Tom's Hardware > Forum > Old Man/Woman's Club > Other > What the foreign press really thinks of us

What the foreign press really thinks of us

Forum Old Man/Woman's Club : Other - What the foreign press really thinks of us

Tom's Hardware: Over 1.4 million members in 6 different countries available to answer all your high-tech questions. Sign up now! Its free!

Ask the community Add a reply

Bottom Search this thread

<A HREF="http://www.villagevoice.com/screens/0538,dibbell,67946,28.html" target="_new">http://www.villagevoice.com/screens/0538,dibbell,67946,28.html</A>

Quote :

Watchingamerica.com has for some months been part of a nutritious media breakfast, serving daily doses of U.S.-focused news and commentary from abroad to an America unwholesomely satisfied with the view from up its own ass. And now that Katrina has plunged us deeper than ever into the warm, fecal waters of national self-examination, it's especially refreshing to step away to perspectives so distant, at times, as to render exotic even such familiarly American phenomena as, for instance, screwed-over black people. "There are some interesting and heart-wrenching stories about this race, which they call 'Negro,'" explained analyst Dr. Shahram Mohammednejad last week to viewers of the Iranian News Network's Katrina coverage. "Surely you know that up to 50 or 60 years ago, blacks had to sit at the back of the bus. Martin Luther King's mother was the first to have the courage to sit at the front. That started a revolution. [King] was eventually assassinated by the CIA."

As such B-minus homework suggests, of course, the risk of a site like Watching America is that the average American know-nothing might come away from it confirmed in his belief that foreigners know even less. Indeed, given the quantity of unabashed conspiracy theory on display here (the CIA/Mossad/Freemasons blew up the World Trade Center, says one Arab talking head after another; the Nicole Kidman vehicle The Interpreter is part of a plot to destabilize the Mugabe regime, says the Zimbabwean state press), you half suspect the site itself of conspiring to make non-Americans look asinine. But what then to make of the incisive, knowing critiques relayed from Taiwan, from France, from Mexico? "[If] the United States didn't exist it would have to be invented, so that other countries would find it harder to conceal their own defects and inconsistencies," writes one Parisian daily. And the fact that that's supposed to be a defense of the U.S. (from pro-American Le Figaro) suggests just how indefensible we've become.

<A HREF="http://www.cameronwilliamson.com/nutshell.mp3" target="_new">"Like a scrotum, there it is in a nutshell."</A>
Roll Tide!
<A HREF="http://www.cameronwilliamson.com" target="_new">-={Apathetic Asshole.}=-</A>

Add a reply

TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

By Robert Tracinski

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,â€? she said. â€œThey 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

Reply to Riser

You forgot the illuminate that all of the above groups as a whole congealed into in the 1300's and finally came out as the Freemason's. A all controlling power of financial and Military power world wide. A Pyramid with an illuminated all seeing eye at the top of it as still represented on American currency.

Bush makes a Free Masons handshake to this day and is seldom very good at it depending on how influential the one he is shaking hands with he gives his upper two fingers away to early and the cameras pick it up.

It is really hard for people who research these kinds of things to believe in none conspiracy theories when they know real history where the Church and the King of France had most of he Knights Templar killed and their leader burned at the stake because they were so powerful. The Knights Templar were the Special forces of their time and they belonged to the richest group in history now only followed by the holy church.

These people did not pack their bags and go home guys they went underground and still rule much of our daily lives every day as still represented by the Pyramid on U.S Currency. A world wide power they still are. The Word Assassin is derived from the word Hashish that very drug is what Arab and afghan warriors for hundreds of years used to make them invincible in battle. Bin Laden and his boys are in fact part of the global Illuminate and if Bush had the world trade centers destroyed he simply called on a brother in cause to do it.

(\__/)
(='.'=)
(" )_(" )

Reply to SoDNighthawk

heeeeeeyyyyy i learned all that in Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code.

-I'm sorry, but the UN must be firm with you. Let me in, or else.
-Or else what?
-Or else we will be very angry with you... and we will write you a letter, telling you how angry we are.

Reply to SNeaKyTiKi

LOL

(\__/)
(='.'=)
(" )_(" )

Reply to SoDNighthawk

Only in America can an unfortunate set of circimstances exacerbated by the extreme force of a perfectly natural event be construed as a political failing, underground conspiracy, or a holy comeuppance.

Why can't it just be a hurricane?

....WW (5.1)

Reply to _WW_

You truely will never know how things were or werent unless you were here in it.

Quote :

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

Thats dead wrong! We all"People in the south" knew and have known for years almost exactly how this thing was going to unfold. The state of LA. has known it and the Feds have known it.

Quote :

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

The transportation was there even before the storm and still had a chance to work just after the storm. The Mayor screwed the pooch on this one. The engineers were there but it wouldnt have mattered if 10000 had been there because the pumps for the most part were under water. This was something that we have know was going to happen.

Quote :

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

I agree with your thinking on this one. It will remain a disaster waiting to happen again if they dont redesign the city to be more of an Island, but this wont happen.

You get semi close to the real issues in your next statements but you make the mistake of #1- Overthinking the problems. They are truely very simple. #2- having to rely on the media for info. This of course cant be helped if your not here in it. Most of the prisoner stories are BS. They did have evacutaion plans and they did not just turn out large numbers of prisoners. Were there some good people left? Of course there were but the majority were some of this Worlds worst scum. By that I mean wicked, bad people. I not referring to poverty level. Out of the ones that were in the "Good" category, there were many of them that refused to leave and still would today. Cajun French "CoonAsses" have lived in the swamps for generations. They dont think in the same terms as much of the world does because they very much live in a world of their on. People that have never been south of NO into the Bayou have never seen how isolated these people are. Thats their way of life. Also keep in mind that the death toll numbers arent nearly as high as expected so this is the untold succsess story.

