Puppy vs Nephalim

[Nawd]

Now that Guardian, is very funny!!
:D

No offense Guardian, maybe it's me, but it seems that your reaction is a bit over the top, especially if the puppy wasn't hurt in the end (that does not make puppy throwing alright of course !!.)

No offense taken...but I have to say I think I just had this discussion about a bear and another stupid human. We can save a whole lot of bandwidth if I just admit up front that I have no sympathy whatsoever for people who throw puppies ;D

 

[Cyre2067]

No offense taken...but I have to say I think I just had this discussion about a bear and another stupid human. We can save a whole lot of bandwidth if I just admit up front that I have no sympathy whatsoever for people who throw puppies ;D

/agreed - Why I didnt find the puppy toss funny. Now the crazy Samurai sword guy who plunged to his death on his own sword murdered a coworker with said sword and that's why the cops were after him. That said, I have no sympathy for murderers regardless of how bad their life is/was, and found his death ironic. Quite literally 'live by the sword, die by the sword'. "Porn Star Killer Falls to Death, Samurai Sword in Hand" - I mean, how's that for a headline?

Interested in feedback cuz my sense of humor is one of the ways I think I'm still ponerized.

 

[Joe]

I thought the thing was so bizarre and as if out of Simpson cartoon that I laughed as well, more in bafflement at the craziness of this world than at anything else.
Judging from the articles so far, the guy was out of his wits, maybe it was "lucky" for the puppy to be thrown at a motorcycle gang instead of some other less fortunate end ?

No offense Guardian, maybe it's me, but it seems that your reaction is a bit over the top, especially if the puppy wasn't hurt in the end (that does not make puppy throwing alright of course !!.)

Can't say I agree here. I had the same reaction as Guardian - there's nothing funny about some mentally disturbed person throwing a puppy, regardless of the circumstances. That SAO posted the story in the Tickle me section with a was a bad choice IMO. It didn't reflect the core nature of the story - i.e. it isn't funny, it's screwed up. It belonged in the "suggest an article for Sott" forum with a and some approp. comment about how messed up the world is.

Same goes for Puck's story.

 

[truth seeker]

I'm with Perceval and Guardian on this one. When I saw both articles, I didn't understand why either would be considered funny.

In regards to the puppy story - many times, we are made to think that if an animal suffers no visible injury, it is okay. Anyone who has ever adopted an animal from a shelter (or any place else) will find that they can have psychological issues as humans do. Many of these conditions can take years for an animal to overcome and are caused by the very same people who would throw an animal.

As for the porn star story, Puck, perhaps you may want to revisit the thread you posted regarding the transvestite video. The similarities I see between this thread and that one is the societal propensity to laugh at those who are "different". It's almost as if our culture makes us think that it's okay to make fun of others who are "not like us". The questions that then come up for me are "Why do we feel they not like us?" and "Who will be next in line on that list?". In short who are "they" and when will we be next?

It seems that perhaps the real issue is why we feel separate from others and what is preventing us from putting ourselves in their shoes. This is a common affliction we all have. Maybe a good place to start when taking the opportunity to explore this is by imagining that we are that puppy, we are that porn star, we are that transvestite. When we really start to look at it that way, in the grand scheme of things, I think we are.

 

[Mikey]

No offense taken...but I have to say I think I just had this discussion about a bear and another stupid human.

I do not understand what you mean with "discussion about a bear and another stupid human". Did I miss something?

 

[Gawan]

No offense taken...but I have to say I think I just had this discussion about a bear and another stupid human.

I do not understand what you mean with "discussion about a bear and another stupid human". Did I miss something?

Hi Data,

have a look here:

man attacked by bear

 

[Tomek]

Well, this whole puppy situation gave me the occasion to read the thread about the tranny rapper video, and it was pretty inspiring. It brought to me a lot of things to think about, specially when Laura talks about "sitting on two stools."

You know, this puppy stuff and the tranny rapper video (as far as I can imagine what was in this video) are the typical links I post on my Facebook page. Not that I think is funny, but because it contributes to a certain vision of our world, a world where things goes really wrong; even though my facebook contacts do not necessarily share this view and simply "like" my links, adding comments like "lol".

And that's one of the main reasons I didn't add forum members as facebook contacts. That's why I take a step back regarding my participation in the Work. I was afraid they see me as a guy wallowing in the middle of weirdness, even if that's probably what I am, currently. I tried to ignore that the main purpose of the Work is to see the world, including and specially ourselves, as we truly are. I tried to avoid the suffering of unveiling myself, the pain to reveal myself to the few people on this planet for whom I have admiration and respect (that's you, folks), and that wasn't working.

