Joshe

Yes, I grew up with my mom and my sister and my aunts, and my sister had many attractive friends and I hung out with them often. I even had all girl friend groups in school where I was the only guy in the friend group, and I've been genuine besties with a couple of hot girls. But that doesn't mean I didn't go through very similar challenges with the opposite sex as most other men go through, and it doesn't mean I don't understand crippling anxiety/fear regarding the opposite sex, because I went through that as well.

Yeah, I was actually going down that line of thought the other week. Like, how did we miss this?

Putting a name to the pattern is a good idea because the pattern does exist. It doesn't make sense to say "Dark triad + sadism", lol. I actually love the term because it's a good example of how terms box in our thinking. For example, it's easy to say "are they dark triad?" and then tick off the boxes, but that makes it easy to overlook sadism. And if you look closely, sadism does seem to cluster with the triad.

That's true. But what I'm saying is it doesn't have to be this way. One can use logic and reason to see the truth of things such that healthy reappraisals replace the less accurate, unhealthy ones. I'm not sure this is accessible to everyone or what the challenges might be, as it came natural to me early on, but I think it's largely accessible and just takes practice. That said, it seems easy to do wrong, so I'm actually not sure. Still, automatized antecedent-focused reappraisal (such a mouthful, lol) is probably one of the best self-help technologies that exists. I just came across the term today. It kinda seems like Psycho-cybernetics adjacent but pointed at situations instead of self-image.

I gotcha. I'll keep that in mind. Yeah, you're remembering right. You, me and him had a convo talking about sisters and you were talking about your brother. The lee joker or something like that. I didn't know he got banned, wtf? Haha, I see. That actually makes sense. I actually don't mind deep probes at all. I'll try to keep in mind this is a big driver for you, and see your probes as mining more so than critical audits, lol. Lol, yes, I've thought about this too. Like, is this some sort of strange Ni-Ni dynamic? Fucking weird, lol.

I don't think you have to see yourself as low value to feel the sting of rejection. I think the highest value person on earth can feel it and the sting of rejection is natural. The solution isn't to mask it with thoughts of your value. The solution is to train your interpretations upfront, so the sting never lands. Automatized antecedent-focused reappraisal isn't suppression. It actually prevents the negative appraisal from landing because you've used logic and reason to see the reality of the situation more clearly, and have found the wise relationship to it. Recited appraisals you don't believe never automatize, and you just end up faking it. "I'm high value" as an affirmation can't cut it, IMO.

I interpreted that you were trying to bring this advantage to my awareness when you said "I think you have been really well socialised and have sisters yeah?", as if it was lost on me. It is a good point, so sorry if I misinterpreted, but I wasn't sure how else to interpret it. I actually just realized I may have been misinterpreting you a lot. Maybe you're just adding caveats that I've compressed, because I compress a lot, but I'm not sure because we have history where your responses clearly assumed ignorance on my part. Unless I've misinterpreted those instances or took one or two occasions as your default response pattern to me. I'm genuinely sorry if I've misinterpreted you. I'm just not sure that I have.

Automatized antecedent-focused reappraisal.

Yes, I'm aware of how things are more or less difficult depending on circumstances. That doesn't mean the solutions as I see them are not correct or useless, even if the climb is higher. Yes, that's how learning works, lol.

Nah bro. You gotta let the bitch know who is boss, because you know, that's what leader men do. @Olaf Trying to appear to be a leader actually just makes you look like a lost boy. Do you also pose with steeple fingers like Elon Musk during serious convo with your girl? All this micromanagement of how you're perceived is actually hurting how you're perceived. Abandon ship. When your tact with women is to vigilantly run a script that aims to manage her perception of you, you're actually operating FROM HER FRAME!!! She's still writing your script bro. You will literally be perceived like a weak beta with this approach because it comes across as insecure overcompensation, and it will be snuffed out, sooner or later, and you will ruin everything you worked for. The solution is to fix the base, not the content. Become a non-needy man with healthy boundaries and you don't have to manage frame. You just say yes or no as you feel, not yes or no depending on her.

