Tangentially related: I had the disconcerting experience of reading a Wired article about his arrest[1] while unknowingly sitting about six feet from the spot where he was apprehended. When I read that the FBI agents had stopped at Bello Coffee while preparing their stakeout, I thought, huh, interesting coincidence, I just had a coffee there.
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!
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.)
He was being arrested in the article, not IRL. When I say “Ulbricht walked into the public library and sat down at the table directly in front of me” I mean that I read
> 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.
I had the same confusion initially, interestingly chat GPT gets it:
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!
> their realization created a vivid mental image of the event unfolding in that space, which made the story feel more immersive.
Glad 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.
Legitimately and I say this was absolutely no shade intended. This is a reading comprehension problem, nothing to do with aphantasia.
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.
I realised what was going on, but I did a double-take at:
> 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.
Done for effect: it felt to the OP as if it was the present so the writing conveys that, while elsewhere making it clear the arrest was not the present.
I am as baffled at the responses and appreciated this explanation as it was helpful to me to work on my communication style and expresses a lot of similar frustrations I have. Like what is actually going on here? this isn’t shade at anyone, I just feel like people are losing some fundamental ability to deduce from context what they are reading. it’s doubly concerning because people immediately reach to an AI/LLM to explain it for them, which cannot possibly be helping the first problem.
Agree. This entire thread is weird. How do so many people in this thread have such obvious reading comprehension issues?
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.
I wonder what is going on? I’ve noticed this getting worse for a long time to the point I’m not sure it’s my imagination anymore. I usually like to lambast whole word reading as a complete failure in the american school system that contributes to this, but I think it’s likely something else. Shorter attention spans?
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.
I do think the comment had something about how it was written that made it hard to follow. I understood the first sentence. But then I got to
> 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.
Right. I'm not claiming the LLM has visual imagination - I suspect that OP has it, and that ChatGPT was trained on enough text from visual thinkers implicitly conveying their experience of the world, that it's now able to correctly interpret writing like that of OP's.
It's a strange feeling, watching the AI get better at language comprehension than me.
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).
You could also say that ChatGPT erred similarly to the original writer, who was unclear and misleading about events.
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.
There's many more ways to err than to get something right. ChatGPT getting OP right where many people here didn't tells us it's more likely that there is a particular style of writing/thinking that is not obvious to everyone, but ChatGPT can identify and understand, rather than just both OP and ChatGPT accidentally making exactly the same error.
Why would that be more likely? Seems like OP and ChatGPT (which is just many people of different skill levels) might easily make the same failure to communicate. Many failures of ChatGPT are failures to communicate or to convey structured thinking.
Because out of all possible communication failures OP and ChatGPT could make, them both making the exact same error, in a way that makes the two errors cancel out, is extremely unlikely.
Reducing any judgment out of your comment, you have to admit that the commenter's action was a successful comprehension strategy they learned from and can use in the future without chatgpt.
Okay, that's actually pretty wild. I totally misunderstood too, but the response from the "AI" does indeed "clear it up" for me. A bit surprised actually, but then again, I suppose I shouldn't be, since language is what those "large language models" are all about after all... :)
Indeed. But their is something surprising here, however. people like chomsky would present examples like this for decades as untracktable by any algorithm, and as a proof that language is a uniquely human thing. they went as far as to claim that humans have a special language organ, somewhere in their brain perhaps. turns out, a formula exists, it is just very very large.
> chomsky would present examples like this for decades as untracktable by any algorithm, and as a proof that language is a uniquely human thing
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.
Which should be expected, because since human brain is finite, it follows that it's either possible to do it, or the brain is some magic piece of divine substrate to which laws of physics do not apply.
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.
That’s not what it means at all. You threw a monkey in your own wrench.
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.
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.
You are wrong! Confidently wrong at that. Distribution of potential, not number of available states. Brain capacity and capability is scalar and can retune itself at the most fundamental levels.
As far as we know, universe is discrete at the very bottom, continuity is illusory, so that's still finite.
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.
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.
I never bought into Searle's argument with the Chinese room.
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.
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.
I don’t think I understand this entirely. The point of the thought experiment is to assume the possibility of the room and consider the consequences. How it might be achievable in practice doesn’t alter this
The room is possible because there's someone inside with a big list of rules of what Chinese characters to reply with. This represents the huge amount of data processing and statistical power. When the thought expt was created, you could argue that the room was impossible, so the experiment was meaningless. But that's no longer the case.
I'm not sure I'm following you. My comment re Chinese room was that parent said the data processing we now have was unimaginable back in the day. In fact, it was imaginable - the Chinese room imagined it.
Just as an additional datapoint, since I’m confused by fellow commenters’ confusion—I thought your narrative was clear, colorful, and entertaining, and I hope you’ll keep things so literary and engaging in your future contributions too :)
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.
Yes, I thought it was an interesting blend of past and present. If this were a scene in a show or movie it could be edited beautifully - the reader, sitting alone in a corner, looks up and in a lucid, almost psychedelic way, the past comes to life with Ulbrict sitting in front of him, that unfold as he continues reading.
Regarding your edit. The first paragraph kind of lines up with you reading about it. But the second one is kind of confusing, and I think it's because "then" can mean two different things here. You meant "at the time of his arrest". If you casually read it without cross referencing the first paragraphs context, you might think it means "as I was sitting there".
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
His writing employs a little bit of poetry in order to capture his feeling. Not all writing benefits from being as clear and bland as possible. HN should probably read some non-fiction books from time to time
Not sure which novels you’re picking but in my experience novels are frequently more ambiguous and harder to parse than the parent comment, often on purpose. If you’ve really ’never had a single issue’ maybe you’re not choosing challenging texts
Wow, you've totally cracked the mystery. This explains why all the commenters are at each other's throats - half of them are reading it one way and half are reading the other way, and only one of the two ways makes any sense.
Yes, it took three reads before I worked out what the story was trying to say.
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.
Exactly, that was my point about then being a word that can be interpreted in two ways, and the following sentence does not error correct this assumption.
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.
I used to live in Glen Park at that time and I vividly remember seeing Ross working as a cashier at the Canyon Market, helping me bag my groceries. It was probably around the time he was starting the Silk Road. The place where he was arrested was also my favorite table at the Public Library, where I used to go work. It is incredible to be that close to history.
I believe they are suggesting an experience of imaginatively visualising the events of the arrest linearly as they were narrated in their read-through of the article, serendipitously aided by being physically present at the same location, and are referencing the article's narration partially in the present tense to similarly immerse us in medias res as we follow their remark.
Alternatively, they are themselves Ross Ulbricht, describing an out-of-body fever dream or post-traumatic flashback. This seems ... somewhat less likely.
Singular "they" dates at least back as far as the 14th century, and I've yet to meet a person who objects to it but does not use it themselves now and again without even noticing if you observe them speak enough. It's entirely integral to English.
The interlude during which some pushed for "they" to be exclusively plural, was a mere brief blip in the history of the language.
It's also a couple of centuries older than singular "you", so if you want to complain about a pronoun changing between singular and plural, that's a better candidate.
I’ve been writing they to refer to individuals in the third person for five decades. Usage of they as a neutral singular pronoun began in the 14th century. Stercus alibi iace, outrage monkey.
