One last time. I know it will not make one tiny bit of difference, but I’ll do it any way.
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And it simply amazes me that anyone can try to put the responsiblility on people who a)do not have all the facts and b)are acting in no way irresponsibly.
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My whole arguement rests on the fact that there was nothing the fans could have done with the knowledge they had to prevent this from happening. Which “middle ground” are you speaking of?
I was just pointing out the stupidity of your stance. And since this is the Pit, there is no reason why you should not attack me. As there is no reason why I shouldn’t do the same to you.
You are wrong. And since you are bringing it up, you were wrong in the Kwaanza thread also. You seem to be wrong most of the time and have a hard time when people prove you are wrong. I am “intellectually dishonest”? Because I have the unmittigated gall to see through your bullshit, paper-thin arguements? I would consider it an honor that a debator whose only goal is to prove himself right at the expense of civil discourse refused to debate with me.
First off, I never said the crowd was mostly to blame. I was simply objecting to the “the crowd is totally innocent” crap I was hearing. Second, The line about the British needing to learn to stand in line was not meant to be taken to mean that the British are the only ones with this problem. It was in response to the stuff I was hearing to the effect of “that’s just the way we British do it”–which seems to me to say that you don’t think it is WRONG. When we have rioting here in the US, we typically think of that as a bad thing. We don’t defend pushing and shoving as “traditional” and try to pass it off as “ok”
I don’t care to argue whether or not this is the central point, The Ryan, because I don’t think that it was. Why don’t you try addressing it and maybe you will realize its importance. Or perhaps not. In any case, if you are arguing about the blame of the crowd, whether or not the crowd behaved in a normal manner is not a bizzare point.
It looks to me like this thread concerns the fact that the DVD was implying that the tragedy was caused by violence.
I hope this helps.
Let me know if you ever need the obvious explained to you again.
Opal,
Whether or not you ( or I ) believe that the behavior of the fans was acceptable is unimportant. It was the accepted behavior, the officials in charge of safety knew it was the accepted behavior, and the consequences of ignoring the potential for danger were predictable. Indeed they were predicted in that earlier report that Biffer Spice mentioned back on the first page.
In addition, beginning your assertion with, “When we have rioting here in the US,” is begging the question.
If violence is the norm, it is still violence. Reading this thread, it is clear that everyone except for The Ryan and Opal do not seem to understand this. Had everyone simply shuffled into this place without pushing, and refused to go any farther when they encountered resistance, this would not have happened. The police WERE irresponsible, and quite probably should shoulder 90% of the blame. But to absolve the people who actually DID the pushing based on the fact that it’s “the norm” is just wrong.
You’re kidding in that first sentence, right? Gangs in LA consider shooting rivals the “accepted behavior.” It’s still violence. This doesn’t change the fact that the police WERE negligent. But that doesn’t mean that nobody else was comitting violence.
Our British friends are obviously too stupid to figure out what is appropriate conduct in public. Let’s all shut up and wait for them to get their personal Darwin Awards.
If you wish to equate harmless pushing with violence then let he who has never indulged in a playfull shove cast the first stone. It certainly isn’t comparable with the intent to harm or kill associated with soccer hooliganism or gladatorial combat.
Acceptable to the gangs, yes. If I am reading the Brits correctly, the behavior of the fans was considered acceptable to everyone, even the police.
dropzone,
In order to lessen the perception that the Us vs Them in this thread is strictly along national lines, let me share my doubt that I’m the only Yank in this thread that thinks you are acting like a bloody fool. Nor am I alone in not judging English society.
Also, pay attention. They fixed the problem so no more deaths should occur. The shutting up would be nice, though. I think I’ll take your advice on that; I hope you’ll do the same.
is a valid argument. And it isn’t that it doesn’t mesh with my “political philosophy”, it’s that it doesn’t mesh with what I know to be manifestly true. If someone were to try to convince me that objects fall upwards in a certain town, I’d expect better evidence than “well, all the sociologists [no one in particular mentioned] agree that it does so”.
Certainly sounds like “the fans weren’t to blame” to me.
Because it encourages people to act in an irresponsible manner.
No.
kabbes
Which one is it? Is it that the link is offensive, or is it that the behavior was normal? You seem to be confusing “normal” with “justified”. They are not the same.
I suppose this is “nitpicking”, but that is a sentence fragment. I wouldn’t mention it, except that it is hard to disagree with what you’re saying if I don’t know what it is that you’re saying.
So in other words the documentary was saying that this sort of behavior is normal? Isn’t that what you said the purpose of this thread is (to establish that this behavior was normal)? So is the purpose of this thread to establish that the documentary was accurate?
