Journalistic Patsies, White Feminist Ignorance, and Doctors Who Don't Listen - Dinner Table Digest № 39
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
This edition features two pieces on journalists-as-useful-idiots, one for Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban, and the other, more serious one, for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. I then feature a piece from the Substack New Work in Philosophy, which sees Emily C.R. Tilton argue against the strong epistemic disadvantage thesis, which, she claims, has inappropriately insulated white feminists from engaging in proper intersectional scholarship. I follow this up with a piece that looks at the damage done when physicians don’t take patient complaints seriously, chalking up physical symptoms to psychological quackery.
Sections: Rod Dreher Patsying for Viktor Orban / FBI Spy Scandals, the New York Times and Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election / That’s Above My Paygrade / When the Doctor Doesn’t Listen
How Rod Dreher Caused an International Scandal in Eastern Europe - Balázs Gulyás - The Bulwark
This piece is fascinating, because it describes in a step-by-step kind of way how propaganda machines for autocratic dictators work, and it does so by pointing to a situation in which an American “friendly agent in the media,” the conservative pundit Rod Dreher, momentarily forgot the rules of the game were rigged, before stepping back in line.
Last Thursday evening, [Viktor] Orbán invited the friendly foreign press to his office on the Castle Hill, perched high above the Hungarian capital. In keeping with what has become the accustomed practice in the Orbán era, the prime minister chose to share his ruminations about the current state of the world exclusively with reporters who would never dare to criticize him, but only nod with enthusiastic agreement instead. (This happy group included, in addition to Dreher, Sohrab Ahmari, Gladden Pappin, Roland Tichy, Boris Kálnoky, Ralf Schuler, Javier Villamor, and Jorge González-Gallarza Hdez.)
Dreher returned home to his apartment Thursday night and wrote down what he heard, publishing it in his American Conservative blog. Since Rod Dreher grew up in the United States, he didn’t know that in an autocratic country like Orbán’s Hungary, friendly agents in the media (I’m intentionally eschewing the word “journalist”) are not allowed to write down and publish exactly what they heard if it goes against the interests of their politicians/employers. (Such a blunder could never happen in a Hungarian paper controlled directly by Orbán. Even if a Hungarian equivalent to Dreher wrote an article that would be damaging for the Orbán government, editors working for the party-state would never let it see the light of day.)
I’m really digging this song from German rock band Mono Inc
The Trauma of 2016 (spy scandal, part 2) - Timothy Snyder
Following on the heels of a story about Rod Dreher being a ‘useful idiot’ for the autocratic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, we have historian Timothy Snyder connecting the emerging FBI spy scandal to the New York Times, suggesting that they, too, were being ‘useful idiots’ for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He writes, by way of introduction,
As I wrote last time, the FBI helped Trump in 2016 in two ways. Its inquiry (DC office, McGonigal present through October 2016) into his connections with Russia was framed in such a narrow way (person-to-person contacts) that Trump could use it as his own defense, and did so. Some FBI special agents (New York office, McGonigal present from October 2016) managed to make it public that Hillary Clinton was being investigated for her emails, at a time when the election was being decided. In this essay, I will be discussing a third possible way: moving the press coverage of Russia's actions in a was that served Trump.
From there, he outlines several ways in which the New York Times, in prematurely dismissing the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, acted as a patsy for Russian authoritarianism. In particular, he notes that the mainstream media’s obsession with presenting ‘both sides’ of a story, even to the point of connecting unrelated issues, has disastrous consequences.
Here is a sample [from the NYT article in question]: "The FBI's inquiry into Russia's possible role continues, as does the investigation into the emails involving Mrs. Clinton's top aide, Huma Abedin, on a computer she shared with her estranged husband, Anthony D. Wiener." This sentence, with its weird juxtaposition and overextended clauses, reads like a tweet from the NYTpitchbot on a good day. The reporters were unable just to write a story about Trump and Russia (or even negating Trump and Russia). They had to bring in an issue that had no bearing on the Trump-Russia question, just to serve the weird purpose of "balance."
This is a failure of journalism. If you have the story, write the story. It is not writing the use the existence of another investigation to segue, in a single sentence, from Putin to Wiener. The English language bears such a sentence grammatically, if just barely, but that is no reason that it had to come into existence. The two scandals were of an entirely different structure and scale. One is still going on, and the other was dismissed after a few days. One was of world historical importance, and the other was piffle. The underlying problem is that the habit of juxtaposing one thing and another always serves a purpose that is not journalistic but political. They idea that one should generate "both sides" is an a priori view about politics, not a way of approaching reality. Its consequences are political, as they must be, and as they were in this case. By equating two things that were not at all equal, the Times made it more likely that Trump would win and that Clinton would lose a presidential election.
