Knee-Jerk Dimwits: Good Candidates for a Nanny
There’s a minor meme thrashing its way through the right-wing blogosphere just now, prompted by news of a terrible tragedy in England. Apparently a building caught fire in Doncaster (near Manchester, if that helps) a couple of days ago, and several people died before the fire department could arrive. There is anger because the local police prevented neighborhood residents from rushing into the building – without training, safety equipment, or any kind of firefighting gear – to try to save them. And the wingers are rampant.
A pregnant woman, her husband and their three-year-old son were killed in a house fire early yesterday as police who arrived before the fire brigade prevented neighbours from trying to save them. The woman screamed: “Please save my kids” from a bedroom window and neighbours tried to help but were beaten back by flames and were told by police not to attempt a rescue.
By the time firefighters got into the house in Doncaster, Michelle Colly, 25, her husband, Mark, 29, and son, Louis, 3, were dead. Their daughter, Sophie, 5, was taken to hospital and believed to be critically ill.
Davey Davis, 38, a friend of the family, said: “It was the most harrowing thing I have ever witnessed. Michelle was at the bedroom window yelling, ‘Please save my kids’ and we wanted to help but the police were pushing us back and not allowing us near. We were willing to risk our lives to save those kiddies but the police wouldn’t let us.
“Tempers were running very high, particularly with the women who were there, but the police were just saying we have to wait for the fire brigade because of health and safety. . . .
A South Yorkshire Police spokeswoman said: “The senior officer in charge is confident we handled this incident as professionally as possible. In a situation like that you could end up with more deceased bodies than you had in the first place.”
That’s a heartbreaking situation, and you can understand people being angry about it. But at the same time, you can – if you’re not a right-wing idiot – understand the actions of the police as well. I’m not at all clear that what was done in this case was right or wrong; I think it may be one in which you can’t possibly know in advance. But I’m sure it’s not obviously a case in which the police acted wrongly. And the lessons the right wing likes to draw from it are predictably ludicrous.
It seems very heartless to keep people from trying to rescue someone in need – especially if the rescuer acknowledges the danger and is willing to take the risk. But there are good reasons for limiting exposure to dangerous situations – reasons that call for the kind of hard and harrowing decisions that professionals sometimes must make, where a layperson has the luxury of reacting emotionally. As a former EMT, I recall having it drilled into us that the first priority at any disaster or dangerous emergency scene is not to make yourself part of the problem. Putting rescuers in danger only creates more load on those who come after them, and then have to divert resources away from the original victims to rescue the rescuers; it may even force those later responders to expose themselves to danger to rescue bumblers who were not themselves in danger to begin with.
Maybe, if the police had not interfered, the story above would have ended triumphantly, with amateur heroes gallantly winning through to pull these victims to safety at the very last moment, against frightful odds. But I can easily imagine a very different outcome, too:
Authorities are still sifting the ashes of a tragic housefire today, attempting to locate the bodies of the three residents who died in the flames, as well as those of four well-meaning neighbors who ignored directions not to enter the house and attempted an amateur rescue, and the three firefighters who also succumbed during a prolonged effort to extricate both the original victims and the incapacitated Good Samaritans. Observers on the scene report police warned concerned onlookers it was unwise to enter the burning building without appropriate training, equipment, and backup, and could result in injury to themselves and others, but the agitated neighbors could not bring themselves to heed this advice. After rushing into the building, the would-be heroes became disoriented and were overcome by smoke and flames, thus more than doubling the count of trapped victims needing rescue and inadvertently overburdening the professional rescuers who arrived minutes later. The ten deaths that occurred, including those of three firefighters, are more than three times the number that would have resulted even if all residents of the building had gone without assistance, a fact that some suggest slightly tarnishes the brave and high-spirited, but stupidly incompetent, rescue efforts of these self-elected random bystanders.
Which outcome would have resulted, if police had let people rush into the burning building in Doncaster, I don’t know, and I suspect no one else knows. But there is a reason these things are done the way they are done. The expectation is that that way will result in better outcomes overall, and there is reason to believe that is true.
