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His sentence was excessive and cruel to make an example out of him. There’s a serial child rapist in the same prison serving less time.
The state hates more than anything someone who operates on first principles that the empire is wrong.

A serial rapist, even one that would happily do it again, will often repent and quickly admit guilt. They have no interest in undermining the philosophical basis of the state. They will posture themselves as bound but imperfect citizens under the law.

Ross violated the only remaining national holy religion, the rule of law. He was sentenced for being a heretic.

> Ross violated the only remaining national holy religion, the rule of law. He was sentenced for being a heretic.

Good.

Let's keep in mind that the shared faith in this "holy religion, the rule of law" is the only thing holding together your country, my country, everyone's countries, and civilized society in general. Take that away, and everything around us will collapse, regressing the few survivors of that event to the prehistorical lifestyle of small tribes slaughtering each other for what little scraps the land has to give.

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> Ross violated the only remaining national holy religion, the rule of law. He was sentenced for being a heretic.

That's a weird way of talking about that. The rule of law is what keeps rampant corruption and government abuse at bay. It means the law also holds for the ruler, and not just for the subjects. The rule of law has already been significantly weakened in recent years by openly corrupt judges and politicians, and traitor being elected in defiance of the 14th amendment.

None of this is a good thing. Without the rule of law, it's the people that lose, because then you get the rule of those in power, who will be above the law.

Also his opsec was sloppy. If you want to believe that the spooks were doing full ipv4 scans to DDoS all his legit exit nodes that would make a better movie. But really, he was just in over his head.

Predictably, dark web market operators adapted afterward. The state got lucky and they knew it, so that also factored in to their sentencing recommendations.

Glad he's getting out.

> only remaining national holy religion, the rule of law

Uhm... Really? Is that present tense?

If rule-of-law was a national holy religion, the last 10 years of US politics would have played out very very differently.

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Yep, and now the "heretics" are running the show, or at least a large piece of it, so they pardoned him.

The law means less than it used to.

This is a really excellent analysis and you will see it in a lot of prosecutions once you learn about it
Pretty sure Silk Road enabled loads of pedophiles to go about their activities. This is a false equivalence
> The site's terms of service prohibited the sale of certain items. When the Silk Road marketplace first began, the creator and administrators instituted terms of service that prohibited the sale of anything whose purpose was to "harm or defraud." This included child pornography, stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of any type

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)#Produc...

Despite Silk Road explicitly banning CSAM, and the feds not charging Ulbricht with it when you know they would love the positive PR if they could?
What do you mean? Did it actually allow selling anything related to pedophilia? Like CSAM?
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Yes, but so are a lot of sentences in the US. I've heard of people being put away for decades for mere drug possession.

That said, rapists surprisingly often get just a slap on the wrist, or not even that. The US absolutely needs some balance and consistency in its sentencing, but pardoning this one guy sends a really weird message in that regard. At the very least, just commute the sentence so at least the conviction still stands.

Pretty much all criminal laws are like that since only a fraction of crimes will ever lead to an arrest we make examples out of those are caught to make others less likely to commit crimes in the future when they see the punishment. The deterrence effect is basically "risk of getting caught" * "punishment if you get caught".
It's not just the deterrence but to publicly condemn the act. Condemnation needs to have teeth and the perpetrator needs to feel the burden, otherwise it's just empty words on paper. The burden is necessary to establish social balance. The punishment can't be enjoyable, it needs to take away the unfair advantage gained by the criminal act, it provides a way to repay moral debt back to society.

> A fourth feature of punishment, widely acknowledged at least since the publication of Joel Feinberg’s seminal 1965 article “The Expressive Function of Punishment” is that it serves to express condemnation, or censure, of the offender for her offense. As Feinberg discusses, it is this condemning element that distinguishes punishment from what he calls “nonpunitive penalties” such as parking tickets, demotions, flunkings, and so forth. (Feinberg, 1965: 398-401).

https://iep.utm.edu/m-p-puni/

In the UK, serial child rapists are being given 3 year sentences
In the UK, the police helped hide the crimes of non-british child rapists.

The axiom of their "rule of law" was that racism is the worst possible sin, and that anything done to appease people calling you racist was mandatory. The below link MASSIVLEY understated the number of victims.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/rotherham-sex-abuse-sh...

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in my country it depend on thr color of your skin and your bank account to what charge you get. =) wonderful world!
He operated a site that allowed you to hire hitmen.
[flagged]
> He literally made a marketplace for people who sold, tortured, and killed children, even babies.

cp was explicitly not allowed on Silk road. the man was a lot of things but he wasn't a monster.

I’ve never heard this claim before, where are you getting this?
Child abuse was the one thing that was never allowed on Silk Road.
None of that is true.
Snoop you compare apples with oranges.

People don't really care about child rapists see the Christian churches.

Also you were able to buy everything on silk road including guns. The multiplication effect of this is potentially more worth.

Nonetheless it's still a straw man argument. I personally would not mind at all increasing prison sentences for child rapists.

Silk road had a policy against selling items with intent to harm like guns. While occasionally some weapon listings would slip through, they would be taken down. The focus was drugs (and a lot of legal media). There were plenty of other black market sites on the dark web that sold everything, but that's not what the silk road in particular was about.
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Selling say drugs that kill people (kids including) and illegal weapons that are often used for murders. Such activity is by western standards one of worst crimes, especially in massive scale and run for profit. Even ignoring all other criminal activity, 25 to life seems like a adequate sentence.

It seems that from day 1 US is moving quite far from the place it was and projected itself to others for past decades. More ruthless, money above all, not much fairness in international dealings. Maybe US will be richer after those 4 years, but at current trajectory it will lose a lot of friends and partners.

Please realize this - for Europe, China starts to look like a great not only business but also military partner, much more reliable long term. This is how much such moves can fuck up things.

That's mainly because it cuts into the US government profit margins. They and their favored contractors have been selling arms for profit and love drug running when it suits their aims as they showed with eg support for the Contras.

It is important drugs stay illegal so powerful connected interests can maintain high profit and control. Without that, simple cocaine/meth/marijuana is just an agricultural or chemical commodity with essentially the margin of generic OTC drugs.

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He was serving 2 life sentences + 40 years, not one. Even the prosecutors only asked for 20. What he did was wrong, but the sentence was disproportionate. The judge intended to throw away his life to make a point.
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> for Europe, China starts to look like a great not only business but also military partner

Speak for yourself. China is still worse than the USA, and Xi isn't bound to any term limit, and has built up quite a following.

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