Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht is now on Twitter
He dictates what he'd like to say to family, over the phone or I guess maybe when they visit him.
If you're a twitter person, you should follow and show support.
Ross is innocent and mis-treated on multiple layers.
First it isn't actually a crime to use (or buy or sell) a drug that other people say they don't want you to have. People who try to stop you or lock you in a cage for doing so are the ones committing a crime and the ones to be worried about.
Layer two, he didn't actually buy or sell drugs. He created a marketplace protocol that other people used for the purpose of buying and selling drugs. Of course (wink wink, nudge nudge), he knows what's going. Of course. But the purpose of law is to technically sort out who did exactly what. Not to try to get into someone's head or have a feeling or attitude about the overarching picture of it. Describing what Ross did as illegal and tantamount to the buying and selling of drugs that occurred seems like it would open up a can of worms that makes all sorts of website operators liable for all sorts of things.
And lastly, the prosecution against him was rife with corruption, including biasing the jury with murder-for-hire suggestions that were never charged and eventually dismissed. And including agents being caught and penalized for pilfering money from Silk Road while they were working on the case. (Gee, hard to imagine they could have also manufactured evidence or messages that were allegedly sent by Ross 🙄.)
So even besides whether or not drugs should be a crime, just as a person who wants a legal system that acts at least vaguely out of judiciary principle, there's a whole field day of reasons to be bothered here and to want to support Ross.
The severity of his sentence (life without parole), combined with what he actually did and whether he's a threat to anyone, with the murkiness of whether this is actually a crime (to build the website), with the corruption that was involved to convict him...
just makes it kind of obvious that he's being treated unfairly and victimized.
Makes it obvious that there's no attempt to coldly and plainly apply law here.
I'm no legal expert, but if there's confirmed and obvious corruption involved in an investigation over a parking ticket or some petty crime, I think no judge in their right mind would issue a punishment. And you'd easily get the case revisited if the corruption came to light later. But when someone's life is at stake, it's ignored?
At first, when u saw the headline, I thought he had either gotten out or had access to a phone in prison. Good thing you inserted a link to the yahoo post
First off, the government has no right to criminalize personal behavior that harms no one. When people get arrested and charged for victimless crimes, it hurts.
Plus, this fight against drug has been called a sham by many. There's this conspiracy that major drug cartels want most drugs to be illegal. This will help them retain their relevance and all. It's not of my business but this #FreeRoss is
I moved over to sign the petition and I found these on the page
And this
I believe that says it all.
I shared the link with a couple of KY email contacts. Maybe I'll write a post on it, maybe not. I'm resteeming this though
Steem on
Thank you so much for your care and support for him. I'm sure it would mean the world to Ross if he saw this, and saw how kind souls can rally behind him.
And you're right, the war on drugs is so ugly and destructive. Rips apart families and ruins lives. The little political things people bicker over.. while there's real injustice like this.
And ya, I think the cartels thing is true. I feel like the government is probably in bed with the cartels or even just running the cartels or who knows what. However exactly it works, lots of money is made off of its illegality. And then more money for the prison industrial complex on top of that (probably a little job security and more need for cops too).
So lots of money, and in turn a lot of brainwashing people that there's a need for drugs to be criminalized.
I think I've heard that this is an issue where people are rather quick to change their mind and oppose drug criminality, when it's brought up and argued to them.
So at least there's that.
Steem on, brother!
Ulbricht's punishment is not even about making an example out of him. It has more to do with the silent of terror. The idea is not to make an example out of him because examples are easily forgotten. I think they are trying to create a tombstone so big that people would remember it for far more than just a few small years.
Terror changed hands some time ago. Rocket launchers were exchanged for the pen of judges .... we are just seeing the after effects.
Interesting take. Ya, we're essentially in our infancy of becoming a civilized culture imo…
For the most part we live pretty civilized and are starting to figure it out. But then sometimes people are barbaric, and they do it as a "pretend to be civilized" process of a judge wearing a robe and pretending that the law says this and it's all orderly and makes sense blahblah
But when you weed through it, it's just people being thugs and capturing somebody to protect whatever interests. The "legal process" is essentially like an ex post facto excuse or justification for being barbaric and taking him.
