Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.
It would certainly seem to be the case that the use of automatic weapons in crime is rare in the United States. FBI statistics don't mention how many murders are committed by submachine guns specifically, but presumably it would fall under firearms-other [1], which constitute less than 1% of gun homicides. I'd imagine this is related to the incredible difficulty in obtaining such a gun after the National Firearms Act of 1934. But how prevalent was it back then? Murder by Tommy Gun was certainly quite a famous cause of death back in the 20s and 30s, but how did it compare to all firearms deaths of the period? Someguy1221 (talk) 04:46, 2 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Specifically considering the Thompson submachine gun (the "Tommy Gun"), it was invented in 1918: less than two years before the start of nationwide Prohibition in the United States. One could argue that the Tommy guns proliferated during Prohibition (1920-1933) simply because they didn't exist pre-Prohibition. The National Firearms Act, passed in 1934, imposed registration requirements and a (then-)hefty $200 excise tax on all machine guns (and a number of other classes of firearms), which would have made their acquisition and ownership significantly more difficult and costly.
Since then, a number of court rulings and extensive lobbying have significantly watered down the restriction on firearms ownership in the United States. On the police side, similar lobbying has led to the militarization of (some) U.S. police forces, supplying them with battlefield weapons the Untouchables would never have imagined carrying. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 04:51, 2 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Heh. I believe all of this is based on SMW's having seen some black and white movies. In any case, regardless of taxes, I know that in the 90's in the South Bronx you could either buy an illegal gun for $50 or pay for a hit for $50, whichever you preferred. When a neighbour offered to do a hit for me, I declined, and tipped him (with his .358) and his accomplice (carrying an Uzi) $20 with the instructions not to do so. In any case, I saw the target's boss the next day, but never again the target. μηδείς (talk) 04:00, 3 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Is life so cheap in the Bronx? Here, the going rate for hitmen is $250,000 per murder, apparently. [3]. If you want to put a price on a public figure, you can ask for them to be put on an Assassination market on the Dark web, though these have yet to result in any successful hits. Intriguingly, the Federal Reserve is seen by the contributors as enemy number 1, for their supposed opposition to Bitcoin. Ben Bernanke supposedly had a huge price on his head, but I have no idea if those charged with protecting him were concerned by an "attack of the nerds" in the form of real-life murder, as opposed to cyber-attacks. (The classical terror in the FBI's eyes was Kevin Mitnick, the only cyber-criminal to ever feature on the "FBI's most wanted". Er, wasn't this a slight overreaction to a man who did a lot of intrusion, but very little actual damage to computer systems? Angry nerds crashed fbi.gov with a Denial-of-service attack in retaliation. fbi.gov took a long time to recover, as they waited for a new firewall. Ouch). Eliyohub (talk) 16:00, 3 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Well, you get what you pay for, and these would have been sloppy hits by excons who were more used to jail than the outside. At one point in the 90's there were over 2,000 known murders a year, with half of those in the South Bronx and neighboring Harlem.
My dad worked on an overpass at 96th Street and the FDR Drive where a garbage depot that loaded trucks' cargo onto barges was hidden under an artificial park his firm designed. They used to find a body in the trash every two or three days on average. This led to huge delays, given the truck and/or barge became a crime scene. They fixed the problem by ceasing to notice or report the corpses.
Since this is the reference desk, I thought it would be useful to present some refs to back up Medeis claims, which are coincidentally correct; this confirms that there were 2000-ish murders reported per year in the early 1990s in NYC. By the end of the decade, that had been cut to 1/3rd of it's peak, and the numbers now are about 1/6th as bad as they were. The reasons for the sudden rise, and even faster, fall of the NYC murder rates during the 1990s are hotly debated, early on it was thought that the Broken windows theory of policing was the main result, however later analysis has largely debunked that (because crime rates fell the same way in cities that did NOT subscribe to that method of policing) and instead point to other factors, from economic issues to the controversial effect of legalized abortion on crime rate. Freakonomics authors Levitt and Dubner cover the later theory in some detail, and this article goes over the basic consensus among experts today that 1) it definitely WASN'T the policing techniques put in force during the 1990s, and 2) otherwise, except that it WASN'T that, we're not really sure WHY it fell. Just some background. --Jayron3219:23, 4 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Steal what? Cash and drugs were the only commodities of interest in that neighborhood. Carjacking was a fungible skill, I suppose. But you are talking about people living on $140/mo and food stamps. That comes out to about 1 nickle-bag of smack a day. Not being a junkie, I am not sure, but I suppose that's not enough to satisfy the monkey. In my "case" the guns were borrowed, I didn't want to know who from. And the target was expendable. It would have been $50 for a ten minute job. μηδείς (talk) 04:19, 4 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Why didn't they mug someone or rob a store? Not being a criminal I don't know if infrequently robbing Upper East Siders or frequently robbing South Bronxites or selling carjacked cars or being a $50 hitman has the longest average time to being shot or arrested when done by an impulsive junkie but that's their problem. Why not try to sell the Uzi to some drug dealer or redneck and flee the city they stole it from? Why not end their useless existence with the Uzi? This is your brain on drugs. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:17, 4 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Wow. I mean, a carjacking or robbing will land somebody a relatively short jail sentence (a guesstimate, five years? Ten at most?). Whereas murder tends to get one a long jail sentence. So doesn't some cost-benefit calculation come into it? Were they so confident they would never be caught, that they were willing to risk a 30 year jail sentence for $50? Or were they so used to jail, the idea of returning there did not bother them at all? Which would be your guess? (The alleged crooked cop I mentioned demanded $250,000 for the risk, and he still ended up charged with murder. He dodged the charges with the murder of the star witness, but investigators cleared him of any involvement in the witnesses' murder. The witness was a career crook, many would have wanted him dead, he long knew he was living on borrowed time after a deadly feud with a rival crime clan, others got to him first). Eliyohub (talk) 17:25, 4 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, a little more than I would like to say, but this was a special circumstance; this was not a case of a long-planned scheme on my part to get a professional to knock off a business associate. I had a post-tax income of about $500/wk at the point, and had by choice gotten a one-bedroom apartment for $400/mo in a 90% Hispanic and mostly poor (probably 90% on welfare) due to the cost (a similar apartment downtown would have been half the size for three times the rent. I was two train stops from Manhattan, three from the Upper East Side, about 20 minutes from the Village. There was one white Irish family across the street, and myself comprising the entire white population.
