Also, love the Peterson article. "The alternative might be boring and, I'm afraid, quite old school: you make the case for a vision of politics and of life that is antithetical to Jordan Peterson's vision, and you make it so well that more people agree with you than with Peterson. I get that this is more complicated, and less emotionally fulfilling, than running to the teacher to get him in trouble. But what's the alternative? Investing all of your political hopes in the likes of Penguin Press?" <3
"Treating sex as a treasure that women guard and men must pursue ultimately makes romance worse for both."
Axtually, this is what makes romance possible in the first place, the tension between men and women. Sometimes it works out into a love story, sometimes a tragic opera.
Just that it also can also be hella inconvenient for tomcats and hetero men.
I don’t know the whole saga about your shoulder, but have you ever looked into bone marrow stem cell therapy as an alternative to surgery? From personal experience I can tell you it can work. I have an Ortho I can recommend who is one of the leaders in this.
Lol, love the Peterson piece. I think the backlash to him has made him more influential. If you forget about the culture war and just listen to him, he's a walking pointless Ted Talk
Now I’m intrigued by that book rec. Speaking of the incomprehensible way we all deal with grief, after his mom died my husband suddenly took up distance running—in running sandals. He got incredibly fit to an elite level. But he also injured his Achilles.
I hope your shoulder recovers well. I had a shoulder injury recently (still technically have it as it's not back to normal, but mostly fine) and it was awful.
Just curious, not that it’s my business, who your shoulder guy/gal is. I’ve heard Cardasco and Metzl are the best in NYC. Both at HSS, I believe. I had good results with Metzl. That shot isn’t fun.
I got thrown off a jury once in voir dire because my shoulder problems caused me to know more about the joint than the (civil litigation) lawyers wanted me to. Does knowing about the supraspinatus make me a bad person??
It's a good thing that the cortisone shot took the pain away, you don't want the opposite.
I got a shot of that in my ankle to try and help heal a bad sprain (on top of very old ankle break), and the cortisone did almost nothing for the pain. And the inflammation (which the shot is supposed to also alleviate) is still off the chart, according to the ultrasound.
Be happy the things are working for you so far at least. I haven't been able to run for 2 years now, and may never again. All because of some weird sprain that 4 separate ortho doctors have all failed to figure out what's going on.
Good luck with the shoulder. My mom gets cortisone shots in her knees and says the same thing you do: eerily good pain relief from just about the most painful shot you can imagine. Fingers crossed it works for you!
Freddie, I hope you think long and hard before opting for surgery on your shoulder. I started swimming 30 years ago, right after I gave up smoking (after 25 years of that). I’m now 76 and still in the pool doing laps every other day. But there was a painful hiatus about two years in when I injured both rotator cuffs, and walked around with my arms hanging down, unable to comb my hair, wash my armpits, put a belt through the loops of my jeans, etc. You know. I talked to cool and definite surgeons and was on the verge of going under the knife with a long course of opioid use, addiction, and recovery, followed by six to eight months of painful rehab. But a trusted friend introduced me to a skilled physical therapist who put me on a stretching, massage, surgical tubing resistance regimen. I was slowly able to build up subsidiary muscle groups enough to permit my tears and strains to partially heal,and regained full use and strength of both joints. I’m not saying that PT is going to be the answer for you. I obviously know nothing about your medical history. But surgery doesn’t work for everyone either, and the recovery (I hear) can be brutal. Whatever you decide, I wish you well. Your writing is a gift. Thanks for sharing it with us.
I wanted to comment on the original post about the smears from trans activists but held back at the time because I didn’t feel comfortable apparently criticising our guy...but here goes.
Each time I read a critical appraisal of trans activist behaviour that contains yet another affirmation that one doesn’t hate transgender people & supports their rights to live without sh*t thrown at them for being trans I slide a little more down my chair. It comes across as defensive and - yes - a bit craven.
Of course FdB isn’t a transphobe. He doesn’t need to tell us over again. Defending against lies and smears almost always encourages lies and smears because it shows that they got to you.
I'm going to give H is for Hawk a try. While I think a lot of non-fiction *needs* to be crisp and clear, I agree that pat explainers have worked their way into so much non-fiction. I call it the NPR-ization of writing:
The little anecdote to pique your interest. ("Ahmed takes the number 57 bus every Saturday morning, without fail, all the way to the end of the line. It's a ritual he wouldn't miss for the world - because he's an amateur beekeeper, whose hives are all the way out of town.") This is always written in a chirpily paternal voice that I want to strangle until it's replaced with a dying gurgle.
The breezy summation of the expert consensus. The writer usually removes the Wikipedia citations, at least.
