The Dream World of Covid Denial

August 23, 2021

"I think it is time where God is separating the sheep from the goats….I'm a goat. Because I am not a sheep. I'm not doing what they tell me to do. I'm fighting against it (the vaccine)."

In Alabama — the state with the lowest vaccination rate in the nation. w/@Sarah_Boxer pic.twitter.com/dqCC67cpPX
— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) August 24, 2021

CNN’s unlikely superstar Donie O’Sullivan interviewing members of an Alabama Trump Rally audience.

Posted by greenman3610
Filed in Crock of the Week

20 Comments »

20 Responses to “The Dream World of Covid Denial”

dumboldguy Says:

August 23, 2021 at 10:05 pm
These posts get harder to believe as more “interviews” come out, each one full of more ignorance and stupidity than the last. Is there a bottom to this?

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- Brent Jensen-Schmidt Says:
  
  August 24, 2021 at 3:24 am
  After all the years of experience with these ( something type people ), why are we still gobsmacked? ??
  
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- rhymeswithgoalie Says:
  
  August 24, 2021 at 2:48 pm
  Rational behavior from humans is the exception, not the rule. Our limbic systems run our brains.
  
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Peter Joseph, M.D. (@pjmd) Says:

August 23, 2021 at 10:26 pm
Hurry up, Darwin.

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redskylite Says:

August 23, 2021 at 11:37 pm
Dr. Sherry Tenpenny, another “expert witness” called by the republicans to express her view on the link between vaccines/5G towers. Mmm where does that place all the other expert witnesses called by the grand old. ?
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“Called by Republicans as an expert witness before a June 2021 hearing of the Ohio House Health Committee, Tenpenny promoted the false claim that COVID-19 vaccines cause people to become magnetized such that metal objects stick to their bodies, adding “There’s been people who have long suspected that there’s been some sort of an interface, yet-to-be-defined interface, between what’s being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers.”

Source wikipedia

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- Steampunk_Gentleman #Peace & Justice Project (@Charlesthornt) Says:
  
  August 24, 2021 at 3:01 pm
  Dr Tenpenny is a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine
  
  ie incapable of offering expert testimony on disease, epidemiology or vaccines
  
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  - rhymeswithgoalie Says:
    
    August 25, 2021 at 4:35 pm
    In modern times, osteopaths (DOs) are roughly equivalent to MDs, which have their own great share of unscientific quacks.
    
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    - Gingerbaker Says:
      
      August 25, 2021 at 10:49 pm
      That’s pretty unfair. to MD’s. In my experience, quackery is almost never associated with MD’s and is almost always associated with DO’s and Naturopaths. (Not that all DO’s are quacks – many use only allopathic medicine)
      
      The term osteopathy itself comes from osteopathic manipulation, which is taught at every school of osteopathy, and is little more than chiropractic. Which is itself – outside of the treatment of lower back pain – no better than placebo treatments. IOW, it is almost entirely quackery. A large proportion of DO’s use osteopathic manipulation, a proportion hugely larger than the tiny percentage of actual MD’s who may be quacks.
      
      It is much easier to get into Osteopath schools than schools of Medicine, and many schools of Osteopathy teach other forms of quackery in their curriculum.
      
      Here is a review article: https://quackwatch.org/consumer-education/qa/osteo/
      
      Reply
      - J4Zonian Says:
        
        August 26, 2021 at 3:17 am
        Almost everything you said there is wrong, and it seems your prejudices are much stronger than your research skill here as they are in food stuff. In my experience as a health professional I’ve come across far too many MDs with strong, wrong prejudices as well, who were always willing to give advice no matter how stupid or harmful. (Some DCs, DOs, Naturopaths, etc. too.)
        
        And we’ve seen a full array of lunatic moron MDs (some of them in Congress) making appropriately insane pronouncements about Covid, climate catastrophe, evolution, abortion, and other topics important enough that we shouldn’t have to deal with people in positions of authority not having a clue about them.
      - Gingerbaker Says:
        
        August 26, 2021 at 11:23 am
        So, the roughly 50% of DO’s who use osteopathic manipulation regularly in their practices is, to you, in an equal proportion to the number of MD’s who are quacks?
        
        “In modern times, osteopaths (DOs) are roughly equivalent to MDs, which have their own great share of unscientific quacks.”
      - Gingerbaker Says:
        
        August 26, 2021 at 11:39 am
        “Almost everything you said there is wrong,”
        
        What might those things be?
        
        I admit, I took those things from a single article, but they appear to be documented by the articles author, Dr Stephen Barrett who is a Columbia trained psychiatrist. Dr Steven Novella, who is involved with Neurologica blog and Science-based Medicine blog also contributes to Quackwatch.
      - rhymeswithgoalie Says:
        
        August 26, 2021 at 7:04 pm
        Apparently DOs in the US have different training than elsewhere:
        
        According to Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, “the training, practice, credentialing, licensure, and reimbursement of osteopathic physicians is virtually indistinguishable from those of (MD) physicians, with 4 years of osteopathic medical school followed by specialty and subspecialty training and [board] certification.”
        
