Interesting comment on the Graham Linehan Substack article about Jon Ronson:
grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/so-what-if-youve-been-publically/comment/651985
AlisonWontWheesht - Oct 25, 2020
"I hoped you taped the conversation you had with him, Graham.
I am unsurprised at him being disingenuous. I knew of him solely because he falsely represented himself as an expert on Dr Robert Hare's psychopathy test. (Dr Hare is the one who said Ronson falsely represented himself).
At roughly the time this was happening, I was learning about psychopathy myself, and watching lots of videos, which is how I stumbled across his. A psychologist I had been to see for PTSD related to a car accident had asked me to read the book Without Conscience, Psychopaths Among Us. He believed a "friend" of mine might well be a psychopath. Usually psychologists will not agree to the definition "psychopath" preferring narcissistic personality disorder, which has the same basic traits.
Psychologists generally prefer not to believe someone is absolutely unfixable and untreatable, as psychopaths basically are. They offer attempts to engage with and treat people diagnosed with NPD, which is why you won't often hear a psychologist discuss psychopathy. The truth is, trying to treat people without empathy, shame, guilt, or love just trains them how to better psychopaths.
Anyway, I was lucky, as it just happened to be James David Haynes' (the psychologist I visited) area of interest at this time. I wish I had read the book about two years (or twenty years) previously, would have saved me a lot of trouble with my psychopathic "friend" and made some sense of some things going on in the world.
I am not associated with Dr Hare or his work in any way, but highly recommend everyone reads the book.
Seriously, if you haven't read it, you don't understand psychopaths, even if you think you do. Please, do read it.
It could explain a lot about the current situation women find themselves in. That is not to say all transologists are psychopaths, but that it only takes a few with power to cause absolute havoc and destroy progress.
www.booktopia.com.au/without-conscience-dr-robert-d-hare/book/9781572304512.html
Ronson took the work of an educated scientist and rode his coat tails to make claims that were untrue in order to sell himself as a psychopath expert. Dr Hare says he is not. His "talk" on the subject was one of the last TED talks I subjected myself to, because I realised at that point that anybody could and did say anything they liked in TED talks and they may present themselves as authorities but they often are not. In this "talk", which was grandstanding nonsense in my opinion for the most part, he tries to downplay the reality of and concern of psychopaths amongst us. Having read the book and followed up with further reading, I could clearly see that Ronson's claims could not be true, regarding his expertise and ability to diagnose psychopaths. Only trained mental health practitioners with years of expertise are even allowed to attempt this. He did a workshop on it.
Of course I am not claiming this about Ronson, but it has been pointed out that people who would be diagnosed as psychopaths themselves often make a point of trying to dismiss, downplay or make a joke out of the dangers of psychopaths. They minimise their behaviours and appeal to neurotypical people's sense of empathy to thwart any attempts to reign in the harm psychopaths cause.
This is Dr Robert Hare, an actual expert who has spent his life studying psychopaths and who devised his psychopathy test, speaking up about Ronson's behaviour here:
www.hare.org/comments/comment3.pdf
So, I remain unsurprised that he downplays the issue of harms caused by people with low empathy."