I’m not putting words in your mouth. I’m pointing out the reality of your pseudo-argument.
Hmm, interesting. If so, then why are so many people clamoring for the military to help people there if they’re not designed for that task?
As noted earlier, the same levees (originally) protected the wealth and property of the richest people and corporations in that same city, corporations that need to survive and stay profitable both for the sake of the city and the sake of the country. If racism (or even classism) plays a part in the decisions of those planners, I would expect it to take the form of looking on the city as a place of business and tourism and making plans to protect those sources of revenue while letting the residential neighborhoods suffer. A new, stronger levee surrounding the Central Business District with neighborhood levees deferred until some indeterminate date would have been a sign of that sort of racism. That is not what occurred.
The inability to escape was the result of poor planning on the part of the (mostly black) city mangement who resisted calls to even order an evacuation until Sunday (by which time Greyhound had shut down) and then did nothing to mobilize the RTA and the school system to employ busses to transport the huge number of people who do not own cars. Is it racism? Classism? Simple failure of imagination? The greater lack of planning was due to institutional changes at FEMA–changes that would have prevented any similar planning for Las Vegas or Seattle, neiither of which could be called “poor black” cities.
On the third point, I would tend to agree, following on monstro’s post very early in the thread. Even there, however, I would want to look at individual situations before I cried “racism.” The classic (for this event) situation has been the two nearly identical photos of people wading through waist deep water carrying things while the accompanying text identified the black man as a looter and the (apparently) white couple as “finders.” The AP and various agencies involved have been running back and forth trying to explain this one which has bad feelings stamped all over it. On the other hand, on NPR’s On the Media, last night, one of the interviewed newspeople remarked that the photo editor who was personally responsible for the labels has asked that he be given time before he is grilled on his choices. Time to prepare a smooth response? No. His home has been destroyed, he does not yet know whether his family has survived, and he had (at that point), gone three days with no solid food and very little sleep. Now it may have been a very clear case of racism, either conscious or unconscious. Or, it may have been that the white couple was returning from a neighbor’s house (or one of the stores that actually gave away their perishables) while the black guy was seen by the photographer leaving an electronics store.
The frequent interviews with white victims while the black victims are pictured as huddled refugees may, indeed, be a sign of underlying racism.
Now, racism probably did play a part in determining that the overwhelming number of people suffering without food or water were black. However, that racism was probably more the longstanding racist conditions that have contributed to the creation of a permanent underclass, not the specific actions of the administration, Congress, the governor, or the mayor in this particular instance (which was the point of the OP).
I only want to say that some peoples assertion that Biloxi is getting a lot of help because most of the people there are white is silly. The sheriff has said he’s seen nothing from the federal government, and there was a FEMA representative who said they were going to “take it in the ass” because they basically weren’t there. There were about five hundred national guard troops there, a pretty small number. You probably won’t hear as much about it because the governor of this state is a loyal republican, but there’s not much being done there either. Obviously, the standing water and the fact that there’s only one road out of New Orleans makes it worse there. Plus there is no one place like the convention center where people have congregated. They haven’t had to, since there was no flooding. This doesn’t mean that everything is hunky-dorey in Biloxi.
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by Sequent
When the alternative is doing nothing at all? I’ll take a sporadic shot a relief. I think the desperate people on the ground would take one, too.
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Assuming we can find them. New Orleans is flooded. Where they could find people, they airlifted them. That means we need to find the people and manage to paradrop boxes on their roofs right next to them. That’s nigh-impossible. Sure, they could do it with helicopters, but why not just have the helicopters take people away, like they were doing? The really desperate people aren’t the ones on the ground. They’re in half-flooded buildings.
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Really? Those supplies were “pre-positioned” for fun?
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Knowing Fema, they were ready with those supplies neccessary for refugees. Hence the arc mentioned; you don’t put supplies for airdrops and such in an arc, you centralize it. And it certainly wasn’t going to be enough.