I can't continue to compartmentalize my life between my public contributions and my contributions to this forum -who were close to zero anyway- hoping that these two worlds never meet.

Hi, I'm Polonel

 

[Laura]

Throwing a puppy isn't funny by any stretch of the imagination. It's particularly hard for me to read/hear about such a thing when we have puppies in our house at present and they are so precious and we all love them so much and get so much pleasure just watching them learn things and do all the adorable things that puppies do. Who could take such a purely innocent little creature and do THAT???

 

[Buddy]

For some reason I felt like deliberately avoiding this thread until now, so I just now got around to reading it.

Can't say I agree here. I had the same reaction as Guardian - there's nothing funny about some mentally disturbed person throwing a puppy, regardless of the circumstances. That SAO posted the story in the Tickle me section with a was a bad choice IMO. It didn't reflect the core nature of the story - i.e. it isn't funny, it's screwed up. It belonged in the "suggest an article for Sott" forum with a and some approp. comment about how messed up the world is.

Same goes for Puck's story.

I second this. I've examined much of my own life from the angle of humor. I believe a person can find that they can be ponerized in one area and have a clear, coherent, mature understanding in other areas. In many different contexts of my own life and from what I've seen in the lives of others, I tend to think that what a person finds funny is often related to 'unfinished business' of the past where there still exist things like a 'desire for revenge', a 'desire to punish', a 'desire to be punished', etc. Of course, much of this is deeply buried and few of us act on these desires, but when we perceive others doing it, maybe we get a vicarious sense of thrill which gets transformed into humor.

At least that's the hypothesis I'm working with. I think this is also related to a comment anart (or someone else) once made that humor can also be a buffer. I can see that being true. :)

 

[dugdeep]

I think this is one of the dangers of the age of internet memes - all this stuff comes across our computer screens at the same level. There's a complete "unreality" to it all; a separation that's difficult to pierce. I wonder if we've been trained through years of television watching to not react to this stuff on a deep level - stay emotionally connected only until the next commercial break and then go on as if nothing is different in our lives. It's just another video clip, just another wacky headline, just another weird fact or news event. None of it sinks in. I think it partially has to do with how this information is presented and how it's treated by our peers. It's easy to joke about because it is so separate from us - our real, deeper emotions don't engage with it. Hearing about a guy throwing a puppy barely makes a dent of an impression in most people's psyche except to think that it's bizarre. But if any of us actually witnessed the act, we'd be horrified (I would hope).

 

[ScioAgapeOmnis]

Who could take such a purely innocent little creature and do THAT???

Considering the context, I think it's insanity. It's interesting that the elements of this story are not funny - someone throwing a puppy isn't funny, nor is stealing a bulldozer, nor is an obscene gesture, nor is being insane/disturbed. But for some reason all of it together is so bizarre that I didn't really think about the individual elements, it was almost like a movie - I was imagining the look on the bikers' faces when they witnessed it, looking at each other wondering if they all just witnessed what they thought they did, not even taking offense at something so weird.

So my focus shifted from the what is really going on to almost a caricature of the scene, mentally adding to the situation and focusing more on the subjective/made up additions than the objective reality. No doubt the situation is bizarre, and for some reason "I" decided that humor is the way to "deal" with it, and after that decision was made my mind used all of its reality-creating ability to look for ways the situation "could" be funny, inventing more context if it must.

No doubt that's part of my ponerized machine, my humor is sometimes based on forcing a certain perspective on a situation in order to "make" it funny, so I think I may be in the same boat as Puck.

Also interestingly enough, when Guardian voiced her concerns, I thought it was because she was extra sensitive to anything that has to do with animals, so I wasn't sure that she was looking at it objectively either. But now that more people have chimed in, I reflected more deeply and realized that my mind really did do some acrobatics here, and there definitely is something wrong.

This is probably related to when Michael Jackson died, and I found jokes about his death funny at the time, and was given a mirror at the time about that, but apparently I didn't do much with the mirror, so perhaps now is a good time.

Another time I think I caught a glimpse of it is during the movie Transformers when a human was flicked by one of the transformers and died instantly after flying into a car, and the audience laughed, and I found myself starting to laugh but then felt really strange about that - why is a sudden and dramatic death of someone, even if they are an "extra", funny? So I had seriously conflicted feelings, wondering why I had the urge to laugh, and yet realized that I'm basically laughing at someone dying - is there such a thing as dying in a "funny" way? Not really.