So, what lessons can we draw from this? Something about emotion vs. reason? Self-indulgent agita vs. discipline and hard choices? Shared risks vs. calculated utility? Amateurism vs. professionalism? Maybe the value of not jumping to conclusions?
Nah. The fact that police didn’t let members of the public run into a burning building that killed three people minutes later tells us what’s wrong with modern society, and the dangers of the “nanny state”. You see, we’re all becoming cowardly weaklings, preferring to have professional firefighters with training and equipment put out fires and enter burning buildings, where John Wayne would have just done it barehanded. We’ve been so coddled by nannies like police and firefighters that we actually follow their instructions and don’t burn ourselves to death.
The gloriously inane Mark Steyn somehow manages to compare British police keeping people out of a fire to minimize public danger with the case of Taliban religious enforcers trapping women inside a fire to enforce misogynist limitations on women’s freedom. Because not burning to death is just like burning to death. And, of course, civilization hangs in the balance if firefighting is left to firefighters:
In recent years, the British police have evolved from being merely useless . . . into what John O’Sullivan calls “the paramilitary wing of The Guardian” — the blundering enforcers of the nanny state.
. . . Even when the building’s burning down, you’ve no rights. . . . You can live as free men, with all the rights and responsibilities and vicissitudes of fate that that entails. Or you can watch your society decay and die before your eyes — as England, once the crucible of freedom, dies a little with every day.
Vox Day* manages to make it a conspiracy theory:
It’s clear that the governments of the world are actively seeking to raise humans that are more sheep than wolves. . . .
Don’t defend yourself. Don’t rescue your neighbors. Just sit there and bleat, and perhaps the badge gang will elect to help you.
“The badge gang”? (There’s a P.G. Wodehouse story about the time Bertie Wooster tries to help a pal get engaged by teaching a supposedly adorable child to shout “Kiss Fweddie!” at just the right moment. Of course, the child is a brat and goes out of control, shouting his favorite pet phrase over and over until he ruins everything. Vox Day is that child.)
Kim Priestap manages to work in “nanny-state” three times, as well as “sick”, “disgusting”, “pathetic cowards”, and, of course “the liberals”. (Actually, most of the emergency-services people I’ve known were anything but liberal. They just don’t like to see bystanders rush into emergency scenes and make things worse.) She wants the police fired and made to “fear to show their faces in public”; the British government, in general, should be sued. She ends by sounding the tocsin of rugged individualism in the face of the untrammeled onslaught of insane, liberal, collectivist fire trucks:
Americans, pay attention. This is where we are headed if we don’t stop this insane, collectivist, nanny-state slide.
Yeah – next thing you know, you have professional fire protection services, and then where will you be? (Bear in mind, again, that the kinds of policies exemplified by this incident are standard practice in most professional emergency-services departments. They may or may not have been the right thing in this case. They are almost certainly right in many or most cases. They are in no way a liberal plot, except the the extent that liberals tend to want to do the best thing for the most people, as determined by rational application of facts about the matter.)
And that, finally, brings me to the point of this post.
Leaving aside the total ignorance that pervades these reactions, what startles me about them is how vividly they illustrate the basic conservative mindset. Conservatives are so allergic to the idea that civilized society serves any useful purpose, so resentful of taxes, social programs, and public services of any kind, and so intoxicated by the delusion of their own independence and self-sufficiency, that they actually hate the idea of . . . fire departments. The conservative response to emergencies and disasters is, literally, to deal with it yourself, voluntarily. House on fire? Let the locals rush into the flames on their own. City inundated with storms and flooding? Good luck, dudes – you’re on your own. Healthcare for the poor? (. . . you’re joking, right?)
Once, conservatives used to approve of police and firefighters – they were brave, manly, and did macho things. Recently, the wingers have realized that police and fire protection is paid for out of taxes. Suddenly the police are armed thugs, and firefighters are tools of the nanny state. They would literally rather see the city burn down than pay taxes to prevent it. And they literally see fire departments as some sort of encroachment on their rights – specifically, the right to fight fires on their own. In love with their own vision of themselves as John Galt, John Wayne, and the Spartans at Thermopylae, they’re convinced – or claim they are, when it’s other people’s communities at stake – that having police and fire protection makes you weak, that “freedom” means citizens not gaining any actual benefits from being part of their own society, and that your rights include the right to act in any anti-social or counterproductive way imaginable, just because you feel like it, no matter the effect on other people.
