A couple of weeks ago, Canadian fusspot philosopher Jordan Peterson, who resembles a corpse on a good day, decided to use his vast internet platform (2.7 million Twitter followers) to weigh in on the Fat Model Question, tweeting that the plus-size model on the cover of the latest Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue was “[n]ot beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.”
Tastes vary, but I think it’s fair to say that most normal people feel vaguely disgusted to hear the latest reports on Peterson’s inability to rouse his penis from a flaccid state.
Deeply offended by people laughing at his ridiculous tweet, Dr. Petersor left Twitter in a huff, then un-left it in a minute and a huff.
And you’ll no doubt be thrilled to learn that he refuses to back down on the Fat Model Question. In a recent appearance on his daughter’s podcast he reaffirmed that he was still unable to get a boner looking at fat chicks. And he explained why putting a plus-sized model on the cover of Sports Illustrated is a very mean thing to do, not just to him but to the poor model herself, who is evidently unaware that some people like Dr. Peterson can’t get a boner over her, and who would cry herself to sleep if she knew.
Also it’s very unhealthy to be a plus sized model, as opposed to being a regular model with an eating disorder or a Canadian academic living on a diet of benzos and beef.
Being the petulant baby that he is, Dr. Peterson ended his, er, argument with a “fuck you” to his critics.
I have prepared not one but two rebuttals to his argument, in the form of the music videos below.
If Dr. Peterson wants to fight the Fat Model Apocalypse more directly, he could start by posting “how do you open” queries for his fans, featuring women more his type, like his daughter. And perhaps this young woman beautiful woman.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
@full metal ox
Loved the Joan Jett clip
@GSS
Yeah, we’re pretty proud of her. I cried after her graduation when I called her “doctor” for the first time.
@.45
“calm, rational vibe” may have been an aim of his early on, but any recent clip shows you that the guy is a wreck. He’s either spitting with rage, or breaking down and weeping – and look, nothing wrong with either, obviously, but it’s pretty weird in this context.
(on twitter this morning there’s a poll of “who is the dumbest” and I’m currently torn between JP and Musk. tough call)
Hooray for veterinarians, seriously. We’ve been really lucky and both our former and current vets are amazing. I’m in awe of anyone who does this <3
@Dave:
Objection: assumes facts not in evidence.
@Alan Robertshaw:
The latter would open up Pandora’s box. Consider a devoutly religious doctor refusing to treat patients who are gay. Or who he merely thinks are gay, or whose condition (e.g. HIV) has been associated with being gay in the past. Or a doctor preferring patients based on race, or likely political affiliation … That sort of rule would amount to permitting a form of “medical Jim Crow”.
@Victorious Parasol:
Even that is problematic. What constitutes “drug-seeking behavior”? Claiming to be in pain and asking for more or stronger pain medications? How does one reliably distinguish between the few doing so in bad faith and the many doing so in good faith? Or does one risk subjecting innocent patients to torture just to make sure one never, ever supplies anything to an addict?
And then one must ask: does a policy of trying to obstruct addicts from accessing drugs actually help addicts at all? I would expect they’d just resort to far less safe street drugs and then not take them in an environment with medical supervision, rather than go “well this is just too darn hard, I quit” and recover. We’ve spent decades now employing a strategy of ostracizing addicts and cutting them off from: families and emotional support; money; their drug supply; and even basic needs like food and shelter. The result was streets full of homeless drug addicts and a crisis of overdose deaths. Maybe it’s time to change tack.
On vets:
The one here is, sad to say, not the sort of miracle worker others have described in this thread. Over a decade ago I had a cat who simply went off his food one autumn, then developed jaundice and other problems. Took him to the vet, who diagnosed fatty liver syndrome and had a feeding tube put in. I spent months nursing him back to health, and the special food needed was not exactly cheap, nor the vet visits. He eventually started eating on his own again, but the following autumn the same damn problem developed a second time. And a year after that, a third time. And that one he didn’t recover from, and he was only around 6 or 7 at the time, so not especially old for a cat. Clearly there was some sort of root cause (and apparently, a seasonal one?) that never got diagnosed or addressed here. All this vet did was very expensive, and ultimately futile, symptomatic treatment.
OT:
Why has “Dancing With the Stars” apparently changed to “Dancing with Myself”? Budget cuts? (Note: I don’t actually watch the thing. But I hear ads for it all the time while on the toilet or grabbing a drink from the kitchen or checking email.)
