Monday September 05, 2005

I’M RELEASING YOU ALL TO A GARBAGE BARGE WHERE YOU WILL BARE-KNUCKLE-BOX TILL ONE OF YOU EMERGES AS KING OF YOUR FLOATING HELL. I have spent hours reading about the Gulf disaster online. I am applying to FEMA for compensation. It was a waste of time.

Some sites have been great about pointing readers to informed sources. And many of the informed sources are actually informative.

But in general the weblog coverage of the Gulf disaster has been a festival of imbecilism unchained -- as if a levee broke in the id of every idiot with access to an internet connection. I have seen the flood's horrific aftermath blamed on unwed mothers, a scarcity of guns in New Orleans (great, then we could have had Thunderdome even without the hurricane!), and, of course, on New Orleans itself, and black people in general.

I have seen the blogbrethren exploit the event as yet another Advantage: Blogosphere! moment. So what did I get from this blogosphere that I couldn't have gotten from newspapers and television? A bunch of extra horror stories (including bogus reports of cannibalism), and more names of people to blame, most of them pulled, it would appear, from the tipsheets of political operatives.

I have my own ideas about who to blame – mainly, myself and all my fellow citizens for going along, passively or actively, with the cruel gag that the government that governs best governs least for the past 20-odd years – but for now I can’t stand to be part of the noise. Instead I direct you to this miserable defense of bullshit libertarianism against its obvious consequences. If that doesn’t make you sick without my enlightened commentary, I can’t guess what would.
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