naked capitalism

craazyman says:

I’m a bleeding heart idiot when it comes to these things.

Years ago walking in the East Village at dusk with a girlfriend I ran across a man passed out on the sidewalk. He was disheveled and maybe dead. I walked into a nearby store and said to call an ambulance. They complained he was a drunk and why waste the ambulance. They may have been right for all I know. I felt a weird sense that maybe I was narcissistically virtuous and ultimately grandstanding in some way. This situation, in New York, is admittedly far more ambiguous than the examples in the post. I likely would not do this today, scarred as I am by the world’s psychopaths and vultures.

The second experience was far more strange and I wonder at the ultimate nature of its reality. I walked out of my apartment building in the East 80s one afternoon and there was a cab idling in the street outfront and a crowd of 10 or 12 people on the opposite sidewalk standing around looking. I crossed the street and saw the cabbie — a middle Eastern or Indian/Pakistani type (this was before 911) — wash hunched over the steering wheel with blood all over his face and his shirt. He was breathing but his head was tilted back and he was holding his nose to control the flow of blood. I looked at him and at the crowd, who was completely silent and strangely detached, and I asked if anyone had called an ambulance. No one said a word. I then asked him if he was OK and whether he needed an ambulance. He shook his head slightly, and never looked at me or said a word. I stood there confused for a few seconds and then walked away to run my errand. A few minutes later I walked back to my building and the crowd and the cab were gone. Not a hint remained of anything.

I recall a strange feeling at the scene, sort of a thickness in the air and a heaviness in the light, like the mind-cinema of a dream. It may have been only my anxiety. But that feeling too was completely gone when I walked back, not 4 minutes later, replaced by the usual emptiness and hurriedness of the street. I believe a lot of strange things about the universe and the way it works. That’s why I am a professor of contemporary anlaysis at the University of Magonia. The felonious sailers of Abogard of Lyon may be more than metaphors. It’s all a big school and we are the students, perplexed and confused and gamed by all the trickery. I drift from the topic, but the conforming impulse is deep and Mammon feeds on it as a feast.

Richard Kline says:

Myself, I never assume either that anyone knows what they’re doing or is going to respond to a potential emergency until and unless I observe them demonstrating either point. Part of that is having lived enough years to become, via experience, a tad cynical about the engaged competence of my fellow human beings (gotta love ‘em anyway, tho’). Part of that is a function of what I do for a living, one portion of which involves initiating emergency response protocals as needed regarding which I have observed individuals sit right next to sounding, flashing alarms and ignore them though they are trained to respond. Part of that is through my experiences in theraputic contexts with numerous schizophrenics, some of whom could be reasonably responsive on a given day but most all of whom, including the aforementioned, could sit next to someone noisily bleeding to death or otherwise dying before their eyes and not move a finger, especially if everyone else was non-responding also.

Human beings are capable of a wide range of responses when face with emergencies or simple anomalies. Non-reactivity is always very near the top of the list. It’s simply a mistake to assume that you will get rational, engaged responses from other human beings at any given time. You’ll get them much of the time, yes, but you can’t assume you’ll get them at any _given_ time. So keep an eye peeled and hop to it yourself, or the yolk’s on you.

^WizeUp says:

Well, even if you can get a po po’s attention….

“CLEVELAND – A woman told authorities in December that a man now accused of killing 11 women had beaten her and tried to rape her, and police and prosecutors are giving conflicting explanations for why a case was abandoned that could have led them months earlier to the bodies scattered around the suspect’s stench-filled house.

The woman’s complaint, nearly 10 months before police started finding bodies in Anthony Sowell’s home, adds to the questions about whether law enforcement, neighbors and victims did enough to catch a suspected serial killer. Five of the victims disappeared after the complaint was filed.

The woman had scratches around her neck and was bleeding from a deep gash in her thumb when she flagged down police near Sowell’s home on Dec. 8, according to a police report obtained by The Associated Press.

Police said they found what appeared to be blood on a tissue in the driveway and footprints in the snow indicating a possible struggle.

The report shows that police went into the house and to a third-floor landing, where they saw a trash can containing broken glass, a sweater, pink sweat pants and panties.

They knocked on the door of a third-floor apartment, Sowell answered and they arrested him. They saw drops of blood inside the house and scratch marks on Sowell’s face.

Police suggested that Sowell be charged with robbery, but he was released after two days, Cleveland Lt. Thomas Stacho said Friday. Stacho said a detective presented the information to a prosecutor.

The prosecutor herself decided the woman wasn’t credible and wrote a note saying so “underneath a box that the prosecutor checked indicating that the complaint was unfounded,” Stacho said.

City prosecutor Victor Perez told The Plain Dealer that the detective was the person who felt the woman was not credible.”

