I walk beneath a banner reading “Strength is a Choice” each morning before 5 AM at CrossFit. It is a good reminder. Everything else is a choice too. Getting strong is a reminder to every citizen of their agency. You don’t have to accept being weak... or poor or tyrannized.
A a physician previously caught in the system, I value this essay. New eyes for a new era. A paradigm shift is coming in how we live. Few will be ready.
The critique of 'physical education' in contemporary schools is on point. It is a mere afterthought, its sole purpose to burn off energy so the boys will sit still while their minder drones on about boring inanities. And of course, once it was discovered that the most energetic could be made to sit still with drugs, drugs were used instead, and 'physical education' deprioritized even more.
It is in many ways of a piece with our pathological emphasis on the mind, on abstract reasoning and so on. It is said that our culture is materialistic but this i think is the opposite of the truth - we do not love matter enough, in fact we despise the physical, even as we pretend to believe only in the physical. And of course, as we neglect the physical, the physical world - our buildings, our bodies - become ugly and weak ... which then leads to a degeneration of precisely those mental faculties we prize so much.
"A politics that is focused on health would in many ways constitute a return."
Well we have Michelle Obama and the EU working on that -and I am certainly not against their efforts. There are even some politicians working on banning parking minimums.
I walk beneath a banner reading “Strength is a Choice” each morning before 5 AM at CrossFit. It is a good reminder. Everything else is a choice too. Getting strong is a reminder to every citizen of their agency. You don’t have to accept being weak... or poor or tyrannized.
A a physician previously caught in the system, I value this essay. New eyes for a new era. A paradigm shift is coming in how we live. Few will be ready.
The critique of 'physical education' in contemporary schools is on point. It is a mere afterthought, its sole purpose to burn off energy so the boys will sit still while their minder drones on about boring inanities. And of course, once it was discovered that the most energetic could be made to sit still with drugs, drugs were used instead, and 'physical education' deprioritized even more.
It is in many ways of a piece with our pathological emphasis on the mind, on abstract reasoning and so on. It is said that our culture is materialistic but this i think is the opposite of the truth - we do not love matter enough, in fact we despise the physical, even as we pretend to believe only in the physical. And of course, as we neglect the physical, the physical world - our buildings, our bodies - become ugly and weak ... which then leads to a degeneration of precisely those mental faculties we prize so much.
Excellent essay! Excerpted from it, with a link back to here:
https://patrick.net/post/1347029/2022-08-15-for-profit-medicine-is-deadly?start=24#comment-1950680
Get on the LibDem network:
https://eharding.substack.com/p/why-does-russian-physical-therapy
"A politics that is focused on health would in many ways constitute a return."
Well we have Michelle Obama and the EU working on that -and I am certainly not against their efforts. There are even some politicians working on banning parking minimums.