Hmmm … real thanks to a friend for clarifying an issue … self-deprecating fat joke that ties in with an older Pit thread … subtle big-sky country boosterism … condescending sympathy for people in countries they’ve had more time and less space to fill … implied gratitude for ancestors who LEFT that accursed archipelago. I’m going with the winkie.
[Warning: No irony or sarcasm is expressed or implied in the following:]
Glad that authorities over there have gotten their act together. It would be a rotten shame if the lessons learned from this tragedy were to be forgotten—the only positive thing about the footage is that it can be used to remind people of those lessons, but the “Gladiator” DVD does not use it that way.
I wish that I could the same could be said here. I heard an ad yesterday for a concert for a popular band (can’t remember who) with general admission seating. The lesson of Cincinatti has been forgotten. At the time, even the sitcom “WKRP in Cincinatti” did a fairly sensitive program about it. The producers’ attitude was, “The show is about a rock station in Cincinatti. How could we ignore it?”
One point that has not been raised and was possibly the one final deciding factor amongst a whole host of conditions but whose abscence would likely have changed things.
The game started at the specified time but hold ups on the motorways entailing long and ongoing delays,leading to Sheffield which were, hence predictable enough to be allowed for, meant that Liverpool fans were delayed.
The match organisers did ask the police if they could delay the start of the game by half an hour but were told that this was not possible due to police staffing rotas.
By the time the delayed fans arrived the game had already started.The gates are usually closed a good ten to twenty minutes before the game starts. There was no room in some stands but faced with the liklihood of thousands of dissapointed fans locked outside the ground and fearing the consequencies of such numbers milling around the ground in the local pubs and the potential for violence these fans were allowed access.Had that half hour been available there would have been time to distribute the fans better.
There was space in other parts of the ground, one of the reasons that Hillsborough is used for major event is its large capacity, and the only thing out of the ordinary that caused the disaster was that fatal decision to keep the gates open once the game was underway.
That was a decision reached by the ground organisers on the advice of the police.
None of this is speculation, it is there in the Taylor report.
If the gate had been closed and those thousands of people were left milling around and hanging in pubs and then there was this real big riot, that certainly could have been used as an example of fan violence.
We here in the U.S. have enough examples of our own acting like idiots that we don’t need South American Soccer Hooligans to hold as an example.
Except for my town. We New Yorkers take our sports seriously enough to know the stats and make catcalls with intelligence, but not so seriously that we riot in the streets when we win (or lose).
Oh yeah, I was getting back to the OP.
I don’t think the DVD, in its original form, mocks the death of 96 innocent people. It’s good that that small image is being removed, though. It was misleading and obviously gave the wrong impression of the events on that day.
I agree – the police did not adequately provide for the crowd, and therefore do merit some of the blame. I thought I’d already made that clear. I do not, however, believe that those in the back of the crowd bear zero responsibility for their own actions. I’m not blaming the people who died. But I know that if I were in this sort of crowd (and I’ve been in large crowds before, getting into sports games and such) and I later found out that people died because I and others were pushing our way into a stadium to see a game, then I would bear some of the blame, regardless of any report that absolved me.
Even if one person at the back realises what is going on (which they won’t, because of the sheer number of people), then what do they do?
You have that many fans shouting, screaming etc. then it is impossible to pick out one voice.
Yes, like what the terms “violence” and “free will” mean.
No! What I’ve been saying all along is that if since they don’t know whether it is safe to push, they shouldn’t push. And what’s your reply to this argument? “But they didn’t know that it wasn’t safe!” Duh, that’s why they shouldn’t have pushed.
How are these mutually exclusive? Just because the police were irresponsible doesn’t mean the crowd doesn’t have any responsibility.
The last two sentences really don’t have anything to do with the first.
No, that does not follow.
Do you not understand the concept of free will? Do really think that it means that you have complete control of what happens? No, it doesn’t. I’m really getting tired of these ridiculous statements from you. You’re twisting language to suit your needs. Apparently “no violence” now means “no fighting” and “free will” means “omipotence”. When normal, honest, rational people use the term “free will”, they mean that you can choose how to react to what happens. If someone behind you pushes you, you can choose to push the person in front of you, or you can push the person in front of you back. If you choose to push the person behind you back, are you guarenteed to stop them? No. BUT THAT MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE! If you don’t understand my reasoning here, then you won’t understand what I’m saying at all. I believe that the right thing to do is the right thing to do, regardless of whether one is guaranteed of succeeding. All that matters is whether or not you decide to participate in the violence, not whether that decision is the deciding factor. In your example of the girl who died in the dentist’s office, would a perfect dentist have been guaranteed to have saved her life? Of course not! But that doesn’t excuse incompetence.
kabbes:
I don’t know nothing about the tragedy (double negative intended). I know what Biffer Spice said, and based on that Biffer Spice is wrong. It is wrong to say that people who were pushing others weren’t being violent. I don’t need a detailed account of the incident to know this.
