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 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED];The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Cc: Carl Tollander 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 actually 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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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
