U.S. Senator Questions Attorney General about Aaron Swartz

Geesh, and all anyone else here is saying that his political beliefs on anything else aren't relevant to anyone who is genuinely interested in helping the cause that Aaron fought for. Cornyn, for whatever his agenda might be, is trying to help. And that isn't good enough for you because he's a Republican. And that is just pathetic partisanship.

You're blasting Corynyn because you don't agree with his politics. Fine. But that has absolutely nothing to do with anything here.

Try imagining GP comment as being directed towards those who believe that someone who agrees with you on a few issues is your eternal faithful ally and someone who disagrees with you on a few issues is a partisan demagogue who will oppose you at every turn. There appear to be many such people commenting on HN stories related to this series of events.

Hey, if you Googled it and somehow ended up with the impression that Cornyn might have supported granting Habeas Corpus rights and opposed the Bush Administration's wiretapping, that would definitely be worth a post raising the issue. But that wouldn't happen, because this isn't a fuzzy or subjective matter.

A Senator's stances on issues like these are simple, objective, easily falsifiable facts. This is one or two steps away from demanding a citation for "Barack Obama is a Democrat." Like, if you can't easily figure out for yourself whether it's true or false, the only possible reason is that you didn't care enough to try.

What's reasonable to me is: not putting any politician on a pedestal. They all suck for a lot of reasons.

Unfortunately, you see it on web forums all the time that people have no medium or long term memories: basically they see some politician agreeing with them on some topic and there is much raving about how awesome that person is. Two weeks later, the same politician is against the prevalent view on some other topic, and they are the devil incarnate.

Further there is a trend in these discussions to turn everything into "this guy is from this party, so that party is on my side!" craziness, and piles of confirmation bias start happening.

So I see comments on how various parties will spin any event and posture themselves towards it, with references to a larger political climate - such as the one you quoted first - not as "anti-$PARTY" or "hate", but as a reminder that the politicians are always playing, a "here is the game now" statement.

Similarly, regarding your second quote, calling a politician a clown, is not anti republican anything. The senator has a history of open access, but also has a questionable history in larger civil liberties contexts. The senator posturing himself as a champion of Aaron Swartz because of the open access issue, is just that. We've seen a lot of stuff lately reminding us of Aaron's stance on, e.g. Chomsky and the concept of manufactured consent. This politician is in fact doing what Aaron didn't like in the manufactured consent game. It is a reasonable statement to point it out. Note: when the framing of this as "Obama's DOJ" and other types of strong political gaming that will occur around this, no one will mention Ortiz has been a US Attorney since 1997, and therefore doing this sort of action for many administrations. It will turn into a discussion of which party is responsible, rather than a reasonable discussion about what should be done about an actual problem.

In this context, it is reasonable for anyone who wants to address the problem, rather than the politics, to take steps in discussions like this to remind everyone that the person in question may in fact agree with them on this issue, but they, and the party they represent certainly don't agree on every issue. This is a giant problem - the thinking that any party agrees whole-heartedly with your stances, or that any given politician has the right answers to all problems.

Finally it should be noted that tptacek gets accused of hating just about every single group that exists at some point. It seems he is in that rare place of "he thinks for himself", and so gets these sorts of "super partisan" accusations about hating the democrats a lot too. Isn't it great when your knee jerk defense of your chosen favorites causes you to attack someone who regularly gets attacked for being too much on your side?

Decent letter, I'm glad someone from the Senate stepped up. I would add this :

Seventh, really? 35 years for a kid who learned his lesson and didn't do something horrible in the first place? Some decency and common sense people.