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.
Seems to me there's an obvious difference between people who are trying to help you but have incomplete information and are working in difficult circumstances, and people who want to actively do you harm, possibly for money, but possibly just for the clicks and the lulz. And I don't have any trouble at all distinguishing between the two and identifying who's doing which when it comes to Covid. But never mind, I'm no New York Times columnist with a million-dollar farmhouse.
No kidding. In my area, $1m would get you a small downpayment on a dismal fixer-upper. (TBH, it could also possibly get you a pleasant 1 or even 2 bedroom condo, except for there would always be ten buyers willing to pay more to edge you out.)
Doctors are also much more likely to go to COVID as a diagnosis for symptoms because, well, it's pandemic. A Lyme diagnosis can be missed by a poorly done medical history questioning, since the patient might not even know they were bitten.
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.
Not gloating at an enemy's pain, that's a virtue -- ortherwise heaping scorn on a ruthless assholes who would destroy us. When they punch down, we punch up -- that's the only way to hit them in the nuts...
The Doctor believes in the best of sentient creatures, but is also perfectly willing to be an asshole to companions (especially when played by an actor with the surname Baker).
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.
Fuck them. Doctors have been misdiagnosing me since I was six. I not only haven't gone full Kill Em All With Covid, I have also stopped being a couple of flavors of awful when I realized how shitty the medical field handles certain types of people.
If being gaslit by the medical community makes you a Nazi, you were always a Nazi.
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.
If prayer doesn't work, god is no longer testing you, you have *been* tested and failed, your sinfulness is simply too great. This is Douthat and Dreher we're talking about, after all. Heavy on judgement, light on the mercy.
If prayer works, that's proof of God's existence, and if it doesn't work, that's also proof of God's existence. Cover All The Bases is the First Commandment.
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.
I'm finding I'm having my very own D-K effect, when I find myself asking myself "What is wrong with these people? They can't be THAT stupid!" Then I go, "Oh, yeah, they CAN be that stupid..."
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.
Oh yeah, we want to "destroy" them by providing Douthat with free health care to take care of his Lyme disease, and any other diseases that may pop up later. That's our eeeevil plan, bwahahahaha!
“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.
If Manchin and Sinema weren't in the way, Biden and Bernie would be doing even MORE for Trump voters. Old folks vote disproportionately Republican, let's give 'em all free glasses, hearing aids, and dental!
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for this, because I want more for everyone, and that means more for people I hate too. It's just funny that we're supposed to be in some kind of civil war, and one side is desperately trying to feed and clothe the opposing army.
While a lot of those ingrates would be just as happy to see us all lined up and shot. And yet we continue to help them, because it's the right thing to do and maybe we can win a few of them over.
P.S. Don't forget Elizabeth Warren! She's helping too.
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
Megan McA also wrote a WaPo piece yesterday, referencing Dreher, Douthat, and DeBoer, in which she quickly makes it all about her own suffering. To be fair, I should actually go back and read it closely, but as Rod Dreher knows so well, I am incapable of being fair or kind or merciful.
Ugh. I skimmed it. He's so awful, and his argument seems to be "I couldn't believe I was mentally ill and I thought the medical establishment bullshit, but whaddaya know, I turned out to be mentally ill, despite the fact that the medical establishment is bullshit. I suggest Ross think harder!"
Deboer: "What we have in The Deep Places, I think, is the most compelling and moving version of a bad argument; it provoked my admiration again and again even while I shook my head in concern on every page."
That's not an argument. That's an excuse. And he's not good at them.
"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.
Seems to me there's an obvious difference between people who are trying to help you but have incomplete information and are working in difficult circumstances, and people who want to actively do you harm, possibly for money, but possibly just for the clicks and the lulz. And I don't have any trouble at all distinguishing between the two and identifying who's doing which when it comes to Covid. But never mind, I'm no New York Times columnist with a million-dollar farmhouse.
There’s a mystery there why a $1m house is a financial stretch for a Times columnist and author.
Not that I’m curious. I just presume Douthat’s claim is bullshit and that’s all.
Mr. Blatherings Builds His Dream House.
I bet General Gates watered his horses there!
No kidding. In my area, $1m would get you a small downpayment on a dismal fixer-upper. (TBH, it could also possibly get you a pleasant 1 or even 2 bedroom condo, except for there would always be ten buyers willing to pay more to edge you out.)
Doctors are also much more likely to go to COVID as a diagnosis for symptoms because, well, it's pandemic. A Lyme diagnosis can be missed by a poorly done medical history questioning, since the patient might not even know they were bitten.
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?
Ross is Rod's Guy Incognito... or waitaminute, Rod is Ross's. Jeez... gonna take a bit here
I have often thought this...and couldn't figure out which was supposed to be the Evil twin persona..
Why not both? (One's attracted to chunky artisan sausages, the other's *not* attracted to chunky artisan women.)
I think you've discovered the root of the problem.
Assuming you're referring to Dreher's "primitive root wiener" assholery...I see what you did there, lmao
What if Roy 'droso is the rogue triplet? Really makes you think (it doesn't).
