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a8d9d23
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Maybe there are two types of people in the world: those who favour humans over ideology, and those who favour ideology over humans. I favour humans over ideology, but right now the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas, where everyone is either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain.
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Jon Ronson |
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544d345
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What we do, when we fuck up, we don't lose our job. We lose our vocation.
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Jon Ronson |
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ec31240
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You're standing on an escalator and you're watching the people go past on the opposite escalator. If you could climb inside their brains you would see we aren't all the same. We aren't all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths. And psychopaths are to blame for this brutal, misshapen society. They're the rocks thrown into the still pond.
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Jon Ronson |
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c4a871a
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Even sleep offered no respite from my mental disorders. There was Nightmare Disorder, which is diagnosed when the sufferer dreams of being "pursued or declared a failure." All my nightmares involve someone chasing me down the street while yelling, "You're a failure!"
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psychology
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Jon Ronson |
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8341219
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A life had been ruined. What was it for: just some social media drama? I think our natural disposition as humans is to plod along until we get old and stop. But with social media, we've created a stage for constant artificial high drama.
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Jon Ronson |
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94cb737
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Judging a person on how flustered they appear in the face of a shaming is a truly strange and arbitrary way of forming an opinion on someone. *
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Jon Ronson |
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c0c853f
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we have to think about what level of mercilessness we feel comfortable with.
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Jon Ronson |
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b3d9d68
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Do not go to that place of horror with elevated spirits, and gay hearts, for death is there! Justice and judgment are there! The power of government, displayed in its most awful form, is there . . . The person who can go and look on death merely to gratify an idle humor is destitute both of humanity and piety.
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Jon Ronson |
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818de30
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The sad thing was that Lindsey had incurred the Internet's wrath because she was impudent and playful and foolhardy and outspoken. And now here she was, working with Farukh to reduce herself to safe banalities - to cats and ice cream and Top 40 chart music. We were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland. *
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Jon Ronson |
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2402969
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The idea of Donald Trump and Alex Jones and Roger Stone and Stephen Bannon having power over us -- that is terrifying.
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Jon Ronson |
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84d27b1
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I didn't want to write a book that advocated for a less curious world. Prurient curiosity may not be great. But curiosity is. People's flaws need to be written about. The flaws of some people lead to horrors inflicted on others. And then there are the more human flaws that, when you shine a light onto them, de-demonize people who might otherwise be seen as ogres.
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human-flaws
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Jon Ronson |
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36c585d
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One man was saying, 'It cost me a new SUV for my wife,'" Andrew said. "Another said, 'It cost me a cruise to the Bahamas and a new kitchen.' Everyone was laughing."
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Jon Ronson |
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7a667e8
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You keep staying on our block we gonna have to show you what the burner do." "Thank you, it's great meeting you," says Phoenix. "What's a burner?" I whisper. "A gun," Phoenix whispers back. The man loops and rejoins the others. The streets are deserted. It's just the dealers and us. But then, miraculously, a taxi passes. I flag it. The superheroes all have bulletproof vests. I have nothing. I have a cardigan." --
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Jon Ronson |
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6ba2b94
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We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age. "Look!" we're saying. "WE'RE normal! THIS is the average!" We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside it."
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nonconformist
conservative
normal
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Jon Ronson |
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f93b1d7
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The New York Times, baffled by Delaware's obstinacy, tried to argue the state into change in an 1867 editorial. If it had previously existed in [the convicted person's] bosom a spark of self-respect this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. Without the hope that springs eternal in the human breast, without some desire to reform and become a good citizen, and the feeling that such a thing is possible, no criminal can ever return..
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Jon Ronson |
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a814eb7
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I consider it somewhat psychopathic to label someone from afar as a psychopath. We love nothing more than to declare other people insane, especially people we don't like.
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Jon Ronson |
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4ec11a4
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I'd always wondered why there had been no mention of psychopaths in the DSM. It turned out, Spitzer told me, that there had indeed been a backstage schism--between Bob Hare and a sociologist named Lee Robins. She believed clinicians couldn't reliably measure personality traits like empathy. She proposed dropping them from the DSM checklist and going only for overt symptoms. Bob vehemently disagreed, the DSM committee sided with Lee Robins, ..
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Jon Ronson |
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85d6d72
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Only a handful of therapeutic communities inspired by his Massachusetts ones exist in American prisons today. But, as it happens, one of them is situated on the top floor of the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, New Jersey. And it is being quietly run by the former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey.
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Jon Ronson |
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89817c6
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Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted his contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out using his PCL-R Checklist, which he has spent a lifetime refining. His was not the only psychopath checklist around, but it was by far the most extensively used.
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Jon Ronson |
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fb0b5d4
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So, yeah, the psychopath might cry when his dog dies and you think that's misplaced because he doesn't cry when his daughter dies." I"
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Jon Ronson |
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35bb4d8
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Social scientists have written papers analyzing Eshelman's every move in there, including the strange detail that the more brutally he behaved, the more American South his accent sounded.
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Jon Ronson |
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3a931e0
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Google has the informal corporate motto of "don't be evil", but they make money when anything happens online, even the bad stuff.' In"
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Jon Ronson |
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0f4ead1
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When shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes, nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.
