I think most people, criminals or otherwise, understand this quite well. In fact, I'd guess that criminals understand it better than non-criminals.
What some people don't seem to understand (or even want to think about) is that the law is often a pitiful and nationally embarrasing reflection of ethics. Laws don't get passed because they are good, or helpful, or promote some positive thing. They get passed because enough politicians could be convinced (sometimes by bribery, sometimes by real or implied threats) to vote for them. Why anyone imagines that the resulting laws have a significant correlation with what's good for an individual's rights and freedom is totally beyond me.
Gandhi, MLK, and the U.S. Founding Fathers were all criminals of their times. Sometimes the world needs people to break the law to show how broken the law really is. If you or anyone else judges them solely because the label "criminal" applies to them, then I have no pity for you.
Except those individuals fought the laws and the people behind them. They did not simply try to circumvent the unjust laws. It is tougher to take the moral high-ground when you aren't striving for change. These people are not battling some great injustice, they are breaking [perhaps unjust] laws for their own personal gain (either monetarily or recreationally).
It's is not anyone's place to assign to the oppressed the duty of changing their oppressors' minds.
The Founding Fathers were just victorious. Being powerful enough to deter enforcement is not a reliable indicator of moral high ground.
Equating drug dealers with Ghandi, MLK and the US Founding Fathers is a stretch at the least and outright offensive at worst. These people aren't making bold political statements. They're selling drugs.
If you think that drugs should be legal, convince your fellow citizens to vote to make them legal. MLK, Gandhi and the Founding Fathers did what was necessary to change laws that they felt were unjust. Criminal behavior isn't the same thing as civil disobedience, and there are no shortcuts.
Last I saw, several US states were legalising marijuana sales. It seems that attitudes are shifting.
Your statement is also simplistic: a majority of citizens don't care one way or the other about catching undersized lobsters, yet it's illegal. Trademark infringement is another such law. Then there are laws that the public kind've want but the people in power don't, so they don't get made (eg protection for whistleblowers). The simplest counterexample is tax law. Taxes are incredibly unpopular, yet laws requiring taxes exist.
The genesis of laws is a lot more complex than magically popping in and out of existence with popular demand.
The burden of enlightening someone should never fall upon anyone but that someone. To argue that avoiding imprisonment isn't a burden would be the definition of sophism.
These are all decentralization of power. The Roman empire had an emperor.
Also, "no central bank" wasn't domething that made the US decentralized compared to other contemporary systems. First, because central banks were extremely rare at the time, and second because the central banks of the time, and most modern ones, are a means of transferring power out of the government to private capitalists, so they further decentralize government power.
Neither was retaining the British jury system.
"I know, right? Why don't all those damn sodomites just take their chemical castration and shut up and accept the fact they're criminals?"
>"I know, right? Why don't all those damn sodomites just take their chemical castration and shut up and accept the fact they're criminals?"
"I took mine, and I'm thankful for it every day. No pity."
"One day, this heinous crime I have committed might not be illegal. Knowing that, how can you possibly convict me!?"
In light of this, how can one not lose faith in the law when so many laws that punish people for stupid things are on the books just because a bunch of religious people want to force everyone to "follow their religion" to a minor extent or how the system is setup in a way that encourages government prosecutors to view the people in the cases that are put on their desk as little more than pawns in a game to "make a name" for themselves?
[There's also the fact that judges/lawyers try to hide the idea of jury nullification from juries too...]
So we can't just put the smart people in charge. We have to slowly educate the stupid people out of existence, until the dumbest 51% are finally capable of determining the best people to make decisions, based primarily on their aptitude, rather than on their popularity.
When voting for county dogcatcher, for instance, people would look for "D.V.M." after the candidate's name, rather than "(D)" or "(R)". When people want to hire me, they look at my resume, not my hairline, lapel pin, or party affiliation.
Hey, here's an idea! What's the political science equivalent of FizzBuzz? Whatever it is, you can't get on the ballot unless you can do that thing, live, unaided, and in front of witnesses.
"We have the answers. We're just not soulless enough to want to go through (and perhaps change, in the process) the effort to supply them and make them help."
Platitudes rarely change things.
I get that it's not everyone's desired path (it's certainly not mine), I just think that saying "many of us are smart enough to have the answers, we just choose not to get involved in politics" is perhaps an... underestimation... of the complexity of some of society's problems.
Would you say this (with a straight face) to Alan Turing in 1952?
"What did you expect having a private homosexual relationship in a society where that is illegal? Just take the chemical castration or the jail sentence. Why are you getting so upset about this?"
"Nobody ever broke into someone's house in a state of diminished cognition because of gay sex...."
