How To Spot A Psychopath

While I was reading about the astounding inability of an Indian sorcerer to kill a skeptic with his magical powers, I thought about the time some nut at a party claimed to have eldritch magical powers, and I’d better look out or she’d curse me.

I invited her to do her worst.

It’s been, I don’t know, maybe fifteen years now, and I remain not noticeably more cursed than several other people who were there at the time.

Back there at the party, though, I was slightly worried.

I knew that curses weren’t real, and that even if they were real this eighteen-year-old hippie-wannabe probably wasn’t a very high-level magic user.

(And she also, like, totally wasn’t paying attention to the Threefold Law! OMG!)

But I also know that monsters are not lurking in the dark. And yet, when I’m going for a walk in the middle of the night… I’m kind of worried about monsters.

Not muggers. Monsters.

Likewise, I wasn’t really worried that the girl trying to curse me would decide to get the job done in a more straightforward way, by stabbing me or cutting my car’s brake lines or something.

No, I was worried that Everything I Knew Might Be Wrong, and that her wiggly fingers and fixed stare were, against all reason, actually cursing me.

(If I’d been Sanal Edamaruku, the Indian rationalist with the evil magician dancing around him lighting fires and sprinkling water, I would have had more grounds for concern about mundane physical attacks. There are any number of ways you could poison someone while performing these sorts of rituals, for instance. So I’d want to be pretty sure that my “attacker” had enough faith in his powers to not feel any need to help ‘em along.)

I worry about curses and monsters because, of course, I have an active imagination. Nature, nurture, continued consumption of appropriate entertainment products… for one reason or another, I’m good at making stuff up.

Take this too far and you can end up going a bit strange, but it’s my belief that a solid dose of imagination is a very useful thing to have, even if it does leave you more concerned about things that go bump in the night than you ought to be.

Good old-fashioned imagination seems to be in disturbingly short supply these days, and people are suffering for the lack of it.

Most kids seem to be very good at imagination, but if you don’t exercise your imagination, it’ll atrophy just like anything else. You have to keep… imagining. Reading helps, but reading Newsweek does not help nearly as much as reading Analog.

If your imagination has atrophied, it seems to be the case that you’ll slowly forget what it’s even like to imagine something. By itself, this is just sad. But it’s also dangerous, because every now and then you’ll still find yourself imagining stuff, without realising that’s what you’re doing.

Perhaps it’ll happen because you’re drunk, or over-tired, or on nitrous at the dentist. Perhaps you’ll just have a little burp of creativity, despite your best efforts to think about nothing but real estate prices and the next election. However it occurs, you’ll be so unprepared for it, so un-used to having strange and unusual thoughts, that you’ll assume whatever you’ve just imagined must really be happening.

And this, I theorise, is how people become convinced that Jehovah really has impressed an image of Jesus in a tortilla, or that their new $200 audiophile power cord really does make a difference to the sound of their hi-fi, or that there really are ghosts in that creaky old house. Or any number of much more dangerous things.

I don’t think people reach these conclusions because they’re crazy. I think they reach them because they’re excessively sane, no longer possessing a mental immune system sufficiently sensitised to fantasy to recognise it when it comes along.

Someone who’s been raised in a sterile bubble to protect them from illness will be easy prey for any germ that manages to penetrate the plastic. And people who’ve expelled all fictional foolishness from their minds can, just as paradoxically, end up believing far more ridiculous things than those of us who are completely ready for the inevitable zombie/alien/robot apocalypse, or can tell you exactly what a B’omarr Monk is without looking it up, or who dress up as orcs and wizards on the weekend.

Steve Fuller, unpersuasive testifier for the defense in the Kitzmiller Intelligent Design trial (you know, the one that led a conservative Christian judge to conclude that Intelligent Design was obviously just creationism with a fake moustache), has written a book explaining his views.

That book has been reviewed by Norman Levitt, who has himself written a book which addresses similar subject matter from a somewhat different point of view.

Levitt’s review is not complimentary.

