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Notes -
To your last paragraph, sometimes I think people make statements like that just to see what will stick. When I bought my house out of state, there was an issue involving insulation of the walls we had to hire a contractor to come in and resolve. He got it fixed but at one point, chose to inexplicably leave a shitload of his equipment in a real inconvenient location right outside of the house, while he completely took off to go do another job. He was later confronted and about it and angrily reacted by saying, “Well you have your own stuff laying right here, so why is my stuff a big deal!?” What? It’s my house, you fucking retard. I have the right to have things on it, I also have the right to not have things I don’t want on it, take your shit the fuck up out of here. I have no idea what goes on in these people’s heads. Maybe it’s to say something so stupid the other person just freezes out of confusion and lets it pass? No idea.
There's a revolving set of games that suspects play in these videos, and I think the commonalities are too strong to be explained by anything other than some common structure of the mind. Some day I will map it all out to my satisfaction.
The core activity seems to be gunking up the process and grinding it to a halt through endless talk (which is the main reason why I'm reading this book), but it comes with several variants and corollaries. Importantly, the suspect is almost always "doing nothing," and there is a passivity to the way they describe themselves (Theodore Dalrymple describes this as "the knife went in," ie. never mentioning who was holding the knife) that seems to me to go beyond the desire to avoid responsibility and reach the level of a pattern of thinking. The suspects always want to be treated as normal, and they are obsessed with visible proof, to the point where if there is no visible proof that can be produced at demand, it didn't happen.
I suspect that these (there are other things I've noticed) explain the behaviour you describe. The argument being made isn't "others [allegedly like you] do something similar, so what is the big deal," rather, the argument being made is "I'm doing nothing, and anyways I'm a normal person, so obviously others must be doing something just like that or worse–look, there's the proof!" Of course, the proof is manufactured if it cannot be found.
I understand the pattern. These people hope you’re as credulous and stupid to fall for their antics as they likely are, which turned them into criminals. “There’s always a bigger fish to fry,” is a simple logic. I say, “Cool. After we flush your ass down the toilet first, I’ll be sure to move onto the next turd.” Or handcuff the guy in your custody to the bench and then go after the next guy.
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