It's so funny how outrage poisoned partisans have such crushing issues with pronouns. The word 'They' has been used to refer to individuals for hundreds of years. Get a life
I dont know, ask the commenter - he who reads OPs story and comments on it, projects himself into it when commenting on it.. there is no fixed answer to this.
I thought that starting my story in media res would make for a better dramatic effect, but it seems I overestimated my audience and went a little too heavy on the narrative ellipsis.
> 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.
Well, a lot of times the audience is to blame... There are many people that are stupid, aren't trained in style figures of writing or just not trained in reading in a way that allows for complex conceptual frameworks. It also happens in software: someone writes great code, it's very complex and some people don't understand it and blame the author of writing unreadable code. Its easy to call something unreadable if you don't understand what it's saying. Let me bring it differently: it takes two to tango. I found his story interesting and engaging.
Let me bring it in another way:
Sometimes the joke is brilliant, but the audience just doesn't understand it. It's not a bad joke or a bad comedian. It's a bad audience.
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.
To paraphrase the asshole quote: "if one person misunderstands you, that's their fault; if everyone does, it's yours". The same goes for your comedian analogy: sure, you can tell a brilliant joke in French to a Chinese audience, but why?
I think you could have told it as experiencing the events without making your post confusing, but you'd have to redo your first paragraph. Your first paragraph is external, meta, and places his arrest in your past, which throws off the effect when that suddenly changes in the next sentence. It's not the audience's fault that that is hard to parse.
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.
I found it interesting and could visualize you as you were visualizing it while reading. The only part that made me go back was I thought he sat down to your table until I reread you could see the table he sat down at years ago.
I've seen this type of thing recently and also have been told some comments were "obviously" meaning something else. I think people must've stopped reading books and lost interpretation skills.
I liked the way you wrote it, I could picture you sitting in the library, picturing the arrest yourself :-).
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 :-).
I had a similar experience watching Mr. Robot. There’s a scene where it shifts to first person PoV and the voiceover says something like “am I seeing this? Is this real?” … and it was EXACTLY the PoV I had every day walking out of my office on 36th st back then.
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.
My kids used to go to that library! We lived in the neighborhood (Glen Park- one of the "gems" of San Francisco) and the downtown is almost like a little village (except with California levels of traffic and trash). It was a bit weird to think that my kids were probably reading books while this guys was, uh, transacting his business nearby.
I mean, it’s possible that the library had rearranged their chairs in the intervening years and that exact one was now at a different table, but it was certainly a chair in the same location.
This is unrelated but you just did a wonderful job of explaining why I love history so much. There’s something so exciting (to me) about deeply researching an event, going to where it happened and seeing the land (or library) come alive with images of the past.
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
I read this article when it was first published years ago, and it is written so well I still "see the movie" in my head when I think about it. Your experience must have been next-level.
I'll share my experience, too: I live near Glen Park and was in Bello that day, taking up one of those coveted seats, as all this was happening. I recall being aware of a lot of police cars outside, and perhaps seeing the phalanx around Ross as they walked past the window. Clearly something big was going on, but I stepped outside and the street was already back to normal. Shrug, perhaps I'll hear about it on the evening news. Not a peep. :-)
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.
Literacy and nuance is hard with written words — especially when a large chunk of your audience is either a non-native English speaker or and Adderall addict. I feel like this community is heavily laden with both, and surely there must be some significant overlap between those groups.
i had a similar experience working in copenhagen. read an article about copenhagen sub orbital rockets, looked up and out my window and my eye landed on the rocket i was just reading about. weird.
You’re not going to hear from the people who thought it made perfect sense, so the replies are a pretty biased sample. (This is also true of the parent complaint about reading comprehension, tbh.) But I see three confused replies and three corrections (not counting my own), so it doesn’t seem to be every reply.
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.
I thought it was fine, I wasn't confused for a moment. The only real problem here is that HN attracts a certain brand of nerds who are inclined to think it's hilarious when Maurice Moss says "Yes, it's one of those", many of whom are likely frothing right now because I just committed a comma splice in the previous sentence.
I (and others) have vouched a few of his comments back to life, he does write a good comment.
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.
I feel torn about this because it seems there was good evidence for attempted murder- and I cannot understand why they never tried him for that (seemingly larger) crime. However, for the crime he was actually found guilty of, the sentence was unfair and unreasonable. It seems they unethically sentenced him for crimes he was not even ever charged with.
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.
Not going to comment on the murder part as that’s well discussed here.
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.
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.
Is that why they never prosecuted the attempted murder? It sounds like entrapment.
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.
The truth is no one knows why they didn't bring those charges, or the real details behind the evidence or what happened in those interactions. It's pretty much shrouded beneath things like:
-DOJ released some details and screenshots, but
-the FBI agents who were involved in investigating this topic were like arrested for stealing bitcoin from silk road or something, so their work is hard to find credible
-general lack of clarity as to the identity of the person running silk road at the time this happened
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.
> 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
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.
>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.
> In late February 1974, Hampton and a DEA informant known as Hutton were playing pool at the Pud bar in St. Louis when Hampton noticed the needle marks on Hutton's arms. He said he needed money and could obtain heroin to sell. Hutton responded that he could find a buyer. After the conversation, he called his handler, DEA agent Terry Sawyer, and reported the proposal.
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.
My understanding is that they did not charge him with the attempted murder because it was later found that both parties/witnesses (other than Ross) later turned out to be corrupt and financially benefitting from the situation (keeping his murder payment for themselves) and the Silk Road in general.
Entrapment requires some coercive/persuasive force by the government to push you to commit the crime, the government is allowed to setup entirely fake scenarios and let you choose to do a crime.
Not that it's a perfect source, but reddit lawyers used to describe the difficulty of proving entrapment by laying out two requirements: (1) you wouldn't have committed the crime if the instigator wasn't law enforcement, and (2) you only committed the crime because the instigator was law enforcement. One or the other is not enough. Like an 'if and only if' deal.
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.
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.
Depends a lot on the exact setup. He still chose to try to hire a hitman allegedly. The standard is fairly high, "that man is informing on you" isn't entrapment, without knowing a lot of details it's hard to know and it's rarely actually entrapment.
Built on naive yet admirable ideals? Special community? It was the world’s largest drug market, selling things like fentanyl in large quantities. What admirable ideal is this?!
You really cannot stop illicit drug use. A hard approach to prohibition not only makes people less safe, it’s a massive waste of spending. On just a pragmatic level- Fentanyl and analogues are by weight hundreds of times more potent than morphine. How do you even effectively stop that from getting across borders? Silk Road provided a brief counterpoint, and ideally wouldn’t have had to exist. The ideals it represented were more broad- for drug regulations/spending that focus on safety, and respect individual rights / bodily autonomy (ofc limited to not harming or endangering others).
The Silk Road represented a tiny fraction of illicit drug revenue per country. Some report-skimming would indicate less than a single digit. A series of more profit-oriented darknet markets replaced it. I don’t know what the costs were associated with its takedown but they must have been enormous. I doubt it became large enough for cartels to care much, but the effect of shutting it down is certainly good for them.
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.
Oh, I like that, tough on crime! It's a novel idea. I wish the Nixon and Reagan administrations had thought of that a few decades ago, maybe if they did we could be witnessing the brilliant effects of that sort of policy today!
