396 points
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donald trump gets 10 warnings for intimidating witnesses and indefinite trial postponement for hoarding and most likely leaking classified documents. Sweet sweet justice.

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202 points

People keep trying to convince me it’s not evidence of two justice systems.

 

But it is.

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131 points
*

It’s evidence that we live in corporatocracies masquerading as “democracies”. The 0.1%, shielded by the liability protections of the corporations they own, and their armies of lobbyists — they finance our politics, choose who ends up on the ballot, and shadow write most of our legislation, policies, and regulations.

Trump is free because he is a part of that < 0.1%.

The Boeing execs who oversaw systemic fraud, lied to the FAA, and murdered 166 people still ARE FREE AND RICH. Why? Because they are the 0.1%.

The IPCC hosts fossil fuelled climate summits in fossil fuel exporting countries, inviting fossil fuel corporations and lobbyists to attend — at a scientific conference about how to solve the crisis they created and profited from! why? Because we live in corporatocracies.

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51 points

The US is a kleptocracy, we’re ruled by the people who have looted the public

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28 points

If any country’s government spied on its own people as much as big business does in America, people would flip out. But in America, big business really is the government.

We are so fucked…

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7 points

Good thing guillotines don’t care about wealth, only the size of your neck.

We’ll just have to make the hole slightly larger to fit fatter necks.

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35 points

I think this is a consequence of any (unregulated) capitalistic system in general. The system is founded on money, more money will give anyone more influence and power over the system

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26 points

It’s a consequence of our “growth at all costs” take on capitalism. Capitalism is only livable for the average person when it’s kept in check by a strong government and corruption is vigorously prosecuted. We’ve decided that corruption just happens and there’s nothing we can do about it, and so there are no disincentives to corrupting government.

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2 points

True, but also there are consequences of regulated capitalistic systems where the regulatory bodies become fascistic. And I mean in the traditional (actual) definition of fascistic and not just the way it gets thrown around modernly.

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-3 points

This has nothing to do with an economic system. This same shit is worse even in communist systems, and I’m not even going to try and point fingers at that system and say it is.

The real reason is because of power, and a class system that protects its own.

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14 points

It’s the subtle difference between a JUSTICE system and a LEGAL system.

One aims to maintain law and order in society in a fair and equal way regardless of one’s status or situation.

The other is a system gamed to benefit the richest and wealthiest individuals to get away with everything.

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6 points

At risk of sounding cringe, it’s evidence of one injustice system.

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3 points

Someone should look up the maximum sentence for what he’s been charged with. The current biggest hold-ups are not being able to make someone appear in multiple trials in different places simultaneously, and avoiding the appearance that the court is trying to interfere with an election.

You don’t want the court to not care about the appearance of interfering with elections, or else you’ll have the GoP trying to get Democrat politicians on dubious charges that they’ll definitely not be guilty of but will definitely bury them in scandal and prevent them from campaigning effectively.

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6 points

You’re not wrong, these Trump trial judges are bending over backwards to avoid any grounds for mistrial. In one sense they are doing the right thing inside the legal framework, but look at the downsides.

The public is watching how a rich and powerful man can game the system, even as a criminal defendant the system is working for him. Every incarcerated person can see the reality: they were treated with default brutality, but Trump is treated as royalty.

And even worse, they are allowing Trump to delay every verdict until after the election. If he wins the election he pardons himself, this is a horrible precedent for our democracy.

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4 points

I’m fairly certain his conduct during the proceedings themselves would have landed me or anyone else in jail by now. (And/Or with a fine that required us to do more than lift up our couch cushions.)

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27 points

For the record, Aaron Swartz never actually went to trial, nor was he “sentenced” to anything.

Federal prosecutors came after him with overzealous charges in an effort to make him accept a plea deal (they do that a lot), which he rejected. It would have gone to court where the feds would have had to justify the charges they were bringing.

But that never happened because he killed himself.

We don’t actually know how this all would have played out.

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31 points

The comment in OPs post is misleading but he did nevertheless kill himself because of the justice system trying to prosecute him for accessing science most likely funded by public money in the first place.

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5 points

And will never know, selfishly speaking, the possible extent of his further contributions to society. Died at 26 after an incredible life already.

Besides his life, what else did they steal from us?

RIP Aaron

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8 points

donald tr*mp gets 10 warnings for intimidating witnesses and indefinite trial postponement for hoarding and most likely leaking classified documents. Sweet sweet justice.

Why are you censoring Donald Trump’s name? Is it a swear word now in your country?

We’re big girls here, we can take a little rude language, don’t worry :)

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13 points
*

I don’t know why but i just didn’t want to type that slur. It’s edited now.

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0 points

There are lots of funny spellings:-).

One of the best imho is tRump, like Donald’s Rump.

Or for those in the know, Drumpf.

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285 points

Articles paid for by the public through grants btw

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51 points

With authors often paying for open access publications literally out of their very own money, not just grants.

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4 points

Not at the time this happened. Aaron’s case was one of the motivating factors that led to the Open Access publication movement gaining enough traction that authors could publish that way. JSTOR access is paid for and administered on college campuses by libraries and librarians as a whole field felt terrible both about the paid publication system and the way Aaron was treated. As a community of professionals, the Librarian and Information Science community pushed very hard for the adoption of Open Access publishing into the Academic community.

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2 points

Good to know we had something very good out of this.

Now, let’s beat the living hell out of publishers so that those crazy open access publication prices would decimate.

