I’m all for the freeing him of his crimes when it comes to his crypto anarchic philosophy. But I find it hard to pardon someone for contract killing essentially. Also I’m not an apologist for the FBIs handling of this case either.
In 2021, presumably during SBF's (big Democrat donor) FTX scam, Trump thought that Bitcoin was a scam:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57392734
Now he is best friends with the "crypto", AI, and H1B bros.
* In May 2024, candidate Donald Trump said that if re-elected President, he would commute Ulbricht's sentence on his first day in office
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht
I doubt Trump cares about Ulbricht as much as he cares (for whatever reason) about the continued support of various American libertarians (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and various crypto elites).
While he has made many promises this is significant for being one that he has kept.
The case was dropped after NY conviction since he was sentencing to life, so there was little point in continuing.
Clearly that was a mistake if a lack of an attempted murder conviction helped him get a pardon.
I think it's fair to say judges shouldn't factor non-charged allegations into sentencing, but I think he's at least morally culpable, here, and should at the very least be expected to now show public contrition for repeatedly trying to murder people drug kingpin-style.
I doubt he will ever admit it, but now that he's free I still would like it. I don't care about people enabling drug sales but I do care about people with a God complex who feel entitled to end the lives of those they oppose (in one case because he thought someone stole from him, and another because he thought they would dox him).
the real criminals for that prank were never even tried.
The basic immorality/pointlessness of the war on drugs aside, I don't know how you can assert this: it's not like there's a chain of provenance, and there's no particular guarantee that whatever grade of pure drugs was sold on Silk Road is the same purity that ended up in peoples' bodies.
My understanding of the Silk Road case is that, at its peak, it was servicing a significant portion of the international drug market. The dimensions of that market include adulteration; Silk Road almost certainly didn't change that.
What a beautiful political anschluss between people who just want to ban contraceptives and abortifacients, and people who just want to shoot up heroin. Not sure how you square that circle[1], but it's 2025, and here we are.
It's very telling about libertarian priorities when a cryptobro running an online drug marketplace who tried to hire a hitman gets amnesty, while hundreds of thousands of people who have been convicted of drug possession[1] do not. Likewise, somehow reproductive rights are just not a libertarian issue, either. It's not a party of freedom, it's a party of freedom for wealthy men.
[1] Biden gave a blanket pardon for people convicted of marijuana posession, but that's far less important for libertarians than Ulbricht.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/silk-road-drug-vendor-w...
Is it due to HN policy? I guess they're subjective and ideological, and prone to starting arguments rather than debates.
Maybe "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." or "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."?
I'm honestly just curious as a conscientious internet citizen lol
I expect in such a society, certain groups (e.g. Mormons) would normalize banning yourself from vices the day you turn 18.
I am glad that Ulbricht has been pardoned and I feel like a small iota of justice has been returned to the world with this action.
The New York court convicted him, and then considered the murder-for-hire allegations when determining his sentence. They found them true by a preponderance of the evidence and and that was a factor in his sentence to life without parole. He appealed, and the Second Circuit upheld the sentence.
The prosecutors in Maryland then dropped the murder-for-hire charge because there was no point. They said this would allow them to direct their resources to other other cases where justice had not yet been served.
Starting a business that accepts crypto payments is going to be a tell.
Murder has never been legal.
The society didn't decide, the ruling class decided to use drug policy to attack their own citizens.
History shows that prohibition is an abject failure. The fent epidemic is symptomatic of this failed policy.
If they actually cared about the epidemic, addicts would have access to regulated, pharmaceutical grade heroin whilst also having ready access to treatment.
But then we'd have empty prisons and the police would be free to solve real crimes so we can't have that.
2. There is no evidence anyone else ever said this, either
The closest you get is MLK.
See https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
But MLK also talks about moral obligation and not other forms of obligation.
He was not trying to create a free for all where everyone gets to decide which laws are okay or not, because he (and jefferson) were not complete morons.
Last I heard he was promising to make drug dealers eligible for the death penalty: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-wants-e...
[dead] is different than [flagged][dead]. [dead]-only (no [flagged]) means they're auto-dead, they aren't killed by someone reviewing the comments (moderator or users flagging). One of the two commenters was shadow banned years ago but still gets vouched for occasionally (including by me at times). The other one was shadow banned (looked through their history) 11 days ago, with a comment from dang at the time stating as much. They also get vouched for on occasion, based on their comment history.
> Maybe "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." or "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."?
dang does usually respond to people with something like that first, then for people who get repeatedly flagged or repeatedly engage in certain kinds of behavior, he bans them.
The war on drugs have caused immeasurable harm due to failure to understand most people use drugs either as escapism or as a tendency.
That's why it has failed.
Now it's all about podcasts, energy drinks and crypto coin rug-pulls.
I don't know anything about this guy. Is there really nothing unique about his case?
Don't take my word for it though, the monticello folks looked into it too - https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
It is a fun quote though, because it's one of those quotes that people want to use to justify their own dumb behavior.
"If you don't like the law, feel free to ignore it" - Albert Einstein
Removing moderation or voting systems (simple chronological comment sorting) creates another set of issues so this problem can't be solved without entirely changing discussion formats
Ironic? It's the oldest trick in the book bro
I recommend you read the HN thread when Ulbricht was sentenced [0] first, then come here and read all the "Honest, genuine question, why?"s
Then start practicing not letting politics influence your thought process
In my personal belief, everyone[0] has the right and moral obligation to fight the injustice they care about at the level they can manage. If that's handing out water at the protest or inventing penicillin, do what you personally can do to improve the world.
[0]the average layperson, obvious exceptions for power/money apply
Were there any accompanying policies that you would say, "despite promising to free Ross Ulbricht, I don't think accompanying Policy X would be worth it?"
But, I can't see how this becomes net beneficial in Congress, or in the wider economy. At best it's providing lower friction movement of goods and services. They tend not to go to Federal Tax collecting exchanges, so I cannot for the life of me see how this helps the exchequer, but maybe thats the point?
> Given that he donated nearly $40 million to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle—and he admitted to giving an equal amount to Republicans—his total political contributions may have actually been around $80 million.
https://time.com/6241262/sam-bankman-fried-political-donatio...
> "full and unconditional pardon for any crimes related to drugs".
Does "any crimes related to drugs" include the murder for hire allegations? Does this mean new charges related to that could be brought against him?
Since he was sentenced federally, he'd be under the federal sentencing guidelines, but I imagine those are pretty harsh around the money laundering and drug trafficking (since they're tuned to provide a hammer to wield against mostly narco-enterprises). I suppose the additional preponderance of evidence gave the judge justification to push the sentence to the maximum allowed in the category?
No, it's not. Because the same magnification effect causes the causal, simple and correct sounding to float to the top and the nuanced "<signs deeply> so I dealt with this for 20yr and here's the deal" takes that nobody wants to hear because they're not simple and easy wind up at the bottom but above the flagrantly wrong crap and the trolls.
There's a reason that nothing with real stakes adopts this format and technical discussions that matter still mostly happen in some sort of threaded format that doesn't allow voting or any sort of drive-by low effort interaction to effect much.
Format like this is good for driving interaction, which is why public facing websites use it for their comment sections.
50,676 bitcoins, today valued at 5,3 billion USD.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-h...
He was unique in his magnitude of success. Governments can successfully magnify their enforcement ability by making an example of outliers.
This is all AFAIK, they haven't released the text broadly yet, but his lawyers/etc say he was pardoned for crimes related to drugs.
Even what people call a 'full and unconditional' pardon is usually targeted at something specific, not like "a pardon for anything you may have ever done, anywhere, anytime' which people seem to think it means sometimes.
It's more of a legal term of art to describe pardons that erase convictions, restore rights, etc.
Rather than clemency which, say, commutes your sentence but leaves your conviction intact.
”Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
This could have waited until after the midterms.
Ulbricht later sent ELLINGSON $150,000 worth of Bitcoin to pay for the purported murder. ELLINGSON and Ulbricht agreed on a code to be included with a photograph to prove that the murder had been carried out. In April 2013, ELLINGSON and Ulbricht exchanged messages reflecting that ELLINGSON had sent Ulbricht photographic proof of the murder. A thumbnail of a deleted photograph purporting to depict a man lying on a floor in a pool of blood with tape over his mouth was recovered from Ulbricht’s laptop after his arrest. A piece of paper with the agreed-upon code written on it is shown in the photograph next to the head of the purportedly dead individual.
Later in April 2013, ELLINGSON and Ulbricht exchanged additional messages regarding a plot to kill four additional people in Canada. Ulbricht sent ELLINGSON an additional $500,000 worth of Bitcoin for the murders. ELLINGSON claimed to Ulbricht in online messages that the murders had in fact been committed.
Theres probably a movie or two about it too
Edit: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pardons-silk-road-fou...
>Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."
Considering that his rhetoric was very much based on Christianity, it's clear what standard of "unjust" he was applying.
I see so many Trump adjacent folks demanding we lock up drug dealers, deport them, whatever. But they want to let this one go.
Trump doesn't have the power to unilaterally change laws (fortunately!)
The tweet:
Their observation was that reputation mattered on SR a lot and a well-kept reputation was valuable at scale in a way that it isn't for being a street-corner pusher looking to stretch your buck by cutting your supply with adulterants. The smart play was to provide a high-quality product at a reasonable price (the latter being the easiest part since they were bypassing the obscene markup of official channels).
edit: i see your other comment with the context
He was trying to create a more just, egalitarian society. I don't understand how you can consider acting in accordance with leading research on successful drug policy "moronic"?
That doesn't change what Ross Ulbricht did, but we can now see him as continuous with a great evil that we couldn't see at the time. With more information, our opinions changed, and they were right to change.
Otherwise, the only thing that comes to mind is StackOverflow functionality where OP can mark a single answer as "accepted" and push it to the top instantly (which obv. wouldn't translate well to general discussions).
(For consideration on this topic: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138732/th...)
Not that it matters, as it was an illustrative example.
Considering the diversity of standards of justice within the history of Christianity (which, in just the US, includes—relevant to this topic—MLK, sure, but also the Southern Baptist Convention, founded explicitly in support of slavery), I don't know that having rhetoric grounded in Christian theology tells much of substance about the standard of justice one is appealing to.
Her husband took the fall, whatever the facts actually are, and got a longer sentence.
SBF - well the scale, number of laws violated, duration, number of victims, profile of victims, complete lack of contrition, etc would be why he got a much longer sentence.
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.
B. Orange is not a hero. I don't bow down to Kim Jong Un/Hitler wannabees.
C. Tor is a three letter honeypot.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I find that hard to believe.
I can't imagine he would have known Ross Ulbricht's case.
I feel like me might disagree on Ulbricht, but overall mandatory maximums make a lot of sense.
Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me, and suddenly as I was reading I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in, where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
Having this tableau unexpectedly unfold right in front of my eyes was a fascinating experience, and it certainly made the article suddenly get a lot more immersive!
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-2/
EDIT: to be clear, I was not present for the arrest. I was reading the magazine, some years after the arrest, but in the same place as the arrest. (I didn’t qualify the events with “I read that...” since I thought the narrative ellipsis would be obvious from context; evidently not.)
I suspect the idea beyond "Free Ross" in some circles was that his conviction wasn't so much about drug dealing, but rather it was more a political prosecution for popularizing real uses of cryptocurrencies.
It's weird that GP seemed to purposely obscure that.
It's just unfortunate that Trump, and now, excessive pardons are politically polarized, which could cloud the fact that justice was done today. I don't credit Trump in any way for doing "the right thing" or even having a principled position regarding Ross' case. Clearly, others with influence on Trump convinced him to sign it. It doesn't matter how the pardon happened. Biden should have already pardoned Ross because that crazy sentence shouldn't have happened in the first place.
It happens all the time in pleas and diversion agreements, so don’t frame it as a reckless lone judge going off the reservation.
Didnt have to look far, from dec 9:
https://lawandcrime.com/crime/exonerated-man-heading-back-to...
Just because he was decent with computers does not mean he should be busted out of jail.
I remember when the Democrats were the anti-war party, but Biden was escalating the Ukraine war in the final days of his presidency, and celebrated Dick Cheney's endorsement of Kamala Harris. Crazy how things have changed so much. The left unanimously viewed Bush and Cheney as obviously psychopathic war criminals, and now almost all the Neocons have jumped over to the Democrats. The left used to be extremely skeptical of globalization as evident by the Seattle WTO Protests, mass immigration as evident by Bernie Sanders' comments on its effect on workers' wages, and Big Pharma's perverse incentives to keep people sick and regularly consuming drugs. Yet the media has utterly psyop'd the progressives... it's kinda disturbing.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-i...
There is no way to actually discuss this specific story without discussing politics. A president pardoning someone is an inherently political act and that is only emphasized when it was done on his first day in office and with a statement that includes lines like "The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me." That is all part of the story of what happened here and it involves politics whether you like it or not.
Obama didn't have the votes in the Senate (to overcome the filibuster, also not as many Dems congressmen supported it as you might think). Neither did Clinton (people thought it would happen then)
Of course Trump's platform was enormously based on law & order and combatting the drug trade, which he seems to think should still be actually illegal and is not ending the war on drugs so, I don't know - make of that what you will.
Also there was a long side story with disappeared bitcoins, presumably stolen by federal investigators.
And you didn't bother to address that he ran a market for illegal goods and services, for some reason.
He organized and operated a global criminal drug ring and conspired to have people killed. The only difference between DPR and Pabla Escobar is that DPR was running his drug business in the 2010s instead of the 1980s.
You are insinuating one thing, but perhaps it is also possible reason is that the same people with those old views of the crimes have grown and their views changed. I know mine certainly have gone that way. I’d have to imagine other users have grown with me.
> Where a person has paid a monetary penalty or forfeited property, the consequences of a pardon depend in part on when it was issued. If a monetary fine or contraband cash has been transferred to the Treasury, a pardon conveys no right to a refund, nor does the person pardoned have a right to reacquire property or the equivalent in cash from a legitimate purchaser of his seized assets or from an informant who was rewarded with cash taken from the pardoned person before he was pardoned.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/presidential-pardons-sett...
though he was very stupid with how he did it, I am happy he is a free man
Any time a criminal is caught, people want them to do hard time, but people believe we're too hard on crime if you don't use examples. People think the government should spend less, but are far less likely too agree to any specific cut. People thought Musk was a genius until they realised he is also a jerk.
And while it's sometimes different people, it's suspiciously reliably consistent in what you see said and upvoted.
Yet some of these people have rearranged their entire lives around a singular politician. Ended relationships, moved, started therapy or medication.
It happens on both sides and its pretty sad.
What else would you call that?
> when he had the House and Senate after he was elected, he said "it's not a priority for me."
How could he get it through the Senate without a filibuster-proof majority?
Under our system that means he should be considered innocent of it.
This conversation is messy mostly because people are refusing to do that, which is akin to vigilantism.
A good faith discussion should only involve the charge he was convicted of and pardoned for, which is the narcotics charge.
I am curious how the American government can reimburse those pardoned.
negative reviews aren't the only review, absence of positive reviews is a signal, along with a lot of other positive reviews. later markets at least had reviews outside the markets too
if you are in the bulk and resale drug market you probably aren't getting package with your name on it to your home.
The only thing it would protect him against would be the federal murder for hire statute (18 USC 1958).
I doubt the pardon will be considered to cover that, but we'll have to wait to see the text.
Those allegations were used to deny him bail and influenced public perception, they were not part of his formal conviction or sentencing.
He was convicted on non-violent charges related to operating the Silk Road website, including drug distribution, computer hacking, and money laundering.
Does this change your opinion of sentencing being well-deserved?
That said - There is no evidence that anyone was ever killed, there is pretty thin evidence that he actually ever intended to hire any hitmen (though he may have defrauded people who thought they were hiring hitmen), and a life sentence for non-violent drug trafficking seems draconian. I certainly don't think this should have been one of Trump's priorities (I'm guessing it came through Vance, Musk, or someone else in the crypto community), but I don't have a big problem with it.
Ps. El Chapo got shorter sentence than Ross.
>What else would you call that?
This is one of those comments that accidentally reveals more than intended because I would call that "empathy". You are revealing that the only reason you think people should be concerned about politics is when it directly effects them. Some people actually genuinely care about other people and seeing someone elected who has promised to hurt people is a disturbing and troubling turn of events even if they themselves are likely to be safe.
However, murder for hire is also federal crime - see 18 USC 1958 and the DOJ CRM on this: https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
So depending on the pardon text and interpretation, he may or may not be chargeable with this statute still federally.
I agree this has zero effect on charging him at the state level, and most states do not have statute of limitations on these types of crimes (or they are very long)
source: hundreds of hours in forfeiture court
Yeah, I'm not saying they're less safe. In fact, on average, I'm willing to bet that the drugs sold on Silk Road were much safer than their street equivalents.
My point was about large sales: Silk Road moved not just personal drug sales, but also industrial quantities of drugs that were almost certainly re-sold. Those latter sales are impossible to track and (by volume) almost certainly represent the majority of "doses" sold through SR. Given that, I doubt the OP's assertion that SR itself represents a particularly effective form of harm reduction.
Or as another framing: SR gave tech dorks a way to buy cheap, clean drugs. But those aren't the people who really need harm reduction techniques; the ones who do are still buying adulterated drugs, which are derived from the cheap, clean drugs on SR.
It should eventually pop up here: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-recipients
(among other places)
Both served time.
because that's where the story really jumps the shark. I'm all for some accountability - such as the 12 years in prison already - but that particular case should have been dropped for several reasons, I've seen cases dropped for way less.
(see OJ Simpson paying money damages for a crime he was acquitted of)
Under the presumption of innocence, the legal burden of proof is thus on the prosecution, which must present compelling evidence to the trier of fact (a judge or a jury). If the prosecution does not prove the charges true, then the person is acquitted of the charges.
I don’t buy it. Citing empathy is moral language to justify bad actions.
DPR conspired but didn't actually directly kill anyone
Not saying DPR was a good person, but a little perspective is in order
"Two former federal agents have been charged with wire fraud, money laundering and related offenses for stealing digital currency during their investigation of the Silk Road ..."
Every advancement in crypto was done after the government made a move. And all subsequent moves netted the government less.
Now it takes more agencies to seize darknet markets, and most merchants and consumers get their money back because it was a multisignature transaction and the server stored nothing. Even domains have been seized back from the government.
The crypto space calls it "antifragility", as in the idea - and now history - that the asset class and infrastructure improves under pressure.
It seems like all of these people they wind up charging probably are questionable people who wanted to do the thing and probably did some other lesser things but they probably would have given up on the big thing if there wasn't a federal agency running around doing all the "the informant says the guy is lamenting not having explosives, quick someone get him some explosives" things in the background.
Not going to say Ulbricht is a hero like some of the others, but he trail blazed like none before him! And he deserves his freedom years ago.
Let's go through Trump's campaign promises: Infrastructure, Border wall, increased US manufacturing, repealing ACA, "drain the swamp". He achieved zero of those.
Biden in contrast followed up on his campaign promises: Infrastructure, increased US manufacturing, expanding ACA plus lowering costs. Among others.
That said, the recovery of assets after transfer to Treasury is settled law. [1]
> More broadly, the Court ruled in several cases during this period that pardons entitled their recipients to recover property forfeited or seized on the basis of the underlying offenses, so long as vested third-party rights would not be affected and money had not already been paid into the Treasury (except as authorized by statute).
Was covered in Osborne v. United States, Knote v. United States, In re: Armstrong's Foundry, Cent. R.R. v. Bosworth and Jenkins v. Collard
Subsequent cases make it clear that the offense is not in fact "gone."
> ... the Court in Burdick stated that a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it."
> ... then, in Carlesi v. New York, the Court determined that a pardoned offense could still be considered “as a circumstance of aggravation” under a state habitual-offender law, reflecting that although a pardon may obviate the punishment for a federal crime, it does not erase the facts associated with the crime or preclude all collateral effects arising from those facts.
The court holds that it is not in fact as if it never happened.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/sec...
It was right that they dropped the charge because it was quite obviously entrapment. But none of it reflects well on Ross Ulbricht’s character.
We tried that, it was called the opioid epidemic and Purdue was the pharmacist. We had readily available, doctor-prescribed, high quality narcotics available to anyone who wanted them and the result was an epic disaster that cost thousands of lives.
> weapons weren't permitted on the platform
My mistake.
Meanwhile a sizable campaign has materialized around this case and many people do feel he has done enough time and should be free without any restrictions
Trump released an executive order yesterday that said some of my friends are no longer considered citizens of this country. Yes, sometimes it is incredibly obvious when Washington is to blame for people's suffering.
"I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross. The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
Some number of people also OD on "traditional" street drugs every day. So, this is really not a sound argument.
But during the trial, evidence was presented that he made murder-for-hire payments, the court found that he did by a preponderance of evidence, and the court took this into account when sentencing him.
So, he wasn't convicted of it, but it is part of the reason he was sent to jail for a very long time.
---
I find the Mises Caucus at least useful in pushing to do more than simply be an affinity group for people pretending to play politics. I find partying with LP officials to be very hilarious, what a group of odd balls. But the party itself has no hope of electoral victory, which is why everyone should vote Republican in the current iteration of two-party politics from the libertarian lens.
Ya but, it's all a bit silly isn't it? Realistically those people wouldn't be doing any of that unless they were addicted to media and perhaps by consequence emotionally volatile. If I chose not to be chronically keeping up with stuff on a moment to moment basis that only has vague intangible impacts on my life or those around me, specifically online, does that make me less empathetic or less tolerant of having all my time, energy, and attention stolen from me? That's not always the case, but it often is, and if it's actually relevant, you're opting into poor mental health despite having zero control over anything even if you care, so you might as well not be so tuned in; which part is the good part again?
It's a bit fatalistic perhaps, but I feel like the greatest trick social media (and Trump) ever pulled was convincing us we'd be pariahs if we opted out. If not for chronically keeping up with nearly literally every word the new batch of chronies has to say, they might not be saying it.
Because in my opinion the ethics of operating a drug ring is not as black as white as you state.
The existence of drug rings is an inevitable outcome from the war on drugs and I would argue the blame lands on the politicians who maintain the status quo that incentivises the creation of the black market for drugs.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1138691127416...
"I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross. The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
In hindsight, the prosecution probably wished they didn't do that, since they are said to have had overwhelming evidence and proof, and there is even a Wired article about chat logs pertaining to DPR seeking services, but those are the breaks! If you don't do your due diligence, criminals can be let off on a technicality too!
the corruption what we do know about already tainted the case to the point that it should have been thrown out.
I don't care about Ulbricht, and whether he is guilty of all or some of the charges or innocent. What bothers me in this case is that the government can get away and in particular can get its way in court even with such severe criminal behavior by the government.
Rare case when i agree with Trump:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7e0jve875o
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening."
Trump even personally called Ulbricht mother. I start to wonder whether i have been all that time in blind denial about Trump.
> even though the charge of hiring a contract killer to assassinate his business competition may have been dropped
Just because the charge was dropped doesn't mean he's innocent of it. In fact, reading the chat logs makes his guilt pretty clear. Of course, because the whole operation was a scam, there's little he could have been convicted of. Yet just because the murder was never carried out doesn't mean he didn't intend to have someone assassinated. In my book, paying someone money to kill another person is definitely grounds for imprisonment.
Any two-bit governor could team up with some criminal, and make enough money to be set up for life against a pardon. Even worse if it's a president, as they could likely get off scot-free.
Trump could literally scam everyone and everyone, step down, receive a pardon from the VP, and happy days.
You're not helping by inflicting harm on yourself and those around you. If you want to canvas for the other side, donate, volunteer, great. But these people are obsessed and inflict a lot of damage on themselves for no good purpose.
Most people empathize to those that are infected with a virus. It's often out of their control. You can only offer them help and suggest they touch grass once in a while. But you shouldn't feed into their self delusions that self harm and obsession with things out of their control is healthy and a good way to live their life
The only reasonable argument for drug legalization, in my opinion, is the libertarian one - the idea that you should be free to take the drugs you want to take. I am sympathetic to this argument. I am someone who is able to make wise decisions about the drugs I take. But I also recognize that millions of my fellow citizens are not. The harm to society from drug addiction and overdoses outweighs the benefit to me getting high whenever I want.
That’s exactly what it means under the presumption of innocence.
Advocating for the continued imprisonment of someone for something they are legally considered innocent of, is quite literally vigilantism.
Is there some example of someone getting such money back?
You mean "when I read the part where the FBI agents stopped to have a drink I thought"?
This part makes your comment super confusing. Where you there then or later?
"But he was a libertarian!" Shrugs
[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1391...
There are no mandatory maximums in sentencing guidelines. Just mandatory minimums.
Where's the paper bag that holds the liquor?
Just in case I feel the need to puke
If we'd known what it'd take to get here
Would we have chosen to?
So you wanna build an altar on a summer night
You wanna smoke the gel off a fentanyl patch
Aintcha heard the news? Adam and Eve were Jews
And I always loved you to the max
If you had a trial and they can't prove that, then yes it means you are innocent of this charge in the eyes of the law
He promised to pardon the rioters during the election and it didn't hurt him. I think he decided it wouldn't hurt him (and Trump cares bout that first) and if he thought about the midterms ... maybe won't hurt then either.
Congress isn't directly involved in any of this anyway.
That's a really low bar with that bit added. "I didn't say it would be easy" was his line about his token tariffs the first term ... then he never tried again for the rest of that term.
https://pbwt2.gjassets.com/content/uploads/2017/05/15-1815_o...
That should be "considered innocent by the legal system". People are still free to come to their own conclusions--and act on them--even without a jury rendering a verdict.
Rather famously, for example, OJ Simpson was acquitted by a jury of murdering his wife. But most people these days would agree with the statement that he murdered his wife.
> He went... past the periodicals and reference desk, beyond the romance novels, and settled in at a circular table near science fiction, on the second floor... in a corner, with a view out the window and his back toward the wall.
and realized that I was in the Glen Park public library, at a circular table near science fiction on the second floor, in a corner with my back to the window, and facing directly towards where the article had just said he had sat.
Asserting moral equivalence between someone who ordered dozens of innocent women and children not just killed but dismembered - solely as a lesson for others. Orders which were actually carried out multiple times and DPR who was never charged, tried or convicted of conspiring with a supposed online hitman to kill a competitor (who both were actually FBI informants - clearly making it entrapment). Yeah, that's quite a reach.
Sure, DPR was no saint but why push for the absolute maximally extreme interpretation? Even asserting he "organized and operated a global criminal drug ring" is a stretch. My understanding is he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers. I'm not aware that Ross ever bought or sold drugs as a business or hired others to do so. There is more than a little nuance between 1) buying drugs from distributors, delivering drugs to buyers and collecting the money, and 2) running online forums and messaging for people who do those things. At most, #2 is being an accessory to #1.
Alternatively, they are themselves Ross Ulbricht, describing an out-of-body fever dream or post-traumatic flashback. This seems ... somewhat less likely.
One of these people attempted to place hits on 3-4 individuals, the other one planted a bomb on a passenger plane that resulted in the deaths of over a hundred people.
Get some perspective and/or learn your history.
(The rule of law is important, and we may let off people who deserve harsh sentences for the sake of preserving it, but it doesn't mean they deserve those sentences any less)
Some people view empathy as an active ability to "put yourself in someone else's shoes". Other people view it as a passive feeling along the lines of "it hurts to see other people hurt". If you can just stop being empathic by not thinking about it, you are in the first group. Some of us are in the second group and can't just decide to ignore it.
One of the big reasons I voted for him. He actually keeps the promises he made as far reality will allow.
What's really stupid is that keeping promises made isn't the norm for politicians, of all kinds.
that was Obama - Biden never promised that
Biden delivered on the IRA and climate change bill.
Trump promised to "drain the swamp" and filled it instead. I can't think of any major campaign promise that he fulfilled - he didn't even build the wall (probably his main promise).
And even if you are not a fan of a political group, you are the one being judgemental here on a factor that is very unlikely to be universal within the group.
Treating anyone according to political labels is divisive.
As for the current political environment, I'd say that bureaucratic authoritarianism is at least the devil we know and can be routed around by individuals, whereas autocratic authoritarianism is at best a wildcard that stands to destroy a good chunk of the laws that have actually been restraining naked power.
The prosecutors later used that evidence as support for their sentencing request after Ross was convicted of only non-violent offenses, which has a much lower standard of evidence. The allegations of murder-for-hire were never tested at trial. They may have evaporated under cross-examination by a competent defense. Our system of justice holds that Ross is innocent of those allegations unless convicted at trial.
Just to add one point, flagged comments are mostly flagged by users (as opposed to mods). We can only guess why users flag things, but from looking at a sample in the current thread it's probably because they're mostly flamewar-style comments and/or political-battle style comments (or both). Those aren't good for HN because what we want here is curious, thoughtful conversation.
The messages show he wanted and thought he was getting people murdered. But that's perfectly OK because it was actually the evil FBI he was talking to!
In any case, we turned the flags off when we saw it.
Ross though? The government alleged it but never bothered to prove it. Furthermore the government agents involved were laughably corrupt, so anything they alleged needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt. For all anybody here know, they fabricated the entire assassination story to distract the public from their plot to loot Ross's money (which unlike the assassination stuff, has been proven in court.)
A lot of republicans want a working economy. High paying jobs, low taxes.
A lot of republicans believe in a free market economy. Freedom to innovate, freedom to hire and fire.
And then we have this.
For example, for a while most prostitution and sex work seemed to be online, on places like Craigslist right next to ads for used furniture and jobs. And it seemed to be really effective in getting prostitutes off the streets.
Now that those markets were shut down, I'm seeing here in Seattle we're having pimp shootouts on Aurora and the prostitutes are more brazen than ever. Going after Craigslist has had a negative effect on our cities and has increased crime, and I suspect going after SilkRoad has had a similar impact.
For example, you could defraud suckers into buying a pump and dump memecoin. Elon has repeatedly demonstrated that nobody will prosecute, and POTUS is above the law for as long as he decides to stay in office.
And he was able to code sloppy LAMP code.
The rule of law says innocent until proven guilty.
The reason they didn't go after him for murder for hire allegations isn't because they felt bad for him or that they didn't want to waste tax payer's money.
The reason they didn't go after him for 'murder for hire' was that they knew there was no merit in it.
This is self evident.
Or they show that GP wrote an ambiguous piece of text.
They both had greater-than-life sentences, which in practice is the same thing.
He has both drugs + crypto vs just drugs. *Ignoring the accusations of hit ordering, which I would imagine all librarians cannot excuse.
Not really, this was a case of a private company deliberately pushing narcotics for profit without oversight or any associated increase in access to treatment options.
Now the "opioid epidemic" has been replaced with a "fentanyl epidemic" which is objectively a much more dangerous drug with absolutely no regulation and murderous cartels instead of doctors - and we're still throwing people in prison for the crime of being addicts rather than treating it as a medical issue.
I don't know the stats (or if it's even possible to accurately collect statistics due to prohibition) but I'm fairly certain this costs more lives than the short lived opioid epidemic.
Is it? Preponderance of the evidence is basically “more likely than not”
The Biden DOJs bungling of the insurrection, turning a jail into a martyrs club, slow rolling prosecutions, etc is ultimately worse than the insurrection for democracy.
She was a tireless advocate for his release from the start, and it became a part of the libertarian cause to see him released.
It worked. Trump courted the libertarian vote, and this was his most popular promise to them.
She's an inspiring woman. I'm so glad she lived to see this.
That people can't change their minds? That HN is a hivemind ? (news flash: it's not , it's more diverse than you actually think) or that everything is attributed to "Politics is a mind virus" ? if so, what do you mind by this term specifically?
I personally, find little substance in such comments. If you have an opinion on the matter (which seemingly you do), then please share it so that we can have a discussion about it.