I... wouldn't be too sure about that.
You're making a comment in the context of the article. All of the parent comments to mine made much broader statements in response to the root comment that was a more general statement. "If you break the law, then you have no right to complain when you go to jail." This is what I was responding to. It touches more than just drug law.
You can say whatever you like when you are jailed. But I have limited sympathy, which I reserve for true victims of circumstance. You (usually) knew it was illegal when you did it.
It's fine to disagree with the law, to protest it, to seek change. But "doing it anyway and hoping you don't get caught" is not an attempt at civil reform.
BUT you do have a right to object to unreasonable punishment. That's absolutely within your rights. "His sentence is way too long for his crime" is a discussion I'm happy to have.
Even in less repressive societies it was not that uncommon for drawing attention to your homosexual nature to make you a lightning rod for hate crimes. And the reaction of the rest of society wasn't "I'm appalled that such a thing would happen." It was, "What did he expect announcing that he was gay?" In the face of such attitudes, you blame the person being oppressed for not wanting to fling themselves under the bus?
Murderer, killer, rapist, pedophile, wife beater, convict, criminal, felon, thief, liar, embezzler, con artist, forger, bum, hobo, dishonest, deceitful, traitor, unethical, petty criminal, cheat, scammer, scam artist, pick pocket, snake oil salesman, chiseler, crooked, unfaithful, drunk, addict.
And a thousand more various categories to toss people into (some refer to crimes, some refer to moral character or life situation, and some blend multiple attributes depending on context).
If a person is a rapist, you call them a rapist and not a murderer, and people know the difference. If a person is a convicted thief, you can call them a petty criminal, and nobody would confuse that with being a serial killer.
In fact, it's anti-relativist to say that a certain law is immoral.
We act as if the government is a legitimate, democratic entity, which of course it is on paper, yet the system is neither pure nor fair, and should we all be prepared to sacrifice everything to gain the simple personal liberty that was taken from us at birth?
Our wrath should be directed not at lawbreakers, but at the lawmakers who cause exceptional and unprecedented amount of harm through their corruption and stubbornness. Almost every problem associated with drugs other than the petty crimes of addicts are due to backwards drug policy which causes deaths due to poor/tainted drugs, alienation and fear for junkies, allows cartels and gangs to control production, and countless collateral damage.
On paper, you may be right, but it takes a callous and short sighted view to presume that any person deemed guilty of a crime are deserving of the punishment landed down to them not by the direct consequences of their actions, but other humans bent on exacting the will of those who's interests are neither rational nor inline with the general population.
It might be a comforting thought to hide in the mentality that if you break no law, you are safe, but life is far to short and precious thing to limit oneself to the life sanctioned for you by the powers that be.
For example, in my country, discussing LGBT or even marijuana would get you into serious trouble. Hence, as internet users, we should look beyond our time and space, ensuring freedom of speech.
Edit: This applies for the USA. Other countries I can't really speak about. Some are truly oppressive and I doubt just using the system would accomplish much. I understand that. I don't know how to solve that problem unfortunately.
So what is the correct action for the Fed? To ignore the law and not enforce it?
As far as I know, the Fed is part of the government and, obviously, enforce its laws. If there's a war on drugs, the Fed will try to control these networks in the internet.
Similarly, in other countries, their 'Fed' will try to control LGBT, feminist and religious online communities. Although a different case, the Internet is still the same.
If one is American and doesn't have issues, he/she should at least recognize it is not the same in other places and times.
So as of March 31st, there will be a zero tolerance policy in one specific park. It's one of the weirder and more short-sighted drug policies I've ever encountered, and a good example of this kind of move: from officially enshrined non-enforcement of a law to strict enforcement.
Wow. That's truly sad. I mean, if only talking about the subject already gets you into trouble, I don't want to know how LGBT people in your country actually live.
We always hear about these things in the newspapers and such and it always outrages me,, but to hear it from an actual citizen brings a different perspective, at least for me.
I truly hope this ends sooner rather than later OP.
It's one thing in a country like the USA where there is a (sometimes dubious) code of ethics and rule of law.
It's a completely different matter in an authoritarian society.
What do you think drives the impulse to suppress free speech? And do you really think this is a free speech issue?
Law does not equal to the "rules of society", at best they asymptote the "rules of society", if there is even something like that.
In programming term, law is the formalized code (ie a program) of a society's moral stance. And as any computer program, it has bug, unintended behaviours, and changing one part of it will affect other parts due to unknown complexity. Imagine how hard it is to do random stupid CRUD app at scale, our moral code itself is complex and ambiguous, applying to a few hundred millions users and it's a big fat mess that's barely coherent.
