I caught it on CBS news radio, they usually pull that stuff from the NYC CBS TV affiliate. But I didn’t catch that. Sometimes they get stuff/rereport from NY1 as well.
Is that Gavin McInnes behind them? If so, what kind of party is that?
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If those three videos constitute even 1% of this guy’s video-worthy bad acts, then he’s a flat-out monster, to the point that I don’t think “what an asshole” is the relevant story any more. I’m thinking, if this is happening on a weekly basis, wtf is the matter with the people around him?
Say you park your car and realise you’ve leaked oil all over the parking lot; that’s a car problem that’s happened to you. But suppose you drive it around like that for years, refilling it twice a day and coating your friends’ driveways over and over again with huge oil slicks that they have to spend all Sunday scrubbing away; that’s a you problem that’s happened to them.
In other words, what kind of society are we if we let our friends / relatives / acquaintances act like this forever? Are we that broken by Reagan/Thatcher cult propaganda that we’ll let someone be a human Bhopal disaster rather than offend against their sacred Individual Freedom?
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He’s strategically only picking on people whom he thinks are powerless against him.
Plus, he’s an attorney, so hitting him isn’t advisable. (He probably informs you of this.)
Indeed, these are just the things that have been recorded. No question, he’s a serial a-hole.
If he weren’t a lawyer, she might have more of an argument, but lawyers have a little thing called the Character and Fitness Requirement in order to pass the bar. I’d be amazed if he has not had any run-ins with the law [as a defendant] yet; if there are any, with the addition of these videos, he could almost certainly be disbarred. He’s unfit. He has no character. DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer.
But, really, there would seem to be something medically wrong with him. Guessing some manner of incipient schizophrenia. (Mild autism?) There’s certainly a disconnect between perception and reality. DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor.
Because he showing an inability to read people, to empathize. He seems to have a blind spot in his emotional range. (I did say I wasn’t a doctor.) If you are also not a doctor and wish to diagnose him, be my guest.
I keep thinking back to those old photos of lynchings. The ones that show large groups of white people, of all ages, many smiling, standing together around lynched black people. There are a lot of people in many of those photos, as if gathered for some celebration or worthwhile happening, and all apparently having no problem with being photographed. Medical problems?
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Or Trump’s next lawyer:
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That’s the thing I don’t get (being a Cali boy) is that New Yorkers specifically seem to be really proud of their capacity for rudeness/asshole behavior.
We’ve got a really nice older lady (who I’ve never witnessed being mean, even in really frustrating situations) who apparently is originally from NYC. It’s more or less a constant thing when dealing with a-holes at work that she’ll chime in with “it’s good that X took care of the issue when he/she did, I was about to let my inner New Yorker out on problematic person” or some variant thereof.
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Yeah not so much. That’s just people floating on the reputation. And or the assholes in question. Pretty routinely when people are polled on cities with the nicest people or most polite people. NYC ends up near the top. But just like my fellow Irish Americans who constantly refer to drinking and fighting. There’s people who buy into the stereotype and wrap their identity up in it.
The pop your shirt off want to fight about it thing is neither normal nor accepted. But certain people are REALLY into it. And as I said they seem to most commonly be in some way from New Jersey and Long Island. And I say that as a born and raised Long Islander (jesus god get me out of here) who actually likes New Jersey quite a bit. Its seems as much about proving one has claim to New Yorker status and taking that status away from others.
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Why autism?
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This seems to be the weird dynamic of sadism. You can have two people who both agree on something. One has a mental condition, and is a functioning schizophrenic. The other has sociopathic tendencies and depraved indifference. They both hold an irrational hatred for a certain ethnicity or religion or group.
It doesn’t matter to the schizophrenic why the sociopath holds his hatred. It doesn’t matter to the sociopath why the schizophrenic holds his hatred. They can nevertheless cooperate toward their shared goal. And, from their hatred alone, they are indistinguishable.
The same dynamic is involved when joining a terrorist cell, a lynching, or Nazi Party membership.
I’m not saying “all schizophrenics are evil.”
It’s also not controversial that some schizophrenics exhibit symptoms of paranoia. And that paranoia can take the form of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Eg, chessmaster Bobby Fischer in later years.
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This is what I’m referring to. The teammate I’ve got has been in CA for 30+ years, but seems to be trying to desperately hold on to the title by pretending like she’s going to behave in a rude/a-hole fashion that I don’t think is really in her personality to do.
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In what way? For me to find your answer acceptable, you’ll have to cite criteria in the DSM. Of course, if you have psychiatric training, you should realize that it’s ethically dubious to diagnose someone without interacting with them.
Similarly with neuro-atypicality. If you don’t have the relevant expertise, you shouldn’t be diagnosing, and if you are a professional, you shouldn’t be diagnosing publicly.
Doing so hurts those of us who are neuro-atypical or mentally ill, not emotionally, but socially.
ETA: In addition, this specifically
is a misunderstanding of autism. Note point #3 in the link below. Autism sometimes presents as an inability to read other people’s emotions, not to understand the emotions of others or to feel the full range of emotions (although expression is sometimes non-standard).
https://www.autismspeaks.org/node/113471
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What sort of means would you imagine people using?
