← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Sertorius
Thread ID: 20002 | Posts: 10 | Started: 2005-09-04
2005-09-04 16:19 | User Profile
VDARE.COM - [url]http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050903_new_orleans.htm[/url]
September 03, 2005 Racial Reality And The New Orleans Nightmare
By Steve Sailer
It was the Perfect Storm.
No, not Hurricane Katrina. That could have been much worse. Back in the 1990s, my friend Rob Brennan wrote an unpublished novel called Category 5 about a ferocious hurricane that strikes New Orleans at the worst possible angle. Katrina, in contrast, was a Category 4 hurricane and hit New Orleans only a glancing blow.
No, the perfect storm was actually the combination of social and governmental incompetence at local, state, and federal levelsââ¬âand unmentionable racial reality.
Republican Presidents are supposed to provide adult supervision for crooked Democratic urban machines. But the White House is now occupied by George W. Bush, a politician so irresponsible, so uninterested in proficiency and honesty among his minions that late last year he tried to appoint as Secretary of Homeland Security the egregious Bernie Kerik.
Mr. Bush shows no evidence of holding his appointees accountable, so long as they remain loyal to him personally. Just as he has never vetoed a bill, he almost never fires anyone for poor performance.
VDARE.com readers are familiar with the contempt with which Mr. Bush treats his sworn duties to uphold the laws against illegal immigration. Now the whole country is starting to catch on to his disregard for his duties in his pursuit of image over effectiveness.
His invade-the-world-invite-the-world policies have left America unprepared for predictable domestic troubles, as Paul Craig Roberts recently pointed out here.
The ineptitude displayed by the Louisiana state government is also unsurprising. The state is unique in having a Latin political tradition (it uses the Code Napoleon rather than the English common law, even though Napoleon didn't release his code until the year after he sold Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson), a culture in which the Argentinean demagogue Juan Peron would have felt at home.
The unofficial state motto is "Laissez les bons temps rouler" or "Let the good times roll." Compare that to New Hampshire's official motto of "Live free or die," which display a rather different understanding of freedom. Louisiana's reigning philosophy is freedom from responsibility.
It's a general rule that the tastier the indigenous cuisine, the lousier the government. Its culture has provided America with jazz, A Street Car Named Desire, and the great American comic novel of the 20th Century, A Confederacy of Dunces.New Orleans is a nice place to visit. But you wouldn't want to raise your kids there.
All this is now common parlance, more or less. What you wonââ¬â¢t hear, except from me, is that "Let the good times roll" is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.
New Orleans itself is two-thirds black. It has had nothing but black mayors since 1978. All four of them are from the light-skinned "creole of color" elite, including the notorious Marc H. Morial, now head of the National Urban League. The city government is corrupt and lackadaisical. While the police department has perhaps rebounded from the depths it reached a decade ago when an officer was condemned to death for having a mother of three rubbed out by drug gangstas in his employ, nobody should be surprised that last week numerous officers ran away, and some even freelanced as looters.
In a racially diverse democracy like New Orleans, voting for good government takes a backseat to voting for your tribe's representatives in the eternal ethnic tussle over slices of the pie. As the ultra-competent but not terribly democratic founder of the state of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, noted in a recent interview:
"In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion."
For instance, after blacks took control of New Orleans, they required new police recruits to live in the city itself as a way to exclude white cops. Dean M. Shapiro writes for Court TV's "Crime Library":
"The department was being depleted of experienced officers and the numbers within the ranks were decreasing as crime stats were rising at an alarming rateââ¬Â¦ In order to beef up the rapidly dwindling numbers of NOPD, the department was forced to lower its acceptance standards. Recruits with criminal records, DWIs, unfavorable employment records and dishonorable discharges from the Armed Forces were allowed to enter the Police Academy, whereas they had previously been excludedââ¬Â¦ Their records were expunged and, on completion of their training, they were issued badges, guns and patrol cars and turned loose on the streetââ¬Â¦ These new officers were expected to suddenly straighten up and begin enforcing the laws they had not-so-long-ago been breaking. They were expected to arrest those suspected of crimes, even if those accused had once been their street buddies. But this was an unrealistic expectation."
