181–190 of 201 posts
I liked Swartz a lot. He was idealistic and brilliant. His death was as sad as it was unnecessary. After his death though, I always found it inappropriate when obituaries and memorials called him a reddit cofounder. He joined reddit as part of a merger and didn't stay on long before being let go. The original founders didn't consider him a cofounder, and until his death did not have the nicest things to say about him…
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I don’t think Aaron’s criminal record would have impacted his life much at all. If anything it would have burnished his credentials and credibility as an activist.
He wanted to run for office in the future and saw catching a felony as a risk to that goal
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Some years ago I prepared a (very short) list of people whom I want my future kids to know about. The first name I put down was Aaron's.
i would like to hear about that list. I have a one year old daughter, and i want her to know the good people.
- Aaron Swartz - Carl Sagan - Stephen Hawking - Paul Allen
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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 f…
Driving someone to suicide because they acted against entrenched copyright interests was one of the most DoJ moments ever.
Aaron already suffered from severe mental illness - law enforcement did not drive him to suicide. Prosecutors offered him a plea deal if he took a six month sentence in a low security facility, which he turned down before killing himself. 99.9% of people his age would not end up dead by their own hands in that situation.
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Aaron seemed very opposed to large corporations and their control of information. The increase of control seems to be timed and in favor with the incoming administration. Government using business to do its bidding is very troubling, and I'm sure Aaron would have been very concerned about that. Remember, this increase of power can be wielded by the next populist leader and there are plenty of dark possibilities outsi…
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…
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I can show you people on the left who got deplatformed. What's that feminist lady who literally got banned for saying, "Men are not women."? I forget her name. I'm waiting for Joanne Rowling to get deplatformed for having the audacity to think that there's a portion of transgender men who are using certain aspects of the left's current moral panicking to infiltrate women's spaces. How dare she have an opinion that's…
Deplatforming is when a company kicks someone off its service for violating TOS. Canceling is when a community who previously supported someone sees another side of them and changes its mind. I believe you're conflating the two. But neither is a call to violence. As others have said, stop the false equivalence.
As soon as you take the position that words can no longer be exchanged, the only other option you've left open is violence.
This isn't - or at least shouldn't - be hard to understand.
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It's rather well documented that Aaron had been thinking about suicide long before getting mixed up with the DOJ http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/341150
Did you actually read that link? He wrote the alleged “suicide note” in a moment where he was suffering from extreme physical pain as that was his way of expressing it to give himself some mental release. On top of all of that he was dealing with getting fired which itself can be a mindfuck. To me the proximate cause 100% was the legal case against him - it inflamed any underlying issues and they just kept pressing.…
It's fairly clear that Swartz had a history of suicidal ideation, this wasn't of the DoJs making no matter how unfairly they may have treated him.
>To me the proximate cause 100% was the legal case against him - it inflamed any underlying issues and they just kept pressing. I could be wrong of course but I don’t think anyone will ever truly know what was happening in his head.
Obviously the cause was his preexisting mental issues, a healthy individual would not kill themselves in his situation.
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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.
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Nobody is defending plea deals here. Aaron was offered an excellent deal, regardless of how indefensible plea deals might be in general.
Aaron was forced into a case where his options are 1) take the deal, waive your right to a trial and serve a certain sentence, or 2) exercise your right to a trial and in revenge get a much heavier sentence (some people here mention a max of 30 years - even rapists and murderers can get less than that) since the commonplace nature of plea deals over time devalues the "true" sentences as written in the law because nob…
Those people either don't know what they're talking about or are deliberately seeking to mislead.
>According to Swartz’s defense attorneys, prosecutors claimed that they thought the judge might impose a Guidelines sentence as much as 7 years if Swartz went to trial and was convicted. That’s consistent with a loss valuation in the range of millions of dollars. In contrast, Swartz’s lawyers thought that Swartz might get just probation, which is consistent with a loss calculation at or less than $10,000.
http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aa...
>So, realistically, Swartz was facing anything from probation to a few years in jail if he went to trial — depending largely on how you value the loss he caused — and either a 4 months in jail or 0-6 months in jail if he pled guilty.