Cont: Luton Airport Car Park Fire part II

[catsmate]

You can't see it when you are within it.

The hypocrisy, it burns.

I will say for avoidance of doubt that I know exactly how it works.

Only in the UK do people sneer, 'What are his qualifications?' (code for is he astablishment?).

Bollocks.

So, yeah, this very British idea that people commenting in the DM or youtube as experienced people in the car industry for years can be safely ignored

Again, utter nonsense. You quote from people who have no knowledge of the subject.

and we should obey the command of someone writing copy instead to stop speculating the fire at Luton Airport car park was a lithium-ion one, is based on pure snobbery IMV.

Yes more bollocks.

 

[JayUtah]

Again, utter nonsense. You quote from people who have no knowledge of the subject.

It seems to be an article of faith among conspiracy theorists that their critics have no way to determine the credibility of the conspiracy sources. That belief will not be true for all (or even many) critics. In fact, people drawn to the debunking of conspiracy theories generally arrive there because they actually know something about the subject from professional or similar experience. And it is not necessarily a categorical rejection, such as not accepting sources associated with well-known tabloids or self-publishing platforms. It is most often a substantive rejection because the critic really does have the knowledge necessary to test the correctness of the proponent's source.

A similar article of faith seems to be that critics have no way to determine that the conspiracy theorist herself doesn't know what she's talking about, leading to comical examples of bluster and gaslighting. Yes, we can tell when people are lying. Most conspiracy theorists are blissfully unaware just how dumb they sound, especially when they're trying to be self-important.

Yes more bollocks.

Indeed, what conspiracy theorists, armchair detectives, and other self-appointed "investigators" dread most is people coming along who actually do have expertise and actually do know what they're talking about. The armchair duckies can't compete when it comes to actual knowledge and understanding, so they have to make up new ways in which they're allegedly superior, such has having some sort of innate, natural understanding, or an unassailable personal background. Here, actual expertise and experience is being dismissed—with considerable and fervent hope—as "snobbery."

No, it's not a cultural thing. No, it's not an elitist thing. We simply require a demonstration that sources purported to be authoritative have some foundation of authority. In the real world, the celebration of mediocrity and ignorance is not really a thing.

 

[Mojo]

I will say for avoidance of doubt that I know exactly how it works. I was a 'suit' and a haughty schoolgirl myself. I walked into jobs without even being barely interviewed.

You were educated by that exclusive establishment, Middlesex County Council.

 

[Mojo]

Firefighters from nearby Harpenden (there were firefighters from several regions helping to control the blaze) were reported off the record to have said it looked like a lithium-ion fire.

Did you get that from the same source as your 10 Downing Street press release?

 

[Vixen]

Nice bit of insinuation, there, implying the photo somehow supported the unsourced statement. The photo was published in the Daily Mail, among other places. What is the source for the comment?

What was the exact quote? Was it about the diesel car where the fire started, or the overall blaze, which almost certainly included at least one EV on the balance of probabilities? Was it simply a comment that the fire looked similar to one involving a lithium-ion battery, or was it a claim that the fire must have started in an EV?

IIRC it was an online local newspaper and it was an opinion from an unnamed firefighter from Harpenden Brigade. As you know, employees are not allowed to speak to the press. Plus the mainstream press rely on official press reports.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

IIRC it was an online local newspaper and it was an opinion from an unnamed firefighter from Harpenden Brigade. As you know, employees are not allowed to speak to the press. Plus the mainstream press rely on official press reports.

So you don't know or won't divulge the source, but you think a claim was made by someone claiming to be a firefighter from the next town over and their opinion of a blazing car park was that they reckoned it was a lithium battery on fire.

Well, I'm convinced. What higher standard of evidence could there be?

To hell with the mainstream media and their 'journalism' and 'corroboration' and 'standards' and 'facts'. We need more wot-I-reckon.

 

[Vixen]

Perfectly okay to discuss it here, as it goes to the "evidence" you want to introduce to support your position.

That's more to do with upper management, most likely being upper-middle class themselves, picking a grammar school candidate over others of supposedly lower classes. Just the opposite of what you've been arguing. (Not entirely relevant, but you might also want to have a look at the grammar of that last sentence, I'm sure your Grammar school English teacher would have been appalled.)



