[extropy-chat] Rights and Moral Indignation

[Lee Corbin]

Andrew writes

> On Dec 12, 2006, at 11:03 PM, Lee Corbin wrote:
>
>> Could be [that] twice
>> as many totally nutty and lawless things like that
>> happened in 1906, and hardly anyone noticed.
>> It certainly would not have been national news.
> 
> In the olden days, they called such mayhem "disasters", even
> when on a far grander scale.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

Thanks for that.  Very interesting. To me, the main difference
is that people then had much less of a "social engineering"
mindset than now.  The decades of socialism since 1927 have
encouraged us, falsely, to assume that more laws or more
programs of some kind can make such incidents rarer (which
is *possible*, but not likely, I think).

That is, were an identical event to occur today, there would
be no end of ongoing responses, falling into two rough categories:
(1) what evil thing does this imply about our whole society that
such a thing could transpire?  and (2) what new laws and
new expensive safeguards can be enacted or developed
to try to forestall another Bath School?

(It would be refered to as a noun-type, "Bath School", much the
way that the phrase "another Columbine" now parses in English
easily.)

Still, I have a feeling that I've not fully understood the implications
of it being semantically a "disaster" to the people living then,
Yes, it *does* make it sound like something natural that simply
occurs, like an earthquake or a hurricane.  Is that all?

Lee