But I was talking about paradrops. Fema does not stockpile paradrop gear. This means they’d have to borrow it from the army, which means a lot of people who could not have known they’d be needed.
sigh
What would you say to me if I demanded that creationism be taught in school because “…in a very basic, elemental way, it doesn’t make sense that…” mankind emerged from single-celled creatures?
I assume you would either deride my ability to comprehend a somewhat complex subject… or perhaps you might patiently endeavor to explain mitochondria to me, and what the study of mitochondria has shown. You might explain irreducible complexity to me and how natural selection is perfectly capable of explaining instances of it.
That’s exactly the situation we’re faced with here. You don’t understand the complexity of the effort required, and so you assume it isn’t complicated enough to matter.
I’ve offered specific examples of problems; you’ve waved them off. You’ve even acknowledged you can’t answer them, but “…in a very basic, elemental way…” it doesn’t matter.
BUt that’s nonsense. That is argument from ignorance… it’s argument from personal ignorance. Because YOU don’t understand it, it can’t be so.
It may well be as you say – that the country as a whole is feeling as you do. But if the mission of this board is to fight ignorance, then perhaps these forums should be a place to correct that error, not perpetuate it.
Yes, I’m afraid you are, Monty. Once you translate my words into psuedo-arguments, it becomes exceedingly easy for you to identify them as such. If this is your idea of “honest debate,” well, good day.
Military Can-Do Army of One Attitude:
Killing People: Can Do
Helping People: Not so much
Bombs, we have cached. Food, not so much.
Why are people clamoring?
Again, I just can’t get my arms around this philosophy of “let’s do nothing because doing something implies so many logistical problems.” Yes, it’s hard. It’s very, very, very hard. Yes, it’s a longshot. If we could lift all the people out before they died, then yes, by all means lets do it. But I guess the logistics of lifting people out are infinitely easier than dropping food? Come on.
I’ve been offering suggestions for solutions, you’ve been telling me why they won’t work, and people have been dying. Here’s the thing, Bricker: when people are dying, helping them becomes a very basic, elemental idea. One that is immediately apparent to everybody. Even you, I would hope, feel that basic, elemental motivation.
So, just imagine yourself standing in front of a field with two or three helicopters. In front of you is an angry mob of people who have no logistical training whose friends and family are dying in New Orleans. Patiently, you explain to them over the bullhorn the Subtle Art of Military Logistics and why, even though those helicopters are just sitting there, it would be impossible (as some people here are saying) or detrimental to the larger effort to use the helicopters to drop food and water.
One person raises his hand and says, “I can fly one of those.” Another person raises his hand and says, “I brought a truckload of water and food.” I hate to say it man, but we, the ignorant masses, would trampling over you. Because the need to do something when people are dying trumps ALL artifice, for better or worse.
“And they’d be wrong,” you’d be saying as people are walking over you, and you know, man, maybe you’d be right: they’d be wrong to do that. But instead of using your vast knowledge of logistics to help these poor, misguided people do SOMETHING, no matter how small, no matter how few lives there was a small, sporadic shot of saving, no matter how logistically improbable or unrealistic, you stuck to your well-trained guns and tried to communicate how the Art of Logistics dictates that we let these people die.
So you may be right, but you’re not for real. Not when what we all saw happening on Wednesday is going on. That’s for REAL. There’s no art to people dying, and the faster they’re dying, the less time one has for artfully helping them. I simply refuse to believe that with all that wonderful knowledge, you can’t bring yourself to be part of the solution, only part of the brick wall.
I would say that since our children won’t die tomorrow if we don’t teach them something today, then we have time to practice the art of discerning real science from religious dogma masquerading as real science.
That’s a very… um… liberal attitude.
