Seems fair to lump in with the rest since it was in fact an illegal market place.
I'm much more okay with, eg, petty theft than murder, and would find it weird if people tried to make people stealing candybars from Walmart out to be equal to murderers.
it is pretty equal for the 3rd strike
I am sure we can agree that repeat felony offenders need to be handled specially, and, unfortunately, given the [archaic] nature of the judicial system, laws must be codified and at least in theory represent majority agreement. Whether influenced by baseball or something else, three is the number that lawmakers deemed reasonable, and you have not presented a valid argument against the concept or the number.
Why does sentencing vary but strikes do not? Why is there a "suite of punishments" for these felonies but only one number of strikes?
I never said the concept of strikes is wrong or even that three is the wrong number. I asked why the value is fixed across different crimes because it seems arbitrary. I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary. My question stands, why three instead of some other number?
Do you have a reason for three strikes other than "because that's what we always did" or "baseball"? If those are the only reasons then I think we need to rethink this practice.
And some people make the argument that people commit on average 3 felonies a day https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
This is an especially big danger if you're talking about a gang that currently deals mostly drugs but also smuggles forced prostitutes over borders on the side. Take away the drugs and they're likely to expand the side business.
The Mafia was all about prostitution, gambling, and protection rackets. The prohibition gave them a business where you could make far more than all the others combined, and all you needed to do was to kill people who got in your way.
Gangsterism is funded by various econmic oppornities which for one reason or another are illegal. Some things like assasination and extortion need to be illegal by their very nature.
But by passing laws that make new things illegal, we increase the amount of resources available to fund criminalality.
Sure, we can't possibly legalize murder for hire and still have a functional society, but how much profit can you really make filling those kinds of contracts, especially in a world with no illegal drug trade and no human trafficking because hookers are now clean and legal? They can try to expand side businesses all they want, but some of them have a natural cap to how much demand there can be.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bloody-struggle-erupts-over-avo...
Is that a counter argument? There are bad actors (in society). Some bad actors have social, moral, physical, intellectual barriers that prevent them from acting WORSE. Raising the social barrier (marketplace) isn't any different than the social barrier (legality). If you rather not compete bad actors out of the market because of what they might do, why legally punish them out of the market? Why bother trying to stop them at all?
Allowing a marketplace for murder or human trafficking (or the other nefarious things organized crime gets up to) allows the most efficient and effective bad actors to prosper, as markets are designed to do. But society doesn't want bad actors to prosper, it wants them prevented from acting badly.
I think there's also value in defining what people mean by 'small time dealer' in this context. To me, that connotes someone selling a bit of pot to their friends so they can smoke for free or something. People who ship misc. substances internationally and in some cases earn six figures plus annually don't fit that definition in my eyes.
You legalize drugs, you take away their massive cash flies and cripple their organizations.
I'm not convinced this is true, there's lots of ways to make a big profit illegally, drugs are just comparatively easy. I'm a proponent of full drug legalization (it's a space where I have large amounts of first hand experience that won't be discussed on HN), but it's still important to separate an ideological position from reality. The international drug trade is directly tied to human trafficking. Turning a blind eye to one is turning a blind eye to both.
And human trafficking is for a purpose, take away it's incentives and it mostly goes away too. Legalizing prostitution eliminates a big incentive for human trafficking. Rationalizing immigration laws eliminates most of the rest.
> Rationalizing immigration laws eliminates most of the rest.
This is indicative of what I'm taking about, approaching these problems in an extremely reductive way. Did you know there's an estimated 21 million slaves in the world today?
That is, I don't think it's very common for someone to say "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I can't afford to kill enough people otherwise," rather than what I think is more common, "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I want to buy a house without a lot of effort."
No. I'm just saying that the people upstream manufacturing massive quantities of meth and heroin probably aren't the kinds of organizations that you want to be making that kind of money.
They have the muscle to stay competitive in a market where there is no state authority to give you guarantees on anything.
This isn't an outrageous claim at all, rather it's a well-known fact: https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Studies/Il...
That's why prohibition is such a bad approach, it creates exactly the kind of black markets where these organizations make their massive profits.
Who do you think provides them with the drugs?
Selling to end users is practically a mug's game, so there is no end to the number of people wanting to act as middlemen to avoid it.
A while ago Arte France released a series titled "Cannabis", where the plot revolves around a shipment of Morrocan hashish lost on the Mediterranean sea, with the consequences playing out all over Europe. And while it's a fictional plot, it still paints a somewhat accurate picture how a lot of this business goes down.