@Surplus
For the most authoritative answers, talk to a board-certified anesthesiologist specializing in pain management. Frankly, I’m not inclined to rattle off what I do know about the evaluation of drug-seeking behavior in a public forum because then I could potentially be contributing to somebody getting better at faking a need for opioids or whatever. I’m not going to risk that.
What I can tell you is this: “Reliably” can be a dangerous word to use in medicine because it implies that you can put facts A, B, C, and D into a diagnosing machine and always get the right answer. Or that you can always prescribe a certain treatment for a certain condition and said treatment will always work. A lot of the usual and customary language of medicine deliberately avoids that kind of black-and-white framework – look over a medical record and you’ll see phrases like “appears to be” or “consistent with” in the history and exam sections. The exceptions are for more objective descriptions, such as “an 8 g, 2.8 x 2.0 x 1.2 cm rubbery unoriented nodule with a 4.0 x 2.0 x 1.2 cm portion of tan polypoid tissue at one end.”
Medicine is complicated because people are complicated, with differences in anatomy, physiology, environment, psychosocial history, etc.
In short, it’s not so much “problematic” as it is “requires care and attention to determine with a fair degree of certainty.” And there’s usually a LOT of documentation involved.
Drug-seeking behavior Exhibit A: the topic of this post.
@ Vicky P, surplus, et al
Thanks for your thoughts. I’m a big fan of the cab rank principle. So I am very much against people being able to pick and choose who they help professionally.
That’s especially important to me when it comes to legal Services. Otherwise we end up being gatekeepers of who gets access to justice; and that’s not our job. Nor is it fair.
I can imagine you have similar principles in medical and therapy settings. That’s not to say either profession has to do whatever their clients want of course. I am happy to put any lawful case a client submits, regardless of what I think of the client or cause personally; and indeed whether I think it’s a good or bad argument. (There are some exceptions with allegations of fraud or similar. There we do have to satisfy ourselves that there’s at least some evidence to support that. Doesn’t have to be conclusive; just arguable)
We do though have total control over the conduct of the case. It’s up to us what witnesses we call and how we run the case.
That often gives rise to the phenomenon that you get happier clients when you lose a case but go down fitting than when you win a case and the client is all disgruntled that you didn’t ask certain questions etc.
But thanks for your insights. Can you think of any circumstances where medics have been criticised for who they treat? I can imagine there may have been some.
@Alan
There were those who criticized providers for treating AIDS patients, back in the day before the current treatments were available. You don’t hear about that as much as you used to, thankfully, in part because AIDS is a heck of a lot more manageable than it used to be.
As a Texan, I have to point out that my state’s current governor (and the rest of his team) thinks that providers who perform abortions or prescribe puberty blockers for pediatric trans patients should be arrested. I think this is a ridiculous level of interference in patient care, especially for trans youth who are often at high risk for self-harm or even suicide if they don’t get gender-affirming treatment.
I don’t know how much you’ve heard about the healthcare providers (doctors, nurses, pharmacists) here in the States who think they should get some kind of religious exemption for the kind of healthcare they’re willing to offer. In short, these are people who think their biases against abortion or trans folk should allow them to refuse care to patients. Most people I know in healthcare think this is utter bullshit. You give the patient the treatment they need (in the bounds of current best practice), not what you think they deserve. A friend of mine is an ER nurse, and she is quite passionate on the topic. If you come into her ER, she will take care of you. She may have some things to say if you are putting staff and other patients in danger, but you’re still her patient.
As a general rule, a patient really has to be extremely uncooperative in order to get fired by a doctor. The nearest non-medical equivalent I can think of is, believe it or not, excommunication. (Remind me to tell you the story of my family’s experience with having to request an excommunication some time; it’s a trip.) In excommunication, there’s a process to follow, made up of several steps, with the subject given the opportunity to mend their ways, and you have to get everything lined up just so in order to make it happen. The providers I’ve known who have had to fire a patient hate it. But the alternative is continuing to enable the patient doing harm to themselves or others.
I hit the google, and found a pretty good article that outlines termination of treatment in a pretty broad fashion. Since I mentioned drug-seeking behavior earlier, you may also be interested in this article written for pain management physicians.
Does that help?
