It’s just amazing to parallel Douthat’s *completely different* disease trajectory with Covid, considering Covid-19 first emerged less than two years ago. I think the scientific achievements in understanding the virus, how it’s transmitted, and the development of a vaccine in record time have all been extraordinary.
But what we have here is a Rightwing Narrative, specifically the Uppity Scientists Are Bad narrative combined with the You’re Not The Boss Of Me narrative, and like all their narratives they aren’t going to let things like facts, logic, evidence, or even common sense get in the way.
Has anyone ever seen Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher in the same room together, ever? Just asking. They seem suspiciously parallel. How do we know they're not just one bot who was created in Moscow?
Even though I'm a little devoted to being kinder and gentler and less of a heartless asshole, I dunno, caring more than the slightest amount possible about what Douthat went through is really, really hard. I mean, I can't not see all the harm he's done on one hand and his suffering on the other, and well, it's hard to have any empathy. Maybe it's that Old Testament idea that bad acts deserve punishments instead of a pass. Of course, the old me would elaborate but the new me sees no need. #PraiseEvolving.
I could fill pages with stories of patients with Lyme disease, anaplasmosis and Ehrlichiosis, the deer tick trio that rightly makes outdoors lovers fear to hike, garden and golf up here unless everything is covered in a foot of snow. I hate to read that someone had to see multiple doctors before being diagnosed and treated. If you live where these diseases (or Rocky Mountain Fever) are endemic, here’s my advice should you feel ill, with or without a rash, during spring, summer and fall: take two weeks of doxycycline. Don’t tough it out at home, thinking it’s the flu - it’s not. Most of the patients I treated never saw the tick that sickened them, but mutual tick checks are still great for bonding with your partner.
They say that RWers & white supremacists do a lot of their recruiting in "alternative medicine" circles -- Lyme disease is the ultimate condition for that: something many doctors fail to diagnose or treat, & so quackeries abound. Nothing either of those two are ever done without the direction of their handlers, so yeah the propaganda assault continues.
Lyme disease can be extremely tricky to diagnose because symptoms vary wildly. Douthat is just plain wrong to write that the research focuses only on a single set of known symptoms. That is not even remotely factually correct. Indeed, the major research push over the last 20 years has been exploring all the different ways that Lyme manifests so that diagnoses can be made more quickly and accurately.
To give you some idea of how bizarre Lyme can be: I have had Lyme twice. The first time, I noticed a semi-circular very faint rash on my right wrist. (NOTE: Fewer than half of Lyme victims develop the classic circular rash.) I figured it was a Lyme tick bite, so off to the doctor I went. Two weeks of tetracycline and I was done. But 6 months later, I developed excruciating pain in my left elbow. That lasted a day. The next day, it was in my left shoulder. That also lasted a day. This joint pain moved around, hitting every joint one after the other. My doctor was mystified and just prescribed me painkillers. Finally, I was watching TV one evening when my right knee began to hurt. The pain built up over the course of an hour, eventually becoming so intense I was crying and getting ready to head to the emergency room. And then, it went away. Like someone had turned off a switch, the pain just stopped. The next morning on NPR, I heard a report about Lyme disease and the newly discovered phenomenon of traveling arthritis the disease produces. I ran off to get a Lyme test and it was off the charts. Three months of intense antibiotic treatment cured it.
The second time I got Lyme, I had no tick bite that I was aware of. I woke up one morning and had double vision--my eyes were displaced from one another with one looking slightly upward compared to the other. This went away after about 10 minutes. The next morning, it did not go away. Off to the emergency room! Ten minutes of interview and a blood test later, I had Lyme again. Thanks to the research done in the intervening years--research into the oddly variant nature of Lyme symptoms--the ER doctor was able to make a best-guess initial diagnosis of Lyme disease and then confirmed it with a blood test. A couple of weeks on antibiotics and I was cured.
So Douthat and Dreher can both go suck eggs. But they're badly misinforming their readers, giving out false information that will likely lead their followers to try using poultices and burning sage to treat their disease. Or maybe Ivermectin. I hear that cures all kinds of ailments associated with horses' asses.
I hate that (Don't) Douthat is rewarded for his clunky literary swill with a 'million-dollar 18th century farmhouse" rather than a large drawer overflowing with rejection letters saying essentially "please for the love of God no more submissions until you take some kind of class"
(Roy otoh, deserves a million dollar farmhouse!)
Styron isn't an easy read. There is a lot of work involved. Knowing this, we can surmise Dreher has never read any Styron because Rod is a grifter and grifters are above all lazy.
Cops, who get about six months of training on average before being handed a gun, deserve infinite deference to their "professional" decisions. No second-guessing there, how dare you!
