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I just discovered I have the power to delete YouTube comments on threads I’ve started.

Do psychopaths dream?

Sweet dreams

It is a question that is often posed by the victims of psychopaths, by people who have known them, and just by the curious. In fact, when you type “do psychopaths” into Google, the search suggestions are as follows:

1. do psychopaths cry?
2. do psychopaths feel fear?
3. do psychopaths yawn?
4. do psychopaths love?
5. do psychopaths dream?

The first four are boring questions, and very easy to answer by anyone who ever gave them any thought:

1. Rarely
2. Yes, but hardly. Fearlessness is one of the main criteria in the PCL-R
3. You might as well ask, “do psychopaths need to breathe?” Yes, we yawn when we’re tired, just like you!
4. Nah

But the fifth question is interesting. Its answer isn’t immediately obvious a priori and it tries to delve into the inner worlds of psychopaths in a clever way. What’s more, it’s one question to which, despite its popularity among inquisitive souls, is difficult to find a satisfactory answer, amid tedious conversations that go nowhere, and threads where everyone says equally plausible but mutually contradictory things.

Well look no further, because I am a psychopath, and I can confirm that yes, I dream. I don’t dream very often (or at least I don’t often remember my dreams), in fact more often than not I have the stereotypical “death sleep” of a vampire, unburdened by thoughts and concerns from the day. I don’t have sleepless or disturbed nights because of stress, and I don’t lie awake mulling over ‘bad’ things I’ve done. But I do, on occasion, dream. My dreams tend to be fairly weird, though nothing so surreal as to inspire artwork.

One recent dream I had, there was a bird trapped inside my room, beating its wings pointlessly against the closed window. As I walked over to open the window and free it, it seemed to panic and fly at me, so I hit it to stop it pecking me and it fell to the floor, dead. A couple of nights ago, I dreamt the house next door was on fire. The family that lives there has three children and two dogs, and they were also trapped upstairs (noticing a pattern yet?) I dialled for the emergency services, but when the fire brigade arrived, they had brought the police and accused me of setting the fire, which as far as I can recall, I hadn’t. In both dreams, I tried to do the decent thing, but the other ‘characters’ in the dream had other ideas and did their best to throw my help back in my face. I’m not really into dream interpretation, but if anyone wants to have a go at figuring these ones out, be my guest.

Most commonly, I’m not even in my own dreams. Or rather, I’m like a static observer or an omniscient narrator, and the other people in the dream are acting out a story in front of me. Usually they’re not people that I know in real life, just ‘characters’ that inhabit the dream world. Sometimes I can go in and out of different people and take control of them for a while, make them do what I want to do, see the dream from their perspective, and then fly out and go back to watching again. These dreams tend to be violent, and seem to be set predominantly in horror movies or wars, but there’s not really any emotional content to them or consequences for being in them. Like I said, I’m more of a bystander watching things happen. Even when I ‘take over’ the characters, what happens to them doesn’t really end up affecting me. If the person I’m inhabiting gets hacked to death, then I just fly out of them and look down on their mutilated corpse with detached interest.

are made of this

Very occasionally I dream of people close to me dying. In real life, this sort of event doesn’t cause much emotion in me. If I liked the person, I am sorry they’re no longer around for me to enjoy them, but the idea of crying about it is utterly foreign. However, in these dreams, I’m very upset, grief-stricken even, in a way I have never been in my waking life. I seem to imagine myself as an ordinary, empathetic person, crying about the death of someone I love, just like I’ve seen other people be around death, and being really cut up about their loss. Unlike the previous two types of dream, these are closer to what I would think of as a nightmare, in that they’re actually unpleasant to experience. I don’t enjoy feeling those emotions, or at least dreaming that I am feeling them, and I especially don’t enjoy losing control of myself. Then, when I wake up, I’m back to normal. My pillow is sometimes wet; whether with tears or sweat, I don’t know. But I just think “huh, that was weird”, and go about my day.

 

I have no idea if these dreams bear any resemblance to the sorts of dreams other people have. I’d be interested to hear from you.

Art credit goes to the extremely creative, extremely talented and extremely dead Zdzisław Beksiński.

I wonder if he’s living his dreams now?

Dear Kentucky, Mitch McConnell Might Be a Psychopath

Contradiction in facial expression – a smile with a frown – smirk and dead eyes

McConnell: ‘Winners make policy, losers go home” and more quotes on “Stuff Psychopaths Say.”

