I don't particularly think there's much to be gained by going against the hivemind on all of this, but I also don't "blame" the prosecutors for Aaron's death. Aaron killed himself. Suicide and depression are tricky things, and not one single person currently living knows what the full story is. If that's enough to get me labeled as "usually reasonable" as well, then so be it.
When you say things like "we don't know the full story" or "suicide is tricky", you aren't taking a reasonable middle-of-the-road position you're effectively endorsing the status quo. By refusing to pick a side when there is a disagreement or struggle between groups of unequal strength you still pick a side: you side with the stronger group. When people are bullied, be it in the schoolyard on by the government, the power difference is immense. That means by default the bully will win. It's just that simple.
We don't have all the information. In life you never have the information you need to make perfect decisions. But we can ask ourselves if we're OK with the status quo, and if not, try to change it.
To reduce the whole affair to simply "Aaron killed himself." is crude and far from reasonable.
By refusing to pick a side when there is a disagreement or struggle between groups of unequal strength you still pick a side: you side with the stronger group.
"Blame" is an interesting concept though. In almost any complicated scenario, there is plenty of "blame" to be spread around and you can reasonably argue that multiple different entities are to "blame" for $WHATEVER.
To use a somewhat tangential example... when Ron Paul talked a lot about "blowback" vis-a-vis US policy in the Middle East a few years ago, people said "Ron Paul is blaming America for 9/11". Well, yes... and no. What Ron was saying, in essence, is that there is culpability in multiple places, which is a more nuanced position than "America is good, terrorists are bad, Team America, Fuck Yeah!" OR "We were responsible for 9/11".
So with that in mind... I don't exactly "blame" the prosecutors for Aaron's suicide either. But that doesn't mean I don't think they hold some degree of responsibility, and it doesn't mean I support the status quo, or that I don't want changes made in the law, the sentencing guidelines and the behaviour of prosecutors.
IOW, it's not necessarily the case that either "side" bears 100% of the responsibility for what happened.
Basically my thought is that blame is not zero sum. Assigning some blame from one party should not in any way be taken to mean another party is not less to blame. Multiple parties could each be (for lack of better terminology) "100% to blame".
Mathematics isn't failing here. You're mixing contexts. If you look at it from the perspective of the victim, it's less than 100% of the blame. If you look at it from the perspective of a single perpetrator, they're 100% to blame because the other perpetrator doesn't absolve them of any of the blame. If you try to add the 100% of each perpetrator in isolation together, you're making an error.
My point isn't that mathematics is failing somehow, but rather that blame or responsibility is something that cannot be summed. Trying to do so is like trying to add up happiness and sadness. Ethics, and the underlying human emotion, don't have a system of arithmetic that we are aware of.
Have an upvote, for an interesting comment. I'm not completely sure I agree with the sentiment, but you make an interesting point. I'm not sure what exactly it would mean to say that two different parties are both "100% to blame" for something, but I suspect there's at least kernel of something there that I would agree with.
As a simple and obviously rather obscure example to think about zero-sum blame, consider two men sitting in a room facing opposite walls. In front of each of them are identical control panels; in order to launch the nuke they both need to issue identical commands at the same time.
Both should be considered fully responsible for anything that happens. I would would not consider "Well he turned his key too!" to reduce blame in any way, they would both be to blame just as much as if the system only required one operator.
Wether this principle of non-zero-sum blame can be applied to situations less obviously engineered is something I can't really support, but it is a point of view that I hold.
"If you're not for us you're against us" is a poor counterargument, no matter how eloquently stated. There must be room for more nuanced positions. If insufficient knowledge is not sufficient cause for having no position, the only possible result is complete polarization.
Perfect information is rarely available for any situation, yet one must interpolate the best that one can. It seems to me that we have more information than most.
When more information is available, we then adjust (Bayesian interference).
A reasonable middle-of-the-road position would be to not take sides until enough facts are known about the subject at hand, and even then submit them to a careful analysis and consideration, context is very important. And also, a person must have the right to not be compelled to choose a side, even in the face of overwhelming evidence i.e. everyone can have their opinions independently of what is really going on, we might not like it but we have to put up with it.
