I sense a psychological gap here.

The people who intervened short of jumping the blood-spattered psycho were driving somewhere, not looking for combat. They weren’t armed (thanks, California!), and they weren’t all friends who know they can trust each-other for backup. They were, in other words, both psychologically and materially unprepared for stopping a psycho-killer.

Some me a person who doesn’t jump in in those circumstances and I’ll show you almost everyone on Earth, and I’ll repeat that it’s easy to talk tough on the internet.

(And in fairness, like I said, I’m sure from their posts that many of Misha’s commenters are “rough men” as the famous poem speaks of - but most people aren’t, and it’s not reasonable to condemn the 23 year old woman to eternal damnation for not being a “rough man” and fulfilling the requirements such men put on themselves.)

I should be clear that I do not consider the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ to be mutually exhaustive categories — there are people and viewpoints that don’t fit cleanly under either category. But there definitely is a distinctive and self-aware group of people with reasonably identifiable beliefs that can be classified as ‘the left’. They even talk about themselves in such terms. (Recently they seem to be calling themselves “progressives”, which I view as a total misnomer because their political views are fundamentally regressive, but I don’t want to be too digressive.) Classifying very broad cultural and political movements doesn’t usually mean identifying a single unifying idea that can be expressed in a single sentence; such movements are integrated by sets of mutually reinforcing ideas, only some of which may be held by any individual member of the movement.

The “bundling” of causes under a broader umbrella is perfectly legitimate. Environmentalism does this sort of thing, tying together global warming, alternative energy, opposition to oil exploration and drilling, anti-pollution regulation, forest preservation, recycling and a host of other specific causes under a higher level concept. Ideas should be accepted based on their merit, yes — but they must also be integrated together, related to other ideas and assembled into an appropriate conceptual hierarchy. That’s part of what it means to take ideas seriously.

And for the record I would sooner have bamboo shoots stuck underneath my fingernails than sit down and watch Bill O’Reilly. Everything I’ve heard about the man leads me to think he’s an ignorant, nativist populist blowhard. Hey, yet another reason I’m not a Republican!

And this is my critique of what you just said in your last sentence. The right wing view that there are exactly two sides to everything -it’s a false dichotomy. There is not one ubiquitous mass of leftist ideas -that any sane person can point to. They vary in many respects and are quite different -almost always. One should either agree with ideas or not based on their merit -not because it epitomizes some rationale.

I think that is what you meant to say -anyways.

Some of us are - maybe more than the average, and that is certainly something that would affect the outcome, at least to a matter of degrees.

But show me a person who can’t bring himself to jump on some goblin’s back in an attempt to save the life of a two-year-old being stomped to death in the street…

…and I’ll show you someone who deserves far worse than to be ‘castigated’.

‘Asking’ or ’suggesting’ that evil stop just isn’t enough - sometimes even ordinary people have to do something.

- MuscleDaddy

(Nor is the comparison to Genovese valid; Genovese died partially because the police didn’t take the calls seriously, and because she got up and moved out of sight before the killer came back to finish killing her. The idea that “people watched her get murdered and did nothing” is simply a myth.

The people here did call the police (who did take the call seriously, and came in a damned helicopter for maximum response time), and did try to deter the attacker, both verbally, and by looking for weapons to attack the obviously crazed murderer with.

Contra the commenters at Misha’s, whose smugness revolts me, I don’t blame the 23 year old woman who drove up for not physically engaging a violent psychotic, unarmed, or any of the others. Maybe Misha’s commenters are all trained martial artists or combat-hardened veterans, but random civilians are not psychologically prepared for mortal combat with a random psychotic who’s already trying to kill someone.

To castigate them and wish them eternally damned for that strikes me as at best greatly mistaken, and at worst horribly easy for someone who wasn’t there.)

The price of containment and treatment is vast amounts of potable water flushed away, thousands of kilometers of sewage networks and huge financial and energy costs treating the toxic waste.

Given the differences in many developing countries urban environment, dry systems are often cheap, hygienic, efficient, autonomous solutions.