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September 07, 2005
So it's come to this . . .
An announcement that people will be "saved" at gunpoint: BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 6 - As a handful of pumps toiled to drain the water out of a sprawling city today, the New Orleans police said they would force the 10,000 or so residents left in the city to leave and Louisiana officials warned of long-term damage to the area's environment.This is Orwellian, and it ought to remind everyone that what is happening right now really can't properly be called strictly a "natural disaster." Here's Robert Tracinski: But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.The whole thing is well worth reading, and while I do not agree with his premise that welfare people are themselves guilty of immorality (after all, they're merely accepting what the government makes available to them, which makes them no more morally culpable than a farmer accepting subsidies not to grow crops), he has some interesting observations not to be found anywhere else. Like these: What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.I don't agree with blaming victims, and right now, I'm not especially interested in blaming anyone -- certainly not for the disaster (even a disaster compounded by a failure to evacuate). But on the other hand, I'm wondering whether there's a connection between victimhood and the idea of helping people at gunpoint. (To say nothing of building public housing in artificially drained swamps located below sea level.) posted by Eric on 09.07.05 at 10:39 AM
Comments
George Gordon Battle Liddy -- what a MAN! Robert Tracinski is also excellent. Yes, I read that essay of his at the Intellectual Activist site. Very good. No, I do not blame the victims. But I do blame the "victims", i.e., the thugs whom the "progressives" are fawning all over. I have had it up to the water level with all this "I is depraved on accounta I is deprived" nonsense. I don't think the welfare state is a sufficient cause of this mess, however. We have had a welfare state all over the U.S. since FDR first took office and started his New Deal. In New York City on 9/11/2001, under the great Rudy Guliani (in the Oval Office come 2008!), we had none of this thuggery. We saw firefighters, medics, police, and ordinary citizens display extraordinary heroism. The only thugs were the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center. Poverty? Racism? New York has Harlem and the South Bronx -- and yet they didn't riot. Racism is no longer a legitimate political issue anyway, since the Supreme Court struck down all laws mandating segregation back in 1954, and countless civil rights laws have been passed since then. President Bush has Condoleezza Rice as his Secretary of State and Clarence Thomas sits on the Supreme Court. So, what is it with New Orleans? Hmmm.... Steven Malcolm Anderson the Lesbian-worshipping man's-man-admiring myth-based egoist · September 7, 2005 03:52 PM |
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Ah, the people who brought us the "War on Drugs", showing their true agenda again. "We'll protect you, even if it makes us kill you!"