Genius Aaron Schwartz (founder of reddit) killed himself due to Obama's DOJ

[Serious]

You 16, you could do 20, come home young
Catch 50 years when you 26? Holmes, you're done

Where's the love

 

[Hiphoplives4eva]

Some of you people disgust me. You call man that took a stand a coward. What the fukk have you people ever done? Have you ever faced 50 years in prison, and a $1,000,000 fine? If not don't judge this man. RIP to Schwartz

My sentiments exactly. fukking cowards throughout this place. But its ok though, because Obama has a mean jumpshot!

 

[Fillerguy]

lol There are innocent ppl right now on death row and arent about to kill themselves. I can't feel pity for those who straight up give up. At least have the stones to off yourself until after the verdict is in. Dude is a co-founder of Reddit, a website where ppl determine what's "news worthy.

:rational:He had money, a powerful platform and a loyal following which cant do shyt for him let alone bring anyone to justice/prevent this from happening again.
So miss with that "fukk the government" and "unfair" shyt. He clearly wasnt build for standing for anything once shyt got real so

 

[NZA]

well, obviously now it's clear he wasnt built for it, but he seems like he had his heart in the right place.

i think government overreach on internet crime is going to cause some pushback. there already is meaningful change on the way p2p filesharing is prosecuted. in the early days it was draconian and you were allowed to just throw thousands of IPs into a court and never have to bring the actual evidence against each individual, now courts are forcing tougher standards on those cases, so the media rights tactics have been altering. chances are, this guy's death is going to make some changes as far as first time offenses for fairly minor stuff like this goes.

 

[88m3]

lot of talkers in this thread face something similar and get back to me

 

[Sensitive Blake Griffin]

it's a sad story, but I'm not gonna rationalize suicide

“A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers' days by forcing 'em to witness a grotesqueness.”

 

[jackswstd]

So Obama tied the noose and gave him a boost?

 

[No1]

The man taking a coward's way out is not the point.

The point is that this man was pushed to the brink because the Department of Justice bent over backwards to charge him for "stealing" words essentially. Both companies involved decided to not to press charges. MIT later went on to release most of what this man stole into public domain.

So, here's the deal:

This man was facing 35-40 years and $1,000,000 for stealing words while Jack Lew, Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner get a cabinet positions and Rick Scott wins governorship.

And you motherfukkers shrug it off like this is supposed to be normal behavior.

People like Bernie Madoff only get prosecuted because they steal from other wealthy people. When you defraud the lower classes or the taxpayer's money, you get key positions in government.

By the way, @zerozero was right, this man did more than anyone of here ever will to attempt to change the system and he did it quietly and humbly. He was one of the key driving forces against SOPA.

After reading this article, as for the first bolded, none of those things are remotely related and one of those names is not like the others. But your posturing. How was I suppose to react when I didn't even know who the kid was? Seems like a stand up guy.

To be honest, it takes away from the actual story which is about the law.

One court had ruled that the pertinent law related to situation's like his. Another federal court said it did not, the DOJ did not appeal that court's interpretation. So you had two competing interpretations, but the one saying that interpretation was wrong, was more recent, but it probably had no bearing over this district. So basically you had an overzealous prosecutor with an axe to grind that sought to bully this kid. His stances against SOPA and ties to Wikileaks probably did not help him. But basically, someone wanted to have a big case on their resume (that or they were getting external pressure).

The guy got a raw deal because the latter court's interpretation makes more sense and just from a common sense standpoint, it did not appear to be a big deal. What's most disappointing is that Ortiz is the first Hispanic to ever hold that position in Massachusetts and with her history, she should know a bullshyt charge when she sees one. No idea why she greenlit that prosecutor. But then I don't know what she was like when she was a prosecutor in Mass., maybe she was always like this. The whole thing has me confused. For the record, for those complaining about corruption, those Wall Street crimes aren't even in her domain. You need to ask New York prosecutors why they never went at Wall Street.

 

[SHO-NUFF]

 

[TrueEpic08]

Looks like most of the outrage was covered. Most of it.

I have major problems with the way that a suicide is thought of on this site (and in a lot of Western society in general) as some sort of negation of the productive value of the human, as if that is what absolutely defines what a human should be seen as and how he should be valued in a given societal context.

Garbage. All of it. Nothing but repressive, moralistic garbage.

Here's what the situation actually entails: A man, rather than become an example of the "justness" of a system of law predicated on distortions of their own values and exceptions that are applied in odious manners, decided to kill himself instead. I'm not going to postulate about his reasoning any more than that, but in my opinion, suicide takes remarkable courage.

I don't think a lot of people here think about death much, what death actually entails for consciousness and being (It's almost as much of a crime as suicide itself in our society), so here's my take on it: To go and kill yourself, on some level you have to confront the ingrained bar of death and fear of it that is instilled in the largesse of us as young children. Everything related to death is bad, those who kill are worse, killing yourself is thus at least a double crime, and in a way is more heinous than the murder, because you condemn yourself to an act against nature (whether you believe in some deity or not, Deus sive Natura or whatever). To look into that and state, "No, I will transgress and ultimately obliterate this bar and discrimination against death and suicide" takes remarkable will. It's the ultimate reversal of the most closely held of values in Western society.

