A catastrophic earthquake followed by equally if not more destructive tsunamis struck Japan earlier this year, and not a box of matches was stolen. Yet in New York City we have some minor gale force winds and a few inches of rain and the scum bags are out en masse… This is the United States, land of the free, home of the low-lives.
Sorry folks, we can sugar coat it any way we like but the truth is that there is a significant portion of the U.S. population (as well as that of many other countries) that is made up of vultures; just waiting for a wounded or even weakened society to pounce on.
The ‘intellectuals” with all of their psychological mumbo-jumbo can label it any way they wish and justify it any way they like. Yet at the end of the day it all boils down to delinquency, pure and simple. TGO
Refer to story below. Source: Forbes
By E.D. Kain | Forbes
In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg chose not to evacuate the criminals in Rikers Island, according to Mother Jones. The mayor has also warned that any looters caught during or in the wake of the storm will be placed in internment camps. This raises questions about the role of law enforcement and order during a natural disaster. It also raises questions about the psychology of looting and rioting which occur after most natural disasters.
On one level, it’s understandable that people attempt to avoid evacuation orders in the face of an oncoming hurricane or other natural disaster. After all, leaving entire neighborhoods empty leaves them open to looters and other criminal opportunists.
In the fires in Arizona last summer some neighborhoods in northern Arizona had to be evacuated for a day or two and even in that short period of time there was some looting. In much more populated areas with higher rates of crime, this is going to be much more widespread.
Besides, many people are conditioned to think that all news reports are little more than media hype. Why leave home when the storm might just blow over?
The real damage, of course, will be caused by the storm itself and by flooding, which New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, estimates will be in the billions or tens of billions for his state alone. But the crime, the looting, and the other betrayals of societal trust are what often sting the worst, or at least leave the most bitter taste in peoples mouths.
Sometimes looting can actually be little more than people attempting to get supplies like clean water and food. Other times it’s sheer criminality.
Social psychologists distinguish between different types of looting:
According to James Glass, a political science at the University of Maryland, the first category is justifiable:
“When there is a breakdown of civil order, and when people fear they are going to starve or die of thirst, one could make a moral case in these sorts of circumstances for looting,” he says.Many, though not all, of the pictures from Chile show people looting precisely these kinds of goods. Plasma TV sets have also been among the loot carried off.
“There was plenty of co-operation and empathy, and people trying to help each other just to stay alive,” he says. In Professor Glass’s view, the popular response to the recent earthquake in Haiti lent little support to the theory of Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-Century political philosopher, that a world without government would be characterised by a “war of all against all” and lives that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
“People helping to dig bodies out of the rubble, to find some kind of shelter, giving people something to drink – as many instances of that as of people acting selfishly.”A lot depends on the political environment, he says.
Community perceptions of police abuse, poverty, and other factors can lead to looting and riots and provide cover for true criminality. This is what we saw in London.
The police can have a difficult time differentiating between criminality, mob violence, and the first category of looting for actual need, which can in turn lead to police abuse and even the killing of innocent people, as in the case of Henry Glover. Looting can also be heavily dependent on culture. There was no reported looting in the wake of the massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan, for instance.
Even in America, it really is remarkable how little looting actually takes place. There’s something about major disasters that often brings people together. Perhaps also the opportunity to safely commit crimes is diminished by the disaster itself. Potential looters don’t want to get stuck in the middle of a hurricane either. Still, there is more opportunity in an empty Newark street to loot and rob than there was in the streets of London during recent riots there and yet we see nothing even close to that in New Jersey in the wake of Irene, though obviously more will come to light as damage is assessed and the storm moves further north.
All of this lends some credence, I think, to the notion that even in a stateless society, perhaps people would not resort to the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish” behavior that Hobbes described. Perhaps it is in our collective coercion of others that the worst in society emerges. The third category of looting stems almost entirely from perceptions of the state. Most people are not criminals. Most will not loot or cause harm in the wake of a natural disaster. Most of us will, somehow, attempt to help one another – with or without a government.
