I meant to post about this at the time: this astonishingly callous Washington Post Editorial was published last Thursday; it lambasts wussy Europeans for whining about it being ‘a bit warmer than usual.’
As my friend Vinay puts it, this is not the first time we’ve heard somebody say ‘Hi, 3000 of your people are dead: we’re largely responsible. woot!’. At least some of the Post’s readers would appear to take similar offence.
But what really got me was this passage:
…maybe they will now at least stop turning up their noses at those American summer inventions they’ve long loved to mock: […], the air conditioner that produces sub-arctic temperatures…
Er… those would be the same air conditioners that, later in the same day the article was published, contributed significantly to the failure of an overloaded power grid? Result: roughly as many people as live in the UK were without power for up to 30 hours. Hmm, OK.
And no, actually I still don’t think this is an example of irony. Schadenfreude, perhaps?