Do autism and psychopathy overlap?
Answering that question runs into a lot of difficulties over definition. For reference, I give the Mayo definition of both conditions below
* Autism spectrum disorder is a condition related to brain development that impacts how a person perceives and socializes with others, causing problems in social interaction and communication. The disorder also includes limited and repetitive patterns of behavior.
* Antisocial personality disorder, sometimes called sociopathy, is a mental health condition in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend to purposely make others angry or upset and manipulate or treat others harshly or with cruel indifference. They lack remorse or do not regret their behavior.
As you will see, psychopathy is no longer called that any more. For a while it was renamed "sociopathy" but now it is usually called "antisocial personality disorder'
There would appear to be one clear area of overlap: concern over other people and their feelings. But the causality would appear to be different. The psychopath is aware of other people's feelings but doesn't care while the austistic person is not aware. Both ignore other peoples feeling but for different reasons. Still, that indifference is a central feature of both syndromes so their apparent identity is an important question.
In my case, I am a person with a pretty full set of autistic characteristics, and I am aware of how little other people's sufferings and feelings impact me. I am not a sympathetic person. I do for instance greatly deplore the vicious October 7 attacks on innocent Israelis by a deranged Palestinian minority but I cannot FEEL anything about that event.
But on the other hand I have always been generous to others in some ways. At present I give roughly half of my disposable income to a charitable cause while living a generally frugal personal life. I have long given away a large slice of my income
So there is clearly a possibility of mistaking the two traits and unwinding any confusion depends on looking at other characteristics of the person
Another potential confusion is the way I drive. I am a "demon" driver and that could be mistaken for psychopathic carelessness. But it is an item of pride to me that in 60 years of driving I have never hurt myself or anyone else. I just work with fine margins, that's all. I have been known to give my passengers the shakes however
So again, things that may look the same may in fact be fundamentally different
This very post is an instance of autistic behaviour. It is common for autistics to be unusually self-revealing. Psychopaths, on the other hand, tend to be devious and to "fake good"
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen is an acknowledged authority on autism and he argues that calling it a "disorder" is wrong.
https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcpp.12703
Like some of the people mentioned in the article linked below I am inclined to think it can be a gift, or even a "superpower"I commented on that article a few days ago
https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2024/04/beautiful-minds-inside-identity.html
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How Can People Keep Claiming That Penalties Don't Deter Criminals?
Gordon Tulloch long ago did the numbers on this and found that the threat of punishment DOES deter crime. See below:
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/does-punishment-deter-crime
Last week, New York’s progressive Assembly speaker, Carl Heastie, claimed he doesn't believe increasing penalties deters crime. He said:"I was simply asked a question of, ‘Do I believe that increasing penalties deters crime,’ and I gave a simple answer, ‘No,’ ” Heastie told reporters Tuesday. “I don’t believe, in the history of increasing penalties, has that ever been the reason that crime has gone down.
"I'd love somebody to give me an example as to when that happened."
Unfortunately, Heastie is hardly alone. Soros backed District Attorneys across the country don’t believe that their unwillingness to prosecute criminals has anything to do with increasing crime. In academia, most criminologists (which is dominated by sociologists) don’t even include things like arrest and convictions rates in their empirical work on questions such as gun control because they don’t think that it matters in determining crime rates.
It is hard to believe that anyone takes such a claim seriously, but it is a popular idea among progressives. If Heastie really believes that, then he should be open to abolishing police and prisons. If penalties don’t reduce crime, then why waste money on police, courts, and prisons? By the same token, perhaps we should also eliminate the penalties for violating the gun control laws that Heastie so strongly supports.
We can see what happens on our southern border when we don’t enforce laws or impose penalties. People simply continue breaking the law and entering by the millions.
California’s murder rate peaked in 1993 at 13.1 per 100,000 people, an increase from 10.9 per 100,000 in 1989. But by 2000, the murder rate had fallen by 53% compared to its 1993 peak. One obvious explanation is the enactment of California’s tough, three-strikes criminal punishment law on March 7, 1994.