TomH
I really don’t see why you guys think that continuously begging the question establishes anything.
nikjohns
STOP PUSHING! Is that really so hard to figure out? Just because you can’t prevent a tragedy doesn’t mean you are free to exacerbate it. Can you imagine the police officers in the Rodney King beating using that defense? “There was no way I could have overpowered those other three guys and stopped them from beating the guy, so I figured I might as well join in.”
I’m starting to see Libertarian’s exasperation at people’s reference to “society” as if it were a person. When a bunch of people can claim innocence because it was “the crowd” of which they were a part that did it, something is seriously wrong. It wasn’t “the crowd” that pushed those people to their deaths, it was human beings.
I see your logic Ryan but you fail to see that of other posters.
Crowd pushing at large gatherings, particularly at English soccer matches, is generally par for the course.
This happens still but yet the death of others is a rare event, so rare that your logic of not pushing because of what might happen is a long way outside the experience of most fans.
Since this was not a likely or usual occurrance there is absolutely no way that most fans could have even imagined the possible outcome, they had been doing similar for years.
If we were all blessed with 20/20 hindsight then of course crowd crushing is a dangerous activity, if a similar event were to happen again then I would agree that you could apportion more responsability on the fans.
Thing is history repeats itself, lessons are not learned and similar tragedies occur time after time. Things like having large numbers of people crammed into a leisure facility with inadequate access and fire breaks out.
The Cocanut Grove fire should have taught the whole world but even today similar events happen. Maybe the crowd was responsible, in your logic it is, after all it should have been obvious to them that an orderly evacuation would have allowed far greater numbers to survive,when a door will not open outwards the crowd should have stood back to allow it to be opened instead of crushing up further, they should have seen that the place was already packed and should have excercised their judgement in not going in there and when the fire broke out they should have behaved more rationally.
Those people died simply because they placed their trust in those whose job it was to ensure that the facilities and control were adequate.One does not attend a mass event with safety uppermost in ones mind you expect the organisers to carry out their job.
The DVD concerned is giving referances to a certain type of violence, that is intentional aggressive combat violence, not accidental unintentional violence which is why the image of the Hillsborough victims is so out of place and so offensive.
TR, there is a great body of work out there on the sociology of crowds. You obviously haven’t read any of it. A crowd is not just the sum of the individuals that comprise it. It most certainly is not analogous to a group of LA cops, who could easily take a step back and decide whether or not to participate.
I suspect some of the Americans here are having trouble divorcing the issue from the prejudices they already hold about “soccer hooligans”. In much the same way that some have suggested Ibrox didn’t make the impact it should have (and thus preventing Hillsborough) because what goes on at an Old Firm match in Scotland isn’t necessarily seen to be relevant to top-level football in England.
TomH, fair play to you for your polite response, and in particular your restraint in dealing with OpalCat’s “kindergarten” comment, which was quite possibly the most tasteless thing I’ve ever read on these boards.
Gah. I’m just going to make one more appeal to reason, this time using physics.
Take a pipe that is 1 square yard in cross-section. Take another that is 1 inch wide in cross-section. Connect them via a steep gradient that leads from one to the other. Run some water very very slowly into the 1 square yard pipe. Observe how quickly it runs out of the one square inch pipe.
You will convert a 1mph stream into a 1300mph stream.
Pressure will similarly be multiplied by a factor of 1300.
The analogy, I hope, is obvious. You had lots of fans suddenly let from a wide open area into a narrow tunnel. Small, tiny cumulative nudges from the back multiply themselves into a powerful force on those in the tunnel. The actions of those at the back do not need to be violent shoves and pushes for this to translate itself into an irrestible force for those in the middle.
This is entirely predictable. The police needed to prevent the build up from occurring. Once it has occurred, it is too late. The Ryan - I am 100% sure that if you had been in that crowd - that even if the crowd had the benefit of 1000 The Ryans - the outcome would have been no different.
Certainly this is what the official investigation found - that to put any blame on the fands was unreasonable.
If one person stops pushing, then the people behind will continue to push. You are then forced into the person in front of you, and have to push in order to stay on your feet. The Rodney King beating is nothing to do with this, and there are virtually no parallels between the two events.
Beg, beg, beg the question. Is that all you people can do? You’re asking me to believe that once in a crowd, people magically lose their free will. Get enough people together and poof a hive mind takes over, and all are slaves to its will. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all you have produced is a blatant appeal to authority. People can decide whether or not to actively participate, regardless of what some sociology academic says.
kabbes:
Your physical argument is utterly unconvincing, because atoms have no free will. People do.