I was just reading a part of "Blink - The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" that I think applies here, even though it is about autism. Please forgive the length but I had to include it for the needed context. I have emphasized the applicable parts.

We can all mind-read effortlessly and automatically because the clues we need to make sense of someone or some social situation are right there on the faces of those in front of us. We may not be able to read faces as brilliantly as someone like Paul Ekman or Silvan Tomkins can, or pick up moments as subtle as Kato Kaelin’s transformation into a snarling dog. But there is enough accessible information on a face to make everyday mind reading possible. When someone tells us “I love you,” we look immediately and directly at him or her because by looking at the face, we can know—or, at least, we can know a great deal more—about whether the sentiment is genuine. Do we see tenderness and pleasure? Or do we catch a fleeting microexpression of distress and unhappiness flickering across his or her face? A baby looks into your eyes when you cup your hands over hers because she knows she can find an explanation in your face. We make these kinds of complicated, lightning-fast calculations very well. We make them every day, and we make them without thinking.

4. A Man, a Woman, and a Light Switch

The classic model for understanding what it means to lose the ability to mind-read is the condition of autism. When someone is autistic, he or she is, in the words of the British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, “mind-blind.” People with autism find it difficult, if not impossible, to do all of the things that I’ve been describing so far as natural and automatic human processes. They have difficulty interpreting nonverbal cues, such as gestures and facial expressions or putting themselves inside someone else’s head or drawing understanding from anything other than the literal meaning of words. Their first-impression apparatus is fundamentally disabled, and the way that people with autism see the world gives us a very good sense of what happens when our mind-reading faculties fail.

One of the country’s leading experts on autism is a man named Ami Klin. Klin teaches at Yale University’s Child Study Center in New Haven, where he has a patient whom he has been studying for many years whom I’ll call Peter. Peter is in his forties. He is highly educated and works and lives independently. “This is a very high-functioning individual. We meet weekly, and we talk,” Klin explains. “He’s very articulate, but he has no intuition about things, so he needs me to define the world for him.” Klin, who bears a striking resemblance to the actor Martin Short, is half Israeli and half Brazilian, and he speaks with an understandably peculiar accent. He has been seeing Peter for years, and he speaks of his condition not with condescension or detachment but matter-of-factly, as if describing a minor character tic. “I talk to him every week, and the sense that I have in talking to him is that I could do anything. I could pick my nose. I could take my pants down. I could do some work here. Even though he is looking at me, I don’t have the sense of being scrutinized or monitored. He focuses very much on what I say. The words mean a great deal to him. But he doesn’t focus at all on the way my words are contextualized with facial expressions and nonverbal cues. Everything that goes on inside the mind—that he cannot observe directly—is a problem for him. Am I his therapist? Not really. Normal therapy is based on people’s ability to have insight into their own motivations. But with him, insight wouldn’t take you very far. So it’s more like problem solving.”

One of the things that Klin wanted to discover, in talking to Peter, was how someone with his condition makes sense of the world, so he and his colleagues devised an ingenious experiment. They decided to show Peter a movie and then follow the direction of his eyes as he looked at the screen. The movie they chose was the 1966 film version of the Edward Albee play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as a husband and wife who invite a much younger couple, played by George Segal and Sandy Dennis, for what turns out to be an intense and grueling evening. “It’s my favorite play ever, and I love the movie. I love Richard Burton. I love Elizabeth Taylor,” Klin explains, and for what Klin was trying to do, the film was perfect. People with autism are obsessed with mechanical objects, but this was a movie that followed very much the spare, actor-focused design of the stage. “It’s tremendously contained,” Klin says. “It’s about four people and their minds. There are very few inanimate details in that movie that would be distracting to someone with autism. If I had used Terminator Two, where the protagonist is a gun, I wouldn’t have got those results. It’s all about intensive, engaging social interaction at multiple levels of meaning, emotion, and expression. What we are trying to get at is people’s search for meaning. So that’s why I chose Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I was interested in getting to see the world through the eyes of an autistic person.”

