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Now is not the time to play the blame game

Seriously.  Instead, it’s time to play the game where we ask conservatives to outdo each other on the subjects that so often provide them with the occasion to muse that some humans are just a tad less human than others!

Today’s contestants are Barbara Bush and John Derbyshire.  In alphabetical order:  first, Barbara touring the Astrodome.

What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.

Damn!  That’s hard to beat:  Hurricane Katrina as a stroke of luck.  Poor people movin’ on up to the floor of a sports stadium.  But wait:  what about poor black people?  Surely, you think, the subject will inspire John Derbyshire.  And it did!  Here, John is defending Steve Sailer’s remark on the far-right VDARE website, “What you won’t hear, except from me, is that ‘Let the good times roll’ is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.” Take it away, John:

Our own Roger Clegg noted last year that “Birth rates for unmarried women vary widely by race and Hispanic origin. . . . Among African Americans, 68.2 percent of births are illegitimate, versus 23.0 percent for non-Hispanic whites.”

Meanwhile, so far as males are concerned, the Bureau of Justice reports that “At midyear 2004 there were 4,919 black male prison and jail inmates per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared to 1,717 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 717 white male inmates per 100,000 white males.”

Under the circumstances, to say, as Steve Sailer does, that African Americans “tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups,” and “need stricter moral guidance from society” does not seem to me very outrageous.

Unless, that is, you believe that it is ill-mannered to talk about these things at all . . . in which case you had better take the matter up with Roger Clegg and the Bureau of Justice for their “shocking,” “unspeakable,” and “tasteless” breaches of etiquette.

Vote for one of the above, or nominate a contestant of your own.  No fair heading over to Dave Neiwert’s place and picking up stuff from “race vampires” (Neiwert’s term) like David Duke or the Council of Conservative Citizens.  But if you find “mainstream” conservatives like Derbyshire going to the mat for far-right extremists and white supremacists, that’s fair enough.  They do it all the time, you know.

Posted by on 09/06 at 07:24 AM

  1. It would be hard to beat Babs.  Explains a lot about the Bush gene pool.

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  09:18 AM

  2. I agree with China Mieville that this kind of thing is basically a distraction.  Barbara Bush isn’t a policymaker, nor is Derbyshire, and their idiotic statements can’t really compare to the actual decisions of the Bush administration that killed so many people.

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  09:56 AM

  3. This blog claims the right to indulge in distractions, having written six consecutive posts on the outrage that is the Bush response to Katrina.

    More seriously, China Mieville is wrong, for reasons I’ll explain tomorrow.  Hint:  it is about race and poverty, and the wingnuts confirm that with every other word they utter.

    Posted by Michael  on  09/06  at  10:05 AM

  4. Get your facts straight, Michael. Those po’ folk’ are moving on up to an abandoned sports arena. With space age artificial turf. I bet you feel foolish, now.

    Seriously, for a woman whose contact with minimum wage employees is limited to when room service sends the laundry help up to deliver a requested extra pillow to the luxury suite, and whose contact with people of color is restricted to Condoleeza and Alberto, you get idiocy like that quote. And Derbyshire’s one step short of “Exterminate the brutes!” here.

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  10:39 AM

  5. Got another one for the pantheon of racist, hateful comments coming out of the mouths of the “morality” crowd, this one from that paragon of good taste (ahem), the American Spectator:

    http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8684

    A cretin (sorry to the Cretins) named George Neumayr manages to squeeze in enough racially loaded words to keep psychologists busy for a few days and perfectly manages to stay true to the modern conservative credo of blaming the victims.  I love this line, though:

    “New Orleans was ripe for collapse. Its dangerous geography, combined with a dangerous culture, made it susceptible to an unfolding catastrophe.”

    If it was so clear, then Bush & Co. bear responsibility for intentional malice and murder, not mere negligence.  Such arguments give even more power to the words of the rapper who said “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Mr. Neumayr may be hard to beat here for callousness and racism.

    Posted by Mitchell Freedman  on  09/06  at  10:41 AM

  6. I nominate Robert Tracinski. Over at his site, The Intellectual Activist, you can find his intellectually dishonest “An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State”

    http://tiadaily.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1026

    He says,” But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

    “The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

    “The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

    “The man-made disaster is the welfare state.”

    So the situation was not caused directly by Katrina? I guess we can expect looting nationwide at any moment.

