One thing that is so obvious that it seems silly even to say it is that regardless of what you think about the politics of a country or a region, nobody is morally culpable for where they happen to be born or where they happen to reside.
And yet the public discourse is sufficiently demented that a lot of people don't seem to be willing to follow this very obvious point to its logical conclusions.
That's why you have college kids in the US yelling "Free Palestine" in response to the October 7th attacks, as if anyone who lives in Israel deserves to be the victim of a terrorist attack. It's why you have people claiming on televised news broadcasts that "there are no Palestinian civilians" (apparently even Palestinians who are two months old don't count as civilians). It's why there are conservatives who mock victims of violent crimes because if they lived in a blue city they must have "voted for" what happened to them and brought it upon themselves (as if all 1.5 million people who live in Manhattan must have exactly the same political beliefs. . . and as if there exists a set of policies that, if implemented, would ensure that no violent crime would ever happen). And it's why cartoonists and celebrities mock victims of natural disasters in red states.
The logic of these notions doesn't check out if you spend all of two seconds thinking about it.
That's a great point. Guilt by location is such a weird thing. It's interesting too that I hear more conservatives make this argument internationally (in the sense that people in some countries "deserve" dictatorship because they're not willing to fight against it) but I hear more liberals make the argument domestically, as a way to argue that people living in red states deserve to have bad things happen to them because they vote poorly. Both arguments miss reality in crucial ways.
Yeah. There's the saying that people can "vote with their feet," but it's a little bit of an overrated assertion. I mean, there is definitely a little bit of that. Domestically, most people have some amount of say over where they live, and they take a variety of factors into consideration, but their choices tend to be fairly constrained, by employment opportunities among other things. To some extent, it's really employers who are voting with their feet. Moreover, a lot of people who make that argument don't want people voting with their feet internationally, for the reasons to which you allude: this very fuzzy notion that if someone is from a country that's bad, their coming here means that they're bringing the badness with them.
Using a tragedy as political theatre is pretty yucky. The “FAFO” type comments especially. But I wonder if the comments along the lines of the one you called out are the result of a repeated pattern- one where the people who have the power to make a positive change in the aftermath of a tragic situation send their thoughts and prayers and then do nothing else.
As a public school teacher this makes me think of legislators after a school shooting. So many thoughts and prayers are in press releases of congress people and government officials, but when the time comes to pass legislation that could prevent another school shooting it seems those last dead kids aren’t in their thoughts anymore.
There should be serious investigations into how this flooding happened and where the communication breakdown was. And the findings should result in changes to be better prepared in the future. There’s nothing wrong with the thoughts and prayers- but it can’t be the only response. Actions are needed too, and people with a platform to call for those actions should use it.
Thanks for the comment and for getting me to clarify my thoughts a bit. I shared a version of my response below to Notes after I wrote it since I think it does a better job than the original post in some ways of clarifying the issue. So thanks again!
I think you're right to reference school shootings as the origin of the pushback against empty prayers in the face of preventable tragedy. The problem with people like Takei weighing in like this, especially so early, is not just that he's creating a false binary between prayers and accountability, but also that we don't know enough to know what went wrong. Liberals, including the NYT earlier this week, pointed to DOGE cuts as a likely source, but in just a week we've discovered it's much more complex than that. The NWS offices in TX were fully staffed and ready for a flood like this. The failure seems to be a combination of state, local, and individual failures.
And these kinds of failures are very bipartisan. It's not like California hasn't had its fair share of preventable deaths from natural disasters, but I hear Democrats talking this week as though the GOP is the only party that consistently downplays future danger. That's actually a very normal human bias and one we have to work really hard in all of public policy to push back against. Disaster prevention and mitigation is one of the trickiest areas of public policy because if you do your job well no one knows you did it at all. That makes it really hard to justify expenses even when those expenses - like the flood alarm system, which would have warned the camp staff - could save many innocent lives.
So what I object to is not the call for answers, but the weaponization of people's darkest hour to justify a politicized and polarized accounting of a tragedy that has its roots in the nature of human democratic systems rather than in one political party over the other.
And for what its worth, Trump's DOGE cuts will almost definitely make disasters like this more likely in the future, so this isn't an argument that they were neutral. But it seems highly unlikely that they had any particular role to play in the outcome of this tragedy. There was one retirement that I'd like more information on, but other than that issue it seems this tragedy was decades in the making and stemmed from failure to act at all levels of government as well as individuals making very poor choices that directly impacted children in their care. It's awful all around.