That's not how I was using "single point of failure." The failure I was speaking to was identification by law enforcement.
In a broader sense: We can acknowledge that there's an underlying problem, and how to fix it, while at the same time being willing to advocate a temporary fix until the underlying problem actually is fixed.
Think of it like polyfill: The underlying problem is that old browsers exist, but we can't boil the ocean and make everyone upgrade, so we use polyfills to gain the functionality we want on those old browsers.
Remember Prohibition? That wasn't lifted because people wrote to their Congresspeople, but otherwise respected the law and followed it. It was lifted because it was widely disrespected, and a huge black market for alcohol was created, along with a lot of brutal violence. Same goes for civil rights for black people in the 1960s. Same goes for civil rights for gay people (like legalizing gay sex, previously criminalized). People committed the crimes and got caught, it went through the justice system somehow, and either a law was passed or the Supreme Court rule on it. It took a Supreme Court case to nullify the anti-gay-sex laws when some people in Texas were prosecuted for it and it got appealed up to the supremes as a privacy/freedom issue.
Changing the laws is the long-term solution.
Not buying drugs from big cartels is the short-term one.
According to you, the people in the Underground Railroad were doing the wrong thing, and should have followed the prevailing laws on slavery, and it was wrong for slaves to rebel, even when they were being brutalized and murdered. Your position is disgusting and repugnant.
This depends very much on who you're talking about.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ana-davila/drug-cartels-where-...
The solution will never be shutting down darknets and arresting people.
Either way, there's a lot of violence happening directly because of drug cartels, foreign and domestic.
I wonder if anyone can point to place where drugs are legalized and violence increased? Where addiction increased?
Seems absurd, yet people don't think the drug war is absurd-- they don't immediately see this takeover of Hanza as the government illegally operating a black market for weeks and thus committing massive crime, and they don't see the shutdown of the market as a further crime violating the rights of the sellers to sell something that morally and practically their buyers should be able to buy (when it comes to drugs anyway)
Here's a reference for your reading pleasure (though this is, I believe, U.S.-centric, so not exactly the case here)
https://www.quora.com/Are-undercover-cops-allowed-to-break-t...
https://www.eff.org/pages/playpen-cases-frequently-asked-que...
Is that true? Or is it the behavior that's illegal?
And until those countries figure out mind control it's just going to be oppression of their actions.
Now that we've cleared that up, I still think laws against "acting" gay are wrong (within the same framework that it's legal to "act" heterosexual).
Of course in a post homophobic world the distinction is rather irrelevant. It makes no difference to anyone if homosexuality is innate, or just a set of chosen behaviours. Why would it matter either way? But for a while it was necessary to remind people that you don't have any choice about being gay, or about having gay relationships. That claim was a response to homophobia, not something rooted in science of philosophy
Of course, this has as much veracity as the idea that the Earth is flat or that the Sun and planets revolve around it, but there's a lot of people who believe it.
It seems to me that the purpose of the "born with it" argument is to develop empathy among people who lack understanding. Because it helps explain why people act on their feelings, even if they are not a good idea. We can all relate to the power of lust, love etc. It is an important point to make. But that argument only has relevance to people who find it distasteful in the first place. The argument is a reaction to homophobia.
Also, remember that a lot of people (particularly religious ones) want to regulate social behavior, even in the bedroom, because they believe this is important for society's survival and prosperity. So in their view, homosexuals should be oppressed (either strongly by the state, or more weakly by social pressure) for the good of society, and to keep their behavior from "spreading". There's not really a way to counter this mentality by people like us because their worldview is so entirely alien to us: we don't believe in divine retribution for "immoral" behavior (a la Sodom & Gomorrah) and they do, and nothing's going to shake their belief.
As you hint at up above, there are non-religious people who believe regulating sexual behavior is important for society. Do you have a way to counter that idea when it's based on a secular worldview which is not so alien to yours?
One reason might be that they believe that having a culture which is hedonistic toward sex is harmful for society, and they believe that acceptance of homosexual behavior necessarily leads to having such a culture.
>presumably Stalinists?
That is definitely not a reasonable assumption to make.
>but if you're not religious and don't believe in utilitarianism, what exactly is the goal for your society?
It is perfectly possible to be utilitarian, non-religious, and opposed to the acceptance of homosexuality. All it takes is a belief that acceptance of homosexuality is on the whole and over time more harmful for people than intolerance of homosexuality.
>Society bundled behaviour and innate characteristics into a single thing.