New York City increased the number of police officers from 31,000 to 40,000 during the 1990s, and major felonies meanwhile plunged from 430,460 in 1993 to 162,064 in 2001. Over those same years, the number of murders plummeted from 1,927 to 649.
Amidst longer prison sentences and higher arrest and conviction rates, criminals will commit fewer crimes. The vast majority of empirical research by economists shows that. It’s also simply logical that in addition to keeping criminals off the street, the threat of arrest and conviction will deter criminals. The higher price for crime, the less crime you get, Most criminals do not want to go to prison.
Criminals also don’t want to get hurt, and an armed citizenry can make criminals think twice. The defensive value of guns is evidenced by international comparisons of so-called “hot burglaries,” whereby a resident is at home when a criminal strikes. In the United Kingdom, which has tough gun-control laws, almost 60% of all burglaries are “hot burglaries.” In the United States, where gun ownership is commonplace, the “hot burglary” rate stands at only 13 percent. The overall burglary rate in the UK is about two-thirds higher than the rate in the US (2.7 per 1,000 in US and 4.5 per 1,000 in England & Wales).
Convicted American felons reveal in surveys that they are much more worried about armed victims than about encountering the police. The fear of armed victims causes American burglars to spend more time than their foreign counterparts in “casing” a house to ensure that nobody is home. American burglars break into homes during the middle of the day, when homeowners are less likely to be at home, but British burglars often break in during the evening so that they can get the homeowners to open up any safes. Felons frequently comment in interviews that they avoid late-night burglaries because “that’s the way to get shot.”
It isn’t rocket science. Criminals are deterred with higher arrest and conviction rates, longer prison sentences, and the fact that victims might be able to defend themselves. One wonders if people like Carl Heastie have ever had children.
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Arizona Supreme Court revives 160-year-old abortion ban
Arizona’s highest court on Tuesday revived a 160-year-old ban on abortion, a decision that ratchets up the political stakes in a state that could decide the 2024 presidential race.
Abortion in the state has been allowed through 15 weeks of pregnancy under a law that the GOP-controlled Arizona Legislature passed in 2022, shortly before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Abortion opponents and some Republican politicians argued that the recent law didn’t override one dating to 1864 – before Arizona was a state – that banned abortion throughout pregnancy except in lifesaving situations.
The Arizona Supreme Court, in a 4-to-2 decision, agreed that the 19th-century law takes precedence. The court delayed implementation of the ban for at least two weeks to allow for additional legal arguments, but abortion-rights advocates appear to have few options to prevent it from taking effect.
The state high court said legislators had made clear at the time of the 2022 law that they wished to restrict abortion as much as federal law allowed.
“To date, our legislature has never affirmatively created a right to, or independently authorised, elective abortion,” Justice John R. Lopez IV wrote for the court.
Most abortions take place before 15 weeks of pregnancy, and Arizona thus far has seen little change in the number of abortions since the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to the procedure. Now a state with a libertarian streak will have one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans, similar to laws in deep-red states such as Oklahoma and Texas.
It is unclear when or whether the ban will ultimately be enforced. Arizona Attorney-General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, said Tuesday that women and doctors won’t be prosecuted while she holds office.
Nonetheless, the ruling is likely to supercharge the fight over a ballot measure to protect abortion rights that is expected to be on the state ballot in November – and could spill over into other races in a top battleground state. The measure would allow abortion access through foetal viability, or more than halfway through a typical pregnancy. Abortion-rights groups already have collected more than 500,000 signatures, putting the measure on track to clear the threshold required to appear on the ballot.
Arizona is a longtime GOP bastion that has been electing Democrats in recent years. Abortion was a potent issue in the 2022 midterm elections, when Democrats won all major statewide offices and performed better than expected across the country.
November’s election will see many competitive races in the state, meaning Arizona voters could decide which party controls the White House and both chambers of Congress. Republicans have worried that an outright ban would push winnable voters into the Democratic column.