To spit in the face of that monolith, to take into one's hands the ultimate act of free will, that being the jump into the barred state of life (That's all death is, just another state in life that has been societally marked as death...) before anything sanctioned by a society that places productive value on life will do it for you, will determine your will for yourself, is that not the ultimate form of courage in the West? I believe so, to an extent, which is why I am and will continue to be absolutely offended by anyone who denies this man because of his suicide. As I will be offended by anyone who says that suicide is "the coward's way out".

It's no such thing. It's the ultimate commitment of the self to your own will.

I'm not interested in talking about the case right now, mostly because everything has either been said or just because I dislike repeating myself. Maybe another time.

 

[nalej]

People that are belittling him for the suicide are basing it on religious beliefs I could care less what they think. Don't bother to rationalize with that.

 

[Fillerguy]

Looks like most of the outrage was covered. Most of it.

I have major problems with the way that a suicide is thought of on this site (and in a lot of Western society in general) as some sort of negation of the productive value of the human, as if that is what absolutely defines what a human should be seen as and how he should be valued in a given societal context.

Garbage. All of it. Nothing but repressive, moralistic garbage.

Here's what the situation actually entails: A man, rather than become an example of the "justness" of a system of law predicated on distortions of their own values and exceptions that are applied in odious manners, decided to kill himself instead. I'm not going to postulate about his reasoning any more than that, but in my opinion, suicide takes remarkable courage.

This man isnt some Buddhist monk lighting himself on fire for a cause. The feds were closing in so Aaron offed himself out of fear and depression. Stop romanticizing this poor man's death. "Western courage" is defined as confronting uncertainty and difficulty head on. Its showing endurance during times that would break ordinary men. Suicide doesn't change the world; getting dragged through the dirt does!


Suicide can never be the ultimate expression of free will because we're dying as it is. Every heartbeat, breath, cheeseburger is slowing killing us; those who commit suicide are just quickening a process that entropy started a while ago. To me living in spite of the inevitable, in a universe where life is constantly under the threat of wanton destruction, is the ultimate act of free will.

 

[zerozero]

this man is @TrueEpic08's soulmate in sentence syntax:

The Days When We Had Rest, O Soul, for They Were Long « Blogarach

While I’ve always thought that there was something particularly crass about our habits of erecting edifices of grief to strangers whom we perceive as similar to us even as we note and let pass without comment the deaths of so many more distant, more different people in our country’s wars and misadventures, and while I likewise find our habit of reacting with dismay to items like the prosecution-unto-death of Aaron Swartz even as we’re dimly aware that poorer, less connected, less important people are hounded to their lives’ ends by the dirty machinery of our penal system, which is powered by punishment wholly out of scale to any wrong, punishment which is itself quite often the only wrong ever committed, the sheer, tawdry, grotesquely ill-proportioned persecution of the young man for acts whose criminal taxonomy is something out of a Lewis Carroll poem is the sort of spectacle that really does make you wonder how long, actually, a society intent on destroying its genius in order to preserve the inbred rights of its rentier class to extract filthy lucre from the margins of genuine intellect can endure.

 

[GetInTheTruck]

Its okay, Obama cried for Sandy Hook victims.

 

[TrueEpic08]

This man isnt some Buddhist monk lighting himself on fire for a cause. The feds were closing in so Aaron offed himself out of fear and depression. Stop romanticizing this poor man's death. "Western courage" is defined as confronting uncertainty and difficulty head on. Its showing endurance during times that would break ordinary men. Suicide doesn't change the world; getting dragged through the dirt does!


Suicide can never be the ultimate expression of free will because we're dying as it is. Every heartbeat, breath, cheeseburger is slowing killing us; those who commit suicide are just quickening a process that entropy started a while ago. To me living in spite of the inevitable, in a universe where life is constantly under the threat of wanton destruction, is the ultimate act of free will.

How, exactly? Getting dragged through the dirt in a way that delegitimizes your entire position with distortions of it is meaningless. If you're being dragged through the dirt as nothing more than a plaything of circumstance and contingency, where's the courage or free will in that? It's nothing more than submission. In fact, if any type of will, it's the will to submission rather than any type of free will to be valorized.

And your second paragraph indirectly supports my position. If entropy and an agglomeration of circumstance is killing us anyway (which is a depressing way of thinking. Yes, we'll eventually die, but can't we have some joie de vivre about it? Even in thinking about death...), how can it not be the ultimate act of free will to rip away the control over your progression into that state of life from random circumstance for yourself, to take control of it and say, "I decide how I enter the state of death, and no one else." You are the one who allows yourself to slide into nullity, not the flow of life, or a random bullet or anything else.

What you state is a strong expression of will in and of itself, but that can go one of two ways: It can either be an expression of resistance toward an odious formulation or context (though the word "resistance" in and of itself denies the inevitable, and the dominion of unfavorable circumstance certainly does not equal any type of inevitably awful situation in my thought) or it is as I say above, a will to submission.

this man is @TrueEpic08's soulmate in sentence syntax:

The Days When We Had Rest, O Soul, for They Were Long « Blogarach

He could've split that into two or three sentences, but this is funny nonetheless (What you said; what he said is only funny if you have a particularly black sense of humor. Maybe you don't, but I watched a movie marathon of Vase de Noces and We fukk Alone this weekend, so )

To be serious, he's also not exactly wrong in his questions.