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  11:01 AM

  7. Props to Babs for even giving them folks the effort of her ‘thoughts.’ It was just two years ago she was telling us the mind is a beautiful thing to waste:

    “Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it’s gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” - former first lady Barbara Bush - “Good Morning America” March 18, 2003

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  11:07 AM

  8. Ex-Con, I think an Ayn Randian nominee falls under the same restrictions as David Duke or the Council of Conservative Citizens.  No fair!

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  11:10 AM

  9. I agree with you, Michael, and disagree with China Mieville. This stuff is important precisely because it underlies the policy. And those making policy, at least in the last four decades or so, understand the way the game is played. Policymakers use code words or don’t even bother to defend what they actually do, while movement “intellectuals” like the geniuses around the American Spectator and NRO provide the justification from a convenient step or two away.  After all, even-the-liberal-New Republic® suggested that The Bell Curve was a conventional-wisdom breaking work of staggering genius.

    Oh yeah....my vote is for la Barbara.

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  11:34 AM

  10. where I grew up, this was/is called ‘Minnesota Nice,’ where politeness and tolerance are often a mask for racial and class bigotry--when things are working, everything’s good, in a paternalistic sort of way, but then something bad happens, and then the old stereotypes and biases come out, ‘proving’ that ‘these people’ (insert minority group here) have some sort of character defect that prevents them from ever rising to the status of (insert ‘good’ minority group here).

    it’s sad that the Bush administration can’t even admit one iota of responsibility for failing to ameliorate this catastrophe, (while blaming the Left for ‘politicizing), and at the same time, try to scapegoat the poorest, most vulnurable members of society.

    who was it that said, ‘you can best judge a society by the way it treats its poorest members?’ it sure as hell wasn’t a Republican…

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  11:36 AM

  11. "Props to Babs for even giving them folks the effort of her ‘thoughts.’ “

    Thanks, Manson’s whatever. And to everyone else , I am NOT a bitch. So shut up.

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  11:49 AM

  12. He’s not a conservative, so this won’t count, but Jesse Jackson did ‘muse that some humans are [treated] just a tad less human than others’:

    Jackson at the New Orleans airport, which was overflowing with cots and refugees: “This looks like the hold of a slave ship.”

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  11:58 AM

  13. I vote for Barbara, partly because of where she said it.  You had to go looking for Derbyshire on NRO whereas Babs said it to an NPR reporter.  More people heard Barbara Bush.

    Also Mrs. Bush is supposed to be respectable.

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  12:04 PM

  14. If only half of what is below turns out to be true then avoiding debate on race, society and immigration would be criminally derelict, in my opionion. I don’t see how we can avoid the conclusion that a substantial minority of the young black men turned into frenzied savages at the first imposition of a fractured infrastructure. To emphasize that conditions were intolerable in the Superdome, thereby mitigating our condemnation of what went on, begs the question of what/who made the conditions so intolerable to begin with. It seems that the UK and Australian “tourists” (whites) behaved in a commendable, patient, civlized manner, putting up with deprivation, trusting there would be aid, albeit delayed. On the other hand, from the first night in the Superdome, young black thugs were on a terroristic rampage, and the accounts indicate that they were just the vanguard of a seething hatred expressed by the majority of the Superdome population against everything that represented order and civility, the white Britons being a visible and direct focus of their hate.

    A sick irony, isn’t it: throughout the first days of the flood it was these thugs who were the most visible focus and concern of the entire country, we hadn’t yet learned of their crimes. Pray for the towns and cities where they have been re-settled.

    I love the internet; you can ignore the truth but it cannot be suppressed anymore.

    In the two main refugee centers, however—the Superdome and the Convention Center—too many people witnessed the degeneracy for it to be ignored. The first refugees had arrived at the Superdome the day before the hurricane, on Sunday, August 28th. The last finally left the stadium on Saturday, Sept, 3, so some people may have spent nearly a week in what, after the toilets began to overflow, became known as the Sewerdome.”

    It’s appalling and shameful that they were left that long

    “Preparation for refugees was pitifully inadequate. By day, as many as 25,000 people sweltered in temperatures that rose into the 100s. Whatever order had been established soon melted away, and the stadium reverted to the jungle. Young men robbed and raped with impunity. Occasional gunshots panicked the crowd. At least one man committed suicide by sailing off a high deck and splattering onto the playing field. Bodies of the murdered, and of infants and the elderly who died of heat exhaustion began to accumulate. Six babies were born in the stadium. Charles Womack, a 30-year-old roofer, said he saw one man beaten to death, and was, himself beaten with a pipe. Crack addicts—who had brought their most valuable possession with them—smoked openly and fought over drugs. “

    My guess would be that’s the source of the problem right there. The crack addicts. The “war on drugs” is not working.

