Sulphur on 17/3/2023 at 03:14

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I'm not sure pathological narcissism combined with a lack of filter is a mental illness per se, but he should definitely get help inasmuch as Twitter needs someone else to run it.

Sulphur on 17/3/2023 at 18:51

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I was expecting a funnier riposte in the inevitable post that pointed that out, to be honest.

Here's a dictionary entry:



The fun part of language is reconciling how meaning drifts over time and a term can come to mean multiple things.

Sulphur on 18/3/2023 at 03:16

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If I thought Musk had full-blown (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder) NPD, you better believe I'd mention exactly that. Pathological as an adjective in the colloquial sense above very obviously means you still attach a noun to it - so of course it has to be specific. I'm not 'arguing against the root of it', good grief. There exist colloquialisms, and there exist the original terms, and the two don't have to mean the same thing in everyday speech; I'm sure you can judge what was meant by context alone. So maybe that's confusing, but semantically these constructs have different usage features. If we'd been talking about someone as 'pathologically silly', I doubt we'd be having a discussion about that as a mental disorder.

Nicker on 19/3/2023 at 03:48

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When does another person's behavioral configuration, which does not compliment one's own configuration, become a pathology? Are ADHD and autism illnesses or just variations on a sliding scale? What we call pathology often seems to be just preference or a value judgement.

To me, pathology is when that configuration creates a solitary predator, as opposed to a social carnivore.

Even then, solitary, humanoid predators are not entirely broken, they are just a danger to society, because they can masquerade as humans. To them, socialized humans are the malfunctioning ones, therefore deserving of consumption. But unlike social humans, they cannot survive without us (assuming that I am one of us and not one of them).

Perhaps the real disease is why socialized humans either love people with dangerous configurations or simply cannot identify them until it is too late. History is a parade of these adorable monsters. The present shows us that we can't seem to shake them. We even lavish them with titles, the most common being So&so The Great.


Perhaps real pathology is when a person cannot function in either world.

Nicker on 19/3/2023 at 04:38

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Would that also depend on whether the harm is to the affected individual or if it is a danger to others? Considering that some people feel threatened just by the existence of divergent individuals, historically the definition of pathology seems to be largely a function of social fashion than any sort of objective measure.

The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) has ballooned since its first edition. Is that because of increased awareness, increased reporting, reduction of stigmas, a finer diagnostic resolution, an increase in actual disease or as a marketing tool for psychiatric drugs?

Homosexuality is no longer listed but that doesn't mean that, in a less tolerant future, it will never be included again.