Martial Law

[Recycled]

So, suppose there's a massive natural disaster and after a few days things go wild: shooting at aid helos and police, rapes, looting, setting the city on fire and such. At what point is serious martial law acceptable? Do the gangs of hoods have a right to due process? Who makes that call and how does the revised "rules of engagement" get out to everyone before the military just starts shooting?

 

My fascist side wonders why, when police are holed up on a roof under attack and people are shooting at aid helicopters, a Cobra isn't sent in to hose the fuckers? My libertarian side wonders what the self-defense rules of engagement would be if a roving gang headed toward my house. Do I need to wait until they actively threaten my life or do I just start shooting.

 

New Orleans is a really rough town, so it's probably an extreme...but maybe not. Chilliwack might be just as scary.

[Dechristo]

You do whatever you think your conscience can handle.

[lummox]

exploit a kill mechanism.

[slothrop]

Go listen to that mp3 of the New Orleans mayor in the other thread... drug addicts holding up hospitals. He seemed to say that he asked for martial law to be declared.

 

Attacking aid workers is just unacceptable. I think that kind of thing deserves immediate deadly retribution.

[Gary_Yngve]

Kill the insurgents!

[TREETOAD]

Do muslims like jazz?

[Dechristo]

You say jazz man, I say jasmine. Let's call the whole thing off.

[archenemy]

that mp3 rocks. I would vote for that guy to be mayor anytime. That guys talks straight--something I have rarely heard from a politician.

He makes sense, and I agree with his request/declaration for martial law.

[Gary_Yngve]

A converse question:

 

Suppose there's a massive natural disaster and after a few days, there isn't sufficient govt response. When does it become ok to loot grocery stores for food? When does it become ok to loot other stores for valuables that could be exchanged for food?

[Dechristo]

when your mother says so

[Dru]

A converse question:

 

Suppose there's a massive natural disaster and after a few days, there isn't sufficient govt response. When does it become ok to loot grocery stores for food? When does it become ok to loot other stores for valuables that could be exchanged for food?

 

why wait for a disaster? start looting now. you need to stock up. be prepared!

[Off_White]

According to the press, black people loot, white people find

 

 

[ashw_justin]

I read this hilarious article in the Times about how people were looting Walmart. It was written in a tone as if it were soooo horrible...

 

Yeah. Poor, poor megacorporation. Fuck Walmart. People are dead and dying, Jesus...

 

 

 

According to the press, black people loot, white people find

 

 

 

Fucking racist retards.

[murraysovereign]

According to the press, black people loot, white people find

 

Ouch! Where did you find that?

[catbirdseat]

exploit a kill mechanism.

You owe me one for supplying you with that phrase.

 

Is it looting if you haven't eaten in days and you steal food? Is it looting if your wife and kids have been laying on hard concrete at the convention center and you take a mattress from the hotel nearby?

[TREETOAD]

EAT THE RICH

[Gary_Yngve]

http://www.snopes.com/photos/katrina/looters.asp

[Recycled]

There's looting and then there's looting.

 

I suspect that there was a certain element that were rubbing their hands with glee when the evacuation order came through. They were first in line to loot pharmacies, hospitals, electronics stores and to grab the most they could as soon as most people were out of the way. That's a far cry from people needing food, water and shelter in a natural disaster and getting it from stores and other stockpiles. The former seems to represent most of the violence and intentional property damage and IMHO should garner a strong response. The latter is just plain commen sense.

[EWolfe]

Men that rape women in these type of situations are THE MOST DISPICABLE criminals of all, and should be shot with enough injury to insure they will not carry on with that activity.

 

[olyclimber]

you mean drug around in the streets by a hay hook through the gonads?

[Dechristo]

would that be two hay hooks?

[Gary_Yngve]

Depends if you've been Lanced previously.

[Recycled]

Now, to really stir the shit up:

 

 

From New Orleans Craigslist

 

by Robert Tracinski | The Intellectual Activist

 

September 2, 2005

 

It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

 

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

 

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

 

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

 

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

 

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

 

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

 

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

 

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

 

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

 

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

 

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

 

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

 

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

 

"'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

 

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

 

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

 

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

 

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

 

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

 

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

 

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

 

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

 

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. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

 

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

 

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

 

 

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

[Dechristo]

lacerative

[EWolfe]

Reminds me of "The King of Hearts"