If they just didn’t understand why the police in England did what they did, it would not be remarkable – probably most people don’t understand it (though some might think that was a reason not to shoot their mouths off). But the wingers worked this up into a matter of principle – and their principles are not just grounded on ignorance of how and why societies work in certain respects, but are offensive to the very idea of society. They can’t stand the thought that society makes demands upon them, that benefiting from the civilization you live in means you have to conform to it in even basic ways, that your right to run around and act like a jackass might cause enough of a problem that you should be prevented from doing it. Add their childishflaunting of “liberty” without regard to others to their refusal to contribute to aspects of the government that benefit others, and you have a stance that sees being thrown entirely on your own resources as preferable to having any sense of mutual dependence with members of your own community (though the neighborhoods of the rich are conspicuously endowed with amenities and public services).
The fact that some people in England were prevented from taking a brave but foolish step in the face of disaster bothers me far less than that so many people in America would like to see everyone thrown into disaster with no support at all. The police in England may or may not have been right in this case, but they were acting for the good of all, and with good reason. The wingnut jerks who can’t stand that are acting for the worst for everyone not as privileged as themselves, and on no reason better than their own selfishness, hypocrisy, and delusionally heroic sense of self. The unbelievable childishness of it no longer surprises, but it still takes your breath away.
* Among the many reasons my hair pisses me off is that it makes it impossible for me to mock this “Vox Day” clown on that score anymore. He’s still a dick, though.
Do you have a statistical analysis handy of whether there are more bodies when neighbors try rescuing?
Apparently a stupid book, but it’s rather telling exactly
that your rights include the right to act in any anti-social or counterproductive way imaginable, just because you feel like it, no matter the effect on other people.
Unless, of course, those actions in any way involve a vagina, in which case you absolutely must not be trusted to act on your own and make your own decisions…
gattsuru:
Have you really sunk to the level of randomly citing a cultist work of fiction out of context, and with no discernible point?
whether there are more bodies when neighbors try rescuing
That’s the crux of the issue, and numbers are hard to come by.
Part of the problem is that “bystander rescue” covers many situations, most of them not dangerous, and in those cases rescue is encouraged, not discouraged. Examples would be doing CPR on someone who collapses, or giving first aid at a simple accident. We teach classes to equip people to do that (but also discourage them from trying if they don’t know what they’re doing). Everybody agrees that is desirable.
The issue is cases in which attempting to rescue would either compromise the victim further (one of ER personnel’s major complaints is getting people to stop dragging victims out of crashed cars – it rarely helps, and often makes things much worse), or put the rescuer themselves in danger (swimming into rough water to “rescue” someone you think is “drowning” is another common problem). It’s hard to say definitively which cases fall into the “do rescue” category, and which into the “do not rescue” category. The solution is generally to have professional responders on the scene make that determination – which is what the cops in Doncaster did. There are rules of thumb, as well: it is generally discouraged for ordinary bystanders to go into the water to attempt a swimmer rescue, to have anything to do with electrical or chemical hazards, or to enter a structural fire (Doncaster again), but there is no way to make those determinations categorically, in advance.
I Googled around a bit and found some general guidelines or policy statements discouraging bystander involvement in hazardous emergencies, but nothing like statistics. I suspect there is really no way to calculate “death rate in definitive ‘no go’ circumstances“, because that category is not precisely defined or tracked.
Trying to blanket conservatives as being against firefighters is pretty absurd. The absurd counterpoint to that would be labeling liberals as those who believe it takes a veteran firefighter to place a ladder against a building.
Your point that the bystanders could have become fatalities from helping is well taken – fools rush in and all – but stopping people from rendering any help whatsoever definitely resulted in fatalities.
The outrage seems to come from the police being more interested in following the letter of the law than helping with the situation. None of us were there to make a clear determination, but it seems that is what made the natives restless.
