10.9.05
The "Libertarian" response to disaster
I'm going to be kind... this has to be the most retarded blog post in the history of the medium. No, hold on a second... I'm afraid that, while being kind, I have unintentionally devalued the sheer stupidity of the argument. Really, I'm surprised that the person who wrote it has enough intelligence to breathe, much less pick up a pen and write or bang out shit on a computer keyboard.
Such a short post, and yet so much bullshit: tendentiousness, density, and the most unlikely "logical" conclusions. Let's start with this "ironic" observation:
In the wake of compounding disasters, ordinary people spontaneously kept a whole city fed, clothed, watered, and in some instances, even powered.
No, not at all. First of all, approximately 500,000 people lived in the city of New Orleans, and over 3 million in the metropolitan area, before it was destroyed. Even counting all the people held hostage by the Bush administration and redneck suburban cops in the Superdome and the convention center, we only get to about 50,000 people (i.e., much less than 10% of the pre-hurricane population). This hardly counts as the "whole city" of New Orleans.
Second, without at all denigrating the very real heroism of the "ordinary people" who kept their comrades and compatriots alive, they "spontaneously" did nothing along the lines of what the author suggests. The food, water, and clothing they found and the electricity they connected to were already there due to previous activities of the state. But according to the author's narrative, we should believe that the "communists", unwittingly relieved of the burden of "centralism", somehow managed to incant into existence all of these basic necessities. Needless to say, this is absolute poppycock.
It is much more credible to say that the survivors of this natural/manmade catastrophe mananged, through their actions, to scrounge enough remnants of previous state activities to carry on a bit of civilization in circumstances under which all of the foundations of civilization had been knocked out.
And finally, without help from the outside (i.e., the "statist" outside), exactly how long would these heroes have been able to carry on? The author doesn't say, and let me tell you, he can't, because it would not have been long at all. Let us, for a very brief moment, consider the necessities of life: food - requiring arable land and laborers to work it; and water - requiring clean water sources, neither of which were not possible in a city into which all kinds of toxic shit had flowed.
Can we really expect that a few hundred ragged survivors could have carried on indefinitely completely cut off from all of the basic sources of life in a ruined post-industrial wasteland? Hell fucking no. Saying that the survivors in New Orleans managed to survive "spontaneously" is akin to saying that all of those Soviet parades took place "spontaneously". Anyone, and especially "Libertarians", who believes this needs a real head examination.
Then there's this:
At every turn, these civilizational functions were halted by slobbering subhumans with big guns, unlimited funds, and a license to kill -- collectively known as the State.
Does a Libertarian need to blame the entire apparatus of "The State" for this? Perhaps there is a simpler explanation - like "racism", for example. Hello... the idea of "turf", and "our land is our land" and "if you are not our color, then get the fuck out"? All of these have a long-lasting, and still very relevant, currency in the United States. Speaking as someone who comes from the South, if you actually go there, you will, I guarantee you, see these principles in action.
And in any event, one of the tenents of "Libertarianism" is that the only functions of the State should be to provide for a) national defense, and b) protection of private property. The "subhumans with big guns" were police and National Guard - the very people whose functions someone like "Sapienza", the author, would normally be defending. Considering that they were "defending" private property in White areas, like Gretna, I really cannot see how "Sapienza" can be attacking them. If he has to swallow institutionalized racism as part of his "libertarian" pill, then he should either spit the whole thing up or shut the fuck up.
When I read shit like this, I have to conclude that so-called "libertarians" are actually advancing the agenda of the crypto-fascist Right and the Bush administration. I mean, hey, after all, it doesn't matter if Bush - someone who, like Reagan, sees government as "The Problem" preventing you from solving all your difficulties - is competent or motherfucking incompetent. The real problem is not competence or motherfucking incompetence - the real problem, according to shitheads like "Sapienza", is that anyone who steps into government are even judged at all according to criteria like "competence" or "motherfucking incompetence", since they think that the whole system of governance is wrong and wrongheaded anyway.
This is the same belief that Bush holds and Reagan held. How can you possibly judge the performance of a system when it is run by people who are determined to "strangle it" in their disguting bathtub? As Dave Lindorff says,
Yet with such governmental nihilists in power, how could the outcome in New Orleans have been other than an epic disaster? Would these people have hired teachers for their schools who didn't believe kids could learn? Would they have gone to doctors when they were sick, who professed a belief that medicine was a joke? Would they have hired a contractor to build their home who said that engineering and architecture were for sissies?
Finally, you may wonder why I have put "Sapienza", the author's name, consistently in quotes. This is why: "Sapienza" means "wisdom" in Italian. Anyone who writes this tripe, and then ends with the question "Anyone want to mock the "invisible hand" now?", surely must either have a seriously ironic made-up name or a serious genetic defect in the family line. No, Mr. "Sapienza", I shan't mock your Santa Claus-like belief - I'll only mock your crappy argument (I'm being generous again) and your ridiculous surname.
