Chicago: Over 3100 shootings for the year and around 540 murders. Decent chance you guys will hit 700 bodies before the year is out.
1. Chicago has a reputation to live up to.
I'm pretty sure that "Chad" is Chet Haze, aka Chet Hanks, aka Tom Hanks' son.
Holy shit. You just added value, Tigre.
5: Holy shit how have I not heard of that guy. I also love how the author may have been the getaway driver for a Walgreens robbery.
Regional drug use is kind of interesting. In the last eight years I've never even seen PCP. I've talked to guys from back east who've never seen meth and we recently hired a guy who was working near the Pine Ridge res up in SD who says up there heroin was almost nonexistent, everyone's using meth.
The guys have a term for these kinds of fans: cloutheads.
Isn't "clout" old-school Chicago for social influence? Like, Mike Royko writing about Mayor Daley?
OMG. The slumming law student from the University of Chicago? My alma mater.
8: yes, although if I recall, Royko complained that the real meaning was the person who had influence (your clout, then, is a person you know), not the influence itself.
I also love how the author may have been the getaway driver for a Walgreens robbery.
Yes! I read that and thought, "wait, did that just happen?" It does bring home just how easy it can be to get caught up in this stuff, though.
10: That's what's so Chicago about the usage in the article -- it's still naming people. I'd use 'clout' to mean influence, not what Royko does, and the modern Chicago gang usage seems to sort of follow Royko. I love it.
So many thoughts.
1: Another bad year, still probably not close to the tops per capita (I just checked, last year's champ St. Louis is way out in front of Chicago).
5: I want this badly to be true.
9: Yeah, reading the article when I got to that point I started laughing about the "law student in Hyde Park," like why not name the school, and also because the type of person just seemed so ... obvious.
The disclaimer up front about the name changing seemed like waving a flag saying "I am not Alice Goffman."
I work indoors downtown, but my job intersects with these communities; someone I work with has been shot (he's fine), and several more in the vicinity of shooting, because work in the field put them in these areas. The guy who's been shot once said, with a fair amount of contempt, "in the '90s we had gangs. These aren't gangs. These are just ... cliques ... but they've got nobody controlling them."
13 comments. This article is gold. Buncha racists.
Now we're judging threads by the number of comments? Anyway, at least it got more than Perec.
That is a great article. This quote in particular
As one of the other CBE rappers would always say, "You know, white people, Mexicans, bitches, those people don't live the life, but they love hearing about it. People want the Chiraq stuff. They want a superthug ghetto man, and I'm giving that to them. I'm just playing my role."
It sounds very, well, Trumpian. Integrity is for losers.
It was an absolutely wonderful article. I don't have anything constructive or clever to say except that we are all guilty. The white kids getting their vicarious kicks. Ouch. I suppose it's the same thing as nice vegetarian Jeremy giving blow jobs to the ira.
It was an absolutely wonderful article. I don't have anything constructive or clever to say except that we are all guilty. The white kids getting their vicarious kicks. Ouch. I suppose it's the same thing as nice vegetarian Jeremy giving blow jobs to the ira.
As long as he doesn't swallow it's vegetarian.
It seems like this drive to generate power, expertise and meaning out of nothing at all. In theory, one could just....stay off Instagram, but that would remove one from the circuits of narrative. You mostly think that people must be pretty bored a lot of the time - horrible schools, horrible jobs, no money to go anywhere or do anything - and so they make their own excitement but because the options are limited the price is high.
I'd say that people who are motivated to make multiple rap videos should have better social options than waiting around to see if they're Chief Keef 2.0.
The sex work bit is interesting and depressing. On the one hand, the fact that there are so many new varieties of sex work is extremely useful to any reasonably attractive young person, and doing sex work has certainly helped a couple of my friends when they didn't have other options. But it does seem like the world is an even meaner and more commodified place than it used to be.
Also: begging on the internet. I know a couple of people who get by this way, essentially - it's not sex work, it's just leveraging charm, attention and the ability to put your story over. People who want to be associated with you (or internet-you) in some way give you money or buy you stuff. Not that this is new, but tumblr in particular has enabled it in new ways. And I'm not talking about scam artists, either - just people who genuinely need money to eat and have a place to stay and who beg for it online. Again, something that has really helped out a couple of people I know (who were sincerely in need for health/family reasons) but still a bit depressing.
I'd like fully automated luxury communism, but it seems like what we've got is fully automated luxury begging.
9: My nephew starts classes at the law school tomorrow, and son starts second year undergrad.
21: In the future, every one will be Kato Kaelin for 15 minutes.