Amazing idea! After all, giving long term prison sentences to drug dealers, and even drug users, has totally eliminated drug use, it's not like it has exploded over time...
Separating the drugs from the adjacent crime and problems that come with an illicit industry by finding a way to make it run kinda like normal business seems pretty admirable to me.
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.
>It’s cheaper than the alternative, though, if there is rat poison in it, there is nothing you can do!
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.
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.
Something anyone with an addict in their life needs to know:
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.
I think you're advocating for better mental health care and rehabilitation of addicts, which I agree with. However, the idea that addicts will destroy their lives regardless of whether they stop using, or are forced to stop using, their drug of choice is an extremely dangerous statement. Many addicts get better by changing their environment and quitting/going to rehab/etc.
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.
The important question isn't raw numbers, it's which destroys a greater percentage of lives out of those who consume it. If heroin were as widespread as alcohol, would it still be true that alcohol destroys more lives? We obviously can't know for sure without trying it, but preliminary results aren't promising.
Yeah, I don't know. There's certainly people that are just broken, but reading other examples, I think there are plenty of people who just happen on to a perfect addiction(, or maybe an imperfect one that fills the spot). The manifest destiny stuff is kind of a mix that soothes a lot of people with various motives whether or not it is representative of the median case.
> 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.
> Ulbricht stopped selling them because it wasn't lucrative enough.
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.
There's a reason Wikipedia doesn't accept "I saw it" as a citation.
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.
"Facebook is a communication tool for friends and family that is sometimes used for illegal activity" is categorically different than "Silk Road is a tool created to facilitate illegal activity."
There are many Christians who would happily to get in long arguments over which values are “clearly Christian.”
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.
> If you really want to understand, it’s not hard. It just requires making an honest effort to try, without judging
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.
Well, he just did an executive order to label cartels as foreign terrorists, and has spoken at length about drugs in many of his speeches. Not sure why you think such a statement is controversial.
Because I don't think he has a honestly held belief about anything. I think he's happy to do whatever is most expedient for his interests.
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.
I replied with more details in a sister thread but calling it a schtick is more accurate that I think you meant. It's exclusively a shtick; he doesn't actually believe it, or care about it.
Historically, many anti-drug / anti-cartel leaders are actually members of a rival cartel, and want to use law enforcement to fight their wars for them.
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.
>he signed an executive order forcing prosecutors to seek the death penalty when police are killed
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.
> Historically, many anti-drug / anti-cartel leaders are actually members of a rival cartel, and want to use law enforcement to fight their wars for them.
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 Wikipedia article does not flag Giuliani as being a member of Russian organized crime, but someone who Giuliani's law firm represents, an individual by the name of Dmytry Firtash.
Furthermore the timeline for this is over a decade after Giuliani was mayor of New York.
The link doesn't say that. The phrase you use is a reference in the Wikipedia article to the DOJ's characterization of Dmytry Firtash, "a Ukrainian oligarch who is prominent in the natural gas sector", not Giuliani.
Well, now you probably understand that Trump is not really anti-drug/anti-cartel. Nor do I think he's pro-drug/pro-cartel. I think he doesn't actually care except in how those issues affect his political career and public profile. Many of Trump's more ... let's call them "random" seeming statements and actions make much more sense if you look at them through the lens of "he doesn't actually care one way or the other".
Ulbricht's career represents many core values of a certain wing of today's Libertarians.
* 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)
So are libertarians fighting for complete legalization of drugs? If so, why aren’t they pressing on Trump for that? Why wasn’t that an executive order vs pardoning this guy?
> I think it's a belief that a lot of us arrive at early in our lives, many eventually grow out of it.
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.
> I would take issue with assuming that it was net positive with ratings.
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.
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.
> 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'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.
I proclaimed nearly this exact opinion in the jury box after being summoned between 15 and 20 years ago. They didn't pick me for trial, which was the intended effect. I really did believe it at the time. Nowadays, I just think it's way more complicated and there are no simple or blanket answers.
Re-consenting: this is a different argument than saying more lives were saved because the reviews would remove adulterated products. Again, just look at opioid addiction for very clear evidence of the opposite effect.
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.
> Again, just look at opioid addiction for very clear evidence of the opposite effect.
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.
No doubt people were buying weed and hallucinogens on Silk Road, but there was A LOT of opioids, Xanax, cocaine, meth, and other highly addictive drugs that change people’s brain chemistry for the worse.
silk road was on the dark web, a place that is oriented 100% around anonymity. This precludes any sort of "elimination of fraudulent reviews" since there's no reasonable way to build any sort of chain of trust.
I explained several ideas to eliminate fraudulent reviews in my comment, that you didn't address. The main thing is to make a review coupled with a purchase that involves a large cut to the platform, so each review is very expensive. Secondly, don't take reviewers themselves seriously unless they've also made a large overall number of purchases to a diversity of sellers- making becoming a credible reviewer also expensive.
> 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.
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.
The cybersecurity podcast Risky Business interviewed an FBI agent who was deeply involved, I'd highly recommend listening to it if you want that perspective. If I remember correctly, the agents who were investigating the murder for hire stuff were later found to have been stealing some of the bitcoin they were confiscating and the prosecutors fro the Ulbricht case decided they didn't need to bring up those charges to get a conviction (which they obviously didn't).
That is interesting. I'd suspect he could possibly be found guilty of attempted murder, and have the sentence reduced or eliminated by arguing that his previous sentence unjustly assumed guilt for this as well, and factored it into the sentence he already served.
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.
There was deliberately no mention of the alleged murders-for-hire during the trial.
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.
"for the crime he was actually found guilty of, the sentence was unfair and unreasonable."
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.
> 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.
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"?
the benefit wasnt really unique to silk road or ross. it was just a very convoluted, roundabout demonstration of how safe drug use can be when its done in the right environment. legalization would be even safer…
Safer for buyers and users I guess. Based on being able to smell marijuana coming from so many car windows just walking around town, I'm not sure it would be safer for the public. I'm not anti-legalization by the way - I think it's similar to gambling: a mixed bag.
What are you talking about? I specifically said it was unethical that they seem to have sentenced him for crimes he was never even tried for- but deserved a fair trial for. You appear to think I was saying the opposite of that?
I just can't fathom the lack of self-awareness of people who championed Ross Ulbricht's cause, seemingly because he looks like them, codes like them, and sat in the same public library they frequent or became associated with a techno-libertarian identity. Hundreds of drug and gun dealers are sentenced every week, some certainly unjustly. Where is the outrage for them?
Those people that championed Ulbricht's cause are for the most part also the people championing the cause of drug dealers and other victims of New Prohibition. If you genuinely care about this cause, you might ask yourself whether alienating other supporters is the best approach.
If you're just looking for someone to feel superior about, find another forum.
My impression is that a big part of the outrage is directed not at the conviction, but at the disproportionate sentence.
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.
It's the scale of the crime (he facilitated 10s of thousands of transactions), the judge clearly stated she wanted to make an example of him and give pause to anyone thinking about doing something similar in the future, and she was angry at the many of the letters of support Ulbricht's fans family and friends sent the court.
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.
As for the murder part Christina Warren knows best:
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.
