About to fly to Perth, Prosper, Katrina.

[tcpip]

About to hop on the big silver bird and fly to Perth for a week or so. Finished most of my data for my presentation at the SAGE-AU conference. On Saturday at 7pm there will be a eating, drinking and talking fest which I'm hosting at:

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Oxford Hotel
368 Oxford St Leederville WA 6007
ph: (08) 9444 2193 Hotels--Accommodation

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So leave an el-jay comment if you expect to turn up, so myself and the hotel have some sort of idea of numbers. Expected activities, apart from SAGE-AU, include a visit to Murdoch University where the lovely people at MARS are holding a "How to Host a Murder" eve. Add that to two days of the conference and possibly a journey down south and all shall be good.

Presentation at Prosper Australia went extremely well. There were a few surprises in the audience, including the Herald Sun reporter who interviewed me on the notorious tram-ticket case and Greg T. Both were their due to their respective fathers being members of the organisation.

Here's a prediction: The Liberal Party may self-destruct in a very messy manner. The rise of the extreme religious right in the party, is marginalising the more centrist liberals. The latter of course don't have the numbers and the former don't care about party unity. They have an agenda of fire and brimstone. Shame we're the one's who have to receive their "inspired" governance.

So, hurrican Katrina. Kill those who try to get food and water. When is a looter not a looter? This is a disaster of epic proportions. Not surprisingly many are having a go at the Bush administration as up to 10,000 are feared dead. Time to face the awful questions of responsibility. This guy is a hero. How did Cuba cope? With decentralised administration and social capital of course.

Comments

[spinner.livejournal.com]

Shame we're the one's who have to receive their "inspired" governance
I'll drink as much as possible to that

as for the AP's tagging of photo's, letting race decide if they were shoppers or looters: an utter disgrace.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

That's not quite what happened.

As per the Snopes article, the photographer who captioned the AP's 'looter' photo witnessed the (black) man in that photo go into a grocery store and take the items.

The photographer who took and captioned the other photo saw the (white and/or Latino) people it depicts picking up goods that were already floating away. Further, he was from AFP (Agence France Presse), which is not the same organisation as AP (Associated Press). Two different organisations, two different contexts, two different captions.

AFAICT, the controversy erupted when Yahoo News picked up and ran both pictures without stopping to cross-check the captions - understandable, given how busy news services have been lately. Readers missed the fact that AP and AFP are not the same organisation, and that the captions had been based on information beyond what appeared in the photos themselves.

[spinner.livejournal.com]

S'pose thats why one clicks on those underlined bits of text.

Cheers for the clarification!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I'd been laughing out loud, except I'm in a library...

[shorxrore.livejournal.com]

i checked all that out, AFP has another article in which they call black people looters but not white people.

also, the explanation is a load of crap. there are plenty of cases where black people were taking stuff 'floating down the river' and they're still called looters. my opinion is that white people went out in search for an explanation so they don't feel guilty for being a white, a common reaction, and the second they found something (the AP/AFP confusion in one example of 'racist' news reporting) they dropped the issue and did the usual backlash against black people we always do when they complain about racism.

EVERYONE in america (should) know that this the NORM of news reporting. if you call the police one of the first thing they ask you is if the person was black or not. news reporting ALWAYS says if people are black and almost NEVER says if they are white. there is absolutely positively 100% the normal reaction against black people there always is in american reporting. that one example was a mix up, but there are more that prove it, and regardless, yahoo news should have made the effort to see that sort of mix up being offensive to people and fixed it before they printed it.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

i checked all that out, AFP has another article in which they call black people looters but not white people.

Link?

that one example was a mix up, but there are more that prove it

Well, point me at 'em and I'll stand corrected :-)

regardless, yahoo news should have made the effort to see that sort of mix up being offensive to people and fixed it before they printed it.

Things were just a *mite* chaotic at the time.

[shorxrore.livejournal.com]

chaos shouldn't stop people from being blind to blaringly obvious things if one is knowledgable at all about race relations in the US, which i would hope a major news corporation is.

and somehow i completely forgot the link to the discussion i was talking about...that's weird. anyway this was the one i think: http://www.livejournal.com/users/azad_slide/357962.html

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Commenting glitched, see response below.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

The photographer who took and captioned the other photo saw the (white and/or Latino) people it depicts picking up goods that were already floating away.

Whilst I accept the technical explanation as legitimate, I wonder about the idea that collecting food and drink under these circumstances is described as "looting". I've always been dubious of the idea that a person, in survival mode, is engaging in theft. I have my doubts if others (i.e., non-"blacks" were engaing in the same activity that it would receive the same caption.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

I think of it as 'justifiable looting', in the same way that killing somebody in self-defense is 'justifiable homicide'. By my understanding, it's against the law and as such is theft; however, whatever moral authority the law might possess comes from its ability to protect its subjects - which in this case is 'not much'.

I certainly don't intend to criticise anybody for grabbing survival supplies that wouldn't be saleable afterwards anyway. In their place, I'd be doing the same thing.

