Article by Fiona Fox (SMC) for the Revolutionary Communist Party (c. 1996)

I'm very happy for her to have whatever political views she wishes, but the way she talks about Carol having ME as if it stems from having some kind of personal weakness of will is pretty concerning. It reminds me so much of the kind of attitude I've encountered (that the fact I have ME relates to some kind of weakness of will).
 
Adrian said:
I think some people are very attracted to the mind over body (and hence matter?) message behind the BPS model. It seems to be a kind of moral belief (I'm a good person so not ill or my mind is strong so I'm not ill).
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I think their love of the mind-over-matter fairytale is little more than desperately trying to deny their own human frailty and inevitable mortality.

It is the most profound and destructive of all psychopathologies. The inability to accept the limits of the material body, the ultimate rule of matter-over-mind.

It disturbs their equipoise. :rolleyes:
 
Sean said:
I think their love of the mind-over-matter fairytale is little more than desperately trying to deny their own human frailty and inevitable mortality.

It is the most profound and destructive of all psychopathologies. The inability to accept the limits of the material body, the ultimate rule of matter-over-mind.
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Now you don't want to get me started on this.

Firstly it is me that is always right, not either of these ladies. Always.

Secondly, Descartes was right that mind rules matter. Mind is dynamic action (like, er, neuron membrane excitation to be modern) and matter is merely aggregates of fermions lolling about being kicked around by action. Descartes's physics was actually remarkably on track - mind was physics for him, as it should be.

But of course mind can only act the way matter lays things out for it to act so nothing is 'in control'. Everything is a chain of Aristotelian causes - formal and final.

I could bore you of hours with all this stuff.
 
Luther Blissett said:
Oxfam is a perfect example of the Bourgeois authoritarian paternalism manifestested in the colonialist hegemony of the post colonial project visited upon the working classes disguised as saving poor people.
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Whenever I hear the word "hegemony" I reckon I've got a good take on the person using it. Just one of my personal heuristics. Could be wrong, but it's worked for me so far.

EDIT: In fact wasn't she in Harry Potter?
 
TiredSam said:
The last time I read something by someone who was so unashamedly and heroically struggling with the burden of being completely right about everything it was Ayn Rand. Despite being at opposite ends of the political spectrum the two authors have so much in common. Wouldn't it be great to put them in a room together so they can decide which one of them is really right?
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The far ends of the political spectrum do seem to kind of join up in a weird way and become a sort of dictatioral blob.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
Now you don't want to get me started on this.

Firstly it is me that is always right, not either of these ladies. Always.

Secondly, Descartes was right that mind rules matter. Mind is dynamic action (like, er, neuron membrane excitation to be modern) and matter is merely aggregates of fermions lolling about being kicked around by action. Descartes's physics was actually remarkably on track - mind was physics for him, as it should be.

But of course mind can only act the way matter lays things out for it to act so nothing is 'in control'. Everything is a chain of Aristotelian causes - formal and final.

I could bore you of hours with all this stuff.
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I certainly accept that we can influence to some degree how matter behaves, both internally and externally. But the degree of influence is always going to be absolutely constrained by the basic natural materials and processes we have to work with. Which still leaves a lot of room to move, I grant you.
 
I can't imagine why people who have voiced such certainty about their own political beliefs would be so keen to back the idea that psychiatry can determine "correct beliefs" from "false beliefs." I mean, it's like something you used to hear was going on in the old Soviet Union.


Oh, wait...
 
Makes you wonder about the better means of saving people from them selves - organised famine or the bullet in the back of the head.

There was probably a forerunner of the SMC promoting Lysenko.
 
tornandfrayed said:
There's a link from Claire Fox's Wikipedia page to a Sunday Times interview from 2006 with her & Fiona. Mentions Gemma, 2nd sister, only one adopted. Was then running an IT centre for women. I haven't read the full article as it's paywalled.

https://web.archive.org/web/2014071...sundaytimes.co.uk/sto/style/article202877.ece
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Nothing of great interest, but some good background stuff. I like the way the Institute of Ideas is described as 'left-wing'.

Two things stood out. This paragraph, Fiona talking about Claire:

She held very strong views and there were massive rows, mainly about her becoming a communist. She’d come home from university and lecture my mum and dad. We were a devout Catholic family who knelt down to pray every night, and two out of the six prayers we were made to say began: “Please, God, deliver the world from communism.” I still say a Hail Mary each time I get in the car, and I bet Claire does too. Communist or not, nobody in the Fox family ever left the Catholic Church.

And that Fiona has cystic fibrosis. I didn't know that. Tough for her.
 
Robert 1973 said:
Following the publication of the Forward-ME group letter to the Science Media Centre (SMC) to (http://www.meassociation.org.uk/201...place-your-factsheet-on-cfs-me-05-april-2018/) @JohnTheJack helped me to track down an old article written by the SMC director, Fiona Fox, which seemed to have gone missing from the Web archives.

The article, entitled "Contribution to OTAM" (Our Tasks and Methods), was originally published in an internal publication for the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) circa 1996. Written under the pseudonym Fiona Foster, it offers a fascinating insight into the mindset of Ms Fox, including her belief that Oxfam is a bigger threat to world peace than Iraq, and that her involvement with the RCP inoculates her against myalgic encephalomyelitis.

IFM stands for Irish Freedom Movement: http://powerbase.info/index.php/Irish_Freedom_Movement

PDF of the article:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1hxmo6muypcwkfx/fiona_fox_ME_RCP.pdf?dl=0

PDF with article + extra information and links to further reading:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jroffc18kizqzzn/fiona_fox_ME_RCP_with_links.pdf?dl=0

If anyone is able to update MEpedia, Wikipedia etc. to replace the old dead links to this article on SCRIBD that would be helpful.

[Edited to add link to S4ME thread on Forward-ME letter to SMC: https://www.s4me.info/threads/forward-me-group-letter-to-the-science-media-centre-april-2018.3365/]
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Amazing. As I’ve since got ME I should probably sue her!
 
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