At The Risk Of Being Controversial, I Tend To Be Suspicious Of Americans Who Are Super Identitarian In

University of Technology Sydney, Kuringgai campus. David Turner. Now repurposed and like most remodels (sadly) not quite as colorful.

Incredible how Germany’s collective guilt is only applied to the Holocaust (and only to one part of it and then we can discuss how fake it is anyway) because it’s so obvious they don’t give a shit about what they did in Africa

Gaza, Palestine (2004). Photographed by Abid Katib.

The Hotel Añaza, whose construction started in 1973 and stopped in 1975.

Tenerife, Canary Islands - Spain.

© Roberto Conte (2023)

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got to chant allahu akbar with some palestinian teens today pull up the tweet

As a significant "feminised" category of mental illness, however, HPD [histrionic personality disorder] was superseded in the DSM-III by the introduction of the controversial BPD, a label which has been increasingly applied to women, with around 75 per cent of all cases estimated to be female. Seen as a milder form of schizophrenia and lying on the "borderline" between neuroses and psychoses, the concept has been used in psychiatry since 1938. Like other personality disorders, BPD has a notoriously low reliability level even by the generally poor standards of the DSM, and even within the profession is considered by many as yet another "wastebasket" category (though as Bourne ruefully remarks, the ambiguity of such personality disorders makes them particularly useful in policing deviance in the new century). One member of the DSM-III task force stated at the time of constructing BPD that "in my opinion, the borderline syndrome stands for everything that is wrong with psychiatry [and] the category should be eliminated". The chair of the task force, Robert Spitzer, admitted with the publication of DSM-III that BPD was only included in the manual due to pressures from psychoanalytically oriented clinicians who found it useful in their practices. Such practices have been documented by Luhrmann who describes psychiatrists' typical view of the BPD patient as "an angry, difficult woman—almost always a woman—given to intense, unstable relationships and a tendency to make suicide attempts as a call for help.' Bearing significant similarities to the feelings of nineteenth century psychiatrists towards hysterics, Luhrmann's study reveals psychiatrists' revulsion of those they label with a personality disorder: they are "patients you don't like, don't trust, don't want . . . One of the reasons you dislike them is an expungable sense that they are morally at fault because they choose to be different." Becker reinforces this general view of the BPD label when she states that "[t]here is no other diagnosis currently in use that has the intense pejorative connotations that have been attached to the borderline personality disorder diagnosis." A bitter irony for those labelled with BPD is that many are known to have experienced sexual abuse in childhood, something they share in common with many of those Freud labelled as hysterical a century earlier; a psychiatric pattern of depoliticising sexual abuse by ignoring the (usually) male perpetrator, and instead pathologising the survival mechanisms of the victim as abnormal.

By the mid-1980s, the hysteria diagnosis had disappeared from the clinical setting while BPD had become the most commonly diagnosed personality disorder. BPD is now the most important label which psychiatric hegemony invokes to serve capital and patriarchy through monitoring and controlling the modern woman, reinforcing expected gender roles within the more fluid, neoliberal environment. Nevertheless, as Jimenez (emphasis added) reminds us, the historical continuity from hysteria to BPD is clear: "Both diagnoses delimit appropriate behavior for women, and many of the criteria are stereotypically feminine. What distinguishes borderline personality disorder from hysteria is the inclusion of anger and other aggressive characteristics, such as shoplifting, reckless driving, and substance abuse. If the hysteric was a damaged woman, the borderline woman is a dangerous one."

Bruce M.Z. Cohen, Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness

I’m way behind on Tumblr. Barely keeping up on tiktok with Butch positivity.

Lakota Nation vs. United States (Jesse Short Bull & Laura Tomaselli, 2022)

Vietnamese architects and historians consider the years from 1940 to 1975 the golden age of Vietnamese modernism. In that period, major modernist public buildings such as hospitals and hotels were designed and constructed.

- Mel Schenck via Saigoneer, "How Vietnam Created Its Own Brand of Modernist Architecture"