Seen The Ferguson Riots?

I called someone racist once to settle an argument racism had nothing to do with just to see how it worked. It was funny. I can see why its the card people always like to play. It honestly stops everything and puts everyone else in retreat. It's like the instant-win card. If you visit the world outside our American cultural bubble and look in at it for a moment, you see how painfully pathetic and embarrassing it is for everyone involved.

The first people who should get the hoses and tear gas put on them are the white college-campus Occupy agitators preying on a situation they could honestly care less about. These people descend on a situation with livestreams and cell phone vids, agitating the police, and trying to turn an unfortunate situation into a national anarchist social event.

The black people tearing apart stores and burning down buildings in the name of `justice` is not defensible either.

What is there to say about any of it? Americans of every race and every ethnicity are culturally destitute and one collective social failure. We'll be eating each other in fifty years. The entire fragile fabric of our entire society is held together by television and entertainment.

Compare us with the Japanese who were orderly and polite and civilized during complete catastrophe. A Tsunami wiped a huge swathe of their country out and not one of them so much as stole a candy bar. A giant wave wiped out civilization and law, but they remained civilized and lawful.

That is a deep national character we simply lack.

This is why it's best to just watch football and hope you win as many Superbowls as possible before our economy and society collapse, and we can no longer afford all of the things we fund to keep ourselves in-line, and we become our true selves, which is this:

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But there was looting in Japan

By Neil Steinberg

If I hear one more snide comment about the utter lack of looting in Japan in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami, I’m going to scream.



First, what happened in Japan? Entire towns were washed away. In the hardest hit areas, there was little left to loot and few left to loot it.



Second, the scope of the disaster is so great — the death toll still unknown but leaping upward every day, with nuclear reactors flirting with meltdown and huge numbers of homeless, it isn’t as if the media is going to stop and figure out whether any electronics stores have been ransacked. The proper response to anyone crowing about a lack of looting in Japan should be, “How do you know?”



Third, the entire idea of there being no looting plays into our preconceptions about Japan, a nation where — I’m sorry to be the one to tell you — there is indeed crime, indeed poverty, where the people are not all orderly worker bees collecting honey for the hive. Japanese are human beings — stop the presses! — for good and ill.



Fourth, tsk-tsking over the supposed lack of looting in Japan is a not-so-sly way for Americans to voice the kind of ugly racial prejudice that some of us just itch to articulate, to wag a finger at black residents of New Orleans (after five years, geez, let it rest) for stripping grocery stores after Hurricane Katrina. (Last week, the Justice Department came out with a scathing report indicting the New Orleans police for a range of brutal behaviors. But we can’t worry about that report, no, because we’re too upset over the searing memory of liquor stores being ransacked five years ago. Why is that?)



And fifth — I saved the best point for last — there of course was looting in Japan, as reported in the Japanese media.



From a website of Kyodo News, Japan’s version of CNN, headlined, in Japanese:



“In Miyagi, police report 40 robberies by those taking advantage of the earthquake.”



The text, translated, reads:



“According to police on the night of the 13th the morning of the 14, approximately 1 million yen in cash was taken from the Miyagi City Home Center. There were robberies at a convenience store and a food store, and robberies at approximately 40 other stores by those taking advantage of the earthquake amounting to 1.65 million yen.”



A City Home Center is a store like a Target. And, at 80 yen to the dollar, the loss isn’t great — $12,500 in cash; $20,000 in theft. In this one report. But here was some looting, and there is no reason to think there wasn’t a lot more.



Certain stories such as this scratch such a nasty itch that few repeating them seem to care whether they’re true or not. Condescending racial grievance just doesn’t get the chance to strut its stuff in polite society the way it used to. That’s why some marvel over a claim that an ounce of reflection would have cast doubt upon and a minute’s investigation would reveal as false. (The suggestion that there was perhaps LESS looting in Japan than we’d find here, well that would make sense, given how important social cohesion is there — again, for good and ill. But that’s a different claim entirely.)



I’m not expecting these facts to change anybody’s mind. Because bigotry isn’t about fitting your worldview around reality, it’s about finding examples of reality that fit your worldview, and if the looting-in-Japan claims stop doing the trick, it’s on to something else.