49 ms·

The Falling Man

170 points by kareemm 10y ago

jessaustin 10y ago
As a culture, we really have a misguided attitude about suicide, stemming largely from the insidious just-world fallacy. It's a comfort to many of us in this fucked-up world, to think that maybe it's not as unfair as it seems. As persistent as that warped logic is, it doesn't withstand suicide. We don't want to imagine we could ever face a truly intolerable situation, so instead we imagine a world that doesn't allow such, and we damn those whose deaths would contradict us.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  The world is as Just as we make it. Cynicism is a cancer. We damn those who gave up on trying after having been given the greatest gift that can be received. The point is life - more, better, higher, more beautiful, more intelligent, more creative. Anything that gets in the way of the unfoldment of life in the universe will be deemed bad.
  - electic 10y ago
    "The world is as Just as we make it." - There are limits to this. There are forces far powerful than we like to admit. Systems man made. Systems that are that of nature. With all our might we can bend some of them, but sometimes we can't. Along with things that are full of happiness there are those that fall into depression, poverty, sadness, loss, regret, and suicide. Sometimes we are victims to circumstance. The man that fell from that tower that day didn't want his world to be what it was on that sad day. He didn't give up as you put it. To me he is brave.
    - jomamaxx 10y ago
      The man was not committing suicide, he was murdered.
      - qubex 10y ago
        Precisely. Thanks for summarising it so succinctly and truthfully.
      - shiven 10y ago
        So why the collective censorship? There is no such censoring of "murder" news.
      - electic 10y ago
        I never said he was committing suicide, I said he was a victim of circumstance. Even if he did intentionally jump, it wasn't a bad thing our society makes it out to be. We will never know either way.
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        He was doomed to die no matter what. He was doomed due to the deliberate and malevoloent actions of others. He either chose, or was unable to overcome psychological impulses, to act in a way that he took his own life. I'm looking at a definition of suicide that includes the word "voluntary", which could well be contested given the extreme threat and lack of alternative here. At the same time, I do not personally see all suicide as unwarranted, wrong, or sinful (though there are cases in which I'd strongly prefer people didn't kill themselves). The Falling Man, and the many others who similarly lept from the Twin Towers, and those who similarly take their lives in the face of desperate circumstances are what they are. In many cases the label "suicide" fits. I don't find it dishonourable. But causality and life are complicated, words express ideas, and ideas are our own mental models. If you trace events back to original causes you find numerous complications at ascribing simple terms and unambiguous labels to them. Sometimes the ambiguity is greater, sometimes lesser. Describing these particular deaths as both murder and suicide strikes me as defensible.
        jomamaxx 10y ago
        I obviously understand the nuanced issue regarding the fact that he technically took his own life. But given that is death was absolutely imminent within a few minutes, I really don't think this is a case of 'suicide' in any of the remotely classical scenarios. It's not 'suicide' in any reasonable sense of the term.
    - jomamaxx 10y ago
      99% of misery is caused by humans. Most people who commit suicide are not objectively in situations of extreme difficulty. Many wealthy, successful people commit prison. Surely, negative conditions are correlated with suicide, but it's not the driver. It's a psychological/spiritual issue.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  > As a culture, we really have a misguided attitude about suicide A lot of it is religious. It is considered a great sin in popular religions. Even though many don't follow religion it left this ingrained idea in the culture. Also perhaps is seen as shameful. Part of the desire to censor the images was probably not purely to respect the victims, but also to hide the act, because it is shameful ("don't show this to the children" type thing) The reason it is shameful is that it is seen as the most radical act of "giving up". And that doesn't jive with the "you can overcome anything with hard work" culture. You can read this in how people talked about it -- "they were forced out" instead of "they decided to jump". Both are correct at some level. But first seems more appropriate in our culture. One other level, perhaps even unconsciously we understand there is a possibility of contagion. It has happened and actually has been observed (someone in a high school does, and then usually a string of suicided might follow, the more talk and media coverage the more suicides follow etc). Maybe at some point in that past that fear of contagion got codified as a taboo...
  - gaius 10y ago
    A lot of it is religious. It is considered a great sin in popular religions. Well partially, but there is also that in ancient times it was considered that you would be depriving the emperor/king/state of his rightful property (or hers obv). Infact in North Korea today if you commit suicide your family will be sent to a slave labour camp for that same reason.
  - sullyj3 10y ago
    I think that the just world fallacy is an enormous contributor to the existence of religion in the first place.
    - merpnderp 10y ago
      I was under the impression most religions don't believe the world is just or fair and that it is people's jobs to attempt to make it more so.
      - jessaustin 10y ago
- smsm42 10y ago
  I don't see how it works. Just world certainly does not contradict suicide. A lot of suicide is driven by either mental or physical suffering, and nobody who in not 5 year old doubts that suffering exists in the world, and a lot of it. We certainly hope it won't happen to us, but I don't think anybody denies that it does happen around us. So while I agree that american culture has misguided attitude on suicide, I don't think your explanation works.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    You seem to be using a novel meaning for the term "just-world fallacy": the assumption that suffering is deserved is the whole point.