‘That's Above My Paygrade': Woke Excuses for Ignorance - Emily C.R. Tilton - New Work in Philosophy
While I hate the use of the word ‘woke’ in this context - it seems to be there only for its titular rhetorical shock factor - this piece is absolutely fascinating in the way it challenges the positionality of white (third wave) feminists with respect to how they treat issues arising from marginalization and oppression. In particular, Tilton, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of British Columbia, is concerned with how privileged feminists beg out of robust intersectional discussion with marginalized people by appeal to what she calls the strong epistemic disadvantage thesis (SEDT).
She explains,
The SEDT holds that dominant social positions place strong, substantive limits on what the socially dominant can know about oppression that they do not personally experience—first-personal experience of oppression is to be taken to be necessary for understanding it. With the SEDT in hand, privileged feminists are equipped with an excuse for silence: if they tried to discuss forms of oppression that they don’t experience, they would inevitably mess it up. Since they don’t want to repeat past mistakes, it seems best that they leave that work to someone else.
After describing three types of epistemic ignorance that she thinks have typified the white feminist movement (arrogant ignorance, loving knowing ignorance, and helpless ignorance), she traces their development, which she claims has the unintended effect of further marginalizing the already oppressed.
Helpless ignorance effectively combines the investigative method of the arrogantly ignorant with the hollow credentialing practices of the lovingly, knowingly ignorant. Methodologically, considerations like race, class, and disability are bracketed off or pushed to the side. And, ironically, it is the justification for these exclusions that counts as participation in the credentialing ritual. These things aren’t set aside because they’re irrelevant, but because they’re so important that it would be disastrous to get them wrong. So, you can signal that you take intersectionality seriously, even as you set yourself up to do work that explicitly excludes those considerations.
The progression of ignorance I’ve described follows a predictable pattern. With each step in the progression, what started as a solution to ignorance is transformed into a tool for fortifying it. Calls for inclusivity and intersectionality were meant to alleviate the arrogant ignorance of many Second-Wave feminists. These calls were only superficially answered, which resulted in the rise of loving, knowing ignorance. Loving, knowing ignorance prompted calls for more humility—feminists had an inflated sense of their own understanding, and needed to take the limitations of their perspective more seriously. Now, these calls for humility have been warped into the foundation of helpless ignorance, because perspectival limitations are taken to be insurmountable obstacles to understanding.
The full argument is made in an academic paper, forthcoming in The Philosopher’s Imprint, and can be read here.
When the Doctor Doesn’t Listen - David Tuller - Coda Story
When I was a kid, my mother often complained that my father, who, if he was not working was sleeping, might have had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The problem was that doctors didn’t recognize it as a thing. They thought it was all in his head. It turns out that his story is not unique. This piece chronicles the life of a young British woman who passed away at age 27, as a direct result of Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Her death is the focus of a public inquest calling the British National Health Service to account for their continued and repeated failures in treating Maeve Boothby O’Neill as an attention seeker rather than as someone who was really sick.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis is frequently triggered by an acute viral or other infectious illness, although it has also been associated with exposure to environmental toxins, including mold. Patients have been found to suffer from a range of immunological, metabolic, neurological and other dysfunctions. Core symptoms include profound exhaustion, a pattern of relapses after minimal exertion known as post-exertional malaise, brain fog, poor sleep and heart rate irregularities that lead to dizziness or nausea when in a standing position. Standard therapies have focused on symptomatic relief since the underlying causes remain unknown and there are no diagnostic medical tests. …
As a journalist and public health academic, I have been investigating and writing about ME for several years. I have learned how it can devastate the lives of patients and their families, not least because mainstream medicine has framed it as largely psychosomatic — a modern version of what would once have been diagnosed as hysteria or conversion disorder.
Tuller, the author of this Coda piece, draws our attention to the parallels between how we have treated ME/CFS and how we are treating Long Covid patients, and in particular, women.
All around the world, leading scientists and clinicians regard long Covid as a heterogeneous disease. They are seeking to elucidate its many pathophysiological pathways and find drug targets for therapy. In December 2022, the CDC reported that long Covid “played a part” in 3,544 deaths in the U.S. from the start of the pandemic through June 2022.
Another camp is applying the psychosomatic lens to long Covid. The experts in this group also hold impressive academic status, receive significant research funding and publish in respected journals. They witness the same phenomenon and see something completely different: A global tsunami of mass hysteria leading to paralysis, gait disorders, memory loss, inability to remain upright without feeling sick, repeated flu-like relapses and a list of other complaints.
Medicine has a long and sorry history of bias and discrimination on the basis of sex. Given that ME and other functional and medically unexplained disorders are known to be much more prevalent among women, it is not surprising that patients with these conditions routinely report receiving poor treatment and even abuse at the hands of the healthcare system. Physicians frequently prescribe psychotherapy and exercise programs based on their presumption that emotional or mental distress, negative or unhelpful thoughts and/or unhealthy behavior patterns are causing the persistent problems.
As someone who lived through the visceral, physical effects of a doctor not taking symptoms seriously, and as someone who now lives with debilitating fatigue of my own as a result, I can tell you that the neglect that Boothby O’Neill endured will only become more common as the health care system moves towards away from being a public good and towards being a profit-focused enterprise.
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