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The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Paul Street at Sep 06, 2005

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Here (below) is a piece I did for an excellent left internet newsletter --- Dissident Voice. It's about class, race, capitalism, oil, empire, and Katrina. Driving across Illinois on I-80 this evening, I tuned in briefly to Republican-dominated talk radio (Chicago WLS 890 AM).....ctd. I was informed by Sean Hannity that all of the concerns voiced in this artricle --- concerns with global warming and petro-addiction, with racism, with corporate rule, automobile domination, with plutocratic tax cuts, with the massive diversion of societal resources from social health and civil infrastructure to empire and war on Iraq and more ---- "have nothing to do with this terrible tragedy." None of these are "legitemate issues," Hannity said. Even to mention these things, Hannity intoned, is to engage in the morally bankrupt political grandstanding that is "typical of the left" (a category that seems ---in Hannity's doctrinaire mind --- to include everyone who doesn't think that George W. Bush is "a great American" and who doesn't support what Hannity calls "the president's war for freedom"). The "only legtimate thing do right now," Hannity insists, "is to be giving money to charity so that Americans can help Americans through this American tragedy." "American tragedy?" You bet: read on. And by all means give to the Red Cross at http://store.yahoo.com/redcross-donate3/ The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans: Empire, Inequality, Race and Oil by Paul Street www.dissidentvoice.org September 5, 2005 “This is not the America that I grew up in.” “This is not the America I know and love.” “I can't believe this is happening in America; it seems more like something from the Third World, like Baghdad or Bangladesh.” Such is the incredulous commentary of three corporate media talking heads I've heard reflecting on the terrible events occurring in New Orleans in the tragic wake of tropical storm Katrina. The talking heads are off base. The historic events unfolding in New Orleans are very much about what the (to be a little more specific) United States of America has become. They are the predictable outcome of steep societal disparities and related perverse political and policy priorities that reflect the interrelated and petroleum-soaked imperatives of “American” Empire and Inequality. “Civilized” “America” consigns vast swaths of its large black populace to extreme, concentrated, and highly segregated poverty in shamefully forgotten urban ghettoes where practically Third World living conditions have long prevailed even without “natural disasters.” The residents of these all too invisible First World slums -- majority black New Orleans' sunken Ninth Ward is one of many examples -- languish at the bottom of a militantly hierarchical socioeconomic regime where the top 1 percent owns more than 40 percent of the wealth and the top 10 percent owns two-thirds of the wealth (and probably more than 90 percent of the politicians and policymakers). By 1999, economist Thomas Shapiro notes, the “net worth of the typical [American] white family was $81,000 compared to $8,000 for the typical black family.” By 2002, black net worth had sunk to 7 cents on every white dollar and more than a million black children were living in what social researchers now call “deep poverty” -- at less than half of the federal government's notoriously low poverty level. According to recent reports, unequal health care causes more than 100,000 black Americans to die earlier than whites each year and middle-aged black men die at nearly twice the rate of white men of similar age. The victims of concentrated poverty and related racial hyper-segregation in New Orleans lacked the vehicles and financial resources to escape and purchase lodging at a safe distance from the floodwaters. As the New York Times acknowledged last Friday, “race and class are the unspoken markers of who got out and who got stuck.” “America” is structured around an atomistic, petroleum-addicted transport technology: the automobile. “American” government starves public transportation but maintains an exorbitantly expensive, taxpayer-financed public infrastructure of and for the automobile, trucking, and gasoline industries. “Asphalt Nation's” privileging of the private auto over collective transit is part of why so many poor people were marooned in a living Hell. It's also part of the explanation for Katrina's occurrence and intensity. Global warming, significantly driven by human carbon emissions (by modern petro-capitalism) generated by cars, trucks, and planes, is part of why hurricanes are becoming more frequent and intense. As richer whites fled New Orleans in gas-guzzling SUV's, leaving behind the city's blacker and trapped poor, they contributed to future disastrous meteorological occurrences. Meanwhile, the White House oiligarchy used Katrina's disruption of Gulf Coast oil drilling as a pretext to call for the relaxation of environmental restrictions on domestic petroleum extraction -- something that will push nature's furious revenge to new levels of human destruction. Speaking of petroleum, “America” has been starving basic civil and social infrastructure while spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the immoral, bloody, and monumentally illegal occupation of Iraq. Countless “Americans” are noticing the absurdity of a federal government that can't promptly rescue citizens in one of its own cities at the same time that state invests in a costly, deficit-feeding, and failed imperial operation half-way across the world. That incidentally racist overseas operation has complex and shifting aims and origins, but it has always been very much about Iraq's possession of vast petroleum reserves and the economic and related geo-strategic significance of Middle Eastern oil. Reflecting Uncle Sam's bipartisan determination to control Persian Gulf oil and to maintain imperial credibility, hundreds of thousands of US troops and vast federal resources are tied up in the dangerous violation of the oil-rich Arab world. Large numbers of US citizens are wondering how much more quickly and effectively New Orleans' marooned poor could have been helped had the federal fortune squandered on the Iraq war been free to serve the general welfare and provide for the common defense at home. As numerous mainstream journalists and commentators have been observing, moreover, there are good reasons to suspect that federal dollars diverted to that criminal war could have prevented the all-too predictable (and predicted) drowning of New Orleans. Meanwhile, Uncle Sam spends untold billions on the opulent maintenance of a global empire of more than 700 military bases located in nearly every nation on the planet. Those bases are disproportionately built in proximity to global oil resources, reflecting what Michael Klare calls the conversion of the US military into “a global oil protection service.” They are part of an imperial “defense” budget that equals the rest of the world's total military expenditure. This “defense” budget (mainly dedicated to what the Pentagon calls “forward global force projection”) amounts to more than $600 billion when properly calculated. United States “defense” expenditures outweigh federal domestic expenditures on education by 8 to 1; income security by 4.5 to 1; nutrition by 11 to 1; housing by 14 to 1; job training by 32 to 1. Someone else will have to find the relevant fiscal disparities between empire abroad and flood prevention at home, paying special attention to the Bush administration's refusal to move money intended for News Orleans' levees to war and “homeland security.” These right-handed fiscal priorities provide some common sense context for the remarkable occurrence of New Orleans' Mayor issuing “a desperate S.O.S.” and New Orleans resident Daniel Edwards' observation that Uncle Sam can “do everything for other countries, but…can't do anything for [his] own people. You can go overseas with your military, but you can't get them down here.” Along with the very American phenomenon of widespread gun availability, “America's” huge military budget provide context for the telling scene outside the New Orleans Convention Center: crowds of poor black families chanting “we want help” as armored state vehicles cruised nearby carrying gendarmes brandishing automatic weapons. It's called Guns over Butter. . . and Bottled Water. And it's as American as Apple Pie. “America” might feel less compelled to choose between guns and butter/bottled water (and flood prevention and public transit and sustainable energy policies and…fill in the blank) if federal policymakers weren't so dedicated to piling yet more tax-cut caviar on the plates of the already super-opulent few in the “advanced” world's most unequal and wealth-top-heavy society. By the end of last year, the total cost of the Bush administration's tax reductions reached $297 billion, helping sink federal revenues to their lowest level as a share of the US economy since 1950 and creating “deficits as far as the eye can see.” Twenty-four percent of the great national tax giveaway went to “America's” wealthiest 1 percent, whose households received an average tax cut of $35,000. This spectacular private enclosure of the fading American fiscal commons has combined with monumental military expenditures to boost the publicly financed super-profits of high-tech “defense” corporations and to drain resources away from civil-engineering and disaster-preparedness programs that might have preempted the annihilation in New Orleans. There should be no mystery about why so many black poor people and others in New Orleans and elsewhere across the disproportionately black and poor Deep South were so terribly exposed and unprotected in the wake of a not-so “natural disaster.” Their tragic and terrifying experience is all too predictable and all-too quintessentially [United States of] “American”. It is the natural outcome of the “indispensable nation [Madeline Albright]'s” longstanding failure to acknowledge, confront, and overcome what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the triple evils that are interrelated”: militarism-imperialism, economic exploitation (capitalism), and racism. Truth be told, the US has been sinking in a toxic stew of Empire and Inequality for quite some time. The tragedy of New Orleans is just the latest and best example to date of the “American” peoples' need to complete their many unfinished revolutions, including the one that drew to its final close when the last federal troops left Louisiana in 1877. Paul Street is the author of three books to date: Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, October 2004); Segregated Schools: Class, Race, and Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge-Falmer, 2005); Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy, and the State of Black Chicago (Chicago, IL: The Chicago Urban League, April 2005). Street's next book, Racial Apartheid in the Global Metropolis (New York, NY: Rowman-Littefield) will be published in late 2006. He can be reached at: pstreet@niu.edu Related Dissident Voice Articles * Rodney King in New Orleans by Mike Whitney * Katrina: “Bipartisan” Betrayal by toni solo * The New Orleans Looters Are the Bush Progeny by Mike Whitney * New Orleans and the System that Destroyed It by Gary Leupp * State of Marriage Took Precedence Over State of Louisiana by Jason Leopold * Paul Allen's Other Yacht by Paul Rogat Loeb * Kanye West is My Hero by Justin Felux * The Devastating Impact of Hurricane George by Mike Whitney * “Transformation”: How Rumsfeld Smashed the National Guard by Mike Whitney * The Perfect Storm by Chris Floyd * Waiting for the Outside World by Mike Ferner * They Are Dying at This Moment by Brandy Baker * Zero Tolerance: Bush Gets Tough as New Orleans Suffers by Jack Random * Global Warming & Widespread Blackouts, Just as Deadly as Terrorism by Jason Leopold * The National Guard Belongs in New Orleans and Biloxi, Not Baghdad by Norman Solomon The brilliant left sociologist C. Wright Mills once said that the core purpose of meaningful analytical work on social and political affairs was to make relevant connections between individual pain and structural inequality. The point of such work, by Mills' reckoning, was to de-atomize personal difficulty and relate it to broader contextualizing forces of class, race, bureaucracy, and unjust power and authority. The dominant authoritarian and neoliberal ideology of our time works in the opposite direction. It tells us to separate the personal from the societal. It expects us to think of ourselves and others as purely autonomous sole actors -- a veritable mass of self-produced Robinson Crusoes (with Crusoe's slave Friday deleted from the formulation), each living on his or her own island of possessive-individualist economic rationality and "personal responsibility." How interesting is was, then, to observe dominant American corporate media -- the leading institutional architect and guardian of authoritarian homeland ideological security -- working to fit the square pegs of "Tropical Storm Katrina" into the round holes of the nation's atomistic, state-capitalist, and neoliberal doctrine. The flooding of New Orleans and the subsequent marooning and severely delayed rescue of much of that predominantly black city's disproportionately non-white poor population was in many ways the natural and predictable outcome of a number of structurally entrenched socioeconomic and sociopolitical problems reflecting the dialectically inseparable evils of American empire, inequality, racism, and petroleum-addiction. The richly interconnected problems include: racial apartheid and black hyper-segregation; a transportation infrastructure built around the expensive and climate-heating (carbon-spewing) personal and family automobile; economic racism; environmental collapse; and the broad diversion of American public resources from civil infrastructure (including flood prevention), civil rights, and social health (including poverty-reduction, education, and health-care) to pay for war and empire (including more than 700 military bases located in nearly every nation in the world) abroad and plutocratic tax-cuts at home. At the most immediate level, the New York Times acknowledged on the front page of its September 9th edition that "race and class were the unspoken markers of who got and who got stuck" in New Orleans." Two days later, Times reporter Jason DeParle noted that "what a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn't just a broken levee. It was a chasm of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death. Hydrology joined sociology through the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment." Since the 1970s, DeParle noted, New Orleans "has become unusually segregated," so that "the white middle-class is all but gone, moved north across Lake Pontchartrain or west to Jefferson Parish -- home of David Duke" (and of higher ground). In a society where the atomistic auto trumps public transit, "evacuation was especially difficult for the more than one third of black New Orleans households that lacked a car." While race and class have always been "matters of life and death" in the American experience, of course, Katrina's tragic aftermath has provided perhaps the most graphical and literal illustration in the way that American societal arrangements apportion "freedom" -- a term that George W. Bush beats to death but never bothers to define and whose limits and contested meanings and complex meanings he never (of course) appreciates -- in racially and socio-economically selective and unequal ways. We all know who got "left behind" (to take two words [themselves looted from the Children's' Defense Fund] from Bush's regressive educational "reform" program) to rot in a living Hell in one of the nation's great, historic cities. Dominant media authorities are not generally stupid. They know very well that a commentary like DeParle's touches on just part of the remarkable extent to which recent events have "exposed" some of America's core societal disparities and perverted priorities. As they certainly grasped during the early moments of maximum revealed and racially disparate crisis, Katrina was lifting some of the lid from atop the ugly, oil-soaked can of class, race, and empire that lurks beneath official doctrines of "equal opportunity" and "color" -- and class-blindness. Given their well-rewarded position atop the corporate-crafted, Robinson-Crusoe-fied mass culture and its underlying, heavily racialized socioeconomic regime (wherein media black net worth is equivalent to 7 cents on the white dollar), we can expect them to quite naturally frame Katrina and its aftermath around a number of privilege-friendly and power-preserving concepts within an authoritarian, selective, and diversionary narrative crafted to contain the storm's radical potential. Their job is ideological damage control: putting the lid on the race-class-empire can. Here are some of the key conservative concepts and narratives that we have gleaned so far from dominant media's Katrina coverage: 1. Katrina as essentially a "natural disaster." The richly and darkly "sociological" nature of the tragedy was too "suddenly" and uncontrollably obvious to entirely delete and ignore. Two weeks after the levees were breached (thanks to racist-plutocratic-imperialist "benign neglect" of the need to prepare for a long-predicted catastrophe), however, hydrology and meteorology can be expected to progressively supplant "sociology" (especially left, C. Wright Mills- or Pierre-Bourdieu-inspired sociology) in corporate media's efforts to shape collective memory of the disaster. 2. A focus on "incompetence" in disaster relief management as the main socially constructed factor to merit attention. Here corporate media moves beyond a purely natural interpretation. It fails, however, as it must, to address the roles of competently and routinely imposed racial and class inequality, empire (which feeds domestic inequality and exactly numerous other and related costs at home), and petro-addiction in the construction of Katrina's occurrence and outcome. Nobody at FEMA made the hard-right business party in power steal funds from flood-prevention and disaster management to give its leading fat cat sponsors and constituents gigantic tax reductions even as it called for "good Americans" to make a shared "sacrifice" in the "war on terror." 3. "This Can't Be America. It's more like a Third World nation, like Bangladesh or Baghdad." This frequent comment (and different versions thereof) on the part of numerous incredulous corporate media commentators and reporters minimizes the extreme levels of inequality, poverty, and related racial disparity and public sector starvation that have combined to produce desperate, practically "Third World" living conditions in places like New Orleans' Ninth Ward -- turning race and class into "matters of life and death" in such communities without the "sudden" intervention of inequality-exposing "natural" forces. More than a generation ago, of course, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to warn Americans about the supreme dangers involved in the surrounding of "Negro cities" by "white suburbs." He also spoke passionately against what he called the "triple and interrelated evils" of racism, militarism-imperialism, and economic exploitation/capitalism. Long before Katrina arrived to momentarily and partially dislodge the lid on the imperial race-class can, those "triple evils" combined to consign much of the "world's greatest nation's" black citizens to sub-"First-World" circumstances in isolated, invisible, inner-city eyes of the world-capitalist hurricane. 4. An obsessive focus on real and alleged black "looting" in the hurricane's wake. Of course, "breaking in" to the privately (and corporately) owned stores that happen to warehouse commodified means of survival was the only way for many marooned New Orleans' residents of different racial background to stay alive as the federal government took five days and more to send basic provisions. Besides adding enormous toxic racist insult to racist injury, this revealing media focus conveniently turns attention away from privileged and imperialist "elite's" looting of the public fiscal commons -- a regular and ongoing "stick-up from the top down" -- to pay for its terrible wars and tax-cuts. It was darkly interesting, of course, to see white New Orleans hurricane survivalists described and portrayed by dominant media as "finders," not "looters" when media cameras caught them in the act of stealing provisions to live. 5. A special taste for individual coping and survival stories. Engaging stories along these lines obviously carry strong "human interest" appeal. They also turn attention away from the structural and societal forces that created the collective, racially disparate disaster which made harrowing, heroic, and solitary survival stories necessary in the first place. 6. Folding discussion of how the American System created Tropical Storm and Societal Failure Katrina (TSSFK) into the categories of "political grandstanding" and "partisan finger-pointing." Along with alleged mass black "looting," "raping," "shooting," "killing," and "pillaging," this is a major theme in the post-Katrina ravings of such powerful hard-right corporate media talking-heads as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity. With these and other reactionary, privilege-friendly narratives, dominant media is doing its best to close the American mind to the many ways in which Katrina might educate the populace about class, race, Martin King's "triple evils," and the perverted priorities of empire and inequality. C. Wright Mills would be impressed.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Organum, Baby at Sep 15, 2005 21:20 PM
http://poetry.rotten.com/bbk/index2.html The focus this blog took is sickening. Laughter in the wake of a tragedy like this. I hope some good can come of it though. If the moneygrubbers can be taught that allmost all of them will die together with the poor, and with a poorer conscience, if they do not get a grip and stop the cancerous growth of the capitalist Beast. This is after all just bad weather. The real change will come when the dimming effect can no longer contain the greenhouse-effect. Please powerful ones ! Please wake up !