> it was never real and no one was ever in danger.
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."
Chris Tarbell states that there are logs about 6 imaginary "murder of hire"'s .. none of which actually took place, two were faked by the FBI(?) and four were scams run by third parties outside the USA.
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.
Okay, another comparison would be, everyone who wants Luigi Mangione exonerated also is feeling what some people felt when they wanted OJ Simpson to be exonerated. Do you see now?
Luigi is a symptom of an overly inactive justice system, if you don't prosecute crimes then some people take the law into their own hands (as a matter of fact). Preventing vigilantism is why having a working justice system is important to a functioning society.
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.
The Luigi some people have constructed in their minds is a symptom of an overly inactive justice system. The Luigi of real life is the symptom of a man suffering a psychotic break.
See, you are one of the people who feels about Luigi Mangione what some people felt about OJ Simpson. You’re getting it. You can read about how some people talked about OJ Simpson’s supposed innocence, it is exactly the same energy.
Almost nobody thinks Luigi Mangione or Ross Ulbricht are innocent, or were falsely accused. Neither of the 3 cases are remotely comparable beyond being "people charged with crimes that there is some public sympathy for."
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.
I don't see how those are remotely comparable, the OJ people believed he didn't do it and was set up by the racist LAPD while the Luigi people think that what he did was good actually. I guess the Ross Ulbricht people are more like the latter but they still seem pretty dissimilar.
The lengths the FBI went to in one of the murder for hire cases is interesting.
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."
Did you just make that up? I have never heard that claim before and searching for Ross Ulbricht ketchup just leads back to your comment, so you seem to be the first person to ever claim this.
>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.
This is wonderful. I've never argued that Ross shouldn't have served time but it's always been clear his prosecution and sentencing were excessive and unjust. The prosecutors asked for a 20 year sentence, which seemed disproportionate given the sentencing guidelines for a first-time offender and the non-violent charges he was convicted of. But the judge sentenced Ross to TWO life sentences plus 40 years - without the possibility of parole. There's no doubt Ross made a series of unwise and reckless decisions but serving over ten years of hard time in a FedMax prison is more than enough given the charges and his history.
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.
Madoff stole $20-35B, but by some measures a human life is only worth $10M. I am not really asserting those figures are comparable, just that Madoff stole a lot of money.
Nah, it's more that you do not fuck with the money system. SBF is learning that same lesson.
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).
yes, unless you're a big enough finance scammer that you stole from really rich people (most scammers who steal millions don't get it from the very rich)
But even then the times aren't longer than someone who gets caught with a 100 grams of coke. Skilling got 12 years for a financial fraud so heinous the whole system was re-regulated. You get that for selling crack on the corner.
There’s no question that the “war on drugs” sentencing is ridiculously out of proportion with the actual harm done, especially if you’re not white or upper class. I was making a comparison between types of financial crimes.
Hasn't the Trustee recovered 90% of the money invested? Phantom returns were ignored; at the time of the arrest the phantom returns were considered money lost.
> 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.
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?
It's the same level as saying "tech companies stole from the populace". Which is ethically correct but legally wrong. I guess that's the distinction GP wants to make.
I think there's almost no chance. SBF is a perfect example of someone to throw the book at. He's effectively Madoff 2.0, the people everyone from the lowly to the elite hate.
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.
In any sane democracy I would agree with you. But this POTUS has pardoned 1500 people that actively participates in an insurrection, some of who hurt and even killed police officers. He's pardoned a the Dread Pirate Roberts.
All of those people were perfect people to throw the book at.
From what I read, the Ulbricht pardon was part of a deal at the Libertarian National Convention. So it's just business as usual.
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.
If someone robs a bank, or steals a wallet, they're probably hoping to get as much money as they can. If that wallet happened to $1B in it, I don't think it makes the thief more heinous. If we sentence people based on the amount of money they manage to steal, we're sentencing them largely based on luck.
If you shoot someone and hit their head killing them or just their ear, its a matter of luck (and possibly skill), the charges are different. The justice system judges based on intent as well as outcome (i.e. execution X luck).
well you're not wrong. That attempted Trump assassination was a few inches away from being in the same books as John Wilkes Booth, instead of being talked about for less than a week and then forgotten. Sentences would have been night and day.
Many jurisdictions have the same punishment for attempted murder and murder though.
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're either not understanding or refusing to engage with the hypothetical. When you steal a wallet, you don't get to choose how much money is in it. It could have $5, or $500.
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.)
But if the wallets each only contain $100 and you steal enough of them to get to $1 billion, that is qualitatively different from stealing a single wallet. The man committed fraud repeatedly and caused financial hardships for tons of people. He wasn't lucky in how much he managed to steal, that was a combination of effort, skill, and reckless disregard for the wellbeing of others.
Sure, but that's an entirely different metric to judge him on than the comment I was replying to. Instead of trying to judge the heinousness of his crime by comparing the raw amount stolen ($20-35B) to the value of a human life ($10M), you're judging based on the number of times a crime is committed. That makes intuitive sense; more crimes committed gets a harsher punishment.
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.
> If your stance is that luck would not ideally affect one's punishment
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.
> If you give someone a little shove, they bump their head, and they die
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.
Madoff stole from the rich. That is a sure fire way to have the book thrown at you. Smart criminals steal from the poor, because they don’t fight back as much and the justice system doesn’t care.
It is wildly harmful and an escalation of monstrous practices to look at one or several unjust actions and/or sentences and declare that those who do worse than the person who was dealt out such a retribution should receive an even longer sentence.
If someone gets 10 years for smoking weed, the solution is not to put someone in prison for 20 years for punching someone.
On the same principle, noting that someone who punched someone got one day in jail is not a good justification for why someone shouldn't get two days in jail for smoking weed.
It is interesting but, if I'm understanding the stats being tracked there, it's about petitions received and granted. However, many of the recent pardons by both Biden and Trump were unusual and controversial because they were either never petitioned, preemptive (in the case of Biden's family, staff & political allies) or granted to broad groups (in the case of Trump Jan 6th protesters). I'm not sure they are reflected on the site, or at least not yet, and if/when they are, how the site would reflect one pardon impacting dozens or hundreds of people.
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.
Your math is wrong at least for Biden, I didn't recheck the others. Biden has 1736 pardons commuted or granted in 46.5 months or 37 pardons per month. I suspect all your other ones are wrong since Biden was so off. The recent trend is Biden and Obama being "off the charts" compared to the republican presidents. From my understanding this is due to weed related charges where they did mass pardonings. It's besides the point ones feelings about it, just commenting on the math.
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.
> These charges were dismissed partly because he had already been sentenced to life in New York
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.
The murder for hire was done with the admin account which was called "Dread Pirate Roberts" from the novel "The Princess Bride". The thing about the name is that is passed on over and over. The admin has claimed multiple times that he is not the original nor first administrator (Ross) of the silk road.
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.
This is silly whataboutism. They have plenty of evidence, including PST/PDT timestamps and proof he logged out of other personal accounts when he logged into that account, that suggested it was him. Despite his claims, they watched him extensively and found no indication that anyone else was posing as DPR.
Not to mention that he was caught in part because the first public advertisements for Silk Road were traced back to his personal accounts, and there's strong evidence that he personally grew the first batch of shrooms that launched the market. It was all him from the beginning.
