That weed guy is worth his weight in gold.
maybe MI-6 can hide him from MS-13?
This might well be more racist bullshit about MS-13.
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Medium, the venue for serious thinkpieces. /s
It was a funny story, not even close to believable. But where he fucked up was calling out MS-13 specifically as the duped drug dealer. MS-13 has just as much of a code of “omerta” as a mafiosi. Making them look foolish or disrespecting them publicly is going to have repercussions. They supposedly have to kill a person to join. What did he think was going to happen when a white-bread “Chad-bro” made up a story with them as the butt of the joke?
Yeah, his mistake in thinking seems to be that as long as he didn’t mention a specific member of MS-13 it was no problem. His misunderstanding of gangs is right there in his story, how he thinks one gang member going to jail meant that fictional him was off the hook. Not really getting the concept of gang.
Now, I dunno that he’s in any real danger, nor do I know that he’s safe. But if he had just been vague about the gang in his story there wouldn’t be any question that he’s safe.
Well I know a guy who allowed crack dealers to use his house in return for paying the rent. They then proceeded to kick him out under threat of violence.
So he shopped them to the cops and promptly got rehoused into a much nicer place.
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Maybe what this story needs is a Choose Your Own Adventure version of the story like Bandersnatch, where it seems like the protagonist has all sorts of choices and different paths to follow, but ultimately they all lead to the same end. Pretty sure that leaving the roll of tape in the van leads to the the gangster finding it, opening up the brick and the protagonist getting killed. :-/
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Oh, come on, if we did that the Internet as we know it would grind to a halt.
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Why didn’t the writer just invent a gang? I mean, instead of MS-13, it was EC9. You’ve never heard of EC9? Oh man, they’ve been taking over territory on the East Coast since about 2006. They’re brutal. They once killed a guy by [insert new story here].
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Shoot, his GoFundMe got shut down and all donations returned. Makes me wish I’d made a sizeable donation to the cause.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Maybe it was Quentin Tarantino all along? Sorta his kind of thing.
Also – moritifed here – am I the only one who never heard of MS-13 before?
I have only heard it uttered by Trump and people talking about Trump. Wikipedia tells me there really is a specific criminal enterprise commonly known as MS-13 that’s a real thing with real leadership conducting real violent criminal activities. But at the same time it seems like it’s a racial slur. I think it’s kind of like “mafia”, a word that once referred to a specific criminal organization but that turned into a sort of racial scare word as people started to assume that Italians were all mobbed up.
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If he just wrote about a creepy doll in the attic, he could’ve had a whole movie franchise.
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As a native speaker of German, I think the connotation sure exists in germanophone areas, but Mafia is more used as a generic term for organised crime. One could speak of Japanese, Chinese, Construction Companies or Car Maker Mafia (Bauwirtschaftsmafia, Autoherstellermafia) are used without the racist connotation.
Talking about the Italian Mafia, however, the impression that basically the whole country is run by the Mafia prevails with many germanophones. Even if differentiated between Cosa Nostra, Camorra and ’Ndrangheta, all are Italians are somehow suspected to be part of the Mafia. The blatant racism of the Hollywood-shaped US perception, however, is alien to germanophones. (At least I think so.)
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Are you not familiar with Hollywood?
By your own metrics it’s a guaranteed box office winner.
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I’ve heard of it long before Trump. MS-13 is a real thing and they are exceptionally violent as gangs go. It is ironic that they originated in the US and then deported, only to grow larger because of it, and now are framed as some external invasion.
But as serious of a problem as MS-13 is in some areas (I mean, their mottos are variations of "rape, control, kill”), their reach size is pretty small with an estimated 10,000 in the US, which is ~1% of all street gangs. But similar how the Bloods and Crips were the go to face of street crime in the 80s and 90s, MS-13 is now the great boogie man. And that boogie man has been exagerated into an “invasion” pouring through the border.
And that there is the whole bullshit spin on this. Trump acts like the handful of “animals” he says he is trying to protect America from is the majority of refugee and migrants coming over the border, when in reality they are a tiny, tiny percentage (and there are more criminals from other cartels doing actual smuggling than MS-13). This is just like any other time when we have demonized the whole of the other because of a tiny percentage of bad actors. Like when the Germans and Japanese were all assumed to be saboteurs and traitors during WWII. And then because some sane people are rejecting this false premise, then you have memes floating around that Democrats want MS-13 to come in and rape and kill with abandon. It is absurd, but that is what is going on in some peoples’ minds.
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I should also have said: it fails to adhere to the standard narrative formula.
MS-13 isn’t even exceptionally violent so much as being surprisingly violent compared to its size, and that is pretty much a result of dumping an American gang into foreign gang territory and they had to meet like with like. You can throw a dart and hit a South or Central American gang that is insanely violent and organized on top of being funded and armed by the US. MS-13 is just the soup du jour.
I just find it especially irritating because in 2010 when Los Zetas terrorized Mexican tourism by dumping bodies on resort grounds and would massacre 193 people the next year to send a message almost no one I talked to knew anything about the cartels and gangs, but a few years later people were obsessed about the violent invasion from the south.
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