For a long time time I thought that people simply don't care anymore. It took me sometime to realize that people not as apathetic as they are despondent. The whole system is built in way that it won't defeat you simply by using brute force (although that happens too). The system defeats you by tiring you out gradually, till you are forced to give up.
I think the recent resurgence of alternate lifestyles, Living in the nature, peaceful anarchos, crypto, etc, might have a lot to do with the current state of human mind at large.
Ya, it's complicated. I think definitely improving tho.
It's weird.. like you like to think if you were kidnapped at gunpoint in a crowded shopping mall or something, that you'd have everyone rushing to your help. And you probably would.
So if you're wronged by the system, hopefully the same kind of outpouring would happen.
But it usually doesn't. I don't know how to characterize it. I guess as long as we still have states and a top-down hierarchy to everything, people are necessarily in a frame of mind where it's easy to believe the main storyline and trust the authority.
The alternative/new media is in many ways a reverse reflection of the mainstream/old media. Sort of like the mainstream/old is still driving it, and the alternative gives their alternate view of the same storyline. I'd like to see them be their own drivers more often.
But ya, it keeps chipping away.. the people branching out like you mention, I think, evolves the overall mindset.
What happened to this guy was extremely sad and just shows how govt can use any normal random person for its advantage. The whole story was spun and this guy was projected as the mastermind behind a drug marketplace. Politicians will use funds from drug business from their facade companies.
It was tragic what happened to him. Just tragic and kind of fills one with disgust for the govt.
Right, it's like to just do the trial fairly.. even if they got the conviction, it makes it obvious how brute and thuggish the government is being. But if they can plant some seeds of him being a bad guy plotting murders and stuff, then people can conflate the punishment with that image of him, and it doesn't bother them as much.
It's kind of funny that Ross is just some normal guy who only ever talked about non-violence. Lol. And this is their version of evil mastermind that society needs to be afraid of. 😆
Its insanity, at least with assange there is sympathy. Because people are more aware of the good he is doing. With this guy, people had no clue what he did. Today if you ask a random person about silk road, they will think it was designed by some drug cartel leader to facilitate the drug trade. Absolute junk.
Just check his Wikipedia page - drug trafficker, money launderer, blah blah. May be that's why satoshi nakamoto stayed hidden.
That's a good point, that what he did is sort of vaguely in the realm of Assange, they're both mostly a political type of threat, yet they're seen as kind of totally different categories of people.
I guess they needle the system in different ways. I feel like Ross is actually a bigger threat. Wikileaks is more famous, but exposing dirt like that, while I'm sure it's annoying to them, doesn't seem like a systematic threat to anything. Ross was a pretty direct threat to all the interests surrounding drug illegality.
And then of course people are just kind of used to "drugs = bad", and they know what a drug lord is. So then they just cast Ross as that sort of thing. Whereas with Assange it's more unprecedented and there isn't a dark and scary model to lump him into.
Whether I support drugs or not is irrelevant in this case. When I hear about corruption, manipulation and setup, it makes me furious.
Following!
Petition signed!
Good luck to Ross Ulbricht!
Almost 60k already signed.
that's awesome, you're a boss!!!
Please Help Ross, he has no Obi-Wan Kenobi, we are his ONLY HOPE.
https://www.change.org/p/president-of-the-united-states-clemency-for-ross-ulbricht-serving-double-life-for-a-website
PLEASE spread the word after signing.
Post the link to the petition anywhere you can online.
Post to your own Twitter and Facebook pages.
Please Help Ross he needs US all.
I think he say gudbye to his family... fantastic article I love your work...
I don't upvote random nonsense spam comments, sorry
You mean the dude wasted his time composing that comment?
That's sad
😂😂
loll ,, ya all the creative energy he put into that, it was all for naught!!
it's funny the way those comments stand out when you post something you feel passionate about..
it's like hmm wow, that's really really lame lol
Some people upvote those comments, I don't get it. I don't want to encourage them. Steem is better without fakeness.