Except that if you had read the article, only $140,000 of the defendants money was "allegedly ill-gotten", meaning the government seized ALL of their money, not just the allegedly illegal money.
Your #2 is a non-starter because #1 is flawed.
Your #2 is a non-starter because #1 is flawed.
Red Herring. I made general statements, not opinions about the specific case in the article. Please judge the statements on their own. I was pretty careful in my choice of words, e.g. "to prevent allegedly ill-gotten gains".
> Your #2 is a non-starter because #1 is flawed.
You failed to de-conflate.
> If we want to have a reasonable discussion about this
The "this" in that sentence (to any reasonable human) would mean that you were talking about the subject of the article, the people that got their money seized, not "in general asset forfeiture".
So no....not a red herring.
If you wanted to be careful, your first statement should read: "if we want to have a discussion about asset forfeiture...".