But doctors, teachers, climate scientists (or really any scientists) - people who spend years learning their chosen professions - get no deference whatsoever from Know-It-All Dreher/Douthat.
This is just a particular form of asshole: The guy who sits on the couch watching an Olympic athlete and saying "Yeah, I could do that, if I just spent a little more time getting in shape." Convinced they could do anybody's job better, if they just chose to do so.
Two (more) raging egos, thinking themselves so important that "liberals" want to "destroy" them personally. Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to avoid their speechifying on Windy Fascist Corner.
“I don’t trust us to be judicious and fair to the others in victory,” he went on. “The left is not being that way to us."
Said while Joe Biden and 96% of the Democratic caucus is laboring mightily to give every Quiverfull Fundamentalists Wife $300 a month for each of her seven kids. Oh, and let's not forget the billions that Biden wants to spend on rural broadband, so Dreher's readers can get speedier access to the Plandemic videos they crave.
Freddie Deboer is the subject of enough strong negative feelings that I hesitate to recommend his stuff, and he has a higher opinion of Douthat than folks do around this joint, but his review of Douthat's book is worth reading. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/review-ross-douthats-the-deep-places
"All the back-and-forth over ivermectin and other non-traditional treatments?"
Oh, you mean those dodgy "non-traditional" meds pushed by the Koch-funded quacks at "America's Front Line Doctors" and by the (separate) but equally dubious "Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance"?
While newspapers are being gutted across the country, that an idiot can become reasonably wealthy writing opinion columns for the New York Times is pretty galling.
"This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book 'The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.'" (I think "is adapted from" is the Times' way of saying "has been stretched into".)
I obviously haven't read his forthcoming book, but I've already penned a review:
From "Death Be Not Proud" to "Bang the Drum Slowly," I've read a number of memoirs about people stricken with illness which all ended tragically. Unfortunately, "The Deep Places" isn't one of them, and tragedy only befalls the reader of its deadly prose.
Aren't the same people who can claim "Fauci and his cabal of mad scientists are responsible for loosing this deadly plague on mankind," pretty much the same ones who have been telling us stuff like "The case numbers are fake...besides, 99% percent of them recover...anyway, more people die in car crashes"?
Scott Fitzgerald said that "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
Had Fitzgerald lived long enough to encounter today's Rabid Right, he might take that back,
It’s just amazing to parallel Douthat’s *completely different* disease trajectory with Covid, considering Covid-19 first emerged less than two years ago. I think the scientific achievements in understanding the virus, how it’s transmitted, and the development of a vaccine in record time have all been extraordinary.
But what we have here is a Rightwing Narrative, specifically the Uppity Scientists Are Bad narrative combined with the You’re Not The Boss Of Me narrative, and like all their narratives they aren’t going to let things like facts, logic, evidence, or even common sense get in the way.
Has anyone ever seen Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher in the same room together, ever? Just asking. They seem suspiciously parallel. How do we know they're not just one bot who was created in Moscow?
Even though I'm a little devoted to being kinder and gentler and less of a heartless asshole, I dunno, caring more than the slightest amount possible about what Douthat went through is really, really hard. I mean, I can't not see all the harm he's done on one hand and his suffering on the other, and well, it's hard to have any empathy. Maybe it's that Old Testament idea that bad acts deserve punishments instead of a pass. Of course, the old me would elaborate but the new me sees no need. #PraiseEvolving.
I could fill pages with stories of patients with Lyme disease, anaplasmosis and Ehrlichiosis, the deer tick trio that rightly makes outdoors lovers fear to hike, garden and golf up here unless everything is covered in a foot of snow. I hate to read that someone had to see multiple doctors before being diagnosed and treated. If you live where these diseases (or Rocky Mountain Fever) are endemic, here’s my advice should you feel ill, with or without a rash, during spring, summer and fall: take two weeks of doxycycline. Don’t tough it out at home, thinking it’s the flu - it’s not. Most of the patients I treated never saw the tick that sickened them, but mutual tick checks are still great for bonding with your partner.
They say that RWers & white supremacists do a lot of their recruiting in "alternative medicine" circles -- Lyme disease is the ultimate condition for that: something many doctors fail to diagnose or treat, & so quackeries abound. Nothing either of those two are ever done without the direction of their handlers, so yeah the propaganda assault continues.
Lyme disease can be extremely tricky to diagnose because symptoms vary wildly. Douthat is just plain wrong to write that the research focuses only on a single set of known symptoms. That is not even remotely factually correct. Indeed, the major research push over the last 20 years has been exploring all the different ways that Lyme manifests so that diagnoses can be made more quickly and accurately.
