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Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

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Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#151

Post by jack-r-abbit »

DanBC wrote: post #99
mpyne wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we referring to the same legal system that routinely has people cycle through it without killing themselves?

Comparing rates of attempted and completed suicide between the prison and general population is tricky, partly because access to means and methods should be much harder in prison. But why are the rates of attempted or completed suicide so high?

I think mpyne was saying that there are plenty of people that go through the legal system and don't kill themselves. I don't think it had anything to do with comparing suicide rates in prison with other people. But instead pointing out that many, many, many people who are facing prison do not kill themselves. Some do. (adding my own opinion) But some people also kill themselves when facing divorce. Or job loss. Or Christmas. Depression is an illness. Depression lies.

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#152

Post by Ygg2 »

pdonis wrote: post #136
simpleigh wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought it a nice feature of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (bear with me here...) that the general confession covers "those things which we ought to have done" before mentioning "those things which we ought not to have done". All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.

All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. That still doesn't make doing nothing identical to doing something. You may consider them morally equivalent, but that doesn't make them identical. My point was about how to correctly describe what MIT did. If we start muddying our language because, oh, well, it's all morally equivalent anyway so it doesn't matter how we describe it, we end up not…

If you see a drowning man and do nothing you are guilty of inaction. In this case they knew what was happening and before issuing an informal warning went for the nuclear option.

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#153

Post by roel_v »

ogreyonder wrote: post #145
roel_v wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MIT grants guest access to its network while on the physical premises. > >MIT’s open-network policies at the time allowed anyone visiting campus to access services like JSTOR. Please not this misinformation again. I have no horse in this race, but he was repeatedly kicked off the network, told not to mass-download again, and yet he chose to find ever-more invasive ways of accessing JSTOR, eventually planting a comp…

> if you can't do the time, don't do the crime. That is entirely the point. He may well have been willing to do "the time". But "the time" is wildly disproportionate to "the crime". This is bad for the same reason that we don't execute everyone convicted of breaking the law. Furthermore, how does your logic apply to the NSA? A group of someones very clearly broke the law hundreds of millions of times after being told…

I'm not sure what points you're arguing, or what position you think I'm defending. He knew what 'the time' was, the saying doesn't go 'don't do the crime if you can't do what you feel is a reasonable amount of time for said crime'.

I'm also not sure why you think this whole NSA bruha is relevant to this. What 'the law' is for an individual isn't always 'the law' for state actors, otherwise every soldier who ever killed someone would have to be jailed. I'm not interested in discussing whether the NSA spying is lawful, the point of my post was to counter the demagogy of 'oh he was just downloading stuff within his rights and then they killed him'. He deliberately broke the law, which is exactly what 'activism' is, but then when the time came to reap what he sewed, well we all know what happened then. Which is a tragedy, and I feel for the family having had two suicides close to me last year, but if you're going to make a point about sentencing practices or penalties of computer fraud laws, make them about actual issues, and don't distort what actually happened for your rhetorical convenience, otherwise you're no better than Fox News. (all 'you' in this not directed at 'you you' but meant as a generic 'you' that refers to everybody acting as described).

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#154

Post by gress »

pdonis wrote: post #137
ajays wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Evil triumphs when good people do nothing"

See my response to simpleigh upthread.

So you want to avoid muddy language. Fine. Do you think MIT have any moral responsibility for what happened?

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#155

Post by gress »

roel_v wrote: post #153
ogreyonder wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you can't do the time, don't do the crime. That is entirely the point. He may well have been willing to do "the time". But "the time" is wildly disproportionate to "the crime". This is bad for the same reason that we don't execute everyone convicted of breaking the law. Furthermore, how does your logic apply to the NSA? A group of someones very clearly broke the law hundreds of millions of times after being told…

I'm not sure what points you're arguing, or what position you think I'm defending. He knew what 'the time' was, the saying doesn't go 'don't do the crime if you can't do what you feel is a reasonable amount of time for said crime'. I'm also not sure why you think this whole NSA bruha is relevant to this. What 'the law' is for an individual isn't always 'the law' for state actors, otherwise every soldier who ever kill…

How can you possibly assert that Aaron "knew what 'the time' was?" I'm sure he was aware that there could be legal repercussions, but I sincerely doubt that he thought he was risking a felony conviction, bankruptcy, and prison.

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#156

Post by pdonis »

Ygg2 wrote: post #152
pdonis wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. That still doesn't make doing nothing identical to doing something. You may consider them morally equivalent, but that doesn't make them identical. My point was about how to correctly describe what MIT did. If we start muddying our language because, oh, well, it's all morally equivalent anyway so it doesn't matter how we describe it, we end up not…

If you see a drowning man and do nothing you are guilty of inaction. In this case they knew what was happening and before issuing an informal warning went for the nuclear option.

If you see a drowning man and do nothing you are guilty of inaction.

Yes. But if you take a man and throw him in the water with chains around his arms and legs so that he drowns, you are guilty of something worse. I'm not saying MIT is blameless; I'm saying that there are degrees of blame, and the prosecutors deserve more than MIT does, because MIT failed to help but the prosecutors actively sought to harm.

In this case they knew what was happening and before issuing an informal warning went for the nuclear option.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. What "informal warning" could MIT have issued? They didn't know who had broken into their network until after Swartz was arrested. As for "the nuclear option", see above.

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#158

Post by pdonis »

gress wrote: post #154
pdonis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my response to simpleigh upthread.

So you want to avoid muddy language. Fine. Do you think MIT have any moral responsibility for what happened?

Yes, but the prosecutors have a lot more. Using muddy language obfuscates that.

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#159

Post by BlackDeath3 »

mentalhealth wrote: post #13
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

user: mentalhealth created: 17 minutes ago You're really not a very good troll.

I learned quite a long time ago that realistic discussion of mental health as it actually affects real people generally results in a lot of negative votes here on HN. But please, continue to dismiss my argument by attacking me and not the statement I made. More par for the course hereabouts.

I think the problem here is that you didn't really make an argument. You made an unsubstantiated claim (and misused "diagnosis" while at it) and just sort of left it there.

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#160

Post by PhasmaFelis »

fastball wrote: post #117
meritt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was facing 35+ years of prison. Suicide -- while I agree is a personal choice -- it's not exactly an unreasonable decision given the outlandish sentence.

Suicide is always an unreasonable decision, unless you face something which is literally worse than death. A lifetime in prison is not worse than death. At least you can still talk to your family. You can acquire new skills. There is the chance you get paroled early. Etc, etc.

> A lifetime in prison is not worse than death.

The fuck it isn't. Or, more civilly, that is definitely a statement on which reasonable people may disagree.

I'm not particularly depressed, but if I were actually sentenced to life in prison, I would check out in a hot second. There's no point. My opportunities to create joy in the world and to experience unalloyed happiness are done. The rest of my life would be nothing but marking the days and the years until death. It's a waste of good consciousness. I'm opposed to capital punishment because it's irreversible, but I do believe that death is more merciful than life in prison.

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