As rights slowly get eroded and people are slowly more and more discouraged from doing anything about problems (though ironically they are more and more encouraged to report neighbors to the authorities) I would tend to be on the side of the people saying we are headed further and further towards nanny state status. Situations like this do not fall into that category in my mind and I think the bloggers are over-reacting, however, there is some truth in what they say. To aggressively dismiss everything they are saying serves no useful purpose.
Trying to blanket conservatives as being against firefighters is pretty absurd
So, you think there’s something so stupid that conservatives won’t believe it? I used to hope that was true.
Statements like “The characteristically moronic behavior of the braindead British coppers”, “strange echoes of that fire at a school in Saudi Arabia . . . beaten back by the stick-wielding religious police to die in the flames”, “the British police have evolved from being merely useless . . . into what John O’Sullivan calls “the paramilitary wing of The Guardian” — the blundering enforcers of the nanny state”, “the infuriating behavior of the British police”, “the governments of the world are actively seeking to raise humans that are more sheep than wolves”, “the sort of lunatics who are now running the capital city asylums”, “lazy government officials”, “perhaps the badge gang will elect to help you”, “Those police . . . are pathetic cowards . . . they should fear showing their faces in public again” make it kind of hard to think these people aren’t against public emergency services personnel. Steyn’s ranting about public safety personnel violating the public’s “right” to fight their housefires themselves without any equipment or training is just more evidence of blind ideology.
but stopping people from rendering any help whatsoever definitely resulted in fatalities
That’s the assumption made by all the right-wing commentators. But that obviously goes much too far. The fire killed those people in the house. There’s no proof that efforts by ill-equipped bystanders would have saved them. There is irrefutable evidence that getting into that fire could have killed others (it killed the people already in it). Keeping bystanders away from or out of the burning building certainly protected them from a proven deadly fire – it may have saved some of their lives; letting them try to rescue the victims themselves may or may not have been successful – we have no way to know that.
The outrage seems to come from the police being more interested in following the letter of the law than helping
I don’t see any reason to think that’s true. And in fact, I’m almost sure it’s not. As I said, I have been trained in dealing with just these kinds of situations, from a professional perspective, and I’ve worked with a lot of people with a lot of experience doing that. I know how they think and why their procedures exist. I’m all but certain the thinking here was to minimize casualties and prevent making things worse, with the expectation that the time taken between the bystanders approaching and firefighters arriving would not make much difference to the outcome, good or bad.
I have no way of knowing whether that calculation was correct. I suspect those who were there on the scene will never be sure of that, themselves. I’m absolutely certain that Steyn, and Nordlinger, and the other ignorant yahoos who have been harping on the issue are equally unable to know that – but I observe they are the ones claiming to have certain knowledge of how these events took place, and further that it was caused by some sort of “nanny-state” mindset that not only makes no sense but does not match any known reality about situations such as these. (Think of your local firefighters. Do any of them strike you as “nannies”, in any sense of that word?) This is ignorance compounded with self-righteous ideology, filtered through the sheer bone stupidity that seems epidemic among this bunch.
Have you really sunk to the level of randomly citing a cultist work of fiction out of context, and with no discernible point?
You know what we need to dissuade this type of behavior?
…A bit of the old ultraviolence.
A real conservative wouldn’t bash the Fire Dept. A true conservative knows that those at fault are the lazy victims who sit around waiting for a government handout in the form of subsidized firefighting personnel (hello, socialism) to come and save their indolent asses because they were too god damn lazy to rescue themselves…
KTK:
“So, you think there’s something so stupid that conservatives won’t believe it? I used to hope that was true.”
*sshole.
Honest to peaches, what the f*** does espousing conservative values have anything to do with this? Granted, it’s stupid to say that the police should’ve let people rush into the building just before it collapsed, and I understand your insane illogical misgivings of ‘conservatives do stupid things, thus, stupid is an inherent quality of conservatives,’ but are you so daft as to *actually* believe that this has anything to do with conservatives what-so-ever?
