donald trump gets 10 warnings for intimidating witnesses and indefinite trial postponement for hoarding and most likely leaking classified documents. Sweet sweet justice.
People keep trying to convince me it’s not evidence of two justice systems.
But it is.
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.
The US is a kleptocracy, we’re ruled by the people who have looted the public
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…
But no one would really “flip out” because none one could really do anything about it.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Only struggle is the class struggle
Correct, no clue why I pointed this out and got downvoted but you say the same thing and get people agreeing with you…guess I should have kept with the “capitalism bad” circle jerk.
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I mean… you’re correct lol
because the class system is built into capitalism.
you can’t have unchecked capitalism without an exploited underclass.
and you said it has nothing to do with the economic system, which is false, hence the downvotes…
The ability to move upward in capitalism is much greater than in any other current economic system. Acting like capitalism is the sole reason for the current divide is silly
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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.
At risk of sounding cringe, it’s evidence of one injustice system.
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.
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.
I could not possibly have said it better than this.
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.)
(And/Or with a fine that required us to do more than lift up our couch cushions.)
That’s a problem with the amount of fine being set by law and despite likely not being as wealthy as claimed, Trump still has enough money that $10k isn’t going to hurt him.
Jailing him for contempt has all the same logistical problems imprisoning him is going to, but at a smaller, less secure facility.
Right, right.
2 Justice systems.
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.
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.
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
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 :)
I don’t know why but i just didn’t want to type that slur. It’s edited now.
There are lots of funny spellings:-).
One of the best imho is tRump, like Donald’s Rump.
Or for those in the know, Drumpf.
Articles paid for by the public through grants btw
With authors often paying for open access publications literally out of their very own money, not just grants.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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/
it’s not really.that close.whem you compare it to 2016/2020
Trump underpolls significantly,.by 5-8%, and did for both 2016 and 2020.
Bidens hasn’t led trump in polling in 500 days
You’re wrong about a lot and you’re presenting your opinions as fact. Trump doesn’t underpoll by that amount now.
There was a phenomenon in 2016 where people were reluctant to tell pollsters they were voting for him, because they were embarrassed. Now Trump supporters are the loud minority of voters. And Biden is the boring safe choice. Biden voters are less likely to stay on the phone and answer questions.
Also, national polls mean very little. You have to actually look at the swing state polls to find out who’s winning. And there’s not much data this far from the election.
Finally, we can tell there’s something wrong with current polling just because “Mr. Brainworms” RFK Jr polls around 10% right now. No one is going to vote for him, and definitely not 10% of the population. People are just fucking with the pollsters right now. Do you know anyone seriously considering voting for RFK Jr?
You can project whatever narrative you want into the data but what is I’m saying is fundamentally the case.
Trump outperforms his polling. He did so in 2016 by a wide margin, and he did so again in 2020. You can just go look at the week prior polling. This isn’t some grandiose fiction it’s a statement of fact, that you seem to be ignorant to.
Your interest in a particular narrative doesn’t change what is. What matters is that Biden needs around an 8% lead on Trump nationally to be secure, and has been trailing, basically the entire time.
If the election were tomorrow, and we believe the offsets observed in the two previous national elections, and we should because those were real events made from real data, then Biden would lose in a landslide today.
Because I can’t stand all of your group think naivete:
I went and pulled the 2020 data. The above is the relative error in polling from polls during the months of October and November 2020, calculated against the real votes cast in 2020. Biden underperforms his polling by about 4% and Trump overperforms his polling by about 8%. You can argue with why this is the case, but you can-not pretend that this isn’t the case. You should be adjusting how you see polls with this in mind. When you see Biden trailing Trump in national polling (and he has been for 400 days in a row), you should see that as a CLEAR Trump lead considering that Trump CONSISTENTLY overperforms on election day relative to his polling.
Sources: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/42MVDX
https://electionlab.mit.edu/data
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/data/president_polls_historical.csv
You didn’t answer the question:
Do you know anyone who is voting for RFK Jr? He is polling at 10% right now, so if it’s real then statistically you should know someone.
Maybe. Maybe not. Pollsters typically adjust methodology between elections so this type of analysis is questionable.
