WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU QUESTION YOUR CYBERPATH?

from JOYFUL ALIVE WOMAN

replace the word ABUSER with CYBERPATH - and the behaviors will be the same.

How Your Abuser Might React to Being Questioned About their Behavior

When you confront your abusive friend/relative/significant other/employer/co-worker/neighbor/acquaintance about their abusive behavior, there are 5 things that you can usually expect:

• Anger – They will likely get angry at you for daring to question them.
• Defensiveness – They may try to blame you for their behavior, or try to make you think it’s your fault.
• Diversionary Tactics – They may try to make you feel guilty for confronting them about their treatment of you (or their behavior in general), or accuse you of being jealous. They will usually also turn the tables by accusing you of the same things you brought up (that’s called Projection).
• Lies – They may lie to you (this can and often does fall under Diversionary Tactics)
• Silence – They may simply clam up and refuse to talk about the abuse.

The above are all Primary Tactics of the Abuser/Narcissist/Cyberpath– learn them well

original found at this site

INSIDE THE ABUSIVE MIND

"..the narcissistic abuser often picks energetic, loving, successful, passionate people. They seek out in others, what they lack, then begin the process of appropriating what the other has for themselves. In this sense they are true emotional vampires, robbing their victims of their personality, they energy, their passion for life - metaphorically killing them.

Their preferred method though, in the end, is to have the victim self-destruct, allowing them to walk away in triumph seeking sympathy for what they've had to endure with this 'crazy person'."

(edited slightly for cyberpaths)
Abusive people (such as cyberpaths) typically think they are unique, so different from other people that they don't have to follow the same rules as everyone else. But actually, abusers have a lot in common with one another and share a great many thinking patterns and behaviors.

These may include:

Success Fantasies: The abuser believes in fantasies of being rich, famous, or extremely successful in other terms if only other people weren't holding him back. They're blocking the way makes the abuser feel justified in getting back at them, including through abuse. The abuser also puts other people down as a way of building himself up. Beckstead - prime example!

Blaming: The abuser shifts responsibility for actions to others, which allows the abuser to be angry at the other person for "causing" the behavior. Cyberpath example: "If you wouldn't "tempt me" I wouldn't beg you for intimate photos, cybersex or send you dirty pictures.."

Redefining: The abuser redefines the situation so that the problem lies not with the abuser but with others or the outside world. Cyberpath example: My wife/ partner doesn't love me; won't have sex with me; makes me feel bad - anyway... so I need to turn to you (and net porn) for relief. My boss stresses me out... so I take it out on you (victim) at the computer.

Making Fools of Others: The abuser combines tactics to manipulate others. The tactics include lying, upsetting the other person just to watch her reactions, and provoking a fight between or among others. The Cyberpath may try to charm the person he wants to manipulate, pretending a great deal of interest in and concern for that person in order to get on her good side. (love bombing, coercion, manipulation, brainwashing, anchoring lies)

Assuming: Abusive people often assume they know what others are thinking or feeling. Their assumption allows them to justify their behavior because they "know" what the other person would think or do in a given situation. Cyberpath example: "I knew you'd be mad because I didn't come online when you asked, so I figured I might as well stay away for a week..."

Emotional Dependence: Abusive individuals are usually very emotionally dependent on their partner. The result of their inner rage at being dependent means that the abuser acts in controlling ways to exert power and to deny their own weakness. (If they are having net affairs they may take out their rage on the new victim rather than the spouse - knowing the person they are cheating with has no one to tell without revealing the net affair!)

One major symptom is strong jealousy and possessive actions, normally sexual in nature. Another sign of dependence is the effect of what happens when the abused person leaves the relationship because of the abuse. It is common for the abuser to make extraordinary attempts to persuade them to return.

Lying: The abuser manipulates by lying to control information. The abuser may also use lying to keep other people, including the victim, off-balance psychologically. For example: The abuser tries to appear truthful when actually lying, or tries to look deceitful when actually telling the truth.

Rigid Application of Traditional Sex Attitudes: Abusive persons tend to have more inflexible beliefs about roles and functions of the opposite sex. The man may expect the woman to over fulfill all the household and mothering chores and to be very submissive and subservient.

Drama and Excitement: Abusive people have trouble experiencing close, satisfying relationships. They substitute drama and excitement (sex? playing games with people's heads & emotions?) for closeness. Abusive people find it exciting to watch others become angry, get into fights, or fall into a general uproar. Often, they'll use a combination of tactics to set up an exciting situation.

Closed Channel: The abusive person does not tell much about personal details and real feelings. The abuser is not open to new information about himself either, such as someone else's thoughts about them personally. The abuser is secretive, close-minded and self-righteous. Abusers believe they are right in all situations.