It’s Brit-bashing, and in this case it’s misplaced by those you refer to oh-so-often as “wingers”. It has absolutely nothing to do with politics, or political mindset, and though there may be some correlation between those who are all up in arms over this and their political standpoint, there is no relation. It is an inherently stupid thing, not a conservative thing.
“That’s the assumption made by all the right-wing commentators.”
Even if these assumptions are being made by right-wing commentators, the fact that they’re right-wingers has little to do with the comments. The fact that they’re making with teh stupid does, however. It’s not a political thing, it’s a foot-in-mouth problem that doesn’t originate in political mindset.
You’re trying to politicize this.
Digg: Clockwork Orange!
It should also be noted that most conservatives dismiss Steyn as being a hotheatd radical. It is a stretch to say he embodies the general beliefs of conservatives.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C437EEA9-A9A9-490D-B5E4-CD952FDEEE17
Barbie:
I think you probably underestimate both the pervasiveness of right-wing stupidity and the popularity of Steyn by at least as much as KTK overestimates it. Your Horowitz link is decidedly the exception rather than the rule. Go read the stuff over at The Corner, or Town Hall, or RedState, for example. Maybe there’s a prominent, popular source for reasonable conservative opinion, but I haven’t found it yet. Most of what I see in Right Blogistan makes Democratic Underground seem tame by comparison.
It’s possible that I underestimate the pervasiveness of right-wing stupidity. I have been known to do so previously. However, I don’t think it is as pervasive and stupid as this site plays it. I’m not saying that there aren’t examples to support the posters oppinion, but I think it’s a fair assessment to say that he’s picking an extreme and trying to generalize it, and it’s not a general opinion. Horowitz may or may not be the exception to the rule, but I don’t think you’re (or I, for that matter) qualified in making the judgement that he is. I disagreet hat Right Blogistan makes the Democratic Underground seem tame by comparison. Maybe it’s just that I don’t like to surround myself with stupid people, and I do like to hang around those who are plied with logic, reason, and rationality, who knows. I don’t frequent RedState, or agree with everything that it says, but I do occasionally head over to see what Left blogistan is saying, and I think it’s a natural curiosity to “see how the enemy thinks,” but the examples both sides pick are of the more extreme. I don’t think Democrats are the milder party. I don’t think one side is significantly, or determinably more rabid than the other. Both make the statement, “we’re the lesser evil.” I actually had to hold myself back from making that accusation that dems are the only side making that claim. It was on the tip of my tongue, but upon second thought, I’ve heard both sides make this claim. I think that illustrates how, initially, we let claims made by opposing views take on a higher weight if it serves our arguments.
I don’t think it is as pervasive and stupid as this site plays it.
Have you ever watched Fox News?
And they’re not just some fly-by-night kooks, they’re the highest-rated cable news network. Once again, compare and contrast top-rated conservative personalities like Hannity, Limbaugh, and O’Reilly against highly rated liberal ones like Maddow and even Olbermann, and there isn’t much comparison. It’s not as if we’re cherry-picking obscure names to suit our ends here. Coulter, Malkin, Reynolds, Hewitt. The list of extremely popular right wing douchebags is a mile long.
I think that illustrates how, initially, we let claims made by opposing views take on a higher weight if it serves our arguments.
That’s true in general, I agree. But I’m not entirely sure it’s the case here. Sure, there’s some exaggeration and hyperbole that goes on, but not near as much as you think. As a fairly reasonable and highly rational self-described conservative, you’re decidedly in the minority. Like it or not, you’re on the side that spent the last several years defending things like torture (as long as we don’t call it that) and the suspension of habeas and Geneva Convention rights if we don’t like your background. These weren’t fringe positions.
TG, in the infinitesimal defense of Fox, if you only consider their “news” coverage and not their commentary, they don’t seem to suck any less than CNN, which is consistantly vapid, erroneous, and scare-mongering. I’m inclined to suspect that the vastly larger number of Fox viewers who have factually inaccurate views in not due to right-wing main-stream media sucking more than left-wing main-stream media, so much as right-wing alternative media (where you actually go to learn things) sucking much worse than left-wing alternative media.