It sounds like you don't just want infatuation, you want limerence. Limerence: A state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person, typically characterized by a strong desire for reciprocation of one's feelings but not primarily for a sexual relationship. Like infatuation, this state has a shelf life because what causes the dopamine release comes to an end and stops producing the dopamine or whatever chemical cocktail. Why does a song stop hitting after 50 plays? Same thing happens when "the fire dies" or "the spark is gone". What is that? It's her wanting to experience all the experiences involved with discovery of you - closing the gap. Eventually, the gap closes and the infatuation ends. By that time, it's how you treat her, her temperament, and prospects that determine if she stays, but she will no longer be "locked in". This is just a fact of human psychology, lol. "Locking a woman in" is a fantasy. A nice working dick doesn't solve the problem. Also, it's interesting that, according to the literature, limerence/infatuation runs its course in about 18-36 months. That's just long enough to spawn a human and for the mother to acclimate to motherhood.

Shit, I didn't even think about sincere confabulation. "Heilbrun's version isn't a three-year performance; it's a one-time reframing: a devastated survivor, waking paralyzed in a world where she killed her children, reaching once for the culturally legible explanation — and possibly believing it now." The no-recurrence problem that Heilbrun called "very unusual" for real psychosis: fully explained — confabulated voices don't recur because they were never generated by a psychotic process, only by a meaning-making one, and the meaning only needed making once. Every piece of evidence that the fake theory couldn't absorb, confabulation absorbs frictionlessly. There's no test that separates "sincerely misremembered voice" from "real voice" three years later. The confabulation is stored as a memory of a real event. Even she can't audit it — that's the whole phenomenon."

But she's not performing the standard script of how people in psychosis would generally answer and behave. That's what would require sophistication if this were a ruse. Sophistication or either just be dim-witted or maybe lacking knowledge. Or maybe she thought blaming it all on the meds would be sufficient. If she actually has in-depth knowledge of how psychosis presents and looks over time, and if she was faking psychosis, why wouldn't she just run the standard script? She spent 3 years under psychiatric supervision and never once decided to claim hearing voices. That's odd. So if it is a ruse, it seems like a sophisticated one. That, or it's not a ruse.

Holy shit: This is why we need to know her level of cognitive sophistication or whatever. It could answer if she's even capable of this fake. This seems like it would be a pretty sophisticated fake, so if she or her husband isn't cognitively capable of that, then I'd learn her way, I think.

But then again, if it was premeditated, you would think she would have faked command hallucinations more than just in that 20-min window. Most people don't drop a con before it's been bought. If it was planned, she probably would have looked into what the standard pattern looked like, you'd think. So, this is something to consider. Why didn't she just fake the commands later so that they would be consistent with the pattern? Also, I'm assuming there was no digital evidence hinting at premeditation. If no, that cuts further in her favor. I'd like to know what her knowledge of schizophrenia was prior to the act.

I just wonder if a certain combo of meds could have produced her particular claimed psychosis. I'm just trying to steelman her position. Either way though, that evidence you highlighted earlier regarding the voices only appearing during that 20 minute window is too suspicious for me to not lean towards lucid intent. Given that, I'm not sure if there's any evidence at all that could be presented to make me lean the other way. It's just too suspicious.

Schizophrenic patients

Yeah, I lean that way too but how do we know that the cocktail of meds she was on couldn't have produced something like a command hallucination? Have the experts said that's not a thing?

