• XeroxCool@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 month ago

    So are you not going to count deaths from Helene resulting from people not evacuating properly? For not taking it seriously because it was preventable?

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      15
      arrow-down
      9
      ·
      1 month ago

      Individual choices are different from government incompetence resulting in mass casualties. You understand that, right?

      If lightning strikes a skyscraper that doesn’t have sprinklers, causing it to burn down and kill 100 people- did the lightning kill those people or was it the lack of sprinklers?

      • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        1 month ago

        Individual choices are different from government incompetence resulting in mass casualties.

        There’s a systemic criticism here; people not evacuating Helene properly demonstrates we don’t have proper systems in place to facilitate evacuations in the case of a hurricane.

        Someone who chooses not to evacuate because they didn’t understand the severity or don’t have a car or anywhere to go isn’t an individual choice.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          arrow-down
          6
          ·
          1 month ago

          I notice you didn’t answer my question. I will ask it again:

          If lightning strikes a skyscraper that doesn’t have sprinklers, causing it to burn down and kill 100 people- did the lightning kill those people or was it the lack of sprinklers?

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              9
              arrow-down
              3
              ·
              1 month ago

              Right. Which is why it would be a man-made disaster and not a natural disaster. The same with Katrina and the levees. Katrina was a natural disaster, but what killed the people in New Orleans was the levees not getting repaired when they needed to be.

              And it’s different from people refusing to evacuate since that’s on them, it’s not an issue of other people’s incompetence being the cause of mass casualties.

              • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                7
                arrow-down
                3
                ·
                edit-2
                1 month ago

                it’s different from people refusing to evacuate since that’s on them

                It isn’t though, you need to examine why those people were unwilling or unable to evacuate.

                This is a systemic failure; our systems failed to adequately enable and incentivize people to evacuate. Do you judge a country’s covid response by the number of people killed by covid, or just chalk that up to people’s individual choices too?

    • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 month ago

      “Not evacuating properly”? Plenty of the people who died had no idea the storm was going to be as bad as it was when they were hundreds of miles inland in an area that had never had significant flooding.

      • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        I’m not saying any or all were preventable, only that OP is cherry picking out one single part of a catastrophe to tweak stats without fairly considering the removal of similar causes from the other event.

    • Maeve@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 month ago

      Where will poor people go and how would they afford to go and how would they get there?