It is not about taking perfect decisions, it is about taking the best decision with the information at hand, and if there is not enough information, then I personally would not take a side most of the time (I am only human).
And I say all this while myself taking what you would define as "Aaron's side". I am only debating the philosophical and practical implications of what you said.
I actually agree with you, but this is exactly the opposite of what the author is saying. Charles Pierce (a long-time Boston politics reporter, not a "tech guy") isn't blaming Ortiz for killing Swartz, he's blaming her and her husband for being disingenuous in their public statements about the prosecution and for the casual way they mention a six-month Federal sentence as if it's nothing.
He also attacks the obviously political motivation behind the prosecution:
I guarantee you, if Aaron Swartz hadn't killed himself, he'd have been in an Ortiz For Governor campaign commercial one day.
But that's ridiculous. The only thing that made this case big news was his death.
It's worth reading over old HN threads on the criminal case. The consensus was pretty close to my position now, which is that prosecutorial discretion worked pretty well in determining the charges. That doesn't make the outcome any less sad; nor does raging at the wrong people.
> prosecutorial discretion worked pretty well in determining the charges.
The original charges or the pile of wire fraud charges added at a later time to make for good press? She used her discretion to add piles of charges on him and then claims she didn't want a long prison sentence. At the very least what she said is inconsistent.
I'm not sure I buy that. Aaron Swartz is not exactly Willie Horton. Even if you paint him as a dangerous computer hacker, that doesn't strike me as a particularly convincing political ad.
Imagine the words: "Ortiz has put DANGEROUS HACKERS behind bars!" spoken in dramatic politic ads speaker voice, with the words printed on the screen over a blurred image of jail bars.
That's easily the sort of thing that could be in a political ad. It says not only that she was a good prosecutor, but that she is probably technologically savy as well. I doubt they would bother referring to that particular incident by name (it is often best to be somewhat vague, to keep yourself a hard target to attack).
(This said, I also suspect the politics aspect is more about favors and less about advertising).
I guess so. There may well be some truth to the charge that the case was prosecuted aggressively because it was likely to earn a lot of press. But I think you're right. It seems very unlikely Aaron Swartz was the lynchpin of any grand political strategy.
Willie Horton is an inapt comparison for every scenario in which Ortiz would try to capitalize on her record that I can think of. Willie Horton was a spoiler, not a feather.
I recognize that, but I think it's wholly beside my point, which is that it would be very hard to make Aaron Swartz and his crimes sound threatening. I don't think MIT computer hackers are what keep voters up at night. It might be true that politics played a role in the case, but it's silly to think this case would have been an important part of anyone's gubernatorial campaign.
Hacker does sound threatening to plenty of folks, thanks to the media. We're not talking graybeards elegant solutions to intricate problems here, we're talking about guys out trying to steal your credit card and to empty your bank account.
I think it is very rarely possible to blame anyone for the suicide of another. Aaron's death was tragic, but it was not the prosecutor's fault.
With that said, if this event is something that causes society to carefully evaluate things like outdated computer crime laws and the prosecutorial tactics used in this country than that may be a good thing both for the country as a whole and for his memory.
In any system there's going to be a certain amount of leeway, were you can go beyond what is normally allowed. The problems begin when people become arrogant and abuse the responsibility given to them because it makes it easier for themselves to reach a certain result. These acts themselves are of course awful, bordering on corruption, but we choose to trust people in certain positions to use their judgment and therefore give them the benefit of the doubt.
Once in a while something happens, like someone getting hurt or taking their own life. Then it's no longer about trust, but about accountability and therefore the burden of proof has been reversed. The person with the privileges now needs to convince everyone else that the trust put in them wasn't misplaced. That doesn't mean people involved were responsible for what happened, but it does mean they should be held accountable for whatever shortcut they took.
In this case we need to ask ourselves: Was the pressure and tactics used by the prosecution in line with the alleged crime committed and did the prosecution show enough judgement in regards to the defendants previous mental health issues or even just as a human being?
"If that's enough to get me labeled as "usually reasonable" as well, then so be it."
It's amazing the number of people (myself included) that when talking about this issue have to package what they say in a way to prevent getting pilloried (or downvoted) for their opinions.
