Gatorubet;1903476; said:
C'mon Muck, you cutting off my quote before the sentence before..."Did some idiots loot some buildings? Yeah. Were a couple idiot cops looting the one walmart? Yeah. Everyone saw that footage" does lead to a good intro for you to post your bit, but it contributes little to refuting what I said about the press being overblown. With a million people in the metro New Orleans area, in a small geographic disaster zone, you will and did have looting. I acknowledged that.
You've conflated a number of different issues under the mistaken belief that they all have equal validity.
The bizarro world reporting surrounding the Super Dome =/= first hand accounts of looting on a large scale.
Said looting is also not unprecedented in the US. To be honest it tends to be the norm rather than the exception in poor urban areas during times of disaster or unrest...and yes the residents of those areas also tend to be predominately black.
I am somewhat grounded in what happened in the city back in '05. I didn't get hired to go down there because everything was secretly rainbows and everyone was holding hands singing Joan Baez songs while calmly waiting for everything to get better. Yes I saw the people on their free shopping sprees prioritize high dollar electronics & other non essential items. I also know of a couple of stores that were broken into & ransacked despite taking all of their food items off the shelves & placing them outside for the use of those in need.
I'm also very aware of the media's penchant to screw up their reporting either through a desire to make a story more exciting, as a result of a personal ax to grind or just through sheer ignorance regarding the topic at hand (coincidentally enough I was also present when a (mis)quotes was made that was taken out of context to paint the PSC industry in a negative light...for the record the person in question already WAS a LEO).
'Nor am I fan of the local PD down in those parts. As a strong 2nd Amendment guy I found the decision to go into homes & confiscate legally owned firearms from those in the most need of security to be criminal. That being said the focus on 'police looters' is another bit that's been taken out of context or overblown, many of the stores (including WalMart) had an open door policy for LEOs to come in & commandeer food/water/clothing & similar (including comfort) items for the express purpose of distributing it to those in need and much of the furor over cops 'looting' was a failure on the part of journalists to fact check exactly why many officers were doing exactly what the stores had explicitly allowed them to do.
Looting happened on a relatively large scale in parts of NOLA, that is not something that can be disputed. Trying to downplay it by attempting to link it to the piss poor gonzo journalism that surrounded the entire sorry affair does a disservice to those who are interested in trying to find an accurate representation of what happened.
Furthermore hand waving environmental conditions that are more dangerous for the unprotected to overstate the dangers of other conditions smacks of the exact type of bad reporting you claim to be so against.
:sarcasm meter on: OTOH, it's nice to know I can safely assume you are a lying asshole rapist murderer who engaged in cover ups of civilian atrocities by the military.
It wouldn't exactly be the first time assumptions along those lines have popped up on this board. *shrug*
After all, I can find some pictures and links to the those activities rather easily, and you served in the military so..,, What? A picture of some knuckleheads abusing some random Iraqi citizens does not indicate either the the prevalence or connexity of that behavior to any other person having military careers, at least as a group mindset that indicates tht one person having done it means everyone else did?
Well after all, you are the one who stated that all you ever really needed to know you could see on TV
Oh trust me, as soon as my contract ended I did.
I wasn't joking in the past when I compared New Orleans to Mogadishu.
Let's talk about how the convenience stores are mostly owned by Yakuza, and how the Yakuza is one of the main deliverers of disaster aid. Yeah, the Japanese respond differently, but with an entire different set of cultural norms and reasons behind them, all of them not as fucking noble when you step back a bit.
It's interesting how much that sounds like some of the excuses given by folks in LA who had attacked & looted local convenience stores (which were primarily asian owned) when we went in there back in '92 (Operation Compton Storm baby!!).
So you're allowed to jump to conclusions based on who didn't die...but I'm not allowed to witness THE FUCKING POLICE looting a store and jump to the conclusion that if the cops were doing it, so were many others? GTFOH.
