[FRIAM] [WedTech] Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offendingMuslims|the Daily Mail

Fri May 25 02:15:22 EDT 2007

The link I sent with this notes that of the 38 people who saw Kitty "get 
clobbered"
only a couple would have seen an actual knife or had an idea that she 
was in real danger
or seen anything (and many of the tenants were old and would have had a 
tough time
figuring out what was happening when they'd just been waken at 3am, the 
streetlight
was dim, etc.)

Most just heard a noise in front of a usually noisy bar (this night it 
closed early after a fight),
some saw a woman get up off the ground and walk away (if slowly), 
perhaps a few
actually saw the man by her before he ran away and she got up and walked 
away.
She apparently yelled something one time, didn't keep screaming. (Of 
course if she
was in bad shape she quite likely couldn't have kept screaming but she 
did walk away).
One who realized she was in danger said she called the police, but in 
those pre-911
days lots of calls were lost and callers were regularly abused for 
annoying the police
with non-serious matters (you had to identify yourself to report a crime 
back then).
One observer called the police but got scared to speak and hung up. 
Another was
very very drunk and didn't want to deal with the police. For those that 
didn't realize
it was a knife stabbing, they would have reported an assault, which 
would have brought
out the police in about an hour, too late to help Kitty.

When the murderer did come back and find Kitty, it was behind the 
building next door,
not the same apartment building. The link also notes that a lot of the 
"witnesses" were old
people who wouldn't have seen or heard well, and would have been in no 
position for
heroics, only to call the police. But for most, the incident ended when 
they were woken
up by a yell, they looked to the window, they saw a woman get up and 
walk away.
In short, a typical non-event in noisy tumultous New York.

Of course the NY Times presented this very differently, and thus the 
hyper-example
of citizen apathy. But I also think of cases like these in the middle of 
civilization and
heavy news coverage, and can only imagine how distorted our reporting of 
events
in the Middle East, Asia or Africa is.

[Not long ago I read someone's evaluation of the Third Wave anecdote 
from the
Whole Earth Catalog. In this case it turns out that it wasn't nearly the 
big to-do
that the teacher made it out to be, but the teacher basically made a 
career out of
repeating this "informative lesson" of how Nazism could have started, 
even sucking
in Stewart Brand. The more important lesson there being, "How could this 
bogus version
of events stick around for so long without anyone questioning it as 
obvious bullshit?"
Which possibly relates back to the original thread - in my school we 
didn't study the
holocaust even though I read "Rise & Fall..." for summer reading - 
perhaps the
schools actually thought there were lots of other topics they could 
teach well,
rather than simply caving to possible concerns about Moslem students as 
the paper
asserts.]

Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> Bill,
>  
> I still think the two are related.  The people who watched kitty 
> genovese get clobbered assumed a social fabric in which women dont get 
> beaten to death under their windows and didnt think it their 
> particular responsibility to try to save her life.   The milgrim 
> subjects assumed that the world was not the sort of place where 
> experimenters allow participants to actually torture one another.  
> And, in fact, they were right.  Well, in that particular instance. 
>  
> My former colleague, James Laird, who does research about this sort of 
> stuff, thinks I am a real bonehead about it, so you neednt take my 
> views too seriously.
>  
> Nick
>  
>  
>
>     ----- Original Message -----
>     *From:* Bill Eldridge <mailto:dcbill at volny.cz>
>     *To: *nickthompson at earthlink.net
>     <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net>;The Friday Morning Applied
>     Complexity Coffee Group <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
>     *Cc: *Carl Tollander <mailto:carl at plektyx.com>
>     *Sent:* 5/24/2007 8:48:16 PM
>     *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] Teachers drop the Holocaust to
>     avoid offendingMuslims|the Daily Mail
>
>     Nicholas Thompson wrote:
>>     Carl, 
>>
>>     I am trying to get my Psych 101 in order:  Was the kitty genovese incident
>>     the one that led to that horrendous series of experiments that demonstrate
>>     that if you give people a shock console (or what they THINK is a shock
>>     console) and ask them politely to do so, they will cheerfully use shocks
>>     that they think are lethal, just so long as they are told to?  
>>       
>     Unfortunately not - it's about how neighbors ignore horrible
>     things going on in their insular world.
>     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Genovese
>
>     What it really might represent is how facts are distorted to make
>     events look worse than they
>     are, especially when a newspaper's involved:
>
>     http://www.oldkewgardens.com/ss-nytimes-3.html
>
>     I use to live across from a bar, and one night I saw two guys
>     squaring off on a sidewalk and
>     a third come from behind and break a bottle over one's head. I was
>     on the phone to 911 in
>     a flash, and by the time I'd quickly described the scene unfolding
>     to the dispatcher, the 3 of them
>     were giving each other hugs and going arm-in-arm back into the bar
>     to drink some more.
>
>     In a similarly bad neighborhood where I flipped my bike and broke
>     my collarbone, I was
>     staggering around in a great deal of pain, but got a car to stop
>     (cautiously) late at night in just a few minutes,
>     and they were a great help in getting me to a hospital. Good
>     Samaritans still exist.
>
>     I'm intrigued by one line in the article, "But the same department
>     deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades
>     at Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their balanced
>     treatment of the topic would have challenged
>     what was taught in some local mosques." It makes it sound like
>     there's a good balanced way of explaining
>     the Crusades as anything but a good deal of Euro-thuggery intent
>     on dealing a good come-uppance to
>     the well-entrenched local population some thousands of miles away.
>     Would make for good entertainment
>     to hear this rationale at least.
>
>     Personally, I think most grade school teachers are better off
>     trying to teach simpler, less contentious topics
>     well (even if ignoring whether Columbus was actual ly Catalonian
>     and other possibly interesting side issues)
>     instead of being too focused on fuzzy goals of teaching tolerance
>     and sensitivity, as if there were much
>     of that in history.
>
>     Regarding humor and genocide, I think of the Nazis as a pretty
>     humorless, mystical bunch.
>     Somehow it didn't seem to deter them from genocide.
>
>>     reminds me of the stoners that jg showed us at arrowhead, who would run out
>>     from the crowd, throw a stone, and then sink back into the anonymity of the
>>     crowd.  
>>
>>     Thought experiment:  if all humor were forbidden, would genocide be
>>     possible???  In the Pleistocene context, with many small groups in
>>     desperate conflict for unpredictable resources, what was humor FOR?  
>>
>>     N
>>
>>
>>       
>>>     [Original Message]
>>>     From: Carl Tollander <carl at plektyx.com>
>>>     To: <nickthompson at earthlink.net>; <wedtech at redfish.com>
>>>     Date: 5/24/2007 2:52:28 PM
>>>     Subject: Re: [WedTech] Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid
>>>         
>>     offending	Muslims|the Daily Mail
>>       
>>>     Nick asks:
>>>       >Do we need a science of Comparative Genocideology?
>>>
>>>     Closest I've seen that starts to address this is Chapter 15 from Philip 
>>>     Bobbit's book "The Shield of Achilles"
>>>     titled "The Kitty Genovese Incident and the War in Bosnia".  I'll bring 
>>>     it by FRIAM.
>>>
>>>     C.
>>>         
>>
>>
>>
>>     ============================================================
>>     FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>     Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>>     lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>>
>>
>>
>>       
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20070525/5e9ed28f/attachment.html 