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.
> I don't credit Trump in any way for doing "the right thing" or even having a principled position regarding Ross' case.
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.
I think he's referring to the NY state case, which is difficult to dispute that it was done for political purposes. Although I'm sure Trump would say it applies to the federal classified documents case, as well.
Actually, I support neither major political party. I'm probably closest to a moderate "free markets, free minds" libertarian (note: the small "l" means I'm not in, or aligned with, the national Libertarian Party). I haven't voted for any candidate from either major party for decades. I greatly disapprove of Biden, Harris and Trump equally, along with almost all state and federal politicians of both parties. There are less than a handful of national-level politicians I would trust to dog sit, much less run my country.
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.
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...
> TWO life sentences plus 40 years - without the possibility of parole
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.
> Biden should have already pardoned Ross because that crazy sentence shouldn't have happened in the first place.
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....
Judges are allowed to consider some evidence during sentencing which was not presented at trial. The standard for this evidence is lower than the "beyond a shadow of doubt" standard required for a criminal conviction. This is allowed because during sentencing the judge is considering information related to the history and character of the defendant. The 'hiring an online hitman' (who was an FBI informant) allegation was never charged or tried. Even if it hadn't been obvious entrapment, it might well have evaporated under discovery and cross-examination by a competent defense.
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.
Calling him a non-violent first time offender is very odd given the magnitude of what his crimes were. He created a very large scale marketplace for all things illegal. Independent of his own hiring of hit men (hello non-violent?), selling substances that lead to overdoses, guns, bomb making materials, etc is certainly my definition of violent. Then add the scale; I fully agree with life sentence without chance of parole. This pardon is shameful.
Yup. And just for some context regarding guns at the time; during the years Silk Road was active it was perfectly legal for me (in the state of Virginia) to buy a gun from another citizen cash in hand without ever showing an ID, filling out a BoS, or any paperwork whatsoever.
On the one hand you say we should retain judges making sentencing adjustments where appropriate, but who judges the appropriateness of the adjustments?
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."
Ultimately responsibility lies with the people electing either judges directly or representatives who appoint judges. We must choose people of proper demeanor who will make sound decisions when required. It takes effort on our part to be knowledgeable and vocal, but it's the price for living in a world where we are not at the mercy of unfeeling automatons.
I was at the sentencing, I do not remember the judge mentioning the murder-for-hire cases. To me it was obvious that the prosecution defense and judge had agreed beforehand to not mention it. The judge gave plenty of other reasons for the harsh sentence.
But he’s only served a tiny fraction of what you say was an unjust sentence. So the jury’s still out as to whether he’s served enough time. Other hard drug dealers get way more time than Ross has served.
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.
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.
> 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:
You're ignoring the issue of which acts are criminalized.
The United States incarceration rate is 4x higher than of the rest of the world, in part because it hands out much longer sentences than most other countries. You're not wrong, but it's still the US that is the outlier in terms of sentence lengths [1].
The US is wholly inefficient with the Death Penalty, so I'm against it from a purely financial point of view. By the time many cases get to a point of being convicted they will have already served years, maybe even a few decades in prison already.
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.
Highlighting the polarization and weaponization of the justice system is worthy subject matter for the most powerful nation on Earth. It needs to be set onto a new path that is fair to all involved.
Trump owed the libertarians for their support. This is what they got in return. It's bizarre seeing Trump designate the Mexican drug cartels as terrorists a few hours earlier while Ross facilitated billions in sales of the same products.
I think the attacks on some of these black and gray markets has increased violent crime in the real world. I wish the federal government would stop shutting them down and instead use them as tools to build cases against people breaking the law.
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.
I wish instead of criminalizing addiction we'd fund harm reduction centers and rehabilitation services.
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.
> I wish instead of criminalizing addiction we'd fund harm reduction centers and rehabilitation services.
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.
> Seeing it first hand with a with a family member in public school flipped me.
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?
correct. my comment was intended to point out the disturbing misplacement of priorities, given that the budgets for educating the citizens of the future and for fetty smoking bums are comparable.
While I think anecdotes are valuable and should not be easily dismissed, we have decades of research and evidence supporting the benefit of harm reduction centers. They reduce risk of overdose morbidity and mortality while not increasing crime or public nuisance to the surrounding community.
It's just really hard to swallow the findings in this paper (all non-US cities) when you can see such a visible change on the streets in SF since the pandemic.
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.
I never did any drugs but when I was growing up, it was understood that you needed to keep your drug use somewhat secret, behind closed doors, hidden from the public, I expected there would be consequences from the police if I decided to do drugs out in the open.
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 ).
Yeah although this is more a consequence of how SF decided to handle it. Rather than decriminalising they're just enabling users.
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.
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.
How does that make any sense? So you could never pass a law to reduce risk because in most cases, breaking it won’t create a victim?
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?
if you cause no harm, how could it be a crime? an infraction, sure. a rule violation, sure. but calling a small rule violation which never causes any harm to anyone the same thing as rape, murder, assault, carjacking, etc, is just pure degeneracy of language.
The crime is increasing the risk to other people. Why does that not make it a crime in your opinion?
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.
an attempted crime is an intent to harm another. even my autocorrect could finish that sentence.
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.
So what’s the problem? Attempting crimes is a crime too.
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?
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,
It's a tiny island nation with a single sea port, single bridge, and single airport. Meanwhile western nations are so porous they can't keep millions of undocumented people out.
Having garbage bins in my neighborhood, keeps garbage from being put on the ground.
There are other neighbourhoods where the garbage bins don’t help at all
I don't think much changed, really. The contraband and services offered on these marketplaces has always been backed by criminal enterprises. Mostly the markets provided level of indirection that made purchasing palatable and gave a false sense of safety.
Online markets for sex work allowed women to operate far more safely than "the street" allow. I had friends who were affected by the crackdown on craigslist etc.
I sincerely didn't mean to minimize the harm to sex workers, which is devastating.
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.
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.
> a moment's thought would show pimps are only needed when someone sells sex at a physical location
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.
Thank you for the kind elaboration. I wonder if you could share any writing on the social justice issues surrounding sex work? My knowledge is limited and informed by only a few pieces I've read over the years.
Illegal online marketplaces absolutely do reduce "turf wars". It's argueable that there is harm reduction compared to street dealing. Then I suspect it creates new consumers so there is that too.
Sure, but the point is about secondary effects. If pimps are "competing" online then they need to compete on, well, marketing and UX. If they compete in real life then it is about who controls physical territory.
There are lots of studies about the unintended consequences of prohibition.
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.
Coming from a country where prostition is legal and drugs heavily decriminalized, all with plenty of help programs for people who need it. I can only say that the problem is not the platforms but forbidding things that people won't stop using is simply delusional.
Well, I think that justice has been served. The feds' prosecution of Ulbricht was the epitome of throwing the book at someone to make an example, when the government's case was pretty flawed, in my opinion. 10 years is enough time to pay the debt of running the silk road.
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.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading the comments on this thread. Multiple teenagers (one in Australia) died from the drugs distributed on Silk Road. Ross was ok with selling grenades, body parts, etc on there. But everyone is saying he served his time ???
