My mind can't abide a puzzle. It habitually seems to set itself in a sort of alert, problem-solving state, almost as though looking for something to occupy itself with. When it finds something interesting - which could vary from (say) figuring out the best way to clean a laundry utility-room, or fixing a car's wing mirror, or analysing a puzzling situation, program error, or maths puzzle - it becomes fascinated and
won't let it go until satisfied that the area of interest has been understood sufficiently fully. Very often, it won't let me sleep. It's difficult sometimes to determine which part of me is the master and which the servant.
At school, I had a pretty useless maths teacher and so I used to teach myself maths, using books of past UK Cambridge GCE "O" Level exam papers, with worked examples of all the answers. I would study at night up till bedtime, and sometimes - with a particularly knotty problem - I would refuse to look at the worked answers and would go to bed with an unresolved math question still puzzling my mind, and I would tell my mind to solve it whilst I was asleep. Invariably, the answer would be clear in my mind on waking. I had read about this idea in a book on self-hypnosis, so I applied it, and it seemed to work.
Well, I had invested quite a bit of my cognitive surplus in the subject of this interesting post by
@holt and it must have grabbed the attention of my subconscious, because, though
I thought I had finished with the subject by contributing what I did above, for a couple of days I have had a niggling feeling - my subconscious sort of tugging at me - that I was missing something very relevant to this subject, that I actually already knew about, but had not put in the puzzle to explain it.
When I woke up this morning, it was there in my mind - I already knew about the
type of legal, government-sanctioned corporatised, careless and indiscriminate killing of innocents that the Boeing case seemed to typify - the word
"Aberfan".I went to school in North Wales. An important aspect of the Welsh character is that they understand the need for education as a tried-and-tested way out of serfdom/poverty/dependence, and they take up teaching posts where they tend to remain fiercely nationalistic and teach that nationalistic sense (as propaganda - e.g., making Welsh compulsory) to children in school – and why shouldn’t they? It’s their country (or it was), after all, and they are heartily sick of the history of the English trampling all over them and oppressively milking them economically for all they are worth – e.g., in the coal and slate mining industries. – and with an utter disregard for the safety/lives of the Welsh (No, don't mention all those accidental pit deaths. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.).
If there is any single event that indicated unequivocally that the English were unfit to rule Wales – either economically or otherwise – one that stands out would have to be
the Aberfan disaster. (Refer
Wikipedia, and which I wrote about in
Re: Thermageddon? Postponed! as an example of corporate psychopathy.)
This was a disaster waiting to happen – a manmade ticking timebomb building up in Aberfan. It was the catastrophic collapse of a colliery spoil tip in the Welsh village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil, on 21 October 1966, killing 116 children and 28 adults. It was caused by a build-up of water in a waste tip, the accumulated rock and shale, which suddenly started to slide downhill in the form of slurry.
The black humour at the time had it as: “What’s black and goes to school on Friday? A number 7 tip.”
This was an avoidable disaster: it had been predictable and was a predicted risk, yet the risk had been ignored in characteristically cavalier fashion by the English National Coal Board. The official inquiry blamed the National Coal Board for extreme negligence, and its Chairman, Lord Robens, for making misleading statements. Parliament soon passed new legislation about public safety in relation to mines and quarries. (Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.)
The Welsh were arguably second-class citizens then, and will probably remain such until they gain full sovereignty for Wales. After that, they will only be able to hold themselves accountable for any further corporate negligence.
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You could thus label the
Boeing 737 MAX crashes
"the Aberfan syndrome", because the Aberfan event predated the Boeing 737 MAX crashes. They are of the same
type - i.e.,
legal, government-sanctioned corporatised, careless and indiscriminate killing of innocents. But that's not enough
- what about the cause? The resulting disasters are created/caused by
a Corporate Psychopath.In the film The Corporation, they reviewed the personality disorder "psychopathy". (A psychopath is a person with chronic psychopathy, esp. leading to abnormally irresponsible and antisocial behaviour.)
They gave this checklist of criteria to identify the disorder:
1. Callous unconcern for the feelings of others.
2. Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships.
3. Reckless disregard for the safety of others.
4. Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit/financial gain.
5. Incapacity to experience guilt.
6. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours.
In the film, these criteria were shown to be met by many/most of the legal entities (legal persons) known as "corporations", thus demonstrating that society has legalised these special kinds of psychopaths to operate in society, where they can and do cause tremendous harm - e.g., including such things as economic dependency and control of communities, or a deadly (toxic) environmental footprint - sometimes both, as in the case of the US corporation Exide in their factory in Mexico.