Or a deliberate motive. The problem is we can't know. Right, and this is why she might actually get a NGRI verdict. But how can we know it wasn't planned? Think about it. There are many moms out there who want to be free from their kids for whatever reason. Probably tens of thousands in the US, or at least thousands. I even see local stories pop up like this every couple of months. Recently, a mother and father killed their daughter and tried to dispose of her body in an acid barrel, then called the police and told them the location where she "went missing". The police found the body in the barrel with the parent's DNA all over the outside of the barrel. The ones that make the news are just the ones that went through with it. So, if you really wanted to kill your kids and not be imprisoned, it's not unreasonable to consider someone could concoct a plan that involves admitting to doctors you want to kill your kids months in advance and get yourself on a ton of meds. Again, I'm not saying she did this, I'm just saying it's not unreasonable at all to have on the table, especially with this country's fascination with true crime. If a moderately intelligent person and good actor wants to get away with murder, it's possible. If she has below average IQ, I would probably be more inclined to think she didn't plan it. TBH, I haven't dove deep into her story. Life changes, people change. It's not off at all to me that someone who was once happy became unhappy. Also, a lot of people are self-deceived that they're happy and then wake up to the fact that they're not. This could have happened with her, as it's common.

Check this out: Real psychosis ≠ psychosis caused it "Was it real" and "did it cause this" are two totally different questions, and answering the first one doesn't answer the second. Why realness doesn't entail causation, even for a command hallucination. This is the crux, because intuitively a voice saying "kill them" during the killing feels like it must be the cause if it's real. Three logical wedges say otherwise. First, the clinically documented one: most people who experience command hallucinations don't obey them. Compliance is the exception, not the rule. So "real voice" and "voice that determined action" are demonstrably separable states — the population of voice-hearers is mostly non-compliers, which means a voice's presence underdetermines the behavior. Second, overdetermination: she could have a real hallucination and independent sufficient reasons (the months of suicidal ideation, the conviction the children would suffer without her — the prosecution's alternate theory). If both were present, the act might have happened without the voice, in which case the voice was real and causally idle — a passenger, not a driver. Third, and most important for the legal-shaped version of the question: even a real, genuinely motivating voice doesn't entail lost capacity. Hearing a command, being moved by it, and being unable to refuse it are three distinct states. The insanity question isn't "did psychosis influence her" but "did it strip her ability to do otherwise" — and influence doesn't entail compulsion, logically or clinically.

If you understand evil you can empathize with it, because you know it's unconscious and detrimental to the human it exists in. But that doesn't mean you have to get lost in the empathy. You can feel empathy AND prefer justice at the same time. "People of the Lie" by Scott Peck is a good look into the psychology of evil.

Yeah, that's very damning.

lol, wtf is wrong with you? I'm not sure if you're being playful or just get off on insulting people.

Listen, I'm with you and feel deep empathy for Clancy. Even if she committed the crime outside of psychosis, I still feel deeply sorry for her because she's in an absolute living hell, no matter the circumstances. But I'm considering more than her. You have to consider more of the downstream effects of acquitting her. For example, it teaches every future baby-killer that a string of doctor visits buys a NGRI verdict. (not-guilty by reason of insanity) Also, we can't just rely on an argument about her interior. Even if everything she says is true, the fact of her crime remains. If we start going by who is more believable, you can see how that leads to problems. I'm not saying she's guilty or innocent, I'm just saying there are major consequences for acquittal that should be taken into account.

