Party Vibe

@p0ly 454649 wrote:

if class d does come in you know sites like silk road are gonna shoot up in popularity and will be discussed a lot. great, more crime police good solution.

TBH much more likely that people would just go back to conventional methods of trafficking controlled substances which have worked for as long as drug control existed without requiring complex encrypted computer systems (which can attract more attention than simply buying drugs at a party). In Europe others will take the risk of what aren’t always long prison sentences – I think the max penalty for hard drugs dealing in NL is only 5 years)

Already the ban on mephedrone caused an immediate rise in quality and trafficking of MDMA pills on both sides of the North Sea…

@DaftFader 476252 wrote:

I have to agree with poly on this one GL … I can’t see any “crack down” having much effect on what’s going on at the moment. I’d have to be something pretty brutal to make a proper dent in it.

“they” will do brutal when it gets to being a problem. same as any other form of drugs or social control, and same as in China, iran etc. These countries are only like that because they are only 100 or so years backwards from social control strategies used in modern Northern Europe, which were abandoned as our nations becaome more powerful and prosperous. BTW one big reason Asians and Middle Easterners are so harsh on drugs control is because they feel that the drugs culture was succesfully used by Europe to build and hold colonies/empire – and there is some evidence to that effect coming from both the UK and NL (where an early form of gedoogbeleid was used to keep hold of colonial territories in SE Asia). Ironically I think this is also the real reason why so many drugs are still about, as the leaders of Eastern nations are aware of their value to get revenge for colonialism in the last century. All this is recent history, not ancient history. people in our own living memory can just about remember it, though many are old and prefer not to talk about it.

it would of course make more sense to tolerate and legalise the sales like petrol/gasoline other oils/chemicals and put in safety procedures, but even then we (in the whole world) still fight wars over the stuff, and manage to spill it everywhere where its not wanted yet make it too pricey for those what need it and/or catch places on fire…)

That said, drugs are tolerated a lot more in mainland China than many realise and they stopped using death penalty in Malaysia and Singapore for small posession since about 10 years ago, but that is only because of relative economic good times meaning they can afford to be more tolerant. Come to think of it, the UK came very close to NL style decrim in the late 90s when Blair first got in..

China’s already worked out how to add loads of lag into TOR nodes and make them near unusuable, whilst independently the Germans and Dutch are logging all the traffic in order to crack it (or at least to geolocate it) because spammers and pornographers have abused the service.

The mainstream Internet may seem “hard to control” but easy and affordable access to it depends on a lot of resources which are now in the hands of big corporates and are not trivial for wannabe geek/hacker types to replace with the same reliability, affordabilty and ease of use as todays corporate kit (or the revolution promised by the Internet would have happened by now).

There’s also “black swan” events which get picked up by tinfoil hat mob such as solar flares, which could have a knock on effect of disrupting telecoms infrastructure and removing the major surplus of resources that stuff like encryption needs and even mainstream frivolous uses of the internet such as facebook, youtube, even these websites such as party vibe…

its not impossible to build alternative comms networks away from internet (it is why 21st century germany and the UK still transmit weather forecasts on the radio airwaves using WW II technology) but I read a lot about Northern European military history (to practice my languages) and when things really get heavy its not always guaranteed that the sorts with mindsets closely aligned to technology / engineering follow/support the right-on/cool people. Also “right on cool people” tend not to want to wait in a line to send a telegraph message (encrypted or not) which is is a queue of several to be sent across HF radio and might take hours or days to get through (a prog rocker called Mike Oldfield made a song in the 1970s called Portishead Radio because he had to wait in a long queue to speak to his missus as the Post Office communications centre for shipping was very busy. And this was only 3 decades ago).

also even having decriminalised drugs wouldn’t guarantee a tolerant, just, liberal society (they were decriminalised in all nations during world war II including the Axis ones). I wouldn’t even rule out first a brutal crackdown on “better” drugs followed by tolerance of ones with just slightly more side effects to put off long term use/lifestyles revolving around them. After all its essentially what has happened with MDMA and first generation amfetamine type stimulants and led to the issues with mephedrone in the first place. In fact worth considering how much remains “just” legal and how even in the UK posession is still treated fairly leniently (penalties were quietly downgraded this year)