@ Vicky P
It very much does; thank you.
That was extremely timely as we’d just been chatting about this on that live stream. We have really strict rules about sacking clients. It’s nigh on impossible. Even if they don’t pay you. The BSB (our regulator) say you can only sack a client for non payment if I wouldn’t put them at a disadvantage. Which they take as leaving them without legal representation! As we’re not allowed to hold client money on account (we either have to charge a fixed fee up front but if it’s billable hours then we can’t invoice until after the work is done.) you can imagine some of the issues that crop up. I think I’ll check with the BSB as to their views on hostage taking.
You have to apply!?
That’s like asking a bouncer to throw you out and they say “You’ll need to fill out some forms.”
I am intrigued.
@Alan
Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin.
Disclaimer: There are some items I will gloss over for my own reasons, including but not limited to protecting my family’s privacy.
My stepmother is a priest, now retired, which means she no longer has to work every Sunday but still offers pastoral care every once in a while to those who need it. She was ordained in the Episcopal Church back when that was still unusual – in fact, her ordination was considered News at the time. Not just “yay, new priests!” news but “there are WOMEN who are priests! Will this trigger a schism?” news. Decades before The Vicar of Dibley. (My stepmum says that show was definitely a workplace documentary disguised as a sitcom, and loved it.)
As you can imagine, she very quickly got a lot of practice at dealing with parishoners who were unused (to say the least) to a woman wearing a dog collar. She learned to be flexible: you could call her Reverend, or you could call her “sister,” and there was at least one person who told her, “I’ve always used ‘Father’ for a priest – do you mind if I call you that?” My stepmum did not mind, because what she was called didn’t matter nearly as much as what she needed to do in the course of her vocation.
Years went by, and at one point after she married my dad, she was posted to a church with one communicant who I have always called The Jerk because I wasn’t allowed to call him worse names. (I know his actual name; I do not use it.) The Jerk did not believe women should be priests. Female priests were fakes, in his eyes – he took to calling my stepmum a “priest-ette,” because he was a jerk.
Unfortunately, he didn’t limit it to calling her names. The name-calling was just where it started. His objections to her being in the pulpit escalated to the point where my stepmum had to wear a bulletproof vest under her vestments, and there was a plainclothes detective in the congregation to provide additional protection.
My late dad, as you can imagine, did not take this lightly. He was ordained himself, and came from a long line of clergy that tended to cultivate connections. To illustrate, shortly after his ordination, Dad worked for a bishop who arranged for him to get invited to JFK’s inauguration. Dad continued to rub elbows with the church leadership on a semi-regular basis, so when my stepmum started having to wear the bulletproof vest, Dad went to her bishop and essentially asked, “What are you going to do to protect my wife, one of your priests, from a man who says he wants to kill her?” The bishop said he would pray for him. Dad retorted, “You can pray for him, but if he hurts her, I’ll sue the archdiocese.”
I firmly believe he would’ve done that.
So the excommunication process began, and you can read the details of the process in the Book of Common Prayer if you’ve a mind to. Essentially it’s a 3-strikes-and-you’re-out system. Needless to say, there was much discussion about whether or not The Jerk met the criteria before the strikes started.
The final straw happened one Sunday….
So one Sunday, my stepmum was celebrating the Eucharist with her fellow clergy and the lay servers. One of the lay servers happened to be openly gay, and he also happened to be the one offering the chalice with the wine that day.
The Jerk was there, and came up to the communion rail. The wafers went around. The lay server noticed that the Jerk was wearing latex gloves, which the lay server took as a homophobic fashion statement. Nevertheless, he offered the chalice and murmured, “The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.”
The Jerk gave him the finger, then spat the wafer out of his mouth into the chalice.
(Whenever I get to this point in the story, there is much gasping, no matter if the listener is Episcopalian, another flavor of Christian, Jewish, Hindu, or agnostic/atheist. Some things are just Not Done.)
The lay server kept his cool, returned the chalice to the altar, signaled that it should NOT be touched, and The Jerk strutted away, smug in his certainty that he’d showed them, all right.
That kind of sacrilege doesn’t go over too well with church leadership, and he was declared excommunicated from the entire Episcopal church in the United States. I found the whole thing rather medieval, but was glad my stepmum could stop wearing the bulletproof vest … and then after The Jerk died, I discovered his fan club, who considered him a heroic martyr. I nearly threw up. It’s the sort of adoration we’ve seen here from the incels who praise men who murder women.
