What some of the geniuses at the fake-ass 'free the states' coronavirus spreading rallies are saying
I think that’s hit every thread so far!
If we use the Spanish flu of 1918 as a rough model for some back of the envelope calculations, about 675k Americans died of it. The population of the US at that time was between 92 and 106 million people. Currently we’re a little over 3 times that, so if the coronavirus were to be as deadly as the Spanish flu was we’re talking about 2 million or more dead Americans.
That’s around the population of Nebraska or New Mexico, 1/3 the population of Tennessee, 1/4 of New York City, 80% of Chicago, Philadelphia and Miami combined, or three Washington DCs.
This is no surprise. The world is full of selfish, stupid people.
But the problems with using the Spanish Flu as an example is that it happened in an era before antibiotics and in the middle of the worst war the world had seen. (There are some who claim the pandemic helped speed the end of the war)
You had battlefield deaths from the disease (and poor sanitation/hygiene of the front lines) that you would not have. Also survival in hospitals was already shaky at the best of times due to the prevalence of infection.
Don’t trach the snake.
Antibiotics do not work on a virus.
True. But they do work on potentially deadly staph infections one could get in a hospital back then.
Not only do antibiotics not work on viruses, but there were already 3 Nobel prizes handed out between 1911 and 1913 for antibiotic research before World War I even started. Antibacterials were being developed as early as the 1880s.
See above. Once people were hospitalized, the chance of dying from a deadly staph infection while recuperating from the virus was pretty high. Antibiotics nowadays prevent such things.
Liking not because I “like.” I don’t want anyone to get this horrible virus. I don’t think any of us do. But liking because it’s important that people see these cause/effect events. 
Plus secondary infections like pneumonia that take advantage of depleted immune systems.
Illinois Policy Institute and Richard Uihlein. Now I just have to retrace my steps back from this article. Good thing I left some bread crumbs…
Yep, and some other wealthy funders intent on diverting, dividing, and grabbing control of the political narrative. Given how much energy people on the left are expending by ridiculing these relatively small and unpopular protests, I’d say it’s working.
These protests are a classic example of trying to control politics by controlling the national narrative.
The protests are backed by the same conservative groups that are working for Trump’s reelection. The Michigan Conservative Council, one of the organizers of the Michigan protest, was founded by a pro-Trump couple active in state Republican politics. Another organizer was the Michigan Freedom Fund, whose leader, Greg McNeilly is a Republican political operative who worked for Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s family.
Protests in Wisconsin were organized by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, founded by Republican pro-Trump economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, and by FreedomWorks, a training group for conservative activists that grew out of a political organization founded by David and Charles Koch. FreedomWorks is most famous for its organization of the Tea Party movement in 2009. Its president, Adam Brandon, told Vox reporter Jane Coaston that “this has the same DNA [as] the Tea Party movement.” It “just so happened a lot of our activists were organizers.”
These are not spontaneous, grassroots protests. They are political operations designed to divert attention from the Trump administration’s poor response to the pandemic. Even more, though, they are designed to keep the American public divided so that we do not protest the extraordinary economic inequality the pandemic has highlighted…
These protests have diverted the national conversation by turning a national crisis into partisan division along the lines the Republican Party has developed since the 1980s. But in reality there are few actual protesters: two-thirds of Americans are worried that lockdowns will end too early, not too late. People began to separate physically even before governors required it, and say they will not stop distancing until they are certain they are safe, no matter the official government stance.
Source:
That and perceived power. To be the one wearing the jackboots and not the one under them.
Of course, the other problem with using the Spanish Flu as a model is that, in areas where we do have thorough data, the COVID-19 mortality rate is higher. So even my example above (or @gatto’s in another thread) of sub-1% mortality is a pipe dream, still.
Okay, I’ll get in on this now since no one else has done it:
On a related theme…
https://twitter.com/deannasudnyl/status/1252702987492962306?s=21
When all else fails, reference the Holocaust. 
