[ZeroGravitas]

Fascinating article:

> But they counter the pushback by essentially denying disease, both as an epidemiological reality and as a social reality too. Increasingly by the 1850s, you see people saying, well, yellow fever is not that big of a problem. It’s not that serious of an illness, and anybody who’s temperate and well-mannered and courageous and manly will survive. It only kills the immoral, the drunk, the unfortunate. Your cousin in Philadelphia or your niece in Sligo who thinks of New Orleans as a “necropolis,” they don’t know what they’re talking about, these northern critiques of New Orleans’s health situation are a proxy for abolitionists attacking slavery

[rnk]

Yes, this is an incredible article. Historians must weep at our idiocy. We are exactly as those New Orleans rich slave owners were then, such a terrible synchrony between yellow fever and covid. We are just the same, even though we think we are different. So similar, even to the call to be manly and not let covid keep you down.