I open multi-GB files often enough in VIM. Just make sure that you've disabled any plugins, as _those_ will often crush under large files. The `-u NONE` option will disable `.vimrc` and thus all plugins as well.
Windows have EmEditor.. unfortunately Linux doesn't seem to have any. Hopefully someone can develop a great frontend for the xi editor (https://github.com/google/xi-editor).
Sublime Text is imo near perfect, only thing I miss is the ability to edit multi-GB files (on a reasonably priced laptop).. sadly I believe it will be near impossible for Sublime Text to ever support this.
Even if it was -- not all illegal (or wrong) things are equally wrong.
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.
Except it is completely unequal because you've been given 3 chances to follow the laws of the society in which you live. And because sentencing will still be much less severe than that of murder.
Why not three? This "wide range of offenses" generally applies to felonies, which are grevious enough to be placed into their own category with its own suite of punishments, and it is not entirely unreasonable to apply a singular repeat offense rule to all of them. The fact that the number seems arbitrary to you does not make it invalid.
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.
Three strikes applies to both violent and non-violent felonies and the example earlier in the thread is for petty theft. Do you consider those crimes to be equal? Are all felonies equal?
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.
Actually yes. But California allows some stupid felonies. Petty theft with priors can be charged as a felony, so, third strike can be shoplifting a candybar, since a third strike for stealing anything can be a felony at the prosecutor's discretion. So, it has to be three felonies, but the third doesn't have to be violent, and "prior conviction" upgrades make a lot of petty third strikes "felonies" in CA that would not be such elsewhere.
There's a big discussion about what's bad about drugs. But I wonder if we can rationally work out what's bad about child porn.
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.
> There's a big discussion about what's bad about drugs. But I wonder if we can rationally work out what's bad about child porn.
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.
Paedophillia != child abuse. It's a deviant sexual preference just like homosexuality, even though perhaps you think it is more morally wrong to have paedophillic tendencies than to have homosexual tendencies.
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.
While I believe that western sexual norms are a bit puritanical, the premise behind protecting children with zealous laws is that it is extremely difficult to judge whether child pornography is truely victimless, even if you believe that harm from childhood sexuality is overstated in modern society. Because of the power imbalance between adults and children, and the permanent effects that abuse can have on children, it is reasonable to err on the side of caution and keep all child/adult sexual interactions illegal, and reduce demand for such interactions by keeping pornography illegal.
As an aside, I am curious as to the reason you are being down voted, besides your audacity of expressing an unpopular opinion.
Short of presenting data I think you're making a bit of a leap to say that pornography encourages some undesired behavior. It could easily be argued either way.
I tend to agree with "better safe than sorry" since it's unclear. It can go too far though if you end up punishing many more adults for tangentially related crimes than the number of children who were harmed by actual abuse.
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.
That's not expressing an "unpopular opinion". They're being ignorant about the harm being done to the victims of child pornography and (it seems) trying legitimize that harm by drawing a dotted line to homosexuality.
It has no place on HN. I would downvote if I could.
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.
>They're being ignorant about the harm being done to the victims of child pornography
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.
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.)
Australia is stricter. Somebody was charged for possessing Simpsons porn because it was "sexualised depiction of persons under 16". The defence argued they weren't human because they only had 4 fingers on each hand!
bro.. don't try and make the abusers out to be victims.
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.
The abusers are not the issue here, the parent is questioning whether possession should be illegal in all cases, especially if we are talking about a victimless crime. Photoshopped adult porn to make the actresses look young, for example. It's a good question. However, I expect that no politician is brave enough to ask the question for fear of getting precisely the criticism you just demonstrated. So the discussion will remain theoretical.
Go with an even easier case. What if it is of a 17 year old who is old enough to consent, even by the law where they live, who willingly takes the photograph and releases it. Technically illegal, but why?
> ...It's legal to think about murder as long as you don't behave that way.
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.
> 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.
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.
> to communicate their intention to collaborate on the plan
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.
> Sure they do. It's called "conversation" or "correspondence"
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.
FWIW, the lawyers in this thread tuned out at this point. Nothing is very simple in law, but the ambiguities of criminal conspiracy are reasonably distant from the situation you've described. Conspiracy requires communication in order to agree to commit a crime. Positing a kind of thought that communicates doesn't really muddy the waters much.
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 what you're trying to ask is: Is being labeled gay grounds for imprisonment? Or does one have to be caught in the act of fornicating with a male to be imprisoned? I'm sure it depends on the jurisdiction, but many jurisdictions that have this kind of explicit law usually frowns upon homosexuality so much, that the mere accusation is enough to be damaging.
What I'm asking is more like, if the government microphone in your potted plant hears you coming out as gay to your friends, would that be grounds for criminal punishment?