It is, I think, on par with Roger Ebert’s review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.

It seems to me that Levitt tired of the serious-thinker-versus-stoned-dimwit-with-a-high-opinion-of-himself beat-down fairly early, so he started throwing in hundred-dollar words to keep himself interested.

It is a black day for freedom of speech.

The destruction of the Library of Alexandria; the burning of “degenerate” books by the Nazis… and now this.

I shudder even to say it, but… The Westboro Baptist Church’s globally renowned site, godhatesfags.com, has been taken down.

(I’m not kidding about the “renowned” part. Godhatesfags.com currently has a Google PageRank of 5. That’s only one point lower than mine. And I’m fantastic.)

Wikipedia currently says that this terrible development is the fault of one “Iridius Izzarne of Seattle Washington”, who complained to The Planet, Fred Phelps‘ Web hosts, about an Acceptable Use Policy violation.

If that’s true (I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the complainant’s name, at least, is not entirely kosher…), then the only part of it that surprises me is that it took this long.

The Planet’s Acceptable Use Policy (PDF) prohibits any “data or content…which…constitutes a violation of any federal, state, local or international law”.

Godhatesfags.com is one big hate-speech violation. The “international” part of the AUP makes this an open and shut case.

How long have The Planet been hosting Phelps’ sites? Surely other people have complained?

(And yes, it is sites, plural. The similarly entertaining godhatesireland.com, godhatescanada.com and godhatessweden.com, Phelps’ other sites which make clear his opinions about God’s opinions about what Fred reckons are the most homo-friendly parts of the world, are also now down.)

This shouldn’t be much of an obstacle for the Phelps’, of course. There are plenty of hosting companies that’d be happy to take them on, either out of a fanatical devotion to free speech or because they already host a zillion spam servers and just don’t give a shit as long as the cheques don’t bounce.

I also presume that a family of lawyers like the Phelps’ won’t actually be dumb enough to complain about this horrible infringement of their free speech. Freedom of speech does not guarantee you the right to have your speech broadcast by any private entity.

(Ten thousand points go to anybody who can get Phelps to declare that this is all part of the Jewish banker/Muslim paedophile/Catholic sodomite conspiracy.)

Phelps, whose continued existence at the age of 77 testifies to the fact that neither God nor Satan wants Fred to get any closer to them, remains an absolute pearler of a test case for one’s personal commitment to free speech. He’s a stinking pustulent bubo on the buttocks of society, but he’s got the same right to his beliefs, and right to state them in any even slightly decorous way, as everybody else.

I’ve got to say, though, that I wouldn’t mind at all if Fred Phelps was just a gedankenexperiment.

Pop quiz, hotshot. You’re driving down the highway, and you see this:

It’s fifty feet high, and you don’t remember seeing it the last time you went this way.

And yes, it’s on the premises of a church.

What is it?

Obviously, it’s a cell-phone tower, whose construction was paid for by a cell-phone company.

I think you’d probably get better reception from the Rio Jesus, though.

Coincidental parallelism in the online comics pages, from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and Sinfest.

In which a man who looks like a religious lunatic explains a neuropsychological theory of religious lunacy.

(I’ve already got Robert Sapolsky’s hair; I could look just like him in not that many months, if I tried. It’s been clearly explained to me that I’ll abruptly become single again if I do try, though.)

Usually, the Sunday junk mail is of a mercantile nature. I quite enjoy about half of it. Learning that Aldi’s Weird Product To Find In A Supermarket for this week is a bouncy castle, or receiving one of the remarkably testosterone-rich Gasweld fliers, always brightens my day a little.

Today, though, all there was was this.

It took me a while to figure out what the heck it even was. Religious, yes, that I figured out, but apart from that I was flummoxed until I looked at the Web site mentioned on the front.

The pamphlet is a bunch of Hebrew and English discussing the many bits of the Bible that definitely or possibly talk about Jesus.

