Quote from: Neville Fucking Bartoz on September 22, 2012, 09:31 amIn Europe it's grown legitimately and illicitly in France, Spain, Italy and the UK, in fact I personally know people who grow and harvest opium in Spain and the UK.Sorry Pine never seen you be so wrong before, but botanically stay quiet.I don't have a problem being wrong Neville! But I am curious about why I haven't heard of any real opium/heroin production busts in Europe or America e.g. underground farms. I have trouble believing LE has a 100% success rate at preventing heroin production right next to the consumer base. I have heard of only 1 bust, and that was an addicted couple trying to produce opiates in their backyard, literally a 2 bit affair, I don't think they succeeded in doing it. There seems to be a mysterious absence of information. Maybe this is a purely perceptual thing and it is the economics of the business itself that make it seem peculiar. e.g. LSD busts are relatively uncommon because of concentration of production.Quote from: Limetless on September 22, 2012, 11:04 pmThen why do you PERHAPS pretend to be female when you are male? :P Aren't you, if that is the case of course, treating people like dumbasses? I don't believe I've inferred my sex in any of my posts and I have never declared that I am male or female for abundantly obvious reasons. This just seems to be an obsession some of you have, demanding to know something which is none of your business in any way whatsoever. This place looks remarkably like an anonymous forum to me, not a bar.As for the rest of your post I think you conflate pragmatism with, basically, pushing other people around. I'm pretty sure the Kennedy family were perfectly capable of being both pragmatic and idealistic, they're practically an archetypical example of such. It's not that I don't understand where you're coming from Limetless, it is that I think you are just mistaken.--Coercion doesn't work and this is why:Using coercive methods doesn't make you a better businessman. Any advantages gained are usually temporary and maintenance of control becomes cyclic, it is rather similar to drug tolerance side effect. Next time you ride up with a baseball bat, people will be ready with knives, and so it goes. Since we are talking about heroin in this thread, compare and contrast the Italian Mafia and the Nigerian Igbo. Both deal in heroin. But although everybody imagines the Mafia have No.1 position in the market, this is not true. In fact the Igbo have control over approximately 90% of the market directly and indirectly, but almost nobody has heard of them. Do you know why? Because they don't kill, torture or threaten very many people. In fact in Igbo culture violence is relatively unusual in comparison to the Italian crime syndicates. This neatly puts them out of the spotlight, and they just deal. The key thing is ROI and they know it.Similarly, SR is highly effective at allowing vendors to 'just deal'. All that macho bullshit belongs to the 20th century. Something like 10 or 20 vendors have already been kicked off this site for threatening their customers. At SR, customer is King and we have a symbiotic relationship.Violence should be necessary only in the situation where we are defending ourselves against the enemy. This is not a idealistic philosophy, it is a pragmatic one. Violence is a last resort, but if it comes necessary to apply it, I shall not hold back my paw. You'll notice LE agents adopt zero tolerance policies when their fellows are murdered (even if it is not a written rule). This is in fact for good reason, otherwise anybody in the wrong uniform becomes a target across the city and a cycle of intimidation begins leading to more cop deaths. It is necessary, as they know well, to cut off any possible retaliation by use of overwhelming force to extinguish all opposition. This ultimately saves more lives than it kills. So, killing cops is a dumb idea on several accounts. But if the police begin indiscriminately murdering hundreds of drug vendors in some manner of moral purge, like the one Chairman Mao orchestrated, then it is a fight to the death.Basically, it behooves both drug vendors and LE to stay within the rules of the game, and that is why non violence is always preferable to violence. kmfkewm and shannon have mentioned rationales for punishing state violence via mail bombing, but that is a non-starter for me on 2 accounts. 1. It is bad and obviously I have sympathy for drug war victims but there is no purge. One, or even a group of cops making a dumb mistake is not the same as a nation wide purge.2. If you have to retaliate, then mail bombing is simply ineffective. It is indirect, meaning collateral damage and bad PR = less supporters and it also doesn't kill anywhere near enough people to be an example of overwhelming force. It's like using a peashooters vs a cannon.So in summation, the argument against coercion is that (google game theory: prisoner's dilemma scenario) it is usually Tit for Tat algorithm works most optimally, with the proviso that you initially cooperate with the other fellow in a gesture of good faith.Now you may be thinking: Ah! Those geeks! Hilarious! They know nothing of the "Real World".But actually the geeks are always right. And do you know what Limetless? In some ways the geeks have bigger guns. In another sense SR's biggest weapon is precisely that it doesn't have a standing army of enforcers.-- peaceful platypusQuote from: malycalypsejr on September 23, 2012, 09:41 pmA Florida based Gulfstream II jet aircraft # N987SA crash landed on September 24, 2007 after it ran out of fuel over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula it had a cargo of several tons of Cocaine on board..It worries me that anybody could be so incompetent to smuggle tonnes of cocaine without storing enough fuel for the journey and extra for backup. You know, even a non violent platypus can understand why heads may roll in Mexico. Some black market workers are very clever people. But then you have this not inconsiderable number of people who are the dumbest people I've ever met in my life, they are there, not by choice but purely because they couldn't get work in any other sector of the economy (and I don't mean for good reasons, like there being no job openings). I avoid them on general principals. I'm not running a fucking welfare state here.That aside, I wish Americans would wake up and realize these "rendition flights" are going to come back and bite them in the ass on an epic scale. Nobody will feel any sympathy for America if more terrorist attacks occur. None. The world will say you brought it down on your own head by doing Fascist-like things. And maybe they are right. Any true patriot should be looking at the state of America's morality on this subject with great concern. Why is there so little public protest over the fact America has a concentration camp on its doorstep? I didn't have much hope for Obama but I did hope he'd reverse the trend of increasing state paranoia. So I'm as disillusioned as a democrat.