Comment by sbirchall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbirchall | Hacker News Reader

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"Simple criminals" is a bit of a shoot-from-the-hip oversimplification, I'd say. I wouldn't romanticize "pirates" but I do think there is a lot more to them from a social/anthropological standing than you are letting on. A simple google search for more in depth information can lend you hours of fascinating reading about the culture and politics on board a typical pirate ship and I just thought the HN comment cloud should not allow you to write them off so cheaply. Yes, they were criminals, but they were far from simple! And as such I don't think the use of the term is quite so simple as you are trying to make out.

I'm currently spending a lazy Sunday afternoon reading through http://wp.stockton.edu/hist4690/files/2012/06/Markus-Rediker...

fascinating stuff.

[disclaimer: IANA-Historian, sea shantie junkie and one time pirate king]

Simple crimes, not simple criminals. Compare modern organised criminal organisations: they're nowhere near simple, but at the end of the day, the crime itself is simple.

Again no, you are reducing things to an absurd degree. Organised crime is very complex. Mugging is simple. Theft is not [necessarily] simple. The latter subsumes the former precisely because of it's complexity. You may be talking about something that equates to mugging, however the majority of commenters are holding that the term you are using equates to theft in just about every example.

Look into the Yakuza. Each 'family' can consist of many _tens of thousands of individuals_, from the grunts to the cops and judges on the payroll to money launderers and each one is needed to take one of your 'simple crimes' and make it into a business for the family, so by definition they are not simple crimes.

I think you are nit picking to backtrack on what I still hold was a shoot-from-the-hip over-simplification. I think you are not willing to concede the definition of a word beyond your own example despite a rich history of it's use to the contrary.

Simple is probably not the best word, then, but what I meant to describe was the unambiguity of the immorality of the crime. At the end of the day, piracy was still roughly morally equivalent to mugging, although, of course, vastly more complex.

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