Tell me more about how a judge is calling people privileged.
I mean, do you have any discussion of the idea at hand, or are you just going to appeal to how we feel about hypothetical people who might have said the idea? Either the idea is correct or it's not, it doesn't matter if it's a crack dealer, a darknet market administrator, or a judge who makes it.
ok
- "The family received food stamps for four years beginning when Katherine was 12. They were homeless for six months. "I came from nothing," Forrest said. "I came from a father who made no money. He was a playwright and then a writer, and even though he published a lot of books, I was a complete scholarship student all the way through."
And look, I don't even agree with the narrative of "privilege". I think if you see someone being treated badly, the solution to that is to treat that person better, not to adamantly insist that people who are treated better are privileged. Calling someone privileged is pretty much always an ad-hominem argument to discard what they have to say.
I disagree with Forrest, not because she's privileged, although she IS privileged. I disagree with Forrest because the argument that purer drugs kill fewer people than cut ones is just as valid coming from a street crack dealer as it is coming from Ross Ullbricht. I don't care who says an idea, I care whether the idea is true or not.
Do you have any actual refutation of that claim, or are you going to continue to insist that who said it is more important than whether it's true or not?
EDIT: Ironically, the argument Forrest is making here is actually a particularly offensive appeal to privileged (read: racist) misinformation. She references "crack dealers" specifically because crack has a reputation as the worst of the worst of drugs, when in fact crack is extremely similar to regular cocaine. The difference is that crack is used by poor, often black users, whereas cocaine is used by rich, often white, users. But criminal charges for crack vs. cocaine are still drastically different, although this has improved[1]. This is part of a larger pattern where drugs are prosecuted with more severity if they're used by poor black people than if they are used by middle class white people. For example, PCP is a whole schedule higher than, although these are chemically similar drugs with similar effects and harms in any of the scientific literature I can find.
[1] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/crack-vrs-po...
No, but it does mean that she knows what privilege is and is able to make assertions about it. And being in a good position such as being worth millions and being a judge isn't a privilege if you've earned it.
> I disagree with Forrest because the argument that purer drugs kill fewer people than cut ones is just as valid coming from a street crack dealer as it is coming from Ross Ullbricht.
Purer drugs can kill more people as I pointed out about tolerance levels. Even then, it's not like Ullbricht knew or cared about the quality of the products being sold on his site. He just cared he got his cut.
At least you're engaging with the topic at hand instead of making ad hominem attacks now.
And... I partly agree with you! If you look at my comment upthread, you'll note I tried to make it clear that there's some ambiguity in whether the Silk Road, and the rise of darknet markets as a whole, has been a good thing. I'm certainly not holding up Ullbricht as some moral hero--that's entirely perihelions' hallucination.
The question in my mind, is whether what Ullbricht did is worth putting a 30 year old in prison for the rest of his life. I fundamentally disagree with two things which were involved in this sentencing:
1. Accusations that Ullbricht paid for murders should have no bearing on the court system. From what I've read, it seems like those accusations are probably true, but in the United States of America, we don't sentence people on "probably true" for crimes that weren't even prosecuted. If we're at all committed to the presumption of innocent until proven guilty, we can't be allowing prosecutors to convict for a crime, vaguely insinuate that a worse crime was committed, and get a sentence based on that worse crime's severity. If Ross Ullbricht was being sentenced for murder, he needed to be convicted of murder.
2. Making an example of someone isn't justice for that person. Our court system should not be engaged in sacrificing individuals for political goals, no matter how noble those political goals might be.
In my mind, it's pretty hard to justify a life sentence without accusing Ullbricht of murder or saying we should make an example of him. Everything he was accused of was a nonviolent offense for which he was a first-time offender. The only argument I can see for a harsher sentence is the scale of his operation--but when we compare to SEC cases for example with similar scales, we're still not seeing this severity of sentences.
Ullbricht served 11 years in prison before he was pardoned, and I don't think anything our current justice system does is "fair", I think that's about as fair as we can expect given what he did.