Paradox: a perfect sociopath would have a really good sense of empathy.

In CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a devil laments the fact that evil is crippled, unless it also contains a strain of good. Bill Maher expounded upon a similar point: the 9/11 hijackers were courageous. They wouldn’t have been able to fly a plane into a building otherwise.

I see a lot of “low-functioning sociopathy” in the world, where someone attempts shenanigans and fails because they don’t actually understand how normal humans think. To really fuck with someone, you’ve got to be one of them. Or at least, you have to be able to model the way they think. A sociopath with an intact theory of mind would be really dangerous.

Recently, there was a protest at Columbia University. A few people attempted to frame the protestors as pro-pedophilia by infiltrating their ranks and holding up a “NO PEDO BASHING” banner.

The trouble is, actual pedophiles never never refer to themselves as “pedos”. The word is used as a pejorative. They instead use words like “boylove” and “hebephilia”.

The most visible of such organisations is the North American Man/Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA. A Google search for “pedo”/”paedo” retrieves just seven results (out of 161 total pages) on their website, all of which are either quotes from other people, sarcastic gestures towards the media’s “pedo-hysteria”, or furious negation that the term applies to them.

A pedophile group with a “no pedo bashing” banner is about as believable as an anti-racist group with a “no nigger bashing” banner .

It’s a plant. An obvious plant, unless you’re stupid, or pretending to be stupid. The banner itself is large and attractive, with lots of colours. It’s the best banner at the protest, from what I can see. Someone spent money printing it. Too bad that it’s a sign that nobody actually holding pro-pedophilia views would write.

(Do you imagine that when the sociopath showed the banner to his friends, a couple of them thought “it’s too obvious” but kept their views to themselves? I mean, what benighted soul would chime in with “it should say ‘no boylove bashing'”? You’d be forever marked as “that guy who knows a lot about pedophilia.” It’s like how all men are required by law to mumble and get vague when talking about feminine hygiene products.)

Apparently, this was the same group of waterheads who planted that embarassingly fake Rape Melania sign at a protest outside a Trump International Hotel…angled perfectly towards the camera, even though the rest of the protestors are facing the opposite direction, at the hotel.

I’m torn. I mean, it’s a pretty ignoble thing to do…but since they’re so incompetent at it, maybe they should be encouraged?

(By theory of mind, I mean the one Sally-Anne False-Belief ability that we gain at around four years of age. Tell a child this story: Tweedledee puts a marble in a box and leaves the room. Then Tweedledum enters the room, takes the marble out of the box, and puts it in his left pocket. Tweedledee now wants his marble. Where will he look for it? If the child is three or younger, they will answer “in Tweedledum’s left pocket!” Only as they mature do they realise that although they they know the marble’s correct location, Tweedledee thinks it’s still in the box. Of course, maybe Tweedledee heard Tweedledum enter the room, knows that he likes to steal marbles, and furthermore, knows that he is left handed. In that case, you might expect him to check Tweedledum’s left pocket first. Your theory of mind must reason two levels deep: Tweedledee’s mind -> Tweedledum’s mind -> reality. Or suppose Tweedledum is sneaky and puts the marble in his right pocket to confound expectations. You’re now three levels deep: Tweedledum’s mind -> Tweedledee’s mind -> Tweedledum’s mind -> reality. This can be carried forward an infinite number of steps, minds mirroring minds, until the test subject reaches the end of their ability.)

[Forgot to post this. No longer topical.]

Today, as on so many other days, America crouched in fear.

Why must history always repeat? We talk, and wring our hands, and promise to fix the problem, and yet here we are again: the quietness shatters like glass, and the air turns lethal. Once again, The United States is in the grip of an op-ed writing spree.

Right now, there are countless journalists picking firing words at defenseless strangers. Even as you read this, a delusional madman, prompted only by mental illness and a fetishistic need for attention, is about to unleash the terrifying staccato noise of a fully automatic keyboard.

In a just world, there would be a law banning civilians from owning unlicensed opinions. But thanks to lobbying by pro-opinion activists, American still labours under the loathsome “First Amendment”, allowing any psychotic to spray rapid-fire opinions at defenseless people.

Here is one shell casing. The NY Times declares that regulations in cars reduced the number of deaths via car, and that regulation for guns might produce a similar effect.

There’s a joke about economists who try to calculate the value of cows from the price of a steak in a restaurant. The NY Times appears to be doing the same thing, except the steak has already been processed through someone’s lower intestine.

They’ve taken a summary statistic (deaths per 100 million vehicle miles travelled), put it on a bar graph, and are implying that various regulations are the reason for the decrease. This sort of thing is difficult unless you know exactly how the sausage is made (ideally, the process should be reversible, with all the input variables known). Does the NY Times know this? Does anyone?

Urban roads are far safer than those in rural areas: “Based on data from 2009, highways in rural areas have a fatality risk that is 2.7 times greater than that in urban areas. In general the lower average speeds, greater provision of lighting, greater deployment of traffic control devices and fewer curves in urban areas more than compensate for factors such as the greater number of intersections and the presence of pedestrians.” Over the relevant period, the urban population of the US increased from around 50% of the total to nearly 90%. Could this affect anything?