I'm going to be kind... this has to be the most retarded blog post in the history of the medium. No, hold on a second... I'm afraid that, while being kind, I have unintentionally devalued the sheer stupidity of the argument. Really, I'm surprised that the person who wrote it has enough intelligence to breathe, much less pick up a pen and write or bang out shit on a computer keyboard.
Such a short post, and yet so much bullshit: tendentiousness, density, and the most unlikely "logical" conclusions. Let's start with this "ironic" observation:
In the wake of compounding disasters, ordinary people spontaneously kept a whole city fed, clothed, watered, and in some instances, even powered.
No, not at all. First of all, approximately 500,000 people lived in the city of New Orleans, and over 3 million in the metropolitan area, before it was destroyed. Even counting all the people held hostage by the Bush administration and redneck suburban cops in the Superdome and the convention center, we only get to about 50,000 people (i.e., much less than 10% of the pre-hurricane population). This hardly counts as the "whole city" of New Orleans.
Second, without at all denigrating the very real heroism of the "ordinary people" who kept their comrades and compatriots alive, they "spontaneously" did nothing along the lines of what the author suggests. The food, water, and clothing they found and the electricity they connected to were already there due to previous activities of the state. But according to the author's narrative, we should believe that the "communists", unwittingly relieved of the burden of "centralism", somehow managed to incant into existence all of these basic necessities. Needless to say, this is absolute poppycock.
It is much more credible to say that the survivors of this natural/manmade catastrophe mananged, through their actions, to scrounge enough remnants of previous state activities to carry on a bit of civilization in circumstances under which all of the foundations of civilization had been knocked out.
And finally, without help from the outside (i.e., the "statist" outside), exactly how long would these heroes have been able to carry on? The author doesn't say, and let me tell you, he can't, because it would not have been long at all. Let us, for a very brief moment, consider the necessities of life: food - requiring arable land and laborers to work it; and water - requiring clean water sources, neither of which were not possible in a city into which all kinds of toxic shit had flowed.
Can we really expect that a few hundred ragged survivors could have carried on indefinitely completely cut off from all of the basic sources of life in a ruined post-industrial wasteland? Hell fucking no. Saying that the survivors in New Orleans managed to survive "spontaneously" is akin to saying that all of those Soviet parades took place "spontaneously". Anyone, and especially "Libertarians", who believes this needs a real head examination.
Then there's this:
At every turn, these civilizational functions were halted by slobbering subhumans with big guns, unlimited funds, and a license to kill -- collectively known as the State.
Does a Libertarian need to blame the entire apparatus of "The State" for this? Perhaps there is a simpler explanation - like "racism", for example. Hello... the idea of "turf", and "our land is our land" and "if you are not our color, then get the fuck out"? All of these have a long-lasting, and still very relevant, currency in the United States. Speaking as someone who comes from the South, if you actually go there, you will, I guarantee you, see these principles in action.
And in any event, one of the tenents of "Libertarianism" is that the only functions of the State should be to provide for a) national defense, and b) protection of private property. The "subhumans with big guns" were police and National Guard - the very people whose functions someone like "Sapienza", the author, would normally be defending. Considering that they were "defending" private property in White areas, like Gretna, I really cannot see how "Sapienza" can be attacking them. If he has to swallow institutionalized racism as part of his "libertarian" pill, then he should either spit the whole thing up or shut the fuck up.
When I read shit like this, I have to conclude that so-called "libertarians" are actually advancing the agenda of the crypto-fascist Right and the Bush administration. I mean, hey, after all, it doesn't matter if Bush - someone who, like Reagan, sees government as "The Problem" preventing you from solving all your difficulties - is competent or motherfucking incompetent. The real problem is not competence or motherfucking incompetence - the real problem, according to shitheads like "Sapienza", is that anyone who steps into government are even judged at all according to criteria like "competence" or "motherfucking incompetence", since they think that the whole system of governance is wrong and wrongheaded anyway.
This is the same belief that Bush holds and Reagan held. How can you possibly judge the performance of a system when it is run by people who are determined to "strangle it" in their disguting bathtub? As Dave Lindorff says,
Yet with such governmental nihilists in power, how could the outcome in New Orleans have been other than an epic disaster? Would these people have hired teachers for their schools who didn't believe kids could learn? Would they have gone to doctors when they were sick, who professed a belief that medicine was a joke? Would they have hired a contractor to build their home who said that engineering and architecture were for sissies?
Finally, you may wonder why I have put "Sapienza", the author's name, consistently in quotes. This is why: "Sapienza" means "wisdom" in Italian. Anyone who writes this tripe, and then ends with the question "Anyone want to mock the "invisible hand" now?", surely must either have a seriously ironic made-up name or a serious genetic defect in the family line. No, Mr. "Sapienza", I shan't mock your Santa Claus-like belief - I'll only mock your crappy argument (I'm being generous again) and your ridiculous surname.
