Keith Thompson

There are moments when meaning no longer holds. And still—something remains. (Linked article in my comment below.)

Yes, I’m going on tirzepatide. You must lead by example. Removing friction and making sticking to calorie goals effortlessly is a massive fkn unlock with cascading benefits. Improving insulin sensitivity is also fkn great. I want to experiment with it so I can coach and speak to it from personal experience

Otto Kernberg explains narcissistic personality disorder as a defense mechanism: Kernberg is a 96-year-old Austrian-born American psychoanalyst, professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine, and the most-cited psychoanalyst in the world. His work helped shape how narcissistic personality disorder is defined in the DSM. He describes narcissistic personality disorder as one of the severe personality disorders—but one that operates differently from the others. Beneath the surface, these individuals have a borderline personality organization: a fragmented self-concept, unstable views of others, and an internal struggle between idealized and persecutory experiences. But rather than live in that chaos, they construct what Kernberg calls a "pathological grandiose self." "It is constituted by a combination of ideal aspects of the self, ideal aspects of others that have been incorporated as if one possessed them, and ideal aspirations of the self as if one had achieved them." In other words, the person absorbs the qualities they admire in others and treats their own aspirations as already achieved—building an internal world of grandiosity and self-sufficiency. The cost? Everyone else gets devalued. "Others are devalued; 'we don't need them, we are fine, I'm just great by myself, I don't need anybody else.'" Kernberg explains that the outside world then gets divided into three categories: depreciated, worthless people; those who are great and must be admired so their qualities can be absorbed; and potential enemies who must be fought off. This structure creates an illusion of stability. On the surface, the person appears integrated and secure—far more composed than others with severe personality disorders. But underneath the self-satisfaction and grandiosity lies "an incapacity to love others, and an internal sense of grandiosity and emptiness at the same time." There is no genuine mutuality in their relationships. They need admiration constantly but cannot reciprocate. In therapy, this dynamic plays out directly with the therapist. Kernberg describes a long-term power struggle: "They have to show their superiority to the therapist and keep themselves superior to the therapist because the only alternative is then if they would need the therapist, it means that the therapist is superior to them and they would feel immediately inferiorized and humiliated." The therapeutic work involves gradually clarifying and resolving this superiority-inferiority battle, which then reveals what was always underneath: "the underlying borderline structure against which the narcissistic structure was a defense"—the severe splits between idealized and persecutory relationships that the grandiose self was built to hide. The narcissistic personality, in Kernberg's framework, is not the core problem. It is the solution the psyche constructed to avoid an even more painful one.

As always I only support military action anywhere, in any context, if it directly serves the interests of American citizens. It’s troubling that the arguments we’re hearing for this war in Iran, including from Trump himself, seem to revolve primarily around “bringing freedom to the Iranian people.” As Americans, the freedom of Iranians is not our responsibility. If a single American life is lost in the service of that goal, it will be a travesty. What nobody has even come close to sufficiently explaining is how this war will first and foremost directly benefit American citizens. That is a case that needed to have been made clearly and convincingly before this move, and it wasn’t. We’re also told how this will benefit Israel, and I’m sure it will. But Israel is not America. What does it do for America? How does it help us? That needs to be explained to us. And it isn’t “panicking” or demonstrating “disloyalty” to demand those very basic answers about how American tax money, and potentially American lives, are being spent. We hear about the danger of a nuclear Iran, but that’s odd because we were told that Iran’s nuclear capabilities had already been set back decades. We hear that this war will be over quickly and easily because Iran is powerless, which I hope and pray is the case, and maybe it will be. But that’s odd, too, because if Iran is such a paper tiger then how were they a danger to us in the first place? It seems hard to argue both that Iran is an existential threat to the United States and that we can topple them in 20 minutes with no casualties or negative downstream effects. Also the political calculation really matters here. A huge majority of American oppose this. That’s just a fact. If it costs Republicans in 26 and 28, then, no matter how things work out in Iran, it will not have been worth it. A free Iran at the cost of Democrat rule here at home is a bad deal. A free Iran for an unfree America would be just about the worst trade of the century. I’m praying for our great country today.

Bad sign. Either: People are becoming health neurotics or people aren’t socializing, holding dinner parties, going for dates at wine bars… Both mean decline