I can see the fundies having a heyday with this, bastardly as that would be.
A horrific event…made even more sickening by the bigoted neanderthals on some right-wing comment boards who are cheering this tragedy with remarks like “A good start” and “Not as good as 1990, but not bad!”. Fucking disgusting!
They should hire the people at Disney Parks to set up the area to be able to move lots of people around safely.
I agree. Crowd dynamics are fairly well-understood. A lot more could be done.
religion. what an asshole.
Instead, based on what I’ve been reading today, it sounds like they hired people from Las Vegas to figure out how to suck more money out of the wealthier hajjis’ wallets, and consequently prioritized building fancy hotels and condos and shopping malls over improving safety. If those allegations are true, it’s absolutely disgusting.
It’s disgusting and also unsurprising. See e.g. prosperity ministry or televangelism or pension fraud. Preying on the convictions and/or vulnerabilities of others is a deeply human behavior which isn’t unique to religion.
Meanwhile, earlier this month: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/four-seasons-king-salman-visit-red-carpet-213324
I wonder if they had problems like this prior to the Saudi’s controlling the holy cities? Because, people have been coming to Mecca for the Hajj for centuries, but I’d guess it’s only in the modern era when the concentration of people is so high and with all the work they’ve been doing to the Grand Mosque…?
I don’t know about “prior to the Saudis”, but this is interesting:
They only list one pre-Saudi disaster, a cholera outbreak in 1905…
I bet far more people have the $$$ and time to make the pilgrimage now a days, then back before the 20th century. Higher numbers means more possibilities of problems like this.
But my oh my, thousands have died under Saudi control. That wiki thread had me saying “oh my fsm” over and over.
This has less to do with religion than with poor crowd control. The same thing could happen at an Olympic venue or Amusement Park if there wasn’t enough consideration given to safety.
Hit that wiki link above and let me know if you still think it’s equivalent to Olympic or amusement park danger.
I’m staggered at the numbers.
ETA - I guess you didn’t quite say that. Still, wow.
Only the people from Disney who are Muslims. Otherwise they are not allowed at Mecca.
And male.
They could probably do their jobs off site as far as people flow etc.
Only good thing that comes out of this tragedy is that it puts a chink in the public image of the Sauds as “Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques”.
I think it likely is more about crowd control… Like I said, I suspect that as more people have the means to take the Hajj, more people are going to show up every year, and it’s going to be harder to deal with the overwhelming numbers. That’s why the numbers are so staggering because there are so many people coming every year, and it all has to be done within a particular week, in a particular order, etc. You can’t really redirect people to different places, because they have to be in certain places at certain times, in a certain order.
As for other issues such as this, there was this (sorry for the Fox News link):
Or there are events like Altamont or the 199-whatever year it was Woodstock - crowd control was the issue there, too.
Actually, there is some book that argues that rock concerts are essentially modern day Dionysian (did I spell that right) events…
