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A Serious Question About Anthony Weiner
Okay. Now that we’ve all finished being grossed out, laughing ourselves hoarse, and making Weiner jokes, I’ve got a serious question.
What the hell is wrong with Anthony Weiner?
Clearly, he has a mental illness. It’s obviously an affliction that involves a compulsion to humiliate himself and those close to him. It combines aspects of sadism, masochism, exhibitionism, and addiction. Is this typical of any known disorder? Is it something the DSM-5 has specifically identified? For anyone here in the mental health field — have you ever seen anything like this before?
Usually I relate to politicians by seeing them as akin to ordinary people I know, only more powerful, ambitious, and narcissistic. Hillary’s like the scolding grade school teacher who enjoys her power over six-year-olds far too much for comfort. We all know guys like Bill — probably every woman has a girlfriend who, unfortunately for her, married a smooth-talking, philandering jerk just like him. We all know drunks, drug addicts, people who somehow screw up every job they get, and other self-destructive folk.
But Weiner’s got something really weird going on. He has to be the most humiliated guy in the history of public life, doesn’t he? He clearly longs to be humiliated and to humiliate his family. He deliberately creates situations where he and his family will be grossly humiliated in front of the largest possible audience. To do what he did after participating in a documentary about his humiliation, after years of therapy discussed oh-so-very publicly, during the height of a presidential campaign when obviously the press will be tracking his every breath — well, I just don’t know anyone who has even a minor case of what he’s got, whatever it is.
Do you?
Published in General
Male fraud.
He was texting a Trump supporter which was him metaphorically expanding the Democratic tent. Its performance art and he’s an artist.
Simple, really.
Tenting tonight, tenting tonight . . .
Don’t think so. The problem is that he is high profile and the way he went about it by going by the name Carlos Danger captured peoples imagination and curiosity.
I’ve heard women complain about getting explicit, supposedly unsolicited pics from men on dating sites. In todays culture is that the norm or is it unusual?
Put simply, you can’t fix stupid.
My Dear Dr. Berlinski,
I am so sorry that I have not had time to get to your cry for help until now. Here at the Alexander Portnoy Rehabilitation Center for the Extremely Sexually Neurotic, we deal with people with Anthony’s problem every single day. Yes, they all have their individual quirks. However, when it comes right down to it they all have the annoying quality of being thoughtlessly repulsive. We are not without the ability to treat this. Here is a list of our basic therapies.
1.) Hot Tub filled with Chicken Soup. This is more than just Chicken Soup for the soul but enough for the whole body. We like to hold our clients head under the broth until they have injested enough of the delicious matzo balls. This seems to have a profound effect.
2.) Darkened Room and Bad Hazan. We have a recording of the entire Yom Kippor service (10 hours) sung by one of the worst Hazans on the North American Continent. His monotonous atonal delivery is designed not to put the prayful to sleep but rather to slowly make them wish that they had never been born (there is a long talmudic discussion about whether it would have been better to be born but not now). In the darkened room the client is strapped down on a hard wooden pew and covered with a tallis. This seems to calm the client down. They are more amenable to suggestion after this.
cont.
Let’s put this way. The 21st Century has given us a lot of technological marvels – and one of them is a concept called “revenge porn.”
Young women by the hundreds of thousands think it’s fine to snap photos of themselves in various stages of undress and often performing sex acts, both solo and with their boyfriends. They then send them to said boyfriend electronically, only to be shocked that when their relationship ends, the pic(s) has been shared among his friends or, worse, shared with the world on tumblr or professional websites set up just for such exhibitionism.
There is a movement afoot to criminalize this. But if it’s been shot and sent consensually where does control and ownership end?
Addendum: Based on this theory it is the recipient of Mr. Weiner’s photographs who passed them along to the NY Post who would be guilty of violating his right of privacy.
cont. from #96
3.) Dinner and a Movie with Sheila. Sheila is a NY girl with the singularly most annoying voice in all of Western Civilization. The tonal quality resembles a cross between a hornet and a band saw. Sheila has an opinion about everything, at length, and will be sure to give it all through dinner and especially every few seconds during the movie. Usually, this therapy will break down the defences of the most impossibly annoying client and progress can ensue from there.
Everthing at Alexander Portnoy is cash in advance. You will be required to sign multiple legal waivers. However, we are no longer asking to take hostages as a prerequisite to accepting a client.
Claire, I hope this has been of help to you.
Regards,
Jim
Fran Drescher is now a hooker named Sheila?!?
Yep, I play tournament poker and there is always debate on rules, I aways come down hard on interpreting the rules to discourage poor or lazy behavior at the poker table. My thought is people need an incentive to learn to do it right.
seems to me if you criminalize revenge porn it doesn’t encourage people to not engage in the reckless behavior in the first place..
EJ,
Fran is in an angelic choir compared to Sheila. Also, Sheila is not a hooker. She doesn’t believe in sex, either before or after marriage.
Regards,
Jim
BTW now that I think about, it’s the same approach I advocate at Ricochet, applying the rules of conduct strictly… don’t look to give people free passes on bad, lazy behavior, because nothing is learned for the future…
That doesn’t necessarily disprove my point. Again, all that would, in our perception, work against him, but again he’s associating with people who get away with rape, abuse, fraud, lies, and distortion on a nigh-weekly basis. By all accounts they should all be locked away, but they are free and not even discredited. Is it unusual to assume some of that untouchable-ness apply to him in his mind? I don’t see why it would seem logical at least to Weiner.