Actually, "what are their qualifications?" is a perfectly valid question when someone is opining outside their actual field of experience or expertise. How many full on vehicle fires does the average car mechanic see or have to deal with during their career? I'll take the testimony of someone who has direct experience of a lot of vehicle fires or has made an academic study of such fires as more authoritative.

Similarly, although firefighters deal with a lot of vehicle fires, I wouldn't trust a firefighter to fix my car unless they could show me that they had relevant qualifications. No thanks, I'll go to my local garage who I know have highly qualified car mechanics and years of experience fixing cars.

I respect the ability and knowledge of people within their field of direct expertise.



Thank you for once again giving us an example (and merely anecdotal at that) of "upper class" people looking down their noses at "lower class" people. Nothing to do with "lower classes" showing deference to "upper classes".

Not to mention the fact that your anecdotes are some 40 to 50 years out of date.

By way of counterpoint, I offer my own purely anecdotal evidence, from the opposite side of the class divide.

I went to a state comprehensive, and one of our supply teachers had a decidedly "posh" accent. He was mercilessly teased and didn't even last a term. Another teacher we had was mercilessly teased for having a lisp, whilst yet another for being bald.

What do these anecdotes have in common with your anecdote?
They are all about ineffectual teachers being unable to control a class full of schoolkids. And my first one shows that there is no special deference for the "upper classes" from the "lower classes", so at least that anecdote was relevant to your basic argument, unlike your anecdote.


Nope. It's based on relevant experience and relevant qualifications.

That is well-argued. However, I wasn't claiming it was the lower classes deferring to the upper classes, it is everybody in general. The deferential attitude can be summed up in two words the 'Royal Family', which of itself gives rise to a rigid class system. An ex-pat in Sweden was impressed that his kid was in the same class as a 'baron'. This is the effect of a monarchy, in particular. People get hung up on titles and become obsessed and fascinated by people with them. [Disclaimer: I have to admit, to avoid sounding hypocritical, I, too, in recent days have fallen down the 'Where's Kate' rabbit hole, when after all, rationally, how is her health and marital status more interesting and important than anyone else's?]. It is this that IMV causes the type of passivity amongst Brits that they accept the withholding of information they are entitled to have, for example , the vehicle model and make that caused the Luton fire, the Russia Report, the Priti Patel Bullying Report, the Wills of the late HM Queen and Prince Philip, etc.etc.

I was on a plane from Arlanda to Heathrow recently and immediately knew it was a British cabin crew on board (SAS Airline). When the crew member brought me my Christmas turkey and cheese toast, he was literally fawning and scraping the floor as he asked me if I wanted sugar in my tea. He was the campest cabin crew member I have ever met*. Only Brits are as outrageously over the top obsequious and deferential as this in my experience. No other nationality is as eager and willing to abase themselves as Brits. It is almost traditional, and I believe, a direct consequence of a deferential social structure and loyalty towards the crown instilled and grounded in the single-sex public school system that permeates every level of British society.

You can see just how angry the Brits on this list are by my even daring to enquire what the model and make of vehicle zero in the Luton Airport car park fire was. It's like, how dare you ask or even suggest it was a diesel hybrid because the Fire Chief of Bedford never said that. All he said was that it was 'believed to be a diesel-fuelled vehicle', which does not rule out a mild hybrid with a lithium-ion battery, so fair enough, you would have thought to ask, given the many observers who identified a lithium fire.

*I should add he was a really nice guy, no criticism of his personality at all, just the epitome of a deferential Brit.

 

[Vixen]

That's some pretty weak barrel-scraping you're doing now. "...were reported off the record" is basically just a conspiratorial dressing on "some bloke down the pub reckons..." and it might be helpful to think about how many cars were already ablaze when the Luton fire brigade got there, and then how many cars were already ablaze when the Harpenden fire brigade got there.

When you've looked at the photo you posted and had a little think about that stuff, ask yourself what value there is in an anonymous claim that Harpenden fire fighters thought there was a lithium battery fire somewhere in the coflagration.

It's uttery worthless. Even if the Harpenden brigade have an infallible nose for lithium fires, there were inevitably multiple cars of every fuel type including EVs already cheerfully ablaze when they turned up.

The value is that some local reporter did what journalists should do more often; he or she went to the site and asked eyewitnesses questions.


I don't think this is worthless at all and the reporter was perfectly impartial one way or the other.

 

[Vixen]

No, you're not some brilliant commentator with special insight.



