And This Is Your Shocked Face
Elizabeth Nolan Brown, writing in Reason:
Here’s some fun new research looking at “the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue,” published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The paper—from University of British Columbia researchers Ekin Ok, Yi Qian, Brendan Strejcek, and Karl Aquino—details multiple studies the authors conducted on the subject. Their conclusion? Psychopathic, manipulative, and narcissistic people are more frequent signallers of “virtuous victimhood.”
I can hear you gasping as I type.
The so-called “dark triad” personality traits—Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy—lead to characteristics like “self-promotion, emotional callousness, duplicity, and tendency to take advantage of others,” the paper explains. And “treated as a composite, the Dark Triad traits were significant predictors of virtuous victim signalling.” This held true “even when controlling for factors that may make people vulnerable to being mistreated or disadvantaged in society (i.e., demographic and socioeconomic characteristics) as well as the importance they place on being a virtuous individual as part of their self-concept,” the researchers note.
The authors also note that pretentious victimhood and feigned piety “may be used as a social influence tactic,” a “resource-extraction strategy”:
Claiming victim status can also facilitate resource transfer by conferring moral immunity upon the claimant. Moral immunity shields the alleged victim from criticism about the means they might use to satisfy their demands. In other words, victim status can morally justify the use of deceit, intimidation, or even violence by alleged victims to achieve their goals. Relatedly, claiming victim status can lead observers to hold a person less blameworthy, excusing transgressions, such as the appropriation of private property or the infliction of pain upon others, that might otherwise bring condemnation or rebuke.
The psychological dynamics and nakedly spiteful inclinations of “social justice” devotees have of course been illustrated here, quite vividly, on more than one occasion. And if I can be excused for quoting myself:
It’s interesting just how often “social justice” posturing entails something that looks an awful lot like spite or petty malice, or an attempt to harass and dominate, or some other obnoxious behaviour. Behaviour that, without a “social justice” pretext, might get you called a wanker or a bitch. A coincidence, I’m sure.
Via Protein Wisdom.
Relatedly, claiming victim status can lead observers to hold a person less blameworthy, excusing transgressions, such as the appropriation of private property or the infliction of pain upon others, that might otherwise bring condemnation or rebuke.
None of this is a surprise. Take Hamas. A vile group expressing openly antisemitic tropes. Yet such behaviour is ignored or intellectualised away.
In other words, victim status can morally justify the use of deceit, intimidation, or even violence by alleged victims to achieve their goals.
Typhonblue on threat narratives: How Sally destroys Sue, and How Sally destroys Stu.
None of this is a surprise.
Well, quite. What’s remarkable isn’t the fact that deeply obnoxious people and outright sociopaths will exploit tailor-made leverage, and ideological camouflage for their inclinations, but that so many people, and in particular leftist educators, will excuse, encourage and enable such behaviour.
See also this.
“self-promotion, emotional callousness, duplicity, and tendency to take advantage of others,”
Remember, everything this woman does she does because she cares.
Fuck off, bitch!
Stop pushing me, God damn it!
I’m disabled!
I’m disabled! I can’t walk!
I hope someone kills your whole fucking family.
I hope they kill you, too.
I hope someone burns down your whole precinct with all y’all inside.
Can’t wait to see it.
Can’t wait to see it.
Also, apparently, “disabled” and “can’t walk”.
Incentives work.
Anyone who has every raised/lived with/met a toddler knows that when they don’t get their way, they throw a tantrum. And if throwing a tantrum gets them what they want, they know it works.
Most of the SJWs are arrested development cases, basically just toddlers in adult bodies. Their reactions to being held accountable are the same as three year old being told “no” for the first time, they’re simply incapable of handling it.
If you can make it to age 20 without ever being told “no”, of course you’re going to be a narcissist. You’ve had a lifetime of positive reinforcement.
If you can make it to age 20 without ever being told “no”, of course you’re going to be a narcissist.