Klin had Peter put on a hat with a very simple, but powerful, eye-tracking device composed of two tiny cameras. One camera recorded the movement of Peter’s fovea—the centerpiece of his eye. The other camera recorded whatever it was Peter was looking at, and then the two images were superimposed. This meant that on every frame of the movie, Klin could draw a line showing where Peter was looking at that moment. He then had people without autism watch the movie as well, and he compared Peter’s eye movements with theirs. In one scene, for example, Nick (George Segal) is making polite conversation, and he points to the wall of host George’s (Richard Burton’s) study and asks, “Who did the painting?” The way you and I would look at that scene is straightforward: our eyes would follow in the direction that Nick is pointing, alight on the painting, swivel back to George’s eyes to get his response, and then return to Nick’s face, to see how he reacts to the answer. All of that takes place in a fraction of a second, and on Klin’s visual-scanning pictures, the line representing the gaze of the normal viewer forms a clean, straight-edged triangle from Nick to the painting to George and back again to Nick. Peter’s pattern, though, is a little different. He starts somewhere around Nick’s neck. But he doesn’t follow the direction of Nick’s arm, because interpreting a pointing gesture requires, if you think about it, that you instantaneously inhabit the mind of the person doing the pointing. You need to read the mind of the pointer, and, of course, people with autism can’t read minds. “Children respond to pointing gestures by the time they are twelve months old,” Klin said. “This is a man who is forty-two years old and very bright, and he’s not doing that. Those are the kinds of cues that children are learning naturally—and he just doesn’t pick up on them.”

So what does Peter do? He hears the words “painting” and “wall,” so he looks for paintings on the wall. But there are three in the general vicinity. Which one is it? Klin’s visual-scanning pictures show Peter’s gaze moving frantically from one picture to the other. Meanwhile, the conversation has already moved on. The only way Peter could have made sense of that scene is if Nick had been perfectly, verbally explicit—if he had said, “Who did that painting to the left of the man and the dog?” In anything less than a perfectly literal environment, the autistic person is lost.

There’s another critical lesson in that scene. The normal viewers looked at the eyes of George and Nick when they were talking, and they did that because when people talk, we listen to their words and watch their eyes in order to pick up on all those expressive nuances that Ekman has so carefully catalogued. But Peter didn’t look at anyone’s eyes in that scene. At another critical moment in the movie, when, in fact, George and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) are locked in a passionate embrace, Peter looked not at the eyes of the kissing couple—which is what you or I would do—but at the light switch on the wall behind them. That’s not because Peter objects to people or finds the notion of intimacy repulsive. It’s because if you cannot mind-read—if you can’t put yourself in the mind of someone else—then there’s nothing special to be gained by looking at eyes and faces.

One of Klin’s colleagues at Yale, Robert T. Schultz, once did an experiment with what is called an FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imagery), a highly sophisticated brain scanner that shows where the blood is flowing in the brain at any given time—and hence, which part of the brain is in use. Schultz put people in the FMRI machine and had them perform a very simple task in which they were given either pairs of faces or pairs of objects (such as chairs or hammers) and they had to press a button indicating whether the pairs were the same or different. Normal people, when they were looking at the faces, used a part of their brain called the fusiform gyrus, which is an incredibly sophisticated piece of brain software that allows us to distinguish among the literally thousands of faces that we know. (Picture in your mind the face of Marilyn Monroe. Ready? You just used your fusiform gyrus.) When the normal participants looked at the chair, however, they used a completely different and less powerful part of the brain— the inferior temporal gyrus—which is normally reserved for objects. (The difference in the sophistication of those two regions explains why you can recognize Sally from the eighth grade forty years later but have trouble picking out your bag on the airport luggage carousel.) When Schultz repeated the experiment with autistic people, however, he found that they used their object-recognition area for both the chairs and the faces. In other words, on the most basic neurological level, for someone with autism, a face is just another object. Here is one of the earliest descriptions of an autistic patient in the medicalliterature: “He never looked up at people’s faces. When he had any dealings with persons at all, he treated them, or rather parts of them, as if they were objects. He would use a hand to lead him. He would, in playing, butt his head against his mother as at other times he did against a pillow. He allowed his boarding mother’s hand to dress him, paying not the lightest attention to her.”

So, when Peter looked at the scene of Martha and George kissing, their two faces did not automatically command his attention. What he saw were three objects—a man, a woman, and a light switch. And what did he prefer? As it happens, the light switch. “I know for [Peter] that light switches have been important in his life,” says Klin. “He sees a light switch, and he gravitates toward it. It’s like if you were a Matisse connoisseur, and you look at a lot of pictures, and then you’d go, ahh, there is the Matisse. So he goes, there is the light switch. He’s seeking meaning, organization. He doesn’t like confusion. All of us gravitate toward things that mean something to us, and for most of us, that’s people. But if people don’t anchor meaning for you, then you seek something that does.”

