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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1563 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 29, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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(Mods: Not exactly a "fun" thread but I'm also purposefully not trying to make this CW material. Do what you will!)

Today is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

The alleged horros of the Superdome are an interesting epistemic time capsule. 2005 was before real smartphones existed (iPhone came out in 07, IIRC) and cell phones in general weren't necessarily everywhere. A lot of the game of telephone occurred because the storm utterly blanked cell service in South Louisiana for days (weeks?). A lot of breathless reports went out that weren't anything more than third hand rumors published by reporters who had no way to even begin corroboration on the ground at the Superdome. It was a more innocent time, is what I'm trying to say.

Instead of retroactively CWing this, I'm mostly interested if any Mottizens had any direct experience with Katrina in the Louisiana / Mississippi / East Texas areas. Additionally, I feel like there are enough prepper-adjacent types here to offer some interesting perspectives on how to think about, plan for, and operate in a literal "shit hit the fan" scenario such as Katrina.

I did not have direct experience with Katrina, but Bayou Renaissance Man's Katrina Postmortem is a document I've gone back and referred to a few times as part of my natural disaster prep. Lots of great information about social considerations instead of just physical prep, after-action "shell shock", etc.

(2) in further reports very much matches the reports I've been given. New Orleans underclass blacks are regarded as particularly bad, including by even-more impoverished blacks from rural Louisiana.

My relatives hit the hills and got out ok. They drank pool water; this might shorten their lives a bit, but less so than waterborne illnesses or dehydration(also, Cajuns aren't really longevity maxxing to begin with). They didn't have consistent water or power, but managed to get text messages out that accounted for everyone. None of them had much sympathy for those who stayed in New Orleans. Those were the stupid ones, in their view. They tried to help refugees, but relatives came first, if you weren't related to someone in their town or didn't have someone to vouch for you, back of the line. None of them were preppers, just standard rural/semirural Cajuns. I don't recall reports of people dying from a lack of modern conveniences, despite the town being out of power for a while. Then again, this was the incident which led to the formation of the Cajun navy through spontaneous self organization.

In Texas, there was sympathy for Katrina refugees, but this quickly turned to absolute hatred for the ones that stayed. Louisiana blacks are hated in south-east Texas, Houston very much included- white Cajuns mostly not so much. They're blamed for crime, disorder, bad driving, ruining-it-for-the-rest-of-us rowdiness, uncleanliness, even shitty schools.

just standard rural/semirural Cajuns

I'd love to hear hydroacetylene's line of demarcation for a rural vs semi-rural Cajun.

Semirural- lives in a neighborhood/village, even if not one in town. Rural- lives in a house/homestead without other buildings nearby.

In my opinion, the interesting part of this isn’t the cell coverage. That’s an obvious scapegoat. You mean every time a train goes through a tunnel, everyone aboard starts hallucinating rapes? Before the cell phone every gathering of more than 10,000 caused an imaginary murder crisis? No, the cell coverage is funnily enough a metaphor, used concretely and not in a literary sense, for societal breakdown. Cell coverage goes down, and people interpret that as society going down, and that means the things they register as primal, pre-social, appear before them like fear in the dark. And when the lights come back on, they report that (to them) the things they thought they saw were caused by the dark, when anyone outside can see it was the fear…

Not sure what else to draw from that, but it’s an interesting vignette. Thanks for bringing it.

It's worth noting that even other very poor French-Louisiana blacks hate New Orleans underclass blacks, with a different-kinds-of-(dot, not feather)Indians style Balkans level hatred. It's possible that these particular people are just really that bad.

Instead of retroactively CWing this, I'm mostly interested if any Mottizens had any direct experience with Katrina in the Louisiana.

I have some family that lived in South Louisiana prior to Katrina. When I was young I lived with them for about a year while my mom dried out.

They live in Tennessee now because the town where they lived is gone. The roads you took to get there are gone. The islands and sandbars that acted as anchor points for all the infrastructure are gone.

Katrina was devastating.

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