
Drug Cartel Murders Another Blogger - curthopkins
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/drug_cartel_murders_another_blogger.php#.TrxUUaMaIPE.hackernews
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orbenn
Legalize all drugs and all of this ends tomorrow in the blink of an eye.

~~~
skeptical
That's a useless oversimplification of the problem. Such immediate solutions
have enormous pitfalls.

For example, in Europe, cocaine got significantly cheaper and rather easy to
find. This led to a a considerable increase of its popularity during the last
three years or so. Cocaine is starting to take 'market' from cannabis based
drugs which are much less dangerous and carry much softer consequences.

'Legalize drugs' is a too naive statement, the drug situation needs to be
carefully analysed and adequate solutions need to be put in practice based on
as much factors as possible.

That said, generally, in developed countries I think consumption
decriminalization is a positive thing at present time. It makes room for
advances in thins like hygiene, medical treatment of addicts, etc. without
creating easier access to drugs.

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speleding
I agree that "legalize all drugs" is problematic, and probably not a good
idea. "legalize all drugs less addictive than coffee" is a better option, that
allows cannabis and mushrooms. (some people argue "all drugs less addictive
than alcohol", but that would include cocaine). However, that still has the
problem that customer won't know for sure what they're buying without some
sort of FDA control, and small kids getting their hands on the stuff too
easily. So as a third revision I propose "Regulate all drugs less addictive
than coffee to be legally available to adults". Not very catchy.

~~~
yelsgib
Who gets to decide which drugs are addictive? The main claim by anti-
legalization politicians is that cannabis is addictive.

Giving any small group of humans the right to decide which properties drugs
have and how important/dangerous those properties are is EXTREMELY dangerous.
This is not kids stuff. Millions live and die by these decisions. Who do we
trust to make such decisions?

~~~
speleding
Yes, I know that is complex, that's why I sidestepped the issue by saying
"less addictive than coffee". That's pretty easy to determine in a controlled
double blind and most people agree with it intuitively.

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runjake
It looks like the author at RRW didn't read the article well. Rascatripas was
not hung from the infamous overpass. His body was dumped in town at the base
of a statue where other bodies have been dumped in the past.

The actual article is located at [http://www.chron.com/news/houston-
texas/article/Blogger-murd...](http://www.chron.com/news/houston-
texas/article/Blogger-murdered-and-beheaded-in-Nuevo-Laredo-2260814.php)

~~~
sneak
The past tense of "to hang" when referring to a human being (as in "by the
neck until dead") is "hanged" - i.e. "Rascatripas was not hanged from the
infamous overpass."

~~~
Jun8
No it's not, or more correctly, that is a rather recent development. The
Middle English account of a man punished given on Wikipedia uses _hung_
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered>), in fact this
punishment was referred to as "hung, drawn, and quartered".

Now, if that is the case, how to explain the title of the Wikipedia entry,
i.e. the usage of _hanged_ in place of _hung_. This is the common phenomenon
of regularization of irregular verbs, that has been going a loong time in
English, eventually almost all of them will be regularized. This article
([http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-486935/How-
irregular...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-486935/How-irregular-
verb-drived-extinction.html)) gives some details and explains that there are
about 98 irregular verbs left in the language, compared to 177 in Old English.

You can see this process today in the "driven-drove" dichotomy, different
people choose one or the other. Eventually _drove_ will disappear.

~~~
FreakLegion
It's a little more subtle than that. There are usage differences between the
perfect and imperfect tenses in both "hung-hanged" and "driven-drove," between
active and passive constructions[1], etc. Unfortunately, most native speakers
aren't any more savvy to this than they are to what remains of the English
subjunctive.

1\. It will always be "I drove to the store" and "I was driven to the store"
and "I am a driven person," never "I driven to the store" or "I was drove to
the store" or "I am a drove person."

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Not only that, but neither "driven" nor "drove" is a regular past-tense form.
That would be "drived", a use I haven't heard from anyone over two years of
age.

~~~
FreakLegion
Yes and no. Some people call ablaut verbs irregular, but almost all of them
are in fact regular. They only seem irregular because there are relatively few
of them left to group together [1]. But I'm not aware of any language with a
single pattern of conjugation. Many have 10 or more.

1\. Ex.: Drive-drove-driven, write-wrote-written, ride-rode-ridden, etc. While
they follow a different conjugation pattern, most ablaut verbs are perfectly
regular.

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kiba
Is there no options but an uncorrupted and highly trained military unit to
start marching and cracking down on the cartel? What if the cartel members
hide? Or will they fight?

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GiraffeNecktie
The cartel is largely run by highly trained elite ex-military. One unexplored
option is to acknowledge that drugs are a medical and social problem and not
something for the police, or God forbid, the military to solve. Legalize drugs
and allow them to be distributed through reasonable channels with medical
supervision if necessary. It's worked wherever it's been tried.

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jsf
What I don't get is how come there are no such violence problems with drug
cartels in the United States where surely they must be as large if not larger
since the drugs get somehow distributed there (I'm assuming there's where most
drugs handled by Mexican cartels end up).

~~~
orbenn
The US police/government/courts are less corrupt and have more resources to
crack down on the more visible violence.

There is more violence in America than most people realize. It's considered
mundane so you don't see it in the news as much.

The US is selling arms to the cartels in Mexico, so their violence is
escalated there.

Mexican cartels aren't larger in the US than in Mexico because their supply
sources are in Mexico, they lose momentum over distance and face domestic
competition as they move across the US.

~~~
jsf
I didn't mean Mexican cartels in the US, just cartels in the US in general. I
don't buy that it just doesn't show up in the news, if people appeared
decapitated or hanging from overpasses in the US I think you would see it
mentioned in the news. The corruption and incompetence of Mexican police makes
the problem more obvious since the government has to put the army and federal
police on the streets to keep some control.

I think maybe in the US the cartels have reached some equilibrium that allows
them to operate without so much violence and be discrete enough that they
don't get bothered so much by the police.

~~~
munin
really? so, when did you read about this:
<http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/132405488.html>

a mom and kids gets caught in the crossfire. this was an accident, and how
much news coverage does it get? had you heard about this story before?

the war is outside your house right now and you don't even know, because the
casualties are almost universally poor people (okay maybe not outside _your_
house because you might not be in the USA)...

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ascentofstan
Associated or unassociated with the press, this "blogger" body comes from
somewhere. Corruption is simply a fact of life in Mexico. The most effective
conduit of corruption anywhere is complacency, and lack of inherent disgust.
Traveling a few hrs through some neighboring (Mexican) states? Then carry a
few extra fifties so that you can minimize the average time spent pulled over
on your trip.

That didn't sound repulsive to my little ears, it was simply how things
worked. I learned that bit of travel advice from listening in on the adult
dinner table at about the same time I learned to ride a bicycle in that very
same city (Nevo Laredo).

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grandalf
Powerful entities don't like to be messed with. See the condition of this
blogger and of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.

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maeon3
Is there a service where one can tweet and post on social media, with
industrial strength anonymity?