    - smsm42 10y ago
      Well, "deserved" is very nebulous - I'm not sure there can be any fact, including suicide, that can disprove that particular instance of suffering is "deserved". You can always build a logic that this person has done something - in this life, in past life, in spiritual realm, in thoughts, whatever - that made them "deserve" whatever suffering there is. It's not a verifyiable thing as such, and thus it can't be really disproven by empirical fact. It's a question of faith, which doesn't deal with empirical facts by definition. I don't see how suicide changes anything there.
Rhapso 10y ago
I've allways found it odd that a culture that so values personal freedom: "the right to choose what to do with your life" so activity denies the right to choose how to end it.
- visakanv 10y ago
  See also the backlash against the athlete protesting during the national anthem.
  - smsm42 10y ago
    What this has to do with freedom? He was free to express his point of view, others were free do disagree with him and tell him they don't like his point of view - or, on the contrary, like it a lot. I think it worked exactly as it should be.
- sevenless 10y ago
  It doesn't really though. You have no choice on whether to participate in the market economy, and forming labor unions is restricted. Compared to other developed countries, work hours are long, minimum wage low and holidays short. If you don't work, even if the only work available is horrible and degrading, society thinks it's okay to deny you healthcare and starve you to death. This isn't a necessity, but a moral norm we have, that people who don't work should be punished, by death if necessary. It's interesting that so many pro-market people claim to be individualists, because the view that the market should dictate everyone's life is as collectivist as it gets.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    "society thinks it's okay to deny you healthcare and starve you to death" This makes no sense. Society does not 'deny' you almost anything. That someone cannot or choses not to buy something is not 'denial'. "because the view that the market should dictate " ???? The market does not dictate anything. The 'market' is just the sum totality of 'individual choices'.
Spooky23 10y ago
A former colleague was there and witnessed this. He struggles with it for a variety of reasons, including that he would have been inside a few minutes later. The way he put it, which says it all for me, was that the jumpers were a sort of testimony to the fact there was no way out and no hope for the people trapped up there. There's lots of cultural stigma to suicide, and one of the reasons for that is there is always reason to hope. The poor souls up there ran out of reasons.
- Waterluvian 10y ago
  The thing that sticks with me beyond anything else was that there was so much horror that day, it couldn't be kept off TV. I grew up with the understanding that you simply don't see death live on TV.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Everyone was just gobsmacked and the usual bullshit storymaking aspect of TV coverage didn't happen. I remember all of the volunteers, doctors, nurses, etc heading to one of the hospitals to help triage a flood of injuries -- but nobody came. I was 150 miles away in Albany. When the state government and banks dismissed employees, people were literally running in a daze to go home. I stood on the corner of the busiest street downtown waiting for my wife to pick me up -- everyone scurried off and the streets were utterly empty and silent at lunchtime. It was literally just me and an art installation statue of a guy reading a newspaper. The silence was eerie and bizarre.
damienkatz 10y ago
One very morbid question I have is were some of the jumpers actually pushed? Some of the pictures you see people crowding to the few available edges, a crush of bodies trying to breath. Wouldn't some of the people on the edges have been pushed by those further inside?
- swampthinker 10y ago
  Or perhaps unintentionally knocked off and people crammed the edge. There is no way to know.
- kristofferR 10y ago
  It's possible. In this video you can see 8+ people jumping within a couple of seconds of each other from approximately the same place: https://youtu.be/b9QN3AkydYY?t=344 https://youtu.be/b9QN3AkydYY?t=344
nickthemagicman 10y ago
Why were there no parachutes? It would at least have given them a chance.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- sndean 10y ago
  I was surprised to see there's some people with the same idea: http://www.sosparachute.com/en/site/sos http://www.sosparachute.com/en/site/sos And an ABC News story asked the same question two months after 9/11: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=126613&page=1 http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=126613&page=1
  - mgkimsal 10y ago
    30 meters doesn't seem all that useful. What is that - 9 floors? I guess it'd be better than nothing, but have there been a lot of preventable deaths in 10 story building fires where this would have saved them?
    - sndean 10y ago
      It says "for heights of 30 meters and up," though. Unless I'm not understanding. I'm certainly no parachute expert.
- sulam 10y ago
  At some point you have to make an ethical decision -- what is the best allocation of society's resources? It would be expensive to outfit all tall buildings with parachutes in the exceedingly unlikely event that they would be useful -- and that's before you factor in the low probability that they would successfully save people with little to no training in normal parachuting, much less BASE jumping, a sport which often kills trained participants jumping under far more favorable conditions. You might as well ask why people who work in tall buildings don't take parachutes to work themselves. The answer is obvious, and I hope it's equally obvious why buildings don't do this. On a related note: having to send your shoes through the x-ray machine in an airport security line is almost as bad of an idea. :/
chiaro 10y ago
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” - David Foster Wallace