So.. care to elaborate?
The U.S. is rather unique in providing a right to jury trials for most--in practice almost all, including misdemeanor--criminal cases. And this is a major factor for why sentencing is so harsh and prosecutions so slow in the U.S. In myriad ways the cost of criminal trials has induced the system to arrive at its current state favoring plea deals, with overlapping crimes and severe maximum penalties as cudgels. Be careful about what kind of "protections" you want to impose.
I also suspect Ulbricht quite likely has keys for wallets the FBI didn't find out about (and it's corrupt agents didn't steal).
CNN: <https://lite.cnn.com/2025/01/21/politics/silk-road-ross-ulbr...>
NPR: <https://www.npr.org/2025/01/21/nx-s1-5270051/trump-pardons-d...>
MSN: <https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/trump-pardons-...>
Reuters: <https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pardons-silk-road-fou...>
AP: <https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/trump-pardons-...>
In contrast: Biden didn't pardon Leonard Peltier, the president commuted his sentence. Peltier maintains his innocence.
I think the problem is that I took an artistic style in an attempt to paint a picture for the reader, but I did it in a long thread on a technical forum where people are probably mostly skimming rather than engaging in literary criticism, so I should maybe have anticipated this would be a problem.
Everyone will celebrate Trump’s good deed while he funnels more government money to companies like Palantir to do things similar to PRISM.
It's just that, in layman's terms, a pardon means "you did nothing wrong", whereas a commutation means "you did something wrong but were sentenced too harshly". As far as I know that's also what it more or less means legally (with some nuance).
I'm absolutely not a fan of "tough on crime" sentencing, but he absolutely did do something wrong, even if we ignore the contended "murder for hire" claims he should have been sent to prison for a number of years (personally, I'd say about 5-10 years). This is also by Ulbricht's own admission by the way.
This could be said for any number of people rightfully detained by the US for crimes of incredible magnitude.
You can walk anywhere, and there’s a good chance something big happened nearby.
https://jacobin.com/2022/08/joe-biden-public-option-health-c...
I can't think of any major campaign promise that he fulfilled
Renegotiate NAFTA
Lower Taxes
Move the US Embassy to Jerusalem
Nominate to the Supreme Court from the list he shared
Kill TPP
No Social Security Cuts
Take No Salary
Where he failed, it generally wasn't for trying, but because he was getting blocked by Congress, the courts, and the general bureaucracy. You only have to look at the last 48 hours to see a better prepared Trump committed to his promises.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/murdered-silk-road-employee-...
The campaign against barbarians (Steve Miller’s) crusade, Elons “not enough white babies” stuff, sucking up to the church (Vatican City is a Mussolini scheme), aspirations for conquest of Greenland and Panama, etc are all analogous to the maga playbook.
Most people are clueless. There are idiots who think they are getting $1 eggs next week. Riling up weirdos like libertarians lets the movement punch above their weight.
Why this person specifically? And why at this time? Perhaps the discussion shouldn't be about the actual subject of the pardon, and perhaps more about the motives of the pardoner...
Pablo Escobar revelled in it.
PE put bombed newspapers and killed hundreds, if not thousands of people unrelated to any criminal enterprise or to arresting him. I mean, actual innocent, minding their own business civilians. Over 4000 murders have been directly attributed to the actions and orders of Escobar. Estimates to the actual count range closer to 8000.
DPR went over to the dark side a bit in that entrapment racket, or at least it seems so.
Thinking that someone needs to be murdered isn’t necessarily a character flaw, imho.
It depends on what DPR was led to believe about this fictional person. It is reasonable to imagine that the FBI took every possible measure to make their fake victim seem as murder worthy as possible. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that the “victim” may have been painted as a purveyor of child trafficking, CSAM, or other things repugnant. My point is we don’t know. And if we don’t know, we should reserve judgment.
Ah yes, he accumulated over $5 billion in Bitcoins by entirely legal means. He didn't facilitate the wholesale distribution of illegal (and dangerous) drugs at all. He never contributed to the massive distribution of Fentanyle-laced dopes to the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. He was just the online guy!
This all is mostly idiotic tribal fight when you hate each other because you just must to hate someone.
I profoundly hope for star trek like civilisation in the future
They absolutely do that all the freaking time. Especially when other convictions already result in a long sentence.
Prosecutors have limited bandwidth, and just wasting time adding one more life imprisonment on top of a life imprisonment is not helpful.
Ross heard that one of his Silk Roads moderators was arrested, and so he hired someone to kill the mod? The assassin sent a confirmation photo of his mod, asphyxiated and covered in Campbell's Chicken and Stars Soup?? The supposed assassin was actually a corrupt DEA agent who later served federal prison time for crimes so embarrassing that they were never fully disclosed?!?!
There is some kind of thorny moral question I cannot quite wrap my brain around.
Ross did not successfully have anyone killed, but it seems that he must have thought he was successful?
Ross (it is alleged, and chat logs seem to show) ordered someone's death and paid for it and got explicit confirmation that they were dead. [actually several someones.] Did he feel like a murderer at this point? What a fascinating, real life Raskolnikov style figure.
Later, perhaps much later, he gets strong evidence that the murder was fake. Nothing has changed in the outside world after he learns this -- the victim is no more alive before or after he learns this. Does this change his identity? Is he more or less of a murderer than before?
Do the people who kill with modified Xbox controllers from a warehouse in Las Vegas do the same kind of killing that Ross thought he did?
And then there is some kind of moral thought experiment happening at a Silicon Valley Rationalist, Effective Altruism kind of scale that I can't quite wrap my head around. Do people matter as much in person as if they're just blips on a screen you'll never meet? If Ross could have sent 1 BTC to prevent fatal malaria in a dozen young kids, thousands of miles away, but he didn't, should he feel responsible in some way for their death? Is he about equally responsible for them as for the online people he is pretty sure he ordered killed from afar, but never met?
It's just a lot. The whole story is supernaturally intense; it's hard to believe it was real. It will make for great TV.
See, e.g.
- https://www.vice.com/en/article/murdered-silk-road-employee-... for the faux forum moderator killing
- https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/silk-road-drug-vendor-w... for the other faux five killings (another scam on Ross - he thought he was having extortionists killed? he kept getting confirmations?)
Biden did commute the sentence of several other non-violent cases just last week or thereabouts, and Trump has been talking about Ulbricht for quite some time so it's not a complete surprise.
I guess the whole "murder for hire" thing excluded him from the "non-violent" category. But how that got tacked on seems very odd; the judge basically said "we didn't really handle it in the court case and it wasn't a charge, but it was mentioned a few times and it seemed basically true, so I included it in the sentencing". Like, ehh, okay?
To be honest, I don't really understand much of the logic ("logic") of the US justice system....
The democrats are broken. They keep running women, and not getting messages out that appeal to the average voter. They lost their core reliable voters (old people, Catholics, unions) and are alienating more traditional voting blocs like African Americans and some Hispanic populations with the constant drama over trans issues. Nobody heard about anything this election cycle other than abortion and transgender issues. It’s a big tent party, but when progressives steal all the oxygen, the wheels fall off the train.
They need to run a tall white dude with good hair who talks about economic opportunity, fair play and protecting the future.
My parents live in the country. A farmer (whose father was the county Democratic Party chair) has a massive sign “Trump. I don’t like him, but we need him”. That’s the 2024 election unfortunately.
Nope. This doesn't mean anything, and the charges can be picked up again.
Oh wait, no. He was pardoned completely.
I would much rather the police be focused on stopping violent crime rather than these victimless crimes.
Legitimizing drugs/prostitution makes is easier to regulate and ultimately make safer. Shoving this stuff into a black/gray market is what ultimately creates violent crime.
On the contrary, he can just bury it in the first 48 hours. This will fade into the background soon enough but that group is kept happy.
In 2021, an appeals court opined that: “not every acceptance of a pardon constitutes a confession of guilt.”
I thought the 2021 case was a Supreme Court case, and I was incorrect. I think in the public eye the pardon is viewed differently based on however the story is told.
I prefer corporations because I can voluntarily choose to take my business elsewhere, or even better, create my own competitor. Why I dislike the government is that it's the ultimate monopoly, with guns, and operated mostly by power-hungry sociopaths who will use that power to destroy innocent lives.
Given the corporation or the state, I take the corporation every time.
By the way, I thought the post was written well. It did take a little thinking but it was an interesting take.
We tried that in SF, I was a supporter. Seeing it first hand with a with a family member in public school flipped me. Dumping money into people who aren't ready to convert back into tax payers (even in the most basic sense) while schools got the back burner was enough. Not to mention the tents.
but they didn't, so we can forget about concept of justice.
you're trying to look like you don't understand or aren't aware that jury didn't convict him of murder-for-hire.
He chose a trial by jury, not by a judge. Nevertheless the judge herself decided that he is guilty of the murder-for-hire, and additionally the judge used significantly lower standard than required for conviction.
It has to start somewhere
So you can’t agree with the original sentence and then say he “absolutely deserved to be released.”
Without the chance of parole, a pardon from the president is one of the few ways he could get out of jail.
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!"
Honestly I'm hoping he gets an X account so I can follow him and see which it is lol
> Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me, and suddenly as I was reading I could look up and see exactly the chair he had been in, where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
Alternately:
> Ulbricht had walked into the public library
gives the game away.
If you still want to play around a bit:
> I could see where Ulbricht walked into the public library. The table he sat at. I looked up and saw where the plainclothes police had positioned themselves, how they had arranged a distraction.
That way you are leaving some ambiguity, but are not directly lying with the tenses.
Why is this an either or?
SF spends about $1 billion dollars on schools [1] and while the program ran it had around a $40 million dollar budget [2]. For an area that houses huge tech companies, this doesn't seem like an extreme budget to be working with.
> Not to mention the tents.
Ok? And what options would you give these people, just be homeless somewhere else where you can't see them?
[1] https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/...
[2] https://sfstandard.com/2021/11/17/supervisors-approve-6-5m-i...
> he accumulated over $5 billion in Bitcoins by entirely legal means.
I never claimed he didn't break the law. I said the opposite, that he's guilty of being an accessory to drug dealing.
> He didn't facilitate the wholesale distribution of illegal (and dangerous) drugs at all.
I said "he ran an online marketplace which drug dealers used to sell to their customers."
> He was just the online guy!
I said he's "no saint" and in an earlier post in this thread I also said he deserved a jail sentence and that "ten years was enough" for what he was charged with and convicted of as a first-time offender.
I challenged your assertion of "no difference" between DPR and Pablo Escobar as extreme and your response is to mischaracterize my position as DPR committing no crime instead of responding to my actual position that he's a criminal who is guilty and deserved ten years in jail but not two life sentences plus 40 years without parole. There is a middle ground between "completely innocent of anything" and "no different than Pablo Escobar." I don't understand why you can't acknowledge such a middle ground might exist - and that it is my position.
Otherwise it's "your $100,000 in dollars in cash looks guilty to me."
If there was enough evidence to demonstrate that he attempted to murder someone, why wasn't he charged and convicted of it?
Also, 2 of the DEA agents involved in his investigation were convicted of fraud in relation to the case.
I do believe he probably did attempt to have someone killed, but I'm far from certain of it, and think it should have no bearing on the case if there's not enough evidence to convict him.
I doubt I would be able to get away with "bb88 v $2B". It should so belong to me.
And Ross made millions from those people selling drugs on his site. Quite possibly more than any person selling drugs on his site.
And attempted to hire hitmen to prevent anyone stopping it. Not even as a potential "crime of passion", but solely to protect his money train.
And there's this whole false narrative of "youthful indiscretions". He didn't start building the site til he was 28 and was mostly running it in his early 30s.
Also, Ross wasn't selling those things. He was just operating a market where other people sold things.
If someone gets 10 years for smoking weed, the solution is not to put someone in prison for 20 years for punching someone.
The LP chairwoman has made very interesting political moves this election.
It’s normal to feel bad for someone you know impacted by bad a policy. Ruining your life on their behalf is not empathetic.
That said, it was entrapment and everyone involved should be deeply ashamed and prosecuted. At least those two agents did get some wire fraud charges [0], but the entrapment angle got explored because the charges were dropped.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-federal-agents-charged...
Also, Trump actually got a mixed reception at the convention at best.
Including such evidence in sentencing consideration is not uncontroversial in the U.S. However, it can cut both ways, in that a judge can consider extenuating circumstances in a defendant's life to reduce sentencing. We want judges to evaluate cases and make sentencing adjustments where appropriate. So, I don't think I'd do away with the practice. The real issue is that this specific judge went absolutely bonkers far beyond the 20 years the prosecution asked for during sentencing (which was already very high) and sentenced Ross to two life sentences plus 40 years without parole.
Most of us who are happy that Ross was pardoned agree that he was guilty and deserved a jail sentence for the crimes he was convicted of. The only problem is the sentence was so wildly excessive for a non-violent, first-time offender. Compared to guidelines and other sentences it was just crazy and wrong. Ross has served over ten years. Now he's free. That's probably about right.
There can be whatever reason he wasn't convicted, it doesn't change the fact that he wasn't and presumed innocence is the legal default.
For all his talk of being progressive and cultivation of a youthful maverick image of his own, you would have never seen such a move from Obama and forget about it under the mealy mouthed Biden or a hypothetical Hillary administration. With Trump, rather uniquely and singularly, it happened.
Ulbricht made many mistakes, less so morally but definitely legally, of the kind with which he could have expected to cause punishment to rain down upon him, but the way in which his case was managed and the way in which he was sentenced truly were both disgusting in numerous ways.
They were classic examples of prosecutorial and political vengeance and give much truth to Trump's own description of the same as "The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!”
If you in any way mistrust heavy-handed government prosecutions and persecutions, it's hard to disagree much, even if it's also not hard to imagine Trump being just as abusive in other contexts where prosecution of enemies would suit his interests and personal vengeance.
Now if we see him pardon Snowden too, i'd happily give a standing ovation.
Before someone here smugly chimes in about how Ulbricht also tried to hire out a murder by contract, bear in mind that this accusation was riddled with holes, suspicions of entrapment and in any case wasn't formally used for his sentencing, AND still wouldn't justify the kind of onerously grotesque sentence that was dumped on him. Pedophiles who committed child murders have been sentenced to less than Ulbricht was.
Why is he pardoning a drug trafficker?
That's not very conclusive.
he pardoned Chelsea Manning I think you're forgetting.
There are lots of studies about the unintended consequences of prohibition.
It's better to ignore the rational reasons to oppose them and focus on the emotional ones. For starters, people are repulsed by their cruelty.
Regardless of Ross Ulbricht's crimes, the pro's and con's of the pardon deserve considered discussion.
Are you bringing thoughtful and interesting considerations to this thread?
For example; will he actually wear an ankle bracelet for the rest of his life under the terms of a full and unconditional pardon?
I just learned that he was an Eagle Scout.
Not exactly the résumé of someone getting locked up and the key thrown away.
So while wolfgang42 wasn't there when Ulbricht was actually arrested, their realization created a vivid mental image of the event unfolding in that space, which made the story feel more immersive.
In short: they were reading about an old event, but it happened to occur in the same spot they were sitting at that moment. Hope that clears it up!
For purposes of random citizens saying "he tried to commit murder", no. We're absolutely not bound by that same standard of proof.
In terms of small government, there is news about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) every single day. There will be a massive downsizing in the federal workforce and the regulatory state over the next 4 years. This move towards small government is the thing that excites me most.
I don't know the original reasons for his apparent perma-dead'ing (users can option to "show dead" and see these comments) but I suspect it's due to going fully Australian wih swear words and invectives when he gets a bit passionate about something .. or even just adding colour for a lark, as we do.
People hate congress. Yet each person can vote to only change one congressman at a time.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx
October of 2001 they were up to 80% approval. Left to their own devices by Aug 2002 they were below 50%.
There's an argument to be made that congress doesn't really represent the people at large. Some people go on to make the argument that through gerrymandering politicians choose who's elected, and not the people.
SR allowed children to buy addictive poison without any regulation whatsoever, and Ross profited off of those transactions.
These are not comparable institutions.
However, the Silk Road allowed me to try LSD as an 18 year old in a safe(r) way than those that came before me.* It was those experiences that revealed I’d been depressed most of my life, and that it also didn’t have to be that way, by way of experiencing what that would feel like. I went on to seek new experiences, make new friends for the first time in my life, engage with professional mental health support, went to university, and started multiple businesses. It also introduced my staunchly-atheist self to the experience of spiritual/transcendental experiences, and how those can exist separately from, and don’t require, belief in deities or religion.
It can’t be said where I’d have wound up without those experiences, but my own understanding of myself feels pivotally tied to something I couldn’t have gone through without Ross’ actions. Still, I acknowledge it appears more likely that not he tried to have people killed, and regardless of the circumstances surrounding this, that is condemnable.
*Had it not been for an anonymous group at the time, The LSD Avengers, posting reviews using gas chromatography mass-spectrometry and reagent tests of suppliers on the site, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to take the risk of trying what I’d received. LSD is physiologically safe, not to say anything of any psychological risks, but knowing the dose allowed me to enter into the shallow end of the pool, so to speak. Common substitutes however cannot have the same said of them.
If I’d lived in a time and place that allowed for state-funded drug testing (something my own state has in fact recently abolished despite wildly successful trials), perhaps things would’ve not required a Ross Ulbricht to exist in my case, but I see this as a failure of the system and of drug prohibition as a whole.
Ross would’ve existed one way or another I believe, for better or worse, by another name, had he chosen another path. Now he gets the chance to try his life again. I felt the same way.
Also, your response didn't respond to what I said (which was about previously only responding to a straw man I didn't say). I like to think we strive in good faith for a little higher level of discourse here on HN. Try to do better.
He successfully created a tool to undermine one of the most unjust and predatory policies of the US State - the policy of drug prohibition.
He's a damn hero. I don't understand why Trump, who most of the time seems like a simply awful human being with no end of appetite for state power, has chosen to do this, but I'll certainly take it.
It's beyond obvious that voting and other mechanics of representative rule have not succeeded at simple policy change such as ending prohibition. I look forward to several decades of truth trumping power in the form of the internet undermining states, until the asinine mode of political organization known as the nation state is deprecated entirely.
There are not a shred of evidence that Ross ever had the slightest thing to do with those conversations, and it seems much more likely that the DEA used the DPR account to frame him.
It is clear as mud. We now know:
* At least four other people had access to the DPR account, by design.
* One of those people (the person whose murder was supposedly ordered, who has vehemently defended Ross!) asserts that he knew that Nob (who we know who was a DEA agent) was one of those four people.
* Nob is a serial liar, and is now in prison for having stole some of the bitcoin from this operation.
...what about that make clear that Ross was within a mile of this supposed 'murder for hire' business?
The inflow/manufacture of narcotics won't be affected at all. You'll still have a constant new influx of junkies, and it you'll essentially by funding this widescale and expensive solution forever.
Much better to simple make drug trafficing and manufacture a capital offense. It's been extremely effective in a lot of jurisdictions. Even if you're squeamish about the death penalty, a back of the envelope calculations will tell you you're saving a lot more lives than you spend due to decreased overdoses, drug wars etc,
Another facet of empathy is being able to understand other perspectives besides your own. Maybe this was your interpretation of the bounds of the conversation. It doesn't mean that is the only interpretation.
Here are the exact words from the comment I replied to: "Ended relationships, moved, started therapy or medication." I don't think those are signs someone whose "ability to enjoy life is ruined". In fact, I see those as signs of someone enjoying life more by removing or addressing things that sap the joy out of life.
Unmitigated nonsense. The evidence that he was involved in this is somewhere between unreliable and nonexistent, and he (and the supposed victim) have disputed it since day one. WTF do you mean "openly"?
I am.
He built a tool that allowed people to circumvent a wantonly unjust legal framework by an aging, decreasingly relevant state.
We need more of that.
As with so many matters of crime, punishment, and high dudgeon, the physical reality of the situation always feels so banal. Dread Pirate Roberts’ lawless dark kingdom, where he commissions trans-national assassinations… looks a lot like a nerdy dude’s laptop on a municipal library table.
This standard is an enormous document, https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines which lays out the rules for adjustments. Evidence is admissible (by both sides!) for sentencing, with a lower standard of evidence and burden of proof, to either raise or lower the sentence within the very wide numbers of what the conviction was for. So the Judge in this case found that the lower burden of proof was met for additional violent crimes being committed (with Ulbricht's legal team having an opportunity to rebut), and that impacts the sentencing calculations.
Not a lawyer, but I have listened to US lawyers on podcasts.
A developer builds a platform like eBay but without censorship that can be used by the drug trafficker
It's not the same thing
Jeff Skilling (Enron) served 12 years in jail for insider trading and securities.
Not saying that Skilling, Maddoff or SBF shouldn't have gone to jail. They deserved it. But I do find it interesting that financial crimes can tend to be the most harshly judged, likely because of who they impact (the people with money) and because they cause distrust of the financial system as a whole.
> Madoff stole $20-35B
Not to defend Madoff, but it's not like he made off with that money himself, so I'm not sure "stole" is the correct term. Most of that money went to investors -- it just went to a different set of investors than the ones who had put that money in (the nature of a Ponzi scheme).
you forgot Chelsea Manning; so I stopped reading there
The police finds my soap in the lab of someone who blew up a building. Some people died. Was it my fault, knowing how it was being used? Did I do anything illegal? Unethical? Immoral?
But the war on some drugs are a failure, but also impossible to change due to stupid people, so Silk Road and crypto was a means to work around this, while lowering crime and turning it into an iterated prisoners dilemma so that quality etc could stay high.
Yep, Twitter has had aggressive authentication gating for almost 2yrs now and HN frequently has Twitter links
The fact that the majority of listings on the site were for personal use quantities suggests that the majority of sales were to end users rather than traffickers.
It's hard to dispute that this saved lives and I would speculate that it saved many lives.
>That doesn't mean that large sales weren't made, or that those weren't in fact a significant portion of the site's revenue.
Nobody made any claim that large sales weren't made, of course they were.
It seems questionable Trump even understands or cares what Silk Road did or how it worked.
Or: I can remove that ingredient but it goes against my principle of not accepting constraints.
> Some people died. Was it my fault, knowing how it was being used? Did I do anything illegal? Unethical? Immoral?
Isn't a common critique of the justice system that white-collar crime gets you less prison time (in nicer jails) than being for ex a drug dealer?
Plenty of finance scammers and conmen who stole millions get <5-10yr sentences
like Secret Service and DEA agents getting immediately caught trying to steal Bitcoin from Silk Road?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/03/30/federal-agent...
Also he's handing out tariff exemptions to his political allies like candy.
There's not some high minded principal or strategy here. It's graft and spite. Trump even seems to be holding out the tariff threat as leverage to force the sale of TikTok.
Look you can agree with this stuff if you want but none of it is remotely aligned with libertarian principles. Even squishy ones.
See below; the observation is that the people who were buying individual quantities of drugs from SR were not at serious risk of harm in the first place, relative to typical at-risk populations. Anecdotally, the people I know who bought drugs from SR during its heydey were very much test-everything-twice types.
By contrast, the large sales that SR facilitated almost certainly ended up in street drug markets, where harm reduction would have made a difference. But those people didn't benefit from SR's community standards, insofar as they existed: they got whatever adulterated product made it to them.
This is the basic error in saying "most sales were small": the big sales are what matter, socially speaking.
Letting the homeless block streets with tents is not the same as caring for them, or rehabilitating them.
The Paris Agreement is a joke; it has done nothing. It's just a bunch of big-ass politicians and a few celebrities bloviating about not solving the problem.
Look, I'm not disputing at all that global warming is an issue, or that we need to solve it, or that humans cause it, or whatever. But the Paris Agreement and those all other agreements are all about big idiots pretending to do stuff.
Probably the most effective thing we have done globally to combat warming is changing to electric cars, and that's NOT the Paris Agreement. Not even close.
The Paris Agreement is the ultimate politician's move. Global warming is a technical problem and must be solved by technical means.
Ironically, the one person who is doing more than all the politicians combined to solve this is backing the current administration. Twitter is nuts over if he did a Nazi salute, while doing nothing to focus on solving what they believe is the biggest issue in our lifetimes.
Tasked with investigating Silk Road he ended up in jail himself, along with his co-workers.
There's a very good reason none of this stuff ever went to trial, it would be incredibly embarrassing for the agencies involved to see the light of day.
You are hopelessly lost my friend, unable to comprehend the concept of illegal activity.
Let's be honest anyways, the cryptocurrency "industry" as we know it is less than 4 years old, and in 4 years it may be gone. Exchanges like coinbase and so-called defi innovators like A16Z need this legally-dubious signalling or they'll risk never having another leader corrupt enough to sanction their behavior.
Most recent pardons have been announced in documents labeled "Executive Grant of Clemency", so I don't think "clemency" and "pardons" are as distinct as you're saying.
And while I know you said "usually", I can't help but note that Hunter Biden was pardoned for any federal thing he may have done, anywhere, anytime in the last 10 years. Some of the last-minute pardons were pretty broad as well.
Why is a terrorist and would-be assassin of a former President getting lifetime supervised release? None of the media coverage of the case, going back years, makes that clear. However, a footnote in the original criminal complaint against[2] him offers a likely explanation:
"In or around the end of March 2022, United States immigration officials conducted an asylum interview with SHIHAB. After the interview was conducted United States immigration officials advised the FBI that SHIHAB may have information regarding an ISIS member that was recently smuggled into the United States."
With a little reading between the lines of the criminal complaint, a very different story emerges: Shihab never dealt with any terrorists. He was a paid middleman between two government informants or agents pretending to be terrorists. He took their money, played along, and ratted them out to INS during an asylum interview. After that, once they realized the jig was up, the FBI arrested and charged him at its earliest opportunity - for the plot they had created and paid him to participate in, and which he in turn had informed the government about.
1. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdoh/pr/columbus-man-sentenced-...
2. https://truthout.org/app/uploads/2022/06/Shihab-complaint.pd...
By all official accounts crime is down in SF, but many agree something has changed in the way homeless carry. I would dare to use the word "entitled" to describe the cavalier way large encampments and bicycle chop shops are set up.
A sentence must balance the gravity of the offense with the circumstances of the offender, while still allowing for hope and redemption. A life sentence without parole forecloses this balance.
It's always struck me as odd that the United States - a nation that is packed with far more Christians than Canada - doesn't shape its system of incarceration to be more inline with Christian values and the teachings of Jesus.
Canada's explicit rejection of life sentences without parole (LWOP) through decisions like R v Bissonnette more closely aligns with Jesus's teachings about redemption and mercy. In Canada, even those convicted of the most serious crimes retain the possibility of parole - not a guarantee of release, but a recognition of the potential for rehabilitation that echoes Jesus's teachings about transformation and second chances.
This philosophical difference manifests in several ways:
- In Canada, the emphasis on rehabilitation over retribution is reflected in the term "correctional services" rather than "penitentiary system"
- Canadian prisons generally offer more rehabilitative programs and education opportunities
- The Canadian system places greater emphasis on Indigenous healing lodges and restorative justice practices that align with Jesus's focus on healing broken relationships
- Canadian courts have explicitly recognized that denying hope of release violates human dignity, which parallels Jesus's teachings about the inherent worth of every person
The contrast becomes particularly stark when considering multiple murders. While many US jurisdictions impose multiple life sentences to be served consecutively (effectively ensuring death in prison), the Canadian Supreme Court has ruled this practice unconstitutional, maintaining that even the worst offenders should retain the possibility - though not guarantee - of earning redemption through genuine rehabilitation.
This doesn't mean Canada is soft on crime - serious offenders still serve lengthy sentences, and parole is never guaranteed. But the maintenance of hope for eventual redemption, even in the worst cases, better reflects Jesus's teachings about grace, transformation, and the limitless possibility of spiritual renewal.
The irony is particularly pointed given that the US has a much higher proportion of self-identified Christians than Canada, yet has adopted a more retributive approach that seems less aligned with Jesus's teachings about mercy and redemption.
But hey, you just have to wait for the right president to be elected and you might get your chance. So I guess that's something.
Sorry, that’s just dishonest. Those coins were worth less than 30 million at the time of his arrest.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/10/25/fbi-sa...
A preponderance of the evidence is the greater weight of the evidence after all evidence is considered. Heuristics along the lines of "yeah that fits my priors"—which is what is actually meant by "more likely than not"—are explicitly disallowed.
If Joe Smith in Smalltown, Ohio was hit by a blue bus, and hammock owns 51 of the 100 blue buses in Smalltown whereas torstenvl owns 49 of the 100 blue buses, that is insufficient evidence by itself to prevail by a preponderance standard against hammock in a civil suit.
IANAL, but I think you should be in the clear as long as you left a big red lipstick kiss on the bottom of the card.
This is why we try not to sentence the way you are suggesting.
The only place I've seen anything about "transgender issues" is from the Republicans saying that that is the only thing Democrats are running on.
Wasn't it 60% for China, 25% for Canada and Mexico and 10% for the rest of the planet?
Generatove AI has all but solved the Frame Problem.
Those expressions where intractable bc of the impossibility to represent in logic all the background knowledge that is required to understand the context.
It turns out, it is possible to represent all that knowledge in compressed form, with statistical summarisation applied to humongous amounts of data and processing power, unimaginable back then; this puts the knowledge in reach of the algorithm processing the sentence, which is thus capable of understanding the context.
If he had been running an IRL drug and gun facilitation marketplace in my city, I would have said 20 years was appropriate.
But when the feds make it a techno-political issue, I feel the urge to push back.
Wikipedia suggests this was because he was already sentenced to double life imprisonment. Clearly prosecutors should not waste time pursuing charges that won't really impact a criminal's status, do you disagree?
How many languages do you speak? A large part of this site speaks at least two, and usually English is not the first one of them.
I was referring to hot and cold wallet practices, methods for unlinking transaction activity from your KYC’d funds, and the immaturity of multi-signature at the time
> That’s because he was the Silk Road employee implicated in an elaborate, and fake, murder-for-hire scheme, created in part by a corrupt Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent.
Your second paragraph is setting up a false dichotomy. It's not the corporation xor the state. Fundamentally, corporations as we know them are creatures of the state - government chartered legal entities, running on the government's legal system, with government granted liability shields. But the main point is that where the nominal state disappears, the corporation(s) step into the power vacuum and become the inescapable government. To be able to take your business elsewhere or create your own competitor, you need individual rights. While the underlying physics supports this directly for some abilities, for others you need coordinated collective action. This often takes place through the state, meaning that blanket calls to dismantle parts of the current government can often serve as cover for enabling newer less-constrained government. Think yin-yang and NP/Turing completeness circular reductions, not towering software builds.
Canada didn't have Prohibition to the extent that the US did, which in turn led to the rise and financing of organized crime. All the rest of it fell out of that: Organized crime was violent and ruthless, so people started demanding oppressive laws and harsh penalties to deal with it.
One of the major problems with this is that the cycle is reinforced by law enforcement. You sensibly get rid of prohibition, but then the mob is still around and starts looking for a new source of funding, so you get more extortion rackets etc. Then a law enforcement bureaucracy is created to deal with it, but long-term the mob was going to die out without prohibition anyway and the law enforcement efforts just speed it up a bit. Except now you have a law enforcement bureaucracy with nothing to do, so they lobby to recreate Prohibition in the form of the Controlled Substances Act, which reconstitutes the mob in the form of the drug cartels.
But now instead of saying "prohibition failed, let's repeal it" they say "we need more resources" -- institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are they solution. So the Feds fight any attempts to legalize drugs because it would put them out of a job, but as long as there is prohibition there is organized crime, and organized crime is violent and terrible and a ratchet to ever-harsher penalties.
It isn't supposed to cut both ways. The prosecution is supposed to have the higher burden, and admitting unproven allegations is excessively prejudicial.
