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56 comments on The White House: AEI in All Its Glory (SOTU Open Thread 3)

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Donal on February 1, 2006 - 2:18pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Naturally there are both good and bad sides of Jamaica.  From what I recall, Jamaicans were the most ruthless of drug dealers, killing entire families of competitors.

Reports say that Jamaica is bleeding to death with more than 1,100 murders recorded last year and 100 tonnes of cocaine trans-shipped to western markets.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1859948.stm

Jamaica, birth place for many in Toronto's black community and, according to police, birth place for the gang culture now taking hold of the city, is an exceedingly violent country. With a population roughly the same as Metro Toronto's, it has about 1200 murders a year, and likely this is an undercount. Jamaica also is home to some hateful social attitudes. A recent popular song there has words about burning alive a 'chi chi man,' the Jamaican expression for a homosexual. So, too, a favored local swear word refers to a woman's menses.

http://www.canadiandemocraticmovement.ca/displayarticle800.html

It is the Jamaica where there have already been some 531 murders for the year by the end of last month, largely related to the frightening "drug culture", spawned by the drug lords operating out of depressed inner-city communities and elsewhere. Among those killed were 10 policemen.

Worried over the record number of murders in any one year -- some 1,131 in 2001 -- and conscious of the influence-peddling of drug barons and gun-runners, the major political parties, the incumbent People's National Party (PNP) of Prime Minister P J Patterson, and the Jamaica Labour Party of Edward Seaga, have signed a historic document for a shared commitment to combat crime at all levels of the society.

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20020805T200000-0500_29984_OBS_FACES_OF_JAMAICA_ON___TH_ BIRTHDAY.asp

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Don Sailorman on February 1, 2006 - 3:21pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
There is a nasty and violent Jamaican drug subculture, but nobody much cares as long as they just kill off one another. The very worst Jamaicans have been exported to Toronto and other major Canadian and U.S. cities--very clever way to get rid of your most troublesome citizens. If you check the non-drug-gang homicides, I think you'll find the rate is about half that of Mexico (again, subtracting off the narco-traffickers) and substantially below that of both Brazil and the U.S. The police in Jamiaca thoughtfully carry long double-barreled 12 guage shotguns; they seldom shoot but almost never miss. I used to live on the South Side of Chicago, near the U. of Chicago, way back in the olden days when Milton Friedman had hair, and the Blackstone Rangers used switchblade knives. Violence in that part of Chicago was 20 to 50 times that of urban Jamaica today (with the exception of a relatively few really nasty neighborhoods of Kingston. Kingston is a pit, and I do not go there--ever).
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