To give you some idea of how bizarre Lyme can be: I have had Lyme twice. The first time, I noticed a semi-circular very faint rash on my right wrist. (NOTE: Fewer than half of Lyme victims develop the classic circular rash.) I figured it was a Lyme tick bite, so off to the doctor I went. Two weeks of tetracycline and I was done. But 6 months later, I developed excruciating pain in my left elbow. That lasted a day. The next day, it was in my left shoulder. That also lasted a day. This joint pain moved around, hitting every joint one after the other. My doctor was mystified and just prescribed me painkillers. Finally, I was watching TV one evening when my right knee began to hurt. The pain built up over the course of an hour, eventually becoming so intense I was crying and getting ready to head to the emergency room. And then, it went away. Like someone had turned off a switch, the pain just stopped. The next morning on NPR, I heard a report about Lyme disease and the newly discovered phenomenon of traveling arthritis the disease produces. I ran off to get a Lyme test and it was off the charts. Three months of intense antibiotic treatment cured it.
The second time I got Lyme, I had no tick bite that I was aware of. I woke up one morning and had double vision--my eyes were displaced from one another with one looking slightly upward compared to the other. This went away after about 10 minutes. The next morning, it did not go away. Off to the emergency room! Ten minutes of interview and a blood test later, I had Lyme again. Thanks to the research done in the intervening years--research into the oddly variant nature of Lyme symptoms--the ER doctor was able to make a best-guess initial diagnosis of Lyme disease and then confirmed it with a blood test. A couple of weeks on antibiotics and I was cured.
So Douthat and Dreher can both go suck eggs. But they're badly misinforming their readers, giving out false information that will likely lead their followers to try using poultices and burning sage to treat their disease. Or maybe Ivermectin. I hear that cures all kinds of ailments associated with horses' asses.
I hate that (Don't) Douthat is rewarded for his clunky literary swill with a 'million-dollar 18th century farmhouse" rather than a large drawer overflowing with rejection letters saying essentially "please for the love of God no more submissions until you take some kind of class"
(Roy otoh, deserves a million dollar farmhouse!)
Styron isn't an easy read. There is a lot of work involved. Knowing this, we can surmise Dreher has never read any Styron because Rod is a grifter and grifters are above all lazy.
Cops, who get about six months of training on average before being handed a gun, deserve infinite deference to their "professional" decisions. No second-guessing there, how dare you!
But doctors, teachers, climate scientists (or really any scientists) - people who spend years learning their chosen professions - get no deference whatsoever from Know-It-All Dreher/Douthat.
This is just a particular form of asshole: The guy who sits on the couch watching an Olympic athlete and saying "Yeah, I could do that, if I just spent a little more time getting in shape." Convinced they could do anybody's job better, if they just chose to do so.
Two (more) raging egos, thinking themselves so important that "liberals" want to "destroy" them personally. Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to avoid their speechifying on Windy Fascist Corner.
“I don’t trust us to be judicious and fair to the others in victory,” he went on. “The left is not being that way to us."
Said while Joe Biden and 96% of the Democratic caucus is laboring mightily to give every Quiverfull Fundamentalists Wife $300 a month for each of her seven kids. Oh, and let's not forget the billions that Biden wants to spend on rural broadband, so Dreher's readers can get speedier access to the Plandemic videos they crave.
Freddie Deboer is the subject of enough strong negative feelings that I hesitate to recommend his stuff, and he has a higher opinion of Douthat than folks do around this joint, but his review of Douthat's book is worth reading. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/review-ross-douthats-the-deep-places
"All the back-and-forth over ivermectin and other non-traditional treatments?"
Oh, you mean those dodgy "non-traditional" meds pushed by the Koch-funded quacks at "America's Front Line Doctors" and by the (separate) but equally dubious "Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance"?
While newspapers are being gutted across the country, that an idiot can become reasonably wealthy writing opinion columns for the New York Times is pretty galling.
I have suspicions about Roseanne Barr....
Douthat's column ends with a threat:
"This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book 'The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.'" (I think "is adapted from" is the Times' way of saying "has been stretched into".)
I obviously haven't read his forthcoming book, but I've already penned a review:
From "Death Be Not Proud" to "Bang the Drum Slowly," I've read a number of memoirs about people stricken with illness which all ended tragically. Unfortunately, "The Deep Places" isn't one of them, and tragedy only befalls the reader of its deadly prose.
Aren't the same people who can claim "Fauci and his cabal of mad scientists are responsible for loosing this deadly plague on mankind," pretty much the same ones who have been telling us stuff like "The case numbers are fake...besides, 99% percent of them recover...anyway, more people die in car crashes"?
Scott Fitzgerald said that "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
Had Fitzgerald lived long enough to encounter today's Rabid Right, he might take that back,