The state's Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan made all the right noises about evacuating residents without cars by school bus. But state and local authorities apparently failed to execute, as the famous picture of about 200 New Orleans school buses neatly lined up in a flooded parking lot shows.
It also should have been expected that a large fraction of New Orleans's lower class blacks would not evacuate before a disaster. Many are too poor to own a car, or too untrustworthy to get a ride with neighbors, or too shortsighted to worry.
Judging from their economic and educational statistics, New Orleans' blacks are not even an above-average group of African-Americans, such as you find in Atlanta or Seattle, but more like Miami's or Milwaukee's. About half are below the poverty line. With the national black average IQ around 85, New Orleans' mean black IQ would probably be in the lower 80s or upper 70s.
And of course nobody, despite what they may say, is all that much startled that, when the city's whites and more prosperous and/or foresightful blacks left, New Orleans quickly turned into its demographic analog, Haitiââ¬âwhere 2004's Tropical Storm Jeanne unleashed similar mayhem and chaos.
Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola of New Orleans who represents political prisoners in Haiti, stayed behind with his wife, who is a nurse. He noted:
"I had always hoped that Haiti would become more like New Orleans, but what's happened is New Orleans has become more like Haiti here recently."
In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japanââ¬âbecause, when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks. For example, the per capita imprisonment rate for Asian-Americans is about 1/30th that of African-Americans.
Nor is it surprising that the black refugees at the Superdome and the convention center failed to get themselves organized to make conditions more livable. Poor black people seldom cooperate well with each other because they don't trust other blacks much, for the perfectly rational reason that they commit large numbers of crimes against each other.
Indeed, as Francis Fukuyama's best book, Trust, makes clear, in most of the worldââ¬âoutside Japan and the more British-Germanic-Nordic parts of Europe and their overseas offspring like Americaââ¬âpeople seldom trust fellow citizens beyond their extended families enough to voluntarily come together to solve community problems. Force is generally needed to get them to work with each other. Which is why "civic society" is relatively rare.
(Why Mr. Bush wants to import vast numbers of additional immigrants from cultures where unrelated residents have no tradition of self-organizing as free individuals is a mystery for another day.)
But if all these disasters in New Orleans should have been expected, why did nobody at any level of government act as if they expected them?
Because to anticipate the problems would require noticing that racial differences are relevant. And that can ruin one's career.
Governmental bodies naturally decay rapidly in competence, especially when free discussion of unpleasant realities is suppressed.
New Orleans should remind us that we still live in a harsh world. The make-believe that passes for public discourse, even at the elite level, simply isn't adequate for protecting American citizens.
Copyright é 1999 - 2005 VDARE.com School buses. [IMG]http://us.news3.yimg.com/us.i2.yimg.com/p/ap/20050901/capt.flpc21109012015.hurricane_katrina_flpc211.jpg?x=380&y=235&sig=NbUvEfVIaferkxoZTiys0Q--[/IMG]
2005-09-04 19:11 | User Profile
Sert - Great post, Sailer has a direct hit with this article. This fits nicely with Edgar Steele's article on the same subject.
[url]http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19959[/url]
2005-09-04 21:25 | User Profile
BK,
It is my fondest hope that with most Americans dead set Bush's amnesty that they take a good hard look at the sorry crew who has been raising all the hell and "connect the dots", as they say and realize if we have this much trouble with our native Blacks, then what the hell does Bush think he is doing bringing in more "people of color"? This might cause them to get onto their congressmen instead of bitching about this. Sailer does indeed score a direct hit along with Steele and Duke.