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Organum, Baby at Sep 15, 2005 20:12 PM
Do you then , believe that hindu-math, as you put it, is the product of the trace genes arriving with proto-aryan herdsmen arriving after the flooding of the black sea ? I refer to the works of Gimbutas and later arkeologists. Clearly stating that the agriculural cultures prior to aryan invasion ( both India and Europa ) were producing bigger , more peaceful structures of civilisation. I would further refer to the roman empire whoose only objective achievement was the reinvention of concrete. Followed by the classical european middleages producing close to nothing. The renaisance opens up and welcomes foreign influence and thus invents. I am frightened by the hatred your rethoric creates against people like me. Tall blond blueeyed straightnosed squarejawed ones. Please dont create further tension. I have met girls of my own pedigree that exclude me from even the tought of relation because of what people like you focus on and represent. Go play Yazz ! You dont even have to find i SUPERIOR to other music. But if your head can take the math of it, you have to like it

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By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 15, 2005 16:17 PM
"Algebra has indeed "proved to be of far more utilitarian value than expected," no matter what "they" used it for: the fact is, we wouldn't have it if they hadn't developed it" Parmenide's fallacy I believe. If there had been no Islamic empire to act as a buffer it is entirely possible that Hindu mathematics could have reached Europe SOONER than they did. The Europeans were just as profficient explorers as the Arabs. It is also possible that medieval European scholastic philosphers could have simply invented algebra themselves at some slightly later date. You might as well be saying that because the elevator takes you to the roof the stairs must take you to the basement. Tripe!

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 15, 2005 15:29 PM
BTW, if the fact that there is "more genetic variation within races than between races" makes race an "invalid concept", how come you can point to specific sub-Saharan genetic tracers within the Greek gene pool? You have previously made the absence of such consistent differences the foundation of your argument for the non-existence of race. You seem confused Graeme. "YOU were the one who implied White people have been successful because of their command of the tools of violence" Isn't it about time you left that particular strawman alone Graeme? My claim is that White people's success in war is a RESULT of their greater socio-economic success and their superior aptitude for technological innovation. Not vice-versa. As usual you get the argument back to front.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 15, 2005 14:54 PM
"The "Muslim conquest" was made up of Arabs and Turks, not sub-Saharan Africans. If you're talking about the Egyptian empire, fine, but however it happened, the evidence still suggests that today "Greeks share an *important* part of their genetic pool with sub-Saharan Africans," So you dismiss the Turks and Arabs, who lived in an Empire which bordered on and encompassed lands inhabited by millions of Blacks, as a possible source of the Greek population's Black African genetic legacy? Despite the fact that Greece was incorporated into this empire for almost half a millenia and despite the fact that the Ottomans brought millions of Black slaves from Africa whom they inter-bred with, somehow the Turks and Arabs maintained genetic isolation from their Black neighbours and co-religionists and therefore could not possibly be a source of modern Greek, sub-Saharan DNA. Fine! That hypothesis is, however, in strict contradiction to your earlier claim that geographically and culturally isolated human populations are, despite, superficial differences, more or less genetically indistinguishable. Can you decide which theory you are promoting before you file your next insult strewn polemic Graeme?

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 15, 2005 04:15 AM
"The gene flow from Black Africa to Greece may have occurred in Pharaonic times or when Saharan people emigrated after the present hyperarid conditions were established (5000 years B.C.)." Or it may have occurred over the, post classical, 400 year period of Muslim conquest. Duh! Greece was incorporated into an Empire which had literally millions of Black African subjects and citizens for almost half a millenia. The Dorians came from the Black Sea region. They were hardly likely to have brought any African genes with them. This "important" genetic crossover hasn't had much phenotypic impact, has it? Unless you think that Mando looks like Beyonce Graeme? "Give it a rest. Bwong's point was that high crime and "advanced" civilizations tend to correlate, for various reasons" Yes and I have just deliniated the most obvious ones. "White people tend to be in power just about everywhere" In my opinion because they possess a unique combination of tempremental, cognitive and creative attributes which allow them to create superior technology and superior socio-economic systems. In the opinion of the left-liberal peanut gallery it is because White people are genetically predisposed to violent conquest. Inverted snobbery was the middle-class affectation of the seventies. Inverted racism is the middle-class affectation of the present day.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 14, 2005 19:07 PM
"A sophisticate legal code may signify an "advanced" culture. But it is also an evidence that the people are dishonest and criminal minded" That's got to be one of your best. My mates are still laughing at that one. Primitive societies have laws and customs which seek to address the problem of property rights and personal freedoms. Because primitive societies are not particularly complex in comparison to urban societies and because primitive societies do not produce a surfeit of material goods over which property disputes may develop, their primitive legal codes do not require substantiation beyond the parameters of tribal custom. Low crime is explained in tribal groups because of very high ratios of inter-relatedness, a paucity of material goods to squabble over and an overriding preoccupation with gaining the basic necessities of survival. Not because primitivism is "good" and civilisation is "evil".

