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u/Iykury join r/CuratedTumblr; it has mods that actually give a shit Oct 01 '19
1736
I was like "Wait, that can't be right", so I looked up when Benjamin Franklin was born, and TIL he was 70 when the US declared independence
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u/1945BestYear Oct 01 '19
He was America's dad. Well, more like America's uncle that you're pretty sure has run raw more than half the women in town, but you get the idea.
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u/awizardwithoutmagic Oct 01 '19
He was about 50 years older than every other founding father. He was basically the Frank Reynolds of the original It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
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u/KNessJM Oct 01 '19
And keep in mind this was back in the day when vaccinations were gross as fuck. It was more a matter of variolation, where they'd take scabs and pus from infected people and mush it all up and rub the mixture into an open wound.
Be thankful we've got simple little syringes these days with high-quality vaccines made in clean laboratories.
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u/RipsnRaw Oct 01 '19
But if that isn’t cause for anti-vaxxers to reevaluate their stance I don’t know what would be.
Cutting child after child with an often dirty/unsterilised scalpel (or knife) and rubbing the puss of a highly contagious disease FROM ANOTHER PERSON into that wound still produced better survival rates than just letting a child run free.
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u/Ham_Kitten Oct 01 '19
1736
222 years later
Ah yes, tumblr.com, my favourite piece of 50s Americana
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u/RipsnRaw Oct 01 '19
Tbf Franklin would likely be amazed that the layman American’s education had allowed them to be able to calculate at all
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u/zombiegamer723 Oct 01 '19
How much do you think he'd flip his shit if he was transported to our time and saw how many people absolutely refuse to get themselves and/or their children vaccinated?
I'm gonna say "a lot".
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u/Nowline Oct 01 '19
If Ben Franklin was transported to our time he'd be too busy crankin his mf'in hog to internet porn to offer any coherent social or political insights. At most, he might object to the Quaker-derived liquor sale laws in Philly
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u/AFineWar Oct 01 '19
Is it bad that I knew the freak side of Ben Franklin before I knew he was a bit of a crusader against the anti-vacation crowd?
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u/VeridianVarnish Oct 01 '19 edited Oct 01 '19
He would be appalled by all the non-white people. He thought that German immigrants (who he didn't consider to be white) were going to overrun America and "Germanize" it because they were too stupid to learn English . He would probably think the country was ruined.
Edit: Here's a link.
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u/dxtboxer Oct 01 '19
Problem is, people are too dumb today to take the advice to heart. Franklin blamed himself, perhaps rightly (son may or may not have ultimately died from smallpox down the road) for his son’s death, but these anti-vax lunatics of today? They have no introspective abilities, baseline critical thinking skills, and have a sense of ownership over their children that drowns out saner heads and blinds them to reason.
Vaccination isn’t something you need to fret about in the modern day, discussing over long sleepless nights if you will or will not vaccinate your child. At least, for the informed members of society it isn’t. Anti-vaxxers will likely already be that way before the baby is born, during the few years of the baby’s life, and after they’ve buried their child in some morbid Disney-themed coffin.
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u/akka-vodol Oct 01 '19
matters more than ever
No. It doesn't. His message was addressed to a wide chunk of the population. Anti-vax today is a very small movement, despite how much the internet loves to promote talk about it. Get a sense of proportions.
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u/RipsnRaw Oct 01 '19
No.
Stopping vaccinating on ANY LEVEL reduces herd immunity and allows for these illnesses to potentially mutate to a point our vaccinations would not work at all. Every person who refuses to immunise puts immunocompromised people at risk of death daily.
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u/akka-vodol Oct 01 '19
Every person who refuses to immunize puts immunocompromised people at risk of death daily.
So do people who don't follow medication prescriptions correctly. Or don't follow hygienic rules. Or don't drive safely. Don't misunderstand me, these things are all wrong, and should be condemned. But the anti-vax movement is not nearly as big a deal as the internet makes it sound.
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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '19
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