Cars are safer and more reliable than they were in the 1950s. In some ways this is driven by regulatory requirements, such as the ones in the NY Times article. In other cases, they’re clearly not. Safer cars are more marketable, and I would expect them to out-compete unsafe cars. Early vehicles (such as the 1936 Cadillac had rigid dashboards, studded with knifelike projections. These were replaced with padded polyurethane dashboards, not through law, but apparently largely through market demands.

I’d also wonder about medical care, which is better today than it was in the past. This should have a reductive effect on car mortality, completely orthogonal to government regulation. If I stab someone in the chest in 2017, they’ll rush him to emergency, stabilize the injury, obtain a chest radiograph, perform an orotracheal intubation, clean the wound with saline, and if God is good, he might survive. If I stab someone in 1917, there’s probably nothing anyone can do.

You’ve got a summary statistic generated by a very complicated picture of background facts, and I don’t think we can even learn anything about car regulation from it, let alone gun regulation.

Cannibal Holocaust has many descriptors, but only one matters: filth. People watch it because it’s filth. Midway through, an anthropologist and his guide surreptitiously watch a native ritually rape and sacrifice an adulteress. “Enjoy the show,” his guide advises. The anthropologist throws up, but doesn’t stop watching.

Few films manage to capture such vileness and perversity. The jungle’s heat and humidity seems to press upon you through whatever piece of glass you watch it on. The camera lens itself appears infected, like a petri dish. The soundtrack mixes whimsical Italian pop, eerie tribal percussion, and experimental electronic music, becoming a bleeding and suppurating welt of sound.

The plot is secondary, or tertiary, or duodenary. An anthropologist is in the Amazon, searching for a film crew that went missing many months before. He discovers their tapes, brings them back to civilisation, and watches them. There isn’t much to this movie beyond a powerful impression of sickness. But it’s clever: because it knows to keeps the viewer at arm’s length. Other than one attempt at a moral point (“what if WE’RE the real cannibals?”), the violence happens very far from home, both literally and morally. You don’t feel threatened by the gore and bloodshed, or the fact that you’re enjoying it. It happens in a part of the world so strange that it feels like an alien planet, and everyone who dies is either a primitive native, or a white person who “deserves it” (the missing film crew are established as arrogant and dislikeable). That was Cannibal Holocaust’s “it factor”. Guiltless violence.

There was a “shock jock” radio duo called Opie and Anthony who were famous for their sex-based stunts (such as launching fireworks out of a female fan’s vagina, which sounds very boring over a radio show, but whatever.) At the peak of their infamy, they were interviewed by conservative talk show host Bill O’Reilly. They described their on-air hijinks, and he took them to task, calling them disgusting and degrading to women and so forth. Very well, they’d expected that. They gave him stock answers. Mumble, radio show, mumble, entertainment, mumble, First Amendment. Next question, please.

But O’Reilly wouldn’t let the topic go. He kept coming back to it, over and over, like a dog with a bone. The sex. The nastiness. He wanted to hear all about it. He wanted them to describe it. He wanted to register his shock and disgust, repeatedly. They had an epiphany: O’Reilly was exploiting sex in the exact same way they were. But because his audience was made of grandmas and geezers (median age of Fox News’ primetime audience: 68, according to Nielsen), he had to cloak his pruriance in moral disapproval. It was his way of getting filth on the air: he just had to make sure it was coming from someone other than him, with him wagging a disapproving finger.

Everyone loves perversion, but some of us are hypocrites about it. There’s a saying among prostitutes: he who points with one hand is masturbating with the other.

I won’t overstate Cannibal Holocaust’s cleverness. Of course, “awful things happening in foreign lands” is a common trope, even outside cinema. Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden features long, almost slavering descriptions of the tortures supposedly carried out in Cathay, and George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels work at a similar level (Marquis de Sade, with typical ballsiness, set all of his atrocity porn within his own nation of France). In fact, Cannibal Holocaust’s portrayal of natives will discomfort modern viewers, even beyond any of the events of the film. You’re not supposed to make indiginous peoples look like savages, and monsters. They’re people!

Yes, they’re people. But at real life digging sites, all around the world, anthropologists find human bones in ominous proximity to camfires. Sometimes they’re roasted and split, the marrow sucked out. The events portrayed in the film have really happened, sometimes shockingly recently (the Fore people of Papua New Guinea were practicing cannibalism as late as the 1960s). The truth is, you don’t need to be a monster to eat another person. Even we would do it, if circumstances required. If we are only three missed meals away from anarchy, how far away is cannibalism? Four missed meals? Five? The day might come, and then we will see how much ironic distance Cannibal Holocaust has.

It’s shot well. It has a strong atmosphere. It has all the grace and subtlety of a flint axehead crunching through your parietal lobe. There are some good performances. It is a good movie, by many categories.

But it’s filth. Not just at the surface, but right the way through. After a wave of bannings, censored cuts of it were released, but they did no good. You can’t wash clean a pair of hands that are made of dirt.