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 14, 2005 18:24 PM
"By that standard Euclid's great work was not original either.In your spirit one can argue Euclid plagerised his geometry from the Egyptian land surveyers" And what does Egypt have to do with sub-Saharan Africa? The Egyptians were not Negroes. In fact paleo-skeletal evidence indicates that the Egyptian elite were of Mediterranian and proto-Nordic stock. Euclidean geometry is the product of a cross-pollination of ideas between and within a cadre of high IQ civilisations, none of which were Black. The "Arabic", "Art of Hindu Reckoning" is simple translation. "MOST inventions were inspired by mundane requirements" And they often prove to be of far more utilitarian value than expected. In the case we are discussing, the brilliant invention (algebra) was neither invented by the Arab Muslims nor developed by them into anything useful. Forgive me for not being awestruck.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 14, 2005 11:48 AM
Ha, ha, ha! I will address your "great points" a wee bit later, I'm rather busy at the moment. In the meantime, I notice that one of our "anti-racists" alludes to "morally absent White men". So your rejection of racism is itself based on racist beliefs about White people. There seems to be no human failure (or even natural catastrophe) which you do not trace back to the activities of White people. Replace "White" with "Jew" in your posts and you would have a perfect analog for Nazi propaganda. I will continue to demolish your racist arguments later. Looking forward to it. Calvin

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Gammon101, Bwong at Sep 14, 2005 09:04 AM
Opps, something has disappeared. The last post should be: Besides the refugees fleeing oppression at home, many more migrate to the West(at least initially) for real or percieved economical opportunities. That is not in principle different from Western business people dying to get a piece of action in China. Only difference is your average immigrants don't have millions to invest and don't expect billions in profit. The Chinese government can surly be smug about their superior system.Just look at all the wealthy white men flocking over to pay tribute to the red emperors in unprecedented number.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Gammon101, Bwong at Sep 14, 2005 08:30 AM
That is not in principle different from Western business people dying to get a piece of action in China. Only difference is your average immigrants don't have millions to invest and don't expect billions in profit. The Chinese government can surly be smug about their superior system.Just look at all the wealthy white men flocking over to pay tribute to the red emperors in unprecedented number.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Gammon101, Bwong at Sep 14, 2005 08:08 AM
"Can we be talking about the foreigners and non-Whites who are flocking to Western countries in unprecedented numbers? These people risk their lives every day to live under Western "oppression". Can't be that bad can it?" People have been migrating around the world all over since day one. Why is "non whites" migrating so different from white Europeans who fled "white oppressions" of the Old World to NA? Also, even Bush doesn't bomb his own back yard(at least one would hope)There is no contradiction even for those whose home are bombed by the U.S to want to flee to the United States. That wouldn't prove that the U.S is not an oppressive and murderous force aboard.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Rekouche, Koceilah at Sep 14, 2005 05:55 AM
great points bwong

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 14, 2005 03:27 AM
"except I add "or black" to your list;... it is better to be poor, homosexual, disabled or female in almost any non-US Western country" A rather crude evasion Graeme. Even if your point is true, which is debatable, it is still true that people who fall into these categories, especially Blacks, are still better off in America than in vitrually any non-Western polity. Which is what I said in the first place, so maybe its you who can't read? "Interesting you neglect to include "foreigners" and "non whites" in your list of people whose oppression you appear to disapprove." Can we be talking about the foreigners and non-Whites who are flocking to Western countries in unprecedented numbers? These people risk their lives every day to live under Western "oppression". Can't be that bad can it?

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Gammon101, Bwong at Sep 14, 2005 02:57 AM
It is laughable to reduce the complex dynamics of cultural and technological developments to "race" Not surprsingly, desert dwellers never invented hydrodynamics. A sophisticate legal code may be signify an "advanced" culture. But it is also an evidence that the people are dishonest and criminal minded. Better weapons and technology(the two often go hand in hand) are "superior". But it may be because they're more prone to war and are more homicidal thus need bigger guns.Are violence and blood lust desirable traits? An "adapative advantage" is not superiority in a cosmic sense. It may become deadly when the enviroment changes. The most successful hunter tribes (your "grey wolves")starved to death after they quickly killed off all the big games with their superior skills. Southern Europe was more developed and prosperous than Western Europe because of their advanced banking system. But it sunk to the dark age and did not recover to these days after their banks collapse.The backwater of Western Europe was unscathed because they didn't have a banking system. This "backwardness" became an advantage. Now they are way ahead. "Western advantage" derives from the massive use of technology and computers. What if computers world wide are paralysed for a week?(not unimaginable) The "Western world" would collsapse. Africans would opine years later that the "white men" was stupid to have put all their eggs in one basket. Lack of forsight must be genetic.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Gammon101, Bwong at Sep 14, 2005 02:08 AM
"Taking an overview of history it is absurd to claim that the overall achievements of Europeans does not rise far and above the achievements of any other human ethno-cultural groups" It is absurd to argue that "cultural achievements" are trade marked to any specific enthic or "racial" group who invent everything from thin air just because of their "superior genes". "Cultures" borrow, steal and plagerise from each others. That has always been the way. Newton said he was able to see further because he was standing on the shouders of giants. They are not static. You take a snap shot at a recent phase of history and argue as if it has always been that way. Moreover, we have not yet reached the end of history unless, all these great "European inventions" finally do us in by making the earth unlivable. If my "high IQ" ancestor knew of Europe three thousand years ago they would have thought the "white Europeans" were just a bunch or retarded morons. They would no doubt have noticed the hairy features of the white men and concluded that their backwardness could be explained by their close kinship with monkeys. (to be continued)

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Gammon101, Bwong at Sep 14, 2005 00:50 AM
"The Muslims did not invent algebra. Al Khwarizmi's (from a non-Muslim Parsee family)"Hisab al-jabr w'al-muqabala" was not an original work.It was a translation from Hindu Aryan texts." By that standard Euclid's great work was not original either.In your spirit one can argue Euclid plagerised his geometry from the Egyptian land surveyers. Afterall, all his results were known to the Egyptians. His "only" contribition was a novel way of presention(the deductive method) "The Muslims used (or misused) this fabulous gift for the mundane task of computing complex Islamic marriage laws" It is like saying the only use of the internet is to view porn and for racist assholes to spread hate. What noble use did the Europeans use fabulous gifts such as the gun powder for? Better use technology for "mudane tasks" than mass murder if you ask me. On a larger point MOST inventions and technology were motivated by "mundane" if not downright stupid reasons. A lot of recent and not so recent developments of Western technology were driven by the purposes of war, tax collection and commerce(death, tax and profits). How noble and transcendental are these goals? Further back science was all mixed up with religion and whitchcraft. Astronomy and Chemsitry are descendents of astrology and alchemy. (to be continued)

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Gammon101, Bwong at Sep 14, 2005 00:17 AM
"The best objective standards with which to judge a culture would be to ask in which cultures is it better to be; poor; female; disabled or homosexual?" Interesting you neglect to include "foreigners" and "non whites" in your list of people whose oppression you appear to disapprove. These groups were treated pretty harshly in "Western culture" as well until very recently. If tolerence and compassion are so much encoded in "white" genes or "white culture" why does it take so many centries for them to be expressed? Since you obviously fare very poorly according to these "objective standard" has it occured to you that you may be racially "impure" afterall? Run, run to have your DNA tested! BTW, homosexuals were a lot more acceptible in traditional Chinese society, the Arab world and many non Judeo Christian cultures until Chirtstian invaders and missionaries arrived with their homophobia. Greame is exactly right that your criteria of "high culture" is entirely subjective. I personally prefer Bob Marly to Pavarotti anyday. While I am no artist but the great Tolstoy would probably have agreed. Indeed he argued passionately that the folk music of the peasants was way superior to Beethovan's pretentious, boring bombast(his words). Not that I think Tolstoy was infallible but it show taste is quite subjective. (to be continued)

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Ragu6, Ragu at Sep 13, 2005 21:41 PM
Calvin you keep getting your ass handed to you man. On another note bloggers check out this site. http://iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/home/

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Bauerly, Mtbrad at Sep 13, 2005 15:10 PM
Calvin, even if one does accept your overall argument that racial differences create an hierarchy of civilizations (which I don't), what about the affects of hybidity? For thousands of years races have been commingling their genes and the current rate of crossbreeding is higher than any other time period. Would not a hybrid that contained all the best qualities of all races be even more superiour than any one race, including white europeans? To use grotesque racial steriotypes, wouldn't a smart asian man mixed with the genes of a physically strong african further mixed with a morally absent white person arrive at the ultimate human? Weren't the most successful empires also the most diverse?

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 13, 2005 13:30 PM
"geographical loci are theoretical absurdities. Some groups in both continents have only lived there a few thousand years" Sorry Graeme! I missed that howler. You are claiming that the modalities of regional global biomes have no significant influence on the human populations which inhabit them. Are you unaware that local ecology is considered by anti-racists to be virtualy the sole basis for human cultural divergence? The greatest populariser of this theory is the anti-racist Jewish professor Jared Diamond. Do you happen to have a 2800+ word refutation of Guns Germs and Steel handy? The anti-race fanatics are falling over each other in panic now. In the same post you also aver that 100,000 years is not enough time for significant human selective adaptions to occur. And Dr Dre is a better poet than Philip Larkin I suppose? LOL!

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 13, 2005 11:26 AM
"No, it would be saying 50 Cent is a better rapper, but implying that singing has more arbitrary value than rapping (because the former is associated with whites, the latter with blacks)" This line of argument is stripped of the scant shred of credibility it has, if we look beyond specific cultural "achievements", such as rap, and place these specific achievements back within the totality of broader Black culture. Rap is the musical expression of a culture which is exults in bravado, machismo and violence. I would regard Black achievements in music to be far in advance of their achievements in the sciences, but still, nevertheless, inferior to the achievements of Europeans, such as Mozart, Bach and Vivaldi. The best objective standards with which to judge a culture would be to ask in which cultures is it better to be; poor; female; disabled or homosexual? Poor people in Niger seem to be mainly emmaciated poor people in NO seem to be mainly overweight. Gay people in Iran are burned to death. That doesn't happen in evil White San Francisco does it Graeme?

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 13, 2005 05:00 AM
"So by the same token whites are unable to function as well in "black societies" proves that white are genetically inferior?" No. Not really. That would be a bit like saying that because 50 cent is a better rapper than Pavarotti. 50 cent is the superior singer. "Western civilization" is not monolithic. It has great achievements as well as some real shameful moments" European technological sophistication has certainly made warfare more damaging in the West. Taking an overview of history it is absurd to claim that the overall achievements of Europeans does not rise far and above the achievements of any other human ethno-cultural group. "To argue that being more successful in enslaving and killing other groups is proof of "superiority" is utterly ridiculous" It would, because the fact that 75% of the pre-contact population of Africa were enslaved by the other 25%, would mean that pre-contact Africa would be regarded as one of the most advanced ethno-cultural polities in world history. That's why I prefer to base my analysis on intellectual and technological achievements.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Ragu6, Ragu at Sep 13, 2005 04:46 AM
Maybe calvin you think it's functional for cops to murder and thrash blacks and Indians to a bloody pulp because after all their “savages” – so they deserve it? They deserve the beatings, the jail time, the state sanctioned murder – the chair -, they deserve to be treated as animals. Have you ever investigated why the “savages” make up the majority of people being processed through the criminal justice system in both Canada and the states? And don't give me that crap that they commit the most crime. I wonder if you ever heard of the criminalization of the poor or suppression and control of the malcontent or the structurally imposed barriers that determines upwards social and economic mobility. But I guess it's their fault for not being capable or as capable as your enlightened self and your “race”…because in your world discrimination and intolerance; systemic or otherwise does not exist, except for whites, right? That's right I think after reading these posts of yours I've had an awakening, I will attend to the next Aryan brothers meeting, get a copy of Mien Kamph, order those black docs, shave my head and walk around thinking in fixed separations, associate social attributes to superficial features and arm myself for the upcoming race war. Get a life you f*&^%$ loser!!!

