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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

> This is unlikely to have happened under a system of legal drugs. I've never heard of Walmart -- where legal products are sold -- putting out hits on people.

> The drugs laws are broken. They create perverse incentives.

So... when the laws are wrong, it's ok to murder people. It's the government's fault that you murdered people because they created perverse incentives, therefore you shouldn't go to jail for attempting to murder people?

[Edit] parent post responded to "tried to have people assassinated" with some rhetoric about perverse incentives. Sure with better incentives, it might not have happened, but the parent post comes across as giving DPR a free pass because the incentives were perverse.

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It's not inconsistent to say drug prohibition results in increased violence, and murder is wrong.

That is far too nuanced a position to take here on Hacker News.

What's next, the suggestion that MongoDB has certain use-cases that make it preferable over normal SQL databases while at the same time lacking some of their guarantees?

Please, sir or madam, do not tax the hivemind.

I've got to say: this thread level had me confused until you sorta just pointed at it. Somehow an argument happened/started, but I couldn't tell from where or why (especially since one of the root comments is dead now).

I think you're ignoring the context of the parent post. The topic of the post Multics was commenting on wasn't "Is DPR a sketchy dude?" It was closer to "Supporting operations like Silk Road is inherently immoral. Look at all the bad juju around this. Surely anyone who isn't against drugs is evil, agreed?"

It's not ok to murder people, but with different drug laws, people wouldn't be murdered.

I think it's still an overstatement to even say that no one would be murdered over drugs if they were legal. For example, there are gangs that specialize in things like illegal movement of cigarettes between areas where the taxes/import duties are different. While not as large as it would be were cigarettes to be completely illegal, you can't say that it will go to zero.

The parent post comes across to you as giving DPR a free pass. IMO this says much more about you than it does about the parent post. I see no such implication myself.

Your thought process is simplistic. It's not ok to murder good people, but it's ok to murder bad people. DPR was trying to kill an extortionist threatening to sell out Silk Road users to the police, which would have resulted in many families being destroyed. He definitely deserved death.

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