richardw 10y ago
It's surprising that people would criticise those who jumped. Wow. A focus on the idealised view of the jumper ("they would never have killed themselves!") blocks people from feeling the sheer terror and pain the jumper must have felt. The focus on some abstract concept like "suicide is bad, m'kay" rather than right-here-and-now burning flames and the terrifying strangle of unbreathable smoke. The fact that so many jumped despite all our fears of heights and certain death, is proof of a greater horror in those floors. Society skews our perspective so we focus on the trivial, punishing those whose family members were lost, rather than learning something about the situation those poor people must have been in and empathising with their families.
- rawfan 10y ago
  My little brother is a fire fighter. He tells me it's involuntary. At a certain point the heat and smoke get so intense that you can't do anything but jump. He's seen his trained collegues do it.
  - truth_sentinell 10y ago
    I wonder why most business buildings don't have some sort of mechanism on the outside that allows people to climb off? That would have save many many lives.
    - refurb 10y ago
      You mean a fire escape? Most buildings do, but some are internal. Nothing like that would have helped in the wtc.
      - celticninja 10y ago
        Parachutes next to a window with a hammer. Would have helped some, but of course you could not store enough for everyone. And whilst training may usually be necessary, shoulder and leg straps aren't that hard to work out and a bright coloured mini chute thrown to engage the main chute would be feasible. And of course the perils of crashing into the building etc are still there but for the sort of situations we are talking about you would be almost certainly dead if yiu didn't jump.
amelius 10y ago
I'm not sure if it is mentioned in the article, but perhaps one of the soothing parts is that most of these people probably didn't even know what really happened that day.
bootload 10y ago
The Falling Man has a name. Though not officially identified, it is thought to be Jonathan Briley. A lot of people were killed that day. This is just one story. [0] You can view a documentary about this image here ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gbxJ4xUDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gbxJ4xUDE (1hr 11m) RIP Jonathan. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Man
- gilgoomesh 10y ago
  The source for that Wikipedia article – and the documentary you linked – is an earlier (2003) version of the same linked article by Tom Junod. Jonathan Briley is discussed in the article. While likely, it's not certain.
  - michaelcampbell 10y ago
    Which Wikipedia makes pretty clear. > The subject of the image, whose identity remains uncertain,...
    - bootload 10y ago
      "The subject of the image, whose identity remains uncertain,..." The uncertainty, if memory serves me from viewing the above documentary, is at the request of the family for religious reasons.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
amelius 10y ago
Perhaps "depersonalization" can explain the state some of these people were in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization
obrero 10y ago
Ho-hum. The military campaign which lead to these people's deaths was planned by one man. Osama bin Laden, a Saudi plucked from obscurity when the US government began (via ISI) heavily arming him so that he could oust the secular Afghan government and wage a jihad to impose his own vision of an Islamic government. It is some irony that the people in the Pentagon who sent arms to Mr. bin Laden and his cadre would some day have an airliner plow through their building by the anti-imperialist they had empowered. I guess we'll never see long, mawkish stories in Esquire about the people the US had killed in Afghanistan in the US-backed attempt to oust the secular government and impose the proto-Al Qaeda and proto-Taliban's vision of government. America was gung-ho for bin Laden, when he was killing other secular types. People who "took the other side" on Afghanistan were who were pilloried in the US, beyond the pale, followed by the FBI etc. Then the US decides to plant military bases all over "Saudi" Arabia. The US refers to the country always with the prefix "Saudi", as if its puppet dictatorship there had a divine right which extended to the country name. Some Arabians, Mr. bin Laden, and some of the fellows who plowed into the aforementioned World Trade Center and Pentagon did not appreciate this foreign military occupation. After all, the US had been arming them for a long time to fight against foreign imperialists setting up their military bases on foreign lands. I should note that when the US kills civilians with bombs, it accuses the foreign country of having "human shields" around military installations. Well obviously the Pentagon is a military target. By the US standard I just mentioned the World Trade Center is a military target as it had military intelligence and such offices there. So by the US standard, the people who died were "human shields" cast their to die to protect the military intelligence offices in the World Trade Center. Tired of this mawkish nonsense fifteen years on. The US is who armed this jihadist to fight against secular governments, the US rung his home country with military bases (which in a typical bully/coward way were gone within two years of 9/11 - 9/11 worked, the pitiful helpless giant skulked away in a cowardly manner). It's kind of like the imperialists of France bombing Syria, then asking for worldwide bereavement, world leaders holding hands and marching through Paris to mourn the fact that some brave Syrian anti-imperialists decided to bomb them back a month later. I can understand a powerful nation deciding to subjugate weaker nations, but this mawkish mourning about the "victims" of anti-imperialists fighting to regain control of their countries from the imperialist American aggressor is sickening. Americans are who armed this guy to wage jihad on secular imperialism to begin with. Then they decided to ring his country with their military bases.
Lidador 10y ago
How can the same link be submitted twice? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467708

