Paleo Retiree writes:
- Some eloquent praise for Nicolas (“Don’t Look Now“) Roeg from the very gifted Bernard (“Candyman“) Rose. I recently caught up with Roeg’s 2006 “Puffball: The Devil’s Eyeball” and enjoyed it a lot.
- Who was Sue Mengers? Stay tuned: You’ll soon be finding out a lot more about her right here at UR.
- When science becomes someone’s religion.
- Should the world’s few remaining uncontacted tribes be left alone?
- Are happiness and self-esteem overrated?
- Do New York City’s most celebrated restaurants deserve the praise they’ve received?
- Perhaps addiction isn’t a disease after all.
- A nice appreciation of Christopher Lasch, who was a big, hard-to-categorize intellectual figure from the ’70s through the 1990s, and who was an interesting mixture of leftie and rightie.
- Don’t forget to visit our NSFW Tumblr blog, where we share some of the nutty things that get our pulses racing.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
Lasch is due for a revival. You just have to look at politics. With Trump and Sanders both taking off, it would be wise to look harder at the ways left and right are saying things that, while not identical, surely rhyme.
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Theodore Dalrymple also makes a forceful case for addiction not being a disease:
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Been sober for over 10 years, so I obviously have a few opinions on the matter.
I am the first to acknowledge that there are many workable paths to kicking an addiction. But I also find that people aligned against the 12-step model aren’t terribly familiar with how it works in practice.
The notion that the “disease” model inculcates a lack of empowerment reflects this misunderstanding, I think. It is true the 12-step model encourages people to consider themselves powerless when set against their drug of choice. But this mental move is ultimately is meant to encourage humility, and inculcate in addicts a new habit; a habit to distrust the instincts that got them screwed up in the first place. And to feel encouraged to ask for help.
The end result can be the exact remapping of short-term vs long-term gain this article advocates.
As an aside, I would also note this piece which accuses the disease model of being unscientific contains no science whatsoever. The bottom line is we don’t understand the brain very well at all, and hence don’t understand addiction, either.
Final aside: I agree with the author’s suspicions regarding the sobriety for-profit industry. To my mind this whole edifice is a giant scam on those who are among the weakest and most vulnerable. There are many paths to sobriety, and virtually all of them can be of nominal cost.
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