The Dakotas are getting a lot of (well deserved) bad press because of their elected idiots and a bunch of allied COVIDiots, but there are a lot of very courageous healthcare workers there risking their lives in overcrowded, understaffed hospitals. Here’s one of them, Jodi Doering, an ED nurse, who got a few minutes of attention for this set of tweets over the weekend:
Going to ruin the USA. All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that “stuff” because they don’t have COViD because it’s not real. Yes. This really happens. And
— Jodi Doering (@JodiDoering) November 15, 2020
Which is what I will do for the next three nights. But tonight. It’s me and Cliff and Oreo ice cream. And how ironic I have on my “home”
Hoodie. The South Dakota I love seems far away right now. pic.twitter.com/3e5Qg4yAuS— Jodi Doering (@JodiDoering) November 15, 2020
Of course, like anyone else telling the truth about COVID, she received a lot of threats, and her reply shows what she’s made of:
If people think 72 hours can’t change your life, they have never tweeted from the couch while eating ice cream. I debated on locking down my Twitter. You know, death threats and stuff. I have worried about the safety of my two strong, independent daughters. But if ever there was
— Jodi Doering (@JodiDoering) November 18, 2020
And don’t be a Twitter Dick. ✌?
— Jodi Doering (@JodiDoering) November 18, 2020
Here’s her interview on CNN. Really worth a watch, especially since I timed it to cut out Dollar Store Sarah Palin’s (Gov. Kristi Noem) stupid comments. And, by the way, that’s a real South Dakota/North Dakota accent. Marge on Fargo had a rural Minnesota accent.
leeleeFL
I read this the other day, and expected she would get threats. People are beyond stupid and vicious …..I am really about to not care what happens to the shitheads who are denying this virus exists or that it’s not a big deal. Scrape em off, Claire, they’re trash!
leeleeFL
Never been first!
mad citizen
@leeleeFL: Lucky jackal! I watched this CNN piece the other night, good on this nurse; she is well spoken. It seems like there is another virus that has overtaken the cultists and they live in a different reality. I did read the other day that delirium can be one of the first covid symptoms.
Saw a Lewis Black clip and he was looking at our two realities as an accomplishment as a nation–it’s never been done before! (though I’m guessing that isn’t true)
Barbara
When I talked to my kids about drug use I stressed that they could not be friends with drug users. They could care about them and be friendly, but not friends. Why? Because nearly every addict I have ever known can’t deal with the implicit judgment of their drug use by the people around them that don’t use drugs. It’s imperative to their emotional equilibrium that everyone must be a user. That’s what I feel like when I talk to some people, e.g., evangelicals, who just can’t stand knowing that there are people out there who really and truly don’t believe and don’t care to believe and are not really even all that interested in anything like a “faith experience.” There seems to be a similar psychological need for total validation on the views of COVID-19 deniers. I am not actually hoping for anyone’s death, but I have definitely transcended caring or concern over their demise. But they are taking other people out with them. That’s the problem.
Llelldorin
Noem is dollar store Sarah Palin? But Sarah Palin is already dollar store Donald Trump! This is like Powers of Ten for right-wing lunatics.
Steeplejack (phone)
Nurse Doering is great. That CNN interviewer is incredibly cloying. Ugh.
wvng
I had assumed she would get threats for telling the truth about a deadly disease that she faces every day, because that is our America now. The guy in charge of cyber security gets fired and threatened because he said our elections were safe, meaning he did his job well, so why not threaten a nurse trying to help people who are deathly ill from a disease they choose to think is not real. Trump certainly exposed that our country isn’t remotely what I thought it was.
Kay
I think it’s time that the majority in this country who elected Joe Biden start calling Congress and demand that Republicans respect the election results and admit that Donald Trump lost.
