Reading the Silk Road configuration

Re:Reading the Silk Road configuration by pyre on Friday October 03, 2014 @08:51AM (#8405264)

@jamespo said "Well that's the weakest excuse for ordering someone to be murdered I've read today"

Responding to that with some canned rhetoric around how drug-related murders would be fewer in a post War on Drugs world it's really a response to that post.

I have no righteous indignation. I'm frustrated that the conversation is going like this:

  Person 1: Ordering an assassination is bad, and saying that
            the War on Drugs is bad isn't an excuse for it.

  Person 2: But if the War On Drugs didn't exist, then
            drug-related murder wouldn't exist! Perverse
            incentives!

> Of course the perpetrator of a murder should be held to full account.

This is the point that I see some of these "War no Drugs == Bad" posts dancing around. They ignore this in favour of using this story as a platform to preach their views.

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Re:Reading the Silk Road configuration by themartorana on Friday October 03, 2014 @11:28AM (#8405934)

We can likely all agree murder is almost always bad, and murder over drugs is categorically bad.

So when someone asks for an acknowledgment that murder is bad from another person, it's almost ad hominem, or so it seems to me.

So the debate is whether or not government policies create incentives or motive for crime. There are several documented reasons [1] that good people do bad things, and creating an environment for that isn't helping anyone.

It's not to say that the murderer is less to blame, but culpability isn't something that reduces criminal responsibility.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/27-psychological-reasons-why-...

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