On Capgras Syndrome, stupidity, education and conspiracy

[catvincent]

The always-challenging Rigorous Intuition has a gem this week:

Symptomatic of Capgras Syndrome is the delusion of doubles: that those closest to you, or your familiar objects, have been replaced by impostors and replicas. Tony Rosato, a Toronto comic actor who put in time on SCTV and Saturday Night Live, served two years in prison for criminally

Comments

[astvinr]

Truly fascinating stuff, bro.
I became aware of Pfc. Dinkin due to the efforts of Dick Russell's - The Man Who Knew Too Much...

Ah, this is very good. You'll be well aware of my own interest in the case of Pfc. Dinkin. The only source on him that I knew up until now was from Philip K. Dick who found a passing reference to him in the Warren Report and followed it up himself (it's to be found in Gregg Rickman's interviews with Dick by the way)
You'll also be familiar with my interest in Capgras' Syndrome, too. It underlines a lot of 1950s and Cold War paranoia. The original version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is, to all intents and purposes, a dramatisation of the inner mental state of a Capgras' sufferer, but presented as concrete reality.

Like Curry, HG Wells had it backwards, too...
No, in fact, H.G. Wells didn't get it about face at all. He was cannier than that. In his The Time Machine the time traveller first assumes, when he contemplates their life of leisure, that the Eloi are the aristocracy of this future world,

[catvincent]

I knew you'd dig it.
(I'd forgotten your interest in Pfc. Dinkin - and I'm not sure I ever heard the tale. Scary one, no lie.)

Another issue mentioned tangentially in the above is RIs long-time discussion of organised child abuse - he's interviewed several of the more extreme 'programmed-by-the-CIA-by -abuse-and-made-into-multiples' people and finds much of their tale convincing. I don't, entirely - but he raises some doubt that it's all delusion.

[astvinr]

Oh, I dig it! I dug out the Dinkin thing a little while back because you so inspired me with the whole 'Laughing Man' theme in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - I saw Dinkin's revelation as a manifestation of the way in which a living culture can act to prime assassins if it (the culture) feels it is necessary... Anyway, I'm sure the child abuse thing is relevant too, not least because Jack Finney was heavily influenced in writing Body Snatchers by (you guessed it!) Philip K. Dick's earlier short story 'The Father Thing' in which a young boy becomes convinced his father has been replaced by an alien (he has!) but looking at Dick's work now, in the light of my more recent and more personal researches, the themes of dissociation, false memory, the feeling that loved ones have been replaced with soulless androids all start to look very familiar. Of course, I am aware that later biographies have suggested that Dick may have been abused as a child, but no-one's put that together with his writing to my knowledge. The two go hand in

Inglish as she is wrotten

[astvinr]

Oh, here's the first bit, which should just make it through as a comment. I was struck by several elements in Morford's piece, not least this phrase:
...only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence.
I have direct experience of this. I once had a class of undergraduates from various countries, including Italy, and so took an unintelligible paper written in the kind of mangled grammar only non-native speakers could possibly produce - we're talking about real core, fundamental stuff here, like missing out or messing up the use of plurals, past tenses and articles ('the' and 'a') so (for instance) instead of 'I did not read this' the paper would have 'I no read him' - So I noted the Italian surname at the top of the page and marked it accordingly, making generous allowances for the fact that an Italian exchange-student must have written it. Imagine my amazement to meet the student and discover that it was the work of an Italian-American native

[terrycat]

Most interesting reading. Applicable song too.