Perhaps the most poignant scene Klin studied comes at a point in the movie when Martha is sitting next to Nick, flirting outrageously, even putting a hand on his thigh. In the background, his back slightly turned to them, lurks an increasingly angry and jealous George. As the scene unfolds, the normal viewer’s eyes move in an almost perfect triangle from Martha’s eyes to Nick’s eyes to George’s eyes and then back to Martha’s, monitoring the emotional states of all three as the temperature in the room rises. But Peter? He starts at Nick’s mouth, and then his eyes drop to the drink in Nick’s hand, and then his gaze wanders to a brooch on Martha’s sweater. He never looks at George at all, so the entire emotional meaning of the scene is lost on him.

“There’s a scene where George is about to lose his temper,” says Warren Jones, who worked with Klin on the experiment. “He goes to the closet and pulls a gun down from the shelf, and points it directly at Martha and pulls the trigger. And when he does, an umbrella pops out the front of the barrel. But we have no idea until it comes out that it’s a ruse—so there is this genuine moment of fear. And one of the most telltale things is that the classic autistic individual will laugh out loud and find it to be this moment of real physical comedy. They’ve missed the emotional basis for the act. They read only the superficial aspect that he pulls the trigger, an umbrella pops out, and they walk away thinking, those people were having a good time.”

Peter’s movie-watching experiment is a perfect example of what happens when mind reading fails. Peter is a highly intelligent man. He has graduate degrees from a prestigious university. His IQ is well above normal, and Klin speaks of him with genuine respect. But because he lacks one very basic ability—the ability to mind-read—he can be presented with that scene in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and come to a conclusion that is socially completely and catastrophically wrong. Peter, understandably, makes this kind of mistake often: he has a condition that makes him permanently mind-blind. But I can’t help but wonder if, under certain circumstances, the rest of us could momentarily think like Peter as well. What if it were possible for autism— for mind-blindness—to be a temporary condition instead of a chronic one? Could that explain why sometimes otherwise normal people come to conclusions that are completely and catastrophically wrong?

It seems that autism has certain things in common with psychopathy, and just as normal people can be ponerized to think and feel like psychopaths to certain degrees, they can also be ponerized to have autistic traits that can come and go, or only be active for certain life situations, etc. So the thing that jumped out at me is that he saw the people as having a good time, he saw humor where there was none. He was blind to the vital pieces of the situation to see it in the proper context, and he was basically focused on only one side of it, selectively ignoring (in his case for reasons outside of his control) all else, and then drawing incorrect emotional and intellectual conclusion - that it's humorous.

So it seems I did something very similar, even though I'm not autistic (as far as I know), so I actually can do something about this. Thanks for the feedback everyone, and sorry Guardian I assumed your comments were biased, I really do love puppies and all animals and if I'm not selectively ignoring their suffering because of my programs, I'm just as disturbed and upset by it.

I think this is one of the dangers of the age of internet memes - all this stuff comes across our computer screens at the same level. There's a complete "unreality" to it all; a separation that's difficult to pierce. I wonder if we've been trained through years of television watching to not react to this stuff on a deep level - stay emotionally connected only until the next commercial break and then go on as if nothing is different in our lives. It's just another video clip, just another wacky headline, just another weird fact or news event. None of it sinks in. I think it partially has to do with how this information is presented and how it's treated by our peers. It's easy to joke about because it is so separate from us - our real, deeper emotions don't engage with it. Hearing about a guy throwing a puppy barely makes a dent of an impression in most people's psyche except to think that it's bizarre. But if any of us actually witnessed the act, we'd be horrified (I would hope).

Thinking about it further, I think Digg has a very unhealthy influence on my humor, I have been spending way too much time reading the comments section there, which is very heavily pathological, and I thought I was immune to it "rubbing off" on me. But that's definitely not the only influence, there are plenty of earlier influences now that I think about it, it's just upsetting how easily influenced my mind is, and you're right, if you spend enough time processing that kind of stuff, everything starts to become a sitcom of sorts, it's disturbing. I think the fact that I was imagining the bikers' faces etc is evidence of that for me - my mind was instantly looking for "humor angles" on the situation rather than trying to understand what is in fact occuring, and how serious it is.