170 points by kareemm 10y ago

As a culture, we really have a misguided attitude about suicide, stemming largely from the insidious just-world fallacy. It's a comfort to many of us in this fucked-up world, to think that maybe it's not as unfair as it seems. As persistent as that warped logic is, it doesn't withstand suicide. We don't want to imagine we could ever face a truly intolerable situation, so instead we imagine a world that doesn't allow such, and we damn those whose deaths would contradict us.

jomamaxx 10y ago
The world is as Just as we make it. Cynicism is a cancer. We damn those who gave up on trying after having been given the greatest gift that can be received. The point is life - more, better, higher, more beautiful, more intelligent, more creative. Anything that gets in the way of the unfoldment of life in the universe will be deemed bad.
- electic 10y ago
  "The world is as Just as we make it." - There are limits to this. There are forces far powerful than we like to admit. Systems man made. Systems that are that of nature. With all our might we can bend some of them, but sometimes we can't. Along with things that are full of happiness there are those that fall into depression, poverty, sadness, loss, regret, and suicide. Sometimes we are victims to circumstance. The man that fell from that tower that day didn't want his world to be what it was on that sad day. He didn't give up as you put it. To me he is brave.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    The man was not committing suicide, he was murdered.
    - qubex 10y ago
      Precisely. Thanks for summarising it so succinctly and truthfully.
    - shiven 10y ago
      So why the collective censorship? There is no such censoring of "murder" news.
    - electic 10y ago
      I never said he was committing suicide, I said he was a victim of circumstance. Even if he did intentionally jump, it wasn't a bad thing our society makes it out to be. We will never know either way.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      He was doomed to die no matter what. He was doomed due to the deliberate and malevoloent actions of others. He either chose, or was unable to overcome psychological impulses, to act in a way that he took his own life. I'm looking at a definition of suicide that includes the word "voluntary", which could well be contested given the extreme threat and lack of alternative here. At the same time, I do not personally see all suicide as unwarranted, wrong, or sinful (though there are cases in which I'd strongly prefer people didn't kill themselves). The Falling Man, and the many others who similarly lept from the Twin Towers, and those who similarly take their lives in the face of desperate circumstances are what they are. In many cases the label "suicide" fits. I don't find it dishonourable. But causality and life are complicated, words express ideas, and ideas are our own mental models. If you trace events back to original causes you find numerous complications at ascribing simple terms and unambiguous labels to them. Sometimes the ambiguity is greater, sometimes lesser. Describing these particular deaths as both murder and suicide strikes me as defensible.
      - jomamaxx 10y ago
        I obviously understand the nuanced issue regarding the fact that he technically took his own life. But given that is death was absolutely imminent within a few minutes, I really don't think this is a case of 'suicide' in any of the remotely classical scenarios. It's not 'suicide' in any reasonable sense of the term.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    99% of misery is caused by humans. Most people who commit suicide are not objectively in situations of extreme difficulty. Many wealthy, successful people commit prison. Surely, negative conditions are correlated with suicide, but it's not the driver. It's a psychological/spiritual issue.
rdtsc 10y ago
