Don't Believe Everything You Think

Dear Christian,

I've noticed you post this sort of thing periodically on this list as well as others over the years. Your postings have a decidedly ideological slant.

Here are a few of my thoughts about the piece you've posted and about its author and even my thoughts on you.

Ethnic cleaning? More like natural selection excepting those cases where folks were not ambulatory or not ambulatory for any significant distance. Anybody capable of walking out of the Lower 9th Ward whom did not as Hurricane Katrina approached and perished had only themselves to blame. When judging these sorts of matters I generally follow the rule of W.W.I.D. (What Would I Do). My feet are for walking... dozens of miles if my life depends upon it. I and anybody else walking in that situation would probably get a ride somewhere along the way, too.

The Universe is not concerned in the least with melanin levels in the skin of human beings or whom plays the victim card most effectively and whom utilizes false guilt the best. If a human being makes choices that place themselves in the path of the Universe's hammer they will get squashed every time.

In a town that is predominantly Democratic Party-controlled how would donating to the Republican Party get an emergency management firm a contract to develop a faulty disaster plan?

The U.S. Government and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was not responsible for the flooding of New Orleans, LA, in 2005 and the Universe could give a rat's ass what conclusion some asshole judge reached in a court case about it. New Orleans flooded because nobody bothered to move the damned city out of the way of the largest river on the North American continent.... and where it meets the Atlantic Ocean no less.... and immediately adjacent to and down-wind of one of the most fertile hurricane breeding grounds on Earth.

There were no buses to move those whom needed moving out of the Lower 9th Ward and were willing to leave and could not walk (like I would have) because those buses were neatly parked in their parking lot where Mayor Ray "Pass-The-Buck" Nagin left them. Nagin murdered those people and when the good people of New Orleans reelected him to office afterward that ended the last bit of my sympathy for Nagin's "Chocolate City" (Nagin's words, not mine).

The ancient Egyptians in the Book of the Dead left an instruction NOT to fuck with the river (Nile) but being a lot younger civilization we haven't quite figured that out yet with our largest river.

Christian, I hope someday you develop into an intellectually sophisticated person capable of grasping that the world is a whole lot more complicated than the Republicans being bad guys and Democrats being good guys (or vice versa as other hayseeds believe).

The truth is vastly more complex and layered with level upon level of context and nuance. When the next revolution happens both unrepentant Democrats and Republicans will have good reason to be gravely concerned. Thomas Jefferson would have it no other way.

Greg Palast is a Neo-Liberal hack with an ax to grind and preaches to the choir in an echo chamber.

What guys like Palast and even you seem to fail to grasp is that if one looks at any group of human beings long and hard enough one will find malfeasance. Neo-Liberals like you (and Neo-Cons, too) should know better than to throw stones in glass houses.

One can be simple-minded and think like a cave man and make simplistic mental groupings like all big furry animals with large claws and huge fangs are dangerous or all rich people are greedy and got that way doing naughty things on the backs of workers.

This sort of unsophisticated thinking fails to account for the fact that without a lot of those people in The Hamptons whom Palast mocks we wouldn't have a civilization of note. Any significant civilization requires elites to rule and the Universe in unimpressed and unconcerned with the romantic perception-as-reality of fellow-travelers like you and Palast.