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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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It's always funny just what cross-section of history people know. Like, to me, the Bhopal Disaster is just a thing that happened. I don't know when I learned about it, I can't remember a time I didn't know about it. I could probably give a vaguely accurate summary of it without even checking Wikipedia. I don't understand how anyone could not know about it.

Never heard of the Ogaden War, though.

And I know I've heard the name Gary Condit before, but I don't remember anything about Chandra Levy.

Meanwhile, I bet there's some historical moment that you have deep knowledge about and that I have literally never even heard of.

I can thank the Yes Men for teaching me about the Bhopal disaster.

Torso murders!

Most of the things listed above may have vanished from the public consciousness, but they still have enormous impact within their own particular niche communities. You aren't a good chemical plant worker unless Bhopal is in the back of your mind every time you get the urge to neglect your daily scrubber monitoring paperwork. I suspect the same is true for congressmen with mistresses, African statesmen, and insanity defense lawyers with respect to their relevant now-forgotten events

Similarly, programmers tend to know about Therac-25.

Seconding Bhopal: I have to remind myself that it's not common knowledge outside of industrial safety or PlainlyDifficult followers, despite being the largest industrial disaster of the century by at least one and possibly two orders of magnitude.

((But then again, there's a lot of people who don't remember much about the Beruit explosion, and it rhymed with a couple other (distant) followers for big industrial accidents.))

Focusing too much on individual incidents can be tricky, though. Colgan Air 3407 has had a massive aviation impact and is part of the reason the commercial pilot shortage got so sharp so fast, but the reason it did and similar or larger incidents didn't. Is that because the action came about as a result of the multiple incidents all together? Or because the action had other, non-incident motivations? Does the distinction make sense in this case? If not, does it make sense in broader cases? Was Skyline Towers a warning for Willow Island, or were they two different aspects of a same underlying problem? Was Hyatt Regency uniquely dangerous, or just unusually obvious?

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