If the liquor store owner knows that some of those bottles might contain pure methanol, and people end up dying from drinking said methanol...then, yes, I do think the store owner should do some serious jailtime.
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.
> It also allowed the long string of shady middlemen to be cut out
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.
Selling drugs vs. selling alcohol, this is beyond morality matter but a matter regulated by law, sorry.
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.
>Selling drugs vs. selling alcohol, this is beyond morality matter but a matter regulated by law, sorry.
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.
I don’t think that’s true. Maybe in its infancy law really looks like that, but as societies grow their law books get more complex and can very easily become separated from majority perception of morality. Does morality explain zoning laws, or is it more about the equilibrium point of a pluralist conflict, everyone looking out for their interests, etc.
Roughly. But always read between the lines and follow the money. We didn't selectively ban Tiktok because government finally woke up to the dangers of social media.
Doctors can be arrested for malpractice. I sure do wish we could arrest some of these car makers for telling staff to skimp on details and taking "recalls" as a cost of doing business, but that's an issue for another time.
> 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?
The comment you replied to referenced "multiple teenagers" - the very people that liquor stores cannot sell alcohol to since they're not recognized as mature enough to be freely allowed to drink.
SR allowed children to buy addictive poison without any regulation whatsoever, and Ross profited off of those transactions.
You're right. Ross should have been granted a drug selling license, analogous to a liquor license, and it should have been revoked if he failed to check ID before allowing people to make purchases on his marketplace.
Doing business in, or running, a marketplace without established legal regulations opens you up to undefined consequences. Without laws to bind you, there are no laws to protect you.
Idk about silk road, but hydra (russian online marketplace) was the best thing that happened to russia drug market. It had very good reputation system and even labs that did random testing of drugs being sold
Existence of big marketplaces definitely lower chances of people dying from drugs
I don't think those types of hypotheticals are taken very seriously in court rooms. One, they are effectively unfalsifiable, because it's a about harm that could have happened but didn't. Two, they can be applied universally. Any action might have prevented a catastrophe, after all. Courts persecute based on laws broken and harm done.
Ironically our justice system sometimes does persecute based on hypotheticals. For example persecution for driving recklessly, which is inconsistent with the principle above.
As an Australian who had friends who bought product on silk road my understanding was:
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.
An 18 year old lad from my village, who had just started a job programming, bought a drug from an online “pharmacy” and it turned out to be spiked with a synthetic opioid (N-pyrrolidino-etonitazene) and he died in his sleep at home, alone.
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.
If you knowingly operate a marketplace where unsafe products are being sold, you very much bear some responsibility of those injuries.
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.
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.
So I could bring down eBay by opening a store; selling something that I know (but eBay doesn't) is dangerous / broken / false. If that sale goes through, should eBay be taken down since they operate a marketplace where unsafe products are being sold ? eBay cannot reasonably test every single item that is sold through their platform. Same goes for every second hand marketplace in the world. They need to take some measure to address this, but cannot reduce the risk to 0.
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.
This theory was actually tested last year and...eBay won.
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.
Ebay tries to prevent you from selling illegal stuff though. Silk Road didn't. The reputation system was to prevent scams and bad quality products, not to prevent illegal transactions, right?
A large minority of the population (and in some cases, like weed, an overt majority) of the population don't think those transactions should be illegal. "The law is wrong" is sort of the whole point, and why Ulbricht is a quasi-folk hero.
It's a philosophical difference. As someone running a market where buyers and sellers meet I think it's valid to let the buyers and sellers participate in the exchange among themselves at their own risk. The person running the market doesn't need to treat the participants like children. Plus, if you're on the TOR network and buying obscure research chems using crypto in the early 2010s I think it's safe to assume you're more sophisticated and aware of what you're getting into than the average person.
I think there is some difference between running a marketplace which you intend for people to sell products legally on, and a marketplace which you intend and know people will sell products illegally on.
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.
This is why people only blame the DZOQBX brands that sell on Amazon for review fraud and not Amazon themselves, who are blamelessly hosting all those fraudulent sellers.
Smart people can differentiate between a transparent marketplace which provides a net economic benefit to society from an obfuscated one which by design enables illicit activity.
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.
The government should have investigated the people that listed and sourced the drugs
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
People die when they take drugs all the time, whether brought online or not.
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.
He wasn't dealing them. He's not exactly culpable for the effects of his platform any more than Zuckerberg is responsible for mass hate speech coordinated by third-world dictators or Evan Spiegel for facilitating millions of nude images of children and teenagers.
Hard disagree - Zuckerberg absolutely is responsible for inadequately policing calls for genocide on his platform. Just as every social network is responsible for policing child abuse materials. Should they be punished for such content being uploaded? Of course not. They should face punishment where their wilful failure to police such content results in active harm. Facebook's utterly irresponsible behaviour in Myanmar is a great example - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
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...
I didn’t say Zuck isn’t responsible for the ills of his platform. I said DPR is no more responsible than Zuck or Spiegel. That is, that there’s a distinction between facilitating a drug deal and dealing drugs, just as there is a distinction from managing a communication platform that promotes hate speech and violence.
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.
drugs is one part, but silkroad facilitated more than drug, guns, fake documents, stolen data, money laundering, fake currency, contract killers... the list goes on.
Are you confusing SR with other darknet markets? SR explicitly banned most of these things (guns, fake currency, stolen data, contract killers). Yes, fake documents were allowed.
People are usually jailed for hiring contract killers, even if the contract killer happens to be a FBI informant and the murder does not end up getting done.
There wasn't any evidence that actually happened. It appears that it may have been fabricated by the same investigators that later robbed him of some millions of dollars worth of bitcoin. Then when it went to trial the murder-for-hire charges were completely dropped due to lack of evidence.
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 Conspiracy
I think they were dropped because in 1 out of the 6 cases, the investigation was tainted because the associated government agents committed their own crimes, and also maybe but I can't prove it everyone thought that prosecuting someone who has been sentenced to 2 life sentences + 40 years is a waste of time.
The hitman was a conman for a murder on a fictitious person. While he fully believed he was committing a real assassination, you can't convict people for killing imaginary people.
I'm not convinced that you looked at the article you linked.
> 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.
>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.
Both were fake. One was a con by the DEA and the other one a con by a single guy posing as executioner, victim and a slew of other colorful characters.
Real justice would be changing the laws and sentencing guidance (through a democratically legitimate process), and re-evaluating the sentences of everyone affected.
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.
I think his original sentence was absolutely deserved—even though the charge of hiring a contract killer to assassinate his business competition may have been dropped, I think it's clear he did many things in the same vein. Even if you support his original pursuit of a free and open online marketplace, I think most people would agree he took it a bridge too far in the end.
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.
"he took it a bridge too far" is a massive trivialization.
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.
The state hates more than anything someone who operates on first principles that the empire is wrong.
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.
> Ross violated the only remaining national holy religion, the rule of law. He was sentenced for being a heretic.
Good.
Let's keep in mind that the shared faith in this "holy religion, the rule of law" is the only thing holding together your country, my country, everyone's countries, and civilized society in general. Take that away, and everything around us will collapse, regressing the few survivors of that event to the prehistorical lifestyle of small tribes slaughtering each other for what little scraps the land has to give.
I'm from Germany. I could tell you something about blindly following the "rule of law". If you throw morality out the window the law can become a very ugly instrument.