I should spend more time on this forum and less time in the mire, it's really therapeutic to be exposed to a certain clarity and objectivity of thought and feeling, just as it is toxic to be exposed to pathological thoughts and feelings. Both will rub off on you :(

 

[Al Today]

[...] I wonder if we've been trained through years of television watching [...]

I think there is truth within this statement. Think Hard about this, find that hammer in the garage. The television is one of the best programming tools TPTB (The Psychos That Be), have. More than the desensitisation of empathy, I am concerned about the possible subliminal aspects of the situation. Then there is are frequency emissions... Whew, just turn the damn thing off...

Grr..

But this should not be my concern. This is a free will universe, do what you chose.
Hell, like I should talk... with all the WORK I procrastinate on...

 

[Buddy]

I really do love puppies and all animals and if I'm not selectively ignoring their suffering because of my programs, I'm just as disturbed and upset by it.

I believe that because of what I understand about you through your previous posts.

[quote author=Blink]
But I can’t help but wonder if, under certain circumstances, the rest of us could momentarily think like Peter as well. What if it were possible for autism— for mind-blindness—to be a temporary condition instead of a chronic one? Could that explain why sometimes otherwise normal people come to conclusions that are completely and catastrophically wrong?

[/quote]


Personally, I think it's possible, but "mind-blindness" CAN be viewed as caused by many different factors - not just some supposed hardware malfunction in an "autistic", osit. I tend to think the explanation, in this case, may be more related to a very high sensitivity to pathology (unusually high, in some cases) that many of us have. Perhaps some were born with it and some developed this sensitivity very early in childhood. A sensitivity that can cause us to block/buffer/filter the perceptions of certain things when we are young and while we are too un-knowledgable to realize what we're doing. Mainly because of an extremely low tolerance for the 'chaos' that tends to accompany the psychological problems of others in terms of the inefficient operation (ambient yammering noise) of the intellectual, emotional and motor centers of people in general.

Just a possibility that I was considering, fwiw. :)

Edit: for clarity

 

[nwigal]

I really do love puppies and all animals and if I'm not selectively ignoring their suffering because of my programs, I'm just as disturbed and upset by it.

I believe that because of what I understand about you through your previous posts.

[quote author=Blink]
But I can’t help but wonder if, under certain circumstances, the rest of us could momentarily think like Peter as well. What if it were possible for autism— for mind-blindness—to be a temporary condition instead of a chronic one? Could that explain why sometimes otherwise normal people come to conclusions that are completely and catastrophically wrong?

Personally, I think it's possible, but "mind-blindness" CAN be viewed as caused by many different factors - not just some supposed hardware malfunction in an "autistic", osit. I tend to think the explanation, in this case, may be more related to a very high sensitivity to pathology (unusually high, in some cases) that many of us have. Perhaps some were born with it and some developed this sensitivity very early in childhood. A sensitivity that can cause us to block/buffer/filter the perceptions of certain things when we are young and while we are too un-knowledgable to realize what we're doing. Mainly because of an extremely low tolerance for the 'chaos' that tends to accompany the psychological problems of others in terms of the inefficient operation (ambient yammering noise) of the intellectual, emotional and motor centers of people in general.

Just a possibility that I was considering, fwiw. :)

Edit: for clarity
[/quote]


I think you're on to something there, Bud. My son is highly sensitive to pathologies, as am I. I have been gradually exposing him to objective data that is helping him (and myself) build defenses. It's almost like (to use an analogy) gradually exposing oneself to allergens, avoiding an overwhelming histamine response, or worse, auto-immune disorders. My wife cares for the autistic- sometimes the only difference I can see between them and myself is that I got slightly more breathing room to build defenses before the exposure to pathology really took off.

 

[Gertrudes]

[...] I wonder if we've been trained through years of television watching [...]

I think there is truth within this statement. Think Hard about this, find that hammer in the garage. The television is one of the best programming tools TPTB (The Psychos That Be), have. More than the desensitisation of empathy, I am concerned about the possible subliminal aspects of the situation. Then there is are frequency emissions... Whew, just turn the damn thing off...

Grr..

I think so to. Children's brains are literally sponges absorbing everything! By just looking at cartoons today, one of the first things I "learn" is that killing someone is very funny. Being mean to someone is also funny. And lets not even mention some computer games where hours are spent just trying to kill other people. I for one, can't see how television and some other media can't ponerize. I think they pretty much shape many sides of our personalities and world view.