Wrong. When people say they know what they're talking about and that we should just trust their judgment, every skeptic in the world rises up with the same question: "How do you know that?" And not, it's not "code" for anything, although you seem to have indirectly answered Mark's question whether you believe genuine expertise exists.

In my profession I'm required to perform due diligence on all my employees whom I put forward as subject-matter experts. When we address a safety or correctness concern by saying that an SME has applied his judgment to say it's okay to proceed, we are on the hook to have laid that foundation.

And guess that the profession is? The one you're pretending to lecture everyone about.



Nothing. You have no special insight. Vixensplaining via another color anecdote doesn't cut it.



Nope. You have a well established habit of grabbing the first source that seems to say what you need to have said, without regard for whether it's credible, or even whether you've read it. And now you're frantically trying to shame people into accepting a talking head on YouTube as having more experience and better judgment than the people who actually are going to be held accountable for finding out what happened.

Citing a source is not the same thing as agreeing with it. There is nothing to fear from hearing what someone with industry experience has to say. They do not have to be official investigators. The guy 'Tony' of EV Car-nage, yes, okay so he uses terrible puns, has a regional accent, wears loud t-shirts but that doesn't mean his views are worthless as one poster claimed, saying he wasn't worth wasting time on because he doesn't look or sound like he has academic qualifications. (FWIW no, he was not an antivaxxer, as one poster claims. The point he was making in the video cited by the poster was an analogy of how the 'narrative' was being controlled and he cited the lockdown measures as an example of this, for ease of reference as to what he meant by 'controlling the narrative'.

I don't know why people get so upset about someone expressing a view.

 

[JayUtah]

You can see just how angry the Brits on this list are by my even daring to enquire what the model and make of vehicle zero in the Luton Airport car park fire was.

You "dare" to keep insinuating it was an electric or hybrid vehicle even after knowledgeable and competent authority confirmed it was not. That's not daring; that's desperate.

It's like, how dare you ask or even suggest it was a diesel hybrid...

No, it's not like that at all. It's "How stupid can a person be to cling to a conspiracy theory when all the evidence is against it?"

You're not some bold seeker after truth. You're an armchair detective with delusions of grandeur.

 

[JayUtah]

I don't think this is worthless at all and the reporter was perfectly impartial one way or the other.

You have a singularly abominable record of figuring out whether your sources are impartial.

 

[Vixen]

Yes, it was a diesel Discovery. I know that you are pathologically incapable of admitting you are wrong, but it has been reported by the investigators of that incident that it was a diesel vehicle. Complaining that they didn't say "Simon sez it was a diesel car" doesn't make you any less wrong.


I don't expect any vehicle to catch fire when it is turned off. But the fact remains that many gas and diesel vehicles do catch fire when they are not running.

And what was all that effort to convince us that the vehicle that started the fire at the Luton garage had to be an EV because of the way it was burning if not an attempt to convince us that a diesel car doesn't burn that fiercely. You spent many pages claiming that it was unthinkable for a diesel car to even catch fire.


Because it's your own hyperbole. Spraying water on an EV longer than a gasoline car to keep the fire contained isn't a "nightmare". We've covered plenty of evidence that EV fires are no more intense than gas or diesel fires, that they aren't more likely to catch fire, and that the primary difference, from a firefighting standpoint, is that they can take longer to extinguish. One of my cousins was the captain of a firehouse in northwest Illinois, and he said the way to deal with an EV fire was just to keep pumping water on it until it went out. What source are you citing for your "nightmare" claim, a car salesman or a parking garage attendant?

Citation, please.

As for your cousin, captain of a firehouse in northwest Illinois, is he aware that it is not just about pumping loads of water but that water would be contaminated by highly toxic chemicals?

The other 'nightmare' is the toxic fumes. Breathing in the fumes of a burning lithium-ion fire can damage your lungs within minutes. Why else did the fire brigade stand well away from the building at Luton?

But then you knew all that.

 

[Vixen]

It seems to be an article of faith among conspiracy theorists that their critics have no way to determine the credibility of the conspiracy sources. That belief will not be true for all (or even many) critics. In fact, people drawn to the debunking of conspiracy theories generally arrive there because they actually know something about the subject from professional or similar experience. And it is not necessarily a categorical rejection, such as not accepting sources associated with well-known tabloids or self-publishing platforms. It is most often a substantive rejection because the critic really does have the knowledge necessary to test the correctness of the proponent's source.

