pedophile
TwiceHuman
2d ago
I think you're missing the point. If you wanted to talk to your mother, would I be okay with deciding what you were allowed to say? Would Google? The government? As far as I'm concerned, nobody has the right to hinder communication between anyone else. The fact that Google can even read my emails is already a disaster, and I'm quite sure reading your physical mail is highly illegal, and that the reasons behind this decision aren't invalid for digital mails.
The one who listens has as much freedom as the one who speaks
This sounds like the freedom of association? I like that concept. What I dislike is when companies try to decide who I can associate with, as well as who can associate with me.
The internet didn't work like this before the fallacy of association began. The form of the fallacy is "If illegal content ends up on Google, Google is guilty" or "If a person writes a slur in your game chat, your game is guilty", "If you're friends with a sexist, you're likely a sexist yourself", etc. You might have heard other versions of it, like "Roblox is guilty because pedophiles use it" and "Guns should be illegal because criminals use them". The idea is sometimes mocked as "Hitler drank water once, therefore you're a nazi for enjoying water". I believe that a large chunk of all conflict in the world, and the biggest reason that ideological bubbles have become such a problem, is this very fallacy.
I read this off a comment talking about the Sherlock TV show done by the BBC - stupid people think that smart people are wizards. They literally can't understand them, and when they try it's like a smeared caricature of a psychic precognitive superhuman. When Sherlock enters a room, he intuits the correct sequence of events from an incredibly spurious and thin bit of evidence. From the stupid viewpoint, smart people are magic guessing all the time.
It is not, in fact, magic, but rather a systemic way of thinking that is orderly and (ideally) well reasoned. But a stupid person might go 'what makes your magic guess better than mine, huh?'
If you can't understand people's reasons, you sure as hell can't understand their motivations. It's easier to believe that your enemies are malevolent cackling pedophiles than to understand them as agent-actors with self-interest and multiple motivations. And when a smarter person disagrees with you publicly for reasons you can't understand, you lash back in narcissist ego-defense. People don't like being made to feel stupid even if they are and will lash out in comically disproportionate ways.
Ah, a topic made for me. I needed a break after going through study material that uses vorbeireden to illustrate vorbeireden. I suppose this example helps me shore up my understanding of the differences between delusional perception, delusional memory, and delusional misinterpretation. It seems to be the last one in this case, the patient has a pre-existing delusion which causes him to interpret "neutral" stimuli in a negative context. I think. I am not sure if being accosted by three cops is strictly neutral, even for the neurotypical.
Let us stick to facts and base rates for a moment.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2787197
There was an increase in risk of violence perpetration in men with schizophrenia and other psychoses (pooled odds ratio [OR], 4.5; 95% CI, 3.6-5.6) with substantial heterogeneity (I2 = 85%; 95% CI, 77-91).
The authors note that this seemed relatively stable between countries, so it is fair to assume it holds in the States. This means that, statistically speaking, a man with schizophrenia is about 4.5 times more likely to perpetrate violence than a man without it. This is a significant number. It is not 450 times, but it is also not zero.
The same study notes that the relative risk also depends on the presence or absence of substance abuse:
The pooled odds of violence perpetration in individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders without substance misuse comorbidity (n = 11 079) was 3.5 (95% CI, 2.6-4.6; I2 = 81%; 95% CI, 68-89) (eFigure 5 in the Supplement), and in individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders with substance misuse comorbidity (n = 3586), it was 9.9 (95% CI, 7.2-13.5; I2 = 82%; 95% CI, 69-89) (eFigure 6 in the Supplement).
Taking your testimony to Hassan's clean living standards at face value, he should be at the lower end. We can assume he is probably around 350% more dangerous than the average person, with wide error bars. The conclusion that he is, in fact, more dangerous than average seems almost certain from a statistical perspective.
(The more cynical would invoke FBI crime stats at this point)
But this is the classic base rate problem. We are not just interested in the average person with schizophrenia, we are also interested in Hassan. So I'll go ahead build a quick and dirty risk profile based on your account:
What works in his favor:
- No history of violence or criminality. This is a huge point. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.
- Pro-social paranoia. His delusions seem to compel him toward scrupulous honesty and rule-following, likely to avoid giving "them" any leverage. I've given myself enough of a headache studying psychopathology today that I won't go into details, but it's a good thing.
