That said, I do think he absolutely deserved to be released, not because he didn't deserve to be locked up in the first place, but because he's clearly been rehabilitated and has done great work during his time in prison. All that considered, ten years seems like a not unreasonable prison sentence for what he did. I hope he'll continue to do good when he's released.
The guy operated a marketplace for illegal goods in order to enrich himself. The illegality wasn't just incidental, it was literally his business model -- by flouting the law, he enjoyed massive market benefit (minimal competition, lack of regulation, high margins etc) by exploiting the arbitrage that the rest of us follow the rules.
Said a different way, he knowingly pursued enormous risk in order to achieve outsized benefits, and ultimately his bet blew up on him -- we shouldn't have bailed him out.
A serial rapist, even one that would happily do it again, will often repent and quickly admit guilt. They have no interest in undermining the philosophical basis of the state. They will posture themselves as bound but imperfect citizens under the law.
Ross violated the only remaining national holy religion, the rule of law. He was sentenced for being a heretic.
Good.
Let's keep in mind that the shared faith in this "holy religion, the rule of law" is the only thing holding together your country, my country, everyone's countries, and civilized society in general. Take that away, and everything around us will collapse, regressing the few survivors of that event to the prehistorical lifestyle of small tribes slaughtering each other for what little scraps the land has to give.
There are also societies which have blatant arbitrary authoritarian rule which seem to be well in the 21st century. I doubt that faith in the rule of law is the only thing keeping our societies together.
Well, that's sounds quite logical. When you kill people, they usually fight back. Very strongly fight back. So you have to expect something big to make it worth it. But small very undeveloped tribes had nothing of such, so they have no incentives to slaughter each other.
With neither size nor technology to make a lasting impact, the ones that got slaughtered didn't exactly leave much in archeological evidence behind for us to find.
As for GP's point, obviously those people weren't bred for battle with others. All the tiny tribes would happily frolic in the forest or whatever small prehistoric tribes did when they weren't starving, but eventually they'd grow in size, hit a size limit leading to a new tribe splitting off, etc.; over time, the number of tribes grew to the point that they started to bump into each other and contest the same resources, leading to the obvious outcome.
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> I'm genuinely convinced that prehistoric humans, being literally the same species as us, were just as capable as us in the ability to thoughtfully construct their societies.
I agree. We're basically the same people as we were before, hardware and firmware, +/- lactose intolerance and some extra mutations that, without modern medicine, would prohibit one from successfully reproducing. With that in mind...
> Like, why, when they bumped into each other, couldn't they have formed a confederation?
Because they most likely couldn't have even conceptualized this that long ago, much less make it work.
A "confederacy" isn't some built-in human feeling. It's advanced technology. Social technology, but technology nonetheless. In a way, it's merely a more advanced form of a bunch of elders getting together to deal with a problem affecting all of their tribes - but this is like saying passing around crude drawing on stones is basically a bit less advanced e-mail or international postal network. As an advanced social technology, a confederacy has a lot of prerequisites - including writing, deep specialization of labor (allowing for both rulers and thinkers to thrive), hierarchical governance, a set of traditions (religious or otherwise) that solidify the hierarchical governance structure and some early iteration of a justice system, literate ruling class, etc.; all of those are but a few nodes in the "tech tree" that leads to a confederacy, and more importantly, enables scaling the society up to the point we can even talk about a confederacy as we define the term today.
> I think instead of labeling them as children of nature or starving savages warring with everything in their vicinity, it makes most sense to see them as more or less similar to ourselves.
We still are children of nature. We're not starving because of all the advancement in science, technology and social technologies we've accumulated over the past couple millenia.
Consider that it is only recently - within the last 150 years - we finally stopped going to war over land and natural resources. Human nature didn't change in that time. What changed was that we've expanded to the point every place on Earth's surface has someone staking a claim to it, that the knowledge of these claims quickly becomes known to other groups; we then fought it out in 1914-1918 and then for the last time, in 1939-1945, then most countries accepted agreements to keep the borders as they are, and then we invented nuclear weapons and froze the borders via MAD.
The modern world is a beautiful but fragile place. If we let any of the supporting structures - whether social or technological or military - snap, the whole thing will collapse like a house of cards, and the few people that survive it will be back to prehistoric savagery. Not because they'd suddenly get dumber, but because they'd have lost all the social and technological structures that makes humanity what it is today, and they'd have to rebuild it from scratch, the hard way.