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 13, 2005 04:11 AM
Utter nonsense! The Muslims did not invent algebra. Al Khwarizmi's (from a non-Muslim Parsee family)"Hisab al-jabr w'al-muqabala" was not an original work. It was a translation from Hindu Aryan texts. The Hindus probably developed alegebra from the Chinese rod-numerical system. The Chinese are a high IQ Eurasian race. The Muslims used (or misused) this fabulous gift for the mundane task of computing complex Islamic marriage laws. BTW, I regard Graemes continued name-calling, demands for my banning and refusal to debate as a particularly graceless admission of defeat. So long Graeme!

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Ragu6, Ragu at Sep 13, 2005 04:06 AM
Calvin a couple questions do you actually practice segregation based on a social construct? Do you go around trying to figure out people's blood lines and form relations on those objectives? Or do you just naturally gravitate towards people of your "race" and thus formidable intellectual authority? On another note do you think it was functional when whites were hanging blacks from trees in the south? Or when Yankee soldiers are urinating and torturing Arab prisoners of their criminal occupation? I bet you would be up in arms shithead if some Arab pissed in your face or tortured your brother. Maybe it's ok for you when predominately “White” governments pillage resources from the predominately “colored” Third World leaving in their wake nothing but destruction and strife just so you and I could enjoy our way of life? But I bet it would not be ok when the “sand niggers” react because they're barbaric and backwards and don't know how to function – it's just a property of there nature, am I correct?

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Organum, Baby at Sep 13, 2005 03:40 AM
He refused to be an "ethnocultural darwinist" but seems quite proud of the label "racist". This was ofcourse based on the consept of one human race where a "racist" would be one who didnt like animals. See ? ECD=Racist Did you get that Kal ? ( Doesnt corresponds to nazis who were proud of treating animals better than people) Arab math and medicine. And they tought the viking to make better swords. :-)

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Gammon101, Bwong at Sep 13, 2005 02:14 AM
This calvin is a really nasty piece of work. I have encountered people I disagree with vehemently on this blog on various topics and even all topics but never have I met someone as dispicable and vile as calvin. "Western civilization" is not monolithic. It has great achievements as well as some real shameful moments. Calvin certainly represents a very low point of "Western culture". calvin earlier claimed that the Islamic Arabs merely preserved the intellectual heritage of the Greeks without adding anything to it while the superior Europeans were too busy burning witches and defending themselves against the muslims. Actually the Arabs did much more. Among other things,Greek mathematics was basically just geometry. Algebra as we know now was developed by the Arabs. The Arabs appeared to be better abstract thinkers than the Greeks. The Greeks did not invent their science in a vaccum.They borrowed heavily from other cultures. Nor did they represent the only peak of ancient scientific achievement, though most well known. The Babylonians figured out the rudiments of "Fourier analysis" thousands of years ago. Fourier came up with it around the French revolution. Also one has to wonder about European genetic and cultural superiority if they were put on the defensive for several centries by the muslims. Nice job, Greame!

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Gammon101, Bwong at Sep 13, 2005 01:43 AM
"No. I think that they are unable to fuction in White societies with the same degree of success as Whites, because of adaptive heritable differences." So by the same token whites are unable to function as well in "black societies" proves that white are genetically inferior? "They" cannot function in "white society" perhaps simply because "Whites" make the rules which favour themselves? Your exterme racist attitude, which was common among "whites" barely a generation ago offer a much better explanation for the lack of success of blacks in "white societies" than any pesudo science you expouse. Your social Darwinianism is a profound bastardization of Darwin. "Success" and "fitness" are only meaningful in specific enviromental context. There is no linear ranking of diverse traits in some absolute, cosmic sense. The long hair of some animals is a "superior" trait in cold climate but it would be a handicap in hot areas. To argue that being more successful in enslaving and killing other groups is proof of "superiority" is utterly ridiculous. By the same logic the biggest murderer and rapist would be the most superior individual simply because he can harm others without being harmed. Indeed that was the case in warrior societies where the most violent psychopaths were crowned kings. But in a civilized society such indiviuals tend to end up in jail.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Organum, Baby at Sep 12, 2005 23:13 PM
No Graeme ! They would not. Because according to KKK faith. The "Aryans" ( As opposed to Iranyans ) are the real hebrews while the jewish just stole the title and old grandfather Abraham with it. The bible is all about "whitey" to them and "coloured" are the spawn of something else. Kalvin could be lynched. Or forced to go to church with the biggest imperial super-turtle. He could sing in the quire or howl like a wolf that would like to be superiour to other wolves because it thought it had the prettiest fur. Kalvin has a point though. There are dictators that have killed more than hitler, ( real name schickelgruber ) and even less than schickelgruber. The marshmellowman says heil schickelgruber.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 12, 2005 11:10 AM
Graeme, you have written a 2800+ word essay, congratulations. Can't you use some of the information in it to rebutt some of my arguments, arguments which can, apparently be demolished by the "average 10 year old"? Your refusal to debate reminds me of martial arts "experts" who refuse to spar with boxers because their techniques are, "too deadly man!". Yeah, right! You are tired, Baby is bored. I find that funny because you people never get tired of expositing your own paranoid anti-Western beliefs at great and repetetive length. You have now crafted a 2800 word sacred text as a refuge from open discussion. You remind me of Christians who simply refer anyone who argues with them to the Bible. Isn't it funny how you resemble so closely the people you despise? I'm supposed to be having the, "intellectual shit kicked out of me". I feel more like I am being pelted with marshmallows by small children. Good luck with your religious writing.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Organum, Baby at Sep 12, 2005 05:07 AM
Do you expect the benefit of all the earths resources without any consession ? Ofcourse there are differences. Of course cultures need to adapt to each other."adaptive heritable differences". Oioioi ! Do you suggest "white" trade restricted to "white" ares then. Or suggest naively that any facist regime could contain the cultural interchange there from ? Yes yes: Polpot and Mao and Stalin. And somebody killed a few more than Adolf Hitler. Though his real mane was schickelgruber. "The grey wolves" used to be a turkish nationalist group with a network in germany. And if grey wolves are better seducers than white wolves , yes then, as kalvin would put it, its pure evolution man! I hope you get a kick out of this , cause i am boored. Reinvent, manling !

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 12, 2005 03:57 AM
"You actually think blacks...etc are naturally inferior because they were at the receiving end of violence and destruction" No. I think that they are unable to fuction in White societies with the same degree of success as Whites, because of adaptive heritable differences. "How would you sirs explain the most savage mass murderers in modern history: Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet, Columbus, Bush, Churchill, Kennedy, Reagan (all white)" The greatest mass murderer of all time was Mao, an Oriental I believe. You also forgot Tamerlane, Pol Pot, Hideki Tojo, Attila the Hun and Trotsky, who was Jewish. Blacks like Shaka Zulu, Idi Amin and Bokassa were just as murderous as Stalin and Mao, but lacked the organizational skills, economical resources and intelligenge to murder as efficiently as part Jewish, part Asiatic and part Caucasian, Stalin and Mongoloid Mao. Probably the two greatest murderers of all time. Any news of my banning?

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Rekouche, Koceilah at Sep 11, 2005 22:49 PM
The frontpage place is one site out of a large network of similar sites and blogs. Basically the "angry white man" theme with the overriding ideology of the right wing think tanks. In between pictures of guns and ultra jingoist pro-military articles they throw in the main ideological lines of Israel=good, terrorists=chavez=palestinians, bush=savior, etc. Actually on all of these networked sites, all the content is sandwiched between web-advertisements for books called "Secrets of Conservative Millionaires" and ones on how to gain 50lbs of muscle without lifting weights using "military-style" training techniques. My guess is their average regular readers aren't wealthy businessmen or intellectual right wing activists.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Organum, Baby at Sep 11, 2005 21:56 PM
And why the Ak anyway Koceilah ? Isnt that anti-american behaviour ? Seems like it is a biggie about claiming symbols. I say, let them keep the Ak47 and all other gunsymbols. They have another Tshirt there. Picturing different handguns. The text is " Celebrating diversity" Celebrating, in basic black, and , diversity, in colours that reminds of rasta, jamaica and africa. Cobble this with the other Tshirt-text. "Guns , tobacco and firearms should be a convenience store, not an agency ! A disturbing picture of cruel jokes and planned racism surfaces. Yes ! They even have an explanation of what "humor" is on the frontpage. They are obviously having a laugh. Could explain some of the mechanics behind the attacks 911. Guns, explosives and simple solutions to complex problems. Haters on both sides confirming each others worldwiews. And then the AK47 suddenly makes sense.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Ragu6, Ragu at Sep 11, 2005 21:48 PM
KKKalvin are you for real? What is your malfunction? You actually think blacks...etc are naturally inferior because they were at the receiving end of violence and destruction. Maybe you prefer to keep blacks in the US subjected to the whims of their white masters? Or maybe your solution is the solution that Hitler sought (a white man) the outright extermination of a people. I mean your arguments are absurd...take for instance your point that blacks are naturally backwards and culturally deprived of civility and intellectual advancement. How would you sirs explain the most savage mass murderers in modern history: Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet, Columbus, Bush, Churchill, Kennedy, Reagan (all white)... I mean I can go on for ever but it seems to me that those with the tendency to produce the most destruction lies not in a superficial socially constructed entity such as color but in the extremism of ideology and the pursuit of power. But If we were to take you seriously by your logic the above list makes whites the most uncivilized and backwards "race" on earth.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Rocstar, Ubermench at Sep 11, 2005 21:38 PM
This is one of the worst disasters in American history. I agree with almost everything you have written here. Once again this will become a sealed tomb of racism, death and destruction by the major media - it will be cleansed like the war in Iraq, and so many other atrocities. There are precious few places that hit the nail on the head, I have seen few raw photo footage of the human carnage, with the exception of a few, such as: http://notinhisname.blogdrive.com It's is absolutely incredible, the cover-up machine.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Organum, Baby at Sep 11, 2005 20:02 PM
Their sex/violence theme is an old one. They probably get stuck with a certain kind of follower. In a way it reminds me of a demonstration held by young neo-cons protesting musicians involved in politics. Musicians should stick to their business, music, and leave politickin to , who knows wich professional groups they would endorse. ( Owners ? Maybe lawyers, soldiers ) ? But this is the opposite. Not drawing away democratic rights. Just disturbing the ability to be objective. Its like the car-commercial with the bikinigirl. Buy the car ( politickin ), get the girl. Its on the line of GOB using "born in the usa" on their rallies. ( Giggle ) :-)

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Rekouche, Koceilah at Sep 11, 2005 19:39 PM
Baby, that picture of the girl with the AK just makes me laugh. These folks who did this don't realize that the result of these t-shirts would be to iconize and further popularize Che? Isn't their goal the opposite ? here's the pic: http://www.frontpagemag.com/media/advertisements/fpagecandy.jpg (if it doesnt work just go to main page)

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Organum, Baby at Sep 11, 2005 19:26 PM
The fact that rightist websites are less open to plurality of thought may leave this sites democracy vulnerable. The slur is an insult to people allready marginalized by those that want a divide and a continuation of conflict. Reminds me of an aryan brootherhood leader arrested in new york with colera-vials shortly after the attack on WTS in the nineties. It is telling that he can not differentiate between discourse "keep knocking the living intellectual crap out of this low-life " and real violence wich is physical. The nordic settlers at greenland did not fish wery much and their living conditions were gross. Prime example of lack of adaptability. "The azhkenazi are the ethnic group with the highest average IQ" Coming from a crossroad between cultures and "races", that does not surprise me at all Kalvin. And OK one can call most etnicities "races", ( Ex irish vs english, celtic vs saxon etc ) just as its possible to drool over "decadence" as opposed to "cultural fatigue". I wonder wether to use this slur as a lever against the rightwingers in general, or, in goof faith to warn about the danger of affiliation. And as an afterthought; Frontpage magazine features a bleached girl in a skimpy top. Mouth open , but showing teeth. Bracing a Kalashnikov she features the subtext. "What really happened in the bolivian jungle" J-z! It is now an olymp since that tragical day that changed our lives. The US deserves something better than this.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 11, 2005 12:13 PM
"No, I'm saying that adaptations are too randomized to possibly be correlated even very well with ethnicities, much less phantom "races;" And I suppose that the environmental factors are clear cut, strictly deliniated and quantifiable? You have already posited an absurd description of sub-Saharan Africa as a uniformly densely forested and sparsely populated region. It is not. Genetic and environmental factors interact in ways that ultimately produce human cultures. I have a pluralist approach which assumes that both genes and environment are important in this respect. You have an absolutist approach which is based on a fanatical rejection of arguments which are perfectly logical. Your absolutism is mirrored by the fascism displayed in the last two posts. First I am branded a heretic and then excommunicated. There is also a troubling subtext of violence in Street's last offering. So yes, maybe he should be banned?