Well I’m pretty sure that it would have been marginally different. Certainly not measurably different, but saying that one is not responsible for one’s actions because they did not make the situation measurably different makes as much sense as saying that cheating isn’t wrong as long as you don’t get caught. If I go to someplace like Washington DC and kill someone there, that murder would be lost in the statistical noise of all the other murders, just as the actions of any one person in a crowd are lost in the statistical noise of everyone else’s actions. But that does not make a person in either situation not responsible for their actions.
But suppose having a thousand of me would not have changed anything. So what? Am I the standard by which all morals are judged? While I am flattered, I must abjure this honor. If a thousand me’s had acted in the same manner as these people did, then I would be a thousand times as responsible as any one person.
Morality is not graded on a curve!
nikjohns:
First, you are changing the subject. First you say that the people in the back are not responsible, now you’re talking about the people in the middle.
Second, you are displaying quite a lack of understanding of the physics of the situation. If the only force is from the people in the back, then the acceleration will be divided by the entire mass of the crowd. Do you seriously expect me to believe that the people in the back exerted enough force to push the entire crowd into the wall? Get real! Each person naturally exerts a force equal to their weight times the coefficient of friction between them and the floor. This force points in the opposite direction of whatever net force is being applied to them. If the only non-friction force is that coming from the back, this force will quickly be dissipated by friction. The only way that this force can be transmitted to the front is if people in the middle exert a force beyod what is transmitted to them. Simply pushing enough to stay on your feet is not enough, because the force you exert to stay on your feet is more than the force that the person ahead of you needs to stay on your feet which is more than the force the person ahead of him needs to stay on his feet… etc. By the time it reaches the people at the front, the “keeping on my feet” force will be seriously diluted.
I think we should all just give in to The Ryan. It is Free Will that will save us all in a major disaster. If we just start believing that there is nothing beyond our control, then nothing will ever be scary again. We control it all with the force of our will.
I, for one, have been converted. Through The Force Of My Will I can control physics, see where I cannot and bend thousands of others to comply to what I know to be right. Even when I don’t know what what the right course of action should be.
I’d like to see The Ryan stop his whining and address the fucking point.
The behavior of the fans followed the norm* Here I am using this term in the manner of the 2nd part ( b ) of the third definition from Merriam-Webster Online: * a pattern or trait taken to be typical in the behavior of a social group, while at the same time making a reference to the 2nd definition: a principle of right action binding upon the members of a group and serving to guide, control, or regulate proper and acceptable behavior. I am alluding to the 2nd definition ( the 2nd either by listing here or on Merriam-Webster Online ) but I am not actually asserting that this definition is entirely appropriate for this situation. Use as directed. Not valid on Friday. Offer subject to change without notice. See store for details.
Biggirl, I am simply amazed that anyone can think that there is no middle ground between “no one in the crowd has any responsibility for what happened” and “everyone in the crowd was fully responsible”. The whole of your argument rests of this absolutely idiotic false dichtomy, and I’m tired of trying to explain to you how something besides these extremes can exist. If you think your childish straw man argument proves anything more than you are simply to immature to participate in a real debate, then I don’t think there’s anything I can say to explain my point of view. Between this thread and the Kwanzaa thread, I really do get the feeling that you have absolutely no intellectual honesty, and I don’t see why I should care at all about your position on any issue whatsoever.
No, that’s not the “fucking” point. Biffer Spice did not start a thread to argue that the behavior of the fans was within the norm. Biffer Spice, as far as I can figure out, started a thread to argue that the fans were without blame. It really easy to argue against someone by claiming that they have ignored some bizarre “point” that you have pulled out of thin air, but it really doesn’t prove anything except that you don’t understand the debate.
Way to dismiss several decades of research you haven’t even read, TR :rolleyes: I’m sorry but "I haven’t seen the research but it doesn’t mesh with my political philosophy " is not a valid counterargument. Read it, and then tell us what’s wrong with it.
If you read the OP, which I doubt, you’d see that he did nothing of the sort.
In short: the link drawn between the Hillsborough tragedy and thuggery in sport is offensive.
So the fact that the fans were behaving entirely normally for any crowd in any situation fucking is the fucking point. The documentary wasn’t trying to say that crowds are dangerous because collective small acts of “violence” (if you persist in calling such a pathetic thing “violence” then so be it). The documentary was saying that thuggery still happens in sport, and here is a particular example of it.
I can’t believe I defended your pigheadedness in the recent anti-Ryan threads. Your insistance on ignoring any facts counter to your worldview is astonishing.
Anybody other than The Ryan still want to argue this one?
People moving into a space where there is not enough room for them means that people already in that space are squashed. People at the back cannot see that people are getting squashed, and because of the noise (ever heard 30,000 people shouting and screaming at a football match?) cannot hear what is happening. People near the front, who can see what is happening are starting to get squashed too, and so cannot pass a message back.
This will be my last contribution to this thread, and possibly the whole dope. Simply put, you are arrogant. When we are having a debate, it is not helpful for you to dispute facts. (leaves to go to the pit thread about TR)
