Observations on how Progressives "think"

Whenever there's an accident caused by a private company - say the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 - Progressives are outraged and insist on changing how things are done.  Lives are at stake, and all of that.

Yet when there's an accident caused by a government agency - say the tragic rail disaster in Spain with 80 dead and 140 injured (so far) - then they sing a very different tune.  After all, high speed rail is one of their policy preferences, and so you can't let a few deaths stop the march of progress.  Or even a few dozen deaths.

And they don't seem to realize that this sort of thing goes on all the time:

• 6 dead in French train wreck last week.
• 14 injured (3 seriously) in Spanish train wreck 3 months ago.
• 41 dead in Valencia train crash in 2006.

This site lists 18 fatal train crashes in the last decade (excluding 3 acts of terrorism) accounting for almost 1400 deaths.  The list does not appear to be exhaustive (one of the wrecks listed above is not included). [warning: you should probably disable flash in your browser before you click that link; it did strange things with my CPU utilization when I went to it]

My point is not to show that Progressives are hypocrites (well OK, a bit), but rather to point out that being aware of your blind spots is important to all of us.  If a Progressive were to admit the butcher's bill that results from their railroad fetish, we can at least have a rational debate.

I freely admit that private automobile ownership results in a much higher death toll - but that the benefits to society of a free and highly mobile population make this worth the cost.  You can argue that I'm wrong, but you at least would be arguing from a common understanding of the Universe we live in.

And so the dismissive attitude of Progressives to the clear results of their policy preferences make it impossible to have that debate.  Must be because they're so much smarter than us knuckle dragging idiots from flyover country.