Ownership: The abuser typically is very possessive. Moreover, the abuser believes that anything that is wanted should be owned, and that the abuser can do as wanted with anything that is his. The same attitude applies to people. It justifies controlling others' behavior, physically hurting them, smearing their character, stalking, hacking their computers and taking things that belong to them.

Poor Anger Management: Individuals who have experienced a violent and abusive childhood are more likely to grow up and become spouse abusers or abused people themselves. A person who sees violence, even verbal or emotional violence, as the primary method for settling differences as a child is not going to have very many alternate ways available to channel anger. A person without an everyday outlet for anger risks exploding toward the people closest to them.

Minimizing: The abuser ducks responsibility for abusive actions by trying to make them seem less important than they are. Cyberpath example: "Everything I said online wasn't that bad", or "You took what I said the wrong way."

Fragmentation: The abuser usually keeps the abusive behavior separate from the rest of his life. The separation is physical; for example, the abuser will seduce and malign people online but not in real life.

The separation is also psychological; for example, it is not uncommon for an abuser to attend church Sunday morning and abuse his victim Sunday night. The abuser sees no inconsistency in this behavior and feels justified in it.

Above the Rules: As mentioned earlier, abusers generally believe they are better than other people and so don't have to follow the rules that ordinary people do. That attitude is typical of convicted criminals, too. Each inmate usually believes that while all the other inmates are criminals, he is not. An abuser shows above-the-rules thinking in saying, "I don't need counseling. Nobody knows as much about my life as I do. I can handle my life without help from anybody." (they usually only go to counseling when caught, as a way to say - "I straightened my life out - its ok now", then go RIGHT BACK TO COVERTLY ABUSING)

Self-glorification: The abuser usually thinks of himself as strong, superior, independent, self-sufficient, and very virile. When anyone says or does anything that doesn't fit this glorified self-image, the abuser takes it as an insult.

Inability to express feelings with words: This type of person is rarely capable of true intimacy and may feel very threatened by the prospect of being open and vulnerable. Particularly when frustrated, the abusive person expects instant gratification from their partner who is expected to "read" their mind and "know" what their mate wants. When the mate doesn't know what is expected the partner may interpret this as meaning they do not really love them. Therefore with an abusive individual, rejection = violence (verbal, physical, emotional). (if they do genuinely express themselves its generally a sarcastic remark, a putdown or anger)

Vagueness: Thinking and speaking vaguely or selectively skewing facts lets the abuser avoid responsibility. Cyberpath Example: "I'm working, I can't chat right now." (Working on OTHER VICTIMS??)

ORIGINAL ARTICLE FROM THIS GREAT SITE

The Skinner Box Effect: Sexual Addiction & Online Pornography

by T.M. Grundner

These are the facts:
1. Among the millions of people on the Internet there exists a signifigant percentage for whom online pornography is not, and never will be, a "recreational pursuit." Rather it is, or soon will become an addiction.

2. Researchers and clinicians have established that pornography addiction contains all the characteristics of any other kind of addiction: mood altercation, compulsion, dependency, the need for higher and more exotic "doses" and withdrawl symptoms when the person tries to stop.

3. Because of the "Skinner Box Effect," pornography on the Internet is different and far more virulent than the customary forms. The reason is because it derives its potency from both the content of what is seen, AND from the way it is presented to the user by the technology itself.

For those suffering from the problem, Dr. Grundner provides a series of behavioral and spiritual techniques to help stop the downward spiral. Over 30 personal accounts are presented—taken directly from the Internet itself—of the pain, suffering, loss of jobs, and failed marriages that have resulted from online pornography and sexual addiciton.

This book is a warning, but one which contains a large measure of hope.

http://www.amazon.com

Types of Evil Personalities

excerpts:
About four percent of the population is evil - that is about one person in twenty five.

The mental abilities of evil people closely echo those of the normal population; there is a bell shaped curve of intelligence in both good and evil people.

Most good people are only aware of the least intelligent part of the evil distribution; those are the people who are obviously evil: criminals. The normal and intelligent ends of the evil distribution totally escape most good people's understanding. In this web page I will describe those undetected parts of evil.

What does an evil person of normal intelligence look like? Most people are very familiar with them. An evil person of normal intelligence is a person who makes life difficult, painful, and unpleasant for the good people around them. The supervisor who creates a crises at work by trying to pour a cup and a half of coffee into a cup and then requires everyone to work holiday's and weekends to clean up the mess - is an example of an evil person of normal intelligence. What distinguishes such people from criminals is that they are quicker learners; they figure out what will happen to them if they pursue the sort of obvious evil things that the least intelligent of the evil spectrum do.

Evil people of normal intelligence are careful to do their best to blend into good society. This insulates and protects them from the angered reaction of good people; who would hammer them just as hard as they hammer the least intelligent of the evil. Indeed, evil people of normal intelligence are so successful at blending into good society that their statements, goals and culture have become 'normal' and 'accepted'.