He hasn’t led in the average but is currently within the margin of error. The available evidence suggests a toss up but we won’t know for sure until after the election, as always.
I mean…
No. It’s not margin of error right now. It’s a clear Trump W. Not once you account for Trump’s consistent over performance and Bidens consistent underperformance relative to polling aggregates. Everyone with eyes has been seeing it for better than a year.
Consistent in two elections? That’s not consistent. That’s not even data, let alone a trend.
As I said, pollsters adjust the demographic weighting based on election results. It is possible they will again underestimate Trump’s performance. It’s also possible they will overestimate it. Only time will tell.
But regardless of that issue, it is within the margin of error—that is a statistical reality irrelevant to your speculation about polling errors.
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
And the result were statistically within what they predicted. She did get the popular vote but lost in key states where the margins were small.
No, they did not. That’s not what happened.
Polling probably has taken a dive in accuracy since then, though. Uptake in cell phone use in younger generations has been lingering over the industry for a long time, and it’s finally caught up with them.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
72% chance from here. Probably high enough that swing state voters opted to stay home. This was the vibe practically all October. The FBI felt confident enough in her win to announce they were investigating her to appear unbiased.
Polling being inaccurate for whatever reason doesn’t change the article after article assuring everyone Hillary had it in the bag.
72% chance means Trump needed to flip two coins and have them both come up heads. It’s not that ridiculous.
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.
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.
plea for 1/2 that was rejected
The rejected plea was for 6 months.
6 months is 1/2 of a year.
While that is true.
“1/2 that” would imply 1/2 of 35 years or 17.5 years.
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.
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.
For bulk downloading science journals he had access to.
for breaking and entering*
and DoS
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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.
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:
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
He was a defender of child porn though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20031229025933/http:/bits.are.notabug.com/
Assuming this is actually by the guy, here is what the linked article says about child porn:
In the US, it is illegal to possess or distribute child pornography, apparently because doing so will encourage people to sexually abuse children.
This is absurd logic. Child pornography is not necessarily abuse. Even if it was, preventing the distribution or posession of the evidence won’t make the abuse go away. We don’t arrest everyone with videotapes of murders, or make it illegal for TV stations to show people being killed.
Wired has an article on how these laws destroy honest people’s lives.
OK a reason to not like him but sending him to prison for his views that he didnt act on sounds like fasicm lol I dont agree with his views just saying
Child pornography is not necessarily abuse.
Yikes.
An image of an event is not the event. That’s the reasoning there. There’s some sense of logic there, though the knowledge their abuse is used by pedophiles can absolutely be a continuing trauma for the victims.
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.
still… 35 years? obviously there is more missing information.
It wasn’t 35 years, it was 6 months with a plea deal
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
Most of these guys they just offer jobs to. This was needless. No wonder China is kicking our ass on the cyber front
The whole criminals getting job offers has never been true and will never be true. For many of such jobs you aren’t qualified if you have a criminal record, even small offenses disqualify you.
I mean thousands of war criminals were offered jobs after ww2 so I doubt they would care about a little red tape just hire them into the black no one needs to know
Ah my sweet summer child…how wonderful it must be to live in your world.
That’s still a hell of a sentence for a B&E
Mm. Breaking and entering to share publicly funded research is different than B&E with the threat of violence…
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.
Paradoxically, that’s not how science jourals work. There are no difference between public or prívate funds in this regard.
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 💔
He didn’t even share them as far as I know, he just downloaded them. And the trial hadn’t started yet when he committed suicide.
He didn’t get the chance to share them because he was caught downloading them, and his download requests were getting blocked.
And to be clear, he wasn’t downloading from the Internet as one might download a car, he went into a restricted networking closet and connected directly to the switch, leaving a computer sitting there sending access requests. He had to keep going back to it to check on the progress, which is when they caught him.
And the trial hadn’t started yet when he committed suicide.
Yeah, I agree with the sentiment of the post, but this is just wildly misleading. He was not sentenced to anything, he committed suicide before the trial.
He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected, in an effort to make the feds justify the ludicrous charges they were pressing. Had it gone to trial, he certainly wouldn’t have been found not guilty, but it’s unlikely many of those charges would have stuck. It’s extremely unlikely he would actually have served 35 years.