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Street, Paul at Sep 11, 2005 05:52 AM
This is a question for ZNet blog coordinator Brian Dominick: http://blog.zmag.org/bloggers/?blogger=dominick As I said, I am less than squeamish about banning racist and/or fascist pigs but am not granted the authority to do so. You can look back and see (if its all still there) how many people got banned last spring (March?) for a discussion that emerged regarding pornography and gender on the Lucinda Marshall blog. As I recall, I lost three or so so regular commenters from my own blog who apparently (I confess I did not read the posts on LM's blog) had some civility and other gender-related issues but I truly do not recall anyone using a ZNet comments section to make droves of posts dedicated to the half-erudite elaboration of openly racist neo-eugenicist filth. It seems that you can spout vile rhetoric and stay as long as you are careful to seem to keep a civil tongue and don't threaten to stalk and assassinate the blogger. I have individual comment deletion capacity but that's silly and impractical after a while. I say just keep knocking the living intellectual crap out of this low-life (Hell, maybe I should get banned...but I don't claim to keep a civil tongue around racists or facists in real life and I won't pretend to here) and see if you can get Dominick to read some of his posts and agree to do a cleansing cybernetic Che Guevera (Guevera dug executions and proudly bit his wrist during his own) on this noxious little web maggot that calls itself "Calvin."

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 11, 2005 02:15 AM
I see you are Jared Diamond groupie. There are surviving accounts of attacks on the greenland Vikings by Skraelings. Climate change forced the Inuit South and into conflict with the Greenlanders. The Viking colonists were unable to adopt Innuit hunting based food provision methods because of withering Inuit attacks. You say fatigue, I say decadence. "The most productive climate for invention seems to be multicultural" You make no qualitative distinction between cultures. Faith based religious beliefs once dominated Europe to the same extent as they do modern Islam. What do we gain by dragging our culture back to the middle ages through Islamic immigration? Multicultural societies have no mechanism for selecting which aspects of integrated cultures they assimilate. You get the whole package, good and bad. That's why you have circumcised women, Islamic fanatics, and Albanian sex slavers living in London. The latest unfiltered cultural benefit brought to us from SA has been "jackrolling", gang rape South African style. Are we supposed to console the victim with some ethnic food and a visit to the Mela?

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Organum, Baby at Sep 11, 2005 01:31 AM
Calvin ! The nordic settlements at greenland most probably died out due to malnutrition and inbreeding. After loosing contact with their homeland and worsened climate. ( Little iceage of ca 1500-1600 ) Adaptation to inuit technology and customs would have helped. No excavations support your theory of genocide. Cultural fatigue: Brought on by the inability to reform ones customs and laws to new times. It applies to the sub-saharan as well as to mesopotamia, china, europe, post-colombian america, and usa. You allso seem to misunderstand the history of math. Underestimate the role of religion in legislation and cooperation. The most productive climate for invention seems to be multicultural.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 11, 2005 00:43 AM
"Written languages and "techonological sophistication" are only one measure among many of calculating "achievement;" How absurd! You might just as well claim that the power of speech does not make humans more evolved than apes because apes are better at climbing trees. That's your best one yet Graeme.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 11, 2005 00:09 AM
Koceilah, let me translate Chomsky for you, "When you are losing a debate just call your opponent a Nazi"

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 10, 2005 23:45 PM
"Because two English-speaking empires have ruled the planet for the past 3 or 4 centuries, that's why; if people want to succeed, they have to do so on the terms of these dominant hegemons. This is simple power politics" There is no nation, culture or tribe in history which has not sought to dominate its neighbours. Europeans have been able to do so more effectively than other peoples because we Europeans have created more viable civilisations. Other races show great diligence in the extermination of Whites whenever the opportunity presents itself. What about the extermination of the Solutreans and the Genocide of the Viking colonies of Newfoundland and Greenland? The victorious Zulu at Isandlwana killed the sick in the hospital, the draught horses and the regimental pets. "Today when the sun sets, there will be no more Absarokee [Crow] left! We will kill all their warriors and even the old men; we will save their young boys and raise them to become Dakota [Sioux] warriors, and we shall marry their wives and daughters to raise more warriors" That was the Sioux indians' "culturally inclusive" approach to warfare. Europeans are not more genocidal, warlike and imperialistic than other races. We just enjoy military superiority.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Rekouche, Koceilah at Sep 10, 2005 23:26 PM
I'm reminded of something I heard Chomsky say. When people openly admit they're Nazis, there's really not much to discuss.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 10, 2005 23:08 PM
"It should also be noted that both Rome and especially the US had heavily mixed populations, including large amounts of dark-skinned people" The decline of Rome and the US are directly associated with their transformation from White ethnic polities to mixed-race, multicultural gumbos. The Romans could not defeat the Huns. America cannot defeat Al- Quaeda and has been thrown into turmoil and recrimination by the destruction of one of its Black cities.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 10, 2005 22:34 PM
"the achievements of Rome and Greece were largely unknown until the Renaissance means that Rome and Greece never did anything worth remembering" These achievements were well known to the Arabs. The store of classical knowledge siezed by the Muslims is the basis of the myth of Muslim cultural greatness. Cultural progress in Europe was retarded by near constant Islamic predation. Islam never eclipsed the European civilisations whose knowledge Islam appropriated. Europe defeated Islam and eclipsed Rome. "Europe's main "gifts" to the world have been extremely well-organized systems of violence and aggression" Electricity, manned flight, the x-ray, penicillin, space exploration, deductive logic, the methodology of science, birth control, don't count for anything then? Don't you know anything about the depredations of the Mongols, the extermination and consumption of the Moriori by the Maori, or Zulu militarism? Thank God Rhodesia is now in the hands of peace loving, non-White Robert Mugabe.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 10, 2005 21:39 PM
"Your argument basically amounts to "Europeans think these things are good, and since only Europe ever produced these things, Europe must be the best civilization." If non-Europeans don't think these things are good why are they flocking in massive numbers into the Anglosphere? Don't tell me its simply to enjoy economic benefits. The economic advantages Europeans enjoy are a consequence of their more advanced and productive cultural beliefs. No one said that the Chinese never produced a great civilisation. Chinese cultural achievement correlates well with their measurable cognitive abilities. The ancient Egyptians were not Black and Egyptian civilisation produced a mere fraction of the mathematical and philosophical output of ancient Greece. Pre-Aryan India produced the enigmatic Harrappan civilisation. This civilisation is an anomaly. Sub-Saharan Africa is massive and varied in climate. Mungo Park describes a pre-colonial Africa with abundant agriculture and thriving kingdoms, but with no writing and no technology worth mentioning. Every civilisation grew from an "iliterate rabble" some didn't grow very much though.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Rekouche, Koceilah at Sep 10, 2005 10:33 AM
Graeme. A lot of those people organize, they're dedicated to specific goals. Some very knowlegable in science, archeology, and history. A broad mix, but the general atmosphere gives a feeling quite different than the childish and insincere style presented here.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Snogg, Pondering at Sep 10, 2005 06:26 AM
Thanks Tim, others for your feedback. I will read Tim's Cosby article, then this thread before responding further. It's really cool to join up with zblogs. It's like talking to the person I was back in college!

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Bauerly, Mtbrad at Sep 10, 2005 05:32 AM
.....As for the transfering of FEMA to the Dept of Homeland Security, that was done under the guidence of Bush himself. You cannot try and pin the plame on someone else for this. I know how much conservatives like to pass the buck lately (something about lack of integrity maybe)but in no way is this because of Dems. Actuallly under Clinton FEMA was a cabinet level position and bush moved it out of this level and demoted it into the largest buracracy in the world (ie. Dept of Homeland Security). So you can see if you simply look at the evidence (the dept of Homeland Securty web page doc pg 34 is a good place to start) that it was up to the feds to fund and manage disasters of this scale. That is to not even mention how bush and the republicans cut the funding of the levee project four times and were proposing to cut them a fifth time for this year. Oh, and how Bush cut the FEMA funding by almost 30% in the past few years. Talk about a strong protector.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Rekouche, Koceilah at Sep 10, 2005 05:20 AM
Obviously the Iraqi "race" is the most intelligent since the Sumerians invented writing. Bow to the mighty superior Iraqi. The racist jokers here don't come close to the intelligence level of serious racists like ones found on boards devoted to race like Stormfront.org. At least some of those folks actually read academic papers and work hard to justify their sick thinking. I would've hoped ZNet would attract a higher quality troll. It certainly deserves it. Let us work on this.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Bauerly, Mtbrad at Sep 10, 2005 05:12 AM
"just wondering why people are all over the Feds when the state and local govt's could have evacuated those people" This was already answered back a few pages. But, just to state it again, local government had neither the resorces or the authority to evacuate the city. There is simply no way to evacuate 200,000 people in 48 hours on a cities limited budget. That being said if you refer to my previous post with the link to the Dept of Homeland secerty document you can read how it is up to the federal government to make sure that state and local officials have adiquate plans and the resorces needed to implement those plans. The Document also states that in the event that states are failing to offfer the proper responses it is up to the Feds to step in and take over. Furthermore, on sunday President Bush declared NO a federal issued state of emergency. That is one day before the hurricane hit. After that point it was complete up to the feds to manage the whole area declared in the emergency issue. cont..

