Here's an eye-raiser: a lifeboat-load of men aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig almost fried because they couldn't cut the boat loose. Why? Because in a fit of PC "We think you' re all potential crazed killers" logic, BP banned the crew from carrying knives.If this is true, it is the most insane thing I have ever heard in my life. I've spent many years at sea both for work and pleasure and I never, I say again, never moved a foot from the pier without a bosun knife on my belt. It isn't just a tool, it's an essential part of lifesaving gear. You never know when you'll have to cut a rope or slash through some canvas to keep from being killed to death and you can't go running to the Captain to check out your blade for the occasion because you're too busy trying not to die.
What's more astonishing than the ban is that any of the crew with an ounce of sense didn't refuse to leave shore because of it.
Via The Volokh Conspiracy.
4 comments:
How far does this Bizarro World thinking go?
Sailors with no knives would be like an Army base with gunless soldiers. What would happen if some crazed muslim Major came on post with a pistol? There wouldn't be anyone to stop him....oh wait, bad example.
How about it would be like raising taxes to get the economy moving again...no, hold on, ok, I've got it; it would be like letting some tin pot president admonish our Congress for our immigration policies...
We're screwed aren't we?
I keep a diving knife on the PFD I wear kayaking, and two in my diving gear. Getting tangled and held under sounds like a particularly miserable way to die.
This present PC dislike for pointy things is based on an assumption that the world is too civilized for a weapon to be needed. Ever. Argal, if a weapon exists, it can only be for a bad reason. This is incorrect, and acting as if it were not will only get one hurt. Fortunately, humans are a smart kind of monkey, and I find myself strangely optimistic that this PC nonsense has swung about as far to the crazy as it's going to go. For thousands of years it's been the privilege of the elites to be armed; it can't stay fashionable too much longer to intentionally make oneself harmless.
A couple of years ago I had a conversation with a chap who had been a sailor in the Canadian Navy. (The one that used to be called the Royal Canadian Navy.) Anyhow a lot of sailors as part of their day-to-day working rig carried a sheath knife.
The chap said that in his time he witnessed a lot of fights between sailors, but he never ever saw one sailor pull a knife on another.
"The chap said that in his time he witnessed a lot of fights between sailors, but he never ever saw one sailor pull a knife on another."
That's only because (even in the heat of the moment) those sailors were smarter than the PC nit wits who make such policy. What I don't get is, why did any of the guys working the rig actually take such a restriction seriously? When I was a kid, we didn't go near the water (for such anti-social activities as fishing) without bringing along a knife.
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