    “A group of about 30 British students were among the very small number of whites in the stadium, where they spent four harrowing days. Jamie Trout, 22, an economics major, wrote that the scene “was like something out of Lord of the Flies,” with “people shouting racial abuse about us being white.” One night, word came that the power was failing, and that there was only ten minutes’ worth of gas for the generators. Zoe Smith, 21, from Hull, said they all feared for their lives: “All us girls sat in the middle while the boys sat on the outside, with chairs as protection,” she said. “We were absolutely terrified, the situation had descended into chaos, people were very hostile and the living conditions were horrendous.” She sad that even during the day, “when we offered to help with the cleaning, the locals gave us abuse.”

    Mr. Trout said the National Guard finally recognized how dangerous the threat was from blacks, and moved the British under guard to the basketball area, which was safer. “The army warned us to keep our bags close to us and to grip them tight,” he said, as they were escorted out. Twenty-year-old Jane Wheeldon credited one man in particular, Sgt. Garland Ogden, with getting the Britons safely out. “He went against a lot of rules to get us moved,” she said.

    Australian tourists stuck in the Superdome had the same experience. Bud Hopes, a 32-year-old man from Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, took control and may have saved many lives. As the stadium reverted to anarchy he realized whites were in danger, and gathered tourists together for safety. “There were 65 of us altogether so we were able to look after each other, especially the girls who were being grabbed and threatened,” said Mr. Hopes. They organized escorts for women who had to go to the toilet or for food, and set up a roster of men to stand guard while others slept. “We sat through the night just watching each other, not knowing if we would be alive in the morning,” Mr. Hopes said. “Ninety-eight percent of the people around the world are good,” he said; “in that place 98 per cent of the people were bad.”

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  12:41 PM

  15. continued..

    John McNeil of Coorparoo in Brisbane tells what happened to their group, too, heard the lights were about to go out: “I looked at Bud [Hopes] and said, ‘That will be the end of us.’ The gangs had already eyed us off. If the lights had gone out we would have been in deep trouble. We were sitting there praying for a miracle and the lights stayed on.” Mr. Hopes said the Australians owed their lives to a National Guardsman who broke the rules and got whites out to a medical center past seething crowds of blacks.

    Peter McNeil of Brisbane told the Australian AP that his son John was one of the 65 who managed to get out. The blacks were reportedly so hostile “they would stab you as soon as look at you.” “He’s never been so scared in his life,” explained Mr. McNeil. “He just said they had to get out of the dark. Otherwise, another night, he said, they would have been gone.” No American newspaper wrote about what these white tourists had gone through.

    When guardsmen began to show up in force on Sept. 1 and take control, some blacks met them with cheers, but others shouted obscenities at them.”

    This shows you that the decent black people were just as afraid as the white people were.

    “ Capt. John Pollard of the Texas Air Force National Guard said 20,000 people were in the dome when the evacuation began, but thousands more appeared from surrounding areas when word got out that there were buses leaving town. Soldiers held their M-16s and grenade-launchers ready, and kept a sharp eye out for snipers. “

    But made no effort to form orderly lines of evacuees, or make sure that the elderly, sick, and young went first.

    “That same day, when it was time to board buses for Houston, soldiers had trouble controlling the crowd. People at the back of the mob crushed the people in front against barricades the soldiers put up to contain the crowd. Many people continued to yell obscenities whenever they saw a patrol go by. Some were afraid of losing their place in line and defecated where they stood.”

    “Armed gangs took control, and occasional gunshots caused panic. There was no power, and at night the center was plunged into complete darkness. Degeneracy struck almost immediately, with rapes, robbery, and murder. Terrible shrieking tore through the night, but no one could see or dared to move. When Police Chief Eddie Compass heard what was happening, he sent a squad of 88 officers to investigate. They were overwhelmed by superior forces and retreated, leaving thousands to the mercy of criminals. “

    Those were the “people of New Orleans” not the armed gangs, the thousands at the mercy of the criminals

    “It was not until Sept. 2—four days after the hurricane—that a force of 1,000 National Guardsmen finally took over from the armed gangs. “Had we gone in with a lesser force we may have been challenged, innocents may have been caught in a fight between the guard and military police and those who did not want to be processed or apprehended,” explained Lieutenant-General Blum. “

    He’s right. The only way to deal with armed thugs is with overwhelming force

    “Sitting with her daughter and other relatives, Trolkyn Joseph, 37, told a reporter that men had wandered the center at night raping and murdering children. She said she found a dead 14-year old girl at 5 a.m. on Friday morning, four hours after the girl went missing. “She was raped for four hours until she was dead,” Miss Joseph said through tears. “Another child, a seven-year old boy, was found raped and murdered in the kitchen freezer last night.”

