More about New Orleans
Sep. 3rd, 2005 08:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nancylebovHow does anyone know whether the city was 80% evacuated before Katrina hit? Who'd have done the counting, and how?
This occurred to me when I heard a description of the pictures of people driving out as 90% white. Maybe the person who told me this had an inadequate sample. If different roads were connected to different neighborhoods, then the racial mix on various roads would be different. Or maybe that person misestimated the proportions they actually saw.
Would any visual news junkies please come in with what you saw of people driving out of the city?
N.O. was 67% black. That means 33% white, or at least I haven't heard of any substantial Asian or Native American population there. If 90% of the early evacuees were white and all the white people got out (that's guessing high--in fact, some of them didn't), then only 37% or so got out before the storm.
Math note: it's a number of black people equal to about 10% of the white people, not 10% of the black population.
Many thanks to *everyone* who screamed bloody murder about the slow relief efforts. I believe that if there hadn't been massive public pressure, a huge number more would have been left to die.
I don't know what the government is thinking. "Those people wouldn't vote for us anyway" doesn't seem like enough of an explanation--the Republicans have been brilliant about getting elected, and anyone who was paying the least bit of attention would realize that the vast majority of Americans (certainly including the more energetic people who are more likely to vote) wanted the relief to go through.
Could just hating poor people and black people be enough? Hating them that much? Holocaust analogy: anti-Semitism was endemic in Europe, but something amplified it in Nazi Germany. A minor mystery: many of the Jews had something worth stealing, but the current madness of forbidding aid doesn't seem to have been driven by greed at all.
Or are they trying to immanetize the Eschaton? (_Illuminatus!_ is a novel/trilogy substantially about conspiracy theories. The bad guys believe (perhaps correctly) that they can achieve transcendance if they're around when enough people are killed.)
Other occult distractions: What part of anti-Christ do you not understand? I don't know why all those people who believe in the end times and that the anti-Christ will be good at fooling people also believe that they'll be immune. Alternatively: the U.S. has lost the mandate of Heaven. Things have gone from ridiculous to bad to worse ever since the Lewinsky affair. (I've heard that the Chinese believed that if enough bad things happened, their Emperor had lost the mandate of Heaven, and they'd get themselves a new Emperor. For all I know, this is yet another western myth about China.)
This may sound weird, but I blame Rush Limbaugh. He's the one who convinced a lot of people that anger and insults should be primary tools of political thought. Admittedly, he wouldn't have been popular if a lot of people weren't attracted to his tone, but he smplified something which otherwise might have been a lot smaller.
Minor point: All the Republican rhetoric about choice is proven to be nonsense. The people in New Orleans were desperate for help and helpers were desperate to give it.
This occurred to me when I heard a description of the pictures of people driving out as 90% white. Maybe the person who told me this had an inadequate sample. If different roads were connected to different neighborhoods, then the racial mix on various roads would be different. Or maybe that person misestimated the proportions they actually saw.
Would any visual news junkies please come in with what you saw of people driving out of the city?
N.O. was 67% black. That means 33% white, or at least I haven't heard of any substantial Asian or Native American population there. If 90% of the early evacuees were white and all the white people got out (that's guessing high--in fact, some of them didn't), then only 37% or so got out before the storm.
Math note: it's a number of black people equal to about 10% of the white people, not 10% of the black population.
Many thanks to *everyone* who screamed bloody murder about the slow relief efforts. I believe that if there hadn't been massive public pressure, a huge number more would have been left to die.
I don't know what the government is thinking. "Those people wouldn't vote for us anyway" doesn't seem like enough of an explanation--the Republicans have been brilliant about getting elected, and anyone who was paying the least bit of attention would realize that the vast majority of Americans (certainly including the more energetic people who are more likely to vote) wanted the relief to go through.
Could just hating poor people and black people be enough? Hating them that much? Holocaust analogy: anti-Semitism was endemic in Europe, but something amplified it in Nazi Germany. A minor mystery: many of the Jews had something worth stealing, but the current madness of forbidding aid doesn't seem to have been driven by greed at all.
Or are they trying to immanetize the Eschaton? (_Illuminatus!_ is a novel/trilogy substantially about conspiracy theories. The bad guys believe (perhaps correctly) that they can achieve transcendance if they're around when enough people are killed.)
Other occult distractions: What part of anti-Christ do you not understand? I don't know why all those people who believe in the end times and that the anti-Christ will be good at fooling people also believe that they'll be immune. Alternatively: the U.S. has lost the mandate of Heaven. Things have gone from ridiculous to bad to worse ever since the Lewinsky affair. (I've heard that the Chinese believed that if enough bad things happened, their Emperor had lost the mandate of Heaven, and they'd get themselves a new Emperor. For all I know, this is yet another western myth about China.)
This may sound weird, but I blame Rush Limbaugh. He's the one who convinced a lot of people that anger and insults should be primary tools of political thought. Admittedly, he wouldn't have been popular if a lot of people weren't attracted to his tone, but he smplified something which otherwise might have been a lot smaller.
Minor point: All the Republican rhetoric about choice is proven to be nonsense. The people in New Orleans were desperate for help and helpers were desperate to give it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
It's not a myth.
Date: 2005-09-04 12:50 pm (UTC)You want to know why some Emperors tried to ban books and killed philosophers? Because there were radicals like that a thousand and two thousand years ago.
It's just the same as in Farmer Giles of Ham, which is one of the most biting short satires of government incompetence and corruption resulting in forfeiture of moral authority to govern in the English canon.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-04 01:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-04 01:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-04 03:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-04 01:17 pm (UTC)(Active malice is more comforting to think about, in a perverse sort of way. If you're the victim, at least it means you're important enough that somebody is bothering to hate you.)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-04 01:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-04 03:46 pm (UTC)Roads out of NOLA
Date: 2005-09-04 02:26 pm (UTC)I suspect that a number of middle class blacks also got their asses out in their own private automobiles and poor whites who weren't visiting Brits (the BBC accounts of stranded Brits getting special help getting out of the Superdome --- arrgh, even if the kids were being harrassed because they were white).
It's probably as much about class as it is about race (and the class verbal sniping between middle class blacks and poor blacks that I've witnessed can be quite harsh).
Re: Roads out of NOLA
Date: 2005-09-04 03:09 pm (UTC)I'm sure that a lot of people we'd consider poor, both black and white, got out--it's just that a lot of the very poor didn't.
Also, there were people (presumably both black and white, though I've only heard about whites) who stayed because they had dependents or who made a bad judgement call.
I bet other national governments were helping their citizens, too.
The reason I think the question is important is that if the estimate for the first evacuation is way too optimistic, then there are probably a lot more people still trapped in the city than anyone is taking account of.
Re: Roads out of NOLA
Date: 2005-09-04 03:19 pm (UTC)http://www.nola.com/washingaway/
One of my other LJ friends posted the link.
The Interdictor site says that more people are out on the street now, but they appear to be journalist types. He also blames the bureaucratic nature of government in general for the slow responses.
Re: Roads out of NOLA
Date: 2005-09-04 03:47 pm (UTC)They wanted to leave the poor of NOLA to rot, that's all.
Re: Roads out of NOLA
Date: 2005-09-04 03:57 pm (UTC)But Nancy's enough angry.
(Also, the Mandate of Heaven was a significant part of Chinese culture -- and known even in the communist era according to one of my fellow graduate students at SUNYA who was from China).
no subject
Date: 2005-09-04 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-04 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-05 12:53 am (UTC)Dr. Whom sticks in his spoke
Make that immanentize the Eschaton.