Explaining the sociopath

In February, a Philadelphia grand jury indicted four priests of sex abuse and found evidence that an additional 37 had also abused. The panel that reviews sex abuse cases for the Philadelphia archdiocese was as surprised as anyone. In an article in Commonweal, a lay Catholic publication, the chairwoman of the review board criticizes the archdiocese, saying it "failed miserably at being open and transparent." The problem, writes Ana Maria Catanzaro, was the clergy's attitude of superiority. She writes: So why haven't they gotten it? In a word, clericalism. In his book Clericalism: The Death of the Priesthood, George B. Wilson, SJ, articulates “unexamined attitudes” typical of clerical cult …

Criticizing bishops in the Philadelphia clergy abuse scandalRead More

On Lovefraud's Is he or she military? page, we state that 11,000 soldiers actually completed Navy SEAL training, but fraud busters have found more than 35,000 fake SEALs. Now that Navy SEALs have taken out Osama Bin Laden, there are even more frauds, including a pastor from central Pennsylvania. Don Shipley, a real ex-SEAL who exposes the fakes, says it's not unusual to find members of the clergy pretending to be former SEALs: "It's something with these guys who are in a position of trust that causes a lot of them to do it," he said. "The fact that they are in a position where whatever comes out of their mouth is believed -- I think that causes some of them to take advantage." Shipley has …

Now, more SEAL impostors than everRead More

Editor's note: The author is well-known to all Lovefraud readers as "Ox Drover." By Joyce Alexander, RNP (Retired) I read an article today that made me start to think about psychopathic behavior in groups of people. About groups of people without empathy, without altruistic thinking. Looters hamper rescue efforts in tornado-ravaged Alabama Most of us here in the U.S. have read many stories about the horrible damage done in Japan by both the earthquake and the resulting tsunami which washed over the land, killing tens of thousands, and devastating a large thickly-populated area. We've read where people's life savings, stocks and bonds, and cash were found many miles from their …

Culture or Psychopathy?Read More

We know that there are many unapprehended sociopaths who, exploiting others' vulnerability, have greedily taken things from them, material and otherwise—valuable, precious things they neither deserve nor deserve to enjoy, yet which they may feel they both deserve and deserve to enjoy, and often perversely do enjoy. And we know that many of these sociopaths possess smug, contemptuous and notoriously “shameless” attitudes about their exploitation—these attitudes, and the patterns they form, reflecting the essence of their disorder. And some of these sociopaths may indeed, in a certain sense, get the proverbial “last laugh?” Picture the sociopath lying on a Carribbean beach, or lounging …

Do Sociopaths Get The Last laugh?Read More

Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union at the time. Russia and the Ukraine held ceremonies to mark that terrible day. Read the story and watch the video on Russia, Ukraine mark 25th anniversary of Chernobyl nuclear meltdown at NYDailyNews.com. What caused that terrible explosion? In Nuclear Renewal, Richard Rhodes writes the following: Without question, the accident at Chernobyl was the result of a fatal combination of ignorance and complacency. "As members of a select scientific panel convened immediately after the...accident," writes Bethe, "my colleagues and I established that the …

Chernobyl–mistake or mischief?Read More

Editor's note: This is a more complete explanation of a proposal I made a few weeks ago. How do you avoid a social predator? First, you have to know that they exist. I didn't know they existed. So when a charming, charismatic and supremely confident man swept into my life, I didn't know that charm, charisma and overconfidence were red flags that he might be a predator. And he was. This man took a quarter-million dollars from me, cheated with at least six women during our 2.5-year marriage, had a child with one of the women, and then, 10 days after I left him, married the mother of the child. It was the second time he committed bigamy. “He might be a sociopath,” my therapist com …

Naming the social predators among usRead More