You know - like the bit in the Old Testament where it says you shouldn’t break the bones of any of the meat you eat during Passover, and the bit in the New Testament where it says that nobody bothered breaking Jesus’ legs after he was crucified.

Man, if that’s not an obvious fulfillment of prophecy then I don’t know what is.

Anyway, that was all there was. No exhortations to do anything in particular. I’m used to more directness when people give me unsolicited religious publications.

If I were Jewish, I suppose I would have twigged earlier to the fact that the outfit responsible, Zola Levitt Ministries, is in the business of persuading Jews that the New Testament is not, in fact, claptrap, and that Jesus Was Or Is Lord, et cetera.

Which, I’ve got to say, strikes me as a better horse to bet on than the fairly long list of not-terribly-miraculous Jewish Messiah claimants. But that’s not saying much.

In case you’re wondering, by the way, the Zola Levitt people are not like Jews For Jesus, who are Christians in all but name. Oh, no. They’re Messianic Jews, who differ from Jews For Jesus in that they maintain the Jewish observances mandated in the Old Testament.

Well, not all of the observances, obviously.

I mean, they’re OK with withholding the wages of a hired man until the end of the week, or even longer, in direct defiance of God’s command to not even hold the money overnight. The command not to do that is right next to the one that says you shouldn’t steal from your neighbour, so one presumes it was meant to be taken seriously.

They probably also wear clothing made from two kinds of material, from time to time. Which is another big no-no.

But that bit in the next chapter about men having sex with men? They obey that part.

I’m given to understand that they don’t pay so much attention to the bit in that same chapter about putting adulterers to death, though.

It’s all a bit confusing.

But have no fear - although apparently pretty much everyone who isn’t a Trinitarian Christ-believer is a member of a mere “cult”, God has still “made His message clear in Scripture”.

“Clear”, in this case, indicates concealment beneath multiple levels of brilliant encoding (no, not that kind) that’s taken centuries to figure out.

But that’s all perfectly obvious, too.

…that I’m the only person on the whole Web who’s ever quoted the “we are cool, we are badasses” line from True Lies?

Go on, look for yourself. Hyphenate “badasses” if you like, split the quote up into two phrases, look on Usenet, go nuts. The closest I could find, besides my two pages, was a comment on some illegible MySpace page that now only seems to exist in Google’s cache.

The line is not even, as I write this, in the IMDB quotes for the film.

[Although, now that I look again, IMDB does have “We’re cool, we’re badasses…”, which I accept as being much the same thing since Arnie is unable to pronounce “we’re” and “we are” so that they sound different. There are still, as I write this, only four Google hits for even that, though; two are the same IMDB quotes list, and one’s another single MySpace page.]

The line is, of course, spoken by Arnie as he translates the Scary Terrorist’s self-promotional ranting. It’s an enormously useful quotation to use (preferably in as authentic an Austrian accent as you can manage) whenever someone starts big-noting themselves. I tend to mutter it while reading press releases.

I came to search for it after I looked up the Biblical source for the title of Stephen Fry’s autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot. Fry doesn’t see any need to explain the title in his book’s text, since everybody obviously already knows it’s from a couple of near-identical Psalms. God Himself is alleged to make this observation about a million acres of the Middle East, among other I’m-so-great-I-kick-ass claims.

Why, exactly, the author of those Psalms felt that an infinitely powerful being needed to come on like a self-aggrandising blues/rap artiste, I’m not sure. But the quote fits just fine:

“Gilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine; Ephraim also is the strength of mine head; I am cool; I am a badass.”

Incidentally, True Lies is that rarest of birds, a Hollywood remake of a French film which does not stink. (Well, except for the dodgy title.)

If you’re familiar with True Lies, you’re also familiar with La Totale! (or “The Jackpot!”), because Lies is virtually a shot-for-shot remake of that French movie, only with huge super-expensive effects sequences added.

All of that weird misogynistic stuff in the middle of Lies, with the one-way-mirror interrogation room and such, becomes less mystifying when you know that three Frenchmen actually conspired to create it.