The pat reduction of complexities to a bulleted list. ("Bees are good for the soul. The ancient Mayans knew this.")
And, of course, end the chapter with a nice little slice-of-life observation about the subject of the opening anecdote to tie it all together. ("For Ahmed, of course, the honey is just a bonus. "Sometimes, I think I respect bees more than people," he says with an inscrutable smile. And with what we've learned about bees' contribution to the fight against gender inequality in climate change, we can understand why.")
A B&N full of Walmart Great Value Malcolm Gladwells, if you can keep it.
I'm personally a fan of Peterson, and I mostly don't find him to be a grifter. I read his 12 Rules for Life and have read about the first 1/3 of his Beyond Order. I watch his YouTube podcasts and some other talks he also gives on YouTube. My take is that he's a principled person. He's right of center on some issues, but not a flaming rightwing extremist. (I'll point out that Peterson is not the only writer I've read who, in my opinion, is unfairly attacked by the left and who appeals to some right of center people.)
I also appreciate, especially in the two books I just mentioned, his willingness to take his readers seriously and show his work, by which I mean the philosophical underpinnings of his self-help advice. That's more than I can say for a lot of other works in the self-help genre. He'll occasionally make statements that posit something like "male/female are natural categories," but I don't find him so intolerant. And again, he shows his work.
That said, I'll concede that he might have some grifter tendencies. His site offers a personality test for $10. (Disclosure: I've paid for and taken it.) It's not the most superficial of all things, but it's probably more on the order of Myers-Briggs. I do worry about the supposed fact that a number of rightwing people (variously defined, but sometimes including white nationalists) seem to find him congenial. And I'm not a fan of some of the public commentary on how he "owned" such and such interviewer, though at the same time, I've watched some of the interviews in question and 1) they seem 1) a overly hostile to Peterson and 2) he seems to have acquitted himself well in those interviews. And yes, it's true that he has probably sold a lot more books because of the liberal/left backlash than he would have. So I guess that kind of sort of says something.
Therefore, I mostly disagree with Freddie's assertion that Peterson is a grifter. Freddie's larger argument about appealing to "fairness" and the crying game that, apparently, took place when the publisher announced they would do his next book--that argument is spot on and doesn't depend on me agreeing with Freddie.
FYI -- in the first reference to H Is for Hawk you identify the author as Heather Macdonald. Probably not the hawk you meant :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Mac_Donald
Also, love the Peterson article. "The alternative might be boring and, I'm afraid, quite old school: you make the case for a vision of politics and of life that is antithetical to Jordan Peterson's vision, and you make it so well that more people agree with you than with Peterson. I get that this is more complicated, and less emotionally fulfilling, than running to the teacher to get him in trouble. But what's the alternative? Investing all of your political hopes in the likes of Penguin Press?" <3
"Treating sex as a treasure that women guard and men must pursue ultimately makes romance worse for both."
Axtually, this is what makes romance possible in the first place, the tension between men and women. Sometimes it works out into a love story, sometimes a tragic opera.
Just that it also can also be hella inconvenient for tomcats and hetero men.
I don’t know the whole saga about your shoulder, but have you ever looked into bone marrow stem cell therapy as an alternative to surgery? From personal experience I can tell you it can work. I have an Ortho I can recommend who is one of the leaders in this.
Lol, love the Peterson piece. I think the backlash to him has made him more influential. If you forget about the culture war and just listen to him, he's a walking pointless Ted Talk
Now I’m intrigued by that book rec. Speaking of the incomprehensible way we all deal with grief, after his mom died my husband suddenly took up distance running—in running sandals. He got incredibly fit to an elite level. But he also injured his Achilles.
I hope your shoulder recovers well. I had a shoulder injury recently (still technically have it as it's not back to normal, but mostly fine) and it was awful.
Just curious, not that it’s my business, who your shoulder guy/gal is. I’ve heard Cardasco and Metzl are the best in NYC. Both at HSS, I believe. I had good results with Metzl. That shot isn’t fun.
I got thrown off a jury once in voir dire because my shoulder problems caused me to know more about the joint than the (civil litigation) lawyers wanted me to. Does knowing about the supraspinatus make me a bad person??
It's a good thing that the cortisone shot took the pain away, you don't want the opposite.
I got a shot of that in my ankle to try and help heal a bad sprain (on top of very old ankle break), and the cortisone did almost nothing for the pain. And the inflammation (which the shot is supposed to also alleviate) is still off the chart, according to the ultrasound.
Be happy the things are working for you so far at least. I haven't been able to run for 2 years now, and may never again. All because of some weird sprain that 4 separate ortho doctors have all failed to figure out what's going on.
Suggest you try Regeneration Therapy. Worked on my wife’s knee.