I have some very good friends that live on Burgundy St. this is in the uarter and only one block off of Bourbon st.
They didnt leave untill after the storm had passed. A full day after. The majority of people that went to the SuperDome walked within a few feet of their apartments. There Apartment hasnt been touched by looters. There were certainly horror stories and will be more that havent been told, but many that have been reported just arent true. If my friends were able to hop in their vehicle and drive right out to the city the day after then it certainly puts a slightly different spin on at least part of what went on in NO. One other thing that bothers me that out of all this talk and most of what the media reports MS. is hardly mentioned. This storm will be remembered as the one that sank NO, but South MS. has been shafted because we were hit the hardest. NO at this point has had the attention and the man power to get the ones left and that wanted help out of the city. There are still to this very day people here in South MS. that havent had power or one single person from the Fed Gov. reach them or check on them. Why this doesnt get any attention I will never understand.

ASUS P5WD2 Premium
Intel 3.73 EE @ 5.6Ghz
XMS2 DDR2 @ 1180Mhz

<A HREF="http://valid.x86-secret.com/records.php?PHPSESSID=792e8f49d5d9b8a4d1ad6f40ca029756" target="_new">#2 CPUZ</A>
SuperPI 25secs

Reply to mozzartusm

Very well said!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ASUS P5WD2 Premium
Intel 3.73 EE @ 5.6Ghz
XMS2 DDR2 @ 1180Mhz

<A HREF="http://valid.x86-secret.com/records.php?PHPSESSID=792e8f49d5d9b8a4d1ad6f40ca029756" target="_new">#2 CPUZ</A>
SuperPI 25secs

Reply to mozzartusm

Mozz, it is because of the numbers, not the intensity of the winds and 27' to 30' surge flood wall that consumed homes as far as 5 miles inland of the MS Gulf Coast. The facts are that there are only 250,000 residents or so in the MS Coastal areas yet N.O. has much more money and 500,000 people in a much concentrated area according to the media, not to mention Mardi Gras which really originated in Biloxi, MS (shocked) as Biloxi was the capitol of LA at the time!

Those that are not wrapped up in politics are aware MS was hit with the harder side of the hammer, but the LA will get the glory and the attention due to the levee breaching, and so maybe it is just, since they had two disasters. MS has people who care about one another and help to rebuild on their own, N.O. does not have that same ability, and so it seems just...

<pre>°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°`°¤o \\// o¤°`°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°
And the sign says "You got to have a membership card to get inside" Huh
So I got me a pen and paper And I made up my own little sign</pre>

Reply to RichPLS

I forgot to even mention the storm surge. Even though my ranting may seem to be anti-NO, I truely dont mean for it to come across as such. Im just so tired of hearing so many distorted news tidbits floating around.

ASUS P5WD2 Premium
Intel 3.73 EE @ 5.6Ghz
XMS2 DDR2 @ 1180Mhz

<A HREF="http://valid.x86-secret.com/records.php?PHPSESSID=792e8f49d5d9b8a4d1ad6f40ca029756" target="_new">#2 CPUZ</A>
SuperPI 25secs

Reply to mozzartusm

Very interesting read. Not that I accept all of it at face value but it shows a new perspective (for me) on things.

BigMac

(\__/)
(='.'=)This is Bunny. Copy and paste bunny into
(" )_(" )your signature to help him gain world domination.

Reply to BigMac

<pre> note to self: when posting random links, that are amusing at the time please enter a smilie in the post somewhere.</pre> :lol:

<A HREF="http://www.cameronwilliamson.com/nutshell.mp3" target="_new">"Like a scrotum, there it is in a nutshell."</A>
Roll Tide!
<A HREF="http://www.cameronwilliamson.com" target="_new">-={Apathetic Asshole.}=-</A>

Reply to mrface

I see your point. That was actually an article that I read and decided to post by someone who was in the area reporting on it for another news station. I think it brings awareness to the fact that the reason NO is like this in the aftermath is because of the people there.. the majority of the people there I should say.
I have a friend who lives in Birmingham who visited NO frequently. She has family living in MS. The difference is that the people in MS are helping themselves while NO really isn't banding together as much.
In all of the bad in that report, there was a lot of good going on. But it does make sense that while we're watching the news and they're watching people steal TVs and stuff out of stores, MS wasn't doing that stuff.

I agree with you, I just tossed that out there for criticism.

Reply to Riser

After reading my reply today, I realized that I could have done a much better job of expressing my thoughts without coming across so strong. I really didnt mean to sound like such an ARSE and I apologize for doing so. The content I stand behind, but the way I delivered it could use alot of work.

ASUS P5WD2 Premium
Intel 3.73 EE @ 5.6Ghz
XMS2 DDR2 @ 1180Mhz

<A HREF="http://valid.x86-secret.com/records.php?PHPSESSID=792e8f49d5d9b8a4d1ad6f40ca029756" target="_new">#2 CPUZ</A>
SuperPI 25secs

Reply to mozzartusm

Ask the community Add a reply

Tom's Hardware > Forum > Old Man/Woman's Club > Other > What the foreign press really thinks of us

Go to:

Help |
Forum rules

There are 1095 identified and unidentified users. To see the list of identified users, Click here.

Page generated in 0.321 seconds

Please mind

You are about to answer a thread that has been inactive for more than 6 months.
If you still wish to proceed, please ensure that your posting is original and does not duplicate or overlap any prior responses to this thread.

Add a reply Cancel

Focus On

What the foreign press really thinks of us

Forum Old Man/Woman's Club : Other - What the foreign press really thinks of us

Please mind