> In myriad ways the cost of criminal trials has induced the system to arrive at its current state favoring plea deals, with overlapping crimes and severe maximum penalties as cudgels. Be careful about what kind of "protections" you want to impose.
The lesson from this should be to make the protections strong enough that they can't be thwarted like this. For example, prohibit plea bargaining so that all convictions require a trial and it's forbidden to impose any penalty for demanding one.
It's not supposed to be efficient. It's supposed to be rare.
The differences in the system probably have more to do with electing vs appointing. Electing is more likely to send someone tougher on crime vs well balance.If officials were elected in Canada you would see the same outcome.
Not to mention private vs public prisons and when you make it a business you have to find new customers vs a cost center you want to limit.
He was convicted of:
1. Conspiracy to traffic narcotics
2. Continuing Criminal Enterprise (CCE) (sometimes referred to as the “kingpin” charge)
3. Computer Hacking Conspiracy
4. Conspiracy to Traffic in Fraudulent Identity Documents
5. Money Laundering ConspiracyGlad that ChatGPT, probably like GP themselves, is a visualizer and actually can create a "vivid mental image" of something. For those of us with aphantasia, that is not a thing. Myself, I too was mighty confused by the text, which read literally like a time travel story, and was only missing a cat and tomorrow's newspaper.
What do you think about Trump's actions on electric cars then?
Basically, if you've done something wrong, but can drum up enough support for the winning political candidate, you get a chance to cut a deal and wipe the slate clean.
To those that say he's rehabilitated etc, I'm sure there were other worthy prisoners too, but why does this particular guy happen to get the pardon on day one?!
Same with the pardoned capitol rioters.
It just feels like a very slippery downwards slope, where political back scratching trumps everything else.
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.
Canada definitely had (has?) organized crime in that era, although maybe not to the extent the US did. Check out the Papalias[1] (my great great uncle was a quasi-crooked cop on their payroll), as well as the Musitanos and Luppinos, for a couple southern-Ontario examples. There’s still a (relatively) small but fairly influential Italian mafia presence in a lot of smaller southern Ontario cities, and at least a few of the Papalias are still living off of family money (my family’s cottage, ironically not the side with the crooked great great uncle, is next door to one of the Papalia’s cottages).
Hamilton is the way it is today in large part due to the mob activity from the 40s-90s.
9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
14 “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
[1] https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2018/08/16/silk-road-founder-r...
One does not need a gang and violence to sell drugs online. Selling drugs offline, gangs and violence will get involved.
It’s my understanding in the US that you are innocent until proven guilty, right? Therefore, he is indeed innocent of those crimes, since he was not proven guilty. Unless I’m missing something on how the US justice system works.
If something happens to a lesser extent and what does happen has a lot of the consequences spill over into the US, it's not that surprising that the backlash is more severe in the US.
Also, there will likely still be some pleas. Some people own up to being guilty and want to move on.
There is an absolute dearth of lawyers to support this. We just need more courts and more judges for the initial surge of a couple of years.
When the laws are ones that everyone agrees should be crimes, like murder, spend the resources to convict anyone who commits the crime.
The problem turned out to be that some people got so fixated on formal logic they apparently couldn't spot that their own mind does not do any kind of symbolic reasoning unless forced to by lots of training and willpower.
The US Attorneys made a lot of publicity out of the murder-for-hire conspiracy allegations against Ulbricht in their indictments and in pre-trial media ("although there is no evidence that these murders were actually carried out." as the indictment itself obliquely says).
Ulbricht's defense could have come up with a plausible alternative explanations that he knew redandwhite was a scammer trying to extort him with a story involving nonexistent people, and was just playing along with him for whatever reasons.
[*] If the prosecution had not actually dropped those charges at trial, it would have been confirmed at trial which of the six identities were fictitious/nonexistent and whether all the accounts were managed by the same DEA agents. Hard to imagine that at least one juror wouldn't have formed a skeptical opinion about government agents extorting a person to conspire to kill fictitious people (why didn't the indictment just focus on nailing him on the lesser charges?). If this wasn't a Turing Test on when is an alleged conspiracy not a real conspiracy, then someday soon we'll see one.
ArsTechnica covered these facts in 2015:
[0]: "The hitman scam: Dread Pirate Roberts’ bizarre murder-for-hire attempts. On the darkweb, no one is who they seem." 2/2015 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/the-hitman-scam-...
[1]: Silk Road’s alleged hitman, “redandwhite,” arrested in Vancouver https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/silk-roads-alleg...
Ross was given a life sentence without possibility of parole an incomparable sentence in relation to all other parties that were involved.
Instead we think of “the average person” and project that on everyone.
You looked at the small libertarian interest group, and based on that projected how everyone is. Now you look at hacker news and you’re projecting how everyone is. This projection is where our reasoning fails.
We need gangster hoodlums on the street because lookie here sonny, an online marketplace is dangerous and if it isn't dangerous enough well feds will make it that way.
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.
1) It's safer to buy something online and have it mailed to your house than go pick it up from some shady dude.
2) On the street you would often get duds or spiked product, online reputations were built up over time and important to be maintained (think uber/ebay stars).
Overall silk road probably increased the amount of drug activity but made each incident safer. Not sure what the overall impact would be.
So many people are in jail for crimes they didn’t commit, or for non-violent offenses that were committed out of hardship and a need to eat.
They gave evidence he tried to have someone killed, and that he saw confirmation it had been done.
Even if the accusation is somehow false and he didn’t order that killing, how many people did he actually kill just by running Silk Road?
I’m so sick of the narrative that aww shucks he’s a good kid from a good family and he just made a boo-boo and didn’t mean to build a multi-billion dollar illicit fortune from trafficking deadly drugs and outright poisons all over the world.
If this dude wasn’t a money-raised white kid from California no-one would care.
Although the murder-for-hire charges were dropped, transcripts published by Wired in 2015[0] show Ross Ulbricht openly discussing contract killings: he haggles over price, suggests interrogation, and even provides personal details about a target’s family (“Wife + 3 kids”). These charges were dismissed partly because he had already been sentenced to life in New York, making further prosecution moot—but the transcripts themselves factored into his sentencing. No killings occurred (he was likely scammed), yet the conversations challenge the notion that his crimes were purely non-violent. He was willing to have someone killed to protect his idea.
[0]: https://archive.is/pRG3U.
Presidents of both parties abuse pardon power with monarchic glee. The president now has full immunity. The incoming president and his wife launched crypto-tokens whose only utility is to allow foreigners to send billions of dollars to them anonymously (of course with full identification of the buyer in private communications thanks to the crypto private key, so you can be sure of who sent the bribe).
People are obviously tired and overwhelmed. It's hard to pay attention because Trump has recently threatened so much more: invading foreign allies, military trials for political opponents, using the army against citizens, and so on. When he carries through with just 20% of what he said, it's supposed to be no big deal. But the institutions and norms are destroyed and they don't magically come back if the other party wins.
It seems that from day 1 US is moving quite far from the place it was and projected itself to others for past decades. More ruthless, money above all, not much fairness in international dealings. Maybe US will be richer after those 4 years, but at current trajectory it will lose a lot of friends and partners.
Please realize this - for Europe, China starts to look like a great not only business but also military partner, much more reliable long term. This is how much such moves can fuck up things.
Here twitter is not the main source, there are better ones (both better quality and more user friendly).
I would like a rule to avoid submissions that are login walled unless this is the primary source and an open mirror is available.
Many of us can't. Personally, for nearly three decades I thought the ability to vividly experience a book this way was just some overused and extremely exaggerated metaphor - and then I discovered aphantasia is a thing, and I score close to top of its severity scale.
So perhaps it's less about your starting point, and more about describing a frame of mind some in the audience don't have, and can't relate to.
Curiously, I don't recall ever seeing this particular style of writing before, in any of the books I ever read.
The purpose of eBay isn’t to facilitate illicit transactions, doing so is abusing the platform.
SR was very much for illicit transactions.
Having harm reduction sites doesn't mean you get to shoot whenever and whatever
SF's governance is delirious honestly
It is important drugs stay illegal so powerful connected interests can maintain high profit and control. Without that, simple cocaine/meth/marijuana is just an agricultural or chemical commodity with essentially the margin of generic OTC drugs.
The manhattan project was very intentionally an attempt to create a WMD, it wasn’t a side-effect of something else. You don’t have a point here.
I don’t think we can infer anythin about how LLMs think based on this.
Life imprisonment, no parole.
You have to be a complete and utter wanker to think his punishment was justified.
The left goes into power and does basically nothing.
And then we wonder why one side is winning.
It's ridiculous that people are pretending there is any doubt about his guilt because they like crypto and/or drugs.
Here's how things have manifestly played out over the past 150 years: procedural rules are strengthened because citizens are afraid of unjust prosecution. Some high profile bad guys, or parade of run-of-the-mill criminals, get off because of said procedural loopholes, after which voters demand politicians expand substantive criminal law to re-balance the equation. Upon which more unjust prosecutions enter the public consciousness. Wash, rinse, repeat.
This is what systemic injustice looks like, and the cycle continues as unabated as ever. On the one hand, you have movements like BLM, which have indeed effected change even in the most conservatives jurisdictions, largely by changes in procedural rules by courts and in policy by prosecutors and municipalities. At the same time, you have #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein, etc, which has resulted in the expansion of sexual crimes and punishments, and elimination of statutes of limitations, partly because procedural protections have made it extremely difficult to prosecute past behaviors, not because they strictly weren't already cognizable crimes.
Nobody is going to lose sleep over Weinstein, but long-term which demographics will bear the brunt of this tightening of the screws through the substantive law? You see the fundamental contradictory behavior here? There's tremendous overlap between the #MeToo groups and the BLM groups, and for both their demands are premised on empathy and justice, but at the end of the day we're going to end up with a harsher system that will further disproportionately punish some segments of the population over others. That's what systemic racial injustice looks like, yet nowhere can you find ill intentions or a desire to oppress anyone.
There's an alternative path, here. Notice how the legal screws have taken centuries to slowly but inexorably tighten without any concerted effort, yet in less than a single generation the normative behaviors of individual judges and other legal professionals, both as regards defendant rights (BLM) and victims rights (#MeToo) has seen a sea change. That suggests that by giving back more discretion to the system, not less, it's possible and, IMO, much more likely we could end up with a more fair system all around. Not guaranteed, of course, but neither is it guaranteed that just throwing more money and resources at the existing system would, even assuming we could even achieve let alone maintain that degree of attention from society. The difference between these two approaches, though, is that one requires trusting our fellow citizens, while the other holds out the (fantastical) prospect of an engineered solution.
What you say is also true. So there is a trade here. I'm not claiming it's "worth it," but the alternative without SR at all does seem to be more negative.
Whether someone morally deserves a punishment for a crime depends on whether they actually did it, not on whether they are considered innocent in the eyes of the law.
Of course, I don’t generally support vigilantism , so I don’t think people should try to make other people get what they think the other people deserve as punishment. But, that doesn’t mean that people can’t deserve worse than the law prescribes, just that people shouldn’t like, try to deliver what they think the deserts are.
> For conviction under the statute, the offender must have been an organizer, manager, or supervisor of the continuing operation and have obtained substantial income or resources from the drug violations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_Criminal_Enterprise...
Do you not think the optics are a bit weird when you sentence someone to life for something relatively small, but the reason is another crime you’re very sure he did but you didn’t bother to charge him with?
In instances where it takes more than his signature (e.g. the wall) he has failed to make good on many promises but he definitely put in effort to trying to make them happen.
The worst part are weapons, there is no way to spin it as something benign. Victor Bout for example got 25 years and there was no drug smuggling nor contract murders.
That’s a description of the Scottish “not proven” verdict, not a “not guilty” verdict.
The idea that possession of drugs is or should be illegal is purely arbitrary, and is used thus to justify massive violations of human rights. It is literally insane that the state claims authority over what you are allowed to do to your own body.
No victim, no crime.
If he did a crime that’s strictly less bad than a murder, him being sentenced to a longer sentence than even a single murderer shows that something is wrong. It doesn’t matter if 99% of murderers actually get longer sentences.
This is probably the most ridiculous comment in this thread. Trump even spoke at the Libertarian convention and specifically mentioned how unjust the sentence was and that he would pardon Ross as one of his campaign promises and he delivered. Trump saw parallels between the attack on Ross and the politically motivated law fare the democrats attacked him with. I think the real issue you have with this pardon is that Trump did it and not some democrat.
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.
You need to be a radical far leftist to even believe that. But then this is Reddit.
[0] gives a timeline and fills in lots of details.
Article [1] describes Bridges:
> Bridges was a cryptocurrency expert [... with offshore entities, including one that he had created after pleading guilty in this case]. According to AUSA Haun, his involvement with digital currency cases across the country caused a “staggering” number of investigations to become tainted, and subsequently shut down. She told the judge at Bridges’s sentencing that the corrupt agent had been looking out for opportunities to serve seizure warrants and somehow profit from it.
> The prosecutor also said that bitcoins were still missing, and they weren’t sure if he had worked with other corrupt agents. The US Attorney’s Office seemed to imply that there had been a lot of weird (but not necessarily chargeable) stuff that was still unaccounted for.
Article [2] describes Force:
> [Force's mental health issues]... his previous undercover assignments had ended disastrously. An assignment in Denver in 2004 had ended with a DUI. A second undercover assignment in Puerto Rico had ended in 2008 with a complete mental breakdown. Force was institutionalized, and did not return to his job until 2010. He was on desk duty until 2012, when he was assigned to investigate the Silk Road.
[0]: "Investigating The Staged Assassinations Of Silk Road" 11/2021 https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/inside-silk-road-staged-...
[1]: "Great Moments in Shaun Bridges, a Corrupt Silk Road Investigator" 2/2016 https://www.vice.com/en/article/great-moments-in-shaun-bridg...
[2]: "DEA Agent Who Faked a Murder and Took Bitcoins from Silk Road Explains Himself" 10//2015 https://www.vice.com/en/article/dea-agent-who-faked-a-murder...
[1] was previously posted on HN 2/2016: >>11037889
I suspect that the idea originally was to give some safety valve but if it is used more than a few times by a President, it makes a mockery of it and it should be removed as a power. How can a President ever decide that the entire legal process is flawed and their opinion is right? If the sentence was too long then change the sentencing guidelines.
Hitler was never convicted of the holocaust in a court of law. Does that make him morally innocent? No.
Bin Ladin was never convicted of 9/11 in a court of law. Does that make him morally innocent? No.
FWIW he kickstarted the marketplace by selling shrooms that he grew himself.
Hardly the worst he did. Note a certain Trumps position on the issue though:
"We're going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs, to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts,"
https://reason.com/2023/10/24/trump-who-freed-drug-offenders...
The reactions remind me of a philosophy class I had, where the professor went for a thought experiment in order to explain an idea. "Imagine a world where ...". There was a physicist in the class who kept interrupting the professor, saying "well that's not possible because of how physics works". I would have asked him what he thought about Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings; could he enjoy them at all? But he ruined the class for me so I didn't :-).
UPDATE: apparently I'm wrong that "factual impossibility" is not a defense [0]. But Bridges and Force's criminal behavior tainted the prosecution case on this charge. Presumably why the prosecution made sure those two agents were not mentioned in the trial.
[0]: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/62360/can-you-charge...
Speed limits are done to reduce the risk of you killing someone. Do you really think you should be able to drive however you want and until you actually have an accident, it’s fine?
Now??? Its been just as painful to use without an account for around 10 years now.
Why do they still have courts in the US again?
(Silk Road 2.0 already existed. The guy running it is in prison now, I think.)
edit: ah seems Silk Road 3.0 existed too. So, 4.0 then
And there's nothing in the following sentences that corrects this garden path assumption.
>Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me
Would not confuse as many if you wrote
>At the time of his arrest Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me
Or even clearer
>At the time of his arrest Ulbricht had walked into the public library and sat down at the table which was now directly in front of me
Secondly, Ulbricht was an accessory to thousands of drug deals. You think that none of those consumers of those drugs died as a result? He could easily be responsible for multiple, dozens, hundreds of deaths - far more than most anyone locked up for life.
Germany's highest court has held the same thing.
This is right and proper. We need to defend these principles, now more than ever.
It's almost as if the state was a highly immoral construct.
Read Hoppe.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/deli...
On its own it is not that bad an idea for someone who carries a mandate of the majority of the population to be able to grant pardons.
Which is what matters when determining sentences.
> People are still free to come to their own conclusions--and act on them
People are definitely not free to act on their conclusions. That's vigilantism, what the comment above was referring to.
Existence of big marketplaces definitely lower chances of people dying from drugs
Obviously the hits are a lot messier to prosecute as well with the misconduct of the FBI agents, maybe you could hammer that enough to confuse a jury. But people are commenting like the evidence outright didn't exist - I can only think they have either heard it told second-hand, or are employing motivated reasoning.
People generally don’t get locked up for life even if they do kill someone (in civilized countries), as long as they can be rehabilitated.
To go into the meat of this: he is imagining it while reading in the same location as the incident happened. This is a style of writing. It's definitely not wrong.
> A fourth feature of punishment, widely acknowledged at least since the publication of Joel Feinberg’s seminal 1965 article “The Expressive Function of Punishment” is that it serves to express condemnation, or censure, of the offender for her offense. As Feinberg discusses, it is this condemning element that distinguishes punishment from what he calls “nonpunitive penalties” such as parking tickets, demotions, flunkings, and so forth. (Feinberg, 1965: 398-401).
I’d argue the President should not be allowed to issue pardons that are:
(1) Preëmptive (i.e. absent conviction);
(2) To himself, his current or former Cabinet members, or to any of the foregoing’s current or former spouses or children or grandchildren (or their spouses); or
(3) Issued after the presidential election in the final year of their term.
Furthermore, pardons for violent offences or corruption should be prohibited; provided, however, the President should retain the power to commute such sentences, and the Congress should have the power to regulate the manner in which the President may commute such sentences.
(Notably, I don’t believe this would apply to Ulbricht. He wasn’t convicted of a violent crime.)
On your point about spiked products - it’s clearly a problem for online illegal drugs as well as those bought on the street.
The problem is, you don’t get to leave a bad review if you’re dead.
My point is rather that an online marketplace in the absence of decriminalization and reform can only provide a marginal increase in safety. Sex workers marketing on Backpage, Craigslist, Onlyfans, and IG still face a great deal of risk of violence, pressure from pimps, and prosecution by law enforcement. It's a deeply complex systematic issue which can't be fixed by a website.
For drugs in particular, darknet marketplaces primarily rely on unspeakably violent criminal enterprises upstream. The consumers, sellers, and communities implicated in this supply chain are all losers in this system. The cartels are the winners and the global "war on drugs" establishment are a close second place.
Feel like you have already made up your mind on what you want to believe, but he has actually helped a lot with non-violent drug offenders. That’s part of the reason poor communities (especially Latino) have voted for him despite harsh border policies.
Trump returned to that theme in November 2022, when he officially launched his 2024 presidential campaign. "We're going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs, to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts," he said.
You'll note there are comments here saying saying that he generally keeps his campaign promises. On the bright side I don't agree, but on the other hand I think he does often enough, especially for the "well of course he didn't literally mean that" ones.
He clearly states that he was reading an article, he uses past tense verbs when referring to Ross, and to the events spelled out in the article. If you somehow thought that he could be reading an article that ostensibly has to be describing a past event as he was seeing it in real time that is a logic flaw on you.
It has nothing to do with what you can or cannot visualize. All you have to do is ask yourself could he have been reading an article about Ross’s arrest while watching it? Since nobody can violate the causality of space time the answer is no.
This isn’t just you this is everybody in this thread who is reading this and going this is a little confusing. No it’s very clearly him speaking about a past experience reading an article about a past event.
Taken to the extreme, we could have an impartial legal system putting in prison criminals from an even mix of society, and then the president pardoning everyone from the majority group, leaving in prison only the minorities.
Like it or not, this makes him a heroic figure in the eyes of many people.
> we shouldn't have bailed him out
Bailing him out comes at no cost. Letting him rot in prison provides no benefit to anyone.
Predictably, dark web market operators adapted afterward. The state got lucky and they knew it, so that also factored in to their sentencing recommendations.
Glad he's getting out.
> Then Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me
The problem is that two past events are being described, so tense alone cannot distinguish them. Cut the readers some slack; the writing could have been better.
And how would you call a justice system, so complicated and convulted and therefore expensive that poor people (from minorities) don't really stand a chance to get their justice there?
Obviously Ross was not in that group, but I see presidential pardon as a potential tool to counter the flaws of the justice system.
That reminds me of the early 2000s, where there were a lot of US debates around around terrorism and "harsh interrogations" i.e. torture.
A certain bloc of politicians and commentators kept bringing up a hypothetical scenario where there was a nuclear bomb counting down, and some guy wouldn't admit where it was hidden in a major city. My favorite response to that involved presidential pardons, something along the lines of:
1. "So what? If everything you say is true, then the authorities would simply torture the guy and seek a pardon afterwards. We already have an exceptional mechanism for those exceptional situations, meaning that's not a reason to change it."
2. "Conversely, any interrogator who isn't confident of a pardon is on who does not believe it's at ticking-bomb situation, meaning they cannot justify torturing someone anyway, they just want to do it to make their job marginally easier. That's bad, so it should stay illegal."
Well, you can. Its impact is heavily amplified, but there certainly are ill intentions and a desire to oppress people.
Uhm... Really? Is that present tense?
If rule-of-law was a national holy religion, the last 10 years of US politics would have played out very very differently.
I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, somebody who aspires to be a better writer. But, no, this clarifies that you're just pretentious.
Biden pardonning his son and other criminals also made this clear.
Most people are becoming aware most politicians are actually criminals in suits.
If we assume that both you and MLK were right, but that different policies better suit different conditions, then your proposal could maximize meritocratic effectiveness in an already-very-fair society, whereas MLK's way (the Voting Rights Act) provides a better minimum standard of human rights (similar to 1st and 2nd Amendment protections for people).
Would it be a better system if the not-allowed group is totally dependent on the people that are allowed to vote?
The idea has been around for a bit and I call it interesting, but also with huge potential of misuse.
Change the test slightly, so your target audience will yield better results, giving you a better result.
Either way, as long as climate change and darwinism are controversial topics, I see it hard to implement in a meaningful way.
1500 in jail for protesting in DC? Really, less than that in jail after months BLM riots afaik. Sure, jail a few bad boys, but 1500? No way.
Throw a rock at people in power and go jail. Rape and murder is fine, no threat to DC.
Congress makes laws and impeaches presidents, courts judge constitutionality of laws and try cases of treason and presidents appoint judges and grant pardons.
You can't have impeachment without pardon, otherwise, there wouldn't be a check against judicial tyranny.
Nothing about it requires a dictator. You vote for politicians who repeal laws that don't have widespread consensus, when enough people vote for them they get repealed. Ideally you then do something that makes it more difficult to re-pass them.
> Some high profile bad guys, or parade of run-of-the-mill criminals, get off because of said procedural loopholes
The procedures aren't loopholes. They're prerequisites for a conviction. They by no means make a conviction impossible, but you have to do the work.
> At the same time, you have #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein, etc, which has resulted in the expansion of sexual crimes and punishments, and elimination of statutes of limitations, partly because procedural protections have made it extremely difficult to prosecute past behaviors, not because they strictly weren't already cognizable crimes.
The problem here is not procedural rules at all. It's evidentiary difficulties. How do you distinguish between someone who consents but then has regrets and changes their story, or someone who has sex with someone wealthy in order to extort them for money, and someone who was actually sexually assaulted?
There is no perfect solution to that, but "innocent until proven guilty" is the only sane one. What you then need is a system that can uphold that standard even when there is pressure not to.
> That suggests that by giving back more discretion to the system, not less, it's possible and, IMO, much more likely we could end up with a more fair system all around.
It suggests that when you give more discretion to the system and the system favors you at this moment in time, you get what you want, for now.
But then there is another election and you may not like what someone else does with that discretion.
I've had this thought before and my tentative conclusion is "no". It boils down to the purpose of democracy which is NOT to produce the best government but to make people feel ok about having a government at all.
All these people here saying his sentence is deserved. It's just sick. How is your crime rate going? Declining...right? ....nope
I actually wonder if those charges may still be on the table now that a pardon has been granted.
https://www.crmvet.org/info/lithome.htm#litbkgnd
Sorry for the snark, it's just a very hard problem because we'd end up in a situation where the voters would decide who is part of their club.
IMHO convicting somebody of such a thing is a crime in itself. Simply not excusable. Especially when the crime is essentially a form of white collar crime at best. Bank robbers, drug dealers, and some actual murderers often get more lenient sentences than that.
I think this was a case of the justice system being abused to make a political point. Casually destroying somebody's life to make a political point should be criminal in itself (with appropriate sentences and public disgrace). I don't agree with Trump's politics. But this seems like he's righting a clear and obvious wrong; so good for him. Regardless of his motivations.
Don’t dress up your stance in fancy garb when it comes down to something baser.
It's not one that should be needed or acceptable, and had his successor been someone who seemed to respect law and order I'd have agreed with you, but in the present circumstances it'd seem crazy not to.
The laws should represent, what the people want. Not a small caste of lawyers and lobbyist what it often rather seems to be.
Presidential power is a direct way to represent peoples wishes. Or well, could be, if the voting system wouldn't be flawed as well ..
The Nazi state had to follow its own laws. They just had such laws that enabled the total lunacy that the 3rd Reich was.
All I'm saying is: If you decouple laws from morality you get a really bad time.
I guess since then, the fentanyl crisis has happened and shown that drugs also have more negative impacts
Ridiculous hyperbole about Ross ‘inventing the Dark Web’ or ‘Trump freed a sex trafficker’ is a great reminder that for some people, their ideological opposition can never do anything right and they’ll condemn anything they do without even a second of consideration.
I’m not an avowed Trump supporter (or even American) but believe this was the right call to make. The sentence was overly harsh and he has both served his time and reformed. I’m glad he has been released.
Whether I agree with it or not, the law often recognises differences like this. It's not illegal to lie, but it is illegal to lie in the aid a murder. The lier themselves might not be a murderer, but the lier is knowingly facilitating murder.
Ulbricht was knowingly facilitating crime in the case, and sometimes this crime would result in the deaths of people. And despite knowing all this he took no action to address it.
Perhaps your point was he just didn't deserve the sentence he receive, which is fair, but he clearly did something that most people would consider very wrong.
I also wonder how people would feel if Silkroad was associated more with the trading of humans, CSAM, biological weapons or more serious things rather than just drugs. I doubt the "he's just running a marketplace" reasoning would hold in most people's eyes then.
Let's forget a minute about that holy rule of law, "your" country has elected a convicted criminal, and it's yet to collapse.
I guess my argument boils down to: We already discriminate. My thoughts are that the way we do it is not optimal.
more or less than those who bought drugs from street dealers?
could it not be possible the silk road saved the lives of many more teenagers who would have died from street drugs otherwise?
Yes, every president has pardons that are arguable (Biden pardoning his son, for example). And anyone pardoned has been found guilty of a crime, by definition. But not all crimes are equal.
Pardoning 1500 people that participated in a (luckily failed) insurrection that caused 5 deaths and 100+ injured, is an extremely bad precedent, and sends a very bad signal.
Pardoning people convicted of marijuana possession (like Biden did) is not the same thing as pardoning the head of the worlds biggest guns and drugs marketplace. Even if he did not kill anyone himself (it was proven, just to a lesser extent, but fine). Those drugs and guns most definitely did kill people.
>DPR contacted one of his trusted drug dealer contacts, Nob, and asked him to kill Green for $40,000. Shortly after, Nob sent DPR photos of Green covered in Campbell’s Chicken & Stars soup and victim of an apparent asphyxiation, to prove the murder had been carried out.
> Unbeknown to DPR, Nob was no drug dealer. In fact, Nob was Carl Mark Force IV, the very same DEA agent who had arrested Green.
1. Ross Ulbricht the ultimate entrepreneur?
2. Ross Ulbricht was a freedom fighter?
People need to stop thinking of politicians as their friends and having parasocial relationships with them. They're public servants and should be treated as such.
I'm sure the initial narco kingpins were nice, non-violent people too, but rarely do the people involved with supplying drugs stay that way - regardless of whether you're Pablo Escobar or just some kid peddling weed in a sleepy village in the south of France.
The idea of looking at someone's motivations to determine their sentencing is critical to our legal system - otherwise important defences like the "Battered Wife Defence" wouldn't work.
I think most of us can also see a difference between a poor person stealing some gloves to stay warm in the winter and a rich person stealing those same gloves for the thrill. The only difference here is you don't like the fact that Ulbricht's motivations were more high minded than your average crack pusher (cough CIA cough) - the judge didn't either - in fact he sentenced him harder for it to make an example of him.
I'm stressing it out again, multiple people died from overdose because of him and multiple people were about to get executed because he hired hitman to kill them.
You want a majority to be able to decide who gets punished and who goes free, and even the best designed laws will have unforseen consequences. If the majority is 'evil', well there's just not all that much that can be done in a democracy. Yes it would be better to live in a dictatorship of the most virtuous person in existence, but if you ever figure out how to do that please let me know.
I wish we could run some sort of sentiment analysis to see who was pro and anti the sentencing then vs now.
There was no equation there actually. Let me unwrap it for you, probably this way it will be clear: first line was a satire of the parent comment along the line of depicting deadly but permitted matters; second line was the unpacking the satire higlighting that the fella hopelessly confused (now, this was more like the equation you sought) a socially permitted activity with an illegal one.
I'm not arguing that drugs should be legal, but we do have to be clear that the reasons for banning them and the punishment are not necessarily rational.
The fact that everybody is equal in front of justice and that justice should be independent, two of the basics tenet of the rule of law, were hated by the Nazis and called 'jewish law', and were targeted. Lawyers and judges were increasingly close to the Nazi party. The same crime by a party member didn't had the same consequence.
I think the Nazis pamphlet said that 'roman law follow the materialistic world order, and should be replaced by German law'. Where materialistic was a dogwhistle for Marxism, and world order for Judaism.
What did help Nazis was that older judges and lawyers were often aristocrats who didn't really love the republic, and new one were petty bourgeoisie where Nazism had a lot of supporters. They helped put a staunch conservative (who later joined the Nazis) at the head of the German supreme court before 1933. The man blocked socdems appointments, and changed how the German law was interpreted (basically pushing intent of the law vs letter of the law, where intent weirdly always aligned with Nazi ideology).
Then, once they had power, the first thing they did after the conservative Hindenburg (may he be remembered as Hitler first collaborator) declared a 'state of emergency was to suspend judiciary oversight over arrest and imprisonment.
People don't really care about child rapists see the Christian churches.
Also you were able to buy everything on silk road including guns. The multiplication effect of this is potentially more worth.
Nonetheless it's still a straw man argument. I personally would not mind at all increasing prison sentences for child rapists.
So whatever real-world thing being described would need a different term.
Source?
And it seems people don't particularly like Trump, but vote on him because he seems to be the only one that wants to do something about illegal immigrants:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/us/politics/trump-policie...
And I understand that it's even frustrating for legal immigrants, who waited for years to get citizenship, that illegal immigrants don't have to do anything and get it right away.
The Cabinet or the lame-duck pardons?
Cabinet members are close to the President and in commanding positions of authority; if they’re scared of a law they should work to change it.
Lame ducks, on the other hand, aren’t subject to the single veneer of a check on Presidential pardons: popular outrage. Limiting it in that span, when a President is unaccountable, and where we have ample history of silliness, seems warranted.
Note that I’m not proposing restricting commutations in any of those cases. (I suppose we should add a clause prohibiting the President from preëmptive commutations, too.)