President Biden narrowly won Arizona in 2020 but is trailing former President Donald Trump in most surveys this year, including in a Wall Street Journal poll from March. The poll found that abortion was a rare issue in which voters in seven battleground states favoured Biden over Trump.
“This ruling is a result of the extreme agenda of Republican elected officials who are committed to ripping away women’s freedom,” Biden said Tuesday.
The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Arizona was one of a handful of states that never formally repealed abortion bans that had been on their books before the 1973 Roe decision that recognised abortion rights nationwide for nearly 50 years. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June 2022, the old bans once again became potentially enforceable.
In September 2022, a state trial court briefly allowed enforcement of the old ban, but an appeals court stepped in and blocked it. That court said the 19th-century measure needed to be harmonised with the more recent law, effectively allowing abortions up to 15 weeks.
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The Tailspin of American Boys and Men
Many boys and men are struggling to flourish in their roles as sons, students, employees, and fathers, and to achieve the sense of purpose that comes from being rooted within marriages, communities, churches, and country.
Much of the literature on the boy crisis contains impressive, even essential social science work that clearly demonstrates that boys and men are falling behind. My recent essay, “Men Without Meaning: The Harmful Effects of Expressive Individualism,” is an attempt to distill this literature and explore how expressive individualism—the notion that the inner self is the true self and is radically autonomous—plays a central role in the boy crisis.
The ascendance of expressive individualism, which can be traced to the Sexual Revolution, is partially responsible for the breakdown of marriage and has gained a foothold in religious institutions. Among others, it combines the thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, who divorced sex from gender; psychologist Sigmund Freud, who elevated human sexuality as central to identity; and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that man is innocent and corrupted by society.
Political scientist Warren Farrell and counselor John Gray’s The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys are Struggling and What We Can Do About It is the go-to text for understanding the dad deprivation that is the primary cause of the boy crisis. It lays out how a dad’s presence can positively impact a child’s scholastic achievement, verbal intelligence and quantitative abilities, and development of trust and empathy. Likewise, it shows that the absence of a father’s presence increases the likelihood that a child will drop out of school, commit suicide, use drugs, become homeless, end up in poverty, develop hypertension, and be exposed to or commit bullying and violent crime, including rape.
Fathers, like mothers, contribute in unique and indispensable ways to the raising of children. One example is through play, which helps children develop, learn the limits of their bodies, and properly channel aggression. According to, “Theorizing the Father-Child Relationship: Mechanisms and Developmental Outcomes”: “Children seem to need to be stimulated and motivated as much as they need to be calmed and secured, and they receive such stimulation primarily from men, primarily through physical play.”
Dad deprivation is especially disastrous for boys. As mimetic creatures, theoretical arguments about masculinity and virtue fall short of a father’s lived witness of their mastery. Boys learn how to become good men by imitating a good man, and the mentors of their lives are their fathers.
Thanks to expressive individualism’s effect on our moral imagination, however, today many people dismiss the benefits of embodied play and assume that fathers and mothers are interchangeable. We have accepted the premises that the mind and body are disconnected and the body is unimportant.
Expressive individualism has also changed the way we think about marriage, making it more fragile. Marriage is no longer geared towards the character formation of each spouse and to providing a loving environment for the raising of children, but rather is now primarily viewed as a means to achieving emotional satisfaction and personal improvement. Rather than both husband and wife sacrificing for the good of the marriage, each spouse aims separately to achieve his and her personal subjective idea of “self-actualization.”
As Andrew Cherlin, a sociology and public policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, articulates in The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, marriages based on expressive individualism involve:
Growing and changing as a person, paying attention to your feelings, and expressing your needs…[M]arriages are harder to keep together, because what matters is not merely the things they jointly produce—well-adjusted children, nice homes—but also each person’s own happiness.
Over twenty years ago, in The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men, philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers drew attention to the fact that boys were falling behind in school. Some of the precipitating causes were newer, such as zero tolerance policies, the decline of free play and recess, and the rise of a self-esteem centered safety culture. Others reach back much further. Our education system, in many ways, is not designed for boys. Simultaneous shifts in our economy have lengthened the time spent in school and raised the stakes of getting an education.