“No majority leader wants written on his tombstone that he presided over the end of the Senate,” the minority leader said.

He continued: “Breaking the rules to change the rules is un-American. I just hope the majority leader thinks about his legacy, the future of his party, and, most importantly, the future of our country before he acts.”

Are these the words of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) as the Republican majority changed Senate rules this week to do away with filibusters of Supreme Court nominations?

Actually, they were uttered in 2013, by then-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), when Democrats pushed through a similar filibuster change for lesser nominations.

That McConnell did a 180 on the topic — going from the institutional defender of the filibuster to the man who destroyed it — is unsurprising. He has frequently shifted his views to suit the needs of the moment. But in this case McConnell was correct in 2013, and what he just did this week was even more ruinous than what he accused the Democrats of doing then.

By rights, McConnell’s tombstone should say that he presided over the end of the Senate. And I’d add a second line: “He broke America.” No man has done more in recent years to undermine the functioning of U.S. government. His has been the epitome of unprincipled leadership, the triumph of tactics in service of short-term power.

After McConnell justified his filibuster-ending “nuclear option” by saying it would be beneficial for the Senate, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said this: “Whoever says that is a stupid idiot.”

McConnell is no idiot. He is a clever man who does what works for him in the moment, consequences be damned.

Back in 1994, McConnell lamented to the conservative Heritage Foundation that Republicans hadn’t used the filibuster enough: “I am a proud guardian of gridlock. I think gridlock is making a big comeback in the country.”

For the next quarter-century, he made sure of it. Back then he was fighting all attempts at campaign-finance reform and spending limits, championing disclosure of contributions as the antidote. But when the Supreme Court allowed unlimited “dark money” in campaigns without disclosure, McConnell reversed course and has fought all attempts to enact disclosure.

McConnell famously declared in 2010: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis, author of a McConnell biography, “The Cynic,” reports former Republican senator Robert Bennett’s account of what McConnell told fellow Republicans after Obama’s election: “Mitch said, ‘We have a new president with an approval rating in the 70 percent area. We do not take him on frontally. We find issues where we can win, and we begin to take him down, one issue at a time. We create an inventory of losses, so it’s Obama lost on this, Obama lost on that.’ ”

And that’s what he did. By 2013, for example, 79 of Obama’s nominees had been blocked by filibusters, compared with 68 in the entire previous history of the Republic.

After Justice Antonin Scalia’s death was confirmed last year, it took McConnell less than an hour to say that the vacancy should be filled by the next president. He called keeping Obama’s nominee off the court “one of my proudest moments.”

While other Republicans have at times been willing to criticize President Trump’s outrages, McConnell has been conspicuously quiescent. Although his predecessors at least attempted collegiality, McConnell practices no such niceties (recall his “nevertheless, she persisted” silencing of Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren). But most characteristic of McConnell is his tendency to shift his views to suit current exigencies (on the minimum wage, withdrawal from Iraq, earmarks, abortion, labor and civil rights) and his adroitness at gumming up the works: forcing clerks to spend hours reading a bill aloud on the floor; opposing immigration legislation he’d encouraged; asking for a vote on a debt-ceiling proposal and then trying to filibuster it; urging the Obama administration to support a bipartisan debt commission and then voting against it.

Now comes the filibuster’s demise. In the current cycle of partisan escalation, it’s only a matter of time before the filibuster is abolished for all legislation, killing the tradition of unlimited debate in the Senate dating back to 1789. The Founders did this so minority rights would be respected and consensus could be formed — and McConnell is undoing it.

Two years ago, when a Democrat was in the White House, McConnell said he would only abolish filibusters of Supreme Court justices if there were 67 votes for such a change. This week, he employed a maneuver to do it with 51 votes. It suited his momentary needs, but the damage will remain long after McConnell’s tombstone is engraved.

Excerpt from “Mitch McConnell, the man who broke America“, by Dana Milbank, April 7, 2017

Image courtesy The Conversation US

 

Even Mr. McConnell’s fellow Republicans say somewhat admiringly that he can be a secretive and coldly calculating tactician with an eye for political openings, someone more consumed by political strategy than ideology or philosophy.

 

 

Psychopath TEST Politicians

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*** Do you have any Mitch McConnell quotes that reveal him to be: self-serving, win-at-all-costs, un-empathic, contrary, contradictory, and unconscionable? Please share them in the comments!

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