Downloading isn’t a crime, is it?
He was being charged under the CFAA, a hacking criminal statute that prohibits unauthorized access to computer systems. It was controversially being stretched to cover Aaron’s conduct that violated TOS by an ambitious prosecutor.
Are TOS violations felonies now?
Yes, technically any TOS violation is one ambitious prosecutor away from a felony, thanks to the CFAA.
Can I make my own TOS that corporations agree to when they endorse a check I pay a bill with?
You certainly can! And they will discard that check, charge you for failure to pay your bill, and refuse to negotiate with you in any way.
I’m thinking they endorse those checks without reading every single detail on the check.
If you want to read about how we got into this fucked up situation I’d recommend The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling (a notorious cyberpunk sf writer among other things) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101
That’s uh… It makes sense if you don’t think about it. The access was probably authorized, the use wasn’t.
There is a difference between illegal and unauthorized. If I go into a store that doesn’t allow trying on the clothes before you buy and I try a shirt on, I haven’t broken a law. It still isn’t authorized. The store can throw me out, but I shouldn’t be charged with shoplifting.
What Aaron was doing wasn’t even unauthorized. He was just doing more of it than they liked. In the example above, it would be like bringing 20 (or 2000…) pieces of clothing to the change room when there’s a 5 piece limit. Again, it shouldn’t be illegal, and the site could have enforced account limits if that was their issue instead of relying on bandwidth limits doing the job for them.
Now, the only thing left to question is how he hooked up the computer doing the downloading. I don’t know about the legality of that, but he was accused of illegally accessing the website, not the university network, so I’m guessing even the prosecutor who was trying to expand the scope of the DMCA law didn’t see a way he could charge him with anything on that front.
No, but he obviously felt that JSTOR could persuade a court to make it one. Poor kid.
You wouldn’t download a car would you??
Oh I absolutely would.
https://www.printables.com/search/models?q=Car
Come on, you know you want to.
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Oil CEOs pay fines for bringing about a global climate catastrophe. Fascist politicians are given slaps on the wrist for an attempted coup d’etat. Government officials openly commit gross violations of privacy and suffer no consequences.
But a guy hacks a university network and downloads a hoard of scientific articles that should have been freely accessible to begin with and he gets 35 years in prison. I’ll admit I wasn’t familiar with this case before I saw this picture. Which is kind of insane in and of itself.
Remember Kim Dotcom? He had a file sharing website and the police raided his house with guns like he was a dangerous criminal. There is a video of it on YouTube.
Honestly I had forgotten about the whole MegaUpload stuff.
Given, Kim Dotcom had a long history of being a trash person before the MegaUpload raid; Trading in stolen credit card info, embezzlement, black-hat hacking, etc… But he definitely didn’t deserve to get swatted just because he hosted a site that was popular with media pirates. The police used his prior convictions as justification for their heavy-handed tactics. But the reality is that they likely would have gone in with SWAT even if he had a squeaky clean record beforehand.
There’s a recent Radiolab episode about those that have taken up his mantle and the impact he’s had on scientific publishing.
That’s not exactly what happened.
Aaron committed suicide before his case went to trial, and so he was never convicted let alone sentenced. 35 years was never even likely; had it gone to trial there’s every reason to think he’d have been acquitted outright, or at worst given a slap on the wrist. Not that he should have even been charged, of course.
Well now I’ve got two competing claims, and I can’t believe either one until I see the authoritative history on it
There’s a documentary on YouTube called “The internet’s own boy”, if you want to learn more. Basically, he was offered a 6 month plea, but he would be a convicted felon, and basic logic/morality tells you that you shouldn’t plead guilty to a crime that you didn’t commit. However, the justice system is very imperfect, and often people plead guilty for reduced sentencing even if they’re not guilty. He stood on principle until his legs gave out. they were already in millions spent in attorney fees. Not a shred of justice can be found in how Aaron’s story ended.
Robert Evan’s did a Behind the Bastards episode on this back in December I believe.
Also JSTOR never wanted him prosecuted only to have the files deleted and call it a wash. It was MIT that supported prosecution and who called the fuzz in the first place.
i would say jstor are cunts, but actually it’s the US government that were being cunts here.