I don't have an opinion on the whole "war on drugs" one way or another. But it's straight up dangerous to believe that the law is the be-all end-all in a society, especially when more basic ideals are put down to be less important.
> they broke the rules of society and now society wants to punish them
Contrary to popular belief, every single one of us here on HN are still human, not robots. And we are decidedly part of society.
They likely disagree that their "crimes" ought to be illegal, and do not accept the legitimacy of any punishment for such behavior.
Why should they have to "make a choice" and make "better decisions" when they don't believe what they've done is wrong?
The only reason you are making this comment is because you don't believe drugs (and drug dealing) should be illegal.
Or is it different because fast forward to today, looking back those laws were obviously wrong?
In fact, as others have pointed out, doing so is even legally recognized in the form of jury nullification.
Do you have a source for that? I would have expected that he knew that what he was doing was wrong, but did not care because he was greedy. Disagreeing with a law and disregarding the law are two separate concepts. People often do one without doing the other.
His apology that he delivered before sentencing suggests that he knew it was wrong. Of course it would be incredibly foolish to take such an apology at face value, but it would be interesting if there are any statements made by him at other times that contradict this.
They should probably still accept the reality of the punishment, at least until the law is modified. Disobeying a law for moral reasons is only the first half of civil disobedience.
It costs the government money to put people in prison; not only the cost of their food, shelter, supervision, etc. but also the cost of removing a taxpayer from the workforce. Furthermore, a democratically elected government that is increasingly imprisoning more and more of its people is not likely to remain popular. It is in the government's best interest to only enforce laws that the majority of people are happy to obey.
Civil disobedience is a technique that protesters who think a law is unjust use to take advantage of this interest. By deliberately disobeying the unjust law and accepting the punishment for it, they help put pressure on legislators to change it. The government prefers a situation in which no laws are ever broken--that's why it makes such an extensive effort to incentivize citizens not to break them--but in the case where enough people feel it is in their best interest to break the law even with the punishment that comes with doing so, as people who use civil disobedience do, then the law must change if it is to reflect the will of the people.
The example you gave re: homosexuals/death penalty is extreme, but follows the same principles, as long as that government is democratically elected. Most democracies don't get to the point where they're throwing the death penalty around willy-nilly though, thank God.
It isn't the majority of all people that matters, just the most consistent individual groups of voters. And felons can't vote. How do you disenfranchise and silence entire communities of people? Disproportionately charge them with felonies. It's obviously broken.
Civil disobedience makes sitting ducks of powerless people. Idealism doesn't change laws, or political culture, or us-vs-them mentalities, or nepotism, or corruption, or revolving doors. Law makers change laws, and not easily. Occupy changed what exactly? Maybe it influenced the adoption of Cop Cams a little, but it had little effect on banking practices, and that system affects pretty much everyone.
Change isn't hopeless, but it doesn't work the way you'd hope it would.
If you were in power, and you feared civil unrest, it would be in your best interest to establish civil disobedience as the most severe form of legitimate protest. The idea that dissidents should not use violence but should instead submit themselves to arrest is very convenient for those who already have power.
In public schools across America, civil rights activists who advocated non-violent civil disobedience are lionized, while civil rights activists who advocated for techniques that did not involve martyrdom are either ignored or vilified. The first are given credit for the relative success of the civil rights movement, while the role of the later is severely downplayed. I do not believe that this is an accident.
Except when being used as a talking point to stir a base, they do not care. If anything, their budgeting practice of use it or lose it creates a desire to spend as much as they can.
And as the other commenters have pointed out, it is very very beneficial for the most virtuous form of protest to be 'break the law and accept punishment'.
But then I live in Southern California and nobody walks here.
Eating unhealthy food with a high fat and sugar content in your country is highly illegal. In this hypothetical country you live in, the offence of eating unhealthy food is a felony and punishable by time in prison. This law makes sense: It's for the good of the people. It's a victimless crime, but the war on unhealthy food needs to be enforced or else society will become so fat the entire system will collapse. People will be gorging themselves on big macs instead of showing up for work. Think about the children! The kids will get so fat they'll be unable to find a partner, and won't be able to get a job. People will become addicted to unhealthy food and permanently damage their bodies, causing them to die early.
We need to ban unhealthy food, and throw all of the law breakers in prison like they deserve.
It doesn't matter if you disagree or not, it IS illegal.