- High-functioning. He manages his own life, a feat he is justifiably proud of. This suggests a degree of executive function that is often impaired in more severe cases. Look, the man is cooking regularly, eating healthy, and avoiding people who do lots of coke. He's got me beat on all those fronts.
- No evidence of substance abuse. Per the data, this is a massive protective factor.
What works against him:
- The diagnosis itself. The base rate is what it is.
- Persecutory delusions. Believing a nebulous "they" is actively trying to harm you is a classic risk factor. So far his response has been to flee, but a gun changes the strategic calculus from "flight" to "fight." If he does choose to fight, a gun makes it far more likely to end in tears.
- The specific phrasing. "Be a man" and "take care of business" are freighted with meaning. They are active, not passive. They suggest a desire to resolve perceived threats, not just endure them.
- The "broken IFF." A fair way to phrase it. His Identify Friend or Foe system is malfunctioning. He misinterprets wellness checks and offers of water as hostile acts. Giving a weapon to someone whose IFF system flags friendlies as hostiles is a concerning proposition.
- No insight and likely a strong aversion to receiving treatment. Untreated schizophrenia tends to worsen. He's quite young, we don't know how bad it'll eventually get.
Human men have a wide variance in their propensity towards violence. I would personally class Hassan as moderate risk, but take my opinion with a massive dose of salt since I have never met the guy, I'm hearing the story secondhand, and I clearly lack the opportunity to run reasonably validated scoring systems across the gentleman. It's far from ideal. Good thing that nobody listens to me.
In the UK, where social services and the cops have more power in such matters, Hassan would likely have regular welfare checks from a social worker. If he demonstrated severe self-neglect, they'd have the right to bring him in for treatment, which would be given if he was deemed to lack capacity. Whether or not he meets that bar is unclear to me. I presume he'd react better to an unarmed social worker, but that's a luxury in the States, where gun violence is much more of a risk. Here, they'd probably try and shank you first, or hit you with a beer bottle. The matter would be expedited if he resorted to violence or criminality, but he's not there yet.
You mention the man who attacked the FBI office believing in an "LGBTQ white supremacist pedophile" cabal. His thought process seems totally divorced from reality. We can comfortably call that "broken hardware." But where is the line? As you note, is believing the police kill 10,000 unarmed black men a year (the actual number is closer to a dozen) a delusion, or just a political perspective fed by bad information? Is believing Obama is a gay Kenyan married to a man a delusion, or just a conspiracy theory?
(If I was in an OSCE setting, this is where I'd mutter something about the distinction between over-valued thoughts and delusions, and also the fact that delusions need to be carefully interpreted in terms of their commonality in the patient's socio-cultural milieu. If we could commit Evangelicals who spoke in tongues or spoke to Jesus, we'd be filling a lot of psych wards very quickly. The erroneous beliefs mentioned above have millions of adherents, so from a pragmatic point of view we can't treat them all)
I suppose after all that hedging, I should say something mildly actionable. If I were you, I'd refrain from asking for another wellness check unless you note clear and obvious deterioration on his condition. If you could gently nudge him towards a checkup, well, that might help. He seems to trust you, as he should, since you're clearly looking out for him.
At the end of the day, the US's approach to psychiatric services for the insane (who need it the most, I'd say) is rather suboptimal. This is probably the best way of avoiding suicide by cop or homelessness, while also balancing violating his rights. If only there was a way to bring him in for a few weeks to an impatient clinic and starting him on some antipsychotics. That would probably be best, but it's not on the cards at the moment. @Throwaway05 correct me if I'm wrong here.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
4d ago
I recently had an experience with a regular at work that left me in a bit of a dilemma. It has some worthy CW meat to chew on, particularly in regard to some recent events, so I thought I'd share it here.
Let me tell you about Hassan.
Hassan is not his real name, though his real name is similarly classic Arabic. Hassan is an American black guy. Nothing he has said in the years I have known him implies Islamic faith, but the name suggests maybe his parents had interests in that direction. Hassan is tall, in quite good shape, and fairly handsome - a bit like a Temu Young Denzel. As I mentioned, he is a regular, and he seems to like me in particular, so I usually end up chatting with him for a while whenever he comes in. The last time I encountered Hassan he mentioned his desire to leave Jersey for the south (possibly the Carolinas), something he's mentioned on numerous prior occasions. He has issues with New Jersey that we'll get into later, and thinks the south would be a more welcoming environment. But this last time he added that if he were in the south, he could get a gun (he pantomimed a holstered pistol on his hip as he said this), so that he could "be a man" and "take care of business".