Yes, Rechtsstaatlichkeit only means that the state and its organs have to follow the law themselves. It doesn't say anything about the moral quality of the laws.
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.
> The Nazi state had to follow its own laws. They just had such laws that enabled the total lunacy that the 3rd Reich was.
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.
Not sure why this comment got voted down; it's absolutely true.
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.
> The rule of law means that nobody is above the law
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.
This has nothing to do with the concept of "rule of law". This is simply about how the law is applied and appealed. If anything, the rule of law should protect against these miscarriages of justice, because the law should be applied equally to everybody, and therefore the poor should have the same access to the processes of appeal as the rich and powerful.
Very insightful answer indeed. I found this part particularly interesting:
> 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.
The issue is that we're used to think in terms of Legislative, Judiciary and Executive. That's what most modern democracies are based on.
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.
> 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)
What definition of the laws lawfulness are you using? Capturing the power - it is what makes law lawful, otherwise any law is unlawful.
This is a very crude and on every level incorrect understanding on how laws work, both in a formalistic, as well as a societal way.
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.
You are absolutely right saying that rule of law is not sufficient condition for the existence of modern society. It was a bit confusing still, because nobody claimed the opposite: the comment you replied to was saying rule of law is a necessity.
You may have been saying this but the parent comment that spurred the discussion was making the explicit assertion that "the rule of law is the only thing holding together [...] everyone's countries, and civilized society in general".
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.
I doubt that modern society does fulfill the sufficiency criteria [1], so „the only thing“ can be right, but also it is not the claim that it is enough for survival.
[1] USA regressing to a globally disrespected oligarchy under Trump is a good example.
Not in my wildest dreams I imagined Brazil would give the good example for prosecuting a former president who attempted a coup and that the US would fail to do the same.
Ah, but legal positivism is the norm in liberal societies, and not by accident. This follows directly from the demands of liberalism which privatizes discussion of the objective real and relegates it to individual sentiment. One of the paradoxes of liberalism is that the maximization of individual liberty necessarily demotes authority and elevates power, leading to tyranny.
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.
The Nazis did anything but blindly followed the rule of law. They did the opposite - they used law as a cudgel to beat their enemies with, while somehow magically, not being held responsible for any of their own violations of it. It's how they rose to power, and it's how they liquidated all of their internal opposition in the pre-war years.
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.
I thought everybody knew the first thing the Nazis did was eroding the rule of law, with the help of Hans Frank, before even taking power.
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.
I learned so much from reading this, thank you. Is there more of this same style dense history writing somewhere? (Of course there are caveats and narratives etc., I hope people understand that...)
I bought it as an audiobook and listened for about 30 minutes already. It's been fascinating. It is quite long. But I have definitely learned a lot. Thank you!
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.
> a strongman, even with downsides, is still preferrable to a weak leadership that is unable to defend against external threats or internal chaos
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.
Certain discourse in other languages sometimes like to underline the difference between "rules" and "law" as in "we must aspire to be a state built on law, not a state built on rules." (not necessarily claiming English is such a language either)
Everything done without consideration is very quickly evil. Free tragedy of the commons with every free market; equivalents of Malthus for poverty wages and zero profit margins in the economy; Nash games where all parties want to defect and want the other not to; AI optimising for paperclips.
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.
> Actually they didn't. Everything the Nazis did they had a law for. The mass murder was all lawful according to the 3rd Reich's laws.
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.
"Everything the Nazis did they had a law for. The mass murder was all lawful according to the 3rd Reich's laws."
Can you cite those laws?
I doubt you can, because they do not exist. There were laws for removing jews from academic positions and to confiscate their belongings - but no law allowing to kill them based on them being jews.
The Nazis operated from the very beginning on the principle do things and later maybe add a law about it, if necessary.
"the mechanism, process, institution, practice, or norm that supports the equality of all citizens before the law, secures a nonarbitrary form of government, and more generally prevents the arbitrary use of power."
You ought to distinguish 'the law' that can be discriminatory, unjust, imperfect, and 'the rule of the law', which in theory cannot. In practice, the 'rule of the law' was never truly achieved, nowhere, and recently (post 9/11 it seems) the US might have gotten further from the hypothetical 'perfect state'. Presidential pardon, Guantanamo, or I think closer to everyday life civil forfeiture, or arrest without cause, interrogation without a lawyer...
Some exceptions to the rule of law are just good practice: immunity to the executive power from executing a voted law, immunity for the legislative power (in some countries like France this immunity have some caveats) while elected. Sadly it breeds corruption.
That's not what rule of law is. Rule of law requires following the established constitutional order which the Nazis did not. A feudal king ruling on his whims has many laws, but there is not rule of law.
>The rule of law is a political and legal ideal that all people and institutions within a country, state, or community are accountable to the same laws, including lawmakers, government officials, and judges.
But the Nazis themselves were accountable to their own laws. It was a highly lawful state. Only the laws were pretty fucked because the society lacked any morality.
I know what you mean, and I do agree with your main point about not blindly following orders. I hope most people do. It's just the way you phrase it, I also have to disagree. The Nazis at their core were not "lawful", not even "lawful evil". Not unless the one law is "as long Hitler says it's fine, it's fine".
> Any hierarchy, no matter how authoritatively managed, and any communication of orders, no matter how autocratically and dictatorially issued, would stabilize and thus limit the total power of the leader of a totalitarian movement. In the language of the Nazis, it is the dynamic, never-resting "will of the leader" (and not his orders, which could be given a definable authority) that becomes the "supreme law of total rule".
> Hitler did sign an order for the T-4 euthanasia program. In the T-4 program as many as 100,000 German citizens who were thought to be ‘unworthy of life’ were murdered by Nazi party authorities and other German collaborators. When the German population caught on to what the Nazis were doing with T-4, they protested and Hitler was forced to publicly back down and cancel the program (although it continued secretly in the camps). Having been embarrassed by a written order once, Hitler became wary of doing it again. Important Nazi officials confirmed the oral transmission of Hitler’s secretive orders.
The controlled substance act violated the constitution as it regulates even intrastate trade of drugs. It relies on the tyrannical Wickard V Filburn ruling which says intrastate commerce is actually interstate commerce. The charges against Ross relied on law that flagrantly transgress the 10th amendment of the US constitution as written and as enforced.
This is why they needed an actual amendment to nationally ban, say, home made liquor.
It was 'accurate' until the 1930s when a certain lawyer with initials FDR found his programs unconstitutional, so he threatened to pack the Supreme Court until they were willing to shit can the 10th amendment.
I'd argue more have died from drug regulations than the Nazis, particularly when you factor in how DEA licensing and FDA approval corruption stifles access to medicine, and how prohibition fosters violence without meaningfully curbing harmful drug use.
Can you hear yourself? Are you really saying that "drug regulation" has caused more death than the tens of millions who died in ww2? Not to mention the millions and millions of people whose lives have been saved by drug regulation as they are not exposed to harmful drugs from charlatans.
39 million people died on the European theater of WW2 alone. Estimates of Jewish deaths during the holocaust range from 4.9 and 5.9 million people. Are you seriously suggesting drug ~regulation~ caused more deaths?
