I ran across this while trying to find answers to the question of how necessary knives will or will not be to survival of colonists on Mars. That led to the question of how necessary they are now for living in artificial environments with few natural resources, like the International Space Station (where they have Emerson tactical folders and Leatherman multi-tools) and Antarctica, and eventually to life at sea in modern ships where there are no sails, comparatively few ropes or lines that could be cut with a knife, and a whole lot of steel that can’t.
That led to the discovery of this horrible incident.
It seems that the same insane “PC” mindset that has decided, against all and ongoing evidence, that the best way to deal with terrorists and pirates is to render all of their potential victims as helpless as possible has invaded into life at sea. I’m very, very sorry to hear it.
I wonder if the recently-released movie version includes this incident. Given Hollywood biases, probably not.
Again, we are the tool-carrying species. We have evolved into dependence on our own technology, on tools and weapons on fire and cooked food, and without basic tools we are amazingly and almost uniquely helpless and vulnerable creatures.
News flash: those who seek to render us and keep us helpless and vulnerable are not doing so for our own good.
I hate to be this cynical, but you can see the trade-off for the suits, bureaucrats, administrators, whoever makes these decisions from their climate-controlled offices. If they prohibit knives and a dozen people get killed here and there as a result, well… too bad. They’ll give lip service to what a great tragedy it is, of course, but it won’t effect anyone in their caste, no suits are going to lose any pensions over it, and everyone gets to go back to the golf course as soon as the ceremony is over. If they don’t prohibit knives and someone gets hurt, even though it’s the exact same risk we’ve run for untold thousands of years with the understanding (until recently) that the trade-off was more than worth it, indeed essential, well… if that happens the suits will be looking for a scapegoat, someone in their own ranks to blame, and that is an entirely different matter. We’re no longer just talking peasants here.
So long as this mind-set dominates our culture we’ll continue to see terrorists and (other) deranged people mow down helpless and defenseless people by the scores, confident that they will encounter no significant opposition in any short-term, have plenty of time to kill and kill without resistance, sometimes for hours. In all of history this sort of thing was self-limiting, the need to protect oneself and the obligation to protect the defenseless was commonly understood and prepared for, it is only in our ultra-sheltered modern lives that we’ve been able to maintain the illusion that there is no longer such a need. That illusion has now vanished, but in just a few generations we’ve largely forgotten what needs to be done.
Anyway, this may not be an answer to the question I had in mind (since the actual need for knives to save and sustain lives, however evident it has been for untold thousands of years, doesn’t influence managerial decision-making), but it may be an answer to an even more important question.
Mars is going to be an incredibly dangerous place to live.
The biggest danger to the Martian colonists is not going to be Mars directly, it’s going to be their own bureaucracy making decisions for them far, far removed from the consequences of those decisions.
Just as it is here.
– Robert the Wombat