This seems to be floating around the internet:

It is funny, of course, but I think there may be a darker truth underlying it and all the jokes about Mitt “The Robot” Romney and Mitt the Clueless. Could Mitt Romney be a psychopath? It’s entirely possible. We know, for example, that while only 1% of the population are psychopaths, 4% of CEOs are.

When most people think of psychopaths, they think of movie villains: murderers like Hannibal Lecter. But most psychopaths are law abiding citizens. What distinguishes them is that they lack empathy. They have little or no ability to understand others. And what are we to make of statements from Romney like, “Everything that Ann and I have, we earned the old-fashioned way.”

Romney seems to approach life like I approached Dungeons & Dragons[1] when I was a kid. When I played it, I gamed the system, doing the minimum required to advance in the game. Romney does this in real life. Two examples are telling. First, there is his constant claim that he has done exactly what the law requires—no more and no less. He pays, “Only what the tax code requires.” And, “What is required by law—the financial disclosure—has already been made.”

Second, there is the fact that Romney, even though ridiculously wealthy, appears to only give the minimum 10% tithe to his church. This strikes me as particularly telling. If you are going to treat God the way I used to treat dungeon masters, then there is something wrong with you.

What’s important about this is that Romney seems truly confused that voters might expect him to do more than the legal minimum. It shows a lack of understanding of social interactions. Most people refrain from murder and rape because it is wrong—not because it is illegal. Psychopaths don’t do it because it is against the law. “Those are the rules, right? I’m following the rules. What’s the problem?!”

I can’t say with any degree of confidence whether Mitt Romney is a psychopath or not. There are certainly troubling signs based upon his public persona. Regardless, he is a man of limited empathy who really can’t run the country in the interests of the vast majority of its citizens.

Update (Right Away)

Others have thought this same thing. And still others have argued against it. The argument goes that most psychopaths have problems when they are in school. Well, it seems that Romney was at least a bully who enjoyed tormenting weaker children. Another argument is that most psychopaths are impulsive. In Romney’s business deals, there are some signs of impetuousness—or at least carelessness. Regardless, it isn’t right to base this call on what his business did, given there would be calmer people to modulate his impulses. And finally, most psychopaths don’t form strong family bonds. This is true, but a great many psychopaths create the illusion of family bonds.

I’m not saying that any of these attributes apply strongly to Mitt Romney. But he could still be a psychopath. Arguments like this all depend upon the ridiculous (but never stated) assumption that the rich are necessarily morally superior to the poor. No one is shocked when a poor man shoots his wife, but when a rich man does it: shock! Mitt Romney can’t be a psychopath, just look at all his money!

[1] Actually, I played RuneQuest.

This always bugged me when I was a libertarian. Libertarians, almost to a man, hate unions. I, on the other hand, always thought that strong unions were absolutely essential to a libertarian utopia. If the work force could not organize themselves the same way companies do, there could be no justice. Instead, we would just have a bunch of monopolies—the great world of the robber barons. The fact that most libertarians hate unions makes me think that libertarians are not really for freedom; they are just self-congratulatory third basers[1] who only care about freedom for themselves.

One other thing about libertarians: they tend to love corporations. But the corporation is just a government provided legal status. There is nothing natural about it. If libertarians were honest about their beliefs, they would be against the corporation. But libertarians, like all conservatives, worship the rich. Thus, anything that benefits the rich, regardless how interventionist (e.g. patents, copyrights), is okay. Anything that benefits the poor, regardless of how minor the intervention (e.g. the 0.2 cent—cent not percent—per person that goes to abortions for rape victims), is tyranny. Tyranny I tell you!

And yes, Glenn Beck is very much a typical libertarian. I know there is a brand of “serious” libertarians—especially on the internet. They are even more ridiculous than the Glenn Becks of the world because they should be better able to see their obvious blind spots. I don’t know what the demographics look like, but my guess would be that Ayn Rand appeals mostly to people born of reasonably affluent people (middle class and up). I don’t mind people looking out for their own interests. I do mind when they claim what is good for them is good for everyone. And I really mind when they claim that their philosophy is “natural” and that it can be proved deductively. Please!

[1] I’ve noticed that the term “third baser” does not seem to be common. It maybe refers to Jim Hightower’s comment about George W. Bush, who was “born on third base, thought he had hit a triple.” I’ve heard similar quotes from others. Recently, it seems to be quoted, “Born on third base, thinks he hit a home run.” Romney is an excellent example of this, but I think it is more correct to say that he was born on home plate. Regardless, a “third baser” is someone who started wealthy and ended more wealthy. I think that everyone understands that the hardest thing is to get on base. It is all downhill from there.

I have been highly skeptical of the new Bing It On Challenge commercials. So I decided to try it—just to show those bastards their ads don’t work on me. I used the following five searches:

1. Frankly Curious
2. Don Quixote
3. Madame Tutli-Putli
4. Miller’s Crossing Homosexuality
5. Blond Blonde

Overall, Bing is a hell of a lot better than it used to be. The results did not diverge all that much. But still, on four of the five searches, the results were clearly one sided. But while taking it, I mistook which one was Google. In two cases, I thought I had voted for Bing. I was wrong. It was a blowout with Google 4, Bing 0.

I guess I’m not a “Bing Man.” I can’t tell you have relieved I am!

Afterword

There has been a huge increase in Yahoo! searches bringing people to Frankly Curious. This has happened over the last month. I’m not sure if it is real. There are some weird things going on like lots of people landing here because of searches for Melissa Harris-Perry. I’ll eventually figure it out.

And despite the skepticism of friend when I said I thought Yahoo! and Bing produced identical search results, I was right. Yahoo! uses the Bing search engine.

Capt. Fogg over at Human Voices has written an amusing article about a telephone survey he did. I suspect that you’ve had one of these that appear not to be a survey but an advertisement. “Would you vote for Representative Popular if you knew that he ate live kittens? What about if you knew that he wore ear plugs so he wouldn’t have to listen to them scream? Did I mention that his reelection is the seventh sign that will herald Armageddon?”

You get the idea.

Capt. Fogg mentions that he knew the call must be from a conservative group because they always referred to the “Democrat” Party, rather than the “Democratic” Party. This is a dead give away. But he goes on:

I think that Capt. Fogg is wrong about these people being too smugly stupid to think he would notice. I think these kinds of idiosyncratic pronunciations start off as a signaling device, but they don’t stay that way. (Geoffrey Nuremberg has written about this, but I don’t own any of his books right now, so I can’t be all learned and shit.) I think people in these subgroups only ever hear people pronounce these things one way, so they think they are only pronounced that way.

This is illustrative of the biggest difference between conservatives and liberals. Even the most extreme liberals live in the regular world where people get most of their news from Scott Pelley and Ellen DeGeneres. But conservatives live in an alternate reality and they don’t get out much. This has major negative consequences like being able to more easily dehumanize other people. But it also affects their language. And them’s fightin’ words!