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social-media
shame
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Jon Ronson |
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5c81c0f
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Guy Savelli's role in the War on Terror began when half-a-dozen strangers, within days of one another, contacted him via e-mail and telephone in the winter of 2003. They asked him if he had the power to psychically kill goats. Guy was bewildered. He did not go around publicizing this. Who were these men? How did they know about the goats? He feigned a casual tone of voice and said, 'Sure I can.' Then he phoned Special Forces.
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Jon Ronson |
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746007f
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I vaguely remembered hearing psychologists say there was a preponderance of psychopaths at the top--in the corporate and political worlds--a clinical absence of empathy being a benefit in those environments.
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Jon Ronson |
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9219d75
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If I had a spouse and two kids to support I certainly would not be telling 'jokes' like he was doing at a conference.
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Jon Ronson |
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011611e
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When I was writing my biography of LeBon," Bob Nye told me, "he seemed to me the biggest asshole in the whole of creation."
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Jon Ronson |
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3d23ab8
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Shame internalized can lead to agony. Whereas shame let out can lead to freedom, or at least a funny story, which is a sort of freedom too.
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freedom
internalized
shame
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Jon Ronson |
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0ec48c1
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I saw at least one analysis of the experiment where the author seemed to find it perfectly plausible that if a person was overcome by a violent madness he'd involuntarily start to sound like someone from Louisiana.
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Jon Ronson |
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d1b2015
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Yeah,' said Al. 'I'm very prone to boredom. I gotta go do something. Yeah. That's a fair statement. I'm not the most relaxed person in the world. My mind does not stop working all night.'
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Jon Ronson |
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e8aa1e8
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A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone thought the yellow might calm them. But I couldn't see how. Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.
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humor
cadaver
ronald-mcdonald
buildings
oppressive
ugliness
oppression
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Jon Ronson |
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608d1c6
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The UFO community?" I said. "Why would government spies want to infiltrate that?" "Oh, Jon," said Steven. "Don't be naive."
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Jon Ronson |
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f055b47
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The justice system in the West has a lot of problems," Poe said, "but at least there are rules. You have basic rights as the accused. You have your day in court. You don't have any rights when you're accused on the Internet. And the consequences are worse. It's worldwide forever."
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Jon Ronson |
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8f49a08
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his second message was that a smart orator could, if he knew the tricks, hypnotize the crowd into acquiescence or whip it up to do his bidding. Le Bon listed the tricks: 'A crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. Exaggerate, affirm, resort to repetition, and never attempt to prove anything by reasoning.' The
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Jon Ronson |
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79d8216
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It's not a remarkable note except for one thing. The typeface Tony used to print it is the exact typeface Kubrick used for the posters and title sequences of 'Eyes Wide Shut' and '2001'. 'It's Futura Extra Bold,' explains Tony. 'It was Stanley's favorite typeface. It's sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers too. Clean and elegant.' 'Is this the kind of thing you and Kubrick used to talk about?' I asked. 'God, yes,' says Tony. 'Sometimes..
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humorous
futura
futura-extra-bold
helvetica
stanley-kubrick
stanley-kubrick-s-boxes
typeface
univers
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Jon Ronson |
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23047c9
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In 1996 Hubacek had been driving drunk at 100 mph with no headlights. He crashed into a van carrying a married couple and their nanny. The husband and the nanny were killed. Poe sentenced Hubacek to 110 days of boot camp, and to carry a sign once a month for ten years in front of high schools and bars that read, I KILLED TWO PEOPLE WHILE DRIVING DRUNK, and to erect a cross and a Star of David at the scene of the crash and to keep it maintai..
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Jon Ronson |
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7b88ed6
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One of my dad's colleagues said, "She wants to paint with her shit. Maybe we should give her paints." And it worked.' Mary Barnes eventually became a celebrated and much-exhibited artist. Her paintings were greatly admired throughout the 1960s and 1970s for illustrating the mad, colourful, painful, exuberant, complicated inner life of a schizophrenic."
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Jon Ronson |
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b7206de
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Maybe it was the trying so hard to be normal that was making everyone so afraid they were going crazy.
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Jon Ronson |
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9b1b62b
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In a crowd we are "microbes" infecting everyone around us, a "grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will." We are impulsive, irritable, irrational:"
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Jon Ronson |
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22973e0
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There are obviously a lot of very ill people out there. But there are also people in the middle, getting overlabeled, becoming nothing more than a big splurge of madness in the minds of the people who benefit from it. Bob
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Jon Ronson |
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477c0f7
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For all our mythologizing, the margins can be painful and some people are there because they have no choice.
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Jon Ronson |
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61d57e1
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I didn't realize he was a drunk driver,' I said. 'The other superheroes inferred it was just a regular, random guy you were trying to force a taco onto. But still' - I indicate the nearby crack dealers - 'the Taco Incident surely demonstrates how things can inadvertently spiral.
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phoenix-jones
taco-incident
superheroes
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Jon Ronson |
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9acfeea
|
with social media, we've created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It's all very sweeping, and not the way we actually are as people.
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Jon Ronson |
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5db418d
|
I think we all care deeply about things that seem totally inconsequential to other people. We all carry around with us the flotsam and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. We are a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them?
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Jon Ronson |