Originally published at: Stampede in Israel during religious festival killed at least 45 people | Boing Boing
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Slayer was right, “God Hates Us All.”
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Not that I already didn’t have numerous reasons to avoid large gatherings of religious fundies. The irresponsible, selfish, and/or delusional leaders of conservative sects seem determined to ensure that a certain portion of their marks hand over their “tickets to heaven” in an untimely and gruesome fashion.
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Thank God that no more people died… … …
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yes indeed. and if one was to cover this story beyond this sad event there will certainly be devout assurances from the associated priests that any noble souls who died in this disastrously mismanaged exhibition will be jet-propelled to paradise. (proving once-again priesthood’s prime function is to preserve the priesthood) -sigh-
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ISWYDT.
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What’s weird about human psychology is: probably many more than 45 ultra-religious died due to lack of adherence to mask-wearing and distancing, but no commemoration, no national tragedy.
Tragedy aside, this event had so many thousands of people packed tightly together there might be ancillary Covid deaths from the event itself, which will also go unnoted.
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Acute pain tends to draw our attention more, even if pain in general miserable. Building safety codes, like public health protocols, are needless annoyances to those who believe some variety of Invisible Bearded Sky Man™ is the only protection they need.
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Crowd control failures at religious festivals are a long running problem. The hajj has had numerous stampedes and crushes. There have been scientific papers on the physics of mosh pits that suggest there is a critical number of people per square meter that can precipitate this sort of problem and suggest ways to alleviate the pressure.
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I’ve been saying it for years - organised religion is responsible for more evil than almost anything else in the history of mankind.
And this bit of organised religion fuckwittery seems about as disorganised as it could be.
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Ironically, if this had happened a few thousand years ago, it would have been retold in the Old Testament/Tanakh, wrapped in a story of God’s wrath.
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Maybe I’m being pedantic, but Jews (full disclosure, I am one) don’t have priests - not since the temple was destroyed.
That said, the behavior of certain Haredi (ultra-orthodox) groups is pretty appalling recently.
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Generic statement is just as true.
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Thanks. That mosh pit simulator linked to from the The Physics of Moshpits (that you shared) is quite interesting. It seems it would take only a few tweaks to create a simulator with hard walls and flow to model the tragedy at Mount Meron.
There are stadium architects who would be very interested in that simulator.
I had to study some of Britain’s stadium disasters (Hillsborough, Valley Parade, Ibrox 1971) when I worked at Carlisle United as a steward, and it was depressing how quickly things became tragic because of bad decision making and poorly designed entry and exit points.
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I guess there was a reason the capacity was limited to 10,000. (Over 100,000 people were there)
And already the discourse is “Let us grieve in peace. We’ll clear this up later”. The Ultra-orthodox fundamentalist community in Israel gets away with all kinds of crap by pulling the holier than thou card. Beyond the question of why was this allowed at all during a pandemic, every one of the attendees chose to attend. Yet comments are focused on who allowed too many people to be there.
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