    Africa Brumfield, 32, explained that women were in particular fear: “There is rapes going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats.” Donald Anderson, 43, was at the convention center with his wife who was six months pregnant: “We circled the chairs like wagons because at night there are stampedes,” he said. “We had to survive.”

    The very few whites in the crowd were terrified. Eighty-year-old Selma Valenti, who was with her husband, said blacks threatened to kill them on Thursday, Sept. 1. “They hated us. Four young black men told us the buses were going to come last night and pick up the elderly so they were going to kill us,” she said, sobbing. Presumably, the blacks wanted to take their places on the buses.

    The center was not entirely without a form of rough justice. A National Guardsman reported that a man who had raped and killed a young girl in the bathroom was caught by the crowd—which beat him to death. “

    I’m glad to know the person who did that was caught

    “At one time there were as many as seven or eight corpses in front of the center, some of them with blood streaming from bullet wounds.”

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  12:47 PM

  16. Plus, you’re not factoring in the possibility that Derbyshire was under the toxic influence of Mistress Morphine.

    Posted by norbizness  on  09/06  at  01:10 PM

  17. I’ll throw a vote in for Thyphoid Babs, too, although there is plenty of disturbing rhetoric in the media down here about how the evacuees should be more grateful for what “we” are doing for “them.”

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  01:14 PM

  18. it’s very important to acknowledge the extreme breakdown of law and order, and to place it into context with the other events that occurred--yes, the facts show that many were engaged in violent breaking of the law-- there were thugs and criminals and worse, but there were also fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, grandparents and babies-- to extrapolate this behavior to insinuate that *everybody* who was marooned in the Superdome was a crimina, or is to blame for their own misfortune is to avoid taking any responsibility for this situation…

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  01:33 PM

  19. People who are in any way swayed by Daniel’s rather pernicious comment would do well to read this post by Digby.

    If I may be permitted a bit of blogwhoring ruminated last night on the prevalence of such fears even among liberals. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so incredibly alienated from the country in which I was born and raised - and that’s saying something.

    The obvious answer, of course, is to point out the overwhelming outpouring of good that has come from people across the country, and around the world. I was listening to the radio on the way in to work this morning, and heard Chris Mullen (from the Golden State Warriors) self-effacingly, almost apologetically hand over a check for ten thousand bucks to the local Air America affiliate’s drive-through donation station at the Oakland Coliseum. With little notice nor publicity, people listening on their way to work went out of their way to get off the freeway, drive into the coliseum parking lot and hand over what they had. At 9:30, Mullen showed up to match what had been raised so far. That’s just one story out of tens of thousands.

    (Next Freeper you hear bashing Sean Penn, ask them what they spent today doing, while Penn was pulling people off roofs.)

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  09/06  at  02:17 PM

  20. ”I ruminated.” Sorry.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  09/06  at  02:17 PM

  21. I love the internet; you can ignore the truth but it cannot be suppressed anymore.

    Well, as usual, you have a point, Daniel.  We liberals never knew that the underclass contained some serious sociopaths until we read about it in NRO.  Of course, being liberals, we tend to think that one of the good things about decently competent disaster management is that it prevents crises like Katrina from being turned over to the sociopaths.  When the federal government itself is run by serious sociopaths, however, then things can get very ugly indeed.

    This blog denounces all sociopaths, in proportion to the damage they wreak on civilized society. 

    Posted by Michael  on  09/06  at  03:58 PM

  22. Just catching up on the posts since Sept. 1. The scenes from New Orleans, and the comments of the idiots, and to coin a phrase, evil-doers on the Right infuriate me. Watching the great spin machine try to push blame from the Great Moron and his minions onto the ones who they victimized by their clueless behavior is almost funny. Almost.

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  04:07 PM

  23. WE have to give theprize to the Dauphin’s mom. there has been no apology.  The media has covered it up a bit. it did not make the front page of the Times.  This tells us how the Dauphin is actually close to his roots, sociopaths in the gene pool.  I have despised this overrated women since her first real appearance in public criticizing Geraldine Ferraro and calling her a bitch.  She like Laura are supposed to be the compassion for the two Georges.  they are as fake as anything else with this family. It is even possible to say that they are worse.  They know what they and their family are doing is wrong and do it anyway.  I think that this shows us that there is less heart to Babs than they want us to think. the stench of privelege and incompetence is everywhere.