> amending the constitution is virtually impossible
Not true. We’re probably closer to the end of our Constitutional stasis than at any time in our lives.
Hell, you might be able to ram something like this through today if you added a clause that nullifies past pardons per those standards.
So I don’t know his specific policies here. I do know those of Elon Musk.
Societal taboos for example can create a division like this. You can see this divide between truly anonymous forums vs moderated conversations online.
But now we're playing legal tricks here. The real question would be if Ulbricht was willing to have people killed or not, regardless of what the defense can claim.
EDIT: just to be clear. Legally, I think it makes a big difference if someone decides to have someone else killed, tries to hire an hitman and that hitman turns out to be a policeman in disguise vs a policeman in disguise telling you "there are people doing something that is bad for you, should I kill them?". And it is perfectly right that the second case is crossing a line. But form a moral perspective, if someone answers "yes" in the second case, that still tells us a lot about that person, regardless of whether those people existed or not. The important thing is that those people were real in this person's mind.
And till those steps are implemented, don't you think you would enjoy it, if the next president would pardon Snowden, or your personal favorite case of unjustice?
- Log files found on Ulbricht's laptop with entries corresponding to the murder-for-hire events
- Bitcoin transaction records showing payments
- Messages between DPR and vendors/users about the situations
The court found this evidence admissible as:
- Direct evidence of the charged offenses
- Proof of Ulbricht's role as site administrator
- Evidence of Ulbricht's identity as DPR
- Demonstration of his willingness to use violence to protect the criminal enterprise
The court determined that while prejudicial, the probative value of this evidence outweighed any unfair prejudice, particularly since the government would stipulate no murders actually occurred.
The above is summarized from https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-ulbricht-10
How exactly was it politically motivated law fare?
> In the 1920s, moonshine runners during the Prohibition era would often have to outrun the authorities. To do so, they had to upgrade their vehicles—while leaving them looking ordinary, so as not to attract attention. Eventually, runners started getting together with fellow runners and making runs together. They would challenge one another and eventually progressed to organized events in the early 1930s.
Very interesting insight, thank you for sharing it. Do you happen to know other examples as well?
I made a similar mistake on the original comment as you (I read it as "Ulbricht returned to the cafe, he actually sat down right in front of me while I was reading the story about his previous arrest here, and that's when I realised it was the same place"), and also thought you were saying that you think ChatGPT has a visual "imagination" inside.
(I don't know if it does or doesn't, but given the "o" in "4o" is supposed to make it multi-modal, my default assumption is that 4o can visualise things… but then, that's also my default assumption about humans, and you being aphantasic shows this is not necessarily so).
The rules for translation are themselves the result of intelligence; when the thought experiment is made real (I've seen an example on TV once), these rules are written down by humans, using human intelligence.
A machine which itself generates these rules from observation has at least the intelligence* that humans applied specifically in the creation of documents expressing the same rules.
That a human can mechanically follow those same rules without understanding them, says as much and as little as the fact that the DNA sequences within the neurones in our brains are not themselves directly conscious of higher level concepts such as "why is it so hard to type 'why' rather than 'wju' today?" despite being the foundation of the intelligence process of natural selection and evolution.
* well, the capability — I'm open to the argument that AI are thick due to the need for so many more examples than humans need, and are simply making up for it by being very very fast and squeezing the equivalent of several million years of experiences for a human into a month of wall-clock time.
Which is what this boils down to. Ross didn't know what people were selling. Could be pure high-quality stuff, could be contaminated stuff, could be stuff that was cut up with fent. He made money either way.
If Ross let drug dealers sell fentanyl-laced drugs, which ended up killing someone, he absolutely should be charged.
Those deals wouldn't have been possible without his platform. Sure, maybe the same drug dealer would have sold the bad stuff to some other poor user outside silk road, but those dealings that ended up happening on silk road are his (Ross) to own.
Corruption is a valid point generally. And this question can be raised when discussing pardon for president's family. But is this point valid for this specific case, for the man who already spent 11 years in prison and has no relation to the president?
We needn't act like they share some grand enlightenment. It's just not well expressed. ChatGPT's output is also frequently not well expressed and not well thought out.
Rule of law is a pillar, but not the only one — in an ideal case the laws themselves are bound by constitutional requirements, and the constitutional requirements are bound by democratic will, and the democratic will by freedom of speech, and the freedom of speech by a requirement for at least attempting to be honest.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_pardons_in_the_Unite...
What you are doing here is a distraction from the topic - whataboutism.
This seems unlikely given he's been imprisoned for eleven years.
See: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...
You can clearly see that "deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone (primarily illicitly manufactured fentanyl)" didn't particularly alter or rise until after the 2013 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut down of the Silk Road website and arrest of Ulbricht.
If the Silk Road Marketplace had any influence on fentanyl deaths Then some kind of spike would be expected during the years of operation, 2011-2013.
lmao
If that isn't conspiracy to murder, I'm not sure there is anything that would qualify.
The weird thing here is that a cashier would test it!?
I am not sure about the legal standpoint, but from a moral one I would have felt bad running the business knowing it's regularly abused to harm others and I am not doing anything against it.
We are seeing this play out again. The brownshirts have all been pardoned (with a clear message to the ones who will be involved in the next act - that as long as they break the law in support of the regime, they'll get bailed out), while everyone else is getting in line to kowtow and kiss the ring - because if they don't, they might be targeted.
It's actual insanity that people are looking at this and saying it is fine.
Then again, the whole country has gone insane, it looks at a video of the richest main in the world giving a fascist salute, and insist that he's just giving a confused wave, or that it's the same thing as a still of some other person with an outstretched arm.
The trial for the real one was scrapped because of his other convictions.
Those benefits don't come from nowhere. You're basically getting compensated to take on the risk, same as any other business. The difference in this case is that the risk is that a bunch of thugs with guns will show up and either kill you or put you in a cage in addition to the usual financial ruin.
So, either the old government is in power of the mainstream media, or people are secretly on the right and don't speak out about it. Or maybe a combination of the two.
It was further complicated because a couple of the law enforcement officers involved with setting up one of the six murder-for-hire scams* stole the Bitcoin Ulbricht paid and it was also felt that trying to prosecute based solely on the other chat logs would have been difficult. The FBI agent who arrested Ulbricht was interviewed about it recently[1].
* The other five are said to not have been law enforcement, which makes it curious the number of times Ulbricht was scammed in this manner.
Government wasn’t overstepping, facilitating bad stuff on such scale has to be taken down with big consequences.
There is no „I was just running a site and people used it for bad stuff” he had all intentions and he profited from it.
We've seen what happens when empires fall apart (Rome for example) and things don't revert to "prehistorical lifestyle of small tribes slaughtering each other for what little scraps the land has to give".
I'm not gonna go too far into this because like you say, it's a religion, and I'm not gonna waste my time trying to convert anyone.
In common law, you are found guilty, and then sentenced. The judge does the sentencing, the jury finds you guilty or not.
Then there is precedent. Guidelines are created based on caselaw, so if a simular type of case arrises, that forms the "expectation" of what the sentence will be.
This means that you don't need specific levels of a crime. For example drug trafficking can be a single gram of coke for personal use, vs 15 tonnes for commercial exploitation. hence the range in sentences.
In this case the person throwing morality out of the window was Ulbricht.
You made a false dichotomy, but I’m sure you can figure that one on your own.
There’s also the other aspect where you align your views to the views of your group.
There are places in the US, where being a Republican is absolutely the core of what you are, and you will adopt and genuinely love any candidate from that party.
I think this is necessary class of pardons. A hypothetical example of a good preemptive pardon would be Congress repealing an unjust law, and the president pardoning anybody who broke that law before the repeal.
>(2) To himself, his current or former Cabinet members, or to any of the foregoing’s current or former spouses or children or grandchildren (or their spouses)
Agree on not pardoning himself or cabinet members. Maybe could extend that to include all political appointees. Politicians shouldn't enjoy special privileges like these. But I'm less convinced about preventing family pardons. Those people (generally) aren't politicians. And, if they plan to abuse the president's pardon to commit crimes, they'd either be asking after the crime and risking the president refusing, or asking before and leaving the president open to conspiracy charges.
>(3) Issued after the presidential election in the final year of their term.
I've grown too cynical about the voters to believe this would matter. Most people don't follow politics closely enough to know who's been pardoned, what they did, and any political/personal connections they had with the president.
If I may suggest a limitation, how about allowing the House or Senate to veto a pardon with a 2/3 majority?
Personally I'm in favour of further narcotics legalisation, but with regulation to manage it's social effects and taxation to fund the expensive mitigation measures it would require.
LOL. You're a conservative Christian[1] who thinks climate change is a hoax[2].
[1] >>29187368
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=author:macinjosh+...
Your argument is not an argument for incarceration, it is an argument for abolition of prohibition and regulating the sales of some psychoactives.
The same stone would hit the fentanyl epidemic, it would hit the pushers of ”zombie drug” laced cocktails, it would hit cross-border trafficking, to name only a few. Society would massively benefit. So would the economy.
It’s not possible to make it not exist.
What? In my experience his supporters literally never shut up about how they are the silent majority. The irony seems entirely lost on them.
So the article lied that he was arrested?
I don't have a horse in this race but the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear "we shouldn't have bailed him out" is silicon valley bank and its depositors. That to me was the biggest show of hypocrisy by silicon valley.
Its astonishing that granting pardons to drug dealers and attempted murderers is something Trump sees as one of the more urgent matters affecting the most powerful nation on Earth.
I wish this weren’t true.
The evolution of modern society is as much a result of religion (centralizing a purpose and limiting inner fighting) of science (do things more efficient) as it is to violence.
Violence might be one way to progress, everybody is entitled to an opinion. I just hope you experienced it yourself if you believe it is the way you prefer personally. I am saying just because I thought some things would be great, only to be quite disappointed when I actually tried them...
The focus wasn't on the exact timeline and facts of the situation. It was on what it felt like as he read the piece.
Whether or not you think he deserved the prison time, the problem here is how utterly brazen Trump is in accepting bribes.
They were too small. But they had their own social orders of equivalent importance, and breaking those would break them apart. There's a reason religion and tradition played bigger role in a distant past, and going against them was severely punished. It's not just out of spite or "us vs. them"; people take threats to stability of their group personally. It's definitely in part a survival mechanism.
> The evolution of the modern state is a result of inter society competition for who can apply the most massed violence against a competing state.
Yes. More specifically, it's the result of growth. It's the same thing as small tribes fighting each other over some small areas of land, except scaled up. Bigger groups have a competitive advantage over smaller groups, but there's a limit to the size of a group beyond which it ends up splitting apart; increasing that limit requires stacking more layers of hierarchy and associated social technologies. "Rule of law" and the legal system in general is one of such technologies, and it looks like it does today, at scales of groups we have today.
A group of dozens can just work on instinct alone. A group of hundreds requires some rules and specialization and designated authority. Scale that 100x, and you need another level of leadership hierarchy just to keep sub-group leaders coordinated and aligned. Scale that 100x further, and you kind of have to get something looking like a modern nation state, as anything else would either break apart or be defeated by another group that is more like a modern nation state.
See also: Dunbar's number.
> We've seen what happens when empires fall apart (Rome for example) and things don't revert to "prehistorical lifestyle of small tribes slaughtering each other for what little scraps the land has to give".
Europe would disagree.
That comparison does not flatter Ross Ulbricht.
https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...
You shouldn't necessarily change your negative opinion of someone, just because they're right about something. To invoke Godwin's law: Adolf Hitler was a staunch opponent of smoking, in a time when many Allied cultures thought smoking was great, but that doesn't mean you're wrong about him.
What he did care about were libertarian votes. There was a deal that libertarians will support Trump if he promises to free Ross. This is on record, you can find it.
e.g. nobody will prosecute any property related and others low level crimes (e.g. damage is less than hundreds or at least tens of thousands). Crime rates will increase and the system will collapse at some point.
As far as I know, SilkRoad had a whole reputation system in place to allow users to flag untrustworthy sellers; that system was inline or even ahead of what many "legal" marketplace had put in place. A part of why SilkRoad was so successful is precisely because overall that reputation system allowed users to identify trustworthy sellers.
Would you call this amnesty? He was already in jail for a decade, I thought.
Why is it legal to drive a car, then?
Also buying bitcoin, exchanging to Monero, installing Tor, understanding the risks, etc. Is much more work than just finding the next dealer.
GP misremembered what the 500 casualties number refers to (see article).
Also how exactly are jury trials superior to e.g. Magistrates Courts in the UK?
Isn’t the American legal system already very bloated and inefficient? So spending even more money on it might not be the best idea?
This is false. Even if you take the Nazi propaganda that their laws were themselves lawful (which they were not, beginning with the clearly unlawful capture of power) at face value, the Nazi regime did not adhere to its own laws and regulations. While in some cases the Nazi regime did codify a basis in law for their atrocities (i.e. excluding and expropriating jews), much of the Nazi terror both in a civil and military context would have been explicitly illegal under the law at the time.
This includes the November Progroms of 1938 (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novemberpogrome_1938), large parts of the Nazi's approach to warfare, as well as the entire Holocaust (the murder of more than 6 million jews and other "undesirables"), for which the Nazis did not bother to create any legal justification.
While the Nazi regime was deeply bureaucratic (in that it documented its policies, orders and their results in high detail) this is not the same as "following the law". Most of the Nazi's atrocities evolved not through a process of lawmaking, but from their racist ideology and were given legitimacy through the highly personalized nature of the regime: Hitler was explicitly above the law, as were his orders, not matter if expressed through him personally or in his name by his followers.
All kinds of products kill consumers every day, and we don't consider the person who sold them responsible. And the suppliers of those products heavily encourage and even manipulate people into buying them; do we know whether Ulbricht even advertised his services?
the action of suggesting, without being direct, that something unpleasant is true
[0]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/insinuat...
Look towards other countries with similar policies (Portugal, Netherlands, etc.) in their cases they saw a decrease in drug usage and fatalities. The difference is they decided to not encourage their behaviour by allowing open air drug markets to flourish, with kiosks just down the street handing out the necessary paraphernalia.
Ten? Oh man. Have you read about the FALN commutation? Iran-Contra? Watergate? The 1960 presidential election? Roosevelt (both of them)? Wilson? Lincoln? Those are just a very few of the instances of disrespect for the rule of law that come to mind immediately.
Ironically our justice system sometimes does persecute based on hypotheticals. For example persecution for driving recklessly, which is inconsistent with the principle above.
I'm really intrigued how people can say these things like they're facts. That's really happening a lot more nowadays. It's an opinion you have.
Or am I wrong, and do you have a source or personal account of some kid in a sleepy village in the south of france? Or could it be that the people who DO stay that way don't reach the media, because they DO stay that way?
> You can't do whatever you want with your body
is pretty reasonable, but how about we rephrase it as something like:
> You can't do something with your body that significantly increases the risk of harming others
?
I don't think we're going to see clear messaging on this from Trump.
If your legal system doesn't have enough resources to prosecute 90% of people who are committing crimes.................................
.......................................... then maybe the state should.............................................
.................... wait for it...................................
.....................................give the legal system more resources.
(I know right, it's mindblowing, revolutionary, difficult-to-conceive stuff - I can see why nobody has thought of it before)
Principles are much more important to a businessman than a gangster.
The recent change in policy simply reflects the prevailing trend of reducing disparities in sentencing for criminals while increasing disparities in crime victimization by failing to enforce the law.
I bet you 100% of democratic voters could accurately describe the maga platform. The number who could describe the democratic platform would be far less.
Trump and his minons tried to undo the results of an election. An election he lost. Lost even while abusing his power as president (see his calls in Ukraine and Georgia as evidence).
Nobody on the left supports looters or rapists. If there is evidence someone committed a crime, prosecute them. Trump is the only person I know that supports rapists (see Epstien and Gaetz). He says if you are loyal to him, you don't have to face the consequences of your actions. That to me is what is most scary.
Speak for yourself. China is still worse than the USA, and Xi isn't bound to any term limit, and has built up quite a following.
Online isn't the important factor here.
> One does not need a gang and violence to sell drugs online.
Gangs and violence aren't there to support a marketplace. They don't help you find customers or customers to find you. They don't improve the efficiency of exchange. They're there to enforce outcomes. Selling drugs leads to outcomes that don't care whether the buyer and seller found themselves online.
I'd argue promoting that narrative was ultimately worse than the insurrection for democracy.
On my book, this is pretty serious.
In addition you have the guy that was supposed to be murdered also claiming that it could not have been Ross.
The murder for hire case was very weak and then in addition you had the two federal agents working the murder for hire case charged for stealing bitcoins.
That said, rapists surprisingly often get just a slap on the wrist, or not even that. The US absolutely needs some balance and consistency in its sentencing, but pardoning this one guy sends a really weird message in that regard. At the very least, just commute the sentence so at least the conviction still stands.
It's certainly not what pardons are for.
I think Bidens family pardons are problematic as well. I can understand why he did it.
I dont understand the argument for pardoning Ross.
The concept of justice must include an element of proportionality, I would argue that Ross's sentence, for a first time non-violent criminal, was over the top. Without proportionality justice becomes arbitrary, based more on luck and your connections to power.
We punish those we can punish: the little guy. Whilst those running governments, corporations and networks that facilitate repression, hatred and genocide go scot free.
Many in jail awaiting trial are very guilty and the outcome of the legal proceeding is effectively a foregone conclusion. Exchanging a shorter sentence for a plea makes sense for all parties. Prosecutors can then spend their court time arguing more important cases, judges don't have to patiently direct clown shows where guilt is extremely obvious, and the defendant gets a lesser sentence. There is plenty of abuse in the plea system, and no shortage of outrageous prosecutorial misconduct. But that doesn't invalidate the principle of plea bargaining. No justice system is perfect and without plea bargaining every defendant would have to spend a decade in jail, maybe two, before their case makes it in front of a judge. That isn't justice. Unless we assign everybody chatgpt lawyers, judges and juries giving everybody a trial is a practical impossibility.
That's a weird way of talking about that. The rule of law is what keeps rampant corruption and government abuse at bay. It means the law also holds for the ruler, and not just for the subjects. The rule of law has already been significantly weakened in recent years by openly corrupt judges and politicians, and traitor being elected in defiance of the 14th amendment.
None of this is a good thing. Without the rule of law, it's the people that lose, because then you get the rule of those in power, who will be above the law.
I'd say either posture is an insult to your own capacity for reasoned thinking, but I am curious about which kind of insult it is.
The rule of law means that nobody is above the law, not even the Fuehrer or president. Clearly this is not the case in many countries, but it is in some, and it should be.
I would've expected responses like this for Aung San Suu Kyi or Dawit Isaak or someone, but _this guy_? Really?
Oh, I guess he is an e n t r e p r e n e u r... I get it now.
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.
amazing use of the diaresis
Regarding the substance of your comment, we do not have (IIRC) established judicial precedent for the constitutionality of preëmptive pardons. The practice originated with Ford pardoning Nixon, and has not yet been challened nor withstood judicial examination.
Personally, I'd like to see some of Biden's pardons challenged.
> (3) Issued after the presidential election in the final year of their term.
This is an interesting one for those who are seeking a second term but are at risk of losing
"Then when Ulbricht..."
That "then" always does a lot of heavy lifting in English prose.
He killed children.
- "During the sentencing hearing, Forrest heard from the father of a 25-year-old Boston man who died of a heroin overdose and the mother of a 16-year-old Australian who took a drug designed to mimic LSD at a post-prom party and then jumped off a balcony to his death. Prosecutors said the two victims were among at least six who died after taking drugs that were bought through Silk Road."
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-29/silk-road... ("Silk Road Mastermind Handed Life in Prison for Drug Bazaar" (2015))
It's squarely within the Overton window to impose extremely harsh sentences for people who sell heroin*. Most (?) Asian countries *execute* people who sell heroin. Trump himself has proposed, multiple times over the years, executing US heroin dealers[1,2]—which underscores the incredible degree of hypocrisy behind this pardon.
*(It's also within some people's Overton windows to contemplate the opposite of this, in a framework of harm minimization. I can't steelman this argument in the specific case of Ulbricht. Is it harm reduction to sell heroin? Is it harm reduction to sell fatal drugs to high-school age kids?)
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43465229 ("Trump urges death penalty for drug dealers" (2018))
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/05/10/1152847242/trump-campaign-exe... ("Trump wants the death penalty for drug dealers. Here's why that probably won't happen" (2023))
so what? Coalition-building is common in the rest of the democratic world. This is, in my view, a similar thing.
Imagine a hypothetical law which arrests anyone who trades in red shirts. Someone comes along and doesn't see what the big deal is and decides to trade in these shirts on the black market. Lives are saved because it is impossible to get shot at while paying for red shirts over the Internet instead of in person. Then the dude who ran the red shirt marketplace and seems like an opportunistic idealist gets locked up with the key thrown away.
Anyway, it is arguable that the Silk Road saved lives, given that black markets are persistent regardless of legality.
https://cybercrimejournal.com/pdf/Lacson%26Jonesvol10issue1I...
https://gwern.net/doc/darknet-market/silk-road/1/2013-vanhou...
Given that Trump didn't pardon Ulbricht during his first presidential term, why now?
What does Trump, who is notoriously transactional, get in return for this? Alternatively, what signal is he sending and to who?
The US also has laws which we don't care if you break, and the laws we place in this category say a lot about our society. For example, it's widely accepted that people can drive up to 10 MPH above the speed limit and consequences will be rare. Even more severe moving violations are met with a slap on the wrist which primarily effects the poor (fines).
Drug laws were already within this category before Ullbricht started the Silk Road. The was on drugs was explicitly started by Nixon as a war on the antiwar left and black people, and if you didn't fall into one of those categories, you were/are largely above drug laws, since enforcement generally targets those categories, while the social acceptability of popular drugs means that crimes of this nature are rarely reported.
Ullbricht's primary offense was breaking a law that was already broken ubiquitously. Society did not collapse before Ullbricht when these laws were broken, it did not collapse when Ullbricht broke them, and it does not collapse because of the myriad of darknet sites which immediately filled the void left by the Silk Road's closure. Ullbricht's arrest didn't end the blatant disregard for drug laws on the darknet, and yet somehow in the 11 years since his arrest, society still hasn't devolved into small tribes slaughtering each other.
In short, if people breaking drug laws was a real threat to society, then society would have devolved into tribes slaughtering each other already. We have had over 50 years of people ubiquitously breaking drug laws without societal collapse.
> He killed children.
Nit: People died, who may not have died, because of his actions but he didn't kill them. Very few people are forced to take drugs.
I don't like this argument of imputing transitive guilt. If guilt is imputed indirectly, then all of us are guilty of many things, like atrocities that our countries have perpetrated during war.
Second of all, people missed my point I guess: >>42792552
Third of all, the Silk Road saved lives.
https://cybercrimejournal.com/pdf/Lacson%26Jonesvol10issue1I...
https://gwern.net/doc/darknet-market/silk-road/1/2013-vanhou...
Some of us see a major difference between selling heroin to someone, and building the marketplace from which these victim's freely bought drugs.
I think he is owed some responsibility, but he didn't kill them.
Two, I have aphantasia and didn't picture anything. I got it the first time without any confusion.
Are you seriously asking ChatGPT to read things for you? No wonder your reading comprehension is cooked. Don't blame aphantasia.
The police, DEA and Secret service have vast power they can use against the populace. If those same agents are committing crimes then it taints the entire investigation and prosecution. If a cop is found to have planted drugs on past arrestees, quite often a good portion of his other cases are thrown out as well as he has corrupted everything he touched.
It likely doesn't rise to the legal doctrine of "fruit from a poisoned tree" but its in the ballpark.
For the people downvoting me for some reason:
A DEA agent involved in the investigation "was sentenced to 78 months in prison for extortion, money laundering and obstruction of justice"
A secret service agent involved in the investigation "was sentenced to 24 months in prison by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco following his earlier guilty plea to one count of money laundering."
[1] https://www.euda.europa.eu/publications/insights/internet-dr...
EDIT: Added citation for commenter who couldn't be bothered to use a search engine. Link contains links to multiple studies.
Hell at least illegal drugs can be lifesaving. No one needs a home swimming pool.
- "“No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court,” she said. “It is a privileged argument, it is an argument from one of privilege. You are no better a person than any other drug dealer and your education does not give you a special place of privilege in our criminal justice system. It makes it less explicable why you did what you did.”"
https://www.vice.com/en/article/unsealed-transcript-shows-ho... ("Unsealed Transcript Shows How a Judge Justified Ross Ulbricht’s Life Sentence" (2015))
In an increasingly nihilistic world, I'm glad people like Forrest still exist.
One cannot be more wrong: there cannot be freedom without the rule of law and without the existence of a state that enforces it.
But yes, coining pejoratives like “woke” or “fascist” or “communist” and then going to war with the imaginary beliefs attributed to the enemies who themselves don’t even use the term is indeed not helpful. It’s just childish.
Very striking to see how the sentiment has drastically shifted, while the facts of the case did not. There is a really cultural shift visible in how this issue is seen on here.
Madoff's arrest and prosecution was actually pretty ineffectual in my opinion. If an amoral person can live as one of the richest men in the world for 40 years in exchange for spending the last 10 years of their life in minimum-security prison, I think a lot of amoral people would take that trade.
That's very unlikely to be true in the case of the high-school kid who died buying a synthetic drug off the internet. They almost certainly did not have a dealer connection sophisticated enough to sell that. They almost certainly would have lived, if Silk Road were not available to them at that point in their life.
You're advancing an argument about drug markets and personal autonomy in the general case, but it's a very poor fit to the concrete facts in the specific situation we're looking at.
I kinda do see your point, but I think I reach the opposite conclusion. If you are one person on a street corner it's one thing, if you enable a whole electronic marketplace you have a much larger effect.
Then again we should decide whether it's a bad thing to sell drugs, but if it is I would see him as more culpable than a random street dealer.
One example that stands out: I was playing pool in a quiet bar in a sleepy village. The next thing I know, a sixteen year old walks in and attacks another 16 year old. They are at each others throats, smashing cues on each other and throwing pool balls at each other. They are absolutely battered and bleeding by the end of it. One of the kids was the barman's son. As they finish their fight and are dragged out, another barman says to me "there's no need for that in here" and adds "you know what it's all about - who owed who money for drugs".
Just one example, but I've seen it a few times.
What an interpretation!
Another one might be: they tried to throw all kinds of things at Trump, and they all failed because they simply aren't true, until they managed to catch him on some triviality.
The fact that you "rule of law" people keep putting out accusations as if they were convictions, and insinuating people should be judged on these accusations is truly horrible for the system.
This man was at a USP and at other times other facilities. Those are places where even with the best intentions you are not expected to move in any capacity without serious safety concerns. We're talking "shower with your boots, a spotter and and a shank on you" environment without the slightest joke.
It took a while likely because Ross is non-violent and smart, but eventually he was unable to stay in general population to some capacity. My understanding is he has spent significant time in solitary confinement or PC - effectively the same thing at these facilities, very small single cell rooms with a slot in them and the minimum required 1 hour of "yard time" per day, most of which has been suspended to some degree due to COVID and the slow response.
The end result is this guy for sure has spent months to years in a very small cell, possibly without even seeing the sun. I didn't see the sun "for reals" for 6 months. A keyboard warrior can swoop in here and talk about how they cannot do this or how X time restrictions exist, but the reality is they just need to move you back to your cell on paper for a day and then back in or trick you into signing some kind of paperwork consenting.
My heart goes out to both of them and I am reminded that I was the person that help mined the first 1FREEROSS Bitcoin vanity address to help crowd fund his defense. Lyn never gave up the slightest even during times that were fucking impossible to imagine.
It wasn't confusing to me, but evidently the way it was worded confused others.
"If I don't do it, someone else will" - I suppose this is a convenient excuse that can be applied to anything unsavory, from the little guy selling shrooms at the street corner to nation states making nasty biological and chemical weapons?
Not saying there isn't truth to it, just wondering how as a society we seem to accept that doing unsavory things is a necessity because others are doing it (or they will be doing it soon, so we better be the first)
He was punished for the crime of attempting or conspiring to commit murder. Without ever having been found guilty in a trial by jury of his peers determining beyond reasonable doubt that the facts met said crime.
What does it mean to be "operating an electronic market"? Are you under the impression he was physically intermediating these transactions in some way? That the drugs passed through his hands?
That's one difference.
Here's the thing about the US federal law enforcement: there aren't actually a lot of them. In a country of 380 million people, there are 38,000 agents. Google employs more people than the FBI. If the US citizenry decided to take collective action against them, the federal domestic police force alone could not stand against the citizenry.
This shapes where they apply their resources. To be most effective, they need to be visible so that people don't start to think of them as toothless, because mass-resistance to their general police activities would actually work. So they pursue cases into the dust to generate high-profile images of lawbreakers having a really awful time to discourage other lawbreakers.
He was prosecuted because he broke US drug law. But he was prosecuted to the extent he was prosecuted because Silk Road had made headlines as something untouchable by federal authority. That's the kind of Capone energy that the federal law enforcement cannot abide and survive as an institution.
Ross directly profited from the sale of those drugs. So, yes, he was "selling the drugs".
> "I need his real-world identity, so I can threaten him with violence," DPR told RealLucyDrop.
> "I don't know how I feel about that solution," said RealLucyDrop
Rule of law would prevent all of that. Or should.
Also punishing a people for actions of their government is a war crime.
Let's say I "build a network" of mules, planes, trucks, trafficking routes, and people who handle the distribution of drugs. I provide all the logistics to make the drugs go from supplier to end user.
So, a marketplace of sorts... in the real world, not on the Internet.
But, I don't actually sell the drugs to the end user on the street corner. That's someone else.
But a cut of each of those sales rolls up to me, and without me, those sales aren't happening (sure they could happen via someone else, but this particular network exists because I built it and I run it)..
I am what is referred to as a "drug lord".
How am I not responsible for heroin getting into the hands of vulnerable addicts?
The attraction for people to post on Hacker News is mainly to complain, and so in the first you get complaints the sentencing is too harsh, and in this one you get complaints that he shouldn't have been pardoned. Its not necessarily a cultural shift, just an artifact of the types of discussions people have online.
Though I think this argument is tangential to the point on proportionality- Ross's sentence is an affront to justice when considered in the context of the Sackler's treatment
Comparing Meta and Google to Silk Road is a bad faith argument. You might as well compare Silk Road to the phone network at that point.
I'm not sure. I have two questions on that. Is there the appearance of a sentiment shift? I see plenty of people arguing both against and for incarcerating him in both this thread and that old one.
And then if there is an appearance of a sentiment change (which I'm not sure about) is that evidence of a sentiment change or just selection bias? People who are okay with an outcome are much less likely to write a comment than people who are upset. That alone would change the bias of the comments.
at the time, the murder for hire accusations seemed legitimate and they still do today. hopefully they charge him with attempted murder if the statute of limitations isnt up.
I mean, I won't admit it openly but something like that yeah. It doesn't help either that the way to show you disagree is by sharing what you disagree with (which is great) but the way you show you agree is by upvoting (which others don't see).
So one comment with three complaints in the replies but 100 upvotes might look like "people wholeheartedly disagree with this person" but in reality, most readers actually agreed. Comments that are just "I agree" are kind of pointless, so I prefer how things are, but useful to not read too much into "X people said Y" on HN.
So. Comparisons to Google, Verizon, etc?
While his actions aren’t equivalent to a “direct” old-fashioned drug dealer selling fentanyl, they’re clearly also not equivalent to providers like Google or Verizon.
They provide truly general purpose communications networks. Common carriers. That’s different from a marketplace explicitly designed to facilitate a particular thing like selling drugs.
I mean, you can upload non-porn videos to PornHub, or attempt to met platonic knitting circle buddies on there. But let’s not sit around and pretend the entire operation isn’t designed around the explicit purpose of selling porn.
