Just to show that spectacularly idiotic statements are not solely the precinct of the left I give you Katherine Mangu-Ward over at the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard who writes "thank goodness" that tens of thousands of people perished in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The reason? "[T]he story of the buried city of Pompeii has long fueled the imaginations and writings of those who know of it." I am reminded of Lionel Trilling's horrifying observation that, when viewed from a sufficient distance, "the corpses and hacked limbs are not so very terrible, and eventually they even begin to compose themselves into a 'meaningful pattern.'"
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