Died? No. Murdered. Murdered by MIT and JSTOR
Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago
131–140 of 201 posts
Re: Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've often spoken with my more left-leaning friends about the need to try and find middle ground with my more right-leaning friends, and quickly. Donald Trump was an incompetent, by almost any measure you want to use. However, he shifted the Overton Window dramatically. When the Republican version of Barack Obama bursts onto the scene - someone eloquent, competent, and thoroughly able to move effectively in the polit…
I'm bullish on Democrats due to demographic shifts, but they'll need to gain more senators from rural states if they want to pass major legislation. GOP has to somehow consolidate Trumpists with Never Trumpers, may be tricky to do. How will independents respond to GOP after Trump is finished? Will they forgive and forget? So, in my view, both parties need to adapt or they will not achieve that much. Imagine if Dems h…
In this election, Trump received more votes than any other sitting president in history. He lost and now the Democrats seem to assume that those 75M people will suddenly change their beliefs because 78M people hold different beliefs. Moreover, it seems that people voted against Trump more than for Biden because they thought Trump was rude and distasteful.
They fail to recall that this was actually a political route for Democrats. Democrats lost seats in the House when they were expected to gain. They eked out parity in the Senate that probably disappears in 2 years. More importantly, they lost almost all state government races.
Remember, Trump's biggest policy positions (bring our troops home, bring our jobs back, hard on china, the wall, etc) were all Democrat positions a mere 5-7 years ago. Now that the Republicans have taken over those more centrist ideas, they have gained a huge number of supporters.
The Democrats are fractured between centrists and progressives. That fracture is much worse than the Republicans because it is ideological while the Republican fracture is a cult of personality.
Trump will fade. Another person will replace him. They will have all of his populism and charm (yes, he's a natural entertainer). They won't have his rude abrasiveness. He'll then have the majority needed to censor the other side now that the Republicans have decided they agree with the progressives on that point.
Re: Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
99.9% of people were not him. > law enforcement did not drive him to suicide People can keep repeating this, and it will still be false. LEO and Prosecutor action was the proximate cause of his actions. You can make moral arguments that, say, the prosecutor was Just Doing His Job, and I may even agree with you. But you and everyone else are simply wrong about cause and effect, and attempting to blur that tells me mor…
A substantial number of people commit suicide following loss of one's job. Would you feel it's fair to say that their bosses drove them to suicide? I'd say no. Most of such cases, like Swartz, had existing mental conditions that are primarily responsible for their decision to commit suicide. Loss of a job may have been the event that ultimately prompted the act, but the driving factors were mental conditions. Saying…
People are obsessed with blame. Get over it. This isn't about blame or guilt. It is about cause and effect.
I think it is "fair" to describe action B as following from action A, when there is good reason to consider them related.
If you revise your observations of reality based on what you fear might happen later, you're not observing reality.
Re: Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago
#134I commented this recently on a similar post a few months ago, but it's relevant here (lightly edited for accuracy).
Even now you see comments in this thread pretending it was succumbing to depression rather than admit our responsibility and the immense pressure that was placed on him - supremely irritating.
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I remember seeing later that his legal defense fund was posted here for help because the cost of the defense for a federal crime (even though he’d likely win) was 1.5M, and the first comment at the time was someone being nasty to him. (post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529484 , comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529609)
I remember the emails from MIT that showed the IT department going after him, and then when caught MIT choosing to do nothing rather than help.
Even JSTOR backed down rather than move forward.
It still makes me angry and MIT’s reputation was seriously harmed in my eyes because of it.
Journals blocking access to publicly funded research by extorting desperate academics for prestige is what’s wrong. It’s a broken system due to bad incentives that’s worse for everyone except the journals that enrich themselves on the back of publicly funded research, by locking it away and charging enormous rent.
The punishment was disproportionate to a crime that, while possibly illegal, was on the morally right side of a broken incentive structure. He didn’t even get the chance to put the articles up, he downloaded them from a network he had rightful access to. His main crime was leaving a laptop running in an open closet, and downloading more than they wanted.
Luckily Sci-Hub continued his work.
The legal thing and the right thing are often not the same: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html
Maybe the worst part was after his suicide reading comments here about how you can only blame the person who committed suicide since no one else is responsible for the ultimate act.
If you choose not to see a causal link between the pressure of this prosecution and his death, I think that says more about your own motivated reasoning than it does about reality.
This was a failure of our community.