For example, the comic strip 'Miss Peach' is an example of the behavior and actions of evil people of normal intelligence. The 'Put Down', passive aggressive behavior, insults, 'back stabbing', these are all typical behaviors for evil people of normal intelligence. All of these things are so common that many good people adopt them as reasonable ways to behave; they are not, they are as evil as anything could be.

By far evil people of normal intelligence are the most common type of evil person most people encounter. The stress in most good people's lives comes from interaction with evil people of normal intelligence. The goal of the average evil person is to make the lives of those around them as miserable as they can - without doing enough to attract the retribution they richly deserve.

Next up the ladder is the evil person of above average intelligence. These people have a similar goal to evil people of average intelligence; the production of human misery. However these people see the opportunity to do something that evil people of normal intelligence don't see how to do; murder someone and get away with it. They understand that the way to murder someone and get away with it is to not care who they kill, how they kill them, or when they kill them. Such people set up conditions where someone will be 'accidentally' killed and wait for the circumstances to occur.

That leaves us those who are evil and of high intelligence. Most good people are also familiar with these kind of people; we call them leaders - both of industry and of government. It is the goal of such people to get away with mass murder.

If you are a good person you will meet many evil people in your life, you need to recognize them and their actions. More importantly you need to recognize which evil behaviors you have been conned into excepting as reasonable and to reject those behaviors - both in yourself and in others - as unacceptable.

Of course Yin and Yang complicates the detection of evil; in any good person there is an element of evil - in any evil person there is an element of good. In a good man that element of evil belongs in his fighting spirit - where it causes no harm and strengthens his nature. Incidentally, it is because of this element of evil in the fighting spirit that good triumphs over evil; it is something evil lacks.

original article found here

U.S. Congress has Web Privacy in Their Sites

Here are some things Internet users can discover about Kiyoshi Martinez, a 24-year-old man from Mokena, Ill., from some of his recent posts online. He watched “The Colbert Report” on Tuesday night, he likes the musician Lenlow and he received bottles of olive oil and vinegar for his birthday. Mr. Martinez has Facebook and LinkedIn pages, a Twitter account and a Web site that includes his résumé.

So it is surprising to learn that Mr. Martinez, an aide in the Illinois Senate, is also vigilant about his privacy online.

“I’m pretty aware of the fact that ANYTHING you do on the Internet pretty much should just be considered public,” Mr. Martinez said. While he knows that companies are collecting his data and often tracking his online habits so they can show him more relevant ads, he said, he would like to see more transparency “about what the company intends to do with your data and your information.”

“Like all privacy matters, it’s something that people need to be informed on,” Mr. Martinez said.

Those same questions of data collection and privacy policies are attracting the attention of Congress, too. There is no broad privacy legislation governing advertising on the Internet. And even some in the government admit that they do not have a clear grasp of what companies are able to do with the wealth of data now available to them.

“That is why Congress, at this point, is wanting to gather a lot more information, because no one knows,” said Steven A. Hetcher, a professor at Vanderbilt University Law School. “That information is incredibly valuable; it’s the new frontier of advertising.”

Beyond the data question, there are issues of how companies should tell browsers that their information is being tracked, which area of law covers this and what — if anything — proper regulation would look like.

On Aug. 1, four top members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent letters ordering 33 cable and Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Comcast and Cox Communications, to provide details about their privacy standards. That followed House and Senate hearings last month about privacy and behavioral targeting, in which advertisers show ads to consumers based on their travels around the Web. If an advertiser knows that Mr. Martinez watches “The Colbert Report,” for example, it might show him an ad for “The Daily Show.”

As advertisers become more sophisticated about behavioral targeting, and online privacy standards become increasingly varied, regulators and privacy advocates are becoming concerned. A few companies have taken precautionary measures to try to fend off criticism; in the last few days, for instance, both Yahoo and Google have made it easier for people to opt out of targeted ads on their sites. But that may not be enough.

“Some type of omnibus electronic privacy legislation is needed,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, “regardless of the particular technologies or companies involved.”

He and the other members of the House expect to receive responses from all of the companies by early this week. With the responses to the House letters, “we can understand exactly what each sector of the communications industry is technically capable of doing, and how they use the information once they do get access to it.”

One of the controversial new behavioral-targeting technologies is called deep packet inspection, and a company that does it — NebuAd — was a focus of the July Congressional hearings.

In NebuAd’s version of deep packet inspection, a hardware device is put into an Internet service provider’s network that can track where users are going online. NebuAd looks for categories that the user will be interested in. If the device notes that a user is browsing or searching for sites about German automobiles, it can deliver an ad about German automobiles later that day, even when the user is on a site about pets.