Of course upon reading such details I was immediately reminded of another case, in the midwest, with outrageously indifferent officers, from the 1991 news cycle:

“In the early morning hours of May 30, 1991, 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone (by chance, the younger brother of the boy whom Dahmer had molested) was discovered on the street, wandering naked, heavily under the influence of drugs and bleeding from his rectum. Two young women from the neighborhood found the dazed boy and called 911. Dahmer chased his victim down and tried to take him away, but the women stopped him.[29] Dahmer told police that Sinthasomphone was his 19-year-old boyfriend, and that they had an argument while drinking. Against the protests of the two women who had called 911, police turned him over to Dahmer. They later reported smelling a strange scent while inside Dahmer’s apartment, but did not investigate it. The smell was the body of Tony Hughes, Dahmer’s previous victim, decomposing in the bedroom. The two policemen failed to run a background check that would have revealed that Dahmer was a convicted child molester still under probation.[30] The officers laughed about the incident, one joking that his partner was “going to get deloused.”[31] Later that night, Dahmer killed and dismembered Sinthasomphone, keeping his skull as a souvenir.

John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish, two of the three police officers who returned Sinthasomphone to Dahmer, were fired from the Milwaukee Police Department after their actions were widely publicized, including an audiotape of the officers making homophobic statements to their dispatcher and cracking jokes about having reunited the “lovers”. The two officers appealed their termination and were reinstated with back pay. They were named officers of the year by the police union for fighting a “righteous” battle to regain their jobs. Balcerzak was later elected president of the Milwaukee Police Association in May 2005.”

Institutionalized negative selection and reward.

sangellone says:

Would that it were true that people don’t react to seeming emergencies especially nowadays with the ubiquitous cell phones.

Two examples from my business (Nat Gas Utility). Any release of natural gas from our system brings forth numerous calls. We have to dispatch a service tech to investigate but a large leak or discharge can overwhelm our capability as we get more calls than we have service techs.

By way of contrast, an electric power outage can leave the power company in the dark as much as their customers as everyone assumes the power company knows about it, that someone else has reported it when, in fact, no one has!

The second example is our service techs lying prone on the ground cleaning out a valve box. Many is the occasion a passing motorist sees the man, seemingly struggling on the ground, and calls for an ambulance. They don’t notice or ignore the company truck and traffic cones and assume our service tech is having a heart attack or something.

Dan Duncan says:

A good post. Says a lot about our filtering mechanisms…and the bias towards a tragic inactivity.

Personally, I am inspired. As a result, I am not going to just sit back and watch this tragedy unfold….Not on my watch, Mister!

MAYDAY! MAYDAY!

IF THE GOOGLE ALGORITHMS SHOULD PICK THIS THREAD UP AND BRING IT TO YOUR EYES…PLEASE HELP!

THERE IS A GROUP OF PEOPLE AT A SITE CALLED NAKED CAPITALISM WHO DESPERATELY NEED AID! THEY ARE WELL-MEANING SORT WHO ARE FLOUNDERING IN A SEA OF WOEFULLY MISGUIDED KEYNESIAN TRIPE. MANY SUFFER FROM WHAT APPEARS TO BE AN INCURABLE STRAIN OF EURO-ENVY.

THE SITUATION IS SO DIRE, THEY REGULARLY (AND WITH NO TRACE OF SHAME OR HUMILIATION) INVOKE THE TEACHINGS OF PAUL KRUGMAN AND BRAD DELONG.

BUT KNOW THIS DEAR RESCUER…SAVING THEM WILL BE NO EASY TASK! THE DELUSIONS OF INTELLECTUAL GRANDEUR ARE PROFOUND. PARTICLE PHYSICS, MEDICAL DIAGNOSES, ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE, MATHEMATICAL MODELING, JURISPRUDENCE, CHAOS THEORY…NO SUBJECT IS BEYOND THEIR GRASP. THEY HAVE “EVERYTHING FIGURED OUT”. AND THE SELF-CONGRATULATORY APPLAUSE FEEDS BACK TO REINFORCE THIS SENSE OF CERTAINTY. A HERCULEAN TASK, INDEED.

BUT DON’T LET THAT STOP YOU. YOUR HELP IS NEEDED.

AND DON’T BE THE SUBJECT OF A COGNITIVE BIAS STUDY. THESE PEOPLE ARE DROWNING. NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO BE NON-RESPONSIVE. SEND HELP IMMEDIATELY!

Bob Alexander says:

The “Wisdom of Crowds” is widely touted on the internet and about the internet as we find ourselves surrounded by recommendation engines, facebook friends and twitter followers. A study by Fleder and Hosanagar at The Wharton School shows statistically that internet socialization narrows choice and limits diversity. All that is inherent in the process. In the instances of life or death emergency the socialization of crowds limited humane response. Have those that tout the “Wisdom of Crowds” forgotten the work on mob behavior by Emile Durkheim?