Laws against inherent characteristics seem to me at least to be worse than laws which ban behavior. Conflating the two in order to make some particular law sound worse seems sort of dishonest to me.
Perhaps. But within the context of gay rights it is the government that behaved improperly. Society bundled behaviour and innate characteristics into a single thing. That was wrong, and it is important to highlight that.
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
There's still plenty of conservative people who believe the being gay is a personal choice, or perhaps something caused by your upbringing/environment, not something you're born with.
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.
But the whole argument is ridiculous. Maybe there is a choice element to being gay. So what? That is a perfectly valid choice to make. But attacking someone for that is not valid, it is completely perverse.
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.
I agree that it's a valid choice to make, and people should have the freedom to make such choices if they want. However, you said before that "It makes no difference to anyone if homosexuality is innate, or just a set of chosen behaviours." and that's incorrect. It does make a difference, to some people. To those people, they'd oppose it if it were proven to simply be a choice, whereas they'd have more empathy if it were proven to be completely innate: it'd like being mad at a mentally-retarded person for doing something dumb, compared to being mad at or disappointed in a very intelligent person for making a very dumb decision. I'm not defending this mentality (because again, I have no problem with homosexuality and I think people should be free to have whatever physical relationships they want), but I'm explaining it.
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.
>There's not really a way to counter this mentality by people like us because their worldview is so entirely alien to us
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?
Liberty versus authoritarianism? I acknowledge such people exist, but I don't pretend to know or understand their full argument of why it should be regulated. At least with the religious people, I can understand why, I just reject the silly premises (that God will smite us like in the story of Sodom). With atheists (presumably Stalinists?), I really don't get it. Besides, we've seen atheistic authoritarian societies before, and they were a complete disaster, not only economically but also as far as having a happy, functioning society. Hint: if you have to have a wall to keep people from running away from your society, and you shoot people who try to climb over the wall, then the fundamentals of your society are not worth preserving. Now it might be obvious that I'm following a fairly utilitarian philosophy here (happy = good), but if you're not religious and don't believe in utilitarianism, what exactly is the goal for your society? Generally, societies which do not value the happiness of their citizens are religious, because they claim that they need to "please God" or act in certain ways to have a better afterlife. Remove the afterlife and deity and what do you have left? Either wanting people to be happy (but still functional; not happy as in drugged-out all the time and unable to keep society functioning), or you're running the society on what makes one person happy and to hell with what everyone else wants, which is basically narcissism (which probably describes North Korea today).
>but I don't pretend to know or understand their full argument of why it should be regulated
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.
Yes we've rehashed the difference between internal thinking and action. I don't think anyone believes that a government is directly oppressing internal monologue.
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.
>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.
True. It sounds like the site was mostly dealing in drugs, which for small time dealers I feel is a waste of time to prosecute... But the problem is that larger organized criminals often get their funds to do worse things from the drug market.
Wait, it sounds like you're saying big drug dealers are just selling drugs to get money to, I don't know, go on murder sprees? I'm not saying violence is not a part of these kinds of crimes, but I don't think the purpose of their participation is just to enable other, more serious crimes.
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."
For an example of this, check out Portugal that legalized and had great success.
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)
> it sounds like you're saying big drug dealers are just selling drugs to get money to, I don't know, go on murder sprees
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.
But until that happens, don't buy from big drug sellers.
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.
These laws don't usually get changed until people violate them en masse, showing utter disrespect and contempt for the laws.
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.
Paying your taxes funds real crimes too. Should I stop paying taxes?
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.
And I'm saying that it sounds like you think "the kinds of organizations" are using drug money to enable worse crimes. I mean, it's no secret that the purpose of certain laws are to prevent anybody from making "that kind of money," but to me your comment read as if there was more to it.
Because that's also the case.
Big organized crime groups often have access to exactly the kind of logistics required to manufacture and smuggle drugs across large distances.
They have the muscle to stay competitive in a market where there is no state authority to give you guarantees on anything.
Most drug dealers are not "big organized groups." I don't know from Hansa, but I'm betting a big organized group is not likely to use them as a single point of failure.
Of course, it wouldn't have been their only market, but it's among them.
Even something ostensibly harmless as cannabis can finance quite questionable people and groups.
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.
You are correct. Making drugs illegal has funded the creation of massive cartels who use that funding to pursue other crimes and to war against any competitors.
The solution will never be shutting down darknets and arresting people.
The counterargument is that if drugs are legalized then the crime syndicates will need to find a new line of work. It's possible they'll go "legit" like the mob did after prohibition and get into the Casino business, but it's also possible they'll switch to human trafficking or gun running or some other harmful trade.