And the reason I found this concerning is that Hassan is a textbook paranoid schizophrenic.
The very first time I met Hassan he spent 15 minutes telling me that the government snuck into his apartment while he was out and planted listening devices in the walls. He frequently expresses concern that "they" are out to get him, a nebulous shadowy they who mess with his Social Security Disability payments, try to steal his money, try to lure him into doing bad things, sabotage his employment efforts, and try to take advantage of him sexually.
More on that last bit in a moment.
Talking to Hassan, all of this comes out in a non-stop stream of consciousness type exposition that has never even caught sight of a filter or a reality check. It's as though every thought that occurs to him is taken as literal Truth, and never subjected to any kind of, er, sanity checking.
That said, Hassan is actually quite functional. He lives by himself, handles his own bills and money, cooks for himself. These are accomplishments he is very proud of, that frequently come up during his expositions. He will start by telling me how the people at the Social Security office are stealing from him (AFAICT, that was either taxes or a garnishment of some sort), then veer into reciting all the vegetables he eats because he knows how to eat healthy, he cooks for himself, but these people they not eatin' right and it causes problems, mental problems in they head they be havin' mental problems because they don't eat right, not like him because he eats his green beans, real food that he cooks for himself because he knows how to eat right, act right because he learned it in school, third grade, food pyramid, he learned that here in Jersey in school, third grade, and these other people should have learned it but they not acting right, that’s just Jersey, lotta bad people in Jersey, obsessed with money, takin’ from you, takin’ your money.
Just imagine that sort of run-on sentence going on for 45 minutes.
"Acting rightly" is a very serious concern for Hassan. He is deeply worried about people plying him with drugs, or otherwise enticing him into criminal behavior. He recently managed to get a job at a bakery, but he noticed his boss was sniffling and rubbing at his nose, so Hassan flatly told the man to please not offer or force Hassan to do any coke.
He was fired shortly after for some reason. "They" struck again. Jersey, ammirite?
So, we have a man with an internal filter that is severely misfiring at best, with consistent delusions of enemies out to get him, telling me he wants to get a gun to "be a man" and "take care of business".
I consider myself to be a strong proponent of the Second Amendment, but that conversation made me consider the merits of having a chat with my local police department.
Awkwarrrrrrd.
As that thought occurred to me, it wasn't conceived as a hostile action. Five seconds before that moment I would have happily told you that Hassan was the very model of "Oh, yeah, he's crazy but he's harmless." As my brain first traced that hypothetical report, it was largely directed by concern for Hassan himself. He travels on foot throughout the county, often in bad neighborhoods, but that's always been the case. Has something changed? Is he being threatened? If I were to take that info to the police, it would be in the hopes that they would be forewarned, and able to help him.
And, contrary to popular belief, I honestly believe they'd try, because I've seen it before. Someone called the cops for a wellness check on Hassan, and they caught up to him when I was there. Three of them showed up, because this is a small, safe town with little for them to do, and they earnestly tried to just check and see if the man was alright.
Hassan responds poorly to wellness checks. On another occasion, Hassan was trekking around on a hot summer day, on foot and hauling his old lady luggage cart. A much more successful black man (judging by the car) paused to ask Hassan if he needed some water. Hassan yanked out his gallon jug of water from the luggage cart thing and shook it at the interloper, yelling "You need water?! You need water?! You need water?!" I had a young second-generation Hatian kid working for me at the time, and he thought it was the funniest fucking thing he'd ever seen. He was wandering around the place for weeks afterward, randomly muttering "You need water!" to himself and cracking up.
It was worse with the three cops. Hassan was yelling and agitated and scaring other customers, and I ended up sort of forcing myself into the situation and just aggressively treating him like a normal customer to keep him calm until the cops left (Hassan responds very well to being treated with normal, respectful courtesy. Imagine that.)
You might think it was so bad because of the obvious racial element of three white cops stopping an erratic black man and trying to grill him with questions, but it's actually because one of Hassan's persistent delusions is that The Police want to enter a homosexual relationship with him and he has no interest in doing so. It's not even like specific officers. Just "The Police" in general. All of them, I guess. Hell of a polycule. And it sounds funny, but it's probably actually very sad. Hassan has told me that his deceased father was a police officer, and the interest in a relationship from the cops came from when he was a young man. I suspect that the start of this was his dad's old buddies trying to watch out for the son, but their interest and attention being filtered through Hassan’s delusional paranoia.
