4 ms·

That's not the wrong layer of abstraction, that's a different problem entirely - idiotic drug laws - that ends up involving money laundering. If you really tho

That's not the wrong layer of abstraction, that's a different problem entirely - idiotic drug laws - that ends up involving money laundering. If you really thought that supplying drugs was actually evil at a conceptual level, e.g. sex slavery - which also exists, and benefits from money laundering - then its profitability would be irrelevant. I'm not "fixing money laundering" by legalising sex slavery. And "fixing money laundering" was the topic, not "fixing idiotic drug laws".

irjustin 6y ago
You're both not wrong in my eyes. It's that drugs have a disproportionally large section of the income pie. It's way more scalable than sex slavery. But you're right in that AML also includes things like terror financing which wouldn't be fixed by... legalizing terror??? Terror has a pretty sizable portion of the pie... maybe... the lines get blurry really fast when say a state level actor is terrorizing its own people.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  And then you're looking at a different problem with a different root cause. And the whole claim about "terrorism funding" is a farce anyway. It came out of the use of 9/11 to justify whatever privacy-destroying rules they wanted, so everything was "fighting terrorism" even if that made no sense. 9/11 was funded by the Saudis, who have their own country and banks. They didn't need to launder the money, they already had it. Moreover, "terrorism funding" is a joke. It costs only a few thousand dollars to fund a major act of terrorism. You're never going to stop it by depriving them of money because the primary cost of doing it is that it's punishable by death, not that they can't afford the monetary cost of a plane ticket or some fertilizer. So once again you have to use solutions that address the root of the problem. Which for terrorism would be things like putting terrorists in prisons and coffins, or not conducting foreign policy by propping up authoritarian regimes whose victims then get so pissed off that they're willing to give their lives over it.

irjustin 6y ago

You're both not wrong in my eyes. It's that drugs have a disproportionally large section of the income pie. It's way more scalable than sex slavery. But you're right in that AML also includes things like terror financing which wouldn't be fixed by... legalizing terror??? Terror has a pretty sizable portion of the pie... maybe... the lines get blurry really fast when say a state level actor is terrorizing its own people.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
And then you're looking at a different problem with a different root cause. And the whole claim about "terrorism funding" is a farce anyway. It came out of the use of 9/11 to justify whatever privacy-destroying rules they wanted, so everything was "fighting terrorism" even if that made no sense. 9/11 was funded by the Saudis, who have their own country and banks. They didn't need to launder the money, they already had it. Moreover, "terrorism funding" is a joke. It costs only a few thousand dollars to fund a major act of terrorism. You're never going to stop it by depriving them of money because the primary cost of doing it is that it's punishable by death, not that they can't afford the monetary cost of a plane ticket or some fertilizer. So once again you have to use solutions that address the root of the problem. Which for terrorism would be things like putting terrorists in prisons and coffins, or not conducting foreign policy by propping up authoritarian regimes whose victims then get so pissed off that they're willing to give their lives over it.