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.
If they could expand the side business, they already would have. The massive profits of illegal drugs gives them the capital to invest in new side businesses, take that away they can't expand anything.
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.
I dont think human trafficking is as easy as drug trafficking and gun running is a much smaller market than drugs. Legalization will be a severe impediment to the activities of the cartels.
> The counterargument is that if drugs are legalized then the crime syndicates will need to find a new line of work
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?
Society doesn't want to consider certain transactions to be legitimate.
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 agree. This is why the "counter-argument" doesn't make sense. It assumes that it's not preventative (so it's a negative effect?). Might as well let them carry on?
The point is that gansterism will become a smaller part of the economy, have "less funding" if you want to think of it that 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.
The counter-counterargument is that we can legalize difficult-to-police but high-volume "sin" crimes, such as drug use and prostitution, regulate them to the point it's impossible to be a criminal syndicate in those realms, and leave the syndicates with lower-volume crimes, such as murder for hire.
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.
And 'small time' drug dealers get their supply from the bigger fish. The value in prosecuting them isn't in stopping end users or sales that max out at like $200, it's in working towards shutting down large international suppliers. Because they don't just ship drugs, they ship people and weapons too. Regardless of how one feels about drug use, the realities of the trade are grim.
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.
The reality of illegal drugs is by making them illegal you give massive amounts of capital to the worst people in the world, who invest those profits into other awful trades.
You legalize drugs, you take away their massive cash flies and cripple their organizations.
> 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.
Drug trafficking funds human trafficking. It's not the other way around. Removing profit incentives from bad behavior is an easy way to improve human behavior. Our murder rates plunged after prohibition was repealed, for example.
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.
Extortion, money laundering, racketeering, human trafficking, illicit organ selling, slavery, gun running, piracy (Somalia not Napster), poaching, assassinations, political violence for hire, etc. are all independently profitable. There will be profit incentive for bad behavior as long as laws exist that people don't want to abide by. People are terrible to each other on a daily basis, the world over.
> 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?
Buying drugs can fund actions far worse than just creating drugs. From human slavery (drug mules) to murder. Some of the other things on that list are bad not because the actual item being traded is bad, but because of what the trade enables. I'm not seeing a significant difference between the markets in this regard, except for popularity.
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.
Buying drugs doesn't fund those actions. Making drugs illegal does, just like when Prohibition started murderous gang wars, gave us the highest murder rate in modern history, caused thousands of deaths from adulterated spirits, and funded the modern mafia.
Murder is illegal. But somehow the profits from tens of millions of murders aren't injecting cash into a vast underground economy. It's the money that does that.
Buying drugs does fund those actions. Drugs being illegal are a major reason why, and why I support legalization. But that doesn't excuse anyone currently making a purchase today.
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.
People have the right to control what goes in their bodies. I don't have the ability to see if my weed is "violence free", because drug prohibition took that away. You can't hold me responsible for violence among marijuana cartels if you don't give me a clean source for my marijuana.
It's like saying encryption is used by terrorists, so if I buy encryption I'm indirectly supporting terrorism.
You can be held responsible. You don't have a right to obtain a substance just because you want it. It doesn't matter if it "goes in your body" or not. That's not how rights work. You have to justify the value to society.
It's exactly how rights work. Freedom of speech doesn't have to justify it's value to society, it's an innate right that's not up for vote. Google the founding fathers and natural law.
If freedom of speech didn't have to justify its value, you wouldn't need legislators to enact it as a law. Legislators aren't going to legislate without justification, and they shouldn't.
Doesn't this holds true of the other crimes we were talking about taking place on the dark-net as well? Maybe not at the same rates, but even weapon sells don't definitely mean someone is coming to harm by that specific sell.
Paying taxes contributes to legally dubious actions such as drone strikes at weddings. Buying certain types of cheap clothing or manufactured goods supports slave like conditions for some workers. Buying beef and other food products contributes to deforestation, depletion of fishing stocks and other things destructive to the environment. Going to a strip club supports human trafficking and sex slavery. Buying diamonds and rare earth metals necessary for tech devices supports bloody, endless civil wars. The drug wars raging in Mexico pale in comparison to the atrocities and Heart of Darkness horrors happening still in the Congo, with its rich supplies of coltan.
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.
It promotes growth of the marketplace which also allows buying/selling of drugs that do involve victim crimes. If the market was limited to safely produced/trafficked drugs, it would be different. One might even make the argument that shutting down a market that only allowed victimless drugs end up causing harm.
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.
I'm not saying they're perfect in every way. Merely that they're big enough and serious enough that it makes no sense to refer to it as a "hobbyist company" anymore. I could see it in the Roadster days, and the early Model S days, but not now.