To us, it’s ridiculous, but in the circles he runs, it’s not out of the question.
I will investigate.
I think the difference is due to how people perceive Hilary and how they perceive Huma.
We’re 4 pages in, with little or no discussion of a spiritual explanation.
People are tempted to all sorts of bad, wicked, and often self-destructive behavior. It’s the tragedy of the human condition. It’s recognized in both the Judeo-Christian and other traditions. Think of the tragic flaw of Greek mythic heroes.
Many Christians believe in a doctrine called total depravity, which seems to fit here. It doesn’t mean that everyone is “totally depraved,” but rather that all people have a fallen nature, are slaves to sin in some way, and are helpless to solve this problem without the intervention and grace of God.
I think that people are dangerously inclined to justify their own bad behavior, especially when they can point to apparently worse behavior than someone else. I know that I am often guilty of this. Thus the instructions of Jesus to “judge not lest ye be judged,” and criticism of my effort to remove a speck from my brother’s eye when I have a plank in my own. This doesn’t mean that we can never point out sin in others, but that we must be very careful and humble in doing so. I’m often not very good at this, either.
Schadenfreude is very hard to resist, especially in circumstances involving the political opposition.
Maybe we should pray for Mr. Weiner and his family, instead of laughing at them.
Ah Sheila. I’ll never forget the last time I saw her.
Looked just like that.
Can’t we do both?
Claire is much more gorgeous with her naturally dark hair, though. Sometimes Mother Nature really does know best.
I think he’s doing fine for the Republican Party. Nothing wrong with him at all.
At first I expected that liberal Democrats would embrace him as a kind of modern, liberated man. I may be badly analyzing here but I can’t help thinking that there’s a double standard for him. Would Democrats denounce a gay couple with a similar public issue? Where are the libertarian Democrats? At Ivy League schools, this is called “kink,” I believe? Which is a protected lifestyle in those circles. This is even a Kink Day at Columbia College if I’m not mistaken .
I think it’s because he’s a white guy married to someone who feminists want to transform into an fully liberated icon who is not dependent on “some man.” To complete the transformation she must “dump Weiner” and transcend her mentor, who labels herself a “transitional figure.” He’s also stridently pro Israel, which puts him on a collision course with regnant ideologies in the Dem Party. Maybe.
For all their talk about liberation and pride liberal Democrats are so bourgeois. They think they’re the Village but they’re Levittown.
I have long suspected that a kind of purge has been going on among Democrats who are stridently and independently pro Israel, inclined to buck the Party or oppose the President on a tough vote. A recent vote being the so called Iran Deal and a future vote that could help to create a Palestinian state.
I think you are onto something. There is some anger there, I think.
Re #111
What’s coming back to me is that people were forced to abandon Weiner when it came out that he was corresponding with a girl who was, I think, underage. Her letters clearly revealed she had—if you can imagine it— a crush on Weiner. I don’t think it was proven she got any pictures (though one letter from her to Weiner sounded like she did.) Breitbart’s question was: Isn’t Weiner’s correspondence with this girl inappropriate ?
The girl didn’t come from much money at all. After the story came out, it seemed somebody got to her family, and got them and the girl to shut up about all of it. I don’t think that girl was the only one among the, ah, recipients who was, as Trump would have said, “on the younger side”.
Maureen Dowd hinted that the other, older, females were willing participants. (She subtly made them out to be skanks.) But no one could show any evidence that any of the old-enough women were asking for that kind of attention from Weiner.
He was in Congress for a long while before the first public incident, and he resigned. He ran for mayor, and it was during the campaign that the second incident took place ( I think). So in fairness to New Yorkers, who do have a history of electing jerks, they didn’t know .
If I recall, the first incident was made public when he tried to Direct Message ( is that the right expression?) a girl he was flirting with and inadvertently tweeted to his entire group of followers.
He’s just being frank.
Re: 114
So the pro-Israel politician was married to a woman with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. And, at one point, had every parent of a teenage daughter in America wanting to take a hatchet to the stuff he was displaying.
Israel never gets a lucky break.
What is wrong with him?
A lot.
Psychobabble would be me doing an extensive analysis of his dreams, arguing that people and objects in them represent parts of his oedipal drama. Noting that Anthony Weiner’s not well in the head seems like a wholly common-sense judgment.
Yeah, but the why of that remains. This is a strange thing to find arousing, particularly given the huge risk of exposure and humiliation. I think we’d all understand if he was having an affair, in person, with a flesh-and-blood woman, even if we didn’t find it at all morally acceptable. But this is not how most adult men get un-horny.
Yes. You don’t need to believe in any traditional religion to know that betraying and humiliating your family is wrong, or that making promises you don’t keep is wrong. (I assume he promised to stop doing this many times.)
To me, that answers the question, “What in God’s name are you doing on top of the babysitter?” What Weiner was doing requires a little more explanatory heft, so to speak.
Here is a story on the subject… http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/30/how-did-the-ny-post-get-anthony-weiners-texts-and-pics/?utm_campaign=atdailycaller&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social