[extropy-chat] re: news in perspective

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 06:27:02PM +0200, Amara Graps wrote:

> BTW, despite my comment earlier about wishing that the America media
> put this in perspective, it seems from what I've read today that the
> economic consequences could be huge. And I don't like seeing people

Economic consequences? It's just money. No amount of money can bring
back dead people. Comments a la "this is our Hiroshima" and "this is 
our tsunami" and even "this is worse than the tsunami" (that's verbatim) 
demonstrate a certain provincial arrogance to it.

A few thousands people are dead, sure, but this is in no way even
the same magnitude: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake#Casualties_in_historical_context 

It's not important, unless it is ours that are hurting. It's a reporting
and empathy bias dwarfing Texas. 

> in other governments (e.g. Schroeder) exploiting the New Orleans
> tragedy in political ways. Nevertheless, I think that that the US

He's just capitalizing on the fallout from Kyoto and ShrubCo's past policy.
It's not callousness, and definitely not schadenfreude, but
there's certainly a more detached view from the distance, and sure lots of lost
goodwill. Perceived reporting and (partly unrepentantly offensive)
perception bias is of course also not necessarily more endearing.

> government will have a hard time with receiving aid. The view of the
> US from countries outside has changed alot in the last 4 years. It's
> hard to help a government that one despises, even though it is the
> American people themselves, not the government, who will suffer.

Yep.
 
> Here's a bit of 'trivia' that someone pointed me to today,
> a video, from January, from the PBS program "Nova":
> 
> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3204/02.html
> 
> The video fairly accurately predicted what was going to happen.
> I wonder why the New Orleans area wasn't better prepared, given
> that these dangers were so well-known.

Reliable sources say 80% of funding for NO infrastructure budget was cut
post 9/11. Another source says the NO mayor is not one of the 
brightest specimens of humankind -- no idea whether this is true.
And of course there's the usual lack of compassion and leadership
by the main simian.

It's a mix of incompetence, corruption, and good old human
stupidity, as usual.

I'm reading Diamond's "Collapse" right now, there are plenty of lessons
to us in there. Technology is useless, if wielded by idiots. 

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.leitl.org
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