Comment on Surviving a heatwave : Prison Edition
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 1 week agoIf you look into building codes in North America, you’ll find out that they were almost all decided by industry board rooms with no public engagement. You don’t need a conspiracy to make every cheap and sturdy form of construction illegal, when the people that wrote the regulations were literally owners of Portland Concrete, several timber companies, and several “insulation” companies. You don’t need a conspiracy when a group of rich people just acted in their own self interests.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
I basically agree with what you’re saying here, yeah, basically a bunch of totally unquailified PTA-like organizations are actually responsible for a surprising amount of norms and standards in the US, which are treated as if they are very smart and good rules, made by very smart and good people.
I think the stylistic quibble here is… what you in your example call ‘not a conspiracy’, I call ‘a conspiracy’.
A conspiracy doesn’t need to be secret or well hidden or non obvious, non mundane.
A conspiracy is literally just when a bunch of people decide to do something, and then do things toward that goal.
www.law.cornell.edu/wex/conspiracy
But, we as a culture have a rather hysterical relationship with the word conspiracy, because it is so often used by people promoting … basically either extremely racist, or convoluted/incoherent, or sci-fi nonsense level plots.
But but, taking the very literal and basic concept of what the word means… and just replacing ‘illegal’ with ‘immoral’ or ‘devious’ or somesuch… people conspire very often and frequently, and its usually extremely straightforward with little to significant attempt to ‘hide’ the conspiracy at all.