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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2318 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.

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.

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