It doesn't help that neither of them has a personality. They're both just whiners.
And "they" can't even be bothered to use different initials.
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.
Not gloating at an enemy's pain, that's a virtue -- ortherwise heaping scorn on a ruthless assholes who would destroy us. When they punch down, we punch up -- that's the only way to hit them in the nuts...
I'm reminded of any given episode of "Dr. Who". After all kinds of bloody mayhem, The Doctor has Davros cornered and outwitted.
The evil Kaled mutant cries out, "HAVE MERCY!"
From every couch in front of every telly, there is an answering cry of, "Fuck no Doctor! Don't listen to the sombitch!"
But The Doctor shows mercy, because he/she is a hero and believes Good prevails.
The Doctor believes in the best of sentient creatures, but is also perfectly willing to be an asshole to companions (especially when played by an actor with the surname Baker).
“The Good ended happily, the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” —Wilde
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.
Fuck them. Doctors have been misdiagnosing me since I was six. I not only haven't gone full Kill Em All With Covid, I have also stopped being a couple of flavors of awful when I realized how shitty the medical field handles certain types of people.
If being gaslit by the medical community makes you a Nazi, you were always a Nazi.
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.
Bravo to you and your docs.
You should have just prayed about it, I hear that works wonders (unless it doesn't, but that is just God testing you).
If prayer doesn't work, god is no longer testing you, you have *been* tested and failed, your sinfulness is simply too great. This is Douthat and Dreher we're talking about, after all. Heavy on judgement, light on the mercy.
The Passion of the Cripes
If prayer works, that's proof of God's existence, and if it doesn't work, that's also proof of God's existence. Cover All The Bases is the First Commandment.
I think the preferred biblical remedy is ashes & potsherds... They do a good Job
Leeches! NEEDS MOAR LEECHES!!!!!
“But they're badly misinforming their readers…” That’s what they do and they get the big bucks for it.
They do need to stick to their core competencies
Or maybe Ivermectin. I hear that cures all kinds of ailments associated with horses' asses.
Do you want Rod and Ross dead?
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.
The Dunning-Krueger is strong with them.
I can believe that being a doctor isn't so hard, as long as I make a deliberate effort to never learn what doctors actually do.
I'm finding I'm having my very own D-K effect, when I find myself asking myself "What is wrong with these people? They can't be THAT stupid!" Then I go, "Oh, yeah, they CAN be that stupid..."
Reminds me of this article.
https://clickhole.com/total-alpha-move-this-man-just-let-the-ac-repairman-know-he-would-have-fixed-the-ac-himself-if-he-knew-how/
(is there some secret Substack way of embedding links? Ordinary HTML doesn't seem to work.)
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.
Oh yeah, we want to "destroy" them by providing Douthat with free health care to take care of his Lyme disease, and any other diseases that may pop up later. That's our eeeevil plan, bwahahahaha!
But they have to believe it, or they might not feel good about ruining our fucking lives in a million ways.
"Windy Fascist Corner" is giving me life, lmao
“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.
Does Biden bending over backwards to accommodate Manchin and Sinema count?
If Manchin and Sinema weren't in the way, Biden and Bernie would be doing even MORE for Trump voters. Old folks vote disproportionately Republican, let's give 'em all free glasses, hearing aids, and dental!
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for this, because I want more for everyone, and that means more for people I hate too. It's just funny that we're supposed to be in some kind of civil war, and one side is desperately trying to feed and clothe the opposing army.
While a lot of those ingrates would be just as happy to see us all lined up and shot. And yet we continue to help them, because it's the right thing to do and maybe we can win a few of them over.
P.S. Don't forget Elizabeth Warren! She's helping too.
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
Megan McA also wrote a WaPo piece yesterday, referencing Dreher, Douthat, and DeBoer, in which she quickly makes it all about her own suffering. To be fair, I should actually go back and read it closely, but as Rod Dreher knows so well, I am incapable of being fair or kind or merciful.
I can’t believe we live in a world where both Megan McArdle and Bari Weiss are gainfully employed—to say nothing about Megan “My Dad” McCain.
One of those Megan's has an h in her name, I think the McCain one who married plagiarist Ben
“They all look alike to me.”
“Cosi fan tutti.”
Ugh. I skimmed it. He's so awful, and his argument seems to be "I couldn't believe I was mentally ill and I thought the medical establishment bullshit, but whaddaya know, I turned out to be mentally ill, despite the fact that the medical establishment is bullshit. I suggest Ross think harder!"
Deboer: "What we have in The Deep Places, I think, is the most compelling and moving version of a bad argument; it provoked my admiration again and again even while I shook my head in concern on every page."
That's not an argument. That's an excuse. And he's not good at them.
"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"?
Are we sure this not the "Front Line Kovid-19 Kritical Kare Alliance"? Asking for a friend
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.
Eh. Much of the gutting is by parasitic, extractive owners — vultures— who don’t go for investing in a better product.
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,