        Some notorious MD quacks and nutcases:
        – Dr. Oz
        – pediatric neurosurgeon Michael Egnor
        – neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock
        – neurosurgeon Ben Carson
        – pediatrician Jay Gordon
        
        Dishonorable mention
        – Ron Paul
        – Rand Paul
        
        There are, of course, thousands more MDs that have “gone bad” that are not famous. What’s worse is that quackery like “integrative medicine” is insinuating itself into what were once leading medical schools. Check out the “quackademic medicine” articles on SBM:
        
        https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/tag/quackademic-medicine/
neilrieck Says:

August 24, 2021 at 6:08 am
If memory serves, both sheep and goats were sacrificed at the Judaic alter by the priests (not god). We are human beings. If god exists, I’m she that he/she would prefer us to use our god-given intelligence so “roll up your sleeve and take the jab”

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Gingerbaker Says:

August 24, 2021 at 8:48 am
One wonders of the Venn overlap of antivaxxers and religionists – I’ll bet there is a huge overlap, because religion almost requires the suspension of critical reasoning. It makes the belief in the absurd, despite a lack of evidence, a moral good. It sanctions and encourages stupidity. And if there is any undercurrent to Trumpism it is the approbation of stupidity.

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J4Zonian Says:

August 25, 2021 at 10:28 am
This. is. not. about. stupidity.

It is unconscious relation to symbols working itself out in the outer world. To stop it we have to understand what the symbols mean and respond on a symbolic and therapeutic level. Responding as if it’s “stupidity” and not psychological symbolism reinforces the surface symbol and drives us all even farther from awareness of what it really is, and means. The cognitive process George Lakoff is talking about when he says not to reinforce conservative frames is a parallel to this, though that too is surface; Lakoff ignores the deeper psychological reality, too. (Don’t Think of an Elephant)

I don’t know yet how to describe this to people who don’t know the reality of and won’t accept the primacy of the psychological. All I can do is offer another example.
(The point of using the following article is not the money; it’s the combination of conservative white people’s prejudices and lack of inner resources keeping them from becoming aware of their own unconscious. That’s what’s allowing others to manipulate them. Thinking that’s about stupidity reveals a remarkably similar and parallel unawareness among progressives.

“The Big Money Behind the Big Lie”
“Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.”

“What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works… is that it doesn’t actually require proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.”

IOW, in the minds of conservatives, Black and Hispanic (and Native American, and Jewish, and Islamic, and poor, and intellectual, etc.) equals not like me, equals unAmerican,* and that means [here’s the leap that’s hard to make if you’re unaware of how psychology works:] votes cast by those unAmericans, and by extension, anyone voting for the same candidates they do, are unAmerican, and therefore, according to US exceptionalism, not legitimate. Therefore those votes shouldn’t count. So in conservatives’ imagination, those votes are made to fit into whatever categories are handy: fraudulent votes, cheating, eg. (Believing progressives are cheating is another projection.) Then, as always with projection and other delusions, imagination is taken for reality. This is about racism, but racism is not about race; it’s one manifestation among many of the projection of intolerable parts of the self onto others of various kinds.

US exceptionalism is a form of collective malignant narcissism, a combination of narcissistic personality disorder and anti-social personality disorder, aka psychopathy or sociopathy.

*In another manifestation of this disease, “American” is assumed to refer only to the US, not the other 2 continents and numerous islands that make up the Americas.

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- Gingerbaker Says:
  
  August 25, 2021 at 11:05 pm
  I think you are selling stupidity short. Half of the country IS stupid compared to the other half. And the half to the left on the Bell curve is a much larger set than antivaxxers. Heck, the western half of the half to the left is roughly the same size as the set of antivaxxers.
  
  No doubt there are some antivaxxers who are intelligent, just as there are some intelligent people who often believe very stupid things. And I think your ideas on the topic do much to explain these people. But stupid people often believe stupid things because they are not intelligent enough to know the difference. They simply do not reason well.
  
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  - J4Zonian Says:
    
    August 27, 2021 at 3:19 am
    
    Reply
neilrieck Says:

August 25, 2021 at 9:36 pm
“Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?” This line is spoken by Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in the James Cameron movie Aliens. It also popped into my head after listening to the woman in the video offering “her opinions on the vaccine”

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ubrew12 Says:

August 25, 2021 at 9:38 pm
God is separating the sheep from the goats… and killing the goats. Why would you wanna be a goat?

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Keith McClary Says:

August 25, 2021 at 11:39 pm
Disagreeable people found to be more prone to conspiracy theories
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-08-people-prone-conspiracy-theories.html

People who are antagonistic, exploitative and generally disagreeable are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, according to recent study from a UO researcher.
…
“In plain terms, it seems like disagreeable people, who score high in these traits, are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories,” Kay said. “They are prone to odd beliefs. They don’t feel like they are in control of their lives. They are robbed of their agency and have an innate distrust of other people and organizations like the government.”

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