Discussion for article #241419
I guess he meant freak accident, or perhaps an act of God, an actual legal term.
To be a freak of nature, or lusus naturae, a phenomenon has to be natural, not man-made. Perhaps the accident was a lusus technologiae, a freak of technology.
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Conservatives have become so incompetent that now they are calling their lack of accountability for lax regulation and profits over safety a “freak of nature?” Well, they certainly are freaks but there isn’t anything natural about it.
All people make mistakes but some just can’t admit they are responsible for anything. Even the TeaParty trailer trash have come to understand the real difference between a responsible Democrat and a corrupt Republican official. There is a reason they hate the GOP Establishment so much these days.
Democrats don’t try to pass themselves off as gods or angels. The GOP family values/job creator frauds have ridden that dead horse way too far and way too long for anyone to buy into that conservative BS any longer. Republicans are responsible for the crap they sowed since Reagan and what it has reaped in failure after failure to perform.
Just wait until the New GOP Speaker is unable to keep the House in session nor the government open for any length of time because of its Far Right wing.
It’s going to be the final straw for the Silent Majority. How do Republicans believe there will not be repercussions at the polls? Citizens pay taxes and expect services in exchange for them. Republicans just want the titles and glory not the work that comes with being a public servant. It has never been more obvious.
2016 marks the year we finally send the majority of these Washington GOP slackers back to the public equity firms, Wall Street banks and foreign multinationals from which they came.
What was man-made about a rock slide?
What on earth are you talking about?
Shumlin is a Democrat, FWIW, but I don’t see how what you wrote has anything to do with the train derailment regardless.
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The Governor of Vermont is a liberal Democrat. Even they can say dumb stuff sometimes.
Plus that section of track had just been modernized. While not a freak of “nature”, it was certainly not negligence. A freight train had just passed over it Sunday night with no problems.
This incident actually goes under the “stuff happens” category (unlike Jeb saying that about shootings).
Freak of nature or lack of maintenance or safety features due to no money for it…pretty much all the same thing in some folks’ eyes.
So he meant an Act of God or a freak accident. A freak of nature is a mutation, what used to be called a “sport”. Even by analogy, this wouldn’t have been a freak of nature unless the rocks that slid somehow stopped obeying the laws of nature as previously understood, and started following mutated laws of nature that caused them to slide.
Now, if the rock face had been properly examined and regularly inspected, and met none of the criteria that would make one expect that it would be unstable and slide onto the rails, then, and only then, would it be fair to characterize this as a freak accident, or act of God. The governor presumably said what he said, however garbled, to assert just that, that the engineering due diligence had been done but the rocks slid anyway. But even if we make allowances for him expressing this assertion with the incorrect catch phrase, I don’t see how he can make that assertion, before any investigation, that this was an unpredictable occurrence, that he is morally certain that due diligence was followed and the rock face that slid had met the safety standard.
If anything, knowledge of the general poor state of upkeep of our infrastructure, including our railways, should lead to the working hypothesis that this was no act of God, but an act of negligence, probably multiple acts of compound and systematic negligence. If that idea is proven wrong by careful investigation of this particular case, fine. But governors should not be reaching and announcing conclusions before the investigation.