Steal the pensions and other retirement funds of millions? At worst, slap on the wrist.
Steal a single dollar from a single billionaire? Hope you like solitary, buddy.
Let's spend 1/4 of that all the drug enforcement money on harm reduction.
Most illegal drugs by far go through regular border crossings, but he hasn’t obsessed about them in the same way.
plus in North America you don't really need a darknet market to get a gun illegally. US FedGov ain't gonna get to involved in illegal gun sales in Europe.
https://freeross.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Doc_14_Dismi...
Well that's the entire principle of price elasticity. The less costly (not only in terms of money, but also in terms of risk and time) something gets the higher the demand, at least up to a point.
I'd rather get my milk from the corner store than some anonymous reseller on amazon. Real life drug dealers operate in markets too.
I mean, I’m not sure Pablo Escobar ever sold drugs or murdered anybody with his own hands. Metaphorically though there was a ton of blood on his hands. Charles Manson allegedly never killed anybody himself either. But we generally agree these guys were bad for society.
I’m generally lasseiz-faire about drugs, and I generally put the onus of responsibility on the person choosing to ingest them.
But there are some drugs, like opioids, that kind of transcend that. They cannot reasonably be safely used in a recreational manner, and are objectively a cancer to society.
This structure is self-reinforcing and very resilient: few people here and there rejecting faith in rule of law, or authority of the courts, or money, don't make a difference - we write such people off as weirdos and carry on with our days, secure in knowledge our world will continue to work as it worked the day before. But if sufficient amount of people have their faith falter, that's where the trouble starts.
For example, if enough people stop trusting in the justice system to deliver something resembling justice most of the time, you'll see people ignoring courts and laws and taking justice into their own hands[0]. People start lynching and killing each other, others see them getting away with it, which quickly destroys their trust in the system, and now you're at the precipice. If shooting a (person accused of being) thief is fine, if shooting a billionaire is fine, then why uphold a contract? Might as well get your own at gunpoint, etc. At this point everything stops working - banks, healthcare, fire services, stores. Your country collapses. You probably die.
That is why threats to our shared belief system are so dangerous, and need to be dealt with swiftly and aggressively. It's not about elites in power wanting to stay in power (though it's no doubt part of it for them) - it's because should we all start thinking our social structures don't work, and that everyone else thinks this too, and start acting on this expectation, they'll all collapse in an instant.
--
[0] - No, whatever it is that America has with its police is still far from that point.
They idolize Ross for creating a drug market because they view it as freedom of speech.
And he does this to distract from the fact that he will not stop the Ukraine war, not stop H1B etc.
Many of the same people also complain about the Biden laptop and Biden's pardons.
This is like crying about whataboutism when a judge cites judicial precedent to justify a sentence. Good luck with that, it might work as a "nuh-uh" in online discussions but in real life, precedent does actually matter.
I think life with no parole was far to harsh.
Trump was also the target of "politically motivated judicial scrutiny" (and rightfully so!) So I guess he would be justified in pardoning himself and his entire family, right?
edit: this section of reasons’ article summarizes the situation nicely.
“Now that Ulbricht has no chance of having his initial conviction and sentencing overturned or adjusted, it's likely the feds out of Maryland decided the indictment no longer was needed to make sure the government had some further means in their back pocket to punish Ulbricht for showing a safer, saner way around their insanely damaging drug war.”
the reason the charges were dismissed is similar to the reason he wasnt charged initially: because attempted murder charge was unnecessary from the prosecutors point if view. not because he is innocent of the charge. the article also notes that torture was an element in those murders. this guy should not be walking free
I don't know what the appropriate sentence for Ulbrecht, but I think your claims about proportionality are missing the fact he didn't just direct commit a few crimes, such as trying (unsuccessfully) to hire a hitman, but he facilitated hundreds of thousands of crimes. Maybe you think selling drugs and guns to randos should not be illegal, but that is a separate question of whether or not he broke the laws as written.
As for your last point, I don't disagree that the wealthy/powerful/connected live under a different justice system than everyone else.
A pardon is used when you want to erase the criminal record on top of that.
In the case of the Silk Road of course, it's much worse, since the platform specifically existed to facilitate illegal behaviour. I couldn't care less about the drug dealing aspect per say, but absolutely facilitating sale in these quantities with no protection from outright poisoning from contaminants is immoral. But he also sold weapons via 'the armory' https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/not-ready-silk-roads-the...
He also directly attempted to have someone murdered, which is a very serious crime in any country. The guy is not a hero. - https://www.wired.com/2015/02/read-transcript-silk-roads-bos...
Trump was president and commited a ton of crimes while being one, and a ton of others before and after. He was rightfully prosecuted, but unfortunately escaped any real consequences. His trials were mediatised and saw big attention form politicians because he was a former president, who was impeached being sued for a ton of different criminal activities, including multiple directly related to his job (the top job in the US). His trials were directly relevant to the wider public and political establishment, and should have prevented him from ever running again for even a school board.
Biden's son is a nobody. No high positions in government, no power, no shady deals getting billions from Saudis or whatever. Run of the mill small time criminal who got paraded through Congress simply because his father was president.
It's really absurd to try to compare the two, or claim that the myriad of trials against Trump were "politically motivated". The man is a fucking convicted criminal, rapist, absurd creep, tax cheat, stole from a children's cancer charity, plan and simple and obvious for anyone. And uet he's back at the top job, publicly promising vengeance to all those who wronged him. He directly and publicly threatened Zuckerberg and others.
It's really absurd trying to compare the two, and I refuse to believe this can be done in good faith.
Maybe in 10 years we can blame poor reading comprehension on having a decade of computers reading for us. But it’s a bit early for that.
> “‘Weed’ (i.e., marijuana) is the most popular item on Silk Road” (p.8)
> “The quantities being sold are generally rather small (e.g., a few grams of marijuana)” (p.12)
> In Table 1, we take a closer look at the top 20 categories per number of item offered. “Weed” (i.e., mari- juana) is the most popular item on Silk Road, followed by “Drugs,” which encompass any sort of narcotics or prescription medicine the seller did not want further classified. Prescription drugs, and “Benzos,” colloquial term for benzodiazepines, which include prescription medicines like Valium and other drugs used for insom- nia and anxiety treatment, are also highly popular. The four most popular categories are all linked to drugs; nine of the top ten, and sixteen out of the top twenty are drug-related. In other words, Silk Road is mostly a drug store, even though it also caters some other products. Finally, among narcotics, even though such a classification is somewhat arbitrary, Silk Road appears to have more inventory in “soft drugs” (e.g., weed, cannabis, hash, seeds) than “hard drugs” (e.g., opiates); this presumably simply reflects market demand.
> Silk Road places relatively few restrictions on the types of goods sellers can offer. From the Silk Road sellers’ guide [5], “Do not list anything who’s (sic) purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen items or info, stolen credit cards, counterfeit currency, personal info, assassinations, and weapons of any kind. Do not list anything related to pedophilia.”
> Conspicuously absent from the list of prohibited items are prescription drugs and narcotics, as well as adult pornography and fake identification documents (e.g., counterfeit driver’s licenses). Weapons and am- munition used to be allowed until March 4, 2012, when they were transferred to a sister site called The Armory [1], which operated with an infrastructure similar to that of Silk Road. Interestingly, the Armory closed in August 2012 reportedly due to a lack of business [6].
https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU...
But unless you can point to any other group with actual power and money who was pushing for it, the most obvious answer is that the main funders of the crypto PACs were at least ok with it. There's no way they couldn't have subtly squashed this pardon with Trump if it was just the Libertarians asking for it given that they seem to have gotten him to commit to do literally everything else they want.
The comment you refer to is just poorly written.
That said, I think Ross did knowingly enable violence?
But how's that different from arguing that every crack dealer who doesn't cut their crack product is a utilitarian, net-positive life-saver?
Alice sells pure crack. Bob one street down adds fentanyl for the extra kick. It's a reasonable inference that Alice's clients, deprived of Alice, would switch to Bob and promptly off themselves. Does it therefore follow, that Alice-who-sells-crack is an upstanding, lifesaving even, member of society, who should be left free to sell more crack? If not, then what's the differentiation between Alice-who-sells-crack and Ross Ulbricht—what innovation has that cryptocurrency startup innovated, that makes it it a substantively different moral scenario?
Certainly, no crack dealer has ever, in the history of the US, tried to advance this specific utilitarian argument, which Ulbricht attached himself to (as Judge Forrest pointed out—it's a privileged argument of a privileged person).
Minds shuffle information. Including about themselves.
Paper with information being shuffled by rules exhibiting intelligence and awareness of “self” is just ridiculously inefficient. Not inherently less capable.
And an indictment is not proof that the allegations are real or not manipulated. US Attorneys are a deeply amoral group, they don't care about truth or justice, just winning at any cost.
It seems that crypto then and now are pretty similar, mess wise.
Huge amounts of income can even make something as boring as an online digital scrapbook tech sexy.
> “‘Weed’ (i.e., marijuana) is the most popular item on Silk Road” (p.8)
> “The quantities being sold are generally rather small (e.g., a few grams of marijuana)” (p.12)
https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/TR-CMU...
2+ life sentences for a website which sold weed is just outrageous. Also note that since 2012, people have become a LOT softer on weed and even other drugs have been legalized since then. Trump himself has said that he has friends who have benefitted from weed.
He seems to be denying that he hired hitmen:
It's absurd. Even the non-Silk-Road charges look as if they were tacked on so that people like us weren't sympathetic about what were only non-violent drug trafficking charges ("look, he also hired a killer to murder an enemy!").
EDIT: I'm not being sarcastic, either, BTW. But, I do love the irony of writing a positive reply to your comment.
You don't need to hire a hitman when someone blackmails you.
They were dismissed with prejudice.
> “We are pleased that the prosecutors in the District of Maryland, after almost five years, have dismissed their indictment against Ross. Holding this over Ross’ head, without taking it to trial where he could defend himself, has been very damaging to Ross and his case, especially because it contained the only charge of murder-for-hire. Of course, this charge was never proven or convicted, but was very effective in smearing Ross’s reputation and hurting him in the legal process”.
> She said, “We had some good news recently. The indictment and superseding indictment against Ross in the District of Maryland were dismissed ‘with prejudice,’ meaning they can never be re-filed. This is especially good because those indictments contained the only charge ever made that Ross engaged in murder-for-hire. This was a serious allegation that Ross denies. It was never prosecuted or ruled on by a jury but was trumpeted by the government and the media as if it were proven fact”.
https://perspectivesmatter.com/2018/08/silk-road-drugs-the-i...
https://www.humanrightsdefensecenter.org/action/news/2020/dy...
> Following his arrest in 2013, prosecutors also alleged that he planned murder-for-hire although, curiously, he was never charged or prosecuted for it at trial (and the allegations were dismissed with prejudice by a U.S. District Judge in 2018).
> The allegations were never charged at trial, never proven, never submitted to, or ruled on by, a jury, and eventually dismissed with prejudice. Ross consistently denied the allegations (which relied on anonymous online chats never proven to have been authored by him) and those who know him never believed them. The only alleged victim ever identified, Curtis Green, is a fervent supporter of Ross’s clemency.
Many of the promises were directly conflicting, and/or upsetting to other groups that also had promises made to them. One example would be he promised some groups to push for the death penalty for anyone involved in selling drugs, in conflict with his pardon of Ulbricht here.
The brain has infinite potentials, however only finite resolves. So you can only play a finite number of moves in a game of infinite infinities.
Individual minds have varying mental technology, our mental technologies change and adapt to challenges (not always in real time.) thus these infinite configurations create new potentials that previously didn’t exist in the realm of potential without some serious mental vectoring.
Get it? You were just so sure of yourself you canceled your own infinite potentials!
Remember, it’s only finite after it happens. Until then it’s potential.
I once walked home after an evening of some friends and beer.
As I came up to my house it was dark but I clearly saw a little person walking through my back garden. About 3 foot tall, at the most, it seemed. And they were holding the hand of a smaller person half their height. Walking together, no hurry at all.
I just froze and watched them walking away, and turn a corner.
The feelings of disbelief, but wanting to believe were crazy.
I came out of my shock. Ran the length of my home and managed to see mother and child raccoons now walking on all fours.
They must have walked 20 feet on their back legs together, holding hands.
For a minute of my life I was actually Alice in Wonderland and there were tiny people who walked gardens at night.
So even if he does have a stash, it is likely marked, and he will get a knock on the door real fast if it starts moving.
> Having this tableau unexpectedly unfold right in front of my eyes
And the metaphor / tense shift caught me by surprise and made my eyes retrace to the beginning. I still got it, but there was a little bit of comprehension whiplash as I hit that bump in the road.
In some ways, we're treated to an experience like the author's as we hit that sentence, so in that sense it's clever writing. On the other hand, maybe too clever for a casual web forum instead of, say, a letter.
Quoting from Wikipedia: The district court found by a preponderance of the evidence that Ulbricht probably commissioned the murders.[41] The possibility that Ulbricht had commissioned murders was considered by the judge in sentencing Ulbricht to life and was a factor in the Second Circuit's decision to uphold the sentence.
What is this based on? Can't find this on Google.
Also, which fake murder are you talking about? There were 6 alleged murder-for-hire solicitations.
> another facet of empathy
Do you really think political obsession is just a sign of superior morals and humanity?
Empathy should make you less pessimistic about politics because you understand other groups values and incentives. (I don’t claim this description is me)
Clearly not that much evidence if the state didn't bother to prosecute those charges. And why would they? The judge sentenced him as though he had been found guilty of them.
The man just didn’t die because the killer was a DEA agent in reality.
That’s still a felony.
The axiom of their "rule of law" was that racism is the worst possible sin, and that anything done to appease people calling you racist was mandatory. The below link MASSIVLEY understated the number of victims.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/rotherham-sex-abuse-sh...
wow, not even god could eliminate sin but apparently the republicans can?
how do you envision that being enforced? death penalty for any sin? You've never made a sin yourself? If so how could you live in sin-free city? sounds sick and dystopian.
anyway, the point i wanted to make was that when you vote for somebody, you are the one giving that person the authority to take actions on your behalf. if you voted for T, you shouldn't complain about anything he does, because he can only do so because of your vote. learn to be wary of politicians, they treat you right during the dates (election) but after the wedding the true person comes out.
There is no commercial product capable of testing cash for drugs. Anyone claiming to sell such a product is lying.
There is a wipe, like a baby wipe, that is sold as a "cocaine detection wipe". It is a lie.
It uses a dumbed down version of a spot test that is very good at detecting cocaine, but it also reacts with many other substances that are not cocaine.
The test was dumbed down because the substances needed to make it more accurate are much more dangerous than the cobalt thiocyanate (which is STILL not good for you) used in the "safe" tests.
There are thousands and thousands and thousands of substances that will cause a cocaine detection test to return a positive reaction. One of them is Benadryl. Benadryl causes such a strong and vibrant reaction that you would think the entire object being tested was made of pure cocaine.
If you keep a single packet containing one Benadryl pill in your bag and you use it and while taking it a handful of diphenhydramine (Benadryl) molecules get transferred from your fingers to the outside of the packet, and then you toss the packet into your bag and they get transferred from the packet to the interior of your bag, to a wallet in your bag, to the cash itself, testing the cash in that wallet with a cocaine field test will produce a stronger positive result than if you had rolled up a bill and snorted a line immediately prior to the test and there was still powdered cocaine on the bill.
This is not a joke or exaggeration. If you touch a single Benadryl pill with the tip of your index finger, then poke the tip of your finger to a sheet of paper, then you put that sheet of paper in a printer and a rubber roller in the paper-handling mechanism rolls over the spot you touched, every single sheet of paper printed by that printer for MONTHS will test positively for cocaine. (using the tests that don't require training, PPE, and expensive lab equipment).
Did your totally real and not bullshit cash have drugs on them, or Benadryl, or ANY substance with the ring of carbon atoms that the test detects?
"But this study found 80% of bills had dru..."
Buddy 100% of all bills that have been used just once have actual literal shit, feces, dookie, poop, (and staph!) on them.
There is poop in your wallet right now.
In one indictment, in a New York federal court, he was charged with several crimes, but not murder-for-hire. In the other indictment, in a Maryland federal court, he was charged just with murder-for-hire.
The case in New York went to trial first. The murder-for-hire evidence was introduced in that court as part of trying to prove some of the elements of the other charges.
For example to prove a charge of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise one of the elements is that the person occupied "a position of organizer, a supervisory position, or any other position of management". Evidence that a person is trying to hire hitmen to protect the enterprise is evidence that they occupy such a role.
After the convictions and sentencing in the New York trial were upheld on appeal, the prosecutors in Maryland dropped their case because he was then in jail, for life, with no possibility of parole. They said it was a better use of resources to focus on cases where justice had not yet been served.
https://rossulbricht.medium.com/decentralize-social-media-cc...
- So, what about the exploitation, violence, and devastating addiction that results from no-rules drug purveying/trafficking?
(how would you compare Ross Ulbright to medical opioid purveyers/traffickers? If the same, what are they morally?)
- Isn't murder for hire outright objectionable?
Back in 2017, I could still read public profiles, their tweets, and look at the replies, all without logging in.
Now I can't even look at an account page without logging in.
Has to be something else going on here, none of the explanations in this thread are hitting it on the head for me.
Do they really? How? Asking for a friend.
To anyone who voted for Trump because he said he'd be hard on drug dealers: how do you feel about him pardoning a top level drug dealer?
the four disagreements apply to a comment section as well: the comment is factually wrong, the comment lacks information, the comment. draws a different conclusion from the same set of information, or the comment is philosophically opposed to my viewpoint. For an online comment system, spam is another category.
But surely it's just that people love to complain, right? Can't possibly be that they thought something like 25yr was more reasonable?
The war on drugs has always been farcical, deliberately engineered to target minority groups who were opposing power dynamics at the time. It’s why - despite popular opinion to the contrary - cannabis remains broadly illegal at the Federal level and enforced globally through a web of treaties. It’s always been about creating the means of entrapment for those inconvenient to power.
Pardoning Ross smacks of a gift to cryptobros to earn their loyalty to the current powers that be, rather than an acknowledgement of a past mistake. It is nakedly political, pardoning a white man from an otherwise good background while others languish in prison on far less serious charges or convictions. Were any of the drug dealers on his black market similarly pardoned? Were any of his consumers? Of course not, because Ross was a Capitalist making profit in an untapped market, and the others were individuals who were not.
The entire thing is nauseating, and is enough to wash my hands of all involved were the need to dismantle this farce of a war not so grave.
I'm unconvinced that Trump in 2020 thought Ulbricht's total sentence was okay, but four years later has apparently changed his mind. So who's the client here? It doesn't seem to be Ulbricht - is it libertarians in general? Why does Trump, as a second term president, actually care?
They saw him walk in because he was where it happened. The image of Ross, and others, was in mind, however.
Right, because we recognize that indirect, transitive blame is ethically problematic.
> He actively and deliberately enabled those activities for self benefit.
So did the Sacklers with the opioid epidemic, arguably even more directly than Ulbricht. Which of them is in prison?
"Enabling" is exactly the kind of weasel word that I find problematic. It has no strict definition and can be broadened to suit whatever is needed to condemn an action you happen to dislike in any given scenario.
Given that he is now free, and may have access to substantial cryptocurrency wealth, I think it would probably be best under the circumstances if everyone forgot about these allegations and just left him alone to live a quiet life.
I'd like to see some ranked choice voting.
Apparently, there is something in Lorance v. Commandant, U.S. Disciplinary Barracks that indicates that accepting a pardon does not imply guilt, but I am not very knowledge on that.
What definition of the laws lawfulness are you using? Capturing the power - it is what makes law lawful, otherwise any law is unlawful.
So any appeals to the contrary are rooted in appeals to beliefs held in parallel with the liberal doctrines of the state. When Protestants ruled the US, that means some residual (often warped) Christian sensibility, because they were able to attain that consensus. But with greater competition today, that old consensus is no longer possible. Liberalism ensures that.
You can also hold both positions simultaneously without contradiction. That is to say that you can think that his sentence was too harsh while at the same time being of the opinion that what he did was a crime (and should be a crime) and that he should remain convicted and un-pardoned, just with a different sentence than the one he was given.
If you look at this the old way, Hitler wasn't above the law, he was the law, because there was no real split of powers.
Your comment, though, is very interesting because it defies the stupid idea that back then people respected laws, while today....
Somehow this got idolized, which is why (young!) people tend to feel nostalgic about such times. In reality, there was a lot of corruption, Hitler himself evaded taxes, used Party money to fund his own Mercedes etc.... yeah like today!!! :)
Edit: somehow this propaganda of people of law lasted until today. In reality, the guy was a fraud that collected millions over the years. While everyone else had to live in fear of deportations or worse. I don't understand why journalists don't focus on things like this to dismantle idiotic extreme parties.
"Some cash has cocaine on it" has no logical relationship to "all cryptocurreny use is illegitimate".
If they wanted to refute the original claim and say that cryptocurrency has legitimate uses or if they wanted to make a separate point to say that cash is similarly only useful to criminals, they failed.
I don't know the differences but also from my perspective they don't seem to differ that much. Might as well be that Trump said "yeah and pardon that guy Ulbricht ... " while doing tons of other stuff wielding his new powers like he's doing now and his word was taken exact, given there's little difference
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gh5_2YgWoAABY-O?format=jpg&name=...
I'd also argue he almost certainly saved a huge number of lives with Silk Road: the ability to view eBay style feedback and chemical test results makes buying illegal drugs far safer than buying them on the street. On Silk Road people could buy from a reputable seller with a long history of providing unadulterated products, and could view testimonials from other buyers who had sent the products for chemical analysis.
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.
I would take issue with assuming that it was net positive with ratings. Given the anonymous nature handling bots spamming fake reviews would be even harder to catch here, and you ultimately don’t know who ended up addicted/hooked/DUI’s etc from the easy availability this provided. I’m not sure the total effects could ever be qualified, but it’s not like unadulterated drugs are automatically safe. Just look at how many lives pharma-grade opioids ruined, even though they were “safe”.
That’s also not to mention guns and all kinds of other dangerous & illegal parts of it.
I do not understand why he pardoned this guy when he’s supposedly anti-drug and anti-cartel.
I don't really have an opinion on this case because I'm not completely familiar with all the details. It's certainly going to be contentious.
why do you believe he's anti-drug or anti-cartel?
I know this is probably as minority view, but I think if adults consent to buying and using any drug, that should be both fully legal, and their right and responsibility- any negative consequences are 100% their own fault, not the person who sold them. It's probably true that making drugs easier to buy made more people buy them, but I was only considering the ill effects of fraudulently adulterated products. Do the math differently if you don't see it this way.
I don't know how Silk Road was designed, and have never actually used it or anything like it- but I imagine it would be possible to eliminate fraudulent reviews with proper design, and they may have done so. eBay, for example, is almost free of fraudulent reviews because posting a single review is very expensive- you'd need to sell an item to yourself for full price, and then pay eBay their full (rather large) cut to post a single fraudulent review.
As a buyer, you should be able to take a single high effort review that contains something like mass spec chemical analysis results, and further confirm that the reviewer themselves has a credible history of making purchases and reviews broadly across a lot of different sellers. An impossibly expensive to fake signal. This could also be done automatically by the platform- by making the more credible reviews display first.
> I do not understand why he pardoned this guy when he’s supposedly anti-drug and anti-cartel.
I explained this in another comment: >>42787217
Trump is not an idealist- he will promise anything to anyone if it gets power and attention. Previously, he had attempted a political career as a leftist, and switched to the right because it was getting more traction.
It's stunning how far the Democrats have fallen. They've been completely co-opted by the PMC class and simply use identity politics to distract from their utter inability to deliver on anything. One need only look at the sad state of California, its massively delayed and over-budget high speed rail to nowhere, homelessness and decay, over-regulation inhibiting everything including the beloved green energy projects, etc. Texas literally has more green energy and cheaper electricity than California because they let people build, which can even be seen in their falling rents. Progressives can't allow that because it might 'change the character of a neighborhood', which is ironically one of the most conservative and anti-progress positions you could take.
> “Ross Ulbricht has been a libertarian political prisoner for more than a decade,” said a statement from Libertarian National Committee Chair Angela McArdle. “I’m proud to say that saving his life has been one of our top priorities and that has finally paid off.”
Seems the US-version of libertarians is that group.
The Mexican government has a long history of this. The LAPD’s (well documented for over 50 years) do the same thing.
Trump is a convicted felon with lots of ties to organized crime. Nothing about him pardoning members of some criminal organizations but not others is surprising.
In related news, he signed an executive order forcing prosecutors to seek the death penalty when police are killed, and in the same day pardoned 132 of his supporters that were convicted of assaulting police officers during an event where officers were killed.
Either way, obviously, the system has failed.
Or as the commonplace goes, is working as designed.
It is very clear from what you’ve said that you haven’t used it :) I have browsed it when it was active and I was very pro tor. You’re making a lot of assumptions that simply don’t hold for silk road.
So will the Trump admin be making any moves on legalization or safe supply? Especially since between Musk and Kennedy's admitted drug use, the white house pharmacy report, and the allegations about the Trump family itself, it seems obvious that the White House appreciates the usefulness of illegal stimulants?
Or is this another case of "in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"?
If I remember correctly, there were comments from both the prosecution and judge that would basically prove that point- and they allowed evidence related to those other crimes in the trial. If they could prove this misconduct, they may even be able to argue double jeopardy.
He also pardoned a drug dealing cop killer at the end of his last term. Said cop killer has since been arrested for attempting to strangle his wife to death.
https://www.wesh.com/article/cop-killer-pardoned-by-trump-co...
There was the free Ross movement, they promised to vote for him if he pardons Ross and he did.
He apparently tweeted about how much Ross's mum supported him during the campaign.
But my source for all this info is reddit
On a similar note--I've noticed that HN comments are often overwrought, like the commenter is trying to sound smarter than they actually are but just end up muddling what they're trying to say.
Perhaps these things are connected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace). wikipedia uses as reference https://web.archive.org/web/20160407165324/http://gawker.com... and https://web.archive.org/web/20131012012106/http://www.thegua...
plus, at least ebay, amazon, big tech comply or at least sometimes comply with the law banning some products which can't be sold or advertised
It seems people forget about the insane infringements of civil rights through the Patriot Act, NDAA, mass surveillance, lockdowns, firing people over vaccine mandates, etc. A poll showed about half of Democrats supported putting Americans into camps if they didn't take the vaccine, and a third supported seizing custody of their children. Democrats supported mass censorship and state control over media, which is far more authoritarian and fascist than anything the Republicans were doing.
He was not pardoned for any crimes not charged, and therefore could still be charged.
You can see, this was simply a pardon for his existing convictions, no uncharged crimes, not even things related to these crimes.
As a result, he could still be charged with anything they chose not to charge.
As such, your nitpicking was pointless.
There is nothing here that would prevent him from being charged with murder for hire, or even other drug crimes.
He was only pardoned as to his existing convictions.
Lucky him, as his pardon doesn't cover them. But he could still be charged at the state level, and at the federal level with any other crime.
Biden did bad pardons, now Trump has no other course (eg fix the system), but to do bad pardons as well? Except when Trump does it it is not bad because Biden did it first?
This is a bad joke.
Do you think two wrongs make a right?
For reference, Rudy Giuliani was lauded as the anti-organized mayor that brought down the Italian mob in New York, but ultimately was flagged as actually being an upper echelon of Russian organized crime who worked to establish it by eliminating competiton.
The Democrat agenda has far far higher approval ratings than Democrats, and that says a lot about the current state of affairs.
> life in prison was too harsh, but a full pardon is too lenient.
I think you should compare it as: life in prison was too harsh, but 10 years is too lenient.
I was playing devil's advocate, but agree there is more culpability to a seller if the drug overwhelms your ability to make the choice in the first place- however a lot of very illegal drugs do not do this. More so if you're using emotionally manipulative ads and selling methods as the alcohol and pharma industry do.
The law means less than it used to.
First time offender?!?!? Applying that term to a guy who spent years traveling around the world under multiple fake IDs while using state-level security on his hardware and racking up law violations every single day seems like an absurd stretch.
I mean, come on. By that logic, Al Capone was a first time offender when the feds finally nailed him for the first time. Pablo Escobar was a first time offender when he finally got nabbed. Good lord.
"First time offense" applies to your _first offense_. Not relevant when you've committed thousands of offenses over years while living on the run.
Yes. Just like San Francisco and Seattle did when they legalized drugs
This might be a good first step, too. Read more books from a time when people were struggling with arbitrary justice.
And here we are
Saying that law is 'the only thing' necessary for the existence of modern society effectively means it is also a sufficient condition. So yes, someone did claim the opposite.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4h2rnc/comme...
But why were the charges dismissed with prejudice? That's not the normal way to dismiss charges.
"We want competent people coming into our country. And H-1B, I know the programme very well. I use the programme. Maître d', wine experts, even waiters, high-quality waiters, you've got to get the best people. People like Larry, he needs engineers, NASA also needs... engineers like nobody's ever needed them"
The OP made a dumb comment about the length of the prison sentence in comparison to a murderer, I pointed out a) that while the OP thought it was too long, the same exact logic could be used to say it was too short and b) his original premise about the relative degrees of the "badness" of crimes was not an absolute.
You're welcome to disagree, however the comment above is unconvincing. Ulbricht dealt in drugs which he knew from day 1 were unquestionably illegal in this country.
(I do think there's probably an element of deliberate disrespect to federal law enforcement and the justice system, but that alone doesn't answer the question why Ross specifically?)
Slow down there cowboy, it's "ten" because the other poster is referencing a conviction which occurred on February 5th 2015, uncannily close to exactly ten years ago.
I think it isn't mentioned because Silk Road didn't actually facilitate any selling/buying of weapons or any items "whose purpose was to "harm or defraud."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)#Produc...
> I do not understand why he pardoned this guy when he’s supposedly anti-drug and anti-cartel.
He's the candidate that was preferred by Christians, yet probably he was the least Christian-like candidate. Just today/yesterday he criticized a Bishop for values that are clearly Christian, people seem to swallow it. I'm pretty sure trying to add logic/reasoning to the choices he makes is a lost cause.
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.
I wouldn't argue that both sides have gotten more extreme, rather the political spectrum curve has flattened. There is much less rational discourse in general.
Reddit is a great example. Even 10 years ago you could have mostly rational discussions. Now its no better than Facebook. I saw a post today about people being upset the government is giving OpenAI half a trillion dollars. They didn't even realize it wasn't government money. They didn't want to be corrected.
Furthermore the timeline for this is over a decade after Giuliani was mayor of New York.
The rise of the morally bankrupt in America.
%-wise there are just fewer libertarian-minded people here these days.
For LSD there existed a third-party forum, where a group of (supposedly) vendor-neutral, unaffiliated individuals would purchase samples from vendors, send them to private or state-sponsored labs around the world and publish/discuss the results (often with online links to lab results).
Yes, of course vendors could have also attempted to infiltrate these forums. But as enough of these functions were provided by/for the community, the profit incentive tilts. If you ran a vendor account on the Silk Road, your effort was better spent maintaining/improving good infosec and mail/postal security. Some techniques they developed were quite innovative, the professionalism was evident.
Ross’s story is fascinating and tragic- as everything that’s said for and against his character is generally true. Silk Road was built on naive yet admirable ideals. It fostered a special community, some of which really did reflect those ideals. He got in over his head, and really did try to have someone killed.
Though, the details on that latter point are a bit more complicated- authorities had infiltrated Ross’s inner circle- the motive and the ‘hitman’ himself were fictional. Ross still took the bait though, which is pretty damning. Until that point, they weren’t sure they had a sufficient case on him.