It seems like that's what you're doing here:
>...you don't have any choice about being gay, or about having gay relationships.
Being gay does not mean you have to have gay relationships. Having gay relationships is a choice.
The original quote was "being gay is illegal in many places". By saying "being gay is illegal" it seems to imply a behavior though. Being a murderer, or being a pilot, or being a carnivore...
But, you're right. We can all agree that it's totally legal to be a murderer or thief as long as you don't behave that way.
You must know this doesn't make any sense. Murderer and thief are words that describe people who actually murder or steal, not people who just have a desire to murder or steal. Gay describes who you are attracted to.
Is there a reason for the distinction?
Sort of. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1117 ("conspiracy to commit murder") only requires one person to take action and everyone in the group that did the thinking with them is guilty of a crime. This is in the US, but I would be quite surprised if various other countries did not have similar statutes.
More generally, there are all sorts of laws out there that effectively criminalize thoughtcrime rather than behavior. Of course behavior might be needed for anyone to _discover_ the thoughtcrime.
Wrong. It requires all the people to have taken action to communicate their intention to collaborate on the plan, and only one of them to have taken additional action toward acheiving it.
People don't think in groups; thoughts have to manifest as action for people to conspire.
What the law says is "conspire to violate".
If person X and person Y together work out a way for person Y to commit murder and then person Y commits murder, is person X considered as conspiring?
> People don't think in groups
Sure they do. It's called "conversation" or "correspondence". If we had telepathy, we could skip the transcoding to sound or text, but we don't yet, but fundamentally it's the same thing.
Conversation is action, not thought.
> If we had telepathy
There's a couple different things (in fiction, naturally) that go by that name; the active analog to oral communication is also action, the sort of passive integration associated (not exclusively, just as an example) many hive-mind collective organisms in sci-fi is thought rather than action, but also not analogous to what goes on between humans.
I think the distinction here is a pretty dubious one. Consider, as a hypothetical, a situation in which one can actually tell "what someone else is thinking" based on a more advanced form of EEG. Would it still be "thought" as opposed to "conversation" if two people are doing it to each other simultaneously? Why is transcoding in terms of pixels on a monitor different from transcoding as sounds? Is the key difference for you whether the transcoding is active or passive on the part of the thinker of the thought?
Put another way, if we define "thought" as being limited to those things which have no perceptible effect on the world at all, then we run into the separate question about whether this "thought" thing exists in the first place.
I don't think the philosophers engaged, either. Redefining thought to be imperceptible denies everything we actually do know about the biological process of thought, so it's not clear the discussion leads anywhere worth going.
I think your definition needs some work.
Compared to the example you gave, where no one is harmed and no further harm is caused or funded by people being gay.
Edit to specify that this doesn't happen in every drug transaction.
Fixed.
Think of it this way, illegal images could be produced by advanced CGI, but aren't because that tends to be just as illegal. That doesn't excuse anyone who consume images not produced by advanced CGI.
It's like saying encryption is used by terrorists, so if I buy encryption I'm indirectly supporting terrorism.
There's no such flow from people who buy encryption software to terrorist groups.
Buying drugs directly funds people who manufacture drugs.
Buying encryption does not directly fund terrorists.
Bit of a generalisation to apply it to every drug sale ever...
I buy my marijuana from a friend who grows a few plants in his basement. How exactly is that funding slavery and murder?
Are such levels of specificity required when talking about other illegal transactions which have a potential to be victimless?
Don't think that you can claim innocence because you are following the law.
It's more accurate to say that government prohibition fund actions far worse than just creating drugs, human slavery (drug mules) to murder.
same question with regard to home grown weed?
please, elaborate ...
So, what's left of that syllogism of yours?
My understanding is that possessing it means you obtained it from someone, who probably wanted some kind of payment, who abused children to produce the material so he could get that payment.
There are quite a few gaps there. What if it was published for free? What if children weren't physically abused but were secretly and anonymously photographed? Shouldn't there be exceptions for victimless child porn?
Of course the dominant factor is people are horrified by deviant sexualities. We're barely managing to accept homosexuality which is probably more common than peadophilia.
As an aside, I am curious as to the reason you are being down voted, besides your audacity of expressing an unpopular opinion.
It has no place on HN. I would downvote if I could.
You are foolish to believe that all children are harmed by childhood sexuality and/or child pornography. Sex is part of the human nature, and we do not wake up on our 18th birthday and realize that we are ready to begin exploring our bodies. Never mind the fact that human beings can be conditioned to both be traumatized by and accepting of sexual activity by/as children.