Or maybe someone tried to molest him. I don't know, and I can't exactly take his interpretation at face value.
So the optimistic thought of the cops trying to help Hassan while being mindful that he may be armed lasted until the instant it occurred to me that they might try to frisk him, because that could well end in Gay Panic Tragedy.
But really, what right do I have to red flag the man? He has never done anything wrong that I've ever seen. Hassan would walk ten miles out of his way to avoid the appearance of having accidentally stolen a quarter. He might honestly be the most scrupulous person I've ever met - and if part of that is fueled by paranoid delusions, then his paranoia is remarkably pro-social and it might be that this world could do with more of it. By what right should a man that is pathologically righteous be stripped of the right to self-defense?
Well, because his IFF functionality is broken. Because his current modes of behavior may be "pro-social" because his only move when he encounters anything that strikes him as sketchy is to leave. But it's not like the man is powerless now. He's above average in height, and fit enough that I assume he's still doing Presidential Physical Fitness Testing daily, just like he was taught in third grade. If he was inclined to strike at perceived enemies, he could certainly do so by hand. A gun expands effectiveness, it won't add intent where none existed before.
Unless it puts the idea in his head. He's been paranoid and talking about moving to the south for years. Why the gun, why now? Was it a random conversation? Was it the violence on the news, in the air? Hassan strikes me as too focused on daily life for that. It takes nearly 100% of his mental bandwidth to get through his day to day. But I only see slices of his life. If a 3rd grade teacher told him that good citizens watch the news, how susceptible to social contagion would he be?
The final thing that dissuades me from taking a stroll to the station is the fact that we live in New Jersey. Hassan is never going to buy an illegal gun - in the tiny chance that some ne'er-do-well offers him a sale, he would assume he was being set up, freak out, and flee. And if the state that requires fingerprinting and a background check and two character references and a psych history and a sign-off by the local PD and assorted other rules so strict they won't let TheNybber buy a gun... well, if they give Hassan a Firearms Purchaser Card to buy a gun with his Permanent Disability For Psychological Issues money then we have much more general problems. And it's not like a warning like that would carry across state lines, even if the Free Carolinas would take a warning from the People's Republic of Jersey in the first place.
So I'm 99% sure it's a totally moot point. But it raises interesting questions. At what level of non-functionality should people lose rights? Should they, if they've never done anything wrong, in spite of the non-functionality? When I look at things like mass shooters, I will decry playing the partisan blame game when I think the person's thought process is sufficiently disordered - roughly at the level of "GPT2 playing madlibs". Is that a level that justifies preemptive action? If no, does such a level exist at all? If yes, where is the line?
The recent boat guy with the bullet in his brain who thought the "LGBTQ white supremacist pedophiles" were trying to kill him for narrowly avoiding their previous assassination attempts? That dude seems like he might just be broken hardware in a way where blaming any kind of software is just irrelevant. But before the attack he was just filing unhinged lawsuits and expressing wild conspiracy theories (unless there is an LGBTQ white supremacist pedophile cabal, in which case we again have much bigger problems). Is that something a man should have his rights stripped for? If so, is that meaningfully different from believing that, say, the police kill 10,000 unarmed black men per year? Or that Obama is a gay Kenyan married to Big Mike? Even broaching the topic feels wildly ripe for abuse.
Is this whole topic a can of worms best left unopened?
naraburns
nihil supernum
4d ago
Right-coded violence reasserts itself (?)
It's sobering, that this morning someone might have asked you "did you hear about the 40-year-old Iraq war veteran who committed a 'third space' mass murder over the weekend?" and you might have reasonably responded, "Which one?"
(Insert Dr. Doofenshmirtz meme here!)
Of course, like any normal American, the instant I heard that someone had shot up a Mormon congregation and burned their house of worship to the ground I crossed my fingers and prayed the perpetrator was a member of my outgroup immediately wondered if the shooter was a right-coded wingnut who somehow blamed Charlie Kirk's death on the Mormons.
(I've never managed to determine whether Tyler Robinson and his family are actually Mormon, or maybe were Mormon at some point, but nobody seems to care; apparently all anyone else wants to know is whether he was really a gay furry, a groyper, or both. But living in Utah seems sufficiently Mormon-adjacent that a psychotic killer could draw the association.)