Andrea Yates, Texas, 2001/2006 — the direct Clancy precedent. Yates drowned her five children in the bathtub, called 911 and her husband herself, and told police she'd killed them to save them from Satan — believing she was so corrupted that her children were doomed unless they died while still innocent. Documented history: two suicide attempts, multiple psychiatric hospitalizations, postpartum psychosis diagnosis, and a psychiatrist who'd warned against having more children. First jury convicted her in under four hours (Texas puts the insanity burden on the defendant, and its M'Naghten test asks only whether she knew the act was "wrong" — she'd said she knew it was against the law). Conviction overturned on appeal over false expert testimony; the 2006 retrial jury found her NGRI. Same woman, same facts, same state — opposite verdicts. It's the cleanest real-world demonstration that the verdict measures the legal machinery and the jury, not the defendant's mind. If you want one case to sit next to Clancy, it's this one. People v. Decina, New York, 1956 — culpability transfers backward to the last voluntary act. Decina had a known seizure disorder. He chose to drive anyway, had a seizure behind the wheel, his car jumped the curb and killed four children. His defense was pure intruder logic: the seizure was involuntary, there was no conscious act, so there's no crime — you can't punish a man for what his body did while his mind was absent. The court said: wrong timestamp. The criminal act wasn't the seizure — it was getting into the car, fully lucid, knowing what his condition could do. Convicted of criminally negligent homicide. The principle: trace back from the harm to the last moment of control and knowledge, and responsibility attaches there — it's the rule that kills "but I was unconscious" whenever a lucid earlier self knowingly deployed a dangerous later self (driving with untreated epilepsy, drinking into a blackout, another Ambien after prior episodes). One caveat: the transfer is negligence-grade, not murder-grade — the lucid self took a reckless risk, it didn't intend a death. Kenneth Parks, Canada, 1987 — the clean automatism acquittal. Parks got up in the night, drove 14 miles to his in-laws' house, beat and stabbed his mother-in-law to death, seriously injured his father-in-law, then drove to a police station and said "I think I have killed some people" — all, the defense argued, while sleepwalking. He had no motive (he was close with his in-laws, who called him "the gentle giant"), a heavy family history of parasomnias, and EEG findings consistent with the claim. Acquitted outright, and the Supreme Court of Canada upheld it in R v. Parks (1992). This is the case that proves courts will accept the intruder logic when the circumstantial silhouette is clean: no motive, no history of violence, documented sleep disorder, and behavior too bizarre to be a plan. It's the mirror image of Decina — no voluntary act anywhere upstream. Brian Thomas, Wales, 2009 — same defense, different flavor. Thomas, a man with a 50-year documented history of night terrors, strangled his wife of 40 years in their camper van while dreaming he was fighting off an intruder — they'd moved the van that evening to escape some rowdy kids, and the threat apparently followed him into sleep. He called 999 himself, hysterical. The prosecution withdrew mid-trial after its own psychiatric experts agreed he was in automatism; the judge told him he bore no responsibility. Useful because it shows even a prosecution conceding the defense when the evidence profile is right — and because the "victim is whoever happened to be nearby" logic is horrifyingly literal. Herbert Weinstein, New York, 1991 — the brain scan in the courtroom. Weinstein, a 65-year-old ad executive with no history of violence, strangled his wife during an argument and threw her body from their 12th-floor window to stage a suicide. A PET scan revealed an orange-sized arachnoid cyst compressing his frontal lobe. Note what the staging behavior does to the intruder theory: he was organized enough to construct a cover-up, which cuts against "no capacity" — yet the lesion was undeniably real and sitting in the decision-making hardware. Prosecutors, reportedly worried a jury would acquit once they saw the scan, offered a manslaughter plea. This is the "what if it were a verifiable brain event" hypothetical escaped into reality — and it landed exactly on the hard question: was the lesion the cause, or an accelerant on an existing fire? Nobody could decompose the causal shares between the cyst and the marriage, so the system split the difference with a plea. Whitman gets cited as the thought experiment; Weinstein is what actually happens when the scan shows up in court. R v. Quick, England, 1973 — the diabetic nurse and the insulin blackout. Quick, a diabetic nurse, assaulted a patient while hypoglycemic — too much insulin, not enough food. The court's ruling drew a distinction that directly answers the "why does the source of the malfunction matter?" question: a malfunction caused by an external factor (the insulin injection) is automatism, a full defense — while a malfunction arising from internal disease would be insanity, which leads to commitment rather than acquittal. Same defendant, same blackout, completely different legal fate depending on whether the cause came from outside or inside the body. The kicker: this means the law's answer to "why is exogenous more forgivable?" is partly just administrative — external causes are treated as one-off accidents unlikely to recur, internal ones as standing dangers requiring containment. Recurrence risk, not moral desert, drives the line.