> As a culture, we really have a misguided attitude about suicide A lot of it is religious. It is considered a great sin in popular religions. Even though many don't follow religion it left this ingrained idea in the culture. Also perhaps is seen as shameful. Part of the desire to censor the images was probably not purely to respect the victims, but also to hide the act, because it is shameful ("don't show this to the children" type thing) The reason it is shameful is that it is seen as the most radical act of "giving up". And that doesn't jive with the "you can overcome anything with hard work" culture. You can read this in how people talked about it -- "they were forced out" instead of "they decided to jump". Both are correct at some level. But first seems more appropriate in our culture. One other level, perhaps even unconsciously we understand there is a possibility of contagion. It has happened and actually has been observed (someone in a high school does, and then usually a string of suicided might follow, the more talk and media coverage the more suicides follow etc). Maybe at some point in that past that fear of contagion got codified as a taboo...
- gaius 10y ago
  A lot of it is religious. It is considered a great sin in popular religions. Well partially, but there is also that in ancient times it was considered that you would be depriving the emperor/king/state of his rightful property (or hers obv). Infact in North Korea today if you commit suicide your family will be sent to a slave labour camp for that same reason.
- sullyj3 10y ago
  I think that the just world fallacy is an enormous contributor to the existence of religion in the first place.
  - merpnderp 10y ago
    I was under the impression most religions don't believe the world is just or fair and that it is people's jobs to attempt to make it more so.
    - jessaustin 10y ago
smsm42 10y ago
I don't see how it works. Just world certainly does not contradict suicide. A lot of suicide is driven by either mental or physical suffering, and nobody who in not 5 year old doubts that suffering exists in the world, and a lot of it. We certainly hope it won't happen to us, but I don't think anybody denies that it does happen around us. So while I agree that american culture has misguided attitude on suicide, I don't think your explanation works.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  You seem to be using a novel meaning for the term "just-world fallacy": the assumption that suffering is deserved is the whole point.
  - smsm42 10y ago
    Well, "deserved" is very nebulous - I'm not sure there can be any fact, including suicide, that can disprove that particular instance of suffering is "deserved". You can always build a logic that this person has done something - in this life, in past life, in spiritual realm, in thoughts, whatever - that made them "deserve" whatever suffering there is. It's not a verifyiable thing as such, and thus it can't be really disproven by empirical fact. It's a question of faith, which doesn't deal with empirical facts by definition. I don't see how suicide changes anything there.

Rhapso 10y ago

I've allways found it odd that a culture that so values personal freedom: "the right to choose what to do with your life" so activity denies the right to choose how to end it.

visakanv 10y ago
See also the backlash against the athlete protesting during the national anthem.
- smsm42 10y ago
  What this has to do with freedom? He was free to express his point of view, others were free do disagree with him and tell him they don't like his point of view - or, on the contrary, like it a lot. I think it worked exactly as it should be.
sevenless 10y ago
It doesn't really though. You have no choice on whether to participate in the market economy, and forming labor unions is restricted. Compared to other developed countries, work hours are long, minimum wage low and holidays short. If you don't work, even if the only work available is horrible and degrading, society thinks it's okay to deny you healthcare and starve you to death. This isn't a necessity, but a moral norm we have, that people who don't work should be punished, by death if necessary. It's interesting that so many pro-market people claim to be individualists, because the view that the market should dictate everyone's life is as collectivist as it gets.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  "society thinks it's okay to deny you healthcare and starve you to death" This makes no sense. Society does not 'deny' you almost anything. That someone cannot or choses not to buy something is not 'denial'. "because the view that the market should dictate " ???? The market does not dictate anything. The 'market' is just the sum totality of 'individual choices'.

