491–500 of 641 posts
Fuck the war on drugs
It saddens me that acknowledging the war on drugs as being corrosive and detrimental is seen as extreme by mainstream modern society. Few seem to question extreme punishments for crimes related to the manufacture or distribution of drugs.
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According to Wikipedia: Blackmail is an act, often a crime, ... Essentially, it is coercion involving threats of ... of criminal prosecution. Similar searches for the legal distinction between extortion and blackmail consider blackmail a form of coercion. Given (A) that blackmail is coercion (psychological pressure), and (B) coercing someone into committing a crime is entrapment. Would (A) and (B) then not imply that…
I think the law guide I linked it to would file this under "there is no chutzpah defense." He had legal options that did not include "hire a hitman" ("do nothing" is a valid option) and he had a big hand in creating the problem to begin with, or there would be nothing to blackmail him with in the first place. And the state didn't corrupt him, he was already leading a criminal operation when they set out to catch him.…
This. If he hadn't created a multi-million dollar drug empire, there would've been no blackmail. Therefore, the fact that he had to resort to murder to stop the blackmail is no defense at all.
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Agreed. From the FBI press release on his conviction[1] no mention of the murder-for-hire charge. This conviction and sentencing all stem from the drug-selling business enterprise. Our war-on-drugs sentencing is quite disproportional, IMHO; imputing societal harms that are unfounded. After all, Mr. Ulbright simply provided a safer way for consenting individuals to enter personal financial transactions. Silk Road is a…
You seem to suggest that silkroad was an innocent market place that was used for drug trafficking without the knowledge of its creator...
He provided a system that could be used as a valuable service for legal activities. It could also be used for illegal or banned activities in various jurisdictions.
I'm just saying that it's a dangerous precedent to say that anyone creating a communication or transaction platform can be held liable for conspiring with users who use it to commit crimes.
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I didn't mean to imply that it could be considered self-defense according to the letter of the law. Just floating the scenario where you're running a business that, while illegal, is not morally wrong, and you're faced with the possibility of spending the rest of your life behind bars. What do you do?
They would tell you not to run that business because it's illegal. There are legitimate ways to protest a bad law and running an illegal business isn't one of them.
You run a business in the 1800s that frees blacks from the South and transports them to the North. If caught, you risk some severe penalties, maybe even death.
Someone finds out and blackmails you. What do you do?
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It's life, not life without parole. He'll get paroled, eventually. People should read some of the background, including haggling over the cost of a murder for hire. - http://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-2/ Truth is, it's hard to run this sort of thing without getting ripped off, and then violence is the only way to discourage people from ripping you off. Watch Godfather movies, esp. part 2... Mafias arise out of h…
> One of the many ironies of libertarian extremists is that actions which are considered illegitimate when taken by a democratic government become OK when taken by concentrated private power to protect private property. Huh? Libertarian extremists do not condone murder or murder-for-hire. Most libertarian extremists also support proportional self-defense and damages doctrine (Rothbard et al) so would not consider mur…
That was the situation here; party A attempts to blackmail party B with revealing the identities of group C to entity D which will then ruin the lives of all people within group C. Is it definitely right or wrong to hire somebody to kill party A? What duty of care does party B owe group C? Entity D exists and is not going away and will continue to behave in the fashion which party A relies upon as the stick in the equation. Attacking entity D directly is suicidal and ineffective.
If party A was directly threatening to kidnap and imprison or murder all the people in group C, I think aggressive action against them would be much less questionable, and effectively that is what they are actually doing, given the behaviour of entity D.
Putting all those pieces in place already, what is the appropriate response supposed to actually be?
Any way you look at it, it's certainly an interesting situation that people who otherwise would think there was no problem here must take into account. It's all well and good to believe the state is a gang of thieves and murderers writ large (disclaimer; I certainly do), and go about constructing a parallel strategy to circumvent them, but that strategy can't just ignore them, or the consequences of their existence, either.
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.
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Any credible studies to link? The LD50 was extensively document, your claim is essentially vodoo.
Yes, of course. I just thought that flashbacks and other LSD complications are common knowledge. Take a look at this Wikipedia section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide#Adv...
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No part of the allegation that Ulbricht commissioned a murder appears to have been "thrown out"; that accusation was a formal predicate (the second listed "overt act") of the conspiracy charge for which he was convicted. Can someone help me understand why people keep suggesting that this murder-for-hire allegation was dropped? That does not at all seem to be the case.
I didn't read the new indictment, I assumed from articles they dropped all those charges http://www.dailydot.com/crime/silk-road-murder-charges-ross-... http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/29/technology/silk-road-ross-ul... "Prosecutors had charged Ulbricht with commissioning six murders-for-hire but those charges were dropped" The overt act is there in the new indictment they changed after dropping the 6 murder for hire ch…
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They would tell you not to run that business because it's illegal. There are legitimate ways to protest a bad law and running an illegal business isn't one of them.
Let's put it in other terms. You run a business in the 1800s that frees blacks from the South and transports them to the North. If caught, you risk some severe penalties, maybe even death. Someone finds out and blackmails you. What do you do?
EDIT: Also, in your example, this was eventually fixed by changing the law, not by breaking it. And, to the best of my knowledge, everyone ran the underground railroad for free, not for profit.