Trap-18

On the forensic psychiatry framework to assess terrorist violence.

A. I’ve been reading the work of Dr Reid Meloy the creator of the Trap-18 framework to assess terrorist violence. Having learned predominantly about terrorism studies scholars who deal with terrorist psychology (a relatively small group) I am updating my knowledge about relevant forensic psychiatry tools. Dr Meloy’s presentations are highly recommended.

B. Australia has implemented a social media ban for children aged under 16.

C. A group of psychiatrists have published the last psychological profile of Charles Manson. The group make several pertinent observations about Manson’s likely abandonment schema with his mother (John Bowlby’s attachment theory; Jeffrey Young’s schema therapy) (p. 145) and a “world destruction fantasy” (also p. 145) that recalls psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s work on Aum Shinrikyo and its founder Shoko Asahara. The core terrorism literature often argues that terrorists are not psychopaths and are not fantasy prone - I do not find this at all convincing based on my own reading of the relevant cases; and my own relevant “lived experience” and on-going therapy.

D. The authorial voice of generative AI. Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (London: The Penguin Press, 2015) is very highly recommended.

E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Writing and Experience: Reading and Writing Autobiography by anthropologist Dr Andrea Walsh.

F. Bridgewater Associates’ Ray Dalio on the big economic / business cycle.

G. Legendary value investor Howard Marks asks: Is it a bubble?

H. How prime brokers for hedge funds actually work as financial services infrastructure. J.S. Aikman also covered this in his book When Prime Brokers Fail (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010) as part of the post-2008 Great Recession or Global Financial Crisis post-mortems for portfolio managers, risk managers and execution traders.