Somewhat related. As I said at the time,
If that isn’t privilege, I’m not sure what is.
Take Hamas….
Indeed. Hez’bollah, too. Both championed by the British hard left.
(Excerpt from The Swastika And The Cedar by Christopher Hitchens. The other “rally” he refers to was organised by a loosely-organised and secular socialist contingent in Beirut. Hitch may have been a lefty but he was right on the money here).
The indulgence of petty malice breeds greater malice.
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being:
“If you had told me a couple of years ago that a book like Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism would be topping the bestseller lists and receiving accolades from all over, I wouldn’t have believed it. And I’m speaking as someone who, in my 2012 book The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind, warned about the dire ascendancy of identity studies…”
Or murdering someone because they said All Lives Matter.
Remember, everything this woman does she does because she cares.
As Lionel Shriver put it, “Progressives seem especially prone to disguise one feeling as another.”
Not always very well.
Also very much related. The section about Mr Cameron Whitten is, I think, quite telling.
Most of the SJWs are arrested development cases, basically just toddlers in adult bodies.
“Progressives seem especially prone to disguise one feeling as another.”
As I’ve said here before, artificially induced Cluster B personality disorder.
Work with people who have severe BPD/CPTSD long enough, it’s stunning how similar the behaviour and mentation is.
…artificially induced Cluster B personality disorder.
Or in some cases born and raised into it. Or a psychopath-spectrum individual taking cynical advantage of the neurotic hooks the left cultivates, simply because they are a handy means for bending and wearing down the will of another. As they are meant to be.
Black Lives Matter activist, felon, arrested for allegedly extorting businesses. ‘Pay me or you’ll have problems.’
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/black-lives-matter-activist-felon-arrested-for-extorting-businesses/
Their reactions to being held accountable are the same as a three year old being told “no” for the first time, they’re simply incapable of handling it.
The update to this seems somewhat relevant.
Time, I think, to repeat this:
And for a certain kind of person, you can see the appeal.
I wonder what kind of people are at the top of BLM?
Must be why they’re mostly peaceful.
Pay me or you’ll have problems
From the link:
It is to laugh.
Pay me or you’ll have problems
He’s obviously a rank beginner at this. Experienced hustlers know how to extort without the explicit threat. It’s all in the inference.
Experienced hustlers know how to extort without the explicit threat. It’s all in the inference.
Thing is, there have always been those who take pleasure in the degradation of others, who prey on the credulity and insecurity of others, and doubtless there always will be. Such is human nature. But these predatory leanings and act of narcissistic spite, up to and including outright sociopathy, are now institutionally encouraged and actively reinforced.
It’s as if, as a society, we’re losing the ability to recognise malice and pathology when it’s staring us in the face.
Pay me or you’ll have problems
He’s obviously a rank beginner at this. Experienced hustlers know how to extort without the explicit threat. It’s all in the inference.
While he’s in prison he will learn better techniques from more experiences criminals. 🙁
It’s as if, as a society, we’re losing the ability to recognise malice and pathology when it’s staring us in the face.
People have no trouble recognizing it; they just don’t know what to do about it. There was a time when those on the criminal side would have been incarcerated and those on the crazy side would have been institutionalized. Starting a long time ago(the 70s?), we stopped putting the crazies away and either didn’t prosecute or early-released the felons. We lost control when we allowed responsibility to shift from the individual to society. As a result, there’s very little we can do when shit happens.
Perhaps, Steve, we need to institutionalize our ruling elites.
Racial victimhood extends to investigating napping disparity and demands for rest reparations.
NOT Babylon Bee.
But does it compare to the danger of cults? Cults running cafes, bo less?
https://twitter.com/_artsartsarts/status/1282656483952525313
NOT Babylon Bee.
Yeah, but it IS Teen Vogue. I mean, c’mon. That’s pretty well-trodden ground.
Yeah, but it IS Teen Vogue
And the art installation they cover is real.