Meanwhile, In France.

[Occhidiangela]

I believe in the ghettos of NYC, family members and girl/boyfriends of rival gang members are fair game for anything from a beating to rape and murder.  It's been like that since the 1980's.  The lopping off of appendages that's uniquely Muslim.  But the IRA and Unionist in northern Ireland used to maime people by either shooting or baseball bats, as a means of maintaining "order".

I lived in NYC for six years, near the worst projects in Queens and in Spanish Harlem in Manhattan.  I know of what I speak.
[right][snapback]90654[/snapback][/right]

And kneecapping, of course, a handy tool of both the Irish thugs and the American Mafiosi.

May I suggest that the gangsta standard you experienced in New York is not all that far removed from the Mafioso standard of a generation ago? In a similar vein, there are cultural norms here in South Texas that amount to incest with young relations in portions of the Hispanic community, and a slightly different problem among some of the less moral Anglos. The police blotter down here speaks for itself.

The problems of cultural norms versus explicit laws and norms is not unique to any one place. It is a bad mental trap, in my opinion, to try to draw an equivalency across cultural boundaries. Some things cross well, some don't. Is a wife an equal partner? Is she chattel? Is she a guy? Cultures differ in their base assumptions on that.

Trying to apply the gangsta standard to a comparison of cultures strikes me as bad reasoning. The gangsta subculture is just that, a subculture, and a lawless, illegal behavior. The fact that stoning is a legit sanction for infidelity in some Muslim settings, for example, is a different issue than what the clans and tribes do as vigilantes under cultural norms versus explicit laws encoded in the Sharia.

The distinctions of informal and formal sanction, to include so simple a thing as shame, blur or are clear cut depending on the culture. Multi culturalism is not a blending of cultures, it is a juxtaposition of differing breeds of dogs, not all of whom breed or get along well together.

Measuring the wheat of a third world culture, a tribal culture by the bushel of a modern European or Enlightenment based "civilized" society is a False Measurement at best, and misleading in any case. Tribal culture includes American gangs of all sorts, the Belfast gangs and factions in Northern Ireland's strife, as well as the tribal and clan structures in most Muslim/Arab nations.

Cultural conflicts have been with us for a very long time. Charlemagne the Holy Roman Empire versus the pagan Saxons; Islam versus the animists in Arabia, Persia, the sub continent; Ancien Regime versus The Revolution; Zulu versus the pastoralists; secularist versus theocrat versus republican.

There is not yet, nor do I think there will be any time soon, a "one world culture," Nor is it necessary to have one. Thus, as Ashock points out, it is an error to attempt to assess in equal measure the habits across cultural lines without clear demarkation of informal and formal norms, laws, and customs.

Occhi