The drug trade was a huge part of the economy. I could not walk from my door to the subway without being offered "dead presidents" and other brands of heroin (until the locals got used to me). I got robbed, and the identity of the robber was known, and that I had been robbed was almost immediately known to the whole neighborhood, given the "watchers" who sit looking out behind the window shades to notify the high-level dealers of police or gang activity.
For my safety (i.e., "street cred), something had to be done, and I took care of it. But my neighbor, who was a recently released ex-con, also found out from the grapevine. As we were on good terms (his wife and I were close friends), he sensed an opportunity. He showed up after I had resolved the issue, but with a companion I did not know, whom he told me was from Manhattan. They were brandishing weapons, and offered to "do me the favor" for $50.
Had I said yes, it would have been a very easy score for them. My robber was already persona non grata, and it would have looked like typical gang warfare and be ignored by the cops who were all on the take in that precinct. The risk to my "friends" would have been negligent. But I am not the murdering type, and did not doubt that at least my neighbor's companion would snitch if caught. I tipped the gentlemen for their time, as my neighbor said he had borrowed the guns (he'd be killed if he sold them) and paid for the taxi, and said I knew where my neighbor was if I wanted his help in the future.
WOW, what a crazy place to live! I think you meant the risk to them would have been "negligible", not "negligent". If the robber was ALREADY persona non grata with the gangs who controlled the neighbourhood, do you have any idea if he's still alive? I would think they don't need the robbery of you as an excuse to kill him, in that sort of situation? Wouldn't he be likely to end up dead at some point regardless? Eliyohub (talk) 22:02, 4 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
As for the thief, I was smart enough not to go around asking questions to which I didn't need the answer. Referring to the "South Bronx Ghetto" is condescending, and a great oversimplification. And Yankee Stadium is not considered a typical part of the South Bronx, nor is it a particularly bad neighborhood. I was living two blocks from where La Lupe resided (140th Street & St. Ann Avenue) when the famed singer died in 1992.
The two problems of the South Bronx were almost universal police corruption due to the drug trade, and police brutality as in the case of Anthony Baez. The area has been fancied up a bit since I last lived there, and the cities murder rate is less than that of Chicago, about 1/5th of its record heights. But at the time the NYT described it as the largest open-air heroin market in the Western Hemisphere. μηδείς (talk) 01:57, 5 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Right, my almost zero knowledge guess is Yankee Stadium's one of the best parts of the South Bronx but I was surprised how ungentrified it looked only a few years ago. Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in Washington Heights looks like the UES in comparison (and that was another neighborhood that was supposed to be one of the drug capitals of the city in the early 90s). Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:45, 5 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
A Megalosaurus stalks Crystal Palace Park in London.I was to Columbia Presbyterian once, and it simply seemed very old (wartime) and dirty, like most areas of NYC that aren't regularly sandblasted. You'll see that your reffed stats above match mine pretty much exactly, this was no coincidence. My OR is based on direct experience and having read the Times, Post, and Sun (now defunct except for nysun.com) regularly. I walked from St Ann Ave in the Bronx to Saint Mark's (130 "streets" down and 5 avenues over) on three occasions around 1994. If you've seen The Wiz, the subway station scene with the carnivorous trash cans is the 168th Street station of the D-Train. I was freaked out the first time I went there for real, since I grew up in 98% white NJ suburbs, and didn't realize how much of that movie was NYC-informed.
