So if they go out and get sick and die I won’t shed many tears. How about you?
If they only harmed themselves, then I wouldn’t be too upset. A “self-limiting problem,” as they say.
The problem is that they don’t only harm themselves.
What happens when they get sick and infect a lot of other people with no choice in the matter (like others in their household, or grocery store workers, transit workers, medical personnel, etc.)?
I don’t want anyone to die, regardless of political affiliation. That being said, I am tired of having to counter my Facebook Trump friends’ constant conspiracy theories about Bill Gates or claims that the virus issue is overblown.
Well then, welcome to the club Velocity. 
*
More seriously, what Neil deGrasse Tysen said has turned prophetic, except the part where he expected that Republicans with the know how would intervene before the situation was dire.
Neil deGrasse Tyson on Science Literacy (Part Two) | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com [From the Transcript]
Yeah, I realize that hanging a lot with us you already figured out a long time ago how off base a lot of what Republicans are pushing is nowadays.
Cite that most of the people ignoring the stay at home orders are Republicans, or Trump supporters? The ones on TV demonstrating probably are, but those aren’t the bulk of the people out and about.
You know what a good pandemic really needs? Lots of partisanship. That way, positions can be hardened, people can be even more stressed, and we’ll all be sure to behave as irrationally as possible.
Go team.
To add to what Telemark said, if Republicans in rural areas go out and about, that’s one thing. If anyone with the virus (Republican or not) goes about in an urban area, they can potentially infect 100x more people than they could in a rural area. In other words, urban cities with 70-90% Democratic populaces have the most to fear.
This thread reminds me of people who were gleeful over Hurricane Harvey hitting Texas and Florida three years ago (“those are Trump states!”), not realizing that the hardest-hit places were Democratic urban centers like Houston and Miami.
I live in New York so the contrast is pretty clearcut. We have Andrew Coumo telling everyone they should stay home and we have Donald Trump telling people it’s okay to go out (although I’ll concede that what Trump says can change wildly from day to day).
So when I see people hanging out in a crowd in a public place without masks, I know that while they may not be a Trump supporter they’re a Trump follower.
I’m not even sure they’ll bear an equal share of the burden. Black people, for example, mostly don’t support Trump but they’re getting hit hard:
What can we do to stop the partisanship? We tried impeaching Trump and the other Republicans refused.
Yes, if only there would have been a way to spirit away all the Democrats from those states, then everyone here could have had a big laugh watching Republicans drown. The fact that Democrats were hurt too was clearly the only moral problem with popping popcorn to watch a state be ravaged.
If Republicans are currently more likely than Democrats to demand an end to the lockdown, the obvious reason is that more of them tend to live in less populated areas where the risk is lower and the visible damage from the virus is harder to see, but the economic damage from the lockdown is obvious and growing.
Obviously you have a cite for this and aren’t just making it up.
this poll says way more republicans than dems are worried things are moving too slowly to open things up.
That doesn’t follow. If you go to any outdoor recreation location in MA where I live you’ll see dozens and dozens of cars parked and people milling about walking dogs and enjoying the sunshine and completely avoiding proper social distancing. And the bumper stickers on those cars are for Bernie, Warren, and COEXIST. People everywhere are people, and many of every political stripe get tired of being cooped up.
I don’t think they are are following Trump’s ideas of social distancing, but they don’t think it applies to them or they simply don’t care.
My mother recently said that wanting to go out and socialize before we have control of the situation is like wanting to take off your parachute because land is in sight, and I told her it is more like someone flipping out and trying to open the airplane door while in flight.
My BIL soaks up way too much Fox shit but he’s had to stay home since his bar closed and no others are open nearby. The nearest (not his type) tried staying open to serve biker clientele. Here comes sheriff, with padlocks. Bye-bye liquor license and business.
I doubt those bikers were Bernie Bros.
My (R) rural redneck county is loaded with Trimpist retirees. Even they mostly wear masks and keep distance. Morons congregating aren’t necessarily GOPs, just morons.
I saw a meme regarding Michigan and the protests that said " how ironic that men are getting upset about a woman telling them what they can do with their bodies."
Some of them might just be folks listening to the CDC. There’s a reason they haven’t been recommending most of the quarantine measures. My hunch is that it’s because, having studied the question much more extensively than any of us on this board, they’ve come to the realization that extreme measures cause more problems than they solve.
Fortunately, the large majority of those polled here support strong national measures:
Granted, that’s a couple of weeks ago, and the astroturf organizations have been busily proselytizing the Fox news crowd.
It’s part fo the mind set of ‘rugged individualism’. basically you are responsible for you. You go out you get sick it’s on you. If you get someone else sick it’s on them, because they went out too. No harm no foul. The opposite is responsibility to one’s fellow man, you are responsible to those you affect to the degree you can know and act and them to you.
The problem is in this situation it’s not like all the right is only associating from those on the right, but going to spread Covid everywhere they go.
In a very ironic way what they are protesting is the very thing their actions are supporting.