2005-09-06 01:11 | User Profile
A perceptive reader comments on Sailer's piece:
[url]http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/09/black-male-comics-on-race-differences.html[/url]
[B]Monday, September 05, 2005[/B]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS][SIZE=4][B]Black Male Comics on Race Differences in Judgment[/B]:[/SIZE]
A reader writes in regard to [B]my much-denounced comment that the "Let the good times roll" philosophy of New Orleans is worse on average for blacks than for better educated groups with better judgment[/B]:[/FONT]
[SIZE=3] [FONT=Times New Roman]I don't see what's so controversial.[B] If you observe popular Black culture (Chappelle's Show, Comic View on BET, etc.), they never tire of lampooning the wimpy discipline that Whites show their misbehaving kids, whereas the Black parents know that doing so for their children would be a joke, and thus more authoritarian measures are needed[/B]. Very few Black stand-up comics don't have some sort of whoopin' story where they recall how necessary it is to treat Black children differently by whipping them, provoking gales of laughter and cheers from the mostly Black audience. [I'm sure that will be a major theme of Chris Rock's up-coming sit-com about how his dad raised him.]
This only relates to the difference in treatment necessary to keep members of different races from behaving badly, while your remark addressed how to get them to behave well, but again I think many mainstream Black figures like Bill Cosby make the point that you need to more deliberately steer Black youth in a positive direction, as compared with the amount of calculated intervention needed in the cases of Whites or East Asians. Now, they might argue with you over the causes of why Black youth need more strict guidance than East Asians, but does anyone seriously doubt that they do, on average?
Sheesh.[/FONT][/SIZE]
2005-09-06 02:18 | User Profile
It's a general rule that the tastier the indigenous cuisine, the lousier the government.
Funny but not true. Sub Sahara Africa comes equipped with bad cuisine [I]and[/I] bad government.
2005-09-06 02:35 | User Profile
Negroes are exception from every rule. Perhaps they aren't human :biggrin:
2005-09-06 02:43 | User Profile
What is your personal IQ, madrussian?
Petr
2005-09-06 16:46 | User Profile
This is Sailer's best-ever piece on race in part because it his clearest-written. Usually when he has some unpleasant truth to relate, he dampens the lit-fuse by swathing it in academic tones. Here he adopts more of a layman's approach, and its impact is - well, you can judge its impact for yourself by monitoring the firestorm of criticism sure to ensue.
Maybe Katrina was a blessing in disguise insofar as anybody who was ever shouted down in polite society for "spreading hate" now has about 150 hours of news-coverage and videotape to point to. I predict the Racism Is Evil crowd will continue to hold their ground but their motives will have shifted from "hate is always wrong" to "Jesus God, don't rile them up or they'll burn down my house next!"
2005-09-06 18:24 | User Profile
Who is this Tex writing on the AntiWar blog? He needs to have some truth strapped on him about the what and who inside the TerrorDome, apparently.
It sounds like to me that these furriners he's so worried about were all whites- Australian, British, western European. No wonder the Guard wanted them out of there- they were inciting the gibbering masses, and soon enough there would have been one huge slaughter scene for CNN to drag out and blame on racism against blacks somehow.
Maybe this guy is just being satirical. Otherwise, the AntiWar denizens are getting as dense as the OnceFree Republic drones.
[url]http://www.antiwar.com/blog/index.php?id=P2347[/url] Americans last Rightie bloggers are trying to put a positive spin on the appalling pictures coming out of New Orleans, the most striking features of which are the unbroken seas of black faces staring at the cameras from the hellish, stinking concentration camps at the Superdome and convention center. In the latest of several posts aiming to rebut the charge of racism in the way the evacuation was managed, John Cole writes, "This isn't a race thing. This was a money thing....." in an attempt to argue that the poor people were the ones held at gunpoint at the "evacuation" centers. In that the vast majority of poor people in New Orleans are African-American, this spin can be not entirely inaccurate. What it doesn't do is explain the story of these two British girls:
" TWO sisters last night told of the horror of being trapped in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina."Rebecca and Charlotte Scott, 20 and 19 "respectively, arrived home in Reading yesterday after five days trapped in the hurricane-"devastated Louisiana city. They spent three nights sheltering with thousands of refugees in the New Orleans Superdome, huddled with other British women inside a ring of men protecting them after terrifying rumours of rapes and murders. [...] Charlotte, who studies geography at Swansea University, said: "The first night was not nice. It was like a long car journey without moving. "I can't fault the authorities at all. The US Air Force, the army and the police were all great.