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 10, 2005 04:33 AM
" skin colour tends to get darker based on latitude, for obvious reasons, but it is not correlated with any other "black" physical characteristics; you can have dark skin and straight hair, dark skin and wavy hair" The reason that southern Indians, Dravidians and Dalits have dark skin and straight or wavy hair, is that that the population of the Indian subcontinent is a tri-racial conglomerate, as is the aboriginal population of Australia. The aboriginal population of India are described in the Vedas as, bull lipped and noseless. You point out the fact that dark skin color correlates with climate. You fail to notice that climate, skin color and cultural achievement also correlate. No dark skinned people ever achieved a civilisation comparable to Ancient Greece, Rome or modern America, nor is there any Black figure in history comprable to Shakespear, Newton, Pythagoras, Socrates, Abelard, Mozart, the Wright brothers, etc., etc., etc., the list is endless. Since sub-Saharan Africans developed their cultures in isolation from honkey "oppression" for the vast majority of their existence, it would seem that their failure to invent a written language or achieve any significant level of technological sophistication was just bad luck. Three hundred thousand years is one hell of a run of bad luck Graeme.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Gopisfirst, Hhh at Sep 10, 2005 04:18 AM
just wondering why people are all over the Feds when the state and local govt's could have evacuated those people. Another thing just wondering why Congress, especially Democrats, made sure FEMA was put into the Homeland security department. This just adds more beuracracy, and now all of a sudden the Democrats do not want FEMA apart of homeland security when they voted to put it in their. Homeland security was the Democrats idea.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Bok, Yakov at Sep 09, 2005 22:27 PM
Paul, maybe you're one of the few Zneters to blog because you're one of the few with the 'nads to test the market place of ideas? Either that, or you're not affraid of a criticism. Either way, kudos.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Street, Paul at Sep 09, 2005 22:17 PM
Pondering snogg you are all mixed up. You say: "You guys, here's the thing: most people who you would call racist don't have a problem with the 'race' of certain people, they have a problem with their CULTURE and BEHAVIOR. Ghetto culture, to be blunt. Now they may unjustly misread individual blacks as being a part of that culture. And they may be ignorant of its allegedly positive aspects. And they may hold that the behaviors that incence them are genetically inviolable, which is both extremely depressing and most probably untrue. But their PREJUDICE and RACISM is based on personal experience with, and judgement of, behaviors they have been exposed to, or heard about. Often, their racism doesn't extend, for instance, to recent African immigrants." So much of what you say "you guys" call racism" is then described by you as, well,...."PREJUDICE and RACISM," in your last two sentences in this paragraph. You are correct at the end of the paragraph. There's cultural racism and biological racism and here you are talking about --- and yourself skirting with (as you did in an earlier post claiming that your preferred model "Swedish socialism" requires racial homogeneity --- good grief) cultural racism. Perhaps you would like to define "ghetto culture," an interesting term that deserves elaboration on your part. You need to read the comments of the person you are defending. You might look at his earlier comments about "innate ability" and socioeconomic status and then realize he is not a mere cultural racist. Things get worse when you say: "That's my first point. My second is this: what do anti-racist activists hope to accomplish by demonizing those whites who feel this way, BASED ON THEIR OWN PERSONAL EXPERIENCES? (And people who half-way feel this way, like me.) Why is it that Bill Cosby can say extremely critical things about black ghetto culture, and Michael Eric Dyson will write a book in response, firmly but still very respectfully rebutting Mr. Cosby. But when a white person says the same sort of things, they are ostracized and subject to the ad hominem attack. What is accomplished by this?" Please. I have no racial double standard on this at all. Please see my critique of Bill Cosby: “Bill Cosby and White America,” ZNet Magazine (June 1, 2004), available online at http://www.zmag.org/ content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5631. See also my critique of black elitist academic Henry Louis Gates: “Skipping Past Structural Racism: Center Trumps Left in Recent PBS Series in Race in America,” Black Commentator (April 8, 2004), available online at http://www.blackcommentator.com/85/85_think_street.html. See also my piece on Oprah Winfrey: “The Full Blown Oprah Effect: Reflections on Color, Class, and New Age Racism,” Black Commentator (February 27, 2005), available online at http://www.blackcommentator.com/127/127_oprah.html And please pay more attention to people you defend. You are standing up for someone who has identified himself as a racist from England and I'd be curious to know how much direct “PERSONAL EXPERIENCE” you think he has had with what you call “ghetto culture” in the U.S.. I'm curious to know how much such experience you have had. Partly on the basis of my considerable experience with people living under conditions of extreme racial segregation and poverty, I think the problem is exactly the opposite: what you correctly describe (at the end of your first paragraph) as racism (cultural racism here) is more fundamentally the result of the lack of direct white daily experience with black Americans and the single greatest explanation for that absence of contact is white-imposed residential segregation, which is very intensely practiced in the U.S. "Ad-hominim" is a small part of the response to the person you are defending. “Demonizing” is way over the top. I think the person you are defending is a reactionary ass. I'd tell him to his face if he spoke his vile mind next to me at the local pub. My dislike is open and out there and for my part, I (like ebogan4) make zero apology --- I said zero --- for turning my back on someone who calls themselves a racist. And while I'm not going to engage racist trollers directly or first-person, I am very grateful that some of this blog's readers are damn good (and I mean damn good) at responding to them. Sorry, but I really think your defense is incredibly ill-conceived and off-base.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Organum, Baby at Sep 09, 2005 18:46 PM
Hi pondering S. "CULTURE and BEHAVIOR" Consider the sniggering and silence. The silent treatment. The whitecollarcrimes and people passing a dying man in the streets. "Why is it that Bill Cosby can say critical things about black ghetto culture,--,But when a white person says the same things, they are ostracized" A teenager would never badmouth his friends mother the same way he would his own. Same psychological model i guess. Calvin And if grey wolfes are killerwolves killing for fun. Killing untill their prey is gone. What then ? Do you have the figures for Empathy Quotient and Physical Intelligence ?

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Corland7, Creme at Sep 09, 2005 16:26 PM
Street, I've been trying to reach you. Call soon. Sorry to leave this message here.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 09, 2005 12:44 PM
On a further point you make Graeme' "People having different noses isn't remotely like people having different cognitive abilities. It would be like arguing that grey wolves are smarter than black wolves because their fur tends to be a lighter colour" If the grey wolves were observed to be more efficient hunters, display less destructive aggression and had better nurturing skills it would be sensible to consider the possibility that grey wolves were smarter than black wolves wouldn't it? In a more frivolous vein, its amusing that you posit the example of nose shape and the impossibility of it having any relationship to cognitive ability, when it has recently been established that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQs of any ethnic group. Hoy Ve!

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 09, 2005 11:56 AM
Graeme, You claim that "race" as a reality based category is nonsense, because "it is established over a few thousand years, which is genetically and evolutionary speaking practically nothing" DNA sequencing indicates that Africans emerged from the hominid line 200,000 years ago and that an African/non-African split occured 110,000 years ago. 110,000 years is not a "few" thousand in any terms. Africans and Eurasians have inhabited separate geographical loci for longer than half of the lifespan of humanity. So you are wrong on both points. You continue, "If ability was formed by environment, then Blacks not from Africa would not be affected by having lived in Africa" No, but they would be affected by their African genetic legacy. If White South Africans, some of whom have ancestry in Africa which goes back over two hundred years, exposed themselves to the sun to the same extent as Kalahari Bushmen do (the indigenous population) they would have no better protection against skin cancer or sun-burn than newly arrived White immigrants. You are saying that adaptions which have taken place over a few hundred years can obviate adaptions which have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Neither very convincing nor correlating very well to observable evidence.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Snogg, Pondering at Sep 09, 2005 08:41 AM
You guys, here's the thing: most people who you would call racist don't have a problem with the 'race' of certain people, they have a problem with their CULTURE and BEHAVIOR. Ghetto culture, to be blunt. Now they may unjustly misread individual blacks as being a part of that culture. And they may be ignorant of its allegedly positive aspects. And they may hold that the behaviors that incence them are genetically inviolable, which is both extremely depressing and most probably untrue. But their PREJUDICE and RACISM is based on personal experience with, and judgement of, behaviors they have been exposed to, or heard about. Often, their racism doesn't extend, for instance, to recent African immigrants. That's my first point. My second is this: what do anti-racist activists hope to accomplish by demonizing those whites who feel this way, BASED ON THEIR OWN PERSONAL EXPERIENCES? (And people who half-way feel this way, like me.) Why is it that Bill Cosby can say extremely critical things about black ghetto culture, and Michael Eric Dyson will write a book in response, firmly but still very respectfully rebutting Mr. Cosby. But when a white person says the same sort of things, they are ostracized and subject to the ad hominem attack. What is accomplished by this?

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Organum, Baby at Sep 09, 2005 05:22 AM
r4d20 English priest ( Malthus ) ? wanted to go canibal on irish babies. Them being valueless ! Rethoric could have supported that far into the 80 when prime export still was U2. I see calvin copycating that german canibal. Still today northe ireland suffers consequenses of war. Less income and cycle of violence. A genetic test could prove level of english vs irish blood and how many toes etc had to go to feed the hungry. Hmm ! Are you a republican ? Isnt ideological crisis catching on though. The theology must be hard on you. Believing in the end of the world could well be a self-fullfilling one. ( Yes Cr vs Mu ) Bruno was allso in that article. "Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths revolve around them in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds" G.Bruno. Burned 1600. Please join this olde chain of thought. Follow Bs reasoning. Include that we have not recieved any radiotransmissions. Finalize that the time between ability to send radiowaves, and having ended planetary life, is so short that chance of any other near us is negligent. Reminds us of time. A logical investment would be renevable energy and superior housing-architecture. Morals and money ! Or go religious and all is an illusion ? You are republican ? How about growth eternal ? :-)

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Tolsen1, R4d20 at Sep 09, 2005 04:34 AM
"I agree that race and skin colour do not correlate, but I don't believe in the concept of "race" anyway" I've heard, however, that the whole "Race does not exist" is a bit wrong. Genetic Testing has shown that there are some small genes that can be used to identify "race" with high accuracy. http://www.racesci.org/in_media/genetic_markers.htm Keep in mind, however, that these genes do not "cause" or "prove" race - but some genes do appear to be highly correlated with traditional "racial groups". Still, the genetic component of race seems to go deeper than the skin - just look at the way some genetic illnessess are found almost exclusively in some races. On the other hand, my father has Sarcoidosis, which is a disease found almost exclusively in Blacks.....and Scandinavians. The doctors ruled it out early because of his race, but when the tests came back positive they asked some questions and it made sense. Baby, "somewhere on the globe there are still cannibals around, we are going to make a meal out of a them just to teach them a lesson". I laughed my ass off at this one too. Too bad it comes close to describing the attitudes amongst some members of my party nowadays. Where is an aetheist capitalist to turn? Commies and Christians - every way I turn I got people telling me how to live my life.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Organum, Baby at Sep 09, 2005 03:32 AM
Eco is beautiful as usual :-) Thanks for this , Graeme ! Somehow the negatives puts better into perspective the plethora of opposition against Others. Christian vs Muslem fundamentalism. Or animist fundamentalism for that sake. "somewhere on the globe there are still cannibals around, we are going to make a meal out of a them just to teach them a lesson". Reminds me of another of his i once read. He went to many a witchdoctor in different parts of Brazil and they all said he was of the same God, Legba. Gives some strength to respect of other systems of thought and other values. Dont go eating people now though !!!

