Self Defeating Personality Disorder: some thoughts about the Ahmari/Guastella debate

American Labor can overcome the two party system

Self Defeating Personality Disorder was expunged from the Diagnostic Statistics Manual, a controversial handbook for American psychiatrists and insurance companies. It was supposed to be the reformed version of Masochistic Personality Disorder and feminists thought it was just a sexist way of describing women trapped in abusive relationships. They fought successfully to get it out of the DSM. The DSM is should be said, is a monster of a publication that tries to map mental disorders in a (ahem) scientific and socially responsive, achieving neither science nor social progress. But that’s another story. That’s for the trauma book.

I really like both Sohrab Ahmari's piece on the GOP and Unions and Dustin Guastella's response to it.

I’m not being a “fair and balanced” reader. I think the fact that both these pieces are in dialogue with each is a sign that we can think beyond the two party system, with unions providing the third leg of a political system so engorged with corporate and finance capital that it may pitch us into the loving arms of a confidently criminal Donald Trump.

There are few institutional powers ready to challenge the well funded ideological machines represented by both parties, serve two arms of capital — free markets on the one hand and pseudo-Progressive corporatism and meritocracy on the other.