Gladiator DVD mocks deaths of 96 innocent people. Please read

The BBQ Pit
141

**

Oh really? Is it everyone you hold to this impossible standard or just British soccer fans?

**

Not in this context. Crowding into the stadium was the norm.

**

Not without the knowledge that there was a reason to. Pushing into the stadium was the norm. The crowd was acting normally.

**
According to The Ryan, who believes people should act on facts that they know nothing about.

**
I think I did a decent job of spoofing your rhetoric. Of course you disagree.

**
Falsifying quotes. Where? When? What the hell are you talking about?

**
No need to do that, since you believe everyone is responsible for things they know nothing about.

142

I’ve spent my entire life studying people, too. And I’ve seen someone lose their free will just because there are a bunch of other people nearby.

Absolutely no evidence has been presented for this claim that experts agree on this.

Since not everything that encourages people to act irresponsibily is illegal, that’s not the reason for anything being illegal?

Cite?

143

Well, if someone ever produces real evidence, I’ll keep that in mind.

What part of “free will != omnipotence” did you not follow?

No, they’re just highly suggesting it and piling on anyone that says that the crowd wasn’t 100% innocent.

144

No, I think that both nationalities are overly violent. Are you done with the ad hominem attacks?

145

You take a quote from the very first page out of context, and use it to support the claim that I have been “deliberately obtuse for so long”? My statement followed Biffer Spice’s complete misrepresentation of someone else’s position, and was meant to be a comment on that misrepresentation, not on the situation. If you were unable to figure that out, the time to have brought it up would have been many days ago.

146

I assume you left out a word there, but in any case, you’ve once again completely missed the point. “A bunch of other people nearby” is not the same as “a sardine-packed crowd”.

You didn’t ask for evidence. You didn’t dispute that it existed, or question the manner in which it was obtained or the credentials of the people who obtained it. Instead you stated right from the start that you would dismiss any such evidence sight unseen because you didn’t like the conclusion it reached. So don’t start whining now that the evidence hasn’t been presented.

Give me one example of something that’s illegal in the States because it encourages irresponsible behavior. It’s certainly not the reason in this case.

Cite? **
[/QUOTE]

See, for example, Brandenburg v. Ohio, Hess v. Indiana, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, etc etc. All make it clear that speech which might influence people to act violently can be banned if the speech and action are so closely brigaded that the one almost necessarily leads to the other. Implicit in this is the recognition that people do, at times, act instinctively and not individually.

I haven’t even started on the ad hominem attacks yet, but believe me, you’re tempting me.

147

Two things The Ryan:

Firstly, If people can be so bothered to check the context they can do so themselves by considering posts 10 (Biffer Spice), 16 (Kvallulf) and 25 (The Ryan) to this thread. I stand by my view.

Second, there is no prospect whatsoever of you suckering me into feeding your self-induced and self-perpetuating ignorance by responding to your posting style.

148

The Ryan - at the end of the day, the most important lesson in tragedies of this kind are those teaching us how to avoid such events reoccurring. To this end it is important to recognise that Hillsborough wasn’t caused by a few badly behaved individuals, but rather was a tragedy that had been waiting to happen for years, just as soon as the wrong combination of events occurred. Fortunately football does appear to have learned this lesson. Attitudes such as yours, however, very nearly led to the whole incident being written off as a one-off, whose blame could be placed at the door of those who suffered. This, needless to say, really would have been disastrous. I think that this is why those of us who were close to the event are so vociferous in trying to explain the cause.

However I think that we have now done so to my satisfication at least.

I’d just like to say kudos to dropzone for being willing to come to some kind of conclusion on this - I think that his summary is very good and is as fair as we are going to get without everybody involved being exposed to a lifetime of the appropriate culture. Your willingness to understand is inspiring.

Thanks to Biggirl, Gadarene and 2sense (did I miss anybody?) too for showing that you don’t actually have to be immersed in that culture to understand what its effects can be.

And thanks also to my fellow British and Irish posters for being more eloquent than me, especially at the beginning of this thread. I don’t think that my blind rage would have been very convincing in the long run.

pan

149

This is for The Ryan please read this.

http://www.contrast.org/hillsborough/site/history/history-html.htm

Whilst I would agree that this site is campaigning on the behalf of the families of the fans killed that day you should note the following quote,

To be seen at the top of the following,

http://www.contrast.org/hillsborough/site/history/history-html.htm

You are trying to pass responsibility onto the fans whereas an official enquiry chaired by a very senior Judge lays the real responsibility fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the police. I think that I would rather accept the world of such a thorough investigation by a methodical and highly respected and able High Court official than make snap judgements based on the impression gained from a few posts on a message board.
If you feel better qualified than such folk then you really should reasses what makes you think that way or maybe you could at least give the rest of us a more detailed analysis of how you came to your conclusion - maybe even a resume of your authority in such a matter would be helpful.