I think you are thinking of a commutation. That ends the punishment while not absolving the person of the crime.
So the January 6th criminals who got pardons no longer have a criminal record (on this count at least). The 14 people who were only granted commutations are still counted as felons.
But in Ulbricht's case I'd say even this part is mitigated by the fact that facilitating the trade of dangerous drugs was a side effect of running a useful service for responsible drug users.
Also, I was focusing less on Ulbricht, and more on what 'ty6853 wrote in the comment I replied to. Quoting another part of it:
> The state hates more than anything someone who operates on first principles that the empire is wrong.
My point is: the state is absolutely right to hate such people. This is true regardless of whether the "empire" is North Korea or the United Federation of Planets - it's not an ethics issue, it's a structural property of stable social organizations.
As for people living today, unless you really suffer under the yoke of an evil empire, it's worth remembering that, were the state to suddenly break down, things will get much, much worse for everyone in it, yourself included.
It's too easy for all of us to take our daily lives for granted.
No, it doesn't. The brain has a finite number of possible states to be in. It's an absurdly large amount of states, but it is finite. And, out of those absurd but finite number of possible states, only a tiny fraction correspond to possible states potentially reachable by a functioning brain. The rest of them are noise.
They want him to be hard on criminals who do things they don't like. The biggest drug dealers alive are the Sacklers or maybe McKinsey, and they're not in scope either.
Progressives aren't consistent either. No one is. For example, Dems keep screaming about being a country of laws when referring to GOP antics, but want to ignore certain immigration, anti-abortion, and drug laws (in some cases by just refusing to enforce them).
Unfortunately what's good for the goose is good for the gander, as they say.
In the long run letting political influence trump (no pun intended) the criminal justice system is a very bad thing.
By world standards our criminal justice system is a strength of the country. A pity if we lose that.
I agree Assange should not have been pursued at all.
You can't directly compare the two situations. Manning was a US citizen, serving a sentence in the US. During Obama's term, Assange was not yet accused of any crime in the US, so there was no presidential pardon to be had, though Obama could have dropped the extradition request.
Biden did eventually reach a deal with Assange that allowed him to count time served -- essentially the same as commuting a sentence, so along the lines of what Manning got -- and return to Australia.
So in the end, Assange and Manning were both freed after serving time.
All of the death threat allegations were never proven.
He did not deserve to rot in prison for life for creating a website.
Personally, I blame lawyers and prosecutors. A law should be simple, easy to evaluate if it was broken, and always prosecuted. And when it comes to punishments, they should be explicit and without the possibility of being altered.
We've gotten too complacent with making all these arbitrary rules, then fiddling with their non-enforcement and severity by virtue of reduced sentences.
Just to be clear, all they did is rename the US Digital Service to the US DOGE Service. The Digital Service already existed; it hires tech workers from industry on short-term rotations to work on government projects. Now that thing that already existed is called DOGE, and it will continue to do nothing more than bring in industry engineers to make websites for the government. If there’s a “massive downsizing in the federal workforce,” it won’t be because of “DOGE.”
https://reason.com/2023/10/24/trump-who-freed-drug-offenders...
You can talk about whatever you want, but you don't get to limit what other people talk about.
If you think there's anything like "everyone should obey, everyone expects everyone else will obey, and everyone knows they're expected by others to obey" around drug laws, you're living in a fantasy. You can talk about that concept if you want, but I'm saying that concept doesn't apply to drug law, which is, in case you noticed, the primary group of laws Ullbricht was convicted of breaking.
> For example, if enough people stop trusting in the justice system to deliver something resembling justice most of the time, you'll see people ignoring courts and laws and taking justice into their own hands[0]. People start lynching and killing each other, others see them getting away with it, which quickly destroys their trust in the system, and now you're at the precipice. If shooting a (person accused of being) thief is fine, if shooting a billionaire is fine, then why uphold a contract? Might as well get your own at gunpoint, etc. At this point everything stops working - banks, healthcare, fire services, stores. Your country collapses. You probably die.
You're picking unrelated examples and ignoring the issue at hand.
If selling drugs is fine, why uphold a contract? If driving faster than the speed limit is fine, why not get your own at gunpoint?
Sure, generally people agree murder is bad, but that's very little to do with the law or any sort of trust in the law. Your ivory-tower ideals have nothing to do with it: as it turns out, people don't want to be murdered, so we're all pretty happy when the cops enforce that law, whether we trust them or not.
I'll further add: banks, healthcare, fire services, stores, all only work for a segment of our population in the US. By your definition of collapse, large portions of the U.S. collapsed decades ago.
> That is why threats to our shared belief system are so dangerous, and need to be dealt with swiftly and aggressively. It's not about elites in power wanting to stay in power (though it's no doubt part of it for them) - it's because should we all start thinking our social structures don't work, and that everyone else thinks this too, and start acting on this expectation, they'll all collapse in an instant.
"Our shared belief system"?
Let's be clear, this is your belief system, and what you're trying to do is justify ramming it down other people's throats with the physical violence performed by police. Your belief system is probably the majority opinion within the upper-middle-class and richer demographic of Hacker News, and might even be the majority opinion nationally, but it's not unanimous or even close to unanimous. Drug use is well within the mainstream in 2025.
Suppose we're talking about a case where it's a foregone conclusion. 0% chance that the defendant will be acquitted, never going to happen. Then the defendant should plead guilty and save themselves some time and effort regardless of whether it leads to a lesser sentence, right? You don't need to coerce them because they can't possibly gain anything.
Now suppose that the chance isn't 0%, it's, say, 10%. Should we coerce these people into a guilty plea by giving them a 100% chance of six months vs. a 90% chance of five years? Out of a million of them, a hundred thousand would be found not guilty, so no.
> No justice system is perfect and without plea bargaining every defendant would have to spend a decade in jail, maybe two, before their case makes it in front of a judge.
This is why the right to a speedy trial exists, even though it has been eroded dramatically by basically making it a false choice between "you have your trial immediately with no chance to prepare a defense even though the prosecution has secretly been investigating you for months" and "you waive your right to a speedy trial entirely and rot in jail for years awaiting trial".
The way it ought to work is that the defendant has a right to set a "not after" date where the prosecution either has to proceed or release them from jail and drop the charges, which gives them enough time to actually prepare a defense without opening the door to being detained indefinitely awaiting trial even after they're prepared. The prosecution already has this up until the statute of limitations has run, because they can already wait to file charges until they've prepared their case.
> Unless we assign everybody chatgpt lawyers, judges and juries giving everybody a trial is a practical impossibility.
Or we could just have fewer laws and then assign the resources necessary to prosecute the remaining more important ones.
Notice that if you get rid of e.g. drug laws, you also get rid of all the murders and other crimes that come along with the existence of drug cartels, and the load on the courts goes down dramatically.
I'd agree with you if the people that used these drugs did so rationally. That's not the case mostly though from what I've heard. Trauma is often the root cause and that's out of many people's control. From then on it's ub to society to help them.
If a high performing exec wants to buy drugs to function better, sure maybe that's ok but I doubt that's the majority of people.
...living until the age of 61 as one of the richest men in the world, then spending 13 years in minimum-security prison.
> In 2013, following a further appeal, and earlier accusations that prosecutors had concealed evidence from Skilling's lawyers prior to his trial, the United States Department of Justice reached a deal with Skilling, which resulted in ten years being cut from his sentence, reducing it to 14 years. He was moved to a halfway house in 2018 and released from custody in 2019, after serving 12 years. [2]
...living until the age of 53 as one of the richest men in the world, then spending 12 years in minimum-security prison.
Re: NCFE: Lance K. Poulsen went to jail at 65, and while I wasn't able to find out his current situation, he's about due to get out of jail if the other cases are any indication[3]. Rebecca S. Parrett, 60, fled after her conviction and was arrested at age 62 in Mexico, largely due to fleeing to a country with robust US extradition (why?)[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Ebbers
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling
[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-national-century-finan...
[4] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/fugitive-ohio-executive-previ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)#Produc...
There was an "or" in that list of possible reactions. I was not giving an example of a situation in which someone would or should have every one of those reactions. I was directly replying to you by giving you an example of a situation in which it was clear that "political actions in Washington are the primary component" of inflicting harm on people.
>Do you really think political obsession is just a sign of superior morals and humanity?
I never said anything about superiority. That is something you brought to the conversation. Is there a reason you view someone exhibiting more empathy than you as an insult?
>Empathy should make you less pessimistic about politics because you understand other groups values and incentives.
Understanding a person's perspective isn't necessarily paired with the ability to change that perspective. Does knowing a racist might be motivated by fear make their racism less dangerous?
That's the point people don't seem to be getting about anonymous reviews- if the review is more costly than the value it provides the seller, they won't do it, and it's fairly easy to make that the case. A separate enthusiast forum where the reviews are from people with a long history of high effort engagement is a good example of that. That's basically the idea behind crypto as well- making false transactions is more expensive than the value it could return.
They're not overlooking this, they're criticizing it.
Suppose you have to prove that someone occupied "a position of organizer, a supervisory position, or any other position of management" so you introduce several pieces of evidence to try to prove it, one of them is some sketchy murder for hire allegations from a low-credibility source. The jury then convicts on the conspiracy charge without indicating whether they believed the murder for hire claim was proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
Should you now use the murder for hire claim to determine sentencing for the conspiracy charge? No, that's crazy, it's a much more serious crime and they should have to charge and prove that as a separate count if they want it to affect the penalty.
The government as it is the world over pretty much controls your entire life; It dictates what you can and can't do with your own body, it forces you into various forms of indentured servitude, it marks you and keeps track of you like an inventory item, it controls what you can say (where and with whom even), it takes your children from you and puts them into essentially indoctrination camps for "education", it comes up with arbitrary rules that you have to jump through hoops to abide by, and it can even take your children away if you don't teach them the approved things, it can take arbitrary control over any and all of your possessions for whatever reason, it orders you to harm your fellow man, etc... And most of all, it gaslights and forces you to go against your own morals or things you consider wrong, whatever that may be. And just to rub it all in? It says you have to do and abide by all these things whilst still loving government because it's "Democracy" and "Democracy" is pure and noble and fair.
* Terr_: "No, there have been too many serious breakdowns."
* dns_snek: "It's reliably unreliable, so it still counts."
* Terr_: "No, that's literally the opposite of what it means to describe a car as reliable."
* arcfour: "Terr_! Stop demanding perfection! The universe is imperfect therefore true reliability is impossible!"
* Terr_: "No, goddamnit! That's not what I said! FFS, it's as if [RECURSION EXCEEDED]"
Still, in the case of sex work, I think you are simply wrong. Your overall sketch is the "movie version" or police/puritanical version of sex work, a version that equates trafficking and voluntary transactions (not that those transactions can't exploitative in other ways). The majority sex work isn't filled with violence except on the level of the literal street. Notably, my friends and acquaintances who used Craigslist back in the day didn't deal with any pimps and a moment's thought would show pimps are only needed when someone sells sex at a physical location.
Also, afaik, onlyfans is a virtual only platform so workers there face the same physical dangers as people on zoom calls.
Drugs is a more complex beast.
They will sell their souls to a man who would grind them into a paste and sell that paste as a protein snack to his cultists-- in exchange for a hollow, symbolic win that either impacts them in no way whatsoever or maliciously hurts people they don't like.
At least with other political groups you have to, you know, BRIBE them.
Libertarians are so used to receiving absolutely nothing that they will mistake the scent of a steak for a full meal.
Tell me more about how a judge is calling people privileged.
I mean, do you have any discussion of the idea at hand, or are you just going to appeal to how we feel about hypothetical people who might have said the idea? Either the idea is correct or it's not, it doesn't matter if it's a crack dealer, a darknet market administrator, or a judge who makes it.
In our legal system, they are in fact partially responsible if they don't disallow it and don't act upon reports. I'm not sure there is a difference whether it's physical or digital
To try to prove their jaywalking allegations, the prosecution in the first case claims that you were in a hurry to cross the street because you were trying to kill someone, and present some evidence of that from a questionable source. They also have separate video evidence of you crossing the street against the light. The jury convicts you of jaywalking.
The judge in the jaywalking case then sentences you to life without parole, because jaywalking in order to murder someone is much more serious than most other instances of jaywalking. The prosecution in the other court then drops the murder charges, so the murder allegations were never actually proven anywhere.
Is this reasonable? Should we be satisfied with how this works and not want to change anything about it?
[1] USA regressing to a globally disrespected oligarchy under Trump is a good example.
Mind, that's what a two-year-old historical scrape of the front-page alone shows.
What I don't see in that is voting behaviour, submissions overall, stories which haven't made the front page, etc., etc., etc. Much of that is only available within the HN server/DBMS itself, though some might be evident from a more comprehensive scrape of the site. Since items (submissions and comments) are assigned monotonically-increasing IDs, that's at least theoretically possible, though at 42.8 million items and counting it'd take some doing, and there is still a great deal of information concealed from the public: comment votes, purged content, flag detail, vouch detail, unannounced moderator activity.
What has changed markedly is the pardonee's relationship to the political system, and the political system's own degree of (dis)functionality. To that extent, HN both reflects, participates, and is a mechanism for influencing / being influenced by a larger system which has changed markedly.
HN has long been unable to discuss contentious subjects. It's particularly prone to status quoism, and in the present environment, the status quo is markedly authoritarian, fascistic, and personality-cultish, all of which HN's biases inherently (if not intentionally) support.
It disappoints me tremendously, as for all those faults HN remains one of the better online discussion sites. The bar is falling rapidly however, so cold, cold comfort there.
Late edit: Specifically as regards general news sites, those have always featured heavily on HN, with the New York Times specifically being among the top 3, if not the top submitted site. That changed markedly around 2019 not due to changes in HN, but as the Times significantly tightened its paywall, causing front-page appearances to drop to roughly 1/4 their previous quantity. To that extent, HN sees less general news, and less reasonably nonpartisan news now than in its first decade or so. The degree to which social media sites, and Twitter in particular, have themselves shifted rightwards, there's also a strong bias.
Specifically partisan "think tank" (read: propaganda) sites have long had a submission penalty, and don't seem to be more prevalent so far as I've checked. Partisanship has crept up on other sites/domains, however.
Good writing!
Ask Ross Ulbricht
> Are you under the impression [...] That the drugs passed through his hands?
They never said that, and it doesn't have to for being partially responsible. The Pirate Bay didn't host any copyrighted material, but the founders "were found guilty in the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden for assisting in copyright infringement and were sentenced to serve one year in prison and pay a fine." Hosting the website where the issue is rampant is sufficient; no infringing material (drugs or movies) have to pass through your hands
But I think we might be in agreement here since you said above that Ross had some responsibility. I also don't think it's the same as handing out the drugs yourself
U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Robert Hur has filed a motion to dismiss the pending charges filed against Ross Ulbricht
Last week, Hur sought “to dismiss with prejudice the indictment and superseding indictment” pending against Ulbricht
in the motion that he filed, which is linked above, the reason he provides is that ross had already been sentenced and all his appeals had been denied. the motion never mentions lack of evidence or the corrupt investigators. this isnt mentioned in the freeross page
https://freeross.org/false-allegations/
the idea that chat logs were forged or that someone else was using his account are plausible but just barely. its much more plausible that a powerful drug lord ordered hits. its practically unavoidable in the course of running a large, high volume illegal drug operation. its routine. and the feds didnt need a murder charge to screw him, not even a little bit. i havent seen enough evidence to dismiss either camp but i think it should go to trial so the public can see all the evidence and the matter can be settled. there certainly is grounds for further investigation.
Also if you try to overthrow the government you get pardoned which I would have guessed approaches treason.
These are pardonable offenses and conditions.
By this, do you mean "reducing the total amount of prostitution occurring" or "making prostitution less visible"?
Your third paragraph implies the former, but I suspect the answer is actually the latter. There is probably less total prostition now, but what's there is more visible.
You talk about "increased crime" in reference to pimp shootouts, but you know prostitution and sex trafficking are crimes too, right? If thousands of women and girls are suffering but you can't see it because it's all organized online, that's not necessarily better.
In other words, it was too well written
Is this a hypothetical or did I miss a big chunk of this story?
If the war involves people being hurt, then conspiracy and instruction to injure and murder sound like great things to charge the drug lord with. If it doesn't, then I don't see the severity.
Ross Ulbricht is a very unique, interesting case. I don't for a second believe that Trump has any moral imperative with pardoning him, but his sentence for the crimes he was prosecuted for was very clearly unjustly large in an extensively murky case. There's also a whole slew of benefits to Trump for pardoning him - it's largely perceived as very pro-crypto, pro-libertarian (ironic), etc.
By contrast, drug use has no theft victim to report the crime and then even harsh penalties don't act as a deterrent because detection rates are low and addiction is a stronger motivator than the spoils of petty theft. So you would stop prosecuting recreational drug use (compensating by increasing addiction treatment programs etc.), and thereby also eliminate all of the associated crimes as drug cartels murder over territory and drug users commit serious robberies to afford street drug prices that otherwise wouldn't cost more than a bottle of aspirin, avoiding the need to prosecute those either.
At which point crime goes down and you can spend more resources prosecuting the remaining cases.
AKA file your taxes, essentially.
this isn't controversial to say, the governments just go for the laziest intermediary lately
but there is the choice of doing actual investigations for time tested crimes. those dealers just went to other darknet markets, which are far far bigger than Silk Road ever was
What if they sell things that aren't what they say they are and the user dies or is hurt?
honestly guys, its time to download Truth Social so you can see what the President and the right is really saying
by the time it hits your feeds elsewhere, it is often times altered just to inflame you and whatever segment of the algorithm's tree you are already pigeonholed in
It sounds like if an extenuating circumstance resonates with a judge, then the sentence will get modified. Sentencing shouldn't be based on a single person's "feelings."
1. Votes are not shown, but they affect the rank of posts.
2. Every post regardless of rank is shown beneath its parent, as in a tree.
3. Only highly downvoted posts are grayed out or hidden.
4. The community considers simple agreement to be low value noise.
He wants to be known as a guy who trades favors, so here, he ignored all the previous fear mongering about [scary thing], and is repaying the favor to the "libertarian party" who wanted this, and voted for him.
Almost everything he says is just for show, fits his pattern of behavior better than, "he believes [thing he said]" does.
I just read another article about how the person who says we need to follow "law and order" and "respect police" just pardoned everybody convicted of violence against police... again, trading favors instead of consistently following something he said.
The purpose of the trial is to separate the innocent from the guilty, and there is intended to be a presumption of innocence. But because the prosecution has to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, they'll tend to only bring cases when there is a high probability of guilt -- a good thing -- so then let's say 90% of the defendants are probably guilty and 60% are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
A judge is going to become intimately familiar with that. ~90% of the defendants are actually guilty, so the judge develops the intuition that a new defendant is very likely guilty. That's a presumption of guilt. Soon even the innocent ones are getting convicted, when the whole point of the process was to prevent that.
A jury is a fresh set of eyes who look at the defendant as the only case they're going to be deciding for the foreseeable future and haven't been prejudiced by a parade of evildoers sitting in the same chair. It's also twelve separate people who each individually have to be convinced.
While substances can efficiently help someone destroy their life, keeping them away from drugs won’t stop them from destroying their lives. There’s something already broken in these people that they need to fix before it’s too late.
There are perfectly legal alternatives that can be just as effective with a little more effort. Putting heroin in your arm is just quicker than downing a fifth of vodka, or chasing dopamine at the dog track.
Pimps are needed whenever there is coercion involved. It seems unlikely to me that only street prostitution requires coercion. I think we'll soon learn that most of the women on OnlyFans are there because of a violent and manipulative man.
The murder for hire bit was always the most bullshit of all the charges. Not only were the fbi agents that were part of that later jailed for their own actions related to the case (including theft and hiding/deleting evidence), it was never real and no one was ever in danger.
https://bsky.app/profile/filmgirl.bsky.social/post/3lgcck6i6...
Right I'm specifically talking about comments here. I agree that the site, largely, posts and engages with very similar content as it always has.
> It disappoints me tremendously, as for all those faults HN remains one of the better online discussion sites. The bar is falling rapidly however, so cold, cold comfort there.
This sounds like your disappointment is largely that HN has high volume behind political opinions which you disagree. I agree with you and probably share very similar political opinions, but it's also true that fora throughout the net and web have always had resident biases oriented around the founding members. To me that is what it is and not necessarily an indictment on conversation quality which is distinct from the political and social environment it resides in, though I realize it's not completely possible to divorce the two.
> It disappoints me tremendously, as for all those faults HN remains one of the better online discussion sites. The bar is falling rapidly however, so cold, cold comfort there.
Perhaps, but for myself and I suspect many like myself, online discussion sites died years ago once they became dominated by the kind of comments you see on this thread. Knee-jerk opinion blasting and short, emotional posts rarely generate signal but only noise.
> Specifically as regards general news sites, those have always featured heavily on HN, with the New York Times specifically being among the top 3, if not the top submitted site.
My comparison with general news sites isn't to say that HN now has more of it; I've also done my own analysis of site submissions and I agree, I think there's less general news on the site than before. What I mean to say is, the comments here are generally indistinguishable from those you see on the Verge, NYTimes, local news sites, and even most of Twitter.
This sort of gets to the heart of what HN meant to me and I suspect many of us: HN was a unique gathering of tech and non-tech folks who discussed things charitably and in good faith. This means not responding with short, emotional comments meant to be more cathartic than explanatory. This meant that acknowledging that another poster may have a very different political or social lens than yours and that while a discussion may change no minds, it can educate participants in the various ways of thinking that manifest from these varied backgrounds.
Today's HN though is nothing special. I can get this quality of commentary from pretty much any large discussion site online. The only thing that's interesting here is the selection of topics, but that's never been HN's strong suit as it's fairly easy to curate tech topics through various socials and RSS. It's always the commentary and community that's given me, and I suspect others like me, value on this site.
FWIW I don't blame anyone or anything and this post is largely meant as catharsis for myself, much like all the snappy emotional shouting in this thread is meant as righteous catharsis for many of the posters. But I also think it's time to acknowledge that large scale discussion on the web in English is dead. The participants have become too balkanized, too angry, and too disinterested in learning through conversation to have any educational effect. Instead online English-language discussions on large fora largely function as catharsis.
EDIT: I see a lot of people very loudly proclaim how they've given up news sites and social media to read HN. This feels utterly nonsensical to me as there's pretty much no difference in comment quality. Instead, it points to some form of identity sorting where commenters try to "identify" as the kind of person who indulges in fora rather than news sites or social media. To me this feels even more counterproductive because the establishment of an "HN Identity" leads to even more partisanship than what we already have affecting discussions.
Got any sources for this claim? Like an actual law?
A proper analogy would be something like two crimes, A and B, both with the same statutorily defined maximum penalty--life imprisonment--but where the typical sentence for A is much less for B. The defendant is found guilty of A, but the judge uses aggravating evidence to sentence them as-if it were B. But that highlights the fundamental problem: why would we have both A and B with the same maximum penalty, both covering the same or similar behavior? Often the point of A is to make convictions easier because proving B proved too onerous in practice.
What we want to get back to, and which almost every other jurisdiction implements around the world, including both systems thought to be far more fair than ours as well as less fair (for different reasons), is to have better tailored crimes, including penalties. One of the reasons we have so many felonies these days is because sentencing someone to jail for a single day on a misdemeanor offense for stealing a pack of gum for the 20th time can require a jury trial just as onerous as a felony offense with a 20 year sentence. Thus, if you want a more fair system, we probably may need to make it easier to sentence for smaller crimes with lighter sentences. IOW, lower the stakes so there isn't an arms race between punishment severity and procedural protections.
Most countries don't even require juries or panels for serious crimes, let alone light (i.e. misdemeanor) offenses. The shift to granting jury trials for any offense carrying possible jail time started in the early 1900s via Progressive Era reforms. Today only NYC (just NYC, not New York state) and, I think, South Carolina are the only jurisdictions[1] that don't grant a right to jury trials for misdemeanor offenses with jail time as a permitted punishment. Some other states nominally only provide for juries for 3+ or 6+ months of jail, but procedural precedent has resulted in courts effectively extending the right to any offense carrying jail time.
Note that the city of San Francisco has had for decades a public defender's office with equivalent or better resources (time, money, expertise) as the prosecutor's office, but the city sees the same interminable cycle as everywhere else.
[1] Also I think Federal jurisdiction, but purely misdemeanor cases without the threat of felony charges at the Federal level are pretty rare.
I thought the "legal tender" argument only worked in regards to debts to the government, though IANAL.
This is a critical point. His explicitly goal is to be an autocrat, there is no other ideology other than what works.
That's why I think the only real bit of him is the one that admires Putin. That is who he wants to be.
It's why his moves seem so random.
How is that not a massive violation of due process? Imagine you are at trial for something and get convicted. Then during the sentencing, some other unrelated case's evidence gets used by the Judge which was never introduced during trial and defendant never had any opportunity to defend or cross-examine. Judge uses that to sentence you to 2+ life sentences. After that, the other unrelated case gets dismissed WITH prejudice. Huh??? So the evidence which got used to sentence you was never ever cross-examined or tested in court. "preponderance of the evidence" is not what's used in criminal trials but just because it was introduced in sentencing, it's somehow okay?
The gov should have to prove you committed a crime before that information is admissible at sentencing.
Tickles me to see “stasis” so used - not incorrectly, ofc, but nonetheless as a perfect contranym of the original Greek.
The PATRIOT Act was introduced by a Republican and signed into law by a Republican and had wide support from both parties. 62 Democrats and 3 Republicans voted against it in the House (there was only a single senate vote against it), and you can't have a discussion about the Patriot Act's introduction without bringing up the fact that it was enacted at the height of the post-9/11 fear. It has always been a controversial and flawed bill.
Most of today's social issues aren't about left versus right, they are about class.
https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-don...
This kind of divisive nonsense is purposeless and doesn't productively add to the conversation.
Wikipedia isn't perfect, but if I had to put odds on Wikipedia vs "rando on internet forum who claims to remember something from years ago", I'm going with Wikipedia 10 times out of 10.
But "always make sense" doesn't seem to be in Trumps OKRs...
That's mostly a symbolic difference though. The practical end result is the same
If you really want to understand, it’s not hard. It just requires making an honest effort to try, without judging. And that’s what stops people who don’t understand it. Try chatting with an LLM sometime about what it looks like from their perspective. Knowing it’s not a human makes it easier to avoid getting upset.
No.
It's that there's little opportunity for meaningful, substantial discussion in a form that moves discourse forward.
HN's guidelines are reasonable. Their application is lacking. And where discussion occurs on controversial subjects which challenge the status quo, one example of which is the current governance of the country in which HN operates, HN's guidelines actively handicap those arguing against power.
The fact that those with the advantage of power also tend strongly toward nonsubstantive, partisan rhetoric, inflammetory baiting, and gloating ... helps little.
My comparison isn't of HN against discussion at other sites. Again, HN is generally better though the bar is parlous low. There are some other smaller discussions which seem better managed, the most notable of which I'm aware is Metafilter, for reasons which may merit further exploration. There are reasons to believe that any sufficiently large discussion will tend to a minimum viable standard for reasons I've discussed for many years though scattered amongst many comments here and elsewhere, ultimately having to do with media theory, power laws, and group dynamics.
What the HN of the past three days does suggest is at least four years of distressingly poor discussion quality. I hope not longer than that, and if at possible, shorter.
As for news: I read / listen to news media to some extent. Many of those are exceptionally poor, and my results recently writing a parser for CNN's "lite" page give measurable assessment of that. My own media selection is generally left-centrist, and includes numerous non-US venues. I can assure you that the general take on the US is somewhere between disappointment, shock, and horror.
Because one of the hitmen he hired was a scammer, and another was an FBI agent. Still clearly a crime to hire them for murder.
Ulbricht's right-hand-man Roger Thomas Clark, who was involved in one of the murder-for-hire conversations, admitted the conversation was real during his trial:
"In his own remarks, Clark didn't comment on that murder-for-hire conversation—which he at one point claimed had been fabricated by Ulbricht but later conceded was real."
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/opinions/200...
> As these opinions confirm, a presidential pardon removes, either conditionally or unconditionally, the punitive legal consequences that would otherwise flow from conviction for the pardoned offense. A pardon, however, does not erase the conviction as a historical fact or justify the fiction that the pardoned individual did not engage in criminal conduct. A pardon, therefore, does not by its own force expunge judicial or administrative records of the conviction or underlying offense.
The law is murky and seems to hinge on the court's opinion on whether the person who committed the crime would have had they not been influenced by an officer. The police being the ones to start the conversation doesn't rise to the level of entrapment. The police deceiving you into wanting to commit a crime may rise to the level of entrapment if the courts find you wouldn't have done it otherwise (the example I found that illustrated this best was "Hey there's a warehouse full of valuables let's go rob it" isn't entrapment but "Hey this guy said he's gonna kill your kid you need to kill him first" probably does absent any reason to believe you would have killed him without being deceived first). My guess would be that the grey area, plus the relative ease with which they were able to secure a life sentence for the other charges, is why the murder-for-hire charges never went to trial.
If you're just looking for someone to feel superior about, find another forum.
I think the Ukraine stuff is more complicated than you're making it out.
One idea that springs to mind: if a person starts up an anonymous, online marketplace for that activity, imprison him forever.
Surely that can't be entrapment.
"Clark didn't comment on that murder-for-hire conversation—which he at one point claimed had been fabricated by Ulbricht but later conceded was real"
https://www.wired.com/story/silk-road-variety-jones-sentenci...
In general, the recent wave of pardons in the last month reflect the trend over the last 20 years of pardons by both parties being increasingly political, self-interested and granted to connected donors who mount targeted campaigns. Sadly, it's not a great look. Yet I believe the pardon process can, and should, serve an important function of being a final check and balance to correct prosecutorial and judicial excess when it occurs. I'd be happier if the majority of pardons were commutations of grossly excessive sentences in cases most people have never heard of.
Hopefully, many of the more unusual and controversial recent pardons were a final paroxysm in response to the increases in politically-related prosecutions or threats of such prosecutions by partisans on both sides. Regardless of the validity (or lack thereof) of these prosecutions (or threats), it's clear many were pursued more aggressively, timed or conducted with at least one eye on either influencing political optics or retribution. Overall, it's certainly not been a shining moment for our republic. Both parties share the blame and need to do better.
HN is, as you know, chock full of enormous unflagged threads about news stories involving Elon Musk that amount to little more than “Elon Musk says something on Twitter!” It may well be that the mods would happily flag all these submissions into oblivion if they had the time. But I don’t think it’s a good look to have all of this trivial discussion about Musk on the site and then defer to the submission guidelines (reasonable enough in themselves, but lightly enforced in Musk’s case) now that he is in a position of power within the US government.
This isn’t about individual moderation decisions necessarily being wrong or unjustifiable in isolation (though I do think the 'but it might cause a flamewar!' excuse is applied with wild inconsistency). The issue is that avoiding political flamewars on a tech news site in 2025 is a fundamentally different proposition than it was in 2010.
You can find, and log into, your facebook account, should you have one, here, where I'm sure you would be quite identifiable.
facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjqhye3mhbshg7kx5tfyd dot onion
I'll spare you the detailed argument for why Ulbricht is clearly not "just" a news story.
The source is a bunch of chat records from Ulbricht's seized laptop. There's a fairly detailed description of the evidence here [1].
[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1391...
DPR is according to his defenders a symptom of an overly active justice system prosecuting crimes that shouldn't be prosecuted. Though I'm not sure I personally agree with that.
OJ was just a crook.
--
> 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.
I don’t personally hold the opinion that Ross Ulbricht shouldn’t have been pursued according to the law- or support his pardon- or even that darknet drug markets should exist! I’m also not really interested in crypto.
