Given the newfound lack of hierarchy, he wonders: "Am I just another delinquent, or am I a gang member?"
*sips coffee, shrugs, drags on Gauloise*
The cartoon is indeed great although it's interesting that Groening managed to make the ruling trait one that starts with SELF for everyone except HIMSELF. Now wondering what the dance one would be.
I should have a ¿? in that title. Probably.
I like that it's almost a tradition for cartoonists to make sure to lampoon themselves after everyone else.
I am skeptical of the long-term benefit of indiscriminate extrajudicial murders. One question if you want to be "practical" about it is whether gangs need high-level leadership, or if they can be just as dangerous (after a period of adaptation) organized at the block level, the heads cut off.
I have a vague belief that something like that happened in Chicago, leading to an increase in violence. Organized gangs broken up by law enforcement, creating a vast number of tiny disorganized "gangs". Is that narrative familiar to anyone else?
Jeff Fort was sent to Marion in 1986. The next year, the head of the Latin Kings was arrested in New York, but whether he kept running them from prison or not, they stayed pretty organized through the nineties (that is, no crazy factional violence that made the papers or reached anyone I talked to, by then all North siders). Maybe you're thinking of the late eighties conflict in the Folk Nation, I forget what happened to Larry Hoover, but a bunch of Disciples factions started destroying each other-- definitely went badly for the Insane Popes.
definitely went badly for the Insane Popes.
OK that is a ridiculously good ridiculous name, and I am shook to discover they are real. Presumably the Screaming Popes is when they leave your face looking like Francis Bacon painted it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Gaylords Also the Vice Lords I thought had good branding, martini glass outline and the playboy bunny in unlikely contexts. I think tweety bird is a mascot for one of the Latin gangs-- definitely plenty of casualwear embellished with a heavily armed tweety in particular colors. Much of my knowledge comes from context to explain news from a likeable guy I worked with, screenprinting plastic bottles. He had stopped criming after a stint in Joliet. Looked younger than he was, could cover his gang tattoos with a shirt.
He explained that part of the point of the extensive tattoos was to organize prison life-- they were/are basically chaotic cities, and visible markers of tribe are necessary for everybody to keep track of who's who. Also that the people inside by and large gave orders to and received tribute from those outside
I'd never want to be in the Gaylords. You'd constantly be getting into fights.
Wasn't it El Faro that broke the story a couple years ago of the Bukele government cutting a secret deal with MS-13 to bring down crime stats? I guess it can't be ruled out that the period of emergency rule has brought better results despite Bukele being a crook and a clown, but surely the Bitcoin crash has shelved his plans to build the geothermal crypto city on a volcano, or whatever it was.
Incredibly, this is the 2nd time the Gaylords have come up this week. On Sunday I was hanging out with some friends who lived in Chicago as young adults, and they were telling some stories*. This led me to mention that my Gram lived in Logan Square (same house my dad grew up in) when the Gaylords were starting to move in, which obviously was hilarious in 1979. They, of course, were aware of the Gaylords (one of them went to HS in suburban Chicagoland, but not the John Hughes/ogged one).
*one of their neighbors told them to put out prayer candles as a sort of Passover symbol to the Mexican gang. One night they were awakened by a smash, then heard "wait, stop, they're cool."
Oh hey, looking at the wiki page, the Gaylords peaked in 1979. I misspoke above, the summer we visited was '78, but the point remains. Oh, and my dad's street is specifically mentioned. Weird.
I did not recall that the Gaylords were a white gang that was sort of reactionary against the influx of Hispanic. When my dad grew up, of course, Logan Square was mostly Germans, Poles, and similar. When my sister was a journalism student at Northwestern ca. 1990, she covered the neighborhood and interviewed an old timer shopkeeper who still remembered Gram--"Hey honey, come see, it's Mrs. Roth's granddaughter!"
I should ask her what she remembers about the Gaylords.
13.1: Yes.
Various: The decapitation -> chaos thing is real (cf. Mexico), but this is different. The leadership was in jail already; the mass arrests are going much wider and deeper.
Very deep, if this article is right. It gives an estimate of 100,000 prisoners in 6.5 million people. Though that's not an official figure. The official figure is higher than the U.S. rate of incarceration, but astoundingly so.
When we moved to DC in 1988, there were a lot of murders, and I recall speculation that a part of that was because there wasn't a strong enough organizational framework for defining territories. I don't know shit about this, just that was a thing one heard.
It really started to climb in 1988, so maybe it's causal.
Well, I didn't shoot anybody, if that's what your saying.
Well, that's but one possible causal path.
Someone got shot near D.C. because they were pulling a YouTube prank on someone with a gun and poor impulse control. Or really good impulse control and a hatred of YouTube streaming.
Does anyone know when El Salvador banned leaded gasoline? The question was surprisingly unsusceptible to quick googling, but I am not sure that qualifies it as a haunting question.
You can try asking Kevin Drum on Twitter, I bet he'd know.
https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/982631468225574478/elimination-of-lead-in-gasoline-in-latin-america-and-the-caribbean-status-report
In 1995, unleaded gasoline constituted a mere 6 percent of the total gasoline market in El Salvador. Yet by August 1996, lead in gasoline was totally eliminated in the country. This chapter reviews the process of gasoline lead elimination in El Salvador, identifies the factors that enabled such a rapid transition to unleaded gasoline, and gives an overview of the activities to improve urban air quality that accompanied the move to remove lead from gasoline.p. 69 (PDF p. 83)
Oh, last Chicago remark-- the other thing that happened in the eighties in Chicago is the appearance of organized Jamaican criminals, maybe 82? They didn't graffiti or have local lore, but their area near where I lived was the first (and only so far) place I heard automatic weapons. There's now a really good Jerk place south of there, Aunty Joy's by Broadway and Devon.
El Salvador likely doesn't have the car traffic for lead gasoline to be a huge deal in terms of causing street crime. Maybe instead its related to decades of political instability?
I don't know about their roads and traffic, but I think you're right.
It doesn't matter how many cars there are in the country as a whole as long as there are enough in the dense urban areas to build up lead, and in any case there are other sources of environmental lead, like the industrial pollution that led to the 2010 declaration of emergency near San Salvador. https://benwitte.wordpress.com/2010/10/16/el-salvador-declares-first-environmental-state-of-emergency/?like=1&_wpnonce=6dc3dc61c8
I'm still going to go with "Death Squads" as probably a bigger factor. In addition to the dead, something close to 20% of the population was displaced over the course of the war.