21.4: I have a former college schoolmate who does this, but in a weird middle-class academic way--she ran fundraisers the last four years to send her daughter to private boarding school, and now has a gofundme page for a down payment on a house. She's a single mom, and comes from a crust punk background, but she's a fucking linguistics professor these days. It's kind of shocking in its gall.
26: apparently. I don't know about the house, but the daughter got school paid for. I suppose I could go look.
Who on earth contributes money to pay for someone else's kid to go to private school?
Isn't "jakes" for police super old-fashioned? Interesting that it's survived.
4-6: I don't know, the article says Chad flunked out of college, and Chester Hanks graduated*. It's probably Jude Law's or Tim Robbins's kid.
*Obligatory: Of course, RTVF barely counts.
Eh, she's raised $500 of her $1500 goal. So not huge. But still kind of weird to me.
$1,500 isn't a very big down payment. Did somebody start the housing bubble again?
That's not even two mortgage payments.
29: No clue. We reconnected on FB after 18 years without contact. Apparently at some party as a senior I was drunk and or stoned and telling anybody who would listen that if I had college to do over again I would major in Linguistics, and that made an impression on freshman her. She reached out many years later to let me know how I'd changed her life.
She had a kid right after I fell out of touch with her (before graduating college). She still managed to get her doctorate and a teaching position of some kind, so she definitely worked to get where she is. My gut says she's in some sort of punk/hippie/academic/semi-collective scene where there's a lot of resource sharing. It's totally foreign to me. I mean, I have some amount of social capital, and I imagine if I did ask I could raise some funds in an emergency, but I just can't imagine asking barring something truly horrific like an uninsured medical emergency. Private school is not something I can wrap my head around.
33: I don't know. I'm just reporting the facts.
I'm not yet a linguistics professor, but I'll be happy to take any contributions people want to give me.
9 et al
To comply with IRB, it should probably be, "A prestigious private university in a large Midwestern city"
30, it means both "police" and "toilet"?
I used to live in a building that had its very own gang. The conversations I'd overhear from my window made me want to be an urban sociologist. I'm not sure the gang exists anymore, they were probably gentrified out of the neighborhood.
39
Shh. You're not supposed to tell.
"Buttercup's Window: A study in urban residential life"
40: "I'm a mur-diddly-urderer!!!"
It crossed my mind that the "law student in Hyde Park" line might have been intended not to embarrass someone who lived with roommates at the prestigious private Midwestern university, but was actually taking a correspondence course in law at "Jim-Bob's Drive-in School of Law," as my mother called another relative's alma mater (actual name: Loyola Marymount University. My mom doesn't normally meow like that (although she's been known to), so I wonder if she was somehow misinformed?).
Loyola Marymount is in California. The ones in Chicago and New Orleans are just Loyola University.
I didn't mean to imply that the student might be enrolled at Loyola in Chicago, nor that I think "drive-in school of law" is an accurate portrayal of any of the Loyolae. I don't even own a law. The U of C law students I met did run to the eccentric end of the spectrum.
"Iggy's" would be a more appropriate demeaning nickname for a Loyola than "Jim-Bob's."
"in the '90s we had gangs. These aren't gangs. These are just ... cliques ... but they've got nobody controlling them."
This (and also the piece) sounds like the phenomenon Dupree calls Kalashnikovisation in Afghanistan (there's also a good discussion in CJ Chivers' The Gun with reference to northern Kenya). Suddenly nobody needs the leadership to settle disputes, because you've got an AK! Hierarchies got flattened out, the size of political entities smaller, their boundaries more flexible, and the general level of violence much worse.
Has anything changed in the market for guns?
47: I never quite bought that idea, because surely everyone has weapons in rural Afghanistan anyway and always has? Giustiozzi reckoned, IIRC, that the problem was that pre-Soviet invasion you had three centres of power: the local clan chief, the representative of the central government, and the mullah. And generally the mullah was the least powerful of the three. Then the Soviets co-opted or killed the clan chiefs and undermined the central government by contaminating it with foreign-ness, so all the normal mechanisms of dispute resolution were destroyed, and the only surviving pillar of the tripod was the mullah. (Same true in northern Pakistan, but obviously it's still going, and substitute "zamindar" for "clan chief" a lot of the time; and very often the zamindar would pretty much employ the mullah, like the squire in England having the local cure in his gift.)
Maybe the underlying reason is declining appetite for drugs? A gang is basically a government, and governments need some sort of revenue source to function. If fewer people are buying drugs, then how is a gang going to make its money?
AKs are a different order of weapon. I stand to be corrected, but I think local gangs live mostly on extortion not drugs.