Because right now, I literally cannot afford publishing further than Q3, which already eats up most of my personal grant earnings (which are so bad I can say I work purely for an idea).

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220 points
*

Look, the kid was a hero, but this is also patently false.

He was not sentenced to 35 years. The trial hadn’t started. 35 years was the maximum possible sentence. He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected.

We don’t need to spin lies to make his story more tragic than it already is.

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168 points
*

35 years max, plea for 1/2 that was rejected. He was going to get the book thrown at him to make an example. 5 years minimum but I wouldn’t doubt 10-20.

The rapist traitor that headed a insurrection on Jan 6 2021 has never spent a day in jail and is still the frontrunner for president to be legally elected in 2024.

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12 points

still the frontrunner for president to be legally elected in 2024.

The front runner? Really?

I’m not being sarcastic. Im genuinely interested, but can’t be arsed to start going through polls because it’d mean going through the biases of the pollers.

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31 points

Really it’s too close to call but he does appear to have a slight edge if you had to pick a favorite.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/

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14 points

Just remember polls gave Hillary almost a guaranteed win. For all intents and purposes, Trump is the front runner regardless of what any polling says

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2 points

From the nearly all the polls I see, yes. But like you said, bias of pollers. I’ve seen a few that go more in depth to try and figure out the “responds to polls” bias, but I still only see biden ahead by a margin. With those small numbers of concentrated effort vs the wide reach general polls, trump is. It does not instill any level of confidence in me that the “general” polls don’t reflect the “general” voting bias. Even without all of this analysis, just a few million voting for trump is unbelievably concerning to not just the future of the US, but the world that this single country dominates. These fascists are campaigning on the cut your nose to spite your face philosophy.

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-7 points
*

Bro he’s been the front runner the entire time.

This is why people’s sycophantica for Biden are so problematic. !data_vizualisations@lemmy.world

Trump also seems to understand poll at about 8%

Which means Biden needs to be leading by that amount to win.

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5 points

plea for 1/2 that was rejected

The rejected plea was for 6 months.

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-1 points

6 months is 1/2 of a year.

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58 points
*

He committed the idealist’s perennial sin: He thought that because the system is bullshit, it’s okay not to play ball with it.

“Hey this is a bunch of crap. I can be guilty or innocent, and the right move is always to plead guilty even if I didn’t do a damn thing wrong, because if I try to fight the case they’re gonna tack on a ton of new charges and they almost always win and I might go away for most of my life.”

“Preach.”

“I’m gonna plead not guilty because I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No no no no no that is not the way to reform the system no no no that is a bad mistake”

Aaron Swartz was a fuckin hero. Read his posthumous book, it is wonderful. But the same idealism and faith that led him to the good things he did in his painfully short time here, also led him not to understand how to engage with the US federal government and keep your skin.

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16 points

Yeah. Don’t talk to cops. Get a sympathetic/movement lawyer. And this is fucking crucial, do what they say.

A lot of idealistic people understand that you can sell your soul piecemeal and are always in danger of it. But they don’t really understand what not giving up your values is vs not doing what’s smart. You take the plea deal unless you have to rat someone out. And also you don’t commit crimes you aren’t comfortable with the consequences of.

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17 points

For bulk downloading science journals he had access to.

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2 points

for breaking and entering*

and DoS

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2 points

also he worked with wikileaks… i think he was named as a source posthumously…

he also wrote an open source system of servers that function exactly like wikileaks submission system (actually i think it is, given clues as to how it operates… like the manning chat logs)
dead drop is now called “open drop” and powers every major newspaper’s leak submission system…

he was murdered.

not only the did it make no sense, given the 6 month plea bargain option, but he was an outspoken activist and would’ve at least left a note… in the form of some post online…

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159 points

If I remember correctly, it wasn’t even illegal since these scientific articles should have been public to begin with because they used public funds.

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76 points
*

That may be so, but IIRC he was charged with breaking into MIT’s networking room and illegally tapping into their network to get the articles:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2261840/Aaron-Swartz-MIT-surveillance-shot-ruined-tragic-Reddit-founders-life.html

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28 points

That also may be so, but 35 years is fucked up for that. pretty sure child porn first time offenders is like 15 to 30 so hacking MIT for stuff that should have been free gets you more jail time then a first CP offence. OK thats fucked up

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27 points

Well that’s definitely burying the lede from the OP.

It wasn’t the sharing part they had a problem with, it was the B&E and hacking.

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63 points

still… 35 years? obviously there is more missing information.

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33 points
*

It’s not that clear cut and I would recommend listening to the Behind The Bastards episode about him:

Behind the Bastards: Part One: Christmas Hero Episode: Aaron Swartz

https://omny.fm/shows/behind-the-bastards/part-one-christmas-hero-episode-aaron-swartz

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23 points
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Most of these guys they just offer jobs to. This was needless. No wonder China is kicking our ass on the cyber front

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19 points

That’s still a hell of a sentence for a B&E

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6 points

Mm. Breaking and entering to share publicly funded research is different than B&E with the threat of violence…

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15 points

I hacked my highschool servers when I was young and shared the upcoming exams, so everyone could prepare for them. Someone told the authorities, all I got was some extra exercise. Sure it wasn’t MIT, but still 35 years is ridiculous, even a year of prison would have been ridiculous.

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1 point

Paradoxically, that’s not how science jourals work. There are no difference between public or prívate funds in this regard.

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156 points
*

Shout out to Alexandra elbakyan. She continues part of aaron’s work by running sci-hub and libgen, but lives safely out of reach of the american criminal “justice” system 💔

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