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Organum, Baby at Sep 09, 2005 00:53 AM
Graeme and Calvin There is no corelation between "race" aka major human subraces , of wich there are three, and colour. As stated before: Within all three races you have people ranging in skincolour from very light to very dark. Get it? If not i will repeat :-) I believe you are talking about some old euroethnic vs afroethnic score here. This is absurd since these two groups are much closer related to each other than they are to asians, (including amerindians). PS It is quite possible to brutalize groups of people into barbaric behaviour. USSRs and USAs use of Afhanistans primarily caucasian population as frontsoldiers in the cold war is a good example. Another is the brutalization of afroamericans ,described by Koceilahs link. Maybe Calvin can live without the inspiration that comes from chaos. In this case he can claim that "whitey" is better than "blackey" but inferior to "yellowey". Sosietal cooperation and all that jazz. No? I can not And i can claim that the "blackey" is superior. Check the last 100 years of popular music and what music means to peoples development. Piccassos inspiration is the homeland of those that fight against comercial braindeath on USAs graffiti-walls. PS you go Mozart ? i go Italy Arabia Africa home !

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Bauerly, Mtbrad at Sep 08, 2005 16:20 PM
Yakov, I have read much regarding people who fear that if they leave their rent controlled living areas that the rebuild will be upscale. The displacement of the poor minorities in NO is already begining. Investors are foaming at the mouth to get in and "rebuild" NO as a casino/drinking parlor in a more upscale way. Once they remove the affordable housing, the undesirable will be gone. What they don't understand though is that it is these undesirables that are the life blood of the arts in NO, and without them NO will just be Atlantic City.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 08, 2005 11:26 AM
Highlighting the ethnicity of the poor underclass Mississipians who died on the Levees is sympomatic of a sick worldview which insists on imposing a racial analysis on divisions which are essentially economic. These people were exploited in this way because they were POOR not because they were BLACK. Hmmm! Where did I learn that rationale?

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 08, 2005 10:47 AM
Snogg, you will notice that I accepted Graeme's demolition of my male/female genetic difference analogy and ate up my humble pie. You will notice however that he didn't bother to comment on my observation that the existence of wide and randon genetic variation within human races does not preclude the possibility of consistent specific differences between human groups. I presented a bad analogy. The leftists are presenting a manifestly false argument, but this doesn't seem to concern them as long as they can continue to hoodwink the masses.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Snogg, Pondering at Sep 08, 2005 09:36 AM
Alright, here's my first post. I don't understand why this guy Calvin is receiving all these ad hominem attacks, as if he is an intrinsically bad person, rather than just someone holding incorrect views...you act almost as if he's EVIL to hold these views. Don't be so emotional. Second, can someone explain to me why the looting and criminal behavior in New Orleans was confined to black communities, while low-income white communities in Louisiana and Mississippi did not have to deal with such behavior? And what about the other comparison that has been made, with the overwhelmingly noncriminal behavior of the poorest victims of the Tsunami last January? Seriously, I'm sympathetic to Swedish style socialism, but I wonder if one of the keys to its relative success is the homogeneity of Swedish culture...with white and black, it seldom works, unless your dealing solely among the intelligentsia, or unless living domains are, in general, far apart from each other. To sum up my racism problem, and lot of other peoples I think: not wanting to be prejudiced at all, but living in a multiracial environment, usually an urban area, that brings you in contact, DAY AFTER DAY AFTER DAY, with people who happen to be black who happen to conform to the worst racist stereotypes.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Rekouche, Koceilah at Sep 08, 2005 08:48 AM
I was just reading about the Mississippi flood of 1927 where thousands of black people died while being forced to work on levees on verge of collapse. Probably talked about elsewhere on ZNet, but I found this little snippet interesting on the PBS website which includes some history of that tragedy. The National Guard was called in then too, but they were ones raping and abusing people: "Once the situation in the refugee camps hits the national press, Herbert Hoover initiates an investigation of the reports. His investigators confirm numerous instances of abuse, but Hoover chooses to suppress the report. Hoover, known as "the Great Humanitarian," has his eyes set on the presidency. He has ridden a wave of good publicity from his flood relief efforts, and is determined to maintain his positive image. Hoover forms a Colored Advisory Commission of influential African American conservatives, led by Robert Russa Moton, to further investigate the camps. The commission confirms the initial findings. In exchange for keeping the report quiet, Hoover promises that if he wins the election, he will support the advancement of African Americans, including possible agrarian land reform. Moton agrees, and Hoover is never called to account for the treatment of African Americans in Washington County." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flood/timeline/timeline2.html

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 08, 2005 04:37 AM
Keir, as well as designer clothing and electronic goods, neither of which are food or water, one of the main targets of the NO looters was guns, indicating that either the looters intended to do violence against others, or that they needed these guns to protect themselves from people who were already commiting acts of violence. Either way you have a self-created problem of murderous violence which was as disgusting as any other aspect of this tragedy. Why can't you just admit that rape and murder and theft of luxury goods are not excused by conditions of natural disaster?

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 08, 2005 04:17 AM
Graeme, I accept your refutation of my male female analogy. The "within/between" argument is, however obvious nonsense because it fails to differentiate between random differences and consistent differences. If genetic variation was entirely random there would be no race specific phenotypical traits. If, as we must, we accept distinct phenotypical racial variation, we cannot exclude the possibility of consistent racial differences in other areas. Whatever the differences within racial groups these groups differ specifically in phenotype, intelligence, athletic ability, creativity and character. If environment shapes the body it also shapes the mind. The environmental demands of Africa did not place as high a survival value on the qualities of self-restraint and social cooperation, or on the ability to defer pleasure and focus on long term planning, as the environmental demands of Europe did. A fact which was underlined first in Haiti after hurricane Jeane and now in New Orleans after hurricane Katrine.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Bok, Yakov at Sep 08, 2005 03:15 AM
N.O. is destroyed. The mayor has ordered everyone removed. Authorities are going door to door to comply with that order. Yet, many residents have said they won't go. In fact, some residents have said they will use deadly force if anyone attempts to remove them. Would anyone care to comment on this? Is it because of the whole notion of a homestead and individual property rights? Does the government have a right to remove them? Should assistance be given to these people if they choose to stay?

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Rekouche, Koceilah at Sep 08, 2005 01:35 AM
Definately its worth discussing honest viewpoints, even such as those from the very far right. But the trolls here are so ridiculous their postings would be laughable if it weren't for the fact they're taken seriously. Paul you seem to have pretty thick skin and I commend and thank you for the great posts and shut-down replies to some trolls --some very entertaining--, but you may be giving them too much credit. From calling Muslims barbarians to saying black people live in ghettos because they bullied the white people out--this stuff would be rejected as material even for Rush Limbaugh or Pat Buchanan its so far out of reality. My own assumption is some of the trolls are half serious, the rest don't know what the hell they are--except hateful and bent on spreading the hate. They should be given zero feeling of validity, in my opinion. Moving on.. I noticed there's a split between left and right over whether its the federal government or the state's fault for the slow response to Katrina. $58 billion was just granted to the relief efforts. Regardless whos at fault, the poverty problem in this country has been exposed and should be a topic in the dominant press for a while to come.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Jautter, Mind at Sep 08, 2005 01:13 AM
Stupid or Ignorant? Two well known pundits recently debated GWB's status on this subject.One said you can't graduate from an Ivy League university and be that stupid.The other said you can't be infused with that much knowledge and be ignorant.Some people on this blog refute both points.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Street, Paul at Sep 08, 2005 00:27 AM
Koceilah - this is a conundrum I did not fully anticipate when I became one of the few (and I think I get some of why) ZNet commentators to accept the invitation to do a blog through the web site. You go into a space where you open the door to right-wing commentary, some quite vile, including running dog racists from England and such as that. There are three options: deleting (I do not share D. Peterson's previously stated moral objections to any and all comment deletion), ignoring, and responding. Once somebody says they are "a racist" (which was already evident with "cal", of course) they're a good candidate for banning from further commentary IMO but I do not have banning authority - a peculiarity of the group nature of the blog system. Ignoring makes a lot of sense in terms of maintaining one's own sanity and budgeting one's time and in other ways. It's exhausting to keep having to reinvent the wheel with people like 'cal' (who I suspect believes every word) and of course there should be no naive illusion that you are going to change such a vile commenter's perspective on anything. Addressing "Cal" first person strikes me as possibly naive. I confess to having completely written him off. But then there's the problem of seeming in a public forum to have no answer to right "arguments" such as they are and as fundamental as the left responses may be. I respond when I have time, ignore when I must, and I am grateful indeed to those of similar perspective who have time and a gift for doing the often time-consuming work of putting the really awful people in their place for the record.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Rekouche, Koceilah at Sep 07, 2005 22:17 PM
When are people going to stop replying to these people? Paul its probably true they dont even believe this stuff themselves. In fact they just make shit up as they go along, knowing what buttons to push and we always oblige them. Just ignore them, seriously. I dont even read their posts, but look for ones posted by Paul, graeme, and others.. But you guys' posts are just replying to them... Much better things to talk about than give these people attention.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Street, Paul at Sep 07, 2005 19:59 PM
Exactly right, in my opinion.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Jamessp, Shade at Sep 07, 2005 19:02 PM
Calvin-the-hobbesian "Despite this, there has been no White left-wing exodus into the ghettos of America." Actually while the practise is quite uncommon in the USA, in Canada in it is called urban gentrification, and it is pretty common. (Please note that white flight & suburbanization are quite common here as well) For example, in Toronto, our former Governor General lived in an area of the inner city that is quite notorious for "out of control crime" in out right wing media (Cough, CanWest Global). All and all 'urban gentrification' has been assessed as a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand it brings people with more financial resources into 'poor' communities, and it has been shown that people spend a good portion of their disposable income within the community. It also helps diffuse the situation where you have absolute class / race ghettos in the city, and forces people of different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds to interact more. The downside is that the process of 'urban gentrification' does increase the cost of shelter (to some modest extent), and this is enough to push some people into outright homelessness. Please don't take this post as saying that Canada doesn't have urban areas that are highly impoverished, that's simply not true. But, as my limited urban planning and personal experience has show, Canadian 'ghettos' tend to have a far broader socioeconomic mix of people. (a good thing, IMHO)

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Bauerly, Mtbrad at Sep 07, 2005 18:20 PM
Oh and Bush declared a federal state of emergincy for La, MS and Al on sunday. Thats a day before the storm hit. From that point on it was the Feds project. The fact that bush and rightwingnuts are trying to pin it on the local officials shows once again thier inability to lead and understand the rules they wrote and implemented. On the DHS NRP web page go to page 34 for whos responsible for disaster preparadness and response. It says it pretty clearly, its all FED!

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Bauerly, Mtbrad at Sep 07, 2005 16:44 PM
Calvin, there were over 200,000 people left unevacuated in NO. The police were quite busy with other things and how do you get 200,000 people on to buses in 24 hours, what about people without TV's or people who are working? The legistics is huge. You need to go here http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/NRP_FullText.pdf Directly from the department of Homeland security. There you will read how it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure that local agencies have the resources and the plans in case of emergencies. You will also read how in the case of an incedent if local governments fail to deal appropriately it is the feds job to step up. So, even if the locals did make a big mistake ( I don't admit this) it falls to the feds, who it took days to take over. The mayor has many things going on, FEMA pretty much has one job, to monitor and provide relief assistance. It is pretty easy after reading the DHS NRP that it was up to the Feds. Trying to blame the little guy for the fault of the big guys seems just alitle too juvenile for me.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 07, 2005 16:27 PM
There were around 100 thousand people left unevacuated in NO. How many thousands of kids use school busses every day? Door to door? Why not suggest that these people should have each recieved a personal gilt edged invitation to "enjoy some clean water and the chance to extend your life"? It doesn't take a brigade of National Guardsmen to get in a bus and say, "You are about to die, please jump on board". How about the using the Police force?