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On a meta note, one thing that bothered me about 'The Internet's Own Boy' were his interviews on Russia Today. He didn't understand the extent to which he was being used by foreign adversaries to push a narrative favorable to them. That doesn't mean his arguments are wrong, but they're in a quite misleading context. If you go on RT you should do it like Yascha Mounk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cucX1IO78lM
In hindsight, wikileaks was more an arm of Russian propaganda than Aaron understood.
Re: Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've often spoken with my more left-leaning friends about the need to try and find middle ground with my more right-leaning friends, and quickly. Donald Trump was an incompetent, by almost any measure you want to use. However, he shifted the Overton Window dramatically. When the Republican version of Barack Obama bursts onto the scene - someone eloquent, competent, and thoroughly able to move effectively in the polit…
I'm bullish on Democrats due to demographic shifts, but they'll need to gain more senators from rural states if they want to pass major legislation. GOP has to somehow consolidate Trumpists with Never Trumpers, may be tricky to do. How will independents respond to GOP after Trump is finished? Will they forgive and forget? So, in my view, both parties need to adapt or they will not achieve that much. Imagine if Dems h…
I can't reply directly to hijile below, so I'll leave this here:
>>Democrats seem to assume that those 75M people will suddenly change their beliefs
as long as 78M people continue to hold their beliefs, I really don't think the democrats care. A minority vote is a minority vote - whether its 4.9 percent or 49 percent. Personally, I think the dems will work more towards eliminating the EC and gerrymandering thats gone against them.
edit: change second '4.9' to '49'. I really need more coffee..
Re: Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
This can only be true if Republican efforts at voter suppression continue to be successful while also states don’t choose to forgo the electoral college. Republicans only win because of a tremendously successful campaign to not let people vote. They are very much a minority party by any measure except outsized influence. They have fewer voters. Fewer people identify with them. Fewer people support their policies. If…
There's an interesting problem here, though, which is why the US federal government is structured as it is: there are fewer people in, say, Utah than in California. And generally people in California may have different interests than those in Utah. But as citizens of the US, Utah(ians?) deserve representation at the national level, which they just wouldn't have in a first-past-the-post popular vote. A direct popular…
The question of what to call citizens of Utah is a long and thorny one; currently the US Government Printing Office uses "Utahn." [0]
Apparently this was a big 'issue' in the 80's, when the US government usage was "Utahan" or "Utahian," while the local usage was "Utahn." Webster's currently lists "Utahan" as the correct usage, as far as I can tell (their website is trash - searching for "Utahan" and "Utahn" just redirects to the "Utah" entry.
[0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-STYLEMANUAL-2016/pdf...
Re: Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago
#137Really sad. Rest In Peace Aaron.
Re: Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, he was offered a bad deal. Copyright violations very rarely result in prison for first time offenders. He also did a mild case of hacking which together might have resulted in a short sentence. But if he had gone to court I doubt he would have got more than 4-6 months, which is the same thing as the plea deal.
If he had taken the deal and not killed himself he would be alive now and a free man 8 years later. Instead he is dead forever. I think the deal was not that bad by comparison.
It depends on how you value freedom.
Re: Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago
#139Aaron inspired me so much with his clear ethos in his heart.
I could feel his pain in his blog writing so clearly, almost as if he could feel the pain of the whole world and it crushed him.
Re: Tell HN: Aaron Swartz died today, 8 years ago
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm bullish on Democrats due to demographic shifts, but they'll need to gain more senators from rural states if they want to pass major legislation. GOP has to somehow consolidate Trumpists with Never Trumpers, may be tricky to do. How will independents respond to GOP after Trump is finished? Will they forgive and forget? So, in my view, both parties need to adapt or they will not achieve that much. Imagine if Dems h…
Or remove the electoral college (which is an anti-democratic contrivance originally meant to cajole then-slave states into remaining in the Union[0]) and make voting mandatory to completely nuke the GOP's strategy of voter disempowerment (which is their best hope as demographic shifts increasingly favor the Democrats). 0: https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/
The South could have a 3/5 slave vote with or without an electoral college. That was related to total votes and representatives in congress. If anything, Shay's Rebellion was the real reason. The majority (farmers) voted with their guns to steal from the minority (bankers).
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for supper. Several Federalist papers are dedicated exclusively to this idea and the problems of previous democracies. Defending minorities (specifically religious minorities) was the primary reason for going with a Constitutional Republic instead.
The Senate was a similar concession that smaller or less populous states deserved equal voice to larger states. I'd note that if slavery were the reason for the formation, then the Senate would have been a bad idea as it stripped power away from the Southern states (as that article points out, Virginia alone had more than 10% of the total House votes).