After the Haiti earthquake, a lot of people had a problem with the media referring to the looting there as "looting". This was racist, it was argued. Now white people in Chile are looting. Kumbaya.

Chile earthquake: 708 people dead. Horrible tragedy. Not really a good time to be settling old scores, but since said scores were unsettled during an even more horrible tragedy, it's only fair: Can we just end the "looting" debate once and for all, now? White people loot, black people loot. Chinese people probably even would loot, as long as there wasn't a huge poster of Chairman Mao looking over them making them feel nervous. Maybe they are looting plasma screen TVs, maybe they are looting food to feed their babies. We can rank the types of looting by whether it's true survival-style scavenging or a quick way to stock looters' eBay store. This is good.

But the post-Katrina game of calling newspapers racist for reporting on looting is like beer pong: Kind of a fun thing to do in college, but embarrassing once you're out in the real world. This time around, let's spend our time organizing a million phone-a-thons with Ryan Seacrest instead.

[WSJ] [Reuters]