There was a thread on this board some time ago entitled ‘What did he die of ?’ which gave a set of cicumstances in which an individual was found dead partway up a mountain.

Many posters speculated but there were many factors from altitude to gravity to the geological build-up of the mountains.

What that poster was trying to illustrate was that history is a continuum and that events lead into each other, the abscence of just one of which could have seen a differant outcome.

Here you say that the fans bear some if not much of the responsability but you could just as easily factor in the design of the ground, the history of the game and many other things but the immediate cause still remains, the police did not delay the game when asked to do so, the police either were not monitoring what was happening on the CCTV system or did not care - even when it was blindingly obvious, the police did not direct arriving fans away from sectors 3 and 4 to sector 1 and 2 when they had previously used this method during other games with large crowds, the police did allow even greater access to the fatal areas when it was already clear that there was a serious problem.

The attitude of the police toward the public in any large gathering in general was a culture repression(and the many trials exonerating accused persons in crowd gatherings plus condemnation of police by the judiciary bears this out) partly contributed to their indifferance to the pleas for assistance by the public on that day.

As for the fans, they had no information about any problem they trusted the police to direct them to safe areas and far from being a threat there was more of a carnival atmosphere that day.

The fans behaved exactly as they had done for tens of thousands of games over the last 70 to 80 years, indeed the record attendencies for most soccer clubs were far higher, even at Hillsborough, than the crowd that day and occurred mostly in the thirties - yet despite all the pushing there was no inkling that a disaster of this scale could happen.

The final piece in the jigsaw of tragedy was provided by the police who had the experience to know better and the modern equipment to monitor and prevent it.

The use of images from the Hillsborough tragedy do not belong in an analysis of deliberate and organised violence such as gladitiorial combat but rather in articles about the fallability of systems, individuals and circumstances that come together with such terrible consequencies.

Even though you argue your corner well, you are wrong.

150

There have been British posting on this side of the issue
and Irish people
and Yanks
but I haven’t seen a single Commonwealth poster!

If you’re insinuating the Irish fall into that category you better be ready for a much nastier pit thread :smiley:

151

And this “wrong combination of events” was the persistent and traditional violence of the fans that had, until this game, been held in check by the police. When that police was VERY negligent, the fans’ violence (which had been accepted as traditional) caused the deaths of 96 people. Again, the police were negligent. The fans were doing nothing out of the ordinary. But they were still being violent.

152

Flymaster

You still do not get it do you ?

The OP was about the appropriateness of using an image of the deaths at Hillsborough in the context of deliberate and organised combat violence when it was an unintentetional and tragic event resulting largely from the incompetance of police officers.

Have you never ever been in a crowd that is pushing to get to some location, wether its the bar in a crowded nightclub or the seasonal sales in a store.

Merely because there is a physical element to the crowding that does not mean to say that there was any greater than usual risk of harm than on any other similar occasion.

153

From a Commonwealth poster then. If you are in a line and it is not moving in front of you then stop moving forward.
Others have said that people were shuffling forward and didn’t know that there was an issue up ahead as they couldn’t see it. So what. They could see the people in front of them. There was a line of people along the fence who couldn’t go any further forward. There were people behind them who could see that the fence blocked those in front. So, they should stop moving. And there were people behind them who saw that these people had also stopped. At a point in time someone made the decision to ignore the fact that the people in front of them stopped moving and continued to push forward. They are the ones who are at least partially at fault for what happened. That you condone their actions as being “normal” doesn’t change the fact that it was wrong.

But blame the police if it makes you happy. Being the supermen that they are they should be perfect at everything they do, right?

[quote]
originally posted by Kabbes
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.

[quote]

Read this quote again. If the authorities knew that you were living on borrowed time and did nothing about it then they were also at fault. Notice a “wrong combination of police ineptitude”? You all have assumed that the police are infallible. They are not. When they are not acting as police they are probably attending the same games you all are. While they should shoulder a portion of the blame for being incompetent in this instance I don’t see how you can say they are solely responsible. Or, do you blame the cops for your car radio being stolen, too? After all part of their job is to protect you and your property from criminals.
I think a far more important question is why anyone in their right mind would go and watch, IMHO, what is probably one of the most boring games on the planet?
Probably another pit thread entirely.

