Your Book Review: Exhaustion Finalist #13 in the Book Review Contest

full review here:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-exhaustion

you can comment

original book being reviewed

 

This is seriously like prepubescent virgins writing about sex. I don't think it's possible to gain real expertise on those issues without taking into account the life experience of those living it. This is what happens otherwise, it's just as silly posturing and boasting about their imagination.

Everything they write about could apply to peptic ulcers by changing maybe 10 words. Well, could have applied, if the quintessential psychosomatic disorder at the time hadn't been taken off their hands. No lessons learned from that. Absolutely none.

 

I see that the book was published in 2017. We wouldn't wish long covid on either author or reviewer. Would we?

 

Apparently Schaffner is a mBIT coach. That is multiple Brain Integration Technique if you did not know. I didn't.

 

Does mBIT indicate that the integration involves multiple brains or it involves multiple or different integration techniques? Presumable the former requires some form of brain washing to align the brains of a number of people or alternatively telepathy.

I was being flippant, but I am not sure the ‘reality’ is any more reassuring:

So telepathy with yourself, unless one proposes that one of these three brains has some form of potential executive function in relation to the others, in which case does it make sense to talk about three brains?

 

Who knows...but it seems unlikely that all purported brains were fully integrated at the time of writing the book.

 

The author, Anna Schaffner, Professor of Cultural History at the University of Kent, also says of herself:

 

I have not looked at the book, but it seems from the review, its comments and the author’s own site, that she, like so many others, completely fails to differentiate between the idea of chronic fatigue and the condition of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or ME/CFS.

I have no objection to self help techniques as a leisure activity, some people feel they constructively fill their lives with them. However they can be very dangerous when assumed to be effective treatments for serious medical conditions.

 

Why is it that almost everyone pushing this pseudoscience appears to be making money from it one way or another? Often in the form of a stable low-effort business that would end if the scam were exposed.

Rhetorical question, of course.

Also LOL at ancient wisdom. Talk about cultural beliefs. And that mBIT is way too on the nose as The Moods being a direct descendant of The Humours, just slightly tweaked.

 

There appear to be dozens of uninformed but verbose fools responding to the original long nonsense review, confidently speculating at length about what they imagine 'CFS' might be, tens of thousands of words of waffle. The idea that ME (or Chronic fatigue syndrome as Schaffner calls the disease. Of course she does, because it fits her own 'Exhaustion is fatigue, fatigue is chronic fatigue syndrome' waffling) as though ME is public property and the general public have been invited to speculate and pronounce about what it is and what causes it. And they do. Waffling on and on about the people who have it in a dehumanising manner as though we are inanimate objects or subhumans. They refer to Shorter, they refer to Showalter, they condemn the 'd**th threats, they regurgitate every nonsense gaslighting and spiteful press article they have ever read about ME.

Edit. Most of those reviewers have acquired a HUGE sense of entitlement in relation to this disease and the people who suffer from it, entitlement to prattle on their endless speculating, gaslighting, drivel, with no self consciousness that what they are writing is ignorant dross. They need to get off the case and stop feeding.


I hope I never meet any of them. I would rather never encounter another human being for the rest of my life than be subjected to more gaslighting and dehumanisation.