However I strongly believe that a completely different approach to drug laws & regulations is necessary to make people safer and reduce crime.
Ulbricht's right-hand-man Roger Thomas Clark, who was involved in one of the murder-for-hire conversations, admitted the conversation was real during his trial:
"In his own remarks, Clark didn't comment on that murder-for-hire conversation—which he at one point claimed had been fabricated by Ulbricht but later conceded was real."
https://www.wired.com/story/silk-road-variety-jones-sentenci...
We have a multitude of immediate distractions now.
Books build richer worlds & ideas. But without learning to love books very early in life, which takes a lot of uninterrupted time, they don’t come naturally to most.
I used to read a few books a week, virtually every week. Sometimes two or three in a long day and some night. I still read a lot daily, interesting and useful things in short form. But finding time to read books seems to have become more difficult.
You can only be given a sentence for the crime you have been convicted of, otherwise you could easily appeal.
> Is this reasonable? Should we be satisfied with how this works and not want to change anything about it?
It doesn't work like that, and I wouldn't be satisfied by a court system that does work like that. It'd fucking disastrous. If anyone convinces you that it does work like that, they are either a scammer, or want to make the law system _very_ scary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus_in_the_United_St... which have been there for _many_ years. Its a common law principle that at least twice as old as the USA.
That's part of the point. The maximum penalty for many nonviolent offenses is absurd.
> One of the reasons we have so many felonies these days is because sentencing someone to jail for a single day on a misdemeanor offense for stealing a pack of gum for the 20th time can require a jury trial just as onerous as a felony offense with a 20 year sentence.
But why is this a problem? The purpose of the trial is to deter the other million people who would have committed petty crimes if they weren't prosecuted. It doesn't matter if the trial costs ten thousand times more than the value of the stolen goods. Moreover, if the sentence would actually be one day then guilty people would just plead guilty without coercive plea bargaining because it's less trouble to serve one day in jail than to waste two weeks of your life going through a trial and then serve one day in jail anyway.
Whereas if you're innocent you may very well be willing to spend two weeks at trial to clear your name, vs. the status quo where if you try to do that you'll be charged with a dozen vague offenses that everyone commits in the course of an ordinary day but are only charged against people who demand their day in court instead of accepting a plea for some other offense the prosecution isn't sure they can prove, all of which have coercively onerous penalties.
Maybe the pen thing was only to test if the bills were fraudulent, and then the machine in the back of the store could also do drug tests? Or maybe it was all a lie and they were just bullshitting me.
The benadryl thing was a good read
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsuH1msEkvM
BTW Boondock Saints is like one of the dumbest movies of all time, they made a behind-the-scenes documentary about how the film failed because of how arrogant the directors/screenwriters were. It's so stupid, it's great
> One of the most interesting theories however is Ernst Fraenkels "The Dual State". Fraenkel asserts that Nazi Germany is a dual state where the normative state (the state based on the rule of law) coexists with the "prerogative state" (the state not bound by law). While some swaths of society such as the relation to private property, the civil law etc. continue to function on the basis of codified norms (think the building code, neighbor disputes, companies suing each other, "ordinary" criminal law, stuff in relation to ownership of private property), some parts of the state were unbound by the Nazis such as the prosecution of political opponents, the camp system etc. Fraenkel further asserts that once the prerogative state is established, it has a very strong tendency to expand into the territory of the normative state and that state actions once unbound will cause enormous havoc in a certain sense.
This theory kind of generalizes my statements upthread, expanding them to cover authoritarian states. Any kind of society we could label as authoritarian state is by definition already way too large to be fully micromanaged by the people at the top. Such a state has to retain a quite substantial "normative state", as Fraenkels calls it - and this state is what my arguments about intersubjective beliefs apply to. When people stop having faith in the "normative state" - whether because of "prerogative state" overreach or other forces - the whole thing collapses, and not even the strongest tyrant can hold it together.
Interestingly, I get hate from nearly everyone whose bought into either side of the political mainstream, and not because I dislike their candidate (few serious people would argue even their favored candidate doesn't have significant negatives). No, people can't stand that I don't dislike the other candidate/party more than I dislike their preferred candidate/party. It's bizarre because it seems entirely reasonable to have concluded that all the major party presidential candidates are so flawed, each in their own uniquely terrible ways, that they are beneath any serious comparison of which may be less bad. It's simply beyond reasonable discourse to engage in evaluating whether a dog shit sandwich might taste better or worse than a cat shit sandwich. They are all animal shit sandwiches.
I'm responding because you're objecting to my mild statement about Trump's likelihood of having a principled position regarding Ross' case and thus you may have assumed I favor the other candidate or party. Hardly! This is especially galling because I've had to defend Trump, who I dislike as much as Biden/Harris, against reflexive "Orange Man Bad" attacks - if only to point out, sometimes Trump does things which are good. And the same was true of Biden. Both of them have done good things - even if only in the sense of a broken clock being right twice a day.
To be clear, my observation about Trump not basing many of his political positions on long-held, fundamental principles applies equally to both major parties. Neither party is grounded in principle. In recent decades, both parties have abandoned so many of their own long-held, traditional "left/right" pillar positions judged by how they actual govern when in power, if not in their campaign claims, as to now be mostly incoherent. Neither party can seriously claim they arrive at their current political positions by deriving them from deep, unchanging principles. Once again, I'm not making a partisan judgement for or against either. This is simply a factual statement. Neither party's platform positions or political actions over time are self-consistent enough to be grounded in principle. At most, they try to later market the political calculations they've made for pragmatic, contextual reasons as aligned with some principle - but that's just transparent retconning to pander to their base. This is obviously true because no voter can reliably predict what their own party's (or candidate's) position might be on some enitrely new issue in advance.
In the case of Ross, Trump came very close to granting a pardon at the end of his term in 2020. He ultimately didn't pardon Ross due to the uncharged, untried allegations of Ross hiring an online hitman. Trump pardoned Ross now despite the same things still being true. The reasons Trump cited for the pardon were the excessive prosecution and sentence, but those things were also equally true in 2020. So, while I think it's just that Ross is free after over 11 years in a FedMax prison, that's why I don't believe Trump's reasoning was grounded in principle. And it has zero to do with liking Biden/Democrats more or Trump/Republicans less (because I dislike both equally). If Biden had pardoned Ross it would also not have been for principled reasons.
If you value societal order above all else, then you want extremely horrific punishments for crimes, you want near-absolute certainty that you'll be punished for criminal acts, and you want capture and trial to be swift, so that people know that breaking the law results in:
Swift capture Swift trial Swift execution
And with those three things, you get a highly ordered, law-abiding society, because it becomes common knowledge that breaking the law results in death, guaranteed, so unless you're just stupid or insane, you don't break the law.
If you don't value that kind of clockwork societal order, then you get... Western civilization.
Frankly I'll take the chaos of our Western civilization over the stifling draconian societal order of places like Singapore any day of the week.
What else would the term be? Did you always feel that Robin Hood was being unfairly maligned when he was described as robbing from the rich and giving to the poor?
In particular, the chat logs allegedly contain multiple separate instances of murder for hire, but then the claim that Ulbricht had already been sentenced to life without parole as the reason these claims were never prosecuted doesn't make sense, because a conspiracy to commit murder has multiple parties, so where are the murder prosecutions of these alleged contract killers and co-conspirators?
When the Nazis captured power, they did so by excluding the legitimate (and lawful) parliamentary opposition from key votes in parliament by (unlawfully) imprisoning opposition parliamentarians. In a strictly legal sense, this made their entire regime illegitimate from the outset.
What you fail to grasp is that a regime like Hitler's is constitutionally and ideologically incapable of being "lawful", i.e. having any set of laws and norms that would apply consistently, even if these laws were shaped by their own ideology. The whole point of Hitler's leadership was that laws were irrelevant and completely subservient to facilitating his twisted idea of Arian racial domination, with even the "German" society being completely dominated by the "Ubermenschen" that he hoped to create out of the murderous struggle of war.
Even the ancient Romans and Greeks would have recognized the Nazi regime as "unlawful". While the roman empire was a dictatorial regime, it had a mostly consistent set of laws and norms that even the Cesar had to abide by (though these laws gave him tremendous power in comparison to modern democratic executives). "Personalized" regimes in contrast are not build on laws, but revolve around the whims and/or ideology "the leader". You can see some aspects of this in Trump's approach to governance, though the US is obviously still a long way away from the extremes that the Third Reich went to.
Congress could do this when they pass the law. If they didn't, they specifically chose not to.
> less convinced about preventing family pardons. Those people (generally) aren't politicians
What if we invert the question: in what case would the family require a pardon such that their spouse or parent in a position of massive power couldn't help them out of a legitimate scuffle?
> Most people don't follow politics closely enough to know who's been pardoned
Then why do most of the controversial pardons come in this envelope?
> how about allowing the House or Senate to veto a pardon with a 2/3 majority?
I like this much better.
I've seen this sentiment expressed before, including with the movie "The Purge" (that I admittedly haven't seen, but I understood the concept as law becomes suspended for a day and everyone becomes violent). That idea that the only thing keeping people safe is the rule of law seems absurd to me.
There's a sense of empathy, there's religion (e.g. desire of heaven and fear of hell), there are family values (keeping extended family ties together which can induce pressure to do what's considered right), a concern over reputation, a sense of unity with one's culture and wanting the betterment of one's people, collectivism (the psychological/social tendency to put others before oneself), stuff like not wanting to bring shame to one's parents and extended family, a hate for hypocrisy, a simple lack of any desire to be violent, etc. etc.
I like to believe that between most people and their potential for violence, there's a lot of things besides the rule of law. Law enforcement is for outliers that have a desire for violence and nothing else to stop them.
If law enforcement would disappear from one day to the next, people would be less safe, but I don't think to the point that you'd have "few survivors of that event", especially if you consider just a single country/culture going through that experiment, since this probably depends somewhat on culture and its particular values. I'm more inclined to think that life would mostly just go on as normal, carried by habit/convention and the values we instill in offspring.
tl;dr? Cratermoon cannot in fact cite a source for their claims.
This sort of shit is why people can't reasonably trust accusations of logical fallacy on the internet. You can't just yell whataboutism whenever you don't want to answer challenging questions.
You're ignoring the issue of which acts are criminalized.
The DOJ filed a lawsuit on behalf of the EPA against eBay in 2023, seeking to hold them liable for prohibited pesticides and chemicals as well as illegal emissions control cheat devices sold through the platform that violate multiple federal laws and environmental regulations.
There wasn't even really an argument about whether or not the items were actually illegal to sell - all parties including eBay basically stipulated to that and the judge even explicitly acknowledged it in her ruling - the entire case came down to whether or not eBay could be held liable for the actions of third party sellers on their platform who they failed to proactively prevent from selling illegal items.
In September 2024, U.S. District Judge Orelia Merchant granted eBay's motion to dismiss the case, ruling that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 provides eBay immunity for the actions of those third party sellers.
DOJ filed an appeal on December 1st so we'll see where that goes but as it stands now - no, you couldn't take eBay down even by listing stuff eBay does know to be illegal, based on current precedent.
Why the courts applied Sec230 that way in one instance and not another is the real question and the more cynically minded might also wonder how eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's various philanthropic and political endeavors (including but not limited to being the $ behind Lina Khan's whole "hipster antitrust" movement) could be a factor too. He's no longer an active board member but still a major shareholder whose existing shares would likely be worth a lot less if a case with a potential ~$2 Billion in fines had been allowed to proceed.
Also alcohol = drug = substance = molecule. IT all depends on how you morally frame it.
It’s far less nasty than invading, freeing the people from their government and installing a puppet in its place. Also a lot cheaper. Any missile could pay for a school.
Unlike, say, the phone network or your neighborhood street corner it was pretty unambiguously designed to sell drugs (and more)
Apart from any sort of judgement we might want to make, facts are facts and Silk Road was factually designed to sell drugs.
You don't get to participate in the discussion until you acknowledge basic reality.
ok
- "The family received food stamps for four years beginning when Katherine was 12. They were homeless for six months. "I came from nothing," Forrest said. "I came from a father who made no money. He was a playwright and then a writer, and even though he published a lot of books, I was a complete scholarship student all the way through."
The original sentence was two life terms. TO be pedantic, it sounds like you meant to say he deserved sentencing, but not the original sentence.
1 DEA agent for extortion, money laundering and fraud. 1 Secret Service Agent for money laundering. 2 Key advisors in the case.
Since Reagan.
If you're convicted of a crime, let's say selling drugs, that carries a penalty of up to life in prison even though most people get 5-10 years, and then you're sentenced to life in prison after the person doing the sentencing is prejudiced by these murder allegations you've never been convicted of, what's your basis for appeal?
It made the situation...messy, to say the least.
Was it? Based on current law in the US?
While I do not know English Common law well, in many jurisdictions, every part of the drug dealing is drug dealing. Even if you never touch a drug and just provide payment processing services, transport or whatever, as long as you are aware of it and profit from it, it is drug dealing. So every transaction on Silk Road would also be his crime. And there were many, many many. On the other hand, for non-first degree murder, in several jurisdictions his sentence would have maxed out at 15 years. First time offender, he could have walked after 10.
Not to mention lets compare what Ulbricht did to say Snowden?
Are you kidding me?
It is like we live in some idiot version of the Twilight Zone.
I'm surprised they didn't call in the witness who thought they were a glass of orange juice.
All of those people were perfect people to throw the book at.
For the next 2 years all bets are off.
On the other hand, it's clear to me that the correct amount of jail time wasn't zero either, given everything else he allegedly did.
[0] https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
[1] I think about this in the same way that we accept the possibility of bad things happening because people can have private conversations in their own home, or are able to have complete control over potentially dangerous tools and vehicles. IMO the risks are worth the trade-offs and these are important rights to protect in the relationship between people, technology, and government (or whoever wields power).
One of the possible ways Ulbricht got caught was a single Google Captcha that showed his IP address (San Francisco, go figure). So he covered his tracks pretty well.
Civil disobedience is a pretty important part of how we have always dealt with bad laws and bad governments.
[0] A big if, I know…
I was brought up Christian, sealed my religiousness with a confirmation when I was 15 (which required studies and field trips), and been around religious people for a lot of my younger life. Oh, and my mom worked at a church where I grew up, spent a bunch of time in the church, for better or worse.
I'd like to think that the values of compassion and mercy are two of the most fundamental Christian values, at least from the protestants I spent a lot of time with. It seems to me, that the American bastardization of Catholicism, might not actually be very Christian if those two values aren't include in there.
I'm not religious anymore, but if I learned anything from (truly) religious folks, then it would be that you should treat your fellow humans as just that, fellow humans.
If the stats from the Innocence Project are correct[1,2], then it would also mean that nobody is above being a victim of the rule of law, either.
The rule of law is not infallible - and any sort of blind "rule of law" worship is akin to the worship for a dictator; its just merely dressed in different clothing.
[1] - https://innocenceproject.org/exonerations-data/ [2] - https://falseconfessions.org/fact-sheet/
This would likely be hundreds or thousands of bitcoin, as they were worth ~$50 when he was jailed.
[1]: https://counciloncj.org/new-analysis-shows-u-s-imposes-long-...
But my intuition says no, it really does feel like those were peak, pivotal experiences that still stand out as some of the most significant in my life. Not to say it’s not possible, but maybe more so that in my little corner of the world with the relatively limited experiences available to me at the time, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have simply continued to tread the very uninspired life path I was on.
In a way it felt like waking up in the middle of a dream, and realising I could go back to sleep, or get up and change my circumstances. Probably a bit of a cringe analogy, but it feels about right — it was still work and a conscious choice to make positive changes, but prior to then it hadn’t even occurred to me that I could. It’s not lost on me that for positive stories like mine, there’s many people that could counter with negatives.
Drugs aren’t safe, but neither is a life unchallenged I think. In my case that was what I needed I suspect, a challenge to my own views on myself, other people, the world, and what’s possible. Therapy might’ve gotten me there too, for all it’s worth, but I don’t know that I would’ve considered it prior.
Whatever you think about the outcome in this case, it is the moral equivalent of vigilante justice. It is unfair to others convicted under the same regime, who don't happen to be libertarian icons who can be freed in exchange for a few grubby votes.
Regimes have toppled in response to popular uprising against imprisonments perceived as unjust. Having a system of governance without a way to rectify that seems unwise to me.
The check on Presidential authority, in turn, is impeachment. It's not a perfect system by any means, but in my estimation it's a good one.
That adults should be able to buy and sell whatever the fuck they want?
And that the government should not get a say, or even a cut?
I don't necessarily fully agree with that, but for sure it's an ideal, and has been expressed many times (e.g. by libertarians).
I try to interpret what others say with maximum charity and construe their arguments in their strongest possible form, even if they weren't expressed that way. I'm interested in discovering why we disagree, not winning debate points. The hardest discussions are often those where they never seem to understand my position or are unwilling to respond to it. This leaves me with little choice but to meta-up to the 'protocol level' to re-establish productive communication.
In the conversation above, I suspect, based on hints in the last response, that the root issue may have been that a moral equivalence between Ross and Pablo Escobar was neccessary to make Trump pardoning Ross a maximally negative talking point against Trump.
If so, the discussion could never really be about what it appeared to be about: the relative criminal or moral weight of Ross' crimes or the appropriateness of the sentence. Which is a shame because it prevented ever reaching more interesting ground. For example, I wish the pardon had been a commutation instead because Ross was justly convicted of significant crimes before he was over-sentenced. The wrong which needed to be righted was the sentence not the conviction.
Furthermore, heroin != vodka in terms of how addictive it is for the average user, and that's partly why only one of them is legal for recreational use.
Controversies about decriminalization aside, harm reduction exists as a studied component in addiction, public health, and psychology circles for a reason.
Even just adding one word "Then Ulbricht had walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me" would be enough of a clue.
I'm not surprised or upset at all that he went to prison, but unless I'm missing a ton of details (and I probably am), 12 years is plenty for what he did.
Chris Tarbell, the guy who arrested ross, talks about it on this podcast https://risky.biz/RB770/ 37:08
the bitcoin stealing was only one of the 6 murder for hires, so even if you think thats invalidated, there were still 5 others
Suppose it's 1940. You know that Hitler ordered Aktion T4, and conclude that Hitler wants to kill people. Then, you learn that he opposes smoking because he doesn't like it killing people. You shouldn't start doubting that he's the sort of guy to sign mass death warrants: you've learned some information about his internal thought processes, but it's not very useful information if you want to predict his future actions.
"Orthogonal" is subjective. All things are interrelated. That does not mean that our descriptions should be highly-sensitive to noise. Update your internal model of his behaviour, by all means, but if you have predictions that don't require that internal model, consider whether or not this evidence should actually affect those predictions.
In the absence of any other context it's assumed these were acts of "intent to murder" but that's about it .. logs that look like a duck and probably were a duck.
But no actual murders that anyone could find, no bodies, etc.
Broken clocks and all that. I entirely agree that he may have a potential muder conviction on his case, but they instead threw the book at him for a much lesser crime for a way too large sentence. Especially if we compare it to the War on Drugs.
The laws on the books today hardly get enforced. Ross Ulbricht is one of the very few people to go to prison for crypto-related crimes. You probably agree that many people involved with crypto deserve to see the inside of a courtroom, but they won't. So not only is the justice system not capable of processing the people currently in jail (despite copious plea coercion) the justice system has almost completely given up on persecuting many crimes (e.g. fraud), presumably for lack of manpower.
All countries struggle with this resource problem. We want to give everybody a fair trial but we can't. Some countries force pleas on people. Other countries rush trials. Other countries still beat confessions out of people. Different 'solutions' to the same fundamental problem. Unless fair trials get cheap there is no way out.
If someone comes to you and offers you a fictional job to illegally move a lot of drugs for cash and you agree - that's not entrapment, you agreed of your own accord. That the whole thing was a fake setup is not materially relevant.
If you first refuse, and then the undercover officer says "if you don't do this we'll come after you and kill your family" and then you agree under duress - that's entrapment.
It has to be something that's compelling you to do something you would not have done otherwise. Presenting you with the option to make a bad choice is not itself enough because had the situation been real you would have done it.
On one hand I'm sympathetic to Ross in that I can empathize with his youthful ideals and ego that drove the marketplace, but I also think he genuinely would have authorized that person be killed had it been real and people are in prison for a lot less. His market was also a lot more than drugs iirc.
I find his supporters downplaying the assassination bit irritating - I suspect they do it because they know it's the least defensible bit and they can argue it on technicality. I think it'd be better if they just accepted it.
I also think he's very unlikely to commit another crime now that he's out, but still - a lot of people are in prison for a lot less.
And yes, there is the open secret that the US uses its prison system as a form of soft slave labor. Many people don't want to reduce that supply.
But yes, it can and does happen. Any system offering freedom can offer just as much freedom to those who coerce others.
> unable to comprehend the concept of illegal activity.
There's illegal activity on popular forums all the time. How much should Facebook/X/Reddit be accountable for those?
There's nothing beyond morality. Laws are an application based on morality.
And as we know with the 18th and 21st amendments, even the law can have shakey morality based on more factors than "what is good for the populace". That's more or less why I'm against most drug laws. They were not made with "the good health of the people in mind", they were a scapegoat to oppress minorities. It's all publicly declassified, so no one can call me a conspirator anymore.
Not to mention, it's highly unlikely anything at that low a level matters to the functioning of a brain - at a functional level, physical states have to be quantized hard to ensure reliability and resistance against environmental noise.
He wasnt some hands off executive who had no idea. Smart people should be able to not equate an illegal market place with a legal market place
Do you know how rarely LEOs getting convicted of anything? If there wasn't a mountain of evidence that Ulbricht ran the silk road, the entire case might have been rereparable tainted.
You're imagining something like a thief who just intends to steal $X, robs a bank, counts out $X and leaves the rest of the money untouched. In reality, most thieves are opportunists: they will take as much money as opportunity allows without getting caught.
Obviously you couldn't physically fit $1B cash in a wallet, but assuming this hypothetical wallet did have $1B, does that make the thief more heinous or just luckier?
(If you must insist on a literal and physically accurate wallet in the hypothetical, just imagine it held $1B in Bitcoin.)
Surprise: OP time traveled.
I get that there are different views on how much punishment should be based on intent vs outcome. My opinion is factoring in outcome in criminal sentences is often pragmatic, but if we had omniscient judges, judging on intent would be ideal.
you've just described orthogonality between his stance on smoking and his real-life mass-murderous actions. And as far as i see it is very objective orthogonality.
Innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until a random hunch is resolved.
The federal government has a long history of manufacturing evidence and this is no different.
Again, pure evil what you are saying.
I still support the abolition of all bans and controls on access to drugs.
Destroying one’s own self has no victims, any more than bodybuilding does. If we should be free to build ourselves, we should be free to destroy ourselves.
Please don’t assume anyone who disagrees with your philosophy is naive or lacks empathy.
That is a good point. The problem isn't with the message, so this time they shot the messenger.
It’s cheaper than the alternative, though, if there is rat poison in it, there is nothing you can do!
Caveat Emptor is a shit way to run a society. It incentivizes the sociopaths.
Both Hippies and Libertarians fail to understand that if your organizational principles don’t account for sociopaths, they will take over and ruin everything.
This is the point. HN readership has changed dramatically in the intervening years. I don't buy at all that the difference is solely due to comments tending to contradict the article.
But there were in total six murder-for-hire allegations against Ross Ulbricht. That Maryland case in your link [0] was only one of them.
That Maryland one was also a case in which Carl Force, a corrupt federal agent, was deeply involved. The New York trial which incarcerated Ulbricht avoided considering that single allegation, specifically because of the corrupt agent's involvement. [1]
(Confusingly, there were also six allegations of drug-related deaths. These were completely unrelated with the six murder allegations.)
It's notable that, in that Maryland document you linked, the US Attorney could have moved to dismiss the charge without prejudice, meaning that it could be retried, but he chose not to do that.
But he then continues, to say, without explaining why, that Ulbricht was already serving a life sentence which had been affirmed on appeal in New York. The implication is that the US Attorney is hinting that there's no point ever pursuing the 'attempted murder' angle, because Ulbricht is already locked up for life (Narrator: he was wrong).
Here's a summary
* One murder-for-hire allegation (Maryland): Indicted, but dismissed with prejudice by US Attorney
* Five murder-for-hire allegations (New York): Not indicted/charged, not decided by jury, but included in sentencing decision
* Six drug-related death allegations (New York): Not indicted/charged, not decided by jury, but included in sentencing decision
*
What I understand is that the New York jury was allowed to know about the attempted murder-for-hire and the drug-related death claims, but not about the corrupt federal agents.
The murder-for-hire allegations, meanwhile, were allowed to influence his sentencing (and the rejection of his appeal) due to "a preponderance of evidence" as decided by the judge, which would not be sufficient grounds for criminal convictions such as murder, which require evidence "beyond reasonable doubt".
This was not justice's finest hour.
*
[0] Maryland dismissal: https://freeross.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Doc_14_Dismi...
[1] New York's appeal rejection decision: https://web.archive.org/web/20221213001237/https://pdfserver...
https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-bl...
A president will still commute when they think you did do something wrong but were unjustly punished.
Because you’re political view of it is indeed that they were having an insurrection. To the right they were just having a protest that got violent but not anymore violent than any of the others throughout the country that year.
> Pardoning people convicted of marijuana possession (like Biden did)
You mean he pardoned a bunch of drug dealers who will now go back selling drugs to children?
Do you see the issue here? The justice system is to try to cut through the bias and selectively choosing which part of the justice outcomes to ignore is going to be extremely political.
Anything clearly obvious is usually resolved by higher courts so the pardons are completely for when the president just decides “fuck the law in this particular way”.
That distinction wasn’t recognized, and I called attention to it. And also to the fact that Eva Spiegel very strangely isn’t catching any shit whatsoever for knowingly running the nation’s most prolific child porn brokerage platform, with a product tailor-made to do so.
I get why there's noise about banning X suddenly but lets not pretend it's for sudden technical/UX concerns. No one is calling for NYT, WSJ, or WaPo submissions to be avoided. Twitter had auth gating for many years before Elon.
There was definitely a fake ID tab on it. Isn't fraud one of the main purposes of having a fake ID?
Guns were definitely for sale on Silk Road. Ulbricht stopped selling them because it wasn't lucrative enough.
I can't find the original post, but this post quotes his comments at the time when he closed the gun forum:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66587.msg1079466#msg...
While technically accurate, the tone of the Ulbricht quote differs somewhat:
The volume hasn't even been enough to cover server costs and is actually waning at this point. I had high hopes for it, but if we are going to serve an anonymous weapons market, I think it will require more careful thought an planning.If you read it one way, it's almost impossible to not be misdirected, because the following sentence works with both meanings.
If you include the had this would be enough of a clue to correct the incorrect assumption. Although it still might make for slightly bumpy reading.
Maybe they make good allies, after the presidency somebody needs to protect him if he commits too many crimes.
> I would like a rule to avoid submissions that are login walled unless this is the primary source and an open mirror is available.
Twitter had auth gating but also mirrors; now Nitter is discontinued.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MPcGL3Tfac
Here they explain why immigrants rather chose the illegal path opposed to the legal path during Biden's administration.
Now even before Trump came into office, the stream of illegal immigrants have already almost completely stopped:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/world/americas/migrants-t...
So yeah, we can argue about the details, but it is clear that during Biden's administration it was way too easy for illegal immigrants to get into the US, which is unfair for the legal immigrants that went through much more trouble to get there.
Aside from that, the constant flow of illegal immigrants also caused a lot of issues in the states near the borders, and obviously for the country as a whole.
Sure there is, I can take you to court.
>Caveat Emptor is a shit way to run a society. It incentivizes the sociopaths.
Bureaucracy and nanny states do that too.
>Both Hippies and Libertarians fail to understand that if your organizational principles don’t account for sociopaths, they will take over and ruin everything.
I don't think the latter are against locking people up. Or executing them even!
And the former, I dunno, perhaps they handle them Midsommar style!
Not to mention the issue is quite solvable: sellers can sell whatever, but need to specify the contents and whether they match a specification (e.g. same contents as aspirin). If you want to buy rat poison drug or heroin cut with sawdust, it's on you.
Which you won’t be able to do if the cost of prosecuting someone increases several times (i.e. no plea bargains anymore).
> you would stop prosecuting recreational drug use
Aren’t these already (realistically) misdemeanors at most in a lot of places?
Even in the best case e.g. lets say case load decreases by 25% that doesn’t seem enough to balance things out.
I’m confused, though. Are you suggesting legalization? Or just saying that law enforcement should ignore drug traffickers and dealers (because they will certainly continue engaging in violent crime if it’s the latter)
To truly minimize drug related crime you’d need legitimate drug companies to start selling OxyContin/etc. in the candy section at Walmart.
> so the judge develops the intuition that a new defendant is very likely guilty.
A good judge wouldn’t do that. Also by and large random people are relatively dumb and biased. Why exactly are they less likely to convict an innocent person? (Let’s assume that the conviction rate is the same in both cases)
I bet all problems could be solved using this approach. What could go wrong..
Literally entrapment.
Like you said, it hinges on if you would have committed the crime without encouragement from the police.
A trap car is not entrapment. You walking past a trap car, checking if the door is unlocked and then going for a joyride / stealing it means you convinced yourself to do this crime.
An undercover policeman telling you he's seen an unlocked car, and "just take it for a spin, for the hell of it"? That's entrapment.
I guess the psychological aspect of clamoring for a strong leader would need more deep diving. Serhii Plokhy and Martti J Kari have talked about this in regards to Russia, those are available as Lex Fridman interview and youtube lecture: a strongman, even with downsides, is still preferrable to a weak leadership that is unable to defend against external threats or internal chaos.
The reader's pronounciation of German is quite incomprehensible though (book is in English). Völkischer Beobachter is not easy.
you can appeal the sentence as being "too harsh" or out of the normal bounds. That's fair game and quite common.
However, if you are convicted of drug trafficking, money laundering and criminal enterprise, and you are appealing the length of the sentence, its very difficult to appeal if your system/company organisaiton to which you admit to being the head honcho of, uses a very traceable currency to launder money, and therefore can reasonably prove spectacularly large amount of drug trafficking.
The criminal enterprise charge has a minimum of 20 years, adding in drugs to the mix adds an additional 10.
the whole "judge was biased because of unfounded ordered assassination" is plainly wrong.
Sure you can argue that drugs should be legal (but you need support and money to help people escape, see opioid explosion)
but thats not the same as Roos Ulbricht got the wrong sentence. What he did was really obviously illegal, and at industrial scale. industrial scale illegality is going to get you a long sentence.[1]
[1] yes rich people manage to escape justice, this is an affront to justice, but arguing that Ulbricht was wrongly convicted only enables rich people to get off more, because it wrongly states that the law was wrong in this isntance.
Mark my words, the US legal system is going to get a huge shakeup. most constitutional checks and balances for the executive have been dismantled, because of a failure of congress. You don't want that new legal system, as thats going to be injustice for many, control for the few. A central plank of libertarianism is a fair and equitable legal system, we are straying further from that.
Yes he could have. And did not. Whereas Manning was freed, because s/he had sponsors in the right lobbies.
> Biden did eventually reach a deal with Assange
Mostly driven by the UK government, because it would have looked bad to deport a journalist on the orders of our colonial masters. And again it took years, when it could have been done in a minute - like Trump did with his allies. Because the reality, beyond words, is that the Democratic establishment is basically as much an enemy of the free press as the Republican one is, when in power.
Potential is resolving into state in the moment of now!
Be grateful, not scornful that it all collapses into state (don’t we all like consistency?), that is not however what it “is”. It “is” potential continuously resolving. The masterwork that is the mind is a hyoerdimensional and extradimentional supercomputer (that gets us by yet goes mostly squandered). Our minds and peripherals can manipulate, break down, and remake existential reality in the likeness of our own images. You seem to complain your own image is soiled by your other inputs or predispositions.