NebuAd’s chief executive, Bob Dykes, who testified at the hearings last month, said his company protects privacy.

“We don’t have any raw data on the identifiable individual,” Mr. Dykes said in an interview last month. “Everything is anonymous.”

He said NebuAd took several steps to ensure that the information could not be traced back to an individual or an Internet protocol address. The company avoids sensitive categories, he said; someone making a search about H.I.V., for example, would not see related ads. And NebuAd cannot gain access to secure sites.

Mr. Dykes came under scrutiny at the hearings for NebuAd’s technology and for how the company notified consumers.

The ways that some Internet service providers told consumers about their tracking were vague or too subtle, some privacy advocates and congressmen said.

NebuAd lost several customers this summer amid all the scrutiny, including CenturyTel, Charter Communications, WideOpenWest Holdings and Embarq.

“We will not be using this technology again until such time as all the privacy concerns have been addressed,” said Charles Fleckenstein, an Embarq spokesman.

Mr. Dykes said, “We are perfectly O.K. for some of our partners to wait until we have a better, more informed education of the public and folks in Washington before they resume their rollout.”

The NebuAd controversy illustrates the difficulty of regulation in online advertising, when new ways of tracking users arise regularly and companies have different ways of handling data.

The Federal Trade Commission has made some tentative steps toward standards, including a December proposal on behavioral-advertising practices. The proposal suggested that companies provide a clear notice to consumers that lets them opt out of tracking, notify consumers if the company changes the way it uses the data and use reasonable security measures. It also sought comment on several matters.

But Lydia B. Parnes, the director of the F.T.C.’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, has said she supports industry self-regulation, saying that it isn’t yet clear that the consumer is being harmed and that regulations might be too specific to current technologies. Laws have been made on slices of the privacy pie, including data about finances or children. But complying with various pieces of legislation is difficult, companies said.

“Compliance is becoming very complex and not very clear in terms of what applies to a new and emerging business model,” said Mike Hintze, the associate general counsel at Microsoft. “From the company’s perspective of trying to comply with these laws, we thought a comprehensive federal privacy law made a lot of sense.”

There is some industry support for a comprehensive law, but any wide-ranging law would require some legal wrangling.

“They’re raising these bigger-picture questions, and those questions are inherently intertwined not just with privacy laws, but also with contract law, computer-intrusion law, consumer-fraud law,” said Andrea M. Matwyshyn, an assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

“When legislators are trying to regulate in this area, they’re always caught a little bit between a rock and a hard place,” she said. “You don’t want to adopt a technology-specific standard that’s destined to fail as technology advances faster than the law can ever hope to embody. At the same time, you need to allow adequate specificity in the law to allow companies to comply with it and allow consumers to know what their rights are.”

Some advertising industry groups say self-regulation is enough. The most prominent programs are the Online Privacy Alliance and the Network Advertising Initiative. Both ask members to follow principles on notifying consumers and avoiding personally identifiable information.

Regulation is “certainly going to have unintended consequences and unintended impact,” said Mike Zaneis, the vice president for public policy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a coalition of online advertisers.

Some civil liberties groups disagreed.

“There’s a self-regulatory program out there which hasn’t been very effective,” said Alissa Cooper, the chief computer scientist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. She said her organization was concerned about NebuAd’s technology. As for general federal privacy legislation, she said, the center supports it but thinks more information is needed about data-handling.

The letter from the House committee, she said, was “a really welcome development in the absence of any kind of regulation.”

“The companies don’t feel the need to explain everything they’re doing,” she said, “so a little bit of pressure from Congress or the F.T.C. can go a long way.”

As government representatives think about legislation, they are also trying to gauge how aware and concerned consumers are about online privacy. A recent study of about 1,000 Internet users asked them if they agreed with the statement that they were comfortable with advertisers’ using their browsing history to decide what ads to show them. Thirty-nine percent strongly disagreed; only 6 percent strongly agreed. The study was conducted by TNS Global, a research firm, and TRUSTe, an online privacy network.

Is privacy a concern for younger consumers, who are splashing personal details all over MySpace? The sparse data available suggest that it is. A study last year of 2,274 British adults showed that people ages 18 to 24 considered privacy tied with “avoiding hate and offense” as the most important consideration in digital technologies. For older people, privacy was second to “avoiding hate and offense.” The study was conducted by YouGov, a British research firm.

“People my age — in their 20s or in their 30s — a lot of them are very clued up on protecting privacy on the Internet,” said Ben Saxon, 23, a student in Cambridge, England. He has started a Facebook group objecting to Phorm, a NebuAd-like company that is working in Britain and is starting to court the United States market.

Still, he said, “I don’t think complete privacy on the Internet is actually possible anymore.”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE