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Aug. 31st, 2005 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickNew Orleans is mostly underwater and likely to stay that way for a while. There are a couple of interesting things floating to the top, now, which I'd like to share with all ya'll.
First off: Does anyone besides me think that the "death toll may exceed one hundred" reports we were getting all yesterday seemed kind of on the low side? Does anyone besides me think that Mayor Nagin's "thousands may be dead" is an error on the other end, or at least severe talking-out-his-ass? Honestly, the man doesn't even know what's going on with his levees and the Army CoE. I'd like to see a believable death estimate OR a cessation of the "rescuers have to push the corpses out of the way" remarks. It's a very disturbing mental picture I have here, with the corpse imagery, and then you expect me to believe that the death toll "may exceed one hundred"? I'm not stupid -- the only way I can figure that one hundred corpses are getting that much in the way is if there's some kind of zombie activity going on down there, which I won't totally rule out. After all, y'know, New Orleans, voodoo... yeah. It could be zombies.
Second: I'd like some better fucking followup questions on the part of the fucking news media. Yes, there were a lot of pre-Katrina sound bites where people who didn't evacuate said stuff like "No, we aren't going to evacuate. This is our town. This is our home. You can't make us leave." Fine. Good. But then there were no followup questions like "Does your family have a car?" or "If you'd wanted to evacuate, what would have been your plan for doing so?" According to internet sources (a comment on a rant in someone's LJ -- see here, first comment) the Greyhound terminals in New Orleans closed on Saturday. Saturday. The evac order for New Orleans didn't come until Sunday morning, so people without cars, and that'd be mostly poor people, wouldn't have had a bus route out of town, so how the hell were they supposed to evac? There are a lot of people in this world without the money to evac themselves and/or put themselves up for the weeks or months of homeless/jobless life in the event of a catastrophic emergency. Sucks to be them, yes, but should they be left to die because they're poor? I'm not sure that's the right answer. Being poor isn't a crime, last I checked, so should we really be getting all self-righteous about how these people DESERVE to suffer? (Remarks on this front notwithstanding, I generally vote republican, am conservative, and take baths in the blood of murdered puppies. So, y'know, don't be getting the wrong idea.) I rather think our news coverage is missing the boat, here. They're not telling enough truth. I want more truth about the whole evac thing. Where is the truth that is more powerful than small amounts of gold?
Third: Picture captions for folks carrying shit out of unattended stores are nonuniform. If it's looting when a black guy is doing it, it is ALSO looting when a white guy is doing it. Please fix the captions and try to do better next time. Also, why did it take this many days to get satellite pictures for before-and-after comparison of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast? Weather reports for the day after Katrina hit said it was clear... so don't give me the cloud-cover argument.
Fourth: I'm not surprised that someone has attributed Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath to the plain and simple fact that God hates queers... to save you reading the screed, this is allegedly because New Orleans was destroyed just days before the annual (Labor Day Weekend) Southern Decadence festival of gayness was scheduled to take place. Metafilter, as usual, provided the rejoinder from hell: If God really hated gays, wouldn't he have waited until they were actually there, rather than sparing them all the misery? posted by jmccorm at 4:22 PM PST on August 31
*sigh* There'd be more but the whole thing is just pissing me off and distracting me from yaoi bondage porn.
First off: Does anyone besides me think that the "death toll may exceed one hundred" reports we were getting all yesterday seemed kind of on the low side? Does anyone besides me think that Mayor Nagin's "thousands may be dead" is an error on the other end, or at least severe talking-out-his-ass? Honestly, the man doesn't even know what's going on with his levees and the Army CoE. I'd like to see a believable death estimate OR a cessation of the "rescuers have to push the corpses out of the way" remarks. It's a very disturbing mental picture I have here, with the corpse imagery, and then you expect me to believe that the death toll "may exceed one hundred"? I'm not stupid -- the only way I can figure that one hundred corpses are getting that much in the way is if there's some kind of zombie activity going on down there, which I won't totally rule out. After all, y'know, New Orleans, voodoo... yeah. It could be zombies.
Second: I'd like some better fucking followup questions on the part of the fucking news media. Yes, there were a lot of pre-Katrina sound bites where people who didn't evacuate said stuff like "No, we aren't going to evacuate. This is our town. This is our home. You can't make us leave." Fine. Good. But then there were no followup questions like "Does your family have a car?" or "If you'd wanted to evacuate, what would have been your plan for doing so?" According to internet sources (a comment on a rant in someone's LJ -- see here, first comment) the Greyhound terminals in New Orleans closed on Saturday. Saturday. The evac order for New Orleans didn't come until Sunday morning, so people without cars, and that'd be mostly poor people, wouldn't have had a bus route out of town, so how the hell were they supposed to evac? There are a lot of people in this world without the money to evac themselves and/or put themselves up for the weeks or months of homeless/jobless life in the event of a catastrophic emergency. Sucks to be them, yes, but should they be left to die because they're poor? I'm not sure that's the right answer. Being poor isn't a crime, last I checked, so should we really be getting all self-righteous about how these people DESERVE to suffer? (Remarks on this front notwithstanding, I generally vote republican, am conservative, and take baths in the blood of murdered puppies. So, y'know, don't be getting the wrong idea.) I rather think our news coverage is missing the boat, here. They're not telling enough truth. I want more truth about the whole evac thing. Where is the truth that is more powerful than small amounts of gold?
Third: Picture captions for folks carrying shit out of unattended stores are nonuniform. If it's looting when a black guy is doing it, it is ALSO looting when a white guy is doing it. Please fix the captions and try to do better next time. Also, why did it take this many days to get satellite pictures for before-and-after comparison of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast? Weather reports for the day after Katrina hit said it was clear... so don't give me the cloud-cover argument.
Fourth: I'm not surprised that someone has attributed Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath to the plain and simple fact that God hates queers... to save you reading the screed, this is allegedly because New Orleans was destroyed just days before the annual (Labor Day Weekend) Southern Decadence festival of gayness was scheduled to take place. Metafilter, as usual, provided the rejoinder from hell: If God really hated gays, wouldn't he have waited until they were actually there, rather than sparing them all the misery? posted by jmccorm at 4:22 PM PST on August 31
*sigh* There'd be more but the whole thing is just pissing me off and distracting me from yaoi bondage porn.
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Date: 2005-09-01 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-01 12:15 pm (UTC)Nevermind Greyhound, which doesn't necessarily have the rolling stock to clear out any substantial number of people from any given location on short notice. I wanted to know why they weren't commandeering the city busses and shipping the Superdome crowd out over the bridges while there still *were* bridges. A city of nearly half a million ought to have had enough equipment to roll at least half the remaining population of New Orleans out in one big honking caravan. Or at the very least, the Superdome crowd of fifteen to twenty thousand.
Of course, on the afternoon of the big bug-out, the interstate west to Houston was locked solid, which would have diverted the hypothetical convoy north along the path of the hurricane, and god only knows how much of New Orleans' bus fleet was converted to some exotic battery or fuel system which relies on central bus depots, and would leave the evacuees stranded high and dry wherever one full tank/battery/whatever left them on the road...