Sure, it’s a lot of work yet that’s what this whole universe thing runs on. Potential. State is what it collapses into in the moment of “now”.
And you’re right, continuity is an illusion. Oops.
If I try to shoot someone but miss and they never even notice, is that fine because there’s no actual victim?
Edit:
To be more precise, the crime doesn’t even need you to increase the risk to anyone. Just thinking that you’ll increase the risk is already a crime, even if you’re wrong. If you buy a prop gun but think it’s real and try to shoot someone, that would still be attempted murder, even if it couldn’t even have worked. But you’re punished for trying to kill someone, it doesn’t matter wether you’re incompetent at it (well you get a bit less for the attempt compared to the actual successful act but it’s still a crime).
And another edit because coming up with weird hypotheticals is fun:
Imagine planting a bomb with a one hour timer on a marketplace and when it goes off, the marketplace was empty of people by chance.
Does that mean that the worst punishment you should expect should be for property damage because someone needs to clean up the ground? Obviously you committed a crime, even if there’s no specific victim this time.
I personally believe that having lots of parties founded on concise, coherent principles would be very nice from a voter point of view (to express preferences), but those would be completely unable to actually govern-- because there are a lot of decisions to make and compromises to find, and trying to do this solely based on a small set of principles is just not possible, because you would need to abstain from all decisions that your founding principles can not answer clearly (and no current democracy is set up in a way that enables this).
I can picture a system where this could work in theory (lots of parties forming the government, but most parties abstain from voting on any single decision), but I can see no way of preventing scope creep/consolidation...
Regarding the "both main parties equally bad" aspect:
What are your main pain points with the previous administration? As an outsider, to me it appears that despite getting dealt a rather bad hand (Covid/Ukraine/Middle East chaos), they made a lot of correct decisions (in hindsight).
Post-trump republicans, on the other hand, appear irresponsibly selfcentered to me in many ways (climate/emissions, Covid policies, foreign/trade, anti-pluralism). I also think that (2016) Trump poisoned political discourse in a insidiously harmful way, by basically forgoing any form of factual debate in favor of spewing insults at every opportunit (lying Hillary, sleepy Joe, ...)-- this alone I feel almost requires opposition...
What issue would your ideal party tackle first?
>I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross. The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me. He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1138691127416...
Sorry I really don't like YouTube for political content. Any text summaries of how they get citizenship quickly after crossing illegally?
> it was way too easy for illegal immigrants to get into the US
That's moving the goalposts. You said citizenship, not just getting in.
> which is unfair for the legal immigrants that went through much more trouble
And even more trouble now. So even more unfair...
>By a 5–3 margin, the Court upheld the conviction of a Missouri man for selling heroin even though all the drug sold was supplied to him, he claimed, by a Drug Enforcement Administration informant who had, in turn, gotten it from the DEA. The majority held that the record showed Hampton was predisposed to sell drugs no matter his source...The case came before the court when the defendant argued that while he was predisposed, it was irrelevant since the government's possible role as sole supplier in the case constituted the sort of "outrageous government conduct" that Justice William Rehnquist had speculated could lead to the reversal of a conviction in the court's last entrapment case, United States v. Russell.[2] Rehnquist was not impressed and rejected the argument in his majority opinion.
Here's one where the government said "Hey you should sell this heroin that I gave you" and the conviction was upheld because "the record showed Hampton was predisposed to sell drugs no matter his source." So no, the simple act of an undercover cop asking you if you'd like to commit a crime isn't entrapment on its face.
Drug producers want pure products. It's almost entirely middlemen who cut drugs with whatever random chemicals they have on hand.
* unfettered and unregulated and anonymous weapons sales. * willful ignorance and rejection of any of the social costs of buying and selling hard drugs. * commerce that operates in a world that is difficult to be taxes by government entities, and ideally anonymously (even though bitcoin is the least anonymous thing in the world)
Most people seem to think Ulbricht was guilty, and deserved to be found guilty and go to prison, but that the full sentence didn't fit the crime.
The judge said during sentencing that she was giving Ulbricht an incredibly harsh sentence to make an example of him to others who think that facilitating selling drugs is a victimless crime, and she was also angry at the huge stack of nice letters that people sent to the court in support of Ulbricht.
My memory is she started the sentencing hearing by disdainfully reading a few of them from a pile of them she brought to the court that day.
After Ulbricht ordered the hit on one of his forum moderators, the FBI visited him, took all of his computers, told him they were going to be "him" from now on online forever, had him "pose" in a bathtub where they hosed him off and doused him in ketchup to take fake trophy photos, had the "hitman" send the photos of Ulbricht, who famously commented "It had to be done."
Here's a thread in a forum where someone quotes Ulbricht's message stating Silk Road will no longer sell guns.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66587.msg1079466#msg...
Now I see guys doing extremely hard drugs out in the open on the street and on buses. it is a jarring. They're usually not trying to inject or exhale on me ( though the meth smoke guys on some buses don't seem to care ).
However, most of them wouldn't ever use the term libertarian, for not wanting to be associated with right wing libertarians.
There are laws in Germany that make it a crime to condone a crime (forgive, overlook, allow, permit )
Some German courts have ruled that the slogan "between the river and the sea" is condoning the unlawful removal of Israelis or that the slogan is firmly attached to Terrorist Organization Hamas (therefore is by default a criminal statement )
Plenty of people have been fined for chanting the slogan at German protests against the current conduct of Israel in Gaza and West Bank.
There isn't a German law that states "it is illegal to criticize Israel" but laws like the following have been used to punish people criticizing Israel, in Germany:
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__130.html
Some German courts have thrown out some of these cases, they don't agree the Condone Crime laws can be applied to chanting 'between the river and the sea'
A large portion of people at the Libertarian convention that Trump gave a speech at would prefer complete legalization of all drugs.
I think it's a belief that a lot of us arrive at early in our lives, many eventually grow out of it.
Vivek Ramaswamy is a partner at a16z
If you aren't aware that it's an LEO urging you on, I don't see why you should be able to argue impropriety. You made the decision as if it were real and would have real consequences.
Very astute. What’s interesting to me is the ability for youth to discount this potential change, mostly because they just see the end result vs the journey. I know I was like that.
1. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-6573_m647.pdf
What's interesting with that is that I think it is wrong, the part against 'external threats'. France during the revolution was attacked by everyone, and despite absolutely no leadership, managed to beat back, well, everyone. By deferring power, it made its army stronger. Yes, then some the people the republic deferred power to then took the rest of it by force, but the laws were weak and the culture not set yet.
So much corporate/gov negligence leads to permanent environment damage, cancer, death. In most cases it's a slap on the wrist. Maybe some exist, but I'm having a hard time finding an example.
Show me one executive that served this kind of jail time despite direct links to the deaths of multiple individuals and evidence of negligence leading to those deaths.
You can certainly make an argument that the sentencing was warranted but there's a whole lot of history of being sentenced, if at all, to far less for far more egregious crimes.
That's what I'm getting at. The premise is that this guy is Al Capone. But if he was actually guilty of murder then they should have convicted him of murder, whereas if he was only guilty of running a website, those penalties are crazy. Not because they don't ever get handed out or Congress didn't put them in the statute, but because they have within them the assumption that you're a drug cartel. And then because drug cartels are murder factories, the penalties are extreme and inappropriate outside of that specific context.
But the courts are bound to follow the law, which is the problem, because those laws are nuts. They're even nuts in the context of the actual drug cartels, because what they should be doing there is the same thing -- getting severe penalties by charging them with the actual murders, not putting life sentences on the operation of a black market regardless of whether or not there is any associated violence.
It's the same reason people are so eager to lean into the unproven murder allegations to justify the sentence -- it's intuitively obvious that without them, the penalties are excessive.
Well sure you can. It just costs more. But since you're still doing it, the deterrent is still present and then the expensive cases you have to prosecute remain rare.
> Aren’t these already (realistically) misdemeanors at most in a lot of places?
Not for the sellers they're not.
> Are you suggesting legalization?
Yes.
If you could go buy codeine or lisdexamfetamine for $5/bottle from the pharmacy counter at Walmart then there are no more drug cartels, no more drug cartel murders, no more street pushers lacing what was supposed to be MDMA with fentanyl that causes people to OD or get addicted to opioids, fewer addicts robbing people for drug money, higher deterrence for other crimes because police aren't spread so thin, less poverty and desperation because fewer kids have fathers in prisons or coffins, fewer neighborhoods held hostage by drug gangs.
That's a whole lot of crime that just goes away.
More to the point, consider where we are in terms of efficiency. It costs on the order of $100k/year to incarcerate someone. Every one of those drug murders you prevent is saving twenty million dollars worth of keeping someone locked up for two decades. That pays for a lot of two day jury trials for petty theft.
Based on what? This sounds completely made up. Anyone could sell on Silk Road, and faking reviews would be trivial on an anonymous platform. And if someone died from drugs they bought, they're not exactly leaving a review, are they?
Sellers have reputations in real life, but it can actually be difficult to link a death to a specific dealer without a thorough investigation. Even more so on an anonymous platform. Would Silk Road have cared if the police linked deaths to a specific seller? Fuck no.
For the record, I am not anti Silk Road, I'm actually for legalizing drugs. I just find the notion that drugs online were inherently cleaner to be naive Libertarian propaganda.
Yes, he was guilty of running a website, which on the face of it seems innocent right? Sure thats an argument. "i'm just providing an online location for this to happen, but I don't know whats going on"
Apart from he was _also_ running an escrow service, Now to run an escrow service you need to create a contract with conditions to allow money to be released. The problem is that to say "oh he didn't know what was going on" is a provable lie, because to keep the escrow trustworthy, you need to arbitrate, to arbitrate requires knowing what was supposed to be delivered and why it didn't get delivered.
Now, escrow isn't free, you're taking a risk holding that money. So Ross takes a cut.
But the problem is, that money comes from illegal activities. He knows this, so he needs to find a way to make the money legit. This means fraudulently laundering it.
The problem there is that when you combine laundering money and drugs trafficking, you get compound sentences. see https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/operation-foxhound-nets-47...
which has:
> Those arrested face sentences of 10 years to life in prison for the narcotics violations and up to 20 years for the money laundering violations.
However
I want to find agreement, because I want to make sure that understand I'm not saying your viewpoint is wrong, I think your anger is directed in the wrong place.
The sentence is within tolerance for the scale and combination of offences, the murder allegations are a red herring, and didn't materially affect the sentence.
For a large number of drug users, silkroad provided a safer way to obtain drugs, both in terms of violence and quality.
The people that ultimately set the bounds for these sentences are congress. They have chosen the war on drugs, which I think we can agree has caused more violence that it has stopped. The courts did exactly as they are supposed to do with the laws that they had at their disposal. The way the court operated was correct.
What is not correct is the federal governments approach to drugs.
Ross willingly sold weapons, body parts, etc on it. He personally ok'ed the sale of these things (text proof from the prosecution)
It was only some months & years later that I heard about Glen Park, the library, and Bello being part of the drama, and other local landmarks. To this day I keep hearing about other local details. (I learned a few months ago that his group house was on Monterey Blvd, not far from the conservatory).
Looking back, I had noticed a number of 'out-of-town' business people in Bello around that time. Glen Park is a busy local scene, but gets very few visitors, so they stuck out. Clean cut, business casual, but not FiDi types. They were cheerful but not interested in chatting. Who would go to a cafe and not want to socialize, I wondered? I thought perhaps realestate people.
I went to Bello frequently then, and must have seen Ross there a few times too, but I only vaguely recall once or twice. Something drew my attention to his laptop, maybe it had an EFF sticker on it? But he likewise didn't seem interested in conversation. I do recall once he was talking with an older man, in his 50's or early 60's, about libertarianism.
At what point does this strike you as odd?
As soon as your skin color or sexual preference or religion or gender identity or income level is not in-group, they’re pretty different.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/how-the-feds-sta...
>Force got Green to sign a waiver, thereby commencing his role in an impromptu staged torture sting against DPR. Soon Green was being dunked in the bathtub of a Marriott suite by phony thugs who were in fact a Secret Service agent and a Baltimore postal inspector. Force recorded the action on a camera. “Did you get it?” Green asked, wet and wheezing on the floor. He’d felt like their simulation was a little too accurate. They dunked him four more times to get a convincing shot.
There used to be an online archive of every little bit of public information known about the Silk Road's administrators and their court cases. I can't find it anymore. It was over 10 years ago. All I can remember is the site had a weird url.
And look, I don't even agree with the narrative of "privilege". I think if you see someone being treated badly, the solution to that is to treat that person better, not to adamantly insist that people who are treated better are privileged. Calling someone privileged is pretty much always an ad-hominem argument to discard what they have to say.
I disagree with Forrest, not because she's privileged, although she IS privileged. I disagree with Forrest because the argument that purer drugs kill fewer people than cut ones is just as valid coming from a street crack dealer as it is coming from Ross Ullbricht. I don't care who says an idea, I care whether the idea is true or not.
Do you have any actual refutation of that claim, or are you going to continue to insist that who said it is more important than whether it's true or not?
EDIT: Ironically, the argument Forrest is making here is actually a particularly offensive appeal to privileged (read: racist) misinformation. She references "crack dealers" specifically because crack has a reputation as the worst of the worst of drugs, when in fact crack is extremely similar to regular cocaine. The difference is that crack is used by poor, often black users, whereas cocaine is used by rich, often white, users. But criminal charges for crack vs. cocaine are still drastically different, although this has improved[1]. This is part of a larger pattern where drugs are prosecuted with more severity if they're used by poor black people than if they are used by middle class white people. For example, PCP is a whole schedule higher than, although these are chemically similar drugs with similar effects and harms in any of the scientific literature I can find.
[1] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/crack-vrs-po...
It's not even that. It's a matter of, okay, there is a gas station next to the highway. They sell gas to anyone who shows up. "They don't know those people are speeding", wink.
They know those people are speeding. If you went up to the average gas station attendant and asked them if they knew their customers were speeding, they would probably admit they know, because the speed limit is below the speed of the median car and everybody knows it. You may also have other ways of proving they know. They may even know in specific cases rather than just in general. So they're knowingly making money from all of this illegal activity. A dangerous offense that causes thousands of fatalities. Literally making more money than they would otherwise, because cars use more gas at very high speeds, and knowingly enabling the unlawful activity, because those cars don't run without gas.
Should gas station workers all be in prison for life, or is that a crazy penalty for that type of offense?
> The sentence is within tolerance for the scale and combination of offences, the murder allegations are a red herring, and didn't materially affect the sentence.
There can be more than one source of the problem. I'm not disputing that Congress has passed some bad laws.
The issue is, there is still a range of penalties for that offense, and he got the very top of the range. For some reason.
The conviction rate can't really tell you anything because prosecutors will calibrate to bring cases they think they can win in a given system. Systems willing to convict more innocent people will have similar conviction rates but more innocent defendants.
> A good judge wouldn’t do that.
What about a human judge?
> Also by and large random people are relatively dumb and biased. Why exactly are they less likely to convict an innocent person?
Because you have to convince all twelve of them.
No, but it does mean that she knows what privilege is and is able to make assertions about it. And being in a good position such as being worth millions and being a judge isn't a privilege if you've earned it.
> I disagree with Forrest because the argument that purer drugs kill fewer people than cut ones is just as valid coming from a street crack dealer as it is coming from Ross Ullbricht.
Purer drugs can kill more people as I pointed out about tolerance levels. Even then, it's not like Ullbricht knew or cared about the quality of the products being sold on his site. He just cared he got his cut.
Name the jurisdiction(s) where the proposed solutions (e.g. drug legalization) are currently being attempted but aren't working.
> The laws on the books today hardly get enforced.
In large part because there are too many of them.
> Unless fair trials get cheap there is no way out.
You claim the other solutions don't work but how do you propose to achieve that one?
The only solution that actually works is to reduce the number of cases.
Sorry, I looked for it but it seems it's not easy to find mainstream newspaper articles about this. It seems this topic is heavily being censored. Which is interesting in it's own right. But it does also mean that I can't deliver all this information on a golden plate for you, and you'll have to do a little bit of research and analyzing and personal thinking, instead of just reading the headlines that the media is feeding you.
Watch the video, it really gives you might insight into the complexity of the situation, or at least how it was.
And how else would you explain that first the borders were constantly flooded with illegal immigrants, and now not anymore? Something must have changed that has made the illegal path less interesting than the legal one.
I was thinking more along the lines of taking a system that isn't just or fair, and making it more just and fair.
See, I wasn't really concerned very much by profitability and efficiency, more about what is good and right.
Silly me, I guess.
When having these conversations, it’s easy to stand on the moral high ground and forget that we also live among monsters, and alongside organizations that turn regular people into the instruments of monsters. There are a lot of people in this world that have chosen to be incompatible with coexistence in civil society, or to be part of an organization that has chosen to be so.
These people actively do grave harm to other people. Sometimes, the only way to prevent more harm to innocent people is to remove those individuals from the world.
That said, I don’t know anything of the veracity or motivations behind the allegations brought against DPR in this regard, and for whatever reason, his legal circumstances were crafted so as to make sure that the public would also remain ignorant of the details of those circumstances.
While I do not know any of the details involved, I am deeply suspicious of the manipulations of the FBI in cases such as this, having been in proximity to some of their other shenanigans. It’s definitely inside the realm of reasonable speculation to imagine that they may have created a situation where not only was it convenient for DPR to eliminate his “competitor”, but he would be doing a noble thing in the process.
As an example , one of their “successful anti terrorist operations” a few years back involved a mentally challenged person was manipulated by the FBI into a “terrorist” plot where he thought he was “saving the world”…. So they -definitely-do that kind of thing. The Walmart judiciously wouldn’t sell him a gun (he is obviously and apparently challenged) so they sent him back to buy a bb-gun and arrested him coming out of the store.
Because of this and many other examples of behavior with depraved impunity, I am inclined to give DPR the benefit of the doubt on this, in the absence of much more specific and reliable information.
But, as usual, this is a case of false equivalency.
Can we agree that when violence results in penetration of the national seat of power, during the transfer of power, that changes from "civil unrest" to "insurrection"?
This is like saying "but your honor, fights happen all the time", when trying to defend yourself after robbing a bank.
I won't even go into the fact that there is ample evidence that it did not "just got violent". Even if not everyone came there to storm the senate, there is ample videographic proof of people arriving geared up and organized.
Now. Regarding those "bunch of drug dealers". In fact, Biden commuted the sentence of 1500 non-violent offenders so that their punishment was in line with the punishment they would receive today. He pardoned 49 people that mostly have already purged their sentence and today are productive members of society (and there were being kept back by their record)
Really. Spend two minutes reading through the list of pardons, and after reading about the lives of these people, then tell me if you still think those people will sell drugs to children.
Your "US bad because invasion" is a tankie frame. Yes, that refers to the Tiananmen tanks.
It could just be the news coverage. Maybe they wanted people scared before the election. Do you have sources with actual numbers? What is the percentage decrease?
> It seems this topic is heavily being censored
Then how are the illegal migrants "easily" getting citizenship finding out about it?
At least you're engaging with the topic at hand instead of making ad hominem attacks now.
And... I partly agree with you! If you look at my comment upthread, you'll note I tried to make it clear that there's some ambiguity in whether the Silk Road, and the rise of darknet markets as a whole, has been a good thing. I'm certainly not holding up Ullbricht as some moral hero--that's entirely perihelions' hallucination.
The question in my mind, is whether what Ullbricht did is worth putting a 30 year old in prison for the rest of his life. I fundamentally disagree with two things which were involved in this sentencing:
1. Accusations that Ullbricht paid for murders should have no bearing on the court system. From what I've read, it seems like those accusations are probably true, but in the United States of America, we don't sentence people on "probably true" for crimes that weren't even prosecuted. If we're at all committed to the presumption of innocent until proven guilty, we can't be allowing prosecutors to convict for a crime, vaguely insinuate that a worse crime was committed, and get a sentence based on that worse crime's severity. If Ross Ullbricht was being sentenced for murder, he needed to be convicted of murder.
2. Making an example of someone isn't justice for that person. Our court system should not be engaged in sacrificing individuals for political goals, no matter how noble those political goals might be.
In my mind, it's pretty hard to justify a life sentence without accusing Ullbricht of murder or saying we should make an example of him. Everything he was accused of was a nonviolent offense for which he was a first-time offender. The only argument I can see for a harsher sentence is the scale of his operation--but when we compare to SEC cases for example with similar scales, we're still not seeing this severity of sentences.
Ullbricht served 11 years in prison before he was pardoned, and I don't think anything our current justice system does is "fair", I think that's about as fair as we can expect given what he did.
I'll admit I haven't done much research on opiates specifically for the simple reason that I have never known any active opiate addicts (though, I did get trained to administer Narcan). However, in my understanding of drugs such as coke, MDMA, or speed/adderall, which are more common in the tech scene, higher purity is unambiguously a net positive. It's been a while since I was actually involved in the overlap of the tech/festival scene but when I was around that more, I made anyone I knew used drugs aware that I had drug test kits and would let you borrow them no questions asked. I can't claim I ever saved a life, but I can say for certain that ~30 people at a festival I went to ended up riding out bad trips in medical tents or being transported to the hospital due to MDMA cut with DOC, and none of the people I let borrow my test kits at that festival did.
I would say he deserved about 20-25 years. He engaged in a large-scale drug operation. He explicitly set out to start a drug operation. He operated a drug operation that was larger than most could even imagine. And the fact he tried to put hits out on people really seals the deal, while it doesn't matter legally it does matter when we think about how much time did he really deserve.
If you look at who generally dies from drug overdoses it's largely opiate-based drug users. I once listened to two junkies who hadn't seen each other for quite a while talking and letting each other know about who died. They were mostly talking about overdoses, the conversation went on for about 30 minutes non-stop with different names non-stop. None of the cokeheads, eckyheads (MDMA), or speed freaks I knew ever had conversations like that.
Well isn't this obvious enough:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/world/americas/migrants-t...
> Then how are the illegal migrants "easily" getting citizenship finding out about it?
They hear it from each other. They know, it's a whole business, with coach busses taking immigrants to the border where they continue a common path take daily by many people. It's all in that video.
The hypothetical is there to try to tease out a principled stance from our intuition. If someone stole a wallet that contained $1B, should their punishment be a million times harsher than someone who stole a wallet with $1000? Should it be 5x harsher? The same punishment?
If your stance is that luck would not ideally affect one's punishment then the amount stolen isn't itself a factor in determining the punishment. It's downstream of the true factors, such as the number of thefts committed. The amount stolen is correlated but not causal.
I understand that you could face charges if you criticized a group of people and expressed something that can be interpreted as a call for their elimination.
Pretending that those charges are for the criticism doesn't seem right, though.
but we have a separate crime category for those already. "attempted murder" etc. those are crimes because they intended to be a crime, but they just failed for incompetence. it's a lot harder to prove in court (rightfully so).
i would say that i agree with you about attempted crimes, if that helps.
I've pinged dang on some previous threads which I'd have liked to see discussed.
He's been commenting for a few years now about being pretty much maxed out on his moderation and email capacity, and intensive posts simply cannot get the moderation that's required for substantive discussion. He (and other mods, and member flags) can clean up the worst messes account bans are fairly frequent (107 public bans in the past year: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1737783933&dateRange=custom&...>
Contrast:
- 2023-01-25 -- 2024-01-24: 268 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1706076402&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2022-01-25 -- 2023-01-24: 307 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1674540385&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2021-01-25 -- 2022-01-24: 323 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1643004366&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2020-01-25 -- 2021-01-24: 269 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1611468339&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2019-01-25 -- 2020-01-25: 255 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1579845921&dateRange=custom&...>
I'd been meaning to do that check for a few weeks (I'd asked dang about ban frequency and trends, he doesn't have data handy). At least over the past five years its ... reasonably constant. How many unannounced bans occur of course I don't know.
It was under his own will, the DEA just supplied him the means to do so.
It's basically as if I was in a seedy bar and spot a pistol on an undercover agent, and I tell them I know an easy spot to rob near the bar. Then the undercover agent gives me the pistol, asking for 20% of the take. It only turns into entrapment if I was talking about money problems and the undercover agent would have told me robbing a nearby convienence store could be an easy solve to my money troubles.
Edit:
You initially wrote:
> no victim means no crime. victimless "crimes" are just 'arbitrary rule' violations (like going 56mph in a 55mph zone) or infractions. the twisting and distortion of language by the state is counterproductive to society.
So you think not being allowed to bomb someone while being unsuccessful is ab arbitrary rule and should not be called a crime?
My friend, what are you babbling about? Did you hallucinate me saying that China is my model of a utopian society?
Again. Which countries has China invaded or toppled, outside of the imaginary ones you yearn for in your head? Is the list close to that of the US?
>Your "US bad because invasion" is a tankie frame. Yes, that refers to the Tiananmen tanks. (??)
I'm a tankie because I think invasions are bad?? What does that make you, a frothing bloodthirsty hawk? A despotic militarist?
Or will now attempt to argue the tired and ahistorical trope that those other invasions were good actually because Pinochet or Suharto were actually secretly democratic and the thousands they murdered aren't important, and it was good that Arbenz was toppled because he actually wasn't democratically elected and was infact a rabid communist in disguise and the United Fruit Co. lobbying was just a coincidence etc. etc.
If so don't bother. I'm not wasting anymore time talking to one bereft of ordered thought, spinning baffling word associations and tired tropes. I'm not interested in discovering to what extent daily life presents a sisyphean ordeal to you.
- 2007 -- 2008: 0 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1201208605&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2008 -- 2009: 0 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1232831005&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2009 -- 2010: 0 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1264367005&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2010 -- 2011: 0 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1295903005&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2011 -- 2012: 0 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1327439005&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2012 -- 2013: 0 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1359061405&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2013 -- 2014: 0 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1390597405&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2014 -- 2015: 11 [*] <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1422133405&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2015 -- 2016: 77 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1453669405&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2016 -- 2017: 232 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1485291805&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2017 -- 2018: 370 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1516827805&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2018 -- 2019: 240 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1548363805&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2019 -- 2020: 253 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1579899805&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2020 -- 2021: 269 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1611522205&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2021 -- 2022: 323 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1643058205&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2022 -- 2023: 309 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1674594205&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2023 -- 2024: 268 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1706130205&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2024 -- 2025: 106 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1737752605&dateRange=custom&...>
Overall results: ban notices weren't really a thing until 2015--2016. For years up to 2014--2015 I checked for comments additionally by pg as dang wasn't moderator in early years. There may be some additional notices by sctb, in total 344 from 14 July 2016 to 16 August 2019, see: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1737752605&dateRange=all&dat...>.
sctb bans (calendar year):
- 2016: 125 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1483220459&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2017: 137 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1514756459&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2018: 61 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1546292459&dateRange=custom&...>
- 2019: 22 <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1577828459&dateRange=custom&...>
________________________________
Notes:
*: Most of these 11 results are discussion about bans, rather than ban notices. Following 2014--2015 the pattern matches are far more often about actual ban actions.
<>>10019003 >
You don’t know me. Seems you are pretty bigoted towards people not like you. How not progressive of you.
The illegality of drugs is a government reaction, since governance failed to do anything with the problem by action. No-one deserves a life-long sentence in prison for that. This market, as well as minimal competition, lack of regulation, and high margins was created by the same power which sends people to jail.
Do you believe in the presumption of innocence or not? This isn't an ambiguous thing.
I don't think this is generally the stance. If you give someone a little shove, they bump their head, and they get a bruise, you've committed assault, you're facing up to a few months in jail. If you give someone a little shove, they bump their head, and they die, you've committed murder, you're facing potentially years in jail. According to the eggshell skull legal doctrine[0], it doesn't matter that some people are especially more vulnerable than others (ie that you were particularly unlucky and pushed someone who happened to have an eggshell skull), you take responsibility for the consequences when you do something illegal.
Now in our world, no one is going to steal a wallet with $1 billion in it - there is some reasonable assumption that when taking a wallet you are at most stealing a few thousand dollars, and never more money than a person would be comfortable keeping in their wallet. While that's against society's rules for various reasons, it's not a particularly damaging crime. The victim will be perhaps very inconvenienced, but no worse.
However if we lived in a world where a wallet might contain 1 billion dollars, that would be a different story. Now you might very well be causing life altering damage to large numbers of people when you steal a wallet. The decision to do so, knowing the risk, is a much more serious offense. The metaphorical wallet Madoff stole was not only possibly filled with an enormous sum of money, it very likely contained that much. Beyond the much greater and repeated effort that Madoff employed to steal this money than would be needed to snatch a wallet, the very fact he was willing to cause so much potential damage for his personal gain is a much more severe breach of the social contract than a petty thief.
There definitely shouldn't be a simple linear relationship of dollars stolen to days in prison; but that doesn't mean the punishment should be completely agnostic either. These relationships are complex and need to be looked at in context with other relevant factors like pre-meditative effort or degree of remorse. Regardless of one's stance on rehabilitative vs punitive justice, I think we can all agree someone who effortlessly broke core parts of the social contract and would gladly do so again needs to be treated differently from someone who made a bad call in a moment of weakness.
What you're describing is manslaughter or possibly not a crime in most jurisdictions, but your point stands. Generally, murder is an intentional killing, and manslaughter is an accidental killing. But if, say, you give an aggressive drunk a little shove and they bump their head and die, you probably haven't committed a crime. Nonetheless, luck absolutely plays a role in punishment in our current justice system in a thousand different ways. I don't think most people consider the element of luck to be ideal so much as an unfortunate but necessary reality.
With the eggshell skull doctrine, you're talking about paying for damages in a civil case. I think most people see reparations differently than punishment. In civil law, you pay to fix the damage you caused, even though the exact amount comes down to luck. But criminal punishments require some criminal intent. It's a higher bar.
> there is some reasonable assumption that when taking a wallet you are at most stealing a few thousand dollars
I think you're giving thieves too much credit here. They may not expect most wallets to have more than $1000, but I don't think most thieves have some innate goodness in them that makes them want to get a wallet with less than $1000. I think it's the opposite: if thieves knew someone had $1B in their wallet, and the chance of getting caught was the same as stealing any other wallet, I think most thieves would want to steal that wallet more, not less. And I don't think most would care if the money in that wallet rightfully belonged to the investors of Madoff Investment Securities either.
> factors like pre-meditative effort or degree of remorse ... moment of weakness
With these factors, you're judging the thief based on their character. We're both advocating this. The difference is you're arguing someone who steals a larger amount of money has a worse character while I'm arguing they just had greater opportunity.
You don't become guilty or innocent based on legal proceedings. The point of a case is to establish guilt for the purpose of punishment.
But an innocent person doesn't become "guilty" even when the evidence shows that in the court. A guilty person remains guilty whether a court can prove it or not.
Good explanation: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanlewis/2017/04/18/what-is-...
Another distinction here is that a store is offering a contract. It isn't a debt until the contracted is accepted.
Speedrunning the history of civil society the dumb way.
Law is the history of transgressions against the public good.
Courts can do very little to remedy the harm of dying from rat poison. They can address, in an imperfect way, the incidental harm your death by rat poison causes to other people, but, I think most people would strongly prefer not to die of rat poison, than to die of rat poison but have their dependents compensated financially for the loss of their future income, etc.
If you've known anyone addicted to the list of things you mention, you should know that at some point, they are no longer "free to destroy themselves". They are continuing to destroy themselves out of a chemical or phycological necessity. The people who deal drugs or own casinos are running predatory businesses and it should be illegal, just like other predatory business practices are.
Furthermore, they had the evidence, they just dropped the charges because he had multiple life sentences.