Spooky23 10y ago

A former colleague was there and witnessed this. He struggles with it for a variety of reasons, including that he would have been inside a few minutes later. The way he put it, which says it all for me, was that the jumpers were a sort of testimony to the fact there was no way out and no hope for the people trapped up there. There's lots of cultural stigma to suicide, and one of the reasons for that is there is always reason to hope. The poor souls up there ran out of reasons.

Waterluvian 10y ago
The thing that sticks with me beyond anything else was that there was so much horror that day, it couldn't be kept off TV. I grew up with the understanding that you simply don't see death live on TV.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Everyone was just gobsmacked and the usual bullshit storymaking aspect of TV coverage didn't happen. I remember all of the volunteers, doctors, nurses, etc heading to one of the hospitals to help triage a flood of injuries -- but nobody came. I was 150 miles away in Albany. When the state government and banks dismissed employees, people were literally running in a daze to go home. I stood on the corner of the busiest street downtown waiting for my wife to pick me up -- everyone scurried off and the streets were utterly empty and silent at lunchtime. It was literally just me and an art installation statue of a guy reading a newspaper. The silence was eerie and bizarre.

damienkatz 10y ago

One very morbid question I have is were some of the jumpers actually pushed? Some of the pictures you see people crowding to the few available edges, a crush of bodies trying to breath. Wouldn't some of the people on the edges have been pushed by those further inside?

swampthinker 10y ago
Or perhaps unintentionally knocked off and people crammed the edge. There is no way to know.
kristofferR 10y ago
It's possible. In this video you can see 8+ people jumping within a couple of seconds of each other from approximately the same place: https://youtu.be/b9QN3AkydYY?t=344 https://youtu.be/b9QN3AkydYY?t=344

nickthemagicman 10y ago

Why were there no parachutes? It would at least have given them a chance.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
sndean 10y ago
I was surprised to see there's some people with the same idea: http://www.sosparachute.com/en/site/sos http://www.sosparachute.com/en/site/sos And an ABC News story asked the same question two months after 9/11: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=126613&page=1 http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=126613&page=1
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  30 meters doesn't seem all that useful. What is that - 9 floors? I guess it'd be better than nothing, but have there been a lot of preventable deaths in 10 story building fires where this would have saved them?
  - sndean 10y ago
    It says "for heights of 30 meters and up," though. Unless I'm not understanding. I'm certainly no parachute expert.
sulam 10y ago
At some point you have to make an ethical decision -- what is the best allocation of society's resources? It would be expensive to outfit all tall buildings with parachutes in the exceedingly unlikely event that they would be useful -- and that's before you factor in the low probability that they would successfully save people with little to no training in normal parachuting, much less BASE jumping, a sport which often kills trained participants jumping under far more favorable conditions. You might as well ask why people who work in tall buildings don't take parachutes to work themselves. The answer is obvious, and I hope it's equally obvious why buildings don't do this. On a related note: having to send your shoes through the x-ray machine in an airport security line is almost as bad of an idea. :/

chiaro 10y ago

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” - David Foster Wallace

richardw 10y ago

It's surprising that people would criticise those who jumped. Wow. A focus on the idealised view of the jumper ("they would never have killed themselves!") blocks people from feeling the sheer terror and pain the jumper must have felt. The focus on some abstract concept like "suicide is bad, m'kay" rather than right-here-and-now burning flames and the terrifying strangle of unbreathable smoke. The fact that so many jumped despite all our fears of heights and certain death, is proof of a greater horror in those floors. Society skews our perspective so we focus on the trivial, punishing those whose family members were lost, rather than learning something about the situation those poor people must have been in and empathising with their families.

