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Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

nytimes.com

41–50 of 641 posts

Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#41
post #19

That seems way too harsh to me. I have strong opinions on the US War on Drugs and it's failure to meaningful deal with drug use/abuse in the USA. And I feel even worse about how it's spilling out into the rest of the world as we go "global" with everything. I can't say I know every detail of the case but I don't recall anyone getting killed or even hurt by Mr. Ulbricht so in my mind the punishment does not fit the cr…

There was lots of sleazy stuff going down on SR totally unrelated to drugs...stolen credit cards, weapons, etc.

[deleted]

Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#43

Murderers get less than that. We are truly an interesting society, aren't we - somehow kids doing LSD, a mostly harmless substance, is causing us more harm, as a society, than, say, violence?

I suspect that law enforcement's embarrassment over how long it took them to find him also had something to do with it. The equivalent of running from the police in a foot chase, they're going to punish you for it.

Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#44

That seems way too harsh to me. I have strong opinions on the US War on Drugs and it's failure to meaningful deal with drug use/abuse in the USA. And I feel even worse about how it's spilling out into the rest of the world as we go "global" with everything. I can't say I know every detail of the case but I don't recall anyone getting killed or even hurt by Mr. Ulbricht so in my mind the punishment does not fit the cr…

I don't believe the death penalty was ever a possibility, following Kennedy v. Louisiana ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_v._Louisiana , "the power of the state to impose the death penalty against an individual for committing a crime that did not result in the death of the victim is now limited to crimes against the state (e.g. espionage, treason).")

Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#45
post #12

Gross miscarriage of justice. People have a right to buy drugs. Every single government actor involved in this case is far more guilty than Ross and, frankly, they are the ones that deserve prison. Yes, Ross should have realized you can't massively break the law and get away with it. He made a big mistake. But the mistake he made was assuming that other people were more benevolent than they really are. This young man…

> People have a right to buy drugs. Actually they don't, which is kind of the point.

Yes, they do, you just don't understand rights.

Rights are the things that we would all agree should be legally protected if we were all rational about it.

So they're a human construct, but they're still objective.

Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#47
No surprises there. The libertarian defense is hard to hold once fat stashes of cash and murder come in to play: the US certainly did a good and legally questionable job on public character assassination prior to the sentencing!

That said, one can't help but wonder if perhaps the movement in which characters as diverse as Assange, Dotcom, Snowden, ThePirateBay and Ulbricht can be placed is too powerful to snub out with mere regulatory reactionism... particularly given the economic state of much of the educated world and the imminent environmental challenges we face as a planet.

If there's one thing that the study of complex systems teach us, it's that there is strength in heterogeneity. Perhaps it's time for America to change its tune and stop pressuring countries worldwide to overpolice their populations in myriad ways (drugs, internet piracy, IP laws). May we live to see more enlightened times, progressive approaches to state-sponsored social remediation, and less of this nationalism "my way or the highway" / "with us or against us" claptrap that Einstein so eloquently summarized: Nationalism is an infantile disease: the measles of mankind.

Re: Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

#50
post #7

Fuck the war on drugs

Fuck the drug dealers.

You know the dealer, the dealer is a man

With a lot of grass in his hand

Ah but the pusher is a monster

Good god he's not a natural man

The dealer, for a nickel lord

He'll sell you lots of sweet dreams

Ah but the pusher'll ruin your body

Lord he'll leave, he'll leave your mind to scream

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