On average, the energy level of boys makes it difficult for them to sit still for long periods. They can be unorganized and frustrate their teachers, who factor behavior into grading. Perhaps some teachers, mired in expressive individualism, expect girls and boys to behave the same, as “boys on average receive harsher exclusionary discipline than girls for the same behaviors.” In truth, as senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institute Richard Reeves writes: “The parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, future orientation, sometimes labeled the ‘CEO of the brain,’ are mostly in the prefrontal cortex, which matures about 2 years later in boys than in girls.”
The progressive style of education, relying on Rousseau’s romantic vision and promulgated by reformers like John Dewey and others, contends that theoretically children should direct their own educational trajectory. This has been particularly harmful to boys. Approximately since the 1970s, as Sommers writes, children have been treated as their “own best guides in life. This turn to the autonomous subject as the ultimate moral authority is a notable consequence of the triumph of the progressive style over traditional directive methods of education.”
Changes in education were greeted with changes in the economy itself. Precipitated by free trade and automation, America is now a global knowledge economy. Overall, those most negatively impacted have been men without much education. According to “The Declining Labor Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men”: “Between 1973 and 2015, real hourly earnings for the typical 25-54 year-old man with only a high school degree declined by 18.2 percent, while real hourly earnings for college-educated men increased substantially.” American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt’s Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis details how over seven million men ages 25-55 have checked out of the workforce. Such men often receive disability payments or are living with a relative who serves as a source of income.
These disengaged men are spending a great deal of time in front of screens that promote disembodied expressive individualism. This includes an average of 5.5 hours of movies and TV per day, not to mention the rise of exceedingly popular online pornography. Some estimate that Gen Z boys are being exposed to porn at the average age of nine. Studies indicate that pornography rewires the brain, causing boys and men to desire more and more novel content rather than a relationship with a real woman. Male employment is often tied to family structure, and marriage rates for low-income men have declined, demonstrating the unique causes and reinforcing mechanisms of the boy crisis.
The devastating impact of the opioid epidemic is another factor. Some estimate that it could account for 43 percent of the decline in male labor force participation from 1999 to 2015. During that time, the number of overdoses quadrupled, and men made up almost 70 percent of such deaths. The incarceration rate has also risen, and years behind bars reduce the likelihood of finding employment.
These phenomena are not equally distributed across the country, and some have hypothesized that increased deaths of despair (deaths from suicide, overdose, etc.) “among less-educated middle-age Americans might be rooted in ‘a long-term process of decline, or of cumulative deprivation, rooted in the steady deterioration in job opportunities for people with low education.’” The second leading cause of death for American men under 45 is suicide.
All this has left many men without purpose and hope. The boy crisis both reflects and contributes to the broader crisis of America and the West, in no small measure driven by the expressive individualism that has left men and women disconnected from relationships, human nature, and objective truth. America and the West are running on the fumes of our heritage, no longer able to articulate our principles or the gratitude we owe the past.
For much of history, human beings have been most willing to give the last measure of their devotion for what truly provides identity: God, family, and country. Each of these encompasses the individual, pulling him out of himself and toward a life of sacrifice, responsibility, and devotion. Expressive individualism is a stark deviation from the traditional understanding that freedom and virtue are intertwined. As articulated in the classic work Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life:
influenced by modern psychological ideals, to be free is not simply to be left alone by others; it is also somehow to be your own person in the sense that you have defined who you are, decided for yourself what you want out of life, free as much as possible from the demands of conformity to family, friends, or community.
Solutions to the boy crisis must counteract such messaging and ideas, putting forth a substantive view of marriage, revitalizing religious institutions, and honoring fatherhood and male mentorship as fundamental sources of meaning. They will reestablish a proper understanding of the human person and the ties between happiness and virtue. Sadly, there are no silver bullet solutions to these issues. The devastation is far-reaching and multitudinous, and the work we have to do matches the price we have paid.
https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/the-tailspin-american-boys-and-men
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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