House of Eratosthenes

Via Rottie: SFGate and their professional “come interview me” head-shrinkers advise you not to condemn the failed Good Samaritans who just stand around gawking while deplorable acts of violence are committed. Yes, if you see someone weak and helpless being subjected to a good beating, you are not to rush in and right the wrongs without a good plan in place, and that means, you are not to do anything. Nor are you to think ill of anyone else who doesn’t bother to do anything. Those are your instructions for today. Capiche?

Oh yeah and as a pure afterthought, in the “giving you news about what happened” category…some pukeweasel curb-stomped a baby-toddler to death.

One of the witnesses, Deborah McKain of nearby Crows Landing, said she was the first to pull up to the beating scene with her boyfriend, a volunteer fire chief who is 52, as well as her 20-year-old son, her son’s wife and her son’s male friend. They called 911 at 10:13 p.m., police said.

Over the next seven minutes, McKain said, [Sergio Casian] Aguiar kicked his son at least 100 times as he calmly stated that he needed to “get the demons out” of the boy.

Seven minutes! And the gawkers gawked. But tut tut tut, remember what we said up there about judging the gawkers. That helping-the-helpless and defending-the-defenseless is best relegated to the ancient history of Matt Dillon. Nothing to see here, citizen.

Bystanders are justifiably scared and confused in such situations, the experts said Wednesday, and they lack the experience needed to respond with force. They can also be mesmerized by shock.

John Conaty, a veteran homicide detective and former patrol officer in Pittsburg, said that in interviews of witnesses to violence, “the common thing you hear is, ‘I was frozen in fear. I just couldn’t take action.’ ”
:
“I would not condemn these people,” said John Darley, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University who has studied how bystanders react in emergency situations. “Ordinary people aren’t going to tackle a psychotic.

“What we have here,” Darley said, “is a group of family and friends who are not pre-organized to deal with this stuff. They don’t know who should do what. … If you had five volunteer firefighters pull up, you would expect them to have planned responses and a division of labor. But that’s not what we had here.”

For the first ten seconds or so, that’s a great excuse. It’s a mediocre one after thirty. After forty-five seconds, it doesn’t wash at all.

This curb stomping went on for seven…full…minutes. Sorry, shrink. This doesn’t impress me as a logical preponderance of what happens to the human psyche during such attacks, not one bit. What it impresses me as, is a manifestation of one of the Things I Know About People That I Wasn’t Told When I Was A Child, specifically, Item #27.

27. People who make a conscious decision not to offer help or defense to someone who needs it, don’t want anyone else to help or defend that person either.

Think about it. Some guy stomps a baby and two guys watch and don’t make a move to interfere, they can hide behind Dr. Darley’s limp, flaccid excuses all they want. Seven minutes. Hell, make it an hour; might as well be.

What if one of the guys makes a move to help the child and the other guy doesn’t? Think on that. Maybe the guy who interferes, fails. Maybe he gets hurt. It really doesn’t matter — the guy who continued standing there, with his mouth hanging open collecting flies, while the other guy at least made the effort to stand up for what’s right…he looks like what he is. A craven coward.

And that’s why people who don’t bother to stop bad things from happening, don’t want anyone else to do it either. Makes ’em look bad. And that’s why, for every four words that appear in this “article,” at least three of them are dedicated to the effort of eradicating from us any expectation that we should help each other out when bad people come out of the woodwork and do their bad stuff.

There’s very little “news” in it.

Anyway, let’s go on the assumption that Professor Darley is correct here. Something is happening in our society, and these days you can stomp on a little baby for seven minutes and all the bystanders will just stand around like they’re on drugs, watching you. It’s to be expected of them because this is just the way people are. And let’s even suppose, further, that this just makes good sense.

Okay then.

If that is the case, Texas is handling the death row properly is it not? We need to get started on one end of this death row thing, and choke our way through it toward the other end, lickety-split. Go through ’em like Rosie O’Donnell through a crate of M&M’s.

Because people are just that way, too. Mr. Aguiar proved that. So some humans kick their own sons to death…other humans just stand around and watch them. It’s just the way people are. So when we find out people are this violent — knowing our average innocent-bystander hasn’t got in ‘im what it takes to stop that violent guy, when he does his violent stuff — we’d better smoke the hell out of him as fast as we can, right?

I look at it as…our innocent people, like women, girls, old people and two year old babies…they are going to get their defense one way, or the other. And if SFGate and their headshrinkers-on-file are in this great big hurry to eradicate good-Samaritanism from our society, rip the testicles off it, and transform us into a bunch of little pathetic weaklings who will just stand there, mouths agape, watching big strong men stomp babies into the concrete and not lift a finger to stop them after seven minutes — then it’s up to the executioner to supply that defense.

That seems pretty cut and dried.

And if anyone wants to argue that with me, I claim the moral high road. Executing murderers is more civilized and more sophisticated than not executing them. It certainly is, especially in a gelded, overly-vaginized society in which we don’t lift a finger to protect defenseless babies from being stomped into gooey red slush piles on the concrete.

The babes should be able to count on someone. If they can’t count on all these bystanders who are so confused they can’t do the right thing — then let them count on Old Sparky. One or the other.

Bloody fucking hell! 7 minutes!!! That’s evil! How can these people live with themselves? They are just as guilty as the psycho doing the kicking. The whole lot of them should have been rounded up.

Unbelievable.
- pdwalker | 06/20/2008 @ 15:28
Cowards Convention: At least they didn’t offend the ethnicity of the psycho killer. They stopped to look at the crime, but, you know, didn’t want to get involved.

TV, movies, etc. make voyeurs out of the viewers. Peeking through the curtain at some forbidden private act. Secretly, breathlessly, totally absorbed, yet distant, hidden, and protected. Silent masterbation of the mind, without force of character or intellect.

Force of intellect and force of character are powers much feared by all that is the “masses.” Independant action is “actionable;” get back in line, keep your mouth shut, go along-get along, take your Ritilan.

And there they are, trapped in twilight zone 2008, literally watching reality, an act of murder, and their brains are freeze-frame stuck on perpetual mind-fuck.
- Mr. Hatchetman | 06/20/2008 @ 17:27
What in the world makes you think this guy will be executed for the murder of his son? Any half-awake attorney will plead insanity and the perp will do a couple of years in “treatment” before being turned loose on society again.

The same mind-set that impels witnesses to not intervene gives us judges who refuse to consider the death penalty, or appellate judges who overturn death sentences on some irrelevant point.
- sf4 | 06/21/2008 @ 04:20

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