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Bauerly, Mtbrad at Sep 07, 2005 16:12 PM
"FEMA cuts didn't prevent Ray Nagin from utilizing the plan to evacuate the NO underclass by school bus, nor were FEMA cuts responsible for the depravity exhibited in the Superdome" Were would Nagin have gotten the money to do this evacuation? You are talking about sending troops door to door, that can only be done with federal resources. Troop deployments in a stupid war (which we are loosing by the way) did result in low security at the Superdome.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 07, 2005 16:05 PM
FEMA cuts didn't prevent Ray Nagin from utilizing the plan to evacuate the NO underclass by school bus, nor were FEMA cuts responsible for the depravity exhibited in the Superdome, but let's forget about that and concentrate on looking for White scapegoats. Bush may be guilty of dereliction of duty. He wasn't guilty of raping a child victim of the disaster or shooting up rescue helicopters.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Bauerly, Mtbrad at Sep 07, 2005 15:37 PM
Yakov, where did the Head of the ACE state that decreases in funding of the levee construction project did not result in a weakened levee? Can I have a source please. Also, the fact that 46% of LA's National guard troops are deployed in Iraq (closer to 60% of Miss and Al troops) did slow down the recovery and aid opps. You see no fault in the "commander in cheif" lounging around his "ranch" while thousands died? Or in the massive cuts to FEMA? Everybody else, did you hear that as the hurricane hit most of Bush's top advisers were in Greece for a wedding. Many believe that Bush's team would not have allowed this HUGE political hit to happen if most of his brain wasn't drunk in greece.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 07, 2005 13:09 PM
My God! In the only part of his response which was not pure abuse, Paul Street actually invoked the "more genetic variation within groups than between them" argument as if he was debating with some hypnotised college zombie. 95% of all DNA is "junk" DNA. There is widespread, inconsistent, random genetic variation both between and within human ethnic groups. Despite this, nevertheless there are specific consistent differences between the races. That's why they are different colors, duh! A woman could share more DNA with a close male relative than with a woman from a far distant land. Does that mean that "male" and "female" are "invalid taxonomic constructs"? Hilarious!

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 07, 2005 12:19 PM
BTW, in view of your allegation that the ghettos of Chicago are not particularly dangerous, I've been checking out US property prices. It seems that houses in the ghetto areas of America cost a fraction of identical houses in the middle-class areas. True, most of these houses require renovation, but even taking these costs into account, you would still make a vast financial saving by relocating to one of these apparently safe areas. Despite this, there has been no White left-wing exodus into the ghettos of America. I'll start believing left-wing propaganda when they stop preaching and start practicing.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Organum, Baby at Sep 07, 2005 03:38 AM
Calvins statemen It is no more 'wrong' to favour one's own ethnic group than it is to favour one's own family Describes the inequality very well i think. The three subraces all have both very dark and very light skincolours. Racism nowadays follows the skincolour and not racial division Yakovs Bottom is defaitist on behalf of the human race

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Bok, Yakov at Sep 07, 2005 03:19 AM
Graeme, the head of the Army Corp of Engineers said budget cuts did not effect the infrastructure they are responsible for in its ability, or lack there of, to handle a storm the size of Katrina. As for building on a flood plain, I don't know how it works in Canada, but in America, that is a local issue. The feds, and the Bush bashing, have no place here. Further, this was an act of nature, or in some views, an act of G-d. Stop looking for a scapegoat. In times like these, we don't need cynics. Bottom line: man vs. nature, nature wins. Who knows, maybe Vegas or L.A. will be next.

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Occupy_iowa_city_rally

Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Street, Paul at Sep 07, 2005 01:53 AM
Here is ugly cal on my last blog post (comment 62): "I'm a racist, you're a racist and Jesse Jacksons a racist. The differences between us are that I'm an honest racist, you are a racist in denial and Jesse is a manipulative racist." "If you saw two children drowning in a river and realised that one of them was your child, the natural reaction would be to try first and foremost to save your own child. You would have made a choice based on genetic proximity. That's what racism is. It is natural to favour people who are genetically similar. By doing so, we increase our chances of preserving a shared genetic legacy. We are programmed by nature to do this. It is no more 'wrong' to favour one's own ethnic group than it is to favour one's own family. Nor does it mean that you 'hate' other families or other races." So apparently I spoke too soon by describing him as just a cultural racist (and racism of one kind or another is exactly what's behind his citation of successful Jews as proof that black poverty and even apparently black flood-marooning is essentially self-inflicted). Now the poor bastard is reduced to citing "natural programming." And of course, on this post we have him talking about low soceioeconomic status as a result of a lack of innate ability. I gave him too much credit: he's a Bell Curver after all. I naively thought him too sophisticated to do such a suicidal strip-tease and give us the racist Full Monty (and I must say, its not a pretty sight). Where to begin with the moral and ideological autopsy of "Calvin"/ "blairhead"? And why bother? I'll be damned if I'm going to go back to third grade and throw pearls at swine by trying to lead a noxious white-supremacist web troll through the basic fundamentals of race, class, capitalism and the rest of the "1-dimensionsonal Marxoid" stuff that he prefers to avoid so that he can prance around anonymously arguing that blacks are all fucked up and lack "innate ability" relative to whites. I can't imagine even Tony Blair is looking for support from someone at this level. An experiment: you're white (like most readers of this blog) in London and you see a poor black Peckham-ite drowning in the Thames. You also see self-proclaimed white racist "Calvin" drowning in the Thames. You are permitted to save just one...the supposedly genetically similar Cal or the supposedly genetically different black (I say "supposedly" because there is in fact more genetic variation within than between racial groups). Who do you save? The Peckham resident, in all likelihood, in the interest of fair play (water-safety affirmative action?) and perhaps also because you have determined that cal is a reactionary pain in the ass, whatever his color. So much for racist "natural programming." I guess there's a measure of moral-ideological Darwinism in that exercise. Let me proclaim my guilt.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 06, 2005 23:23 PM
Well, well! What exactly are you objecting to Paul? Are you denying the existence of Golders Green, or are you denying that Jews are Britain's most successful ethnic group? It seems that I am a "vile ethno-cultural Darwinist" merely for noticing that a lot of British Jews live in Golders Green. I might as well get it off my chest. I also happened to notice that Peckham is 90% Black. How vile of me. Is there no depth of absurdity to which the racially hysterical left will not sink? Steinberg's opus will, I expect, be another dreary leftist exercise in crafting a definition of a social attitude which suits their prejudice, appending a derisive label (ECD), and granting it spurious credibility with five hundred pages of academic jargon. Another tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Street, Paul at Sep 06, 2005 22:29 PM
Keir thanks. I think the article (which didn't make cut on this site) is incomplete on the role of place and the history of segregation. In Sunday's NYT "Week in Review," Jason DeParle (a pretty good mainstream journalist on domestic policy) notes that "hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment." Further: "once one of the most mixed societies, in recent decades the city has become unusually segregated, and the white middle class is all but gone, moved north across Lake Ponchatrain or west to Jefferson Parish --- home of David Duke..." "Out West," DeParle quotes an LSU geologist, "there is a saying that water flows to money. But in N.O. water flows away from money. Those with resources who control where the drainage goes have always chosen to live on the high ground..." (DeParle, "Broken Levees," NYT, 4 September 2005...I'd link if I was on usual computer). Wow, what "a 1-dimensional Marxoid." Now "c" is telling us about Jews in London: his comment epitomizes the vile ethno-cultural Darwinism so ably criticized by Steinberg. Students pay attention: 'cal' is a moral corpse that repays careful dissection.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 06, 2005 22:04 PM
Strip all of Street's rant of its pseudo- intellectual babble, jargon and sneering ad hominem and you aren't left with much except the claim that crime is a product of social inequality, and that low economic status is the creation of systemic bias. There is a correlation between deprivation and crime, but only a one dimensional Marxoid idiot could believe that it was the only important correlation. What about all of that white-collar crime you lefties are usually at great pains to point out? In societies with a significant measure of economic self-determination, low economic status is also very often evidence of innate lack of ability. BTW, the Jews in London still live in a ghetto despite being the most wealthy ethnic group in the UK. This is proof of tribalism not racism.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Bok, Yakov at Sep 06, 2005 19:57 PM
The enviromental movement dropped the ball after 9/11. It's odd to read about environmental concerns now, especially when many more scientists have said the connection between global warming and Katrina are shaking at best, basically discrediting the MIT report. Further, to say the federal government is at fault for this catasrophy is 1. misplaced, and 2. a bit patronizing to the "victims," implying they need government to take care of them. People knew for six days the big one was going to hit. They had been waiting for it for over 100 years! There was a general evacuation order for the City. the means to leave was there. Why didn't they take it? All problems start locally. If an examination is to take place, start there.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Street, Paul at Sep 06, 2005 17:43 PM
"Calvin's" shame and downward spiral continues. He continues to expose himself as a pathetic racist idiot and a moron to boot. The article I did is not limited just to the very real and relevant issue of racism (which involves a bit more than "blame whitey"), which happens to have been graphically exposed in recent events. For what it's worth, I've been in and around Chicago's South Side black ghettoes for years and nobody there has attempted to rob, murder or otherwise injure me on any occasion. This notion that whites go into the ghettoes and just get mugged and killed is white racist horeshit. As for the rest, ....good God. The notion that the "white-ethnics" (an increasingly less and less relevant term...see Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth) have been "ethnically cleansed" out of urban American by violent blacks is so idiotic it's kind of hard to believe even C believes it. I guess ol Cal needs a basic seminar on race and urban political economy, including a description of how race and real estate markets and developers and downtown policy regimes and suburban auto-sprawl (among other factors)interact to trap large poor black populations in inner-city and suburban-ring slums...the interaction of race, place, and class that is so critical to what happened in New Orleans. The book list is long (I wrote one myself) but Cal will never dive in. He prefers the comfort of his self-satisfied racist illusion that black poverty and segregation are basically the products of inferior black culture and behavior (what Steinberg called ethnic or cultural Darwinism....as wrong as the biological variant). I hope students are paying attention: this is the New Age "post-Civil Rights era" racism that I and others have been writing about for some time. On my last blog, 'C' actually accuses me of thinking and saying that whites are "intriniscally evil." How much stupidity can one man's brain contain? The aftermath of Katrina is at least a good moment for the exposure of reactionary racist jerks like "Calvin": they're the ones who can't stop talking about alleged mass black criminality and savagery in the wake of an episode that has done more that anything in recent history to expose the criminal interaction of class and race (and place) hierarchy--- something a little more complicated than "blame whitey" --- in the US.

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Re: The All-Too American Tragedy of New Orleans

By Blairhead, Calvin at Sep 06, 2005 10:01 AM
Paul, your "blame whitey" polemic is truly pathetic. Blacks are poorer than Whites. Yeah! We all know that Paul. It doesn't mean that Blacks are poor because of Whites though does it? There were no poor Whites in the ghettos of NO for the same reason there are no poor Whites in South Compton etc. The Blacks would kill them. If you don't believe me try dressing in your best wigger gear and strolling through one of these areas. Do you really think that the underclass Blacks are going to debate whether you are a poor or a rich White man before they rob, assault or murder you? This is not a debate that was held in the Superdome where White refugees were racially abused and assulted by Black refugees. Working class Whites have been ethnically cleansed from America's urban centres by the far more violent Blacks. Or did the poor Whites roll out of their NO mansions and flee in their ubiquitous White SUVs?

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