[Helianthus16]

More can always be done. Confining your reaction to the emotional is uninformative and exactly the sort of panic that our media creates and is creating about this event.

If you can't slip smoothly from being sad about the death and destruction to analyzing the disaster response dispassionately, that's your problem.

[charlief]

I think a comprehensive discussion includes the large moral impact: causalities from tsunami. I believe the article was pretty apathetic to this matter, and the high-number of causalities may conflict with the premise that everything went as planned. You said more can always be done, but I would like to know what. I think it is pretty self-righteous to prioritize our media-distortion matters over this question. Perhaps I had poor choice of words, but I believe this does not entirely invalidate my point.

[Helianthus16]

This post as a whole is not a comprehensive discussion of the quake. It is explicitly about the media distortion of the event. If your point is valid it remains off-topic.

Additionally, your language indicates you're still not grasping the problem we are examining. There is no "premise that everything went as planned." That is absolutely not his point at all. His point is that there is a hugely complex system that performed admirably, that emergency relief systems are a war against the unexpected.

I think it's pretty self-righteous to prioritize the decision-making that the Japanese will take care of on their over examining and controlling our own reactions, reactions based on a poor understanding of the emergency response and hysterical reporting.