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  05:08 PM

  24. Except Daniel, the police and National Guard said there were 2-4 rapes but lots of wild rumors flying. I’ve also noticed that lots of whites (including myself unfortunately) get very uncomfortable when surrounded by blacks and I wonder how much that factors in.
    I’m willing to bet the thugs were about 2 percent of the population—but that’s the group everyone pays attention to. think about it. Let’s say there’s 20,000 people there and 2 percent are thugs. That’s 400 thugs so that means a lot of thuggery, while still being the vast minority of people.
    You didn’t also happen to notice the pictures of a black woman yelling at the Guard to help a elderly white woman collapsed on a cot from the heat did you? Nor did you happen to notice the picture of the young black girl holding hands with a 105-year-old white woman in a wheelchair.
    I’ll also remember this next time (white) college students go wilding when their team wins or loses a championship. I guess I should think all white male college boys are savages for smashing store windows and burning and turning over cars.

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  06:05 PM

  25. Gawd, it’s good to be back for further embarrassment among my betters-- looks like this is still the blog of choice for such wistful efforts.

    Apropos of none of the preceding comments, MB as usual seems to be hammering the nail into the historical deadwood of the current erroristrocracy more efficiently than anyone.

    Couple more weeks, and I’ll be free for more extensive commentary and humble pie consumption.  See y’all in (late) September!

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  06:31 PM

  26. Lou,

    I think it’s ridiculous and wrong to make blanket statements about African-Americans, but I reserve the right to assume that white collge students (especially men) at sporting events are bad news until proven otherwise!

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  06:47 PM

  27. Abby,
    Now that makes perfect sense to me!

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  06:59 PM

  28. I posted this as a comment over at Axis of Evel Knievel (a friend’s blog that is pretty damn funny if you have not read it - http://www.axisofevelknievel.blogspot.com/), but I think it is apropos:

    You can hear it now like the pungent breeze of human decay and feces rustling the live oak leaves. Clearly we cannot develop into a disaster welfare state. If everybody knows the Feds will pick up the pieces, then states will just get all lazy ‘n shit with their disaster relief. We cannot encourage an unending cycle of disaster dependency. People will start choosing to live in tornado alleys and hurricane highways, just like those insurance con artists who step in front of cars so they can cash in.
    The silver-helmeted sage Barbara Bush gets it noted, “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this—this [she chuckles slightly] is working very well for them.”

    These would-be freeloaders have been waiting for just this kind of opportunity. No, full Federal responsibility is just a green light to suck off the rusty spigots of Big Mama Fed.

    I think we need a disaster-to-work program, where each state is allowed only one major disaster before they need to take the lead and duplicate all the resources of the Feds, but not too much--you don’t want to replicate the disaster dependency at the state level either. I am not sure how the hospital ships will fit in. I mean, disasters are located in regions, they do not happen to a whole nation (all that stuff about the physical, emotional, and financial impact to the whole country is mushy liberal victim culture shit). Final Fed control just says you can die all you want, the Feds will always be there to bury you.

    Before you know it, everybody will be standing at the metaphorical levee, looking out to the horizon awaiting their disaster meal ticket in stained, second hand swimwear, frayed straw hats, dollar store plastic sand bucket and shovel in hand.

    Federal disaster relief encourages slothfulness.  The poor need to stand in the path of hurricanes to learn the survival skills white affluent people are genetically coded with, aka: cars and gas money.

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  07:09 PM

  29. I’ll also remember this next time (white) college students go wilding when their team wins or loses a championship.

    Lou (and Abby), I really must object to this.  White college students do not, not, go “wilding.” “Wilding” is something done by feral black men who rampage through Central Park, terrorizing law-abiding white citizens and brutally beating and raping a white jogger.  As John DiIulio pointed out in an influential body of work in the 1990s, such black men are “superpredators” whose threat to society required the most severe punitive measures we could devise.  (Hence those incarceration stats for African-American men, duly cited by Derbyshire.)

    The four young men arrested for “wilding” turned out to be innocent, but that’s not the point.  The point is that they were a threat to society nonetheless, in a way no white college student could possibly be.

    I hope you all will observe the correct use of “wilding” in the future.