Law Enforcement and the Justice System have every responsibility to enforce laws as they were written, JSTOR pressed charges and the US Government offered Auron a plea deal to reduce his sentence to 6 months.
Definitely an argument about the inadequacy of US Healthcare to be made here, though. Auron clearly could have used some counseling.
I thought there was a prosecutor who pursued this beyond all reasonable bounds, making Aaron’s life a living hell and driving him to suicide?
Well if a Psychologist had helped him through it maybe he could have turned around and sued that prosecutor into disbarment.
EDIT: People are downvoting this, but TBH I wouldn’t kill myself over a 35 year sentence much less the 6 months in the plea deal this guy got. Wouldn’t consider it for a single moment. He had agency in his own actions.
yeah and maybe that prosecutor is tangentially responsible for his suicide now.
Spilled milk, but yeah that dude was a shill and should probably be dealt with if they haven’t already.
The prosecutor went on to have a pretty successful career and I think had a role in Obama’s administration. She basically said “I’m sorry your son killed himself” but never admitted to having a part in his death.
I’ll take your word for it, never looked into it myself.
and the US government was almost definitely trying to make an example out of him: literally anybody who read the case details whatsoever.
Only prosecuting district attorneys can chose to bring a crimial charge to court.*
*except in north carolina… for some reason they actually let victims prosecute.
He didn’t transfer or share he only downloaded.
It’s also likely that he was never intending to share them. One of the things he was looking to do is aquire a large dataset to analyze trends.
In other words, he was charged for entirely legit use.
I recon he was looking for a specific trend the us government really didn’t want him to prove they had been forcing.
He also was not sentenced. This post is misinformation.
I highly recommend watching the documentary on him, Internet’s own boy.
Behind the Bastards dedicated their last Christmas episode to Aaron as well: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-christmas-hero-episode-aaron-136561888/
Just for context for those who haven’t heard the podcast: the Christmas episodes often center around non-bastards. This is one of those. :P
Reddit could’ve been so good with him at the helm…
He likely wouldn’t’ve stayed. We’d be better off with him anyways. He was moving towards activism and politics. He’d probably either be a prisoner or a congressman by now. And like honestly, we could use a congressman like him.
Good thing we’ve got a second opportunity. ;)
He’s dead so no we dont
OP is referring to Lemmy
Lemmy is already cooked
Start your own instance that isn’t, then.
That’s not the fix.
What is the fix? I don’t understand what you are objecting to.
I didn’t object to anything, if anything, I declared/observed.
Lemmy will suffer the same issues as reddit regarding content, modding, quality, etc. Just not yet
It’s the federation part
If there was no interaction across instances then their respective populations would be smaller and thus the experience would be better
Not a bug, a feature. Bubbles are not healthy, if you can see the horrible, the horrible can see you. You are reminded that there’s dangerous viewpoints out there, they are reminded that they will have to debate and argue logically to be tolerated. That is one of the few ways to cure a toxic point of view. Doesn’t work everytime obviously, but if you get one person to hesitate before posting some sort of BS comment we’re 90% of the way there.
I’m talking from a Netherlands server, you from Canada. I’m sure lots of differences of opinion but I know you’re a person with experiences different from mine and therefore I need to be respectful when discussing things I don’t know anything about.
They are bubbles anyway due to mods and admins existing
But if I wanted to spread misinformation to people then it’s way more effective when the userbase is massive
Also bubbles are way worse when you have thousands of people which as already stated still exists
Bubbles are not healthy
I disagree. Bubbles can be good for protecting vulnerable people and groups.
The most infuriating thing was and still is the fact that some people justify the sentence and blame him for killing himself.
Well killing oneself is always one’s own choice, but it’s terrible that he was given such a ridiculous sentence for no more than a copyright issue. Not even sure if he made money on the material, but even if he did he should have gotten maybe a fine, and imprisonment is just insane.
He wasn’t sentenced, he died before he could go to trial or accept a plea deal, but there is record of a 6 month jail sentence being offered to him.
He’s probably rolling in his grave at the enshittification of reddit now too
Judicially murdered by Carmen Ortiz.