154

ruadh,

Well I count as a Commonwealth poster, as does London_Calling and Biffer Spice, since Britain is a member of the Commonwealth. I don’t think there’s any such thing as the “British Commonwealth”, though.

Flymaster (and The Ryan),

They were behaving in precisely the same way as a group of people pushing their way onto a crowded subway train or bus. The only difference is that the Hillsborough crowd was directed to do so by the police, and was proceeding down a poorly-lit, sloping tunel. If you consider that to be “violent”, then yes, the crowd was “violent”. But by that definition, anything action which brings you into physical contact with another human being constitutes “violence” and most people who live in densely-populated urban areas engage in violence several times a day.

There is not, and has never been, any substantiated suggestion that the crowd was violent by any normal definition of the word. Even Ch Supt Duckenfield, who was tried for the manslaughter of those who died, described it as “a happy crowd”. casdave has posted a link to a site than contains the testimony of a number of eye-witnesses. None of them describes the crowd as being violent, disorderly or anything similar.

This leaves us with three possibilities:

  1. Flymaster and The Ryan are right and the people who were there at the time and those who participated in the official inquiries and trials are wrong.

OR:

  1. The people who were there at the time and who participated in the official inquiries and various trials are right and Flymaster and The Ryan are wrong.

OR:

  1. Flymaster and The Ryan have some special insight into the meaning of the word “violent” which is not shared by the majority of the other posters to this thread, or indeed the majority of first-language English speakers (including the compilers of the OED) and “violent”, of conduct, in fact means “tending to bring oneself into physical contact with others.”
155

OR:

  1. Those people who ran the official inquiries are the same “authorities” who knew that there was a danger the way the stadiums were setup and used the police to deflect public wrath from their own lack of initiative in fixing the problem.
156

The OP was, yes. And, while I’m not exactly outraged by this use of the clip, I concede that there are many better examples of crowd violence, and that this clip would not have been my first choice.

However, the crushers have been portrayed in this thread as totally innocent. Some posters have put 100% of the blame on the police. I am more than willing to place 90%, or perhaps 95% of the blame on the police. This isn’t a problem. The police did not do their jobs. But, the police would not have had to have done their jobs if it were not for the irresponsible tradition of pushing and squeezing for better viewing positions. It was this violence, not the negligence of the police, that caused the tragedy. The negligence of the police merely allowed this cause of the tragedy to build to the point that it became a tragedy.

There certainly is risk. I’ve been in many such crowds, most notably waiting in line to get into clubs and at athletic events. In a good deal of these I have been quite frighted by the prospect of what exactly would have happened if I had fallen in one of the waves of shoving that was started by some asshole in the back. This IS violence, and if you fail to see that, then we are just going to have to agree to disagree.

157

Uzi,

Simply not true, in this case. But the fact that you suggested it is evidence of your ignorance and of your failure to read (or understand) the posts in this thread.

And in any event, it’s simply a variation on my point 2, which is that a bunch of know-nothing bozos who had never even heard of the Hillsborough disaster till Biffer Spice started this thread are right, and everybody else is wrong.

158

TomH, you are sooooooo pedantic sometimes. You know what I meant :slight_smile:

I’ll ignore Uzi’s comments, since (a) you did a great job with them anyway and (b) I am trying not to rise to the bait of people who can’t reply to a thread even tangentially related to soccer without throwing in a comment about how “boring” they find the game. As if anyone else cares.

159

I suggested it based upon a reference someone else had posted. Here it is again for your reading pleasure. Read it slowly as you obviously missed it the first TWO times it was posted (and he says I have a problem with not reading and understanding). :rolleyes:

[quote]

originally posted by Kabbes *
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.**

[quote]

Who are the “authorities” that are mentioned? The police? The event organizers? Who? Little green men? If someone knew that this sort of thing was going to eventually happen and they were in a position to do something about it are they not at least somewhat responsible? .0001% perhaps? If so then the police aren’t entirely at fault. Which is the point most of us so called “ignorant” people have been trying to get across to you know it all types.

But, if you want a really good example of ignorance it is pushing people in front of you when they obviously have no where to go. It is assuming that the police are gods and can do no wrong and should be penalized for being human. It is assuming that just because I don’t agree with you and the results of a report that I don’t know what happened.

160

A nice addition to my sig, but it is as much a willingness to give up as anything. I wouldn’t go to the Second Coming of Christ if all I could afford was the pens, but that’s because of my feelings about crowds in general. They make my flesh crawl! I’ll catch the highlights on the news.