    Posted by Michael  on  09/06  at  07:10 PM

  30. 2-3 rapes over three days among a population of 20,000? That’s doing pretty good, I’d say. The average number would be roughly the same on a typical three days on the UVA campus, I’m sure.

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  07:43 PM

  31. Barbara, because she looks a tad better in pearls.

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  08:10 PM

  32. “The man-made disaster is the welfare state.”

    We have a welfare state? Who knew?

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  08:32 PM

  33. We’re not a nice species - sad to say, but true.  There has never been a time or place or social group without thugs and criminals.  All of the folks donating time, money, material, and their own personal safety may be the majority, but there’s always a significant number who take the opportunity to prey on others.  What’s the sense of looting TVs when there’s no electricity and no one able to fence the loot?  What’s the sense of raping or killing?  None.  That doesn’t stop this element.  As said above, the only way to prevent these kinds of thuggery is to prevent the conditions that permit them.  A government drowned in the bathtub does nothing to help a region drowned by a hurricane.

    Posted by  on  09/06  at  10:20 PM

  34. I was startled to hear the audio of Momma Bush on The News Hour this evening.  No commentary about any of the issues it raised, but nonetheless it turned up.

    Posted by Linkmeister  on  09/07  at  02:31 AM

  35. Some Guy had me going there. I spend too much time with the real thing.

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  06:12 AM

  36. I stole this from The Poor Man Cafe/Institute. It comes from here:
    http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005433.html#51873

    Speaking purely in economic terms, the situation in New Orleans is actually quite positive, long-term. Yes there is the destruction of the port and that’s bad, but consider: 80% of the population evacuated. The remaining 20% stayed, either because they didn’t have the means to leave, or because they were just foolish; how much of each is a guess.

    But in EITHER case, you have to consider that these people were essentially surplus. In other words, the least-functional 20% of the population of New Orleans has been eliminated. That obviously INCREASES the overall functionality of the New Orleans population.

    ...

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  07:39 AM

  37. To be fair, theif, that’s Floyd Alvis Cooper, world class objectivist troll impersonator.

    Posted by norbizness  on  09/07  at  08:59 AM

  38. speaking in purely human terms, you’re an asshole, theif…

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  10:51 AM

  39. Speaking purely in terms of human rhetorical dynamics, we would all do well to look at context before we explode over comments in a thread like this, in which passages may be exhibited as evidence of the assholery of others rather than our own.

    Though in my case that latter is always a safe bet.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  09/07  at  11:26 AM

  40. The problem here, as the Objectivist Turing Test has repeatedly shown, is that it’s so difficult to distinguish people masquerading as nutcase Ayn Rand devotees from actual Rand devotees.  Anyway, for the record, Floyd Alvis Cooper is one of the former, and theif here was simply quoting.

    Chris, thanks for your civility, as always, and norbizness, for your fairness.

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  11:37 AM

  41. What i would *really* like to hear asked of republican political candidates in the future is the following question:

    “Blacks are disproportionately poor, and disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system.  My question is: is this innate to their race, or due to the affects of our larger culture on them as a group?  That is, is it genetic or social, Mr Candidate?”

    because i don’t see any third explanation for it, and what can a republican say?  They don’t believe it is socially caused, if they did, they would have to provide remedy, wouldn’t they?  But they oppose social rememdies.

    Ah, in my dreams....no reporter will ever ask.

    Posted by Zenji  on  09/07  at  11:39 AM

  42. Sorry- #36 was a nomination, not my opinion. I have a hard time understanding the Randian nut balls. That they even manage to breathe unaided amazes me. Sorry to have caused offense.

    Posted by  on  09/07  at  12:18 PM

  43. No offense taken, Theif, and no apology necessary.  Thanks for chiming in.

    Posted by Michael  on  09/07  at  01:33 PM

  44. *Some Guy* must live in the burbs.  Did you know there are affluent people in America who don’t own cars?  And some of them were in New Orleans.  Some people give a shit about the environment and urban quality of life.  Poor people are just lazy?  What a moron.

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  03:33 AM

  45. According to a Washington Post article I read, there were no rapes or murders in the Superdome.  The article dated day four quoted the National Guard commander as saying, “People were surprisingly well behaved.” She saw one man walking around with all his jewelry on.  He had not been robbed.  No white people were targeted or abused.  I read one letter from a white female visiting Prof from San Antonio, who was in the Superdome, that it was a very co-perative environment where people of all races worked together to survive deplorable conditions.

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  03:37 AM

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