rawfan 10y ago
My little brother is a fire fighter. He tells me it's involuntary. At a certain point the heat and smoke get so intense that you can't do anything but jump. He's seen his trained collegues do it.
- truth_sentinell 10y ago
  I wonder why most business buildings don't have some sort of mechanism on the outside that allows people to climb off? That would have save many many lives.
  - refurb 10y ago
    You mean a fire escape? Most buildings do, but some are internal. Nothing like that would have helped in the wtc.
    - celticninja 10y ago
      Parachutes next to a window with a hammer. Would have helped some, but of course you could not store enough for everyone. And whilst training may usually be necessary, shoulder and leg straps aren't that hard to work out and a bright coloured mini chute thrown to engage the main chute would be feasible. And of course the perils of crashing into the building etc are still there but for the sort of situations we are talking about you would be almost certainly dead if yiu didn't jump.

amelius 10y ago

I'm not sure if it is mentioned in the article, but perhaps one of the soothing parts is that most of these people probably didn't even know what really happened that day.

bootload 10y ago

The Falling Man has a name. Though not officially identified, it is thought to be Jonathan Briley. A lot of people were killed that day. This is just one story. [0] You can view a documentary about this image here ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gbxJ4xUDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gbxJ4xUDE (1hr 11m) RIP Jonathan. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Man

gilgoomesh 10y ago
The source for that Wikipedia article – and the documentary you linked – is an earlier (2003) version of the same linked article by Tom Junod. Jonathan Briley is discussed in the article. While likely, it's not certain.
- michaelcampbell 10y ago
  Which Wikipedia makes pretty clear. > The subject of the image, whose identity remains uncertain,...
  - bootload 10y ago
    "The subject of the image, whose identity remains uncertain,..." The uncertainty, if memory serves me from viewing the above documentary, is at the request of the family for religious reasons.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

amelius 10y ago

Perhaps "depersonalization" can explain the state some of these people were in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization

obrero 10y ago

Ho-hum. The military campaign which lead to these people's deaths was planned by one man. Osama bin Laden, a Saudi plucked from obscurity when the US government began (via ISI) heavily arming him so that he could oust the secular Afghan government and wage a jihad to impose his own vision of an Islamic government. It is some irony that the people in the Pentagon who sent arms to Mr. bin Laden and his cadre would some day have an airliner plow through their building by the anti-imperialist they had empowered. I guess we'll never see long, mawkish stories in Esquire about the people the US had killed in Afghanistan in the US-backed attempt to oust the secular government and impose the proto-Al Qaeda and proto-Taliban's vision of government. America was gung-ho for bin Laden, when he was killing other secular types. People who "took the other side" on Afghanistan were who were pilloried in the US, beyond the pale, followed by the FBI etc. Then the US decides to plant military bases all over "Saudi" Arabia. The US refers to the country always with the prefix "Saudi", as if its puppet dictatorship there had a divine right which extended to the country name. Some Arabians, Mr. bin Laden, and some of the fellows who plowed into the aforementioned World Trade Center and Pentagon did not appreciate this foreign military occupation. After all, the US had been arming them for a long time to fight against foreign imperialists setting up their military bases on foreign lands. I should note that when the US kills civilians with bombs, it accuses the foreign country of having "human shields" around military installations. Well obviously the Pentagon is a military target. By the US standard I just mentioned the World Trade Center is a military target as it had military intelligence and such offices there. So by the US standard, the people who died were "human shields" cast their to die to protect the military intelligence offices in the World Trade Center. Tired of this mawkish nonsense fifteen years on. The US is who armed this jihadist to fight against secular governments, the US rung his home country with military bases (which in a typical bully/coward way were gone within two years of 9/11 - 9/11 worked, the pitiful helpless giant skulked away in a cowardly manner). It's kind of like the imperialists of France bombing Syria, then asking for worldwide bereavement, world leaders holding hands and marching through Paris to mourn the fact that some brave Syrian anti-imperialists decided to bomb them back a month later. I can understand a powerful nation deciding to subjugate weaker nations, but this mawkish mourning about the "victims" of anti-imperialists fighting to regain control of their countries from the imperialist American aggressor is sickening. Americans are who armed this guy to wage jihad on secular imperialism to begin with. Then they decided to ring his country with their military bases.

Lidador 10y ago

How can the same link be submitted twice? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12467708