It’s time for a calling campaign. They’re harming the whole country with their cowardice and getting away with it. We can load up their phone lines and demand they do their jobs. I know they’re hostages to Donald Trump. We shouldn’t be dragged into their cult.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@Steeplejack (phone):
The part that got me was her having to repeat for dramatic effect that Woonsocket had fewer residents that the current SD death toll. How complicated is that? (BTW, Woonsocket is the birthplace of Eleanor McGovern, for those of you playing at home.)
zhena gogolia
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix:
the interviewer seemed to think she was saying that everyone in the town had died of Covid.
jl
Sad and horrifying. The denial is not unique to the US. When I read about what is going on some European countries, the same insanity is reported. And a lot of it is due to rabble rousing by right wing groups. There is also the same resistance to masks and social distancing rules, that when done right, can allow a lot of business and life to go on half way normally. But there, usually the national leadership is less likely to be part of that murderous nonsense. And when it does give in for perceived political benefit, there is a willingness to change course when the tragic results become apparent.
But, the US is different, and much of it, though not all, is due to gross malfeasance at the very top of our government.
VOR
@wvng: She contradicted the Great Leader, the only one who tells the truth.
Kay
100% on the Republican Party. This is their work. This is after 11 days. Imagine what bad shape the country will be in after 61 more.
They refuse to defend the country. Eagerly destroying it.
Cervantes
What exactly is “right wing” or “conservative” about denying the existence of a deadly epidemic? That’s the part that really needs explaining. In fact they’re just following Dear Leader, it has nothing to do with ideology, just slavish devotion to a lunatic.
FelonyGovt
In all this horror show of the last 4 years, only a few things have made me cry. One is how Col. Vindman was treated. Another is all this hate and vitriol directed to health care professionals who are risking their lives to treat these horrible people.
dr. luba
@Llelldorin: Republican reverse homeopathy. Or logarithmic Republicanism.
rikyrah
@Kay:
this is who they are. This is who they’ve always been.
BR
@Kay:
Oh wow, 61 more days of this. Each worse than the previous, if history is any guide.
And maybe more than 61 days — it’s not like any of this nonsense will stop on 1/20/21 — the nonsense will continue.
Suzanne
The COVID deniers seem to be feeling status anxiety, as though admitting that it’s real would make them be lower on the social ladder. It’s in the same vein as the comments like “going to college makes you an idiot!!!”.
I find these people tiresome.
BR
@FelonyGovt:
I was reading the other day that trust in health care professionals (doctors, nurses) has been plummeting in polls. This is really a nihilistic movement that’s scorching the very fabric of society. A country where nobody can trust anything or anyone isn’t much of one at all.
Gin & Tonic
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix: So today I learned that there is another Woonsocket, besides the one here in Rhode Island.
guachi
As someone who grew up in Montana I didn’t notice anything off about her accent. It sounded like many people I grew up around who were born in Montana.
Suzanne
@Cervantes: It’s not ideological. It’s about feeling superior to liberals, because they have this totally unmerited resentment against us. It is literally denying a deadly disease so that we don’t feel the satisfaction of being right.
The fact that ***no one feels satisfied because they are right about COVID being terrible*** seems to be lost on them.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Barbara: That more or less describes my feeling too.
Ken
Pity they’re skipping the percussion step, where the diluted substance is repeatedly hit against a surface, or vice versa.
RSA
@Barbara:
I found this article, by David Dunning, We Are All Confident Idiots, insightful on this topic.
Cervantes
@Gin & Tonic: Very strange, because Woonsocket means “Thundermist” in Algonquin and it refers to what are now called the Blackstone Falls in English, located in the city. Why there would be a town by that name in the Midwest is hard to fathom.
Baud
@Suzanne:
I agree.
Jess
Great to see this shining example of compassion and common sense. It brought tears to my eyes. She has a cute dog as well!
WaterGirl
@guachi: I didn’t notice an accent either, and I grew up in Chicago.
mad citizen
@guachi: I detected a little bit of an accent on a few words; not much. I do get to regularly hear a pretty strong Dakota accent from a work colleague.
Remember reading decades ago the upper great plains flat accent was a sort of standard for american tv news, etc. Like Tom Brokaw. Of course lots of the midwest is the same–what a lot of us would say is no accent at all.