And that’s the story of how my family had to petition for the excommunication of a man who threatened my stepmum because he thought girls had cooties and shouldn’t be priests.
@ Vicky P
All I can think to say is, Jesus! But I am so glad your stepmum ended up safe.
But thank you for all the technical background. I’m not religious (well, apart from my unassailable hard core paganism; but holding seemingly contradictory views has never been a problem for me) but I do like religious stuff. If anyone does btw, I recommend Religion for Breakfast and Useful Charts.
I went to catholic school; and we did a lot of religious study there. By which I mean stuff like the history of the synoptic gospels etc. It was a bit weird for a catholic school to be teaching all the ‘is there any historical evidence for Jesus’ but there you are. They really encouraged us to challenge things. Although there were a lot of Jesuit trained people so they did tend to win any arguments.
But Catholicism is a very legalistic faith; so I like the loopholes. Like despite my complete disbelief in the catholic god, I did do ‘nine first Fridays’. Under the rules that guarantees me a place in heaven. No matter what. My last act could be burning down an orphanage and I’d still get in; eventually. So it’s like spread betting Pascals Wager.
Note: I would not burn down an orphanage.
@Alan
I get that reaction a lot with this story.
For that matter, I had a reaction rather like that as it was happening. It’s not that I thought clergy never got death threats. But I associated that sort of thing with important historical figures, like MLK, Jr. And sure, my stepmum was part of a moment in history – the ordination of women – but she hadn’t been part of the first group in the country. She’d been part of the second group. That was cool, but was it really a reason to hate her?
Well, unfortunately, the answer was yes, it was a reason for some people to hate her, and for one man to hate her as a symbol of everything wrong with the modern church. He was petty and arrogant, and I’m glad he’s dead so that my stepmum doesn’t have to worry about him anymore.
Fair enough. But he did real research into alcoholism once upon a time, and it seems nuts to go from the head of a research team to continually bringing up how unattracted he is to someone.
@Vicky P: You have to be extreme indeed to get excommunicated from being an Episcopalian but The Jerk deserved it and even more. I am now going to grab my BCP and look up the procedure — I didn’t even know there was one!
I’m glad he’s dead too. It’s pretty hard to go to Hell if you’re Episcopalian, but since he wasn’t, well, then… we can but hope.
I once met a priest who answered to either “Reverend” or “Mother”, but wasn’t fond of the combo (that being for different clerical women, who she didn’t want to steal the thunder of). Most of the female priests I’ve known of are just “Reverend”.
I am always amused by “Right Reverend” and “Very Reverend” and wonder if it should be extended to “Mega Reverend”, “Extreeeeme Reverend”, “Totally Awesome Reverend”, etc.
@GSS ex-noob
Yeah, he earned it. The desecration story is the one I trot about because it’s the most vivid example. The only people who brush it off are his fan club. But as I said, they’re on his side. They consider him a prophet who was speaking truth to power. I consider him a cranky old man who was angry that the world was not conforming to the model in his head. To borrow the punchline of an old joke, he’s probably the only Episcopalian sent to hell for something besides using the wrong fork.
Mostly I remember being bewildered about the whole thing as it was happening. My stepmum’s a very gentle person, very soft-spoken. While she loves Dawn French’s portrayal of a priest, that’s not the kind of priest she is. It’s still hard for me to understand why anybody would object to her. (In all honesty, I will say that I have disagreed with her on a number of occasions, but it’s all been very typical stepmother/stepdaughter sort of stuff, and not even sufficiently interesting enough to turn into an after school special.)
I’d grab my BCP and tell you what page to look at, but it’s in the other room and I’m comfy. But it was very strange to read it and understand that this was a process that was being put in motion because of something that was happening to my family. At the time, I kept saying, “But that’s so medieval.” I have an easier time with the Rev. Merrily Watkins’ adventures in deliverance because exorcisms have been part of pop culture for so long. But who gets excommunicated these days?
Well, threatening the lives of priests and desecrating the Eucharist will do it.