You are didn’t have a problem with me until I disagreed with you. Do you see any implications of this fact?
Step one: declare some ridiculous claim to be a fact with no substantial evidence.
Step two: complain that one’s opponent is ignoring “facts”.
nikjohns:
First you say I’m arrogant, then you complain because I have not accepted your word as Gospel Truth?
Biggirl:
No one ever has all the facts. That doesn’t excuse them.
Pushing people is irresponsible.
Well then, your whole argument rests on ignoring the fact that they could have stopped pushing.
That both the police and the fans bear some responsibility for what happened.
No, you were pointing out the stupidity of something that looks sort of like my stance, but isn’t my stance.
No, I don’t have a problem with people proving that I’m wrong. What I have a problem with is people saying that since their opinion differs from mine, they have proven me wrong. What I have a problem with is people falsifying quotes to supports their “arguments”. What I have a problem with is people who seem to think that the motto of this site is “Willfully misrepresenting other people since 1973”.
No, because you create bullshit, paper-thin arguments, and then try to pass them of as mine.
2sense:
I see no reason to address the point that this behavior was normal. If what you meant to say that I should address the point that since it is normal, it is okay, then you should say that. While you have implied something of that nature, I can’t recall you making the argument explicit, and it is hard to address a point that has simply been implied.
Outside of childhood, I can’t recall giving a playful shove.
If I did shove someone, and someone got hurt as a result, I wouldn’t claim to have no responsibility.
Playful shoves assume that the other person will not mind. In the soccer fan case, it should be obvious to anyone with any intelligence at all that if the person in front of you is not moving, he doesn’t want to move. By pushing him, you are forcing him to move, when that is manifestly against his will. Using physical force to compel another person to follow your will = violence.
That depends on what you mean by “comparable”. If you mean “on the same order of magnitude”, no they’re not comparable. If you mean “having similarities that can be explored”, then they are comparable.
And you, of course, know more than people who’ve spent their entire adult lives studying this.
If someone were to point out that experts in a particular field agreed on something, I’d expect a better counterargument than “well, I know they’re wrong.”
Certainly sounds like “the fans weren’t to blame” to me.
[/QUOTE]
Do you understand the difference between mentioning something briefly in an OP and starting a thread to argue it?
That would be a “no”, then. Jesus! I’ve seen before that you have a very poor understanding of constitutional law, but this is incredible! If everything that encouraged people to act irresponsibly was illegal …
… anyway, do a little reading, and you’ll find that it’s illegal because you can’t separate the speech from the action which would result from it - and the reason you can’t separate the two is because in situations such as that, people lose their ability to exercise free will and act as individuals. The crowd dynamic takes over and a panic is an inevitable result.
What you know to be true and what is actually true are to very different things. By all means, believe in anything you want, but you cannot dismiss evidence because it contradicts your beliefs. Accept that you could possibly be wrong about somethings.
Feel free to contact me the next time you are in Dublin, and I will bring you to a game in Croke Park, join the queue for Hill 16 and see how far your free will will carry you.
Do you not see here that we are talking about reasonable consequence? If you have done something all of your life and no harm has come of it, then it is not reasonable to expect that when you do it for the 1784th time, 96 deaths will result.
And we are not talking here about people charging into crowds. We are talking about a shuffling forward under the direct supervision of the police! Unfortunately the tightness of the crowd combined with the accepted practice of gently pushing into the person in front led in this case to disaster. As I said before, it was the cumulation of force centering on a bottleneck that caused such a problem.
Maybe some of you are under the misapprehension that there were queues to get into the stadium. That wasn’t how it worked. There was a mass of people all trying to get into a few small tunnels. Anybody ever tried to get onto a crowded train? Like that only multiplied by 1000.
Who do you think the families of the dead blame? I can assure you that it is not the fans.
I suggest you try to get hold of Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby (the same guy who wrote High Fidelity). It is a true life diary-style novel about obsession and in particular his obsession with football. It is well worth a read (one of the finest books I’ve read and a book that spawned a huge cultural change in this country).
In Fever Pitch, Hornby notes that for years prior to Hillsborough, he was in crowds waiting to get into football matches in which he felt pressured and a loss of control. However it always happened within yards of a mounted police presence. He trusted that with the police there, surely everything must be OK. Hillsborough hit a lot of people hard because they realised that the whole time the authorities had just been gambling on everything going right. The wrong combination of police ineptitude and location could have happened to anyone at any time - we really were living on borrowed time.