Suzanne
@BR: In the book “White Working Class” by Joan Williams, she writes about how many men have negative bias toward the professions that are majority female, especially teachers and nurses. I wonder if it’s felt to be emasculating to admit that COVID is real, wear a mask, etc. in certain social cohorts.
GodDAMN. These people and their fucking ISSUES are just so ridiculous.
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl:
The way the “o”s are pronounced is pretty distinctive to the Upper Midwest (same as MN, WI).
Ian G.
@Suzanne:
It’s the same as with climate change denial, admitting it’s real is admitting the liberals are right, and that cannot happen, even as they shovel mud out of their living room from the latest once a century flood happening once every 2 years.
MobiusKlein
As a partial defense, if a person’s blood oxygen is at 75, expecting rational thought may be a mistake.
Jeffro
Sounds good to me (and long overdue). What’s the best way to get the ball rolling here, folks?
Related: this was just terrifying (and if you read closely, there are multiple points where it still could be)
We Came Closer to an Election Catastrophe Than People Realize
Hanging by a thread until we get rid of the Electoral College, folks.
Suzanne
@Ian G.: These people and their fucking psychodrama will kill us all.
Geoduck
@Cervantes: Um, because some white dude from the original founded the place and named it after his hometown. It happened a lot.
Jess
@Suzanne: Well, if they want to die from “not-Covid” to own the libs, let them. I just hope they won’t take us all down with them.
catclub
Check out good old Carlos Castaneda! Mushrooms! peyote!
Flying!
Nicole
@Suzanne:
I find this thoroughly plausible. It seems a lot wrong in society can be traced directly back to racism and misogyny.
Suzanne
@Jess: That’s the problem, they’re taking up healthcare resources and spreading their plague around. If they want to go found their own country called FREEDUMB and not waste my tax dollars on their healthcare and refuse to wear masks anywhere, be my guest.
Just tell me where you’re going to I can go to the other place.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix:
Yeah, the CNN person seemed to believe that her town had actually been wiped out. I was like: “Don’t say it. Don’t say it.”
Suzanne
@Nicole: I would extrapolate that there are many men who don’t like the dynamic of women being expert at anything because it reminds them of their moms telling them to eat their spinach or what have you.
catclub
On Fresh Air, interviewer asked why today’s BLM protests are much smarter than the protests of the 60’s. Subject repsonded that BLM is mostly organized by black women.
Ruckus
@mad citizen:
And one can be delusional without COVID-19, but often republicanism is involved – as well as stupid.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Geoduck:
Yeah, this. Wikipedia:
theturtlemoves
Wait, that’s an accent? Sounds perfectly normal to me as a born and raised West River South Dakotan. She sounds pretty much exactly like my sister in law, who is also a nurse.
Nicole
@Suzanne: While at the same time their dads were telling them women don’t know anything.
Jess
@Suzanne: I know. It’s infuriating. At this point I’m hoping they just hurry up and die off so that wiser folks can take care of business unimpeded.
Gin & Tonic
@Steeplejack (phone): If there turns out to be a Quonochontaug in the Dakotas as well, I will be *really* surprised.
Ruckus
@Barbara:
A very good point. Drugs, cults, both work best (for them) when delusion is used, and the leaders will be delusional as well, as we see with trumpism. Because conservatism has been a delusional cult for most of my life.
jl
@Ian G.: In surveys I’ve seen, three quarters of the population believe that man made global warming is a big problem. Not sure if it is as evenly distributed around the country, but similar majority puts covid control as a top priority, and understands that economic and social recovery can only happen with good covid control.
So, the problem is not all a deluded a population. I think it’s also corrupt and malfeasant political leadership giving a minority an outsized influence. And then $$ from their big funders, reactionary renegade billionaires and corporations who don’t care, don’t need to care, about the rest of society.
