The most politically incorrect blog post ever

Lost in the undertow of the tidal wave of news coming out of the inland sea that used to be New Orleans is the story of the 800 Iraqi Shiites who died today in a stampede — that’s the word they’re using; stampede, as in livestock — on a bridge over the Tigris.
Look, I’ve got as much sympathy for those Iraqis as anybody else. I really do. To lose a loved one or friend in such a senseless way is horrible.
But seriously … what does it say about a group of people that they would literally trample each other to death and push each other off of a bridge?
There are plenty of incidents in the historical record of crowds panicking and trampling people to death. It happened in a Chicago nightclub in February 2003, and 21 people died. So this is definitely not something that’s related to race or ethnicity or religion. But it happens sufficiently rarely that it’s clearly not a normal part of the human condition. It’s not true that any time you get a hundred people in the same place and somebody farts, there’s gonna be a death toll.
So what the hell? What conditions are necessary to create an event like this? Clearly not just any randomly selected crowd is going to be susceptible to the phenomenon. It takes the right combination of factors. But what are those factors? Does the make-up of the crowd have anything to do with it? Is this something that’s far more likely to happen when the crowd is composed of poorly educated people, or does the education of the participants have no bearing on the likelihood of an event like the one we saw today?
I think these are questions that are worth asking. Worth throwing time and effort at to try to solve? No, probably not; we need a cure for diabetes first, among about a thousand other things. But I think failing to acknowledge that these are valid questions is kind of dishonest.
And by the way, to all you idiots out there who are blaming this on George W. Bush: Cut it out. Your ideological brothers in arms are doing a much better job of blaming Bush for the hurricane. Next to them, you people look like rank amateurs.