The successful sociopath’s predatory “empathy” reflects a definite perceptive acumen, making him a genius at manipulation. When this works, it produces a disastrous trust in him.
—Bandy X. Lee et al., The Dangerous Case of Donald Trum
#sociopathy #sociopaths #manipulation

@gleick #Vance is as good at parenting as #Musk.

Musk walks fast and leaves his child to wander behind.

Some people should not be allowed to have children no matter how much money they have. In fact, the more money someone has, the worse at parenting they tend to be: their children more often than not become #narcissistic, #entitled #sociopaths that should never ever be allowed out of their homes as they are a danger to society and ordinary human beings.

@ErikJonker @geopolitics Well, #trump demanded 500 billion in minerals from #ukraine #zelensky refused. Trump got really bad than he gets a NO. #sociopaths and #narcists can’t except a NO. This is the result. It’s time americans wake up, he is doing nothing for the people, he’s all in it for himself. #money

@Snoro

We have two incompatible notions of the idea of "investing". One is to make money. The other is to put resource behind something we want to happen. If one blindly believes the capitalist premise that money is proportional to what people aspire to or are grateful for, it's easy to believe that the world wants the monetary outcomes these companies produce, and so must want the world these things collectively create.

It all goes wonky as a world view if one stops and realizes that what capitalism really brings us is a world where sociopathy--the single-minded pursuit of monetary profit at the expense of all other possible virtues--sells, and where efficient sociopaths therefore rise in the ranks, and so also a world where investing money has to choose between hitching one's wagon to that sociopathy and making a good monetary return or putting one's money into things that improve the world but may or may not make much profit doing it, or might even lose against the sociopaths but will at least be something to be proud of.

Easiest to see with kids. We invest in their future by educating them and spending time with them. Will that turn a profit? Who knows? But who cares? Most of us, hopefully, don't measure success of their kids by whether having them is net financially positive. But we do so for our other investments. Except for family, and people we care about, we call things good investments if and only if they turn a profit. Saving the world but incurring a net expenditure of money in the process is called a bad investment.

To pick something topical, Social Security and Medicare, among other social safety nets, are seen by some as frilly extras. The term entitlement has been carefully chosen and managed to corral us into thinking these a net drain on society. But their hope is to corner us into thinking we must invest in the sociopathy world if we want to live comfortably.

If instead these programs assured we would not fall to ruin, we could more comfortably choose to invest in the world as a whole, in the environment, in institutions we respect, not on the basis of who can outsell who by the most ruthless means, but by who joins us in a world vision.

Yes, safety nets are about individual human dignity, but that dignity in the aggregate is not mere charity. It moves the needle on who we can afford to be in life, on whether societally we can afford a world where people are kind or can afford to care about avoiding human extinction.

The sociopaths want us to think we can't afford to invest in, to spend money on, the safety and health and happiness of ourselves and the world, but only because if they can get us to believe that, most of the world's money, resource and hope will flow to the few of them and they'll be able to delude themselves into thinking that's because the world reveres them and wanted them to succeed in proportion to that windfall and at the expense of the rest of us.

But we CAN afford to invest in such goodness for ourselves and the world. More to the point, we cannot afford not to.

@atsuzaki @ricci
remember, they had no problem mismanaging the covid pandemic, it killed about a million in the USA along and many millions worldwide.
Do you think they will have a problem releasing the polio or any other disease if it add to their concentration of wealth.
We are dealing with #mendacious #narcissistic #sociopaths. Folks can not understand the depth that they do not care.

@DemocracyMattersALot

Why we care about the opinions of obvious #sociopaths like this guy is beyond me.

“I care about declining fertility because I’ve seen the role of fatherhood, the positive role that it can play in the lives of my friends & in my community,” #JDVance said…

“I’ve seen people who become more attached to their communities, to thei families, to their country because they have children,” #Vance added.… “we should care about declining fertility, not just because it’s bad for our economy, but because we think babies are good & we think babies are good because we’re not #sociopaths.”

1 #Vance fundraising email from Aug 2021:
“…I needed to speak DIRECTLY to patriots like you about the serious issue of #radical #childless leaders in this country. We can’t have people who don’t have a direct stake in this country making our most important decisions.
“We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless #sociopaths - they’re invested in NOTHING because they’re not invested in this country’s children. Fighting back won’t be easy - our childless opponents have a lot of free time…”