So far, no apparent Kirk connection! However the Michigan shooter indeed regarded Mormons as the anti-Christ. Perhaps that's the whole story: he just really, really disliked Mormons (sort of like everyone else). This makes Donald Trump's commentary interesting; the President immediately declared that this was a "targeted attack on Christians" and was met with an Evangelical chorus of "Mormons aren't Christians" (which to me seems a little tone deaf, under the circumstances, but times being what they are...). In any event this is probably the deadliest case of targeted violence against Mormon congregations since the 19th century.
(There was apparently a bomb threat in 1993 that could have been a mass casualty event, had the explosives been real. Other than that, I'm not an expert on hate crimes but Google does not seem to think that Mormons are very often the target of such things.)
The North Carolina shooter got less attention (he did not burn down any churches), but that didn't stop Newsweek from digging into some peculiarities of history:
They also confirmed on Sunday that “Mr. Nigel Edge actually changed his name some years ago,” adding that they are working to identify “all of his past.”
One authority referred to him as “Sean,” and according to public records that Newsweek obtained, he previously identified as Sean DeBevoise.
...
According to a 2020 self-published book on Amazon, Headshot: Betrayal of a Nation (Truth Hurts), DeBevoise wrote that on tour, he took "four bullets including one to the head." He said from that moment on his "life would never be the same," adding that "all of this was at the hand of friendly fire that would provide the most crippling mental damage."
This fellow has quite a colorful record, and part of that record includes the fact that
...Edge has been behind several bizarre lawsuits filed in North Carolina this year — including one accusing a Southport church of trying to kill him.
The suit, filed in May, claimed the Generations Church was behind a “civil conspiracy” masterminded by the LGBTQ community and white supremacist pedophiles to kill Edge because he’s “a straight man.”
In January, Edge filed a similar suit against the Brunswick Medical Center, accusing it of being part of a conspiracy launched by “LGBTQ White Supremacists” who were allegedly out to get him because he survived their attack in Iraq.
This reads like schizophrenia to me, but on balance it seems more right-coded than left-coded, concerns over "white supremacists" notwithstanding.
All this seems to have the usual left-coded social media spaces crowing; they have spent the past few weeks assuring us all that right wing extremism is far, far more common and deadly than left wing extremism. But to my mind, neither of these cases quite reach that "political extremism" threshold. The Michigan shooting appears to be genuine sectarian violence of a kind rarely seen in the United States, and the North Carolina shooting looks like a textbook mental health event. Nevertheless, I have no difficulty seeing these as right-coded, for the simple reason that they were carried out against minority groups by white, middle-aged, ex-military men. That's red tribe quite regardless of what their actual political views are--indeed, whether they have any coherent political views at all.
This got me thinking about all the other violence that I see as a blue tribe problem, quite regardless of its ideological roots. The obvious one that Charlie Kirk himself occasionally gestured toward was inner city urban gang violence; that is blue-coded violence, to my mind, though it is arguably "politically neutral." A couple weeks ago I suggested that we should be paying closer attention to the role that "Neutral vs. Conservative" thinking has to play in the national conversation on identity-oriented violence. This weekend's events strengthen that impression, for me. I do not really like the "stochastic terrorism" framing, particularly given my attachment to significant freedom of speech. But neither can I comfortably assign all responsibility for these events strictly to individual perpetrators.
I wish I had something wiser to say about that. I would like there to be less violence everywhere, but certainly the trend toward deliberately directing violence against unarmed, unsuspecting innocents seems like an especially problematic escalation, and one our political system seems to be contributing toward even when our specific political commitments do not. I don't know if drawing a distinction between "tribe-coded" and "tribe-caused" is helpful. But it is a thought I had, and have not seen expressed elsewhere, so I thought I should test it here.
It seems obvious to me that the thing producing this slide is a slide in core values between the tribes. As median tribal values diverge, as the gap between the median positions widens, the basis for mutual toleration disappears as well. We tolerate and cooperate with people because doing so is seen as an obvious net-positive. Lots of people on the right celebrated OBL's death at the hands of US forces. Lots of people on the right celebrate the idea of killing pedophiles.
It likewise seems obvious to me that we are not short on manners or etiquette. Progressivism invented entire new fields of manners and etiquette. The problem, again, is that no amount of manners and etiquette is going to cover fundamental incompatibility of values.
Human cooperation is based on shared values. Without the shared values, "cooperation" becomes incoherent. Cooperating for what purpose, to what end? If we can't agree that the ends are good, then cooperation with evil is an act of insanity.
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