"They told us to stick together and not go in the dark parts." [...] "The sisters paid tribute to an Australian traveller named Bud Hopes and National Guardsman Sergeant Garland Ogden, who helped them get out the stadium.Rebecca said: "We owe them so much. If we'd been on our own I don't know what we would have done."
The girls were moved by officials to a nearby basketball centre, which was being used as a medical centre, on Wednesday. They spent 24 hours helping to wash and feed elderly evacuees before being transferred to the severely damaged Hyatt Hotel on Thursday and finally getting a coach to Dallas, Texas, and a flight to Gatwick Airport on Saturday morning. So they found better accommodations for British white girls and selected other foreigners on Wednesday, while Americans were forced to remain coralled in the hellholes with no food or water. From this story we learn that these lucky ones were smuggled out on vegetable trucks: Last Thursday morning, the group was packed into a vegetable truck and told to be as quiet as possible about leaving. They were taken to the Hyatt Hotel in New Orleans where Miss Sachs, 21, slept in a damp and smelly boardroom. Finally, on Friday morning, they were taken in buses to Dallas from where they began journeys home. So, who did you have to be to get so lucky in New Orleans last week? The international contingent were moved to a separate area to keep them safe from the poor and desperate, from drug addicts and mentally ill who also had no means of escape. "On the second night, the military told us the generator would be going out and it would be pitch black. We were told not to use a torch because we could be attacked for it," Miss Sachs said.
Foreign travellers in the Superdome had herded together for safety, after warnings from US air force personnel.
"There were 40 or 50 of us. The lads were on the outside and the girls were on the inside and we just made sure that we didn't leave any of our bags."
The military told all non-US citizens to stay together for safety, Ms Sachs added.
They later told them they would be secretly smuggled out in groups of 10 under cover of darkness as it had become too dangerous for them to remain in the stadium, she told BBC News.
"When we were leaving, people were going 'Where are you going?' and giving us looks.
"But the military got us out, which we were all thankful for."
Jenny Sachs, of Sheffield, told how soldiers had to smuggle her out of the Superdome in secret.
She said they had told her the lights would go out before the rescue, and warned her not to use a torch for fear of attack. The US Military is supposed to "protect" who, now? Foreign nationals over Americans? Is this a "class thing," "race thing" or something even more evil than we can bear to contemplate? What possible reason could there have been to treat ANY of the people left in New Orleans differently? Weren't the Americans at least equal to Brits and Aussies? Was it that the foreign nationals had diplomats looking out for their interests? If so, what does that say about who was looking out for the interests of Americans?
Anyone? Any righties want to take a shot at explaining why Americans were kept, starving and dying in the NOLA camps at gunpoint, as foreigners were "smuggled" out to the Hyatt and evacuated ahead of them? Are these guys - Bud Hopes and National Guard Staff Sgt Garland Ogden - heroes? As the Australians left the Superdome, food and water were almost non-existent and the stiflingly hot arena was filled with 25,000 people and the stench of human waste. [...] Mr Hopes, 32, said: "That was the worst place in the universe. Ninety-eight per cent of the people around the world are good. In that place, 98 per cent of the people were bad. [...] Mr Hopes said the Australians owed their lives to a National Guard Staff Sgt Garland Ogden, who had broken the rules to get the tourists out of the dome, with 60 people being evacuated to a medical centre. Nice. It's really nice that these people were saved from Bad Americans. After all, what better mission for the American National Guard than liberating foreigners? Maybe the important question about the deplorable treatment of the Americans in the NOLA "shelters" shouldn't be about whether race or class was the criteria, but about nationality.
Posted by: tex on Sep 05, 05 | 10:23 am | Comments? | link
2005-09-06 21:21 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Bardamu]Funny but not true. Sub Sahara Africa comes equipped with bad cuisine [I]and[/I] bad government.[/QUOTE]
Ethiopian food is actually pretty good, although I get the impression its been heavily influenced by Arab cuisine.