this is only tangential to the topic of the astroworld thing, but the reason why i go out of my way spend my time defending victims of crowd disasters is bc the victim-blaming of disaster victims (and victim blaming in general tbh) is always linked with a variety of self-exceptionalist biases. people will look at a disaster and go "that would never happen to me because i'm better than them for XYZ reason." some more vague lines of logic are "i'm not dumb enough to end up in that situation" or "i'm stronger and would survive that situation" (both of which are generally ridiculous, as most who have that thought generally contain roughly one human's worth of smarts and strength). however, another common rationale is "the victims mustve been [less privileged group] because only people who are [dumb/trashy/primitive/weak/whatever other stereotype] would end up in that situation or act that way," and then that self-exceptionalist mindset is literally used and manipulated by people with power/authority like police, the government, rich people, big companies, etc. to help those who are actually responsible avoid taking any blame
a non-crowd crush example of this is hurricane katrina. people on the news literally acted like there were roving bands of violent, black looters that deserved to be killed by the police when the reality was much different. in the wake of the hurricane, there were literally roving bands of violent white supremacists wandering around killing anybody they felt like killing, as well as police doing the same thing. however, because so much of the public held that self-exceptionalist bias, the police were able to blame the victims of the tragedy & violence, gain the trust of the public, and have the victim-blaming narrative be viewed as the truth without question by people all around the country
that said, there are plenty of people who already understand that victims of disasters will be screwed over by the police and harassed by bigots. but then when the people who understand all that see a crowd disaster, they frequently revert to the same faulty logic. this is because they don't understand what a crowd disaster is or what conditions lead to a crowd disaster. there is no awareness in our culture about how these things happen. i believe that this lack of awareness is because the truth of what crowd disasters are like and how they're caused has been actively obscured by monetary interests over the years. one major example is walmart, who spins the media against their black friday shoppers anytime there's a black friday casualty. the racial & class implications at play in black friday crowd slander is probably pretty obvious to anybody who's seen these kinds of stories. major corporations are so determined to maintain their PR narrative and refuse to grant any acknowledgement to the truth, walmart literally refused to pay the family for the death of a black friday staff member for years just to avoid publicly acknowledging responsibility. (here's an article from 2013 about that)
this isn't a crowd crush example, but the way that major corporations can spin narratives against their victims so thoroughly can be seen with the McDonald's coffee burn lawsuit situation, where even people who considered themselves politically aware fell for the narrative that the lawsuit was frivolous. this is a very similar situation to the way that companies eschew responsibility for crowd crushes. everybody is primed by the media for the narrative that it's the crowd's fault, and that is by design. as a result, i think it's important to speak up for the victims of situations like this again and again and again, because even people who wouldn't naturally believe they're better than the victims are basically led to believe that the victims are at fault by media and by the authorities.
and with all these cases-- crowd crushes, the McDonalds coffee lawsuit, and natural disasters alike --the victim-blaming narrative is always authoritarian, classist, and racist in nature. the concept of the victims as the mindless and animalistic mob, the writhing crowd of the poor and unwashed, the inhuman masses... this concept is something that is upheld and maintained by people that want us to believe that the individual members of these crowds (and whatever groups they are a part of) can't be trusted to think and act for themselves, and that they must be guided, contained, and violently controlled by the authorities and upper classes of our society: the major corporations, the bosses, the government, the landowners, the rich, and the police who serve the interests of these parties. and people with lesser privileges (but privileges nonetheless) will mentally align themselves with authority because they view themselves as above the crowd, more human than the crowd, due to the self-exceptionalist coping mechanism that people use to comfort themselves and deny that anything that horrendous could ever happen to them.
basically, to me, the concept of the mindless, self-victimizing crowd is a political concept, and the victims of crowd disasters have to be defended because they are seen as the blame for society's ills, on top of having undergone one of the most frightening and traumatizing experiences a person can undergo.
again, here is a link to that new yorker article on the topic of crowd crushes, this time as an archive link bc the new yorker has reading limits or whatever
