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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

It's really sad that there is a possibility for people who are convicted of non-violent, victimless crimes to spend their whole lives in prison.

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He also allegedly hired a hitman to take out 6 people. The hits weren't executed because the hitman was undercover but if this is true then I have no sympathy for him.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/21/silk-road-...

> allegedly

I have lots of sympathy for a man who was accused of something, smeared in the eyes of the public (and potential jurors), but wasn't even charged with that crime!

He was charged for it - it is part 4 of the "Narcotics Trafficking Conspiracy" charge in his indictment:

http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/February14/Ros...

DPR allegedly hired a hitman, but now we have doubt as to the identity of DPR when those events occurred.

You might want to have a think about what the drug trade does and has done to some South American and East Asia counties before you cry victimless.

A legalised drug trade could be victimless, but not the one which exists now.

That's true, but that's much more the consequence of the legal status of most drugs and the "drug war" policies. I would argue that online marketplaces are solving this problem, not making it worse.

That makes absolutely no sense. The online marketplace suppliers are getting their supplies from the same wholesalers, and charging similar prices.

How are they any different?

Non-violent? Sure. Victimless? Debatable.

I think he got 'drug user' and 'drug dealer' mixed up. The former is easy to defend and is 'victimless', the latter, not so much.

I didn't. Sure, offline drug dealers often cause violent crime, but online don't (apart from the accusation that DPR wanted to kill someone, but I stand firmly on the "innocent until proven guilty" side). The only people who buy drugs are the ones who want them, so you can't say they are victims.

It depends on the drug, literally. As dependency for some types leads to addiction which can cause problems, some of those addicted to some particular drug can be said to be victims. Many other drug types are not that harmful and users would be considered consumers. And of course some legal drugs are also harmful (nicotine, alcohol etc)....

What about Facebook or television? Or McDonalds? Once you feel that you have to moralize and keep people from doing things that you think are bad for them, where do you stop?

> Once you feel that you have to moralize and keep people from doing things that you think are bad for them, where do you stop?

Never. Why would one stop? It is a good thing to stop people from doing bad things.

It's not a moralization that drugs are bad for you. It's an objective medical fact of injuries to the body, psyche, collateral damage to bystanders etc.

Not to forget, acting morally is also a good thing. It seems to be a popular idea that acting morally should be avoided, and I disagree.

No it's a good thing to allow people to make their own choices about how they live and how they treat themselves. Not allowing that is unethical.

> Never. Why would one stop? It is a good thing to stop people from doing bad things. > It's not a moralization that drugs are bad for you. It's an objective medical fact of injuries to the body, psyche, collateral damage to bystanders etc.

Overeating, sitting at a desk all day, consuming alcohol, smoking, tanning, etc. all can negatively impact an individual's health. Should those activities, and many more, also be banned?

Acting morally is an important thing, yes, but the problem is that there is no one definition of morality. How should we all behave? By your standards? By mine? The superset of everyone's personal concept of morality would allow and prohibit pretty much everything all at once.

One reasonable(?) baseline for morality could be the golden rule: don't do things that will hurt others or prevent others from freely living their life — i.e. don't murder, injure or enslave others, steal, etc. Or... don't be a dick.

The world is not black and white; it's black and grey.

>"It is a good thing to stop people from doing bad things."

Vague statement.

You're talking about stopping people from doing what you (or others, all besides the person in question) have decided is a "bad" thing.

You fail to realize that you are working off different definitions of "good" and "bad". Those are value judgements, and by definition almost always subjective.

E.g. The OP you are responding to probably has a definition of "good" and "bad" that takes into account victimless crimes, thus precluding all the "bad" from actually being "bad" if it is self-inflicted. Whereas, it seems you have a definition of "bad" that blanketly covers anything detrimental to an individual, self-inflicted or otherwise.

It's no wonder that the one group criticizes the other for slippery slopes and "where will you stop". Because you've drawn arbitrary lines, leading right back to the idea of subjective value judgements regarding "bad".

Personally, I hate arbitrary lines and definitions. Irreducible first-principles should be used to derive more complex ideas and constructs; and that is imperative if we are ever to have a truly fair and free society.

Online drug dealers may not cause violent crime directly but you have no idea what their supply chain looks like. Unless they are manufacturing the drugs themselves, which is unlikely for most big-money drugs, there is likely blood in their supply chain.

You could potentially argue that the drugs side is victimless. But assuming that the false ID stuff is true, then that's much less likely to be - the I would suspect that a fair percentage of people buying false IDs online are doing it to help with pretty nasty activities.

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