Thug Culture

TONY SOPRANO by JaumeCullell

Different people have different abilities. Some people are smart, some people are athletic, some can sing, some can dance. There are a zillion different scales that you can use to measure a person's abilities.

People are competitive, they want to show they are better than other people in some way. It's an instinct that derives from our sexual nature. Reproduction is our primary purpose and in order to do that you need a partner, and one way to get a partner is to impress him or her with your amazing ability to do that amazing thing you do. For some people, beating other people at some endeavor is the only thing that matters, and for some of those hyper-competitive people society's rules don't matter.

Most people are law abiding, productive members of society. A few are not, but it's those few who garner all the attention. Go to work every day for 40 years, work diligently, keep your head down and it's very likely you will never make the evening news, and most people are fine with that. But shoot someone on a downtown street and within a day everyone will know your name.

Near as I can tell, the Democrats are all for trying to help out the underclass by rooting out institutional discrimination, giving them an education and helping them become productive members of society. The Republicans are all about stamping out the thugs. The Democrats, being bleeding heart liberals, are helping everyone and not discriminating. The Republicans, being hard asses, are condemning everyone who even looks like they might have talked to a thug once upon a time. They are not discriminating either.

Thugs are like cockroaches. You can never really get rid of all the roaches in your house, all you can do is wage a continual low-level war against them. Cleaning, sweeping, exterminating.

Black lives might matter, but last year all we heard about regarding that movement were riots, violence and looting. I suspect that the level of media coverage on those incidents pushed a number of people over to the Law & Order camp, which is how Trump got elected.

The problem with thugs is that they, like Islamic Jihadists, mix with the general population, so unless you have specific information, they can be difficult to root out. I think this may be why church used to be such big part of life. Everybody went to church, everybody recited the hymns, everybody prayed to god. If anything bad ever happened in the community, the community first looked at those people (if there were any) who hadn't been going to church. It was sort of a vetting process. It didn't always work, there is always going to be the odd psychopath who can put on a civilized face but is secretly committing the most heinous crimes. But for the most part it worked.