Ruckus
@Cervantes:
It is a cult, not a political party. It’s just that it has gotten extremely obvious, to all but the cult members.
cmorenc
@Jeffro:
How is it possible to do that (or fix the other even more potent malefactor of Wyoming and California with grossly disproportionate populations each having 2 senators), when the available constitutional avenues to change are not practically attainable without cooperative consent of the very actors and states handsomely benefitting from the current structural imbalance? Change wont happen unless a scenario somehow develops where the current constitutional scheme works sharply to their disadvantage – where big states and population centers attain overwhelming leverage forcing the others to go along with big structural constitutional changes to remain viable. But what might such a scenario be? (Short of outright forceful. successful revolt?)
Kent
Barbara: This is the best description of this phenomenon that I have ever seen expressed. I’m not sure what the word is for it. But I feel exactly the same way around my evangelical relatives. I just can’t be around them because they assume too fucking much and take offense when I push back on their cultism.
When I was younger I would take the bait and argue with these types of people. But you eventually learn that most of them are unreachable. Whether it’s politics or religion or science denial (or usually all 3). Now I just don’t have the desire or energy and I just have to shut them out of my life.
NotMax
Say what you will about Dollar Stores, they’re successful and enduring, the antithesis of Palin.
;)
Gravenstone
O/T, but the geniuses at the Trump campaign have ponied up for a recount of only Milwaukee and Dane counties in WI. The two counties where Trump lost by a combined 364,264 votes! Obviously they’ll be trying desperately to challenge and disqualify a metric boat load of (primarily minority) votes in the course of said recount. They somehow need to find roughly 21k votes. This is going to get dirty, fast.
Wapiti
@jl: I’ll offer: Christianity, specifically the myth that we will live forever because of the sect we belong to.
Maybe the lack of Christianity (not absense, merely that it is not dominant in cultural mores) in Asia, and the need to live with other people without fear of a sky god, makes people better able to live with each other.
jl
@Suzanne: “she writes about how many men have negative bias toward the professions that are majority female, especially teachers and nurses.”
I think the GOP and Fox News have been running a conscious social engineering program to attack anything they don’t like that will get in the way of their power as ‘feminization’. I remember a lot of pundit BS that portrayed interest in anything other than the military blowing up stuff and killing people as ‘feminization’.
Medical professionals, both men and women, have been realizing that social problems, that the GOP wanted to neglect for various reasons, had to be solved in order for them to do their job. So you ever higher proportion of doctors in favor of universal health insurance. Conveniently for the GOP, more and more physicians are women. So, suddenly, manly men were feminized by any interest in medicine.
Back the the day, our manly man society celebrated the women frontier school marms. But now, magically, an interest in education is feminization.
Interestingly, men are becoming far more prominent in nursing, but gosh golly gee, funny that those same quarters still consider an interest in nursing as feminization of manly men.
The GOP has been encouraging barbaric brutalization of our society in the interest of maintaining their own power and influence over their base, appealing to the worst and silliest bigotry.
Edit: by their standards, far more than half of the founders would be sissy feminized ‘soyboys.’ Benjamin Rush was a pioneering physician in mental health and social medicine (even if he was ass backwards on infectious disease control, even by the standards of his day). So, a feminized soyboy.
Matt McIrvin
@Gravenstone: The funny thing is that if you look at the results of the Georgia audit, it’s apparent that for real vote gains they’d be better off insisting on a recount everywhere else. Trump gained votes from that (not enough to swing it by any means, but some) not by disqualifying any votes in Atlanta but by finding accidentally unreported ones in white Republican counties.
Elizabelle
I have been hoping that every word of Nurse Doering’s story checks out, because she is sure our Confirmation Bias guardian angel.
cmorenc
@jl:
There is also the factor motivating medical professionals (especially physicians) that as a practical matter, most patients cannot afford to pay them absent some kind of insurance coverage.
Surdo
Just weighing in as a Cheesehead that lived in Minnesota for 10 years: 4SeasonsMM is bang on about this accent, and about Marge’s. And Marge was bang-on rural Minnesota.
coin operated
@MobiusKlein:
If they had these opinions at 99% O2sat, 75% isn’t going to make a difference.
Signed,
Former nurse who used to work in the old South.
jl
@cmorenc: Yeah, that too.