Assuming he has any relatives without the ‘estranged’ prefix; being related to someone is generally treated as a reason to provide unpleasant feedback where random 3rd parties wouldn’t be allowed to; but it provides nothing special in terms of having that feedback heeded(unless the subject is still a minor subject to your house rules or is hoping to avoid getting cut out of a will large enough to be worth the trouble).
Gigantic assholes tend to either have friends with similar defects or just not have friends; and, as with relatives, friends are generally treated as being able to give candid advice but to run out of sanctions at the ‘don’t be friends anymore’ level.
If someone won’t listen to social suasion you’ve got the options of either treating it as a psychiatric issue(though I’m not sure that this guy meets the Section 9.60 requirements) or a legal matter(odds are that this pattern of behavior is some sort of harassment that even first amendment jurisprudence doesn’t have any time for, though malefactors with working legal knowledge are, if anything, made more dangerous by acceptance of legal sanction as a solution since it’s easier for them to proceed against others than others to proceed against them); but that is tricky when someone is a persistent raging asshole without (known, wouldn’t be a huge surprise) instances of assault or property damage to point to.
Perhaps I just don’t get it and/or have never not lived in a post-Reagan dystopia; but I’m not sure what ‘something’ you are suggesting for the “how could nobody do something?”. Making him a pariah on Youtube seems like a decent plan; though it obviously only works because he hasn’t been reigned in previously.
Is there some sort of example that would assist me in understanding the proposed better way of handling things?
Mm. I have some skin in this game, so this pushes my buttons a bit (apologies for the mixed metaphors).
From the limited reading I’ve done, and from personal experience, it’s my understanding that people with autism do not (or do not always) have gaps in their emotional range. They are often (typically? always?) as capable of experiencing as full a range of emotions as anyone else, and can in fact wear their hearts on their sleeves.
Viz the inability to read people, to empathise: do you consider that two things or one? I ask because there are often held to be two kinds of empathy: intellectual (knowing what others are feeling) and affective (feeling what others are feeling). People with autism often have impairment in the former (they find it hard to read body language, expressions, the “mood” of a conversation) but not in the latter (hearing about the sufferings of others upsets them).
I have read a comment by one person with autism that this inability to read others can lead to the deliberate adoption of an emotionless affect as a defensive strategy: they have so often been criticised, upbraided, shunned, whatever for their innocent reactions to situations they didn’t understand that they find it safer not to react at all.
(Apologies to @Auld_Lang_Syne for essentially repeating your points, but this is close to my heart.)
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No need for any apology. It’s nice to have backup.
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There’s an unfortunate confusion around the concept of ‘empathy’. It is often used to describe the ability to, more or less easily and naturally, discern(and often to feel some sympathetic mirror of) the emotions of others; but this is, unhelpfully, mixed in with the distinct matter of caring about them.
Most of the flavors of bullying and cruelty either require(if they are the sort of thing that needs a deft touch and insight into non-obvious weak points) or are only really worth the trouble with(unless you have some terribly dry, abstract, objective that motivates you) a really solid discernment of the target’s affect, the sort of skill that would otherwise be described as empathy. Lacking that, you won’t have a good sense of where the target is most vulnerable; or derive any enjoyment from their misery.
At the same time; one requires absolutely no competence in reading people to try to model their affect states and predict what effect various things will have. “Will threatening to have someone arrested and deported make them (A) more happy or (B) less happy?” is not exactly a question that requires emotional discernment; it’s trivial to answer from a fairly abstract model unless you are actually a sci-fi starfish alien with blue and orange morality.
I suppose it isn’t a surprise that people who talk about empathy would tend to conflate ‘knowing’ and ‘caring’; since people who do know and don’t care don’t generally talk about empathy; but doing so can lead to either dismissing the possibility of people who care but don’t know; or of assuming that such people are, for want of immediate empathetic knowledge, going to behave in monstrously unfeeling ways even in cases where non-empathetic inferences are more than adequate for the job at hand.
Know whether you are really starting to bore people? Emotional discernment would be a real plus. Suspect that telling someone that their repulsive existence demands state violence will come across as hostile? A mere knowledge problem; and not a difficult one.
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Schizophrenia has absoluely nothing to do with irrational hatred or political extremism. Why are you attempting to make this link?
The mentally ill are not the perpetrators of fascism; they are traditionally amongst its first victims.
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What I’m saying is that’s not a New York thing. Its a dick head thing. I’ve heard people say the same thing about fucking Ohio. Because Ohio is apparently intimidating?
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Yeah, plus since the targets of his bile overlap with the clients he’s trying to attract, he seems to be deliberately going out of his way to find clients for whom he will provide insufficient representation. There’s definitely something wrong with him, but it’s possible his “wrongness” isn’t of the same type as actual mental illnesses.
I’m still amused by Ioffe chiding people for “harassing” him in the street (which they aren’t), when that’s literally his thing. I’m imagining her crying out, “Why oh why won’t you let him harass people in the street in peace?!”
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