September 04, 2005

More Racism

Like I've been suspecting, the racist element is starting to bear its head a little more freely in the wake of the tragedy in New Orleans. Orcinus, a blog out of Seattle, has a nice rundown. It's seriously shameful that this sort of thing still exists.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is quite an experience to read the comments at Orcinus or the post itself, without shaking one's head in wonder. Wonder that even in the face of the evidence you blame the president, Haliburton, Republicans, etc. ad nauseum but not the criminals. I have come to believe that modern "liberalism" is a mental illness with, apparently, the side effect of selective blindness.

Ah yes, we all know that flat screen tvs are a necessity, when the lights are off. Ah yes, shooting at rescue helicopters... self-evidently the right thing to do. Oh, and let's not forget that rape is perfectly understandable when you are poor and discriminated against.

Do you people never think?

MosBen said...

I know that for myself, and I think it's fair to say most or all liberals, the idea that stealing tvs, raping people, and shooting guns at rescue helicopters is awefully self-apparant. I don't feel like I need to comment on how wrong those things are because it's a foregone conclusion. Yes, people stealing electronics and shooting at people trying to rescue them is wrong. Fine. Unlike the President and his appologists, however, I do think there's a distinction between people stealing luxery items and people stealing food from abandoned grocery stores.

That really wasn't the point of the post though. For every one person doing something criminal down there there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people doing nothing other trying to survive. These people have been failed by the government and did nothing wrong. Yet racist conservatives start spouting the shit seen in the Orcinus post.

Everyone knows that oportunistic theft is wrong. Do we really need to have debates on it? The far more interesting thing to talk about is what the people in charge could have done to prevent some of the tragedy.

Noumena said...

No-one's defending the people who are stealing teevees, raping people in the bathrooms of the shelters, or shooting at rescue helicopters. What kind of idiots do you take us for?

The problem is that a black guy carrying a sack is automatically labelled a 'looter' by the person who took a picture of him from a helicopter, while the white woman carrying a similar sack is assumed to have 'found' some food or supplies. The problem is that the shelters are overcrowded, with not enough food, water, or cops, and FEMA waited for days before doing shit about it, beyond keeping people from getting in to help. The problem is that American citizens are being talked about as though they're uncivilized animals whose suffering we should only care about at our luxury. The problem is that people who genuinely want to help, who go to heroic measures to rescue others, are being prevented or even thrown in jail for their actions in the name of 'riot control'. The problem is that geologists have been saying for YEARS that it was only a matter of time before something like this happened, and the Bush administration cut out funding for the levees so we could go blow people up in Iraq.

The problem is that, in the face of thousands of people drowning, starving, and deprived of the medicines they need due to willful negligence on the part of the government at all levels (but especially the federal government), opportunistic racist and classist assholes like you decide to focus on a relative handful of other assholes who are taking the opportunity to swipe a free teevee.

Do you people never experience compassion or perspective?

Anonymous said...

Ah Noumena, always a gentleman.

Yes, assholes like me get tired of dopes like you, who get all warm and self-righteous at the mere thought of your virtue. No one assumes that a black person is automatically looting squat in this situation. No one assumes that whites carrying off tvs found them. Nor does anyone call searching for food and water in local stores looting.

But it is not a relative handful of blacks looting. It is hundreds, if not thousands. Don't you recall the little fact that idiot Nagin opened the prison and told them to skedaddle? Let no one say he didn't do his part to evacuate New Orleans. Where do you suppose they went?

Bush, by the way did not cut funding for the levees. That's in next year's budget. Try again.

This catastrophe is to be laid squarely at the feet of Nagin and Blanco. That fool mayor couldn't stop lining his own pockets long enough to press the school and transit busses into service, despite that being in his own disaster plan.

And just precisely what do you think the Feds could have done more in the first response? The army is not allowed to play cop (Posse Comitatus Act, 1878)), nor can it be deployed with being called for by the governor. Ditto the National Guard which also reports to the Governor.

What good is a graduate degree if you don't have an even elementary understanding of how your government works?

Noumena said...

"No one assumes that a black person is automatically looting squat in this situation. No one assumes that whites carrying off tvs found them. Nor does anyone call searching for food and water in local stores looting."

and yet ...

"But it is not a relative handful of blacks looting. It is hundreds, if not thousands. Don't you recall the little fact that idiot Nagin opened the prison and told them to skedaddle?"

So, it appears you, for one, are assuming hundreds, if not thousands, of black people are the ones doing the looting. Sorry, I get pissed off and start yelling when I'm dealing with racists. Fortunately, while emotional inferences are logical fallacies, emotional rhetoric can be used to expressed perfect legitimate arguments.

As a first response, the Feds could have maintained funding to build and reinforce the levees. Quoting from the Editor and Publisher: "Yet after 2003, [after Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress] the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars."

Second, they could have mobilized what army reserve troops aren't in Iraq after the governor of Louisiana authorized Federal involvement starting the 26th.

Third, once the flooding started, FEMA could have allowed organizations like the Red Cross in right away, to assist with rescue efforts and provide food, water, clothes, and medicine to people already in the overcrowded shelters.

I may not know the ins and outs of FEMA and emergency disaster area law, but you obviously haven't spent much time here if you think either me or MosBen are ignorant of the way the government works.

Anonymous said...

You are just plain wrong. You write: "So, it appears you, for one, are assuming hundreds, if not thousands, of black people are the ones doing the looting. Sorry, I get pissed off and start yelling when I'm dealing with racists."

Sigh. If the overwhelming majority of citizens are black, and they are, and if it has a crime rate 10 times the national average and it does (or did), and it let's it sets its prisoners free to roam the city, how can it possibly be racist to state the obvious?

You wrote: "Second, they could have mobilized what army reserve troops aren't in Iraq after the governor of Louisiana authorized Federal involvement starting the 26th."

According to to today's Washington Post she still hasn't authorized "federal involvement"
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/05/AR2005090500183.html?sub=AR) The National Guard reports to her.

By the way, a search of Lexis-Nexis turned up no mention of the Red Cross being kept out of NO. It did turn up many stories of the RC warning volunteers to stay out until the city was safe.

Now, as previously promised, I will stop commenting.

MosBen said...

Yes, it's possible, maybe even likely, that the crimes being committed in New Orleans now are being committed by blacks. Like our poster pointed out, it's an largely black city and the prisons were indeed emptied. At the same time, the people still in the city are overwhelmingly black and poor, but a reletively small number of them are committing rapes or shooting at helicopters. The point of the post is that while the vast majority of people in the city now are pure and complete victims of the situation, certain conservative elements are using this tragedy to support their racist tendencies. Note that I didn't say all conservatives, and I won't because it's clearly not true. Still, the fact remains that there are some pretty insane and horrible things being said, and I'm not hearing those particular things from anybody but conservatives.

Liberals have our own sets of crazies, and I'm happy to admit it when I see it, but right here, right now, there are starting to be too many conservatives blaming the victims of a natural disaster for my taste.

At the same time, I'm hearing a lot of conservatives defending the federal government as if they made no mistakes. I'm perfectly willing to accept that the city and state governments made mistakes, but it sure looks to me like the mistakes that made the most difference were the ones made by the feds.

Of course, that's just my opinion and I'm very willing to hear other thoughts.