But makes no difference, our TV pundits on conservative media outlets have deemed that health care is a feminized profession and area of interest. Therefore something wrong with it. Takes resources away from using brute force to get your way.
Kay
@Jeffro:
Republicans are waiting to see if the coup works. If it does, they’re all on board. Keeping their coup options open.
Gravenstone
@Matt McIrvin: Agreed. But racists are gonna racist.
Suzanne
@Kent: I think what Barbara described is another flavor of the well-known psychological bias that humans have of not wanting to conceive poorly of themselves. Everyone wants to think that they are typical and okay, even if they are not. I would also add that most people want to feel desirable and aspirational, and being reminded that someone doesn’t think that way of you is interpreted as disrespect by some.
Dan B
@RSA: Great article, thanks!
Aleta
It’s painful to realize that belief in social responsibility in the U.S. has decayed to the point of in effect making instant gratification and habits come before the lives of hospital workers. And that our culture of bars and restaurants and parties (recognizing the importance of gathering) is so shortsighted or selfish we don’t protect the service workers and cleaners who provide that. We need them to give us our ‘normal’ feeling that things are open, businesses are working, but we’ll let them get sick helping us, because we’re once removed by the time they lose their health or infect another.
Jeffro
@cmorenc: dead thread but still…I think it’s important to have the conversation and have it often. Get it “front of mind” for the American people, particular the majority who are getting screwed over by the EC.
One non-amendment-needing, almost-fix that would help is to greatly increase the number of members of the House, to the point where states’ House delegations are approximately in proportion to their populations. So, instead of Wyoming having 1 House member and California having 53, California would have close to 80 since its population is about 80 times larger.
And yes, states would still be winner-take-all, but then the bigger states are weighing in according to their size.
And then we just go win Texas ;)
Barbara
@RSA: No, I think that DK syndrome is different. I mean, it is real and can be confounding in many different settings, but it is different from being incapable of accepting that you might be wrong about something or at the very least that other people disagree with you about it. A disease is different from faith in a higher power, of course, because there are people who can prove the existence of a disease. So refusing to believe that COVID is real takes even more determined will to to tune out the opinions of others that are based on actual experience, like the nurse’s. However, it is similar to what I see with people who will not allow their children (especially) to socialize with anyone who doesn’t profess faith in God, because of fear that their unbelief could spread. The realist in me says that they don’t think faith is all that compelling if it needs such a sustained fencing out of others to sustain it. But that’s where they sit.
Uncle Cosmo
@Geoduck: Steeplejack at #47 supra FTW.
IOW not “hard to fathom” at all.
The intellectual blind spots of so many (allegedly) intelligent and well-educated people have never ceased to amaze me.
Suzanne
@Barbara:
I think there’s something else at work there, which is that they don’t let unbelievers into their close social circle because unbelievers are less likely to give them the ego gratification they’re looking for.
I have known a few people like this, who need need need that constant praise and uplift. It’s the real life version of doing it for the LIKES on social media. Plenty of religious people need that. They don’t just want to be Christians, they want to make sure that other people see them be the best Christians! Their faith isn’t really faith as much as it is another dick-measuring contest. And since unbelievers, or those of a different faith, don’t help scratch that superiority itch, the relationship is unfulfilling.
chopper
@Gravenstone:
“okay, so we fed the ballots back through the machine and the answer’s the same. thanks for the money!”
RSA
@Barbara: Right, I didn’t mean to suggest it was Dunning-Kruger; rather, I found passages like this insightful:
artem1s
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m assuming their understanding of how recounts work is as bad as their understanding of how courts work. They probably think they get to examine every ballot and throw out anything they want or they will hold their breath until they turn blue. Or they are going to try to pull some stunt like they did with Wayne County, MI yesterday. They don’t have a good strategy because they are dumb asses. The FSM has blessed us with stupid enemies and it’s finally working in our favor.
Heywood J.
I feel terrible for good people who have to risk their lives daily to save morons from themselves.
No One You Know
@RSA: Bookmarked! That article’s a great find.