Silk road was not primarily used for "unregulated medicine" but for recreational drugs, weapons and other quite unsavory illegal things.
The bodies dead from the Holocaust are somewhat countable.
The bodies dead because of worldwide drug wars, because it is insanely costly to sell new medicines, and because some poor African child could not get a medicine because a company spent 500 million to get it approved and needs to recoup their costs in the inflated US market is much harder to count.
It's easier I guess to just frame the counterparty as downplaying the Holocaust. I am just not taking the death of the Jews seriously enough, perhaps I am some kind of racist or culturally insensitive person.
In Germany it is currently illegal to criticise Israel. You'll pardon me for being a bit skeptical about rule of law. Rule of good law is good, but rule of bad law is bad.
one of the German states foundations is responsibility for the Holocaust, which led to the founding of the state of Israel.
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:
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'
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.
Grossly excessive sentences for non-victim crimes while letting rapists, murderers and corrupt politicians go free with at best a slap on the wrist, is why people are abandon your "holy religion" in droves
Never read it, but I watched its recent adaptation as a Strange New Worlds episode called Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach, and if it's in any way representative of the source material, then I'd say the ethical problems there are nontrivial.
Ironically, by sentencing him more harshly on the basis of ideology as opposed to on the basis of the criminal code, you are undermining the rule of law, which requires sentences to be based only on statutory law.
It makes me very sad when people act as if the rule of law wasn't important, or worse in case like this they do as if the rule of law was only a limitation of freedom.
One cannot be more wrong: there cannot be freedom without the rule of law and without the existence of a state that enforces it.
Yeah, it's pretty clear that the rule of law is not particularly strong in the US. The past few years have made it clear that some people really are above the law.
That's comparing apples and oranges. One spent 10 years in a jail for making himself rich (and some others), the other never spent a day in a jail for committing at the highest level election subversion, retention of classified information, hush money payment (and more) - and was caught on the latter, eventually. It was arguably "exceptional prosecution" for that hush payment, like Al Capone was caught on a mere tax fraud
>One spent 10 years in a jail for making himself rich (and some others), the other never spent a day in a jail for committing at the highest level election subversion, retention of classified information, hush money payment (and more) - and was caught on the latter, eventually.
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.
> 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
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.
Maybe. Or maybe the arbitrary lines drawn and maintained that define "country" and "society" are the only things allowing hate to prosper. Get rid of the lines and become one people.
He was punished for his visible actions, not his private beliefs.
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.
Many were convicted of the same acts and received far lighter sentences. They specifically sought to make an example out of him. That is contrary to the rule of law.
I think you may be overstating this. The archeological evidence is pretty clear that prehistorical lifestyles weren't just small tribes slaughtering each other, and that there was a lot of variety and complexity in the way prehistoric societies organized themselves. Also, there are some societies that exist in 2025 which proved scary enough examples of what's possible.
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.
> pretty clear that prehistorical lifestyles weren't just small tribes slaughtering each other,
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.
> But small very undeveloped tribes had nothing of such, so they have no incentives to slaughter each other.
With neither size nor technology to make a lasting impact, the ones that got slaughtered didn't exactly leave much in archeological evidence behind for us to find.
As for GP's point, obviously those people weren't bred for battle with others. All the tiny tribes would happily frolic in the forest or whatever small prehistoric tribes did when they weren't starving, but eventually they'd grow in size, hit a size limit leading to a new tribe splitting off, etc.; over time, the number of tribes grew to the point that they started to bump into each other and contest the same resources, leading to the obvious outcome.
It was later, when humanity accumulate knowledge about resources gathering and processing, about nature and how to deal with it to not to die all the time. Then yeas, tribes were becoming larger, wealthier, more stationary. But before that there were very few people, the tribes were nomadic with virtually no alternatives and had nothing of value. At least nothing so valuable that it would be easier to get it by attacking another tribe, rather than by simply moving a couple of dozen kilometers away.
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. Like, why, when they bumped into each other, couldn't they have formed a confederation?
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.
Editing in a TL;DR: imagine you and your friends are thrown back in time to year 20 000 BC or thereabout. Imagine you find the nearest tribe of humans, and by magical means are able to understand and speak their language. Imagine you go to their chief and propose to form a confederacy, and ponder what would stop them from replying "ugh" and bashing your head in with a club. Compare with a closest analog to today, and where the difference comes from.
--
> 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.
Look at every society before the modern state monopoly on violence. Basically none of them were in danger of regressing because of it. 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.
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.
Depends on the time scale. I mean the early middle ages (500 to 1000) could be described as "(smaller) tribes fighting over what is left" (considering all the barbarians from the north pillaging the roman empire while the Arabs conquering it from the south).
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...
> Look at every society before the modern state monopoly on violence. Basically none of them were in danger of regressing because of it.
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".
Nonsense. "The rule of law" isn't one cohesive thing--sure, some parts of it are important for holding together a country/society, but in a sufficiently complex legal system (like the US') there exists a plethora of laws which are irrelevant to holding together society. Every such society has laws which are on the books but are not enforced, weakly enforced, or unevenly enforced. In fact, an implicit part of British Prime Minister Harold Wilson's theory of government was explicitly having laws which only existed to be broken, to allow citizens to exercise their rebellious impulses without causing harm--Wilson believed that turning a blind eye to the breaking of a certain subset of laws actually minimized the harm of unlawful action. An example of this is rules against walking on the grass in many public areas in London, which is enforced by security guards whose only recourse is to tell you to stop.
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.
I'm not talking about any particular law, I'm talking about the general idea of laws as things that apply to everyone, that everyone should obey, and that everyone expects everyone else will obey, and that everyone knows they're expected by others to obey. That's the self-reinforcing structure of intersubjectivity, that allows us to invent and maintain imaginary entities such as "dollar", "law", "justice system", "contract", or "limited liability corporation", etc. Underlying all such entities is the set of shared beliefs about how others will behave.
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.
> I'm not talking about any particular law, I'm talking about the general idea of laws as things that apply to everyone, that everyone should obey, and that everyone expects everyone else will obey, and that everyone knows they're expected by others to obey. That's the self-reinforcing structure of intersubjectivity, that allows us to invent and maintain imaginary entities such as "dollar", "law", "justice system", "contract", or "limited liability corporation", etc. Underlying all such entities is the set of shared beliefs about how others will behave.
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.
> Ross violated the only remaining national holy religion, the rule of law. He was sentenced for being a heretic.
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.
Also his opsec was sloppy. If you want to believe that the spooks were doing full ipv4 scans to DDoS all his legit exit nodes that would make a better movie. But really, he was just in over his head.
Predictably, dark web market operators adapted afterward. The state got lucky and they knew it, so that also factored in to their sentencing recommendations.
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.
> Ten? Oh man. Have you read about [list of older historical events I suggest you were foolish to ignore]
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.
But that's what "rule of law" means: that the rules also apply to the leaders. The fact that leaders in the US aren't held accountable for their crimes means the US does not have the rule of law, but the rule of power. Or the rule of money, probably. The rich are above the law and can buy the government.
> The site's terms of service prohibited the sale of certain items. When the Silk Road marketplace first began, the creator and administrators instituted terms of service that prohibited the sale of anything whose purpose was to "harm or defraud." This included child pornography, stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of a
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.)