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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I don't think "drug war fanboy" is a reasonable inference to draw from this, and I don't perceive any of the support for prohibition that you do.

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Yeah, I am pretty sure the 'evil' the article is talking about is the hiring of hitman to kill people. I am pretty sure we can all agree that is bad.

Yeah everyone who "has an issue" with coverage of Silk Road or the treatment of Ulbricht seems disturbingly eager to gloss over him trying to have people killed.

There are some people who remain open to the possibility that he never actually believed that people were being assassinated. It seemed to me that the whole assassination thing was a barely believable backstory used for a shakedown. Ulbricht conceivably paid the ransom to prevent the leak of user data, knowing full well that nobody was being killed. I came to this conclusion after reading a lot about this story; not just headlines (I did not read this article however).

I'm just explaining that many people are not just "glossing over" that. But who knows what really happened.

In the event that he thought someone really was being killed, it doesn't detract from the motivations he had in the beginning. Power corrupts, he created a monster, etc.

I know I can't write a comment that will settle this particular controversy but I feel compelled to point out that it's only on an internet message board that someone could believe that an elaborate shakedown involving the creation a record of having ordered and verified multiple assassinations, a shakedown in which your eventual vindication depends on a favorable account from the person shaking you down, is the less likely explanation of events than someone simply ordering someone's assassination --- which, if you follow the news, is something that happens all the time, and something that almost always has this exact outcome.

This particular debate reminds me of the epistemological certainty people had about Hans Reiser's serial killer friend, and the notion that the police were fixated on Reiser and not the serial killer because they were put off by nerds.

I don't gloss over it, but like I explained here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14216073, he was never formally charged nor convicted of it, there were multiple federal agents (Shaun Bridges and Carl Mark Force IV) whose corruptness was intimately involved with the hitmen incident, and finally, violence in the drugs trade is a product of prohibition, not one inherent to darknet drug markets or the drug trade in general.

Tbh after this nonsense happened I'm utterly sure that everyone involved in darknet markets firmly avoids doing anything involving hitmen anyway, given how literally every so-called "hitman" online is either a fed, a scammer, or a corrupt fed.

It's not true that he was never formally charged with it. It was a factual element of his conspiracy charge; it was brought into the case in such a way that not only did the defense have the opportunity to rebut it, but, because it was one of the legs of the primary charge in the case, the obligation to do so.

Ah! I stand corrected; I take back all I said about the murder-for-hire stuff.

Ah yes, always good to know that what keeps these self-described freedom crusaders from having people murdered is that they might get caught, not you know, the idea that it's wrong.

Though wasn't that because the targeted person was threatening to harm thousands of other people?

Edit: Nevermind, this is one of the other hits. I was thinking of the "Chemist" one. Certainly killing the guy over money isn't right.

Then could you please explain how you interpret the phrasing "college-aged line of argumentation" used to describe the arguments against prohibition? I don't see any reason to say "college-aged" other than to casually dismiss these arguments as being childish (without actually having the courage to argue the opposite side).

His arguments can be childish and their implications still correct. The strength of an argument is orthogonal to its consequences. It's easy to formulate a bad argument for a valid idea. I don't know how many more ways to say that I can come up with.

The author literally gloats that Ulbricht will never live outside a concrete box, as due punishment ("he had been held accountable") for the sole "sin" (his word, not mine) of creating a drug marketplace.

There is no mention that the internet hitmen saga is a predictable and avoidable negative effect of prohibition (having to resolve disputes by extrajudicial violence instead of having access to lawyers/courts/arbitration), there's no mention that none of the murders-for-hire had actually been done (every internet hitman is a fed and/or scammer) and he, AFAICT, hasn't even been convicted of the procuring murder charges.

The article makes fun of the fact that the murders didn't take place, and were instead faked using canned food. I think you're reading into this a bit.

(As I said upthread: you're incorrect about him never being confronted with the murder allegation in court).

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