Emerson Lake & Palmer, Hoedown, live In Milan, 1973: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpBo2XWjC-Y
Good luck with the shoulder. My mom gets cortisone shots in her knees and says the same thing you do: eerily good pain relief from just about the most painful shot you can imagine. Fingers crossed it works for you!
Freddie, I hope you think long and hard before opting for surgery on your shoulder. I started swimming 30 years ago, right after I gave up smoking (after 25 years of that). I’m now 76 and still in the pool doing laps every other day. But there was a painful hiatus about two years in when I injured both rotator cuffs, and walked around with my arms hanging down, unable to comb my hair, wash my armpits, put a belt through the loops of my jeans, etc. You know. I talked to cool and definite surgeons and was on the verge of going under the knife with a long course of opioid use, addiction, and recovery, followed by six to eight months of painful rehab. But a trusted friend introduced me to a skilled physical therapist who put me on a stretching, massage, surgical tubing resistance regimen. I was slowly able to build up subsidiary muscle groups enough to permit my tears and strains to partially heal,and regained full use and strength of both joints. I’m not saying that PT is going to be the answer for you. I obviously know nothing about your medical history. But surgery doesn’t work for everyone either, and the recovery (I hear) can be brutal. Whatever you decide, I wish you well. Your writing is a gift. Thanks for sharing it with us.
I wanted to comment on the original post about the smears from trans activists but held back at the time because I didn’t feel comfortable apparently criticising our guy...but here goes.
Each time I read a critical appraisal of trans activist behaviour that contains yet another affirmation that one doesn’t hate transgender people & supports their rights to live without sh*t thrown at them for being trans I slide a little more down my chair. It comes across as defensive and - yes - a bit craven.
Of course FdB isn’t a transphobe. He doesn’t need to tell us over again. Defending against lies and smears almost always encourages lies and smears because it shows that they got to you.
I'm going to give H is for Hawk a try. While I think a lot of non-fiction *needs* to be crisp and clear, I agree that pat explainers have worked their way into so much non-fiction. I call it the NPR-ization of writing:
The little anecdote to pique your interest. ("Ahmed takes the number 57 bus every Saturday morning, without fail, all the way to the end of the line. It's a ritual he wouldn't miss for the world - because he's an amateur beekeeper, whose hives are all the way out of town.") This is always written in a chirpily paternal voice that I want to strangle until it's replaced with a dying gurgle.
The breezy summation of the expert consensus. The writer usually removes the Wikipedia citations, at least.
The pat reduction of complexities to a bulleted list. ("Bees are good for the soul. The ancient Mayans knew this.")
And, of course, end the chapter with a nice little slice-of-life observation about the subject of the opening anecdote to tie it all together. ("For Ahmed, of course, the honey is just a bonus. "Sometimes, I think I respect bees more than people," he says with an inscrutable smile. And with what we've learned about bees' contribution to the fight against gender inequality in climate change, we can understand why.")
A B&N full of Walmart Great Value Malcolm Gladwells, if you can keep it.
I'm personally a fan of Peterson, and I mostly don't find him to be a grifter. I read his 12 Rules for Life and have read about the first 1/3 of his Beyond Order. I watch his YouTube podcasts and some other talks he also gives on YouTube. My take is that he's a principled person. He's right of center on some issues, but not a flaming rightwing extremist. (I'll point out that Peterson is not the only writer I've read who, in my opinion, is unfairly attacked by the left and who appeals to some right of center people.)
I also appreciate, especially in the two books I just mentioned, his willingness to take his readers seriously and show his work, by which I mean the philosophical underpinnings of his self-help advice. That's more than I can say for a lot of other works in the self-help genre. He'll occasionally make statements that posit something like "male/female are natural categories," but I don't find him so intolerant. And again, he shows his work.
That said, I'll concede that he might have some grifter tendencies. His site offers a personality test for $10. (Disclosure: I've paid for and taken it.) It's not the most superficial of all things, but it's probably more on the order of Myers-Briggs. I do worry about the supposed fact that a number of rightwing people (variously defined, but sometimes including white nationalists) seem to find him congenial. And I'm not a fan of some of the public commentary on how he "owned" such and such interviewer, though at the same time, I've watched some of the interviews in question and 1) they seem 1) a overly hostile to Peterson and 2) he seems to have acquitted himself well in those interviews. And yes, it's true that he has probably sold a lot more books because of the liberal/left backlash than he would have. So I guess that kind of sort of says something.
Therefore, I mostly disagree with Freddie's assertion that Peterson is a grifter. Freddie's larger argument about appealing to "fairness" and the crying game that, apparently, took place when the publisher announced they would do his next book--that argument is spot on and doesn't depend on me agreeing with Freddie.