{"id":5175,"date":"2018-03-08T18:54:35","date_gmt":"2018-03-08T18:54:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=5175"},"modified":"2018-03-08T18:54:35","modified_gmt":"2018-03-08T18:54:35","slug":"storm-emma-victims-should-we-be-uncritical-in-our-sympathy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=5175","title":{"rendered":"Storm Emma Victims: Should We Be Uncritical In Our Sympathy?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are tons of stories about poor unfortunates being caught out by the weather last week &#8211; in both <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/2017%E2%80%9318_European_windstorm_season#Storm_Emma\">Storm Emma<\/a>, and it&#8217;s predecessor &#8211; and whilst they no doubt had a terrible time being stuck on roads or trains, should we be uncritically sympathetic?<\/p>\n<p>As an extreme example, Friday brought stories about the poor motorists stuck on the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/M80_motorway\">M80<\/a> overnight. Yet to get stuck, they would have to travel during a red weather warning. And these warnings were not exactly difficult to find.<\/p>\n<p>And the reason for travelling?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Making deliveries. Very few deliveries are so urgent they cannot wait 24 hours.<\/li>\n<li>Trying to get to the airport to catch a flight for a netball competition. Sorry, but a netball competition isn&#8217;t more important than your life.<\/li>\n<li>Travelling home from work? Get a hotel room.<\/li>\n<li>Travelling to catch a show? Really??<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It would be interesting to see the media start questioning people in such circumstances a bit more. Just ask them why did they travel, and whether it was important enough to ignore the warnings.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_4944\" style=\"width: 705px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-4944\" class=\"size-large wp-image-4944\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010-12-26-Grazing-In-The-Misty-Morning.jpg?resize=695%2C462&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"695\" height=\"462\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010-12-26-Grazing-In-The-Misty-Morning.jpg?resize=1024%2C681&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010-12-26-Grazing-In-The-Misty-Morning.jpg?resize=300%2C199&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010-12-26-Grazing-In-The-Misty-Morning.jpg?resize=768%2C511&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/really.zonky.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010-12-26-Grazing-In-The-Misty-Morning.jpg?w=1280&amp;ssl=1 1280w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 695px) 100vw, 695px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-4944\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Grazing In The Misty Morning<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are tons of stories about poor unfortunates being caught out by the weather last week &#8211; in both Storm Emma, and it&#8217;s predecessor &#8211; and whilst they no doubt had a terrible time being stuck on roads or trains, should we be uncritically sympathetic? As an extreme example, Friday brought stories about the poor <a href='https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=5175' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7],"tags":[1707,1708,119],"class_list":["post-5175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-beastfromtheeast","tag-storm-emma","tag-stupidity","category-7-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-1lt","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5175"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5179,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5175\/revisions\/5179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}