What MC said; it took it up a notch.
Actually what I was thinking was how innovation in media could be understood in the same sense. Diego Gambetta on the importance of criminal brands. Perhaps it's become easier to establish one and therefore less important to join a bigger one?
I'm not yet a linguistics professor, but I'll be happy to take any contributions people want to give me.
Conjugation $50
Irregular conjugation $100
49: Wasn't there that big article (was it posted here?) about how bad the murder-solution rate is in Chicago, and how there's a public perception among poor people and Black people that the cops will shoot and harass ordinary people but won't actually stop any violence? The case closure rate was something like 10% or something ridiculous.
If you don't have access to a decent job or any kind of interest in life except through marketizing your own proximity to violence, and you're not likely to get punished for being violent, and other people can be violent to you without any repercussions either, that seems like a recipe for escalation.
Okay, I just had an insight: the mistake that YA dystopias make is to make the state (or some other kind of authority) a powerful and intrusive bad actor. Because isn't this just like a watered-down Hunger Games? These kids are out there competing to be more violent in order to get fans and make money, and there's a big, big prize if you're successful enough. But it's not because the government is making them do it - the government is refusing to fix structural injustices.
It's really gross is what it is - a lot of people making money directly or indirectly off of a bunch of kids who de facto can't get out of a violent part of Chicago. It's like Spike Lee's Bamboozled, really.
A lot of inner city "gangs" these days are just relatively small numbers of friends and acquaintances without much in the way of a structure or hierarchy. AFAICT extortion is pretty much non existent and your revenue streams, such as they are, consist mainly of low level drug dealing and various forms of theft. Some of the smarter ones have gotten into the identity theft stuff.
Part of the breakdown was attacking the gangs with RICO prosecutions put shit ton of high level guys in the federal pen with long mandatory sentences.
55.2: so it's more like Al Qaeda. We killed or captured all the senior leadership, and the networks fell apart and now we're left with a lot of little media-savvy self-starter franchises.
Question is: is it a temporary phase? Or will it be followed by a period of consolidation?
54: a public perception among poor people and Black people that the cops will shoot and harass ordinary people but won't actually stop any violence?
Yeah, that's the real problem in that town, all the gainfully employed law abiding citizens getting shot by the police. Or, just maybe you've got a culture going in those neighborhoods where the two overriding principles seem to be "everything gets solved with a shooting" and "under no circumstances is anyone to talk to the police."
a lot of people making money directly or indirectly off of a bunch of kids
Really? So who exactly is going to get called into an office somewhere with "sorry man, Murderville stopped posting to Instagram, we're going have to let you go."
Yes shift from gangs to crews is interesting/difficult from a lot of perspectives. IAN this kind of L, but I've seen lyrics come in as evidence plenty (not in Chicago or NYC fwiw). It is typically unhelpful for the defendant when he is accused of killing someone and his lyrics are "I am going to kill [the person I am being tried for killing]." In that respect intriguing to see the division of labor between writer/shooter laid out here. Wonder if it's the same in other cities.
People should really also read the linked article about Jerryon Stevens. Or don't if you don't need a spiral of despair.
There's a part where the grandma counts "Twenty men in the last three generations who have been incarcerated or killed" in the family and then we get to "Jackie and Chrishona live in constant fear that Jerryon will follow the same path. At this moment, as is often the case, he's not home, and no one seems to know where he is. Out running the streets, they figure."
Answer to the article title? "Probably not".
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2016/Jerryon-Stevens/
is it a temporary phase? Or will it be followed by a period of consolidation?
Time will tell I guess. I think at least some of that drug dealing revenue will be tough to get back. At least west of the Rockies, a lot of street level dealing is done directly by the cartels by bringing up young Honduran guys.
"in the '90s we had gangs. These aren't gangs. These are just ... cliques ... but they've got nobody controlling them."
I've heard something very similar of Oakland - no big organizations, just a patchwork of small groups, each covering a handful of blocks.
At least here the main gang affiliations were never really hierarchical except that there were some loose affiliations you would pay a "tax" to the big organizations so that if your members were in prison they'd get the support of a prison gang. Basically you bought anti-rape insurance for your members.
My local gang still tags with an indication that they are P-Stone Rangers, with some loose affiliation to the Chicago gang, but the Chicago gang doesn't seem to exist in Chicago anymore. So who knows.
" the mistake that YA dystopias make is to make the state (or some other kind of authority) a powerful and intrusive bad actor"
" a lot of little media-savvy self-starter franchises."
It's so embarrassing when Neal Stephensοn seems to have been right.
What has Neal Stephenson been proven right about?