>It has no place on HN. I would downvote if I could. This amounts to morally-derived censorship.
It is foolish to presume that your cultural programming should not be scrutinized; society is worse off for this kind of puritanical closed mindedness. No, I'm not asking you to accept victimization of children, but if you cannot honestly discuss and/or examine both sides of an issue, you cannot be confident in your opinion.
Teenagers sexting each other?
Someone drawing or 3d modelling fictional underage character?
In many jurisdictions thats the same thing as genuine child abuse base child porn. In my jurisdiction, Harry Potter fanfiction with sex counts as child porn - and as one with extended penalty because it is "delivered through very efficient means like computer network".
Not all things are all the same, even with the same label.
As for cultural norms. Many primitive cultures use age of puberty as age of consent. I heard of one (probably Amazon) tribe where sex was treated as common as eating or pooing. It wasn't related to marriage, which they did have. Children were involved much younger than our age of consent. I don't think you could say they were harmed since it was normal behavior and they apparently grew up without emotional problems.
We tend to confuse normal sexual attraction to teenagers with peadophilia and lump them all into the same group. For example teachers having relationships with underage teenage students. It might be harmful but the sexuality is normal, not deviant.
You're right that this is a very difficult topic to discuss rationally but I'm going to try anyway.
> What if it was published for free? What if children weren't physically abused but were secretly and anonymously photographed? Shouldn't there be exceptions for victimless child porn?
1) Compensation does not have to be financial to be an incentive. 2) Anonymous photography of individuals without their knowledge can absolutely cause harm. 3) Being a victim of a crime does not require knowledge of the crime taking place nor does it require physical contact.
> Of course the dominant factor is people are horrified by deviant sexualities. We're barely managing to accept homosexuality which is probably more common than peadophilia.
You're equating homosexuality to child abuse which puts you on the wrong side of history.
I don't think it is productive to strongly stigmatize all forms of paedophillac tendencies, specifically because it reduces the chance of would-be child abusers getting help controlling and/or channeling their urges.
There is some research that suggests higher availability of child pornography (including the simulated/drawn) reduces occurences of child abuse, and although it is of course highly controversial, to me it indicates that it is worth investigating.
As a specific example of what I consider to be a very harmful way of dealing with the (real or fake) child porn issue, is the UK porn identification requirement. No paedophile is going to enter their details when they want to look at loli hentai, so they'd be forced to find some other outlet, for instance by going on the darkweb. Or they end up not doing anything to pacify their urges, which might well raise the chances of them actually participating in child abuse. Of course this is purely speculative, but I don't think these are outcomes you can reasonably dismiss out of hand.
I'm not saying I condone the use of photographic material of minors, I tend towards "90% bad" but really have to think it through more, but I do believe it to be harmful to make hand-drawn or CG child pornography illegal. The "but you're abusing the children without their knowledge" argument doesn't hold water there, and it'd be great if it usurped large swaths of the market for abusive child pornography.
If you believe the MPAA/RIAA's claims that piracy harms sales, there would be some moral case for piracy of CP. Although, there is still some direct harm from the distribution of the material (for the privacy for the victim). However it's more likely that (contra the MPAA) piracy actually serves as advertising, just like in the ordinary entertainment industry.
> What if children weren't physically abused but were secretly and anonymously photographed?
Still harmful for privacy reasons mentioned above, even if less harmful than actual physical abuse.
> Shouldn't there be exceptions for victimless child porn?
Probably, but the example I would reach for is art / drawings of obviously fictional characters, rather than any of the above. The fact that many CP laws extend to this is better evidence that lawmakers are being irrationally swayed by puritanism. (Or that puritanism breeds indifference. Maybe they don't care about the "deviants" interested in these sort of drawings enough to specifically target them, but they also don't care enough to carve out an exception.)
the dominant factor in stigmatized pea do philadelphia has very little to do with deviant sexuality and has everything to do with coercion and rape of still developing human beings. this is seen across just about every other facet of civilized society as well.
We don't allow minors into enforceable contracts, leave home or check out of school, smoke cigarettes or drink booze, and we sure as hell don't allow them to participate in "amateur" pornography where the consequences can be life long.
We restrict these things because the mind isn't developed or experienced enough to understand and appreciate the effects of these actions.
This is a dangerous way to present facts that changes the perception of the reader in ways that may not be noticed while not technically telling a lie.
You are claiming that all crimes are of equal severity and should have equal consequences. That is absurd.