A similar article of faith seems to be that critics have no way to determine that the conspiracy theorist herself doesn't know what she's talking about, leading to comical examples of bluster and gaslighting. Yes, we can tell when people are lying. Most conspiracy theorists are blissfully unaware just how dumb they sound, especially when they're trying to be self-important.



Indeed, what conspiracy theorists, armchair detectives, and other self-appointed "investigators" dread most is people coming along who actually do have expertise and actually do know what they're talking about. The armchair duckies can't compete when it comes to actual knowledge and understanding, so they have to make up new ways in which they're allegedly superior, such has having some sort of innate, natural understanding, or an unassailable personal background. Here, actual expertise and experience is being dismissed—with considerable and fervent hope—as "snobbery."

No, it's not a cultural thing. No, it's not an elitist thing. We simply require a demonstration that sources purported to be authoritative have some foundation of authority. In the real world, the celebration of mediocrity and ignorance is not really a thing.

This is nothing to do with the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories, 'conspiracy theory' being a phrase that has become near meaningless as a casual insult to someone one disagrees with.


It is a straightforward news item.

 

[JayUtah]

This is nothing to do with the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories...

It has nothing but to do with it. You ran out of evidence and argument many, many pages ago. Now you're just trying to shame people away from challenging you. It's pure conspiracy handwaving at this point, peppered with childish fake press releases.

'conspiracy theory' being a phrase that has become near meaningless as a casual insult to someone one disagrees with.

Actually it has a pretty precise meaning in psychology, O Miss I'm-a-Pyschology-Post-Grad.

It is a straightforward news item.

...in the conspiracy section along with all your other "news items."

 

[Vixen]

So you don't know or won't divulge the source, but you think a claim was made by someone claiming to be a firefighter from the next town over and their opinion of a blazing car park was that they reckoned it was a lithium battery on fire.

Well, I'm convinced. What higher standard of evidence could there be?

To hell with the mainstream media and their 'journalism' and 'corroboration' and 'standards' and 'facts'. We need more wot-I-reckon.

I'll see if I can find it. I didn't say it was evidence. Just typical on-the-spot newspaper reporting quoting eye witnesses who were present. What used to happen before the domination of 'press releases' and press agency syndicates all sharing the same 'authorized' information.

 

[Mojo]

The value is that some local reporter did what journalists should do more often; he or she went to the site and asked eyewitnesses questions.

What local reporter?

I don't think this is worthless at all and the reporter was perfectly impartial one way or the other.

How do you know, if you don't know who the reporter was?

 

[Mojo]

What used to happen before the domination of 'press releases' and press agency syndicates all sharing the same 'authorized' information.

The use of press releases isn't some sort of conspiracy, the sad thing is that it's just cheaper than employing journalists.

 

[JayUtah]

I didn't say it was evidence.

You offered it in rebuttal to a claim for which there was evidence. What was your intent?

Just typical on-the-spot newspaper reporting quoting eye witnesses who were present.

You said the firefighter was anonymous, so not really a report. And what's the point of claiming the interviewee was an eyewitness and then turning around and saying it's not evidence. You're managing the astounding feat of simultaneously whiplashing and backpedaling.

What used to happen before the domination of 'press releases' and press agency syndicates all sharing the same 'authorized' information.

You have no problem with "press releases" in your other conspiracy theories, when they tell you want you want to hear.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Citation, please.

As for your cousin, captain of a firehouse in northwest Illinois, is he aware that it is not just about pumping loads of water but that water would be contaminated by highly toxic chemicals?

The other 'nightmare' is the toxic fumes. Breathing in the fumes of a burning lithium-ion fire can damage your lungs within minutes. Why else did the fire brigade stand well away from the building at Luton?

But then you knew all that.

Diesel fires produce water contaminated by highly toxic chemicals. There's even residue after a fire on a modern IC engine that contains flourine.

Breathing the fumes of a diesel fire can damage your lungs within minutes as can any kind of burning hydrocarbon such as foam and synthetic fabric.

 

[Vixen]

It has nothing but to do with it. You ran out of evidence and argument many, many pages ago. Now you're just trying to shame people away from challenging you. It's pure conspiracy handwaving at this point, peppered with childish fake press releases.



<snip>



...in the conspiracy section along with all your other "news items."

Here come the cheap ad hominems.