@Victorious Parasol
Just out of idle curiosity, how did the Jerk respond to his excommunication? One thing to be kicked out of a single church because he didn’t like the priest running things (priestETTE?!? Honestly, did this guy never hear of a priestESS before?), another to be tossed out of the entire domination? And possibly out of all the churches in the area I’d guess, since I can’t imagine him being welcomed into any of the local Catholic and other Protestant churches once that story made the rounds.
@Redsilkphoenix: Jetpack Vixen, Intergalactic Meani
The Jerk’s reaction to being excommunicated went something like, “You’re just SCARED because I speak THE TRUTH! Just you wait – GOD IS ON MY SIDE!” (This is not a direct quote. I am not going to quote his actual words here because many of his screeds are available online here and there, and I will not give him any publicity. He can jolly well stay obscure.)
Honestly, imagine what Donald Trump would say in reaction to being excommunicated, and you’re probably not too far off the mark. The Jerk was not only not-penitent, he was convinced he was right and the Episcopal leadership was obviously bad and wrong because they’d kicked him out. He was a prophet and speaker of truth who was being CRUELLY OPPRESSED by a denomination that had gone astray, but HE’D SHOW THEM when HE was the one in Heaven and they were all burning in Hell, begging for mercy.
He was not a nice man. He also wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought he was.
Fortunately he stuck to his little echo chamber – he’d started a newsletter some time back when all this began, which is how he got his fan club. I really shudder to think what could’ve happened if he’d started out a few years later when social media was like it is today.
@Vicky P: I nearly made the “wrong fork” joke in my post, LOL. I bet he did that too.
I couldn’t find it in my BCP from either 1979 or 1928, but I didn’t look that hard either.
The funnest service I ever went to was at a Renaissance Fair, where the (IRL) priest used the 1559 version, and of course “Queen Elizabeth” and the court attended. Yea verily.
Second funnest was the kids’ service on Pentecost, where the Holy Spirit and the gift of tongues to spread the Word was represented by blowing streams of bubbles over the congregation. It was a great metaphor.
Other great times in church: I went with some friends to Grace Cathedral to walk the labyrinth, and we were there just in time for Evensong. The setting sun through the windows, the spare choir arrangements echoing in the vast space, the Gothic-ness — beautiful! And I always liked Lessons and Carols, even more than Christmas Eve Midnight Mass.
@RedSilkPhoenix: He maybe could have gotten into a Southern Baptist or some other right-wing evangelical church that doesn’t allow women to be ministers. Maybe one of the strict Lutheran or Methodist denominations. But that wouldn’t have been as much fun for him with nothing to complain about. The Catholics and Eastern Orthodox probably would have preemptively excommunicated him if he’d walked in the door. I think most denominations would have frowned upon the Eucharist desecration, though. It’s just Not Done.
@ Victorious Parasol
Holy Ever-Loving Christ on the Cross, who desecrates the Eucharist and expects to be welcome back to ANY church?!?! The levels of delusion of the Jerk are mind-blowing and your moniker for him is well-chosen.
I’m very much enjoying this whole conversation about excommunication and am now wondering if my own church organization has a process for this?
I kinda doubt it, given that there was a big case some years back where they allowed an ordained minister in our church who was an avowed atheist to remain ordained, but you never know. Descrating the Eucharist still seems worse than remaining ordained as an atheist.
@KatInBoots
If I had to guess, based on what I’ve seen of his screeds and what my dad and stepmum told me, The Jerk may not have been clinically narcissist, but he certainly was full of himself. He was right, and that’s all there was to it.
To shift the spotlight again, I should point out that he really hated gay people, too. While his targeting of my stepmom was our family’s main concern, I want to emphasize that she was just one of his targets. He hated a lot of people.
I don’t find her beautiful, but I would rather pull out a fingernail than say that she ‘isn‘t’ beautiful (And too bad for me that I have this bias and others, as it reduces my chances of seeing beauty, but the heart and gonads and brain want what they want.)(
‘Beautiful’ without referent to a perceiver/judger is meaningless.
That doesn’t matter, as {J.P., a.k.a. Yet Another Stupid Person’s Version of a Smart Person}’s opinion doesn’t matter. Saying that some person ‘is’ or ‘is not’ beautiful is profoundly stupid, at least outside of a culture with such rigidly- and well-defined rules that everyone knows that those rules are what’s meant, as opposed to absolute reality…and I’m glad that we’re not like that, whether those rules would come from Holy Mother Church, The Party, or an Enlightened Philosopher-King.