One has to realize that crime in NYC is almost all drug-turf or -debt related. The attention of the police or press is bad for business. One could not buy pot at 3pm where I lived, because the kids were on their way home from school. I let a heroin user who was my weed dealer shoot up in my apartment once. He's dead and I am not. I think the real lesson is that one cannot form such opinions without direct experience, no matter what "RS" one has read or what movie one has seen. For example, some of the action of the movie Shaft (2000 film) was set across the street from where I lived, and it looked as genuine to me as Munchkin Land. I walked out laughing and angry at the price of the ticket about 15 minutes into the film. I wouldn't go around talking about Welsh coal-miners in blackskin based on The Sixth Finger. One must really experience the real thing. μηδείς (talk) 04:53, 5 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I asked this before, and was engaged in discussion with another editor when the section was archived. Lemme know if I shouldn't bring it back like this.
Are there any sociological studies about the cultural structure of social media communities?
Dan Howell made a video about the Five Pillars of Tumblr, (Aesthetics, Fandom, Social justice, Memes, and Porn) and it made me wonder if there's any validity to that idea.
I know that it's just one guy's opinion, but I was wondering if there were any formal studies of the cultural structure of social media communities, in general, not just regarding the five pillars.
By cultural structure I mainly mean subcultures and ingroups, such as the ones Dan mentioned, but I wouldn't so narrow my search.
Yes there are. Here's an example: [4]. This popped up using your keywords in Google scholar; if it's not exactly what you need you can play with the keywords or keep scrolling through the results. Another way is to email the lead author on this example or a related article (academics almost always have a public email address) and ask for help. Best luck. 184.147.120.32 (talk) 11:36, 2 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
@Tevildo: Thanks, but I still don't quite get what "of the type" actually refers to, since, to me, the "type" already seems to be defined by the information "1995 Ford Mondeo". Hope you see my problem... Best--Hubon (talk) 14:27, 2 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure really, but a) there were several models of Ford Mondeo, b) "Mondeo man" was only a stereotype for a particular kind of voter, so lots of those who might have attracted that label actually drove different types of cars, or may have owned a Mondeo but aspired to something different. Alansplodge (talk) 14:49, 2 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Hubon: I see your point - the sentence could be reworded as "1995 Ford Mondeo: the type of car 'Mondeo man' may have aspired to", if that would be clearer. The point is that "Mondeo Man" didn't specifically aspire to own a green 1.8 diesel Mondeo Verona (which would be implied by "1995 Ford Mondeo that 'Mondeo man' may have aspired to"), just that general type of car. Tevildo (talk) 15:44, 2 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, now I see! Yes, of course, you're right. Thanks for explaining to a non-native speaker...! Best regards and Happy New Year--Hubon (talk) 16:14, 2 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I have been looking into cartography articles, and i have stumbled on the matter of how accurate the first map made by greek people were.
500 BC
Ok so i have been looking into Hecataeus of Miletus's map, as (one of) the first world maps ever.
It is interesting to see how he could clearly delineate the italic peninsula. and the Mediterranean Sea to the East. Greeks had such insight !
AD 1154
But then i've stumbled over another map made during the middle ages, by an arab geographer working for the Sicilians. The Tabula Rogeriana
They say it was a map which remained hailed as a brilliant work for a long time by that time.
While it is obviously a good looking map, you can see however the awful depiction of the italian peninsula and the waters surrounding it! and i'm not even talking about France, the UK and the black sea!
It is incredible how the middle ages were such backward compared to ancient romans and greeks !
But then again, giving a more thorough look at Hecataeus life and article, i don't exactly pinpoint the actual way we modern people got a hold on his very map.
And some reconstructions seem to give different versions of Hecataeus one and only map!
So i think maybe the maps of Hecataeus and others were not completely retrieved but only some of the toponyms and they might have reconstructed it with current knowledge of scales and they didnt mentioned it in the page.
So just simply, is Hecataeus's map is genuine or fake?
And if it is fake, then what exactly do we know about Hecataeus's map? (how he viewed size of the seas, their shapes and the shapes of the land, etc) and why do we say we could retrieve Hecataeus map?
Hecataeus' map no longer exists, the picture in the article is a reconstruction - basically it's just a guess at the general land area he would have known about and included, but depicted in a more-or-less modern way so we know what we're looking at. In ancient maps that do survive, Italy is depicted more horizontally, like in the medieval Sicilian map (for example the Tabula Peutingeriana, although that was probably not intended to be strictly geographically accurate). Adam Bishop (talk) 22:17, 2 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Also note that any ancient map would tend to depict the area the author was familiar with more accurately, and probably larger, than more distant lands. So, an Arab mapmaker would tend to portray Arab controlled lands most accurately. StuRat (talk) 19:19, 4 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Neither the map nor most of Hecataeus' work survive to this day, but books referencing his work, by authors who had read it themselves, do survive. Thus we know where Hecataeus claimed to have visited, and generally what he claims to have mapped. The various reconstructions are thus attempts to guess at what Hecataeus could have known, given his travels, and the sources that would have been available to him. Most of ancient literature is known through such means, to the extent that it is known at all. Someguy1221 (talk) 03:59, 5 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