One thing that is so obvious that it seems silly even to say it is that regardless of what you think about the politics of a country or a region, nobody is morally culpable for where they happen to be born or where they happen to reside.
And yet the public discourse is sufficiently demented that a lot of people don't seem to be willing to follow this very obvious point to its logical conclusions.
That's why you have college kids in the US yelling "Free Palestine" in response to the October 7th attacks, as if anyone who lives in Israel deserves to be the victim of a terrorist attack. It's why you have people claiming on televised news broadcasts that "there are no Palestinian civilians" (apparently even Palestinians who are two months old don't count as civilians). It's why there are conservatives who mock victims of violent crimes because if they lived in a blue city they must have "voted for" what happened to them and brought it upon themselves (as if all 1.5 million people who live in Manhattan must have exactly the same political beliefs. . . and as if there exists a set of policies that, if implemented, would ensure that no violent crime would ever happen). And it's why cartoonists and celebrities mock victims of natural disasters in red states.
The logic of these notions doesn't check out if you spend all of two seconds thinking about it.
That's a great point. Guilt by location is such a weird thing. It's interesting too that I hear more conservatives make this argument internationally (in the sense that people in some countries "deserve" dictatorship because they're not willing to fight against it) but I hear more liberals make the argument domestically, as a way to argue that people living in red states deserve to have bad things happen to them because they vote poorly. Both arguments miss reality in crucial ways.
Yeah. There's the saying that people can "vote with their feet," but it's a little bit of an overrated assertion. I mean, there is definitely a little bit of that. Domestically, most people have some amount of say over where they live, and they take a variety of factors into consideration, but their choices tend to be fairly constrained, by employment opportunities among other things. To some extent, it's really employers who are voting with their feet. Moreover, a lot of people who make that argument don't want people voting with their feet internationally, for the reasons to which you allude: this very fuzzy notion that if someone is from a country that's bad, their coming here means that they're bringing the badness with them.
Using a tragedy as political theatre is pretty yucky. The “FAFO” type comments especially. But I wonder if the comments along the lines of the one you called out are the result of a repeated pattern- one where the people who have the power to make a positive change in the aftermath of a tragic situation send their thoughts and prayers and then do nothing else.
As a public school teacher this makes me think of legislators after a school shooting. So many thoughts and prayers are in press releases of congress people and government officials, but when the time comes to pass legislation that could prevent another school shooting it seems those last dead kids aren’t in their thoughts anymore.
There should be serious investigations into how this flooding happened and where the communication breakdown was. And the findings should result in changes to be better prepared in the future. There’s nothing wrong with the thoughts and prayers- but it can’t be the only response. Actions are needed too, and people with a platform to call for those actions should use it.
Thanks for the comment and for getting me to clarify my thoughts a bit. I shared a version of my response below to Notes after I wrote it since I think it does a better job than the original post in some ways of clarifying the issue. So thanks again!
I think you're right to reference school shootings as the origin of the pushback against empty prayers in the face of preventable tragedy. The problem with people like Takei weighing in like this, especially so early, is not just that he's creating a false binary between prayers and accountability, but also that we don't know enough to know what went wrong. Liberals, including the NYT earlier this week, pointed to DOGE cuts as a likely source, but in just a week we've discovered it's much more complex than that. The NWS offices in TX were fully staffed and ready for a flood like this. The failure seems to be a combination of state, local, and individual failures.
And these kinds of failures are very bipartisan. It's not like California hasn't had its fair share of preventable deaths from natural disasters, but I hear Democrats talking this week as though the GOP is the only party that consistently downplays future danger. That's actually a very normal human bias and one we have to work really hard in all of public policy to push back against. Disaster prevention and mitigation is one of the trickiest areas of public policy because if you do your job well no one knows you did it at all. That makes it really hard to justify expenses even when those expenses - like the flood alarm system, which would have warned the camp staff - could save many innocent lives.
So what I object to is not the call for answers, but the weaponization of people's darkest hour to justify a politicized and polarized accounting of a tragedy that has its roots in the nature of human democratic systems rather than in one political party over the other.
And for what its worth, Trump's DOGE cuts will almost definitely make disasters like this more likely in the future, so this isn't an argument that they were neutral. But it seems highly unlikely that they had any particular role to play in the outcome of this tragedy. There was one retirement that I'd like more information on, but other than that issue it seems this tragedy was decades in the making and stemmed from failure to act at all levels of government as well as individuals making very poor choices that directly impacted children in their care. It's awful all around.