招瑤 posted:

its called frame-dragging, its when masses experiencing revolution "drag along" the theoretical positions around them

thank u for the upvote swampman this is a real fuckn good joke

dizastar posted:

reading MIM theory 9, the psychology issue and its really reshaping my opinion on mental illness, psychiatry and so on. i admit i had quite a reactionary view on that matter before. its an insanely good read just like their theory book on feminism & gender and it hasnt aged a bit despite the almost three decade span. its insane how advanced mim were in their theorical output

i read the letter and response on anorexia nervosa (p5-6) and it has some interesting bits but also i feel some less good bits. this isnt aimed at you, but its a nice jumping off point since u prompted me to revisit this.

The letter writer's theory - longing for power - i feel is key to understanding the mindset of anorexia, and you can really see that she has been a sufferer - though once an anorexic you're never really going back to how you were before. In my experience, just like for her it is about power. there's nothing that makes you feel so good as exerting your iron willpower over your body, denying something that everyone else has to do. its almost like magic - will over matter. it makes you feel good. watching people eat, then saying no--thats a great feeling. watching the numbers on the scales go down, thats nice. of course you're ravenous, starving, you think of nothing but food, eating, hunger, cooking, baking, meals, calories, your every thought is consumed with thoughts of food, you dream of food, its a mental hunger - ive read that its because after a while of heavy calorie restriction your body dials back the physical symptoms of hunger because they're too taxing, too energy intensive. instead you get this mental hunger - food obsession. anorexic people fucking love food and everything about it, because they are so hungry. but while all the people around you are compelled to eat when they feel the slightest rumble, your every moment, awake and asleep is consumed with thoughts food, and yet tell your stupid body no. i will not. thats the power. sometimes you feel like you could live on nothing but water.

of course its not power, its anything but, because it feels like its your control, but in truth you have no control over the control. you literally must not eat more than your arbitrary intake. your starving, hunger gnawing, but you literally cant eat, because you already had 500cals today - and when you do it makes you feel terrible, like you've lost, failed, worthless. you start avoiding anything that tastes nice through fear that you'll eat too much. you only have one days food in the house to stop yourself eating. the whole things takes over your life. What makes anorexia so interesting, even among mental illness, if you can use such a word to describe a disease, is that it is one of very few diseases in which the sufferer does not want to be treated. people with anorexia hide their illness, not through shame, but because they don't want others to interfere. This is not the same as not wanting to be "better" - most people with anorexia i know would wish that they were not, but they don't want to be treated. imagine that, where the treatment is worse than the disease itself - and yet, baring the interventions required to prevent re-feeding syndrome the immediate, life saving treatment is just, literally eating, gaining weight, a normal diet. "Curing" the mental element--well who knows, no one has had any luck yet - there's a reason why its the most deadly mental disorder.

but to get back to the point, Firstly, i strongly resist they idea that anorexia is about beauty, and most anorexic people i have spoken to do the same. Since the desires of people with anorexia don't line up with modern beauty standards, except superficially: lose weight. no anorexic every got to their ludicrously low UGW and thought "cool, i look good" even if they do - you can look fucking great and still its not even close, you still think you look like shit. its a very specific type of body dysmorphia that goes well beyond "beauty standards". And very often you do look like shit, anorexia makes you ugly - your arms and legs turn to twigs, your skin ages, turns thin, your hair literally starts to fall out and then your bones break and your heart fails. As far as bulimia goes, you stink of vomit and your teeth dissolve and you die, too much purging fucks with your electrolyte balance and your heart fails, or else you rupture something inside. eating disorders are ugly and disgusting.

it is far closer to self harm than i think people really realize - the pleasure and sense of control of starving yourself is similar to the pleasure and sense of control that comes from self harm. they are both forms of self-destructive self-control, childhood trauma, neglect, abuse etc etc are "risk factors" for both eating disorders and self harm, though plenty of people with perfectly "normal" lives end up with anorexia too. And so just as "stop cutting yourself you'll feel better" is meaningless to the self-harmer, "stop starving yourself and eat, it tastes good" is meaningless to the anorexic - we know it tastes good, hell, not eating gives you a sublime appreciation of the food you do eat.

Secondly i also contest the idea that anorexia nervosa is an "upper middle class" (white?) disease, as Fasting Girls puts it. ED communities are filled with people who don't fit that mold, and i feel that this does a big disservice to people who are not white with EDs. ive read a lot of stories from people who's struggle with their ED is compounded by people around them, family and medical, who dismiss them by basically saying: "black people cant be anorexic, its for whites only." Perhaps it's a "western" disease, perhaps not, but at the risk of being overly general - it just seems like one of those horrible things that capitalism generates, and claiming that it is a white middle class female disease makes it a lot harder for those who are not that to get any sort of help, support or even a diagnosis

Eating disorders are very complex diseases - of course i believe that at its root, capitalism is at fault, but MIM in this instance, and i guess this was 25 years ago now, are putting too much weight on what they learned from reading Fasting Girls, and not enough time doing their own investigation.

radical_dave posted:

i started reading the phenomenology of spirit by hegel, using the new english translation from the cambridge hegel translations. the translator, terry pinkard, has also written a book length commentary called Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason, which i'm reading alongside the primary hegel text as well. normally i wouldn't go to the trouble of reading a commentary while reading the book itself, but hegel is a truly abstruse dude. pinkard, though, goes to great lengths to explain his interpretation of hegel in much clearer language than the man himself used

look at this rube, actually reading phenomenology of spirit instead of just keeping a used copy highly visible on his bookshelf

radical_dave posted:

but hegel is a truly abstruse duded

the phenomenology is rough going, but other writings of his i've looked at have not been so hard to begin -- like the science of logic, or the shorter logic