For example, Suppose you sell servers, and someone calls you up one day wanting 30 of them. You hit it off with this client, a friendship develops, and 6 months later that person, in an unguarded moment, says 'heh, I bet you never thought those 30 servers would end up as part of the 'Drugz, maaan' empire.' Now, unless you're a mandated reporter nothing criminal has occurred so far - you gained knowledge of criminal activity, but your friend hasn't ordered any more servers from you and so you're not taking part in any conspiracy, plus you were paid long before you learned this information (let's assume you can prove all this). However, if you bragged to someone else that you knew who the boss of 'Drugz, maan' is, then prosecutors would be able to subpoena your testimony whether you wanted to give it or not.
This is just a made-up example; I just want to point out that it's not necessarily a question of criminality or free speech. The government (ie the US government, following common law principles)has always been able to compel testimony except from a defendant or a small class of other people who have an intimate relationship with a defendant (doctor/attorney/clergy person). Even though a witness may object to being called and not want to help the prosecution at all (ie a hostile witness), there's still an obligation to testify truthfully. So, free-speech advocates, just because you're allowed to say something and you may not be putting your own freedom at risk, be aware that the subject of your speech could be impacted by your statements.
There are uncomfortable uses of state power in the drug war, like FISA warrants and civil asset forfeiture. This is not one of them.
Edit after reading replies to your comment: Well, I guess I predicted wrongly.
Anti-terroism laws are great, the problem is that everyone is a terroist.
Anti-criminal laws are great, the problem is that everyone is a criminal.
Anti-drug laws can also be great, the problem is that relatively safe drugs are incredibly illegal, and applied typically against minorities, and extremely unsafe designer drugs arn't and circulate amongst the public.
It's not so black and white as I see it, anyway.
If we assume a definition of great that allows the following sentence to be true: Racial discrimination can be great.
Also, while I realise this discussion spans other countries, heroin is not prescribed in the US. In Canada, it is largely prescribed to heroin addicts and not as a pain management mechanism. While I believe it is prescribed in England and probably Europe, the point stands that heroin is illegal for most people in most places.
But the law is so widely varied that to group all these people under the same heading and to narrow it down to choice is in quite a few cases simply in error, depending on who you are, where you are and what your genetic make-up is.
Lots of things that are criminal in one place are considered health issues in another, mental health issues in a third and non-issues in a fourth.
The next two paragraphs you wrote a bullshit though. You said you "made a choice." I suppose that was after you did some time, yes? What did you do before that? Deflecting and ignoring perhaps? Give them a chance to learn.
If your local authorities recognize the right to freely speak (and freely receive speech) you cannot commit a crime online.
In the case of buying or selling contraband, the crime occurs when the contraband physically transfers possession. The network is neither necessary nor sufficient to commit the crime.
Wrong. Everything is a liberty issue.
"This is a you're probably a criminal issue"
This is why this is a liberty issue. Or did everyone just forget that it's supposed to be innocent until proven guilty? Even in the fucking article you have Branwen saying that most of the guys are probably just red herrings but that one guy might be a valid target.
Yet here you are making broad, sweeping statements and dismissing any criticism of the justice process through the lense of "people get what they deserve"... and then you continue to attempt to establish your authority as a criminal as a means to prop up your other claims.
"I have no pity. None."
Let me ask you seriously, who of the people being targeted do you have no pity for? Is it only for NSWGreat? What about Branwen? The other guys? Are they all immediately criminals in your mind? Based off what evidence?
Here's another reason your post is asinine: the way the current system is set up, almost everyone commits a crime everyday. This hasn't applied quite as much in the computer world but due to the fact that the powers that be woke up and recognized the internet as a threat, more and more computer fraud and abuse act style legislation is popping up and pretty soon it will be the same online (e.g everyone commits an online crime once a day)
You do realize, through your self proclaimed vast experience, that the justice system is corrupted as fuck right, and that simply putting bad guys in jail isn't how it always works out right?
Some people enjoy prison. I imagine they're not common.
And you call me tough guy. That's funny. I told you I committed crimes, that I was a violent person in the past. Then you attack me and you want me to be civil? I don't have that in me sorry. I'm a victim of the system you see. Pity me.
If you commit a crime online don't be surprised when they seek to gain evidence against you. This isn't a liberty issue. This is a you're probably a criminal issue and law enforcement is coming after you. I don't protect drug dealers in my neighborhood because of their right to free speech and personal liberty so why would I protect these guys?
It just always makes me chuckle when criminals won't face the fact that they are criminals. They'll deflect, ignore, and basically try anything to escape the reality - they broke the rules of society and now society wants to punish them.
And just to give you a little background - I've done some time in a few bids for violence and drugs. I know what it means to be a criminal because I grew up as one. I have no pity. None. You should've made better decisions. I made a choice to leave that behind a long time ago, and you should too.