It’s this feeling that it could have been any of us that makes us feel that you can’t blame the crowd that day - to do so just seems unfair. They were the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. To say that they could have been more restrained maybe is to miss the point - why should they have been more restrained when there had never before been this consequence of their actions? Are we going to insist on a 1 yard exclusion zone around every person? At what point do previously accepted actions become unacceptable?
Those of you blaming the fans are in essence saying that they should have suddenly woken up from 50 years of normal practice at matches and realised that they had to do things differently. That is just not reasonable.
Have I done any better at explaining myself this time? (No sentence fragments TR?)
I think we’re fighting a losing battle, kabbes. I think these folks are still imagining that British crowds of people (especially football fans) trying to get into a space are somehow more “violent” than American crowds of people trying to get into a space. As someone who’s spent many a time trying to get through a football crowd in Britain and many a time trying to get through rush hour traffic at subway stations in America, I can vouch for the fact that the underlying situations aren’t that different.
Actually, not really, although the conclusionless back and forth in this thread has annoyed me enough to write off the entire British Commonwealth as a load of lunatics. ( so you don’t take me too seriously) However, we don’t usually kill more than one commuter or sports fan at a time by crushing them. Shooting them has always proven much more efficient. ( :eek: so you know I’m making a sarcastic remark about America’s love of gun violence)
Fantastic posts, ruadh. Count me as another Yank who, along with 2sense, groks your argument perfectly well.
And let me second that recommendation of Fever Pitch. Not only is it a wonderfully written book about being a sports fan, but it definitely lends some perspective to the English football culture (and the logistics thereof) that most of my fellow Americans seem to be sorely lacking.
But if this site is to be believed, crushing accidents of the kind that happened at Hillsborough are not uncommon in the USA, but they tend to take place at concerts rather than at sporting events, the latter, as I understand it, being pretty much all-seater events over there.
Quite so. And I mentioned earlier my shock at hearing an ad for a concert here with “festival seating.” People never learn, wherever they live. Or should I say they don’t learn permanently? Fifteen years ago Cincinatti was fresh enough in people’s minds to not let them get away with it. (Football fans have Hillsborough as a shorthand for this sort of tragedy, rock fans have Cincinatti and, now, Roskilde.) When will a feeling of tradition and an attempt at economical seating bring back the pens is probably a better question than if they will be brought back.
So, what have we concluded? May I take a stab at it in order to show that we are mostly in agreement, have been for several days, and are not likely to EVER come to complete agreement?
Hillsborough was a tragedy that was not caused by violent intent on the part of anybody and, therefore, should not have been used in the original documentary on violence in sport and, even though it had been used when it was originally broadcast, should have been removed before the documentary was added to the Gladiator DVD.
The actions and inactions of the organizers and police were the primary causes of the Hillsborough tragedy.
Crowds behave in a generally predictable manner, at least to the extent that, if you were not injured the last X number of times you did something, you can predict that you will not be injured the next time. As potentially dangerous as the pens may appear to those unfamiliar with them, there was no history of mass injury to spectators, and only occasional slight injuries, so spectators that day had no expectations of injury and certainly no reason to expect to be killed. However, a combination of unusual factors that day resulted in the tragedy and those factors have been addressed by the authorities to prevent its recurrence.
People like Opalcat and I, regardless of our national origins, cannot fathom (pun, of course, intended) the appeal of bunching together so tightly that breathing is sometimes a problem and people need to sometimes be handed across the crowd to get them to safety at any event, especially sports, despite our socialist credentials, to the degree that we think anybody who thinks that’s fun is nuts. However, we realize that we cannot convince you otherwise, nor can you convince us. I think that’s as close to reconcilliation as we are going to get.
Just a quick crack at trying to lay to rest another misconception that seems to have arisen………
Although the emphasis in this thread has been (necessarily) on the UK - and English soccer culture in particular – watching soccer in this way isn’t a UK phenomenon. The whole world watches soccer in the way described above…Spain, Italy, Germany, France, South America, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Asia….the entire world to my knowledge.
As regards The Ryan, this from his first post to this thread:
We are all here to fight ignorance but the cost of being relentlessly offended by someone who thinks they have a grasp on a subject but who is, actually, simply too arrogant to acknowledge their own ignorance on that subject, is not a little wearing.
It’s difficult to think someone could be so deliberately obtuse for so long. I personally believe, without wishing to be offensive, he’s demonstrated enough for me to think he has some personal problems.
so you don’t take me too seriously) However, we don’t usually kill more than one commuter or sports fan at a time by crushing them. Shooting them has always proven much more efficient. ( :eek: so you know I’m making a sarcastic remark about America’s love of gun violence)