Day 1:
My approach: zero people saved
Your approach: small number saved
Day 2:
My approach: zero people saved
Your approach: small number saved
Day 3:
My approach: small number saved
Your approach: small number saved
Day 4:
My approach: zero people saved
Your approach: small number saved
Day 5:
My approach: large number saved
Your approach: small number saved
Day 6:
My approach: gigantic number saved
Your approach: small number saved
Day 7 and beyond:
My approach: gigantic number saved
Your approach: small number saved
What’s the plan the produces small numbers being saved intially, then moderate numbers, then large and gigantic numbers? Is this plan impossible to produce?
Because I want this plan. I’m convinced it would be leagues better than three days worth of no people saved, Bricker.
I know it would be hella better than four-going-on-five days worth of no people saved.
What do you think?
Your sarcasm is misplaced in relation to my statement. The evacuation notice was intended for those people who had no specific need to stay behind. Your Brother-in-law represented a service that was needed because the patients could not easily be moved to another facility. . Also, your Brother-in-law was a volunteer (coodo’s to him).
His expectations of disaster relief were not without merit but definitely on the optimistic side given the lack of city planning. There were 2 reasons he did not see immediate relief: one involved the looting and the other involved the unnecessary stay-behinds who required rescue.
One thing that struck me as odd was a statement that the hospital employees were suffering from dehydration. They were in a multi-story building full of water. I don’t understand that at all.
Yes, well, that’s why I’m a liberal. I believe a society should protect the least of its citizens, not just the ones that qualify for tax cuts. I believe that poor people should have the same protections as rich people. I believe that we can spend more time deciding what the best way to teach our children is than we can deciding what the best way to help people who are about to die is. I know, I’m just wacky like that.
We might as well try to put a man on the moon in seven years.
Uh, no. When did I tell you that your approach was wrong? By all means, take your approach. I’m not saying there’s only room for the liberals: everybody’s welcome to help. So my approach would welcome your approach (even though yours won’t welcome mine). It’s easy. We’ll go in to save some small numbers on Wednesday. We’ll be delighted to see you saving any numbers by Friday.
Saltwater.
So you don’t have a problem agreeing to the fact that racism has played a part in the sense of a long, inured, institutional kind of racism, one that set the stage for the current disaster. And while not directly attributable to the specific actions of any small set of individuals, I think you’d have to agree that somehow–probably through the countless actions of a incredibly large number of individuals over a long period of time–this racism was brought about by the actions of humans.
Then why is it so improbable for one to conclude that that long racism–that developed over hundreds of years and has been active right up through the present–did** not suddenly cease** as soon as this hurricane went through? I mean, wouldn’t it be more sensible to conclude that that racism is still and will still continue to inform many people’s actions, both through the recovery and beyond than to consider the idea that it may have just suddenly halted until all the evidence is in? The evidence keeps coming in, and it doesn’t look good.
But I’m not trying to tell you to blame him or her, because it will take ages to sort that out. I’m asking you to consider how much blame we should place on the social evil that we all of us, in a sense, have allowed to inform the reality of our society.
To answer your first question, the city would have had access to both metro buses and school buses. A metro bus will seat about 50 people while a school bus will accommodate 72 (3 on a bench seat). Not only would this have been practical it would have saved the school buses. I count over 200 buses in the picture so with just the school buses they could have moved close to 50,000 people in about 3 trips. I imagine they have more buses than the picture shows and just as many metro buses which would negate the need for round trips.`
When I say “the only logical plan” I’m talking about the best use of money spent (which is the limiting factor in any operation). Helicopters cost over $750/hr to operate (for a nice executive model). They don’t haul that many people and consume a tremendous amount of fuel. Fuel is a key factor in an evacuation plan. Helicopters are also very limited in moderate weather conditions (imagine pre-hurricane winds of 25-50 mph). Buses are cheap to operate especially when you already own them. Rental for a 50 passenger bus (with toilet) will run in the $600-$800 range for 8 hrs of use but again, the city already controls them. I don’t know who’s picking up the tab for the helicopters but it is WAY more expensive than what buses would have cost.