If you wondered how things got quite so bad in Florida, this short video on the BBC website gives a fascinating insight in the bizarre mindset of the average Floridian.
Actually, I don't know just how prevalent this kind of thinking is in Florida, or in other states for that matter. Maybe these are not average Floridians, and I shouldn't tar the whole state with the same brush. But it is clearly prevalent enough to create the what is probably the worst pandemic situation in the world at the moment.
It seems to be based on a kind of obsession with what the alt-right perceives as "freedom", in a very broad and unstructured sense, i.e. freedom to do what you want with no sense of restraining responsibility to the wider world. I'm not sure this is quite what the Founding Fathers had in mind 200-odd years ago; this is kind of a Frankenstein monster of their vision of a Land of the Free.
But this kind of attitude is not based on any philosophy or political theory - it is just a free-form, knee-jerk response to what they see as oppression and constraint, and what most other people see as commonsense regulation. Rational argument and debate has no effect on this kind of attitude, other than to raise anger and violence levels, and I don't really see any solution to it other than mass arrests or just waiting for it to play itself out - presumably these people will eventually contract the virus, although Fate is not always so logical in its dealings.
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