I have my doubts if others (i.e., non-"blacks" were engaing in the same activity that it would receive the same caption.

AP gallery 'Floodwaters', picture 8. Caption: "With much of New Orleans emptied by Hurricane Katrina, some opportunists took advantage by looting stores." The 'looter' in the foreground, looking at the camera and clutching an armful of clothes, certainly isn't black (though he might well be Asian or Latino - picking ethnicity is not my strong suit).

Certainly, there aren't a lot of photos of non-blacks 'looting'. But I think that's at least partly due to the nature of the disaster - most of those who couldn't get out of NOLA were black, and that's going to be reflected in what follows. If 80-90% of those remaining are black (which is about what I'd estimate from footage of refugees at the Superdome etc), I'd expect 80-90% of 'looters' to be black.

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

Decentralised administration is an alternative, but there are many ways to deal with the same problem. Centralised administration can work fine, or can be totally botched. Australia handled Cyclone Tracy very rapidly by providing leadership and vast resources. The USA have handled Katrina very poorly by being disorganised and deploying very few resources. I've said more about this here.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I like your comments.

There is also one other thing which helped the centralised administration during cyclone Tracey work well. The total dedication by Dr. Jim Cairns, Acting Prime Minister of Australia.

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

Lev why is it that humans will applaud a rebellious hero in a movie; but when some teenager saves 100 people from a frickin flood by 'stealing' a bus that would have sat and rusted anyway, some of them cry foul? Where is all this anger against the unfortunate coming from? It can't just be the looting, raping etc.. There are undercurrents of self-loathing here. It fucks me right up :/

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It is fucked up.

In the fantasy world of the movie you can be a hero.

In the real world the unreflexive, unthoughtful, mechanistic weight of bureaucracy remains relentlessly consistent. :/

[amarynth.livejournal.com]

If my drink-drink slash-slash is one of the centrist Liberals, I can't say they offer much of an alternative to the hardliners.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Crap people can have reasonable politics. And vice versa. Although one assumes there should be a certain correlation between decent people with decent politics.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_fustian/]

delicious_irony and I will see you there on Saturday.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

OK, got you marked down.

[redcountess]

What gets me though, is one of the Republican party's principles is decentralised government, yet FEMA was a separate department until the Bush administration made it responsible to DHS!

[cptjohnc.livejournal.com]

I heard an interesting perspective today on NPR today that the US response has, in fact, been excellent, and that people are getting a very unrealistic picture of what is and could be possible under the circumstances. I am unclear on the guy's credentials other than he is an author (but on what I don't know) and a veteran of numerous international natural disaster response teams.

And I'm not sure centralization hurt this effort, as FEMA has no first responders of its own -- at best it coordinates efforts. I've been tangentially involved in coordinating relief efforts on the ground through a couple of natural disasters (Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and flooding in 1996-7 in the midwest) and I know that media reports don't always present the 'fairest' picture of the situation... just the most dramatic.

[shorxrore.livejournal.com]

cuba pwnage.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

One editor snags a pre-captioned photo off the wire and sticks it up on the site; another snags a different photo off the wire and sticks it up half an hour later. There's no obvious reason for them to be checking all their content against all their other content, and indeed it'd be impossible to do.

Asked to compare only those two pictures, anybody can see that it's a bad idea. But they're not working with only those two; they're working with hundreds of pictures and reports. It's like one of those 'Where's Wally?' puzzles - easy to see once you know where to look.

anyway this was the one i think: http://www.livejournal.com/users/azad_slide/357962.html

In reference to the claim that "AFP has another article in which they call black people looters but not white people"? I can't see any white people *in* the sole AFP-credited photo in that post. AFAICT, both services are working on the principle that if their journalists actually see people take stuff from inside stores they can call it 'looting', otherwise they avoid the word; which photos/articles break that rule?

(Last picture on that page is uncredited, but from the filename looks to be AP; note that although it shows a black man jumping out of a broken store window, he's *not* described as a 'looter' - presumably because he's not obviously carrying anything.)

[bridgetdrusilla.livejournal.com]

Expected activities, apart from SAGE-AU, include a visit to Murdoch University where the lovely people at MARS are holding a "How to Host a Murder" eve.

I guess I'll see you there.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Yes, you did. Lovely, it was!

[zey.livejournal.com]

With luck, I'll see you at The Oxford. If not, I guess I'll force myself out the door to Sin and maybe catch you there ;-).

[feathersoul.livejournal.com]

will you be going to Sin?
I'm tossing up between wandering to the Oxford to say hi (if you want me to, that is), or just hoping you'll be at Sin...i have a million assignments and client reports to get done, so i don't know whether it'd be wise for me to go to the Oxford as well as Sin. i'm also very very nervous in large groups of people i don't know, so you probably wouldn't get a very good impression of me!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

That's all OK... It was you who I spoke briefly to at Sin? My hearing isn't the greatest at the best of times and even worse at nightclubs which don't leave much space for conversation!