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An omnivore eating less meat is good for all the reasons being vegetarian is good - it's not all-or-nothing.
That more-vegetarian-than-previously omnivore calling themselves vegetarian is helpful to other vegetarians in that it raises the profile of those issues and normalises pro-social dietary choices.
It's obvious that people making huge lifestyle changes struggle - I'd say support is more personally and societally useful than sneering disparagement about them not "actually" being vegetarian. Technically correct: the worst kind of correct.
Getting the 40-hour week took a revolution in France, Mexico and Russia, an incipient revolution in the UK and Chile, industrial action in Australia, Portugal and New Zealand...
If you really want to argue that the 40-hour work week was the product of benevolent capitalists I think you have to try a bit harder. Perhaps there's an Ayn Rand blog somewhere with some made-up facts you can use?
And yes, I linked to the website of a union.
The IWW worked tirelessly to bring about the 40-hour work week, as well as other fun bits like "weekends" and "workplace safety" (probably Ford's ideas too, right? -_-). I'd say they're in a better position to comment than either you or the author of the original misguided article.
> Sure, but we shouldn't be outraged over Swartz being prosecuted.
WTH not? It was pretty outrageous. I'd be interested to hear your argument that he deserved even 6 months in prison for copyright violation.
> If a crime is not reported it can't be followed up on by law enforcement.
... which is not to say that if a crime is reported, it will be followed up by law enforcement. Many reported crimes are not acted upon at all; some of them get a huge overreaction (like Swartz's) and some get an under-reaction (like HSBC).
That's the link: that justice is only just if the rules are the same for everyone, and they clearly are not.
> I think Jeff was trying to push back against this idea with his post
If you want to make the point that suicide is bad, find a way to do it without insulting a recently-deceased campaigner, especially if a) you have very little personal experience of equivalent situations and b) you have done comparatively little to help others (a fair guess, given that Swartz was so much more active than most people).
> But furthermore, I agree with Jeff Atwood. You shouldn't commit suicide. Even if the corrupt and incompetent federal government charges you with 50 years in prison for downloading journal articles. Don't commit suicide.
If Jeff's article had read like your comment, we wouldn't be having this conversation. I have no problem with you saying that suicide is either morally wrong, or an ineffective campaign strategy — although I happen to disagree with you on both points (citing euthanasia as a sometimes-moral suicide and Thích Quảng Đức & Mohamed Bouazizi as suicides which changed the world for the better).
I think your first sentence perfectly illustrates my point:
> There are laws which may or may not be levied against us in certain situations.
Evidence (including Swartz's case) strongly suggests that this discretion leads to an unjust result.
It's obvious that not every legal action is socially desirable (or "moral", for the sake of brevity) and not every illegal action is immoral (whistleblowers, protestors, etc.). So, like I said before, the criminal justice system is composed of laws and the people who make the call as to whether to prosecute, which in this case includes a powerful company (JSTOR), an academic institution (MIT), cops, the FBI and finally Ortiz and her office.
A few more characters than you might immediately list when you think of "the law", right?
When you say "Someone felt wronged and brought it to the attention of those who could prosecute the crime", you make it sound like it's an automatic process from one to the other. As someone who has both suffered and carried out actions which are illegal according to the letter of the law, I assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.
Read my article: HSBC broke a whole bunch of laws (to the tune of a trillion dollars a year), and got a sweet plea deal and no individual prosecutions. Good luck getting similar treatment if you shoplift an iPod, particularly if you're anything other than white.
> So respectfully empathize with him, and point out your differences about activism.
There's no moral problem with being slightly irreverent to someone in such a strong position: Atwood is apparently financially successful and has a large readership. He is also — unlike the target of his own criticism — alive.
So maybe your concern is strategic. I happen to think "respectful empathy" would have been a worse way of making my point.
Finally, I think my article is pretty clear. The category of person I want to "stick to coding" is "Jeff Atwood", or, more specifically, "Jeff Atwood talking about something he knows nothing about in a socially-damaging way". I don't think anyone would come away with the impression that I don't want to hear from people who've thought about suicide (hence why I didn't mention that aspect of Atwood's post at all).
Sure. But "respecting Atwood's grief" was outweighed by "challenging his dangerous ideology", especially since (as he says in his post) he'd never met Swartz.
Don't think his suicidal thoughts are relevant to his chosen topic of noble activism. If anything, Atwood mentioning it came across a little "I beat suicide... but this guy couldn't".
"The law" isn't some monolith, though -- it's defined by every institution (every person?) enforcing it, and every decision made in carrying out "justice".
It's a crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to port-scan Google. Are you really saying that you'd be getting tired of people talking about it if someone who'd done just that was facing years in jail (a perfectly _legal_ consequence).
> I am neither sure that Aaron Swartz intended to engage in civil disobedience
This is an interesting point: I would develop it to talk about _levels_ of disobedience.
Like Andrew Auernheimer, I think Swartz knew he would get "in trouble", but didn't appreciate the scale -- which is understandable, as I say in my article, because the details of "trouble" are deliberately obscured.
"No politics" is like absolute zero: a state unreachable because of the nature of the universe. In fact, "no politics" is in itself a very political statement; you're calling for a libertarian foreign policy attitude by saying that it's possible to separate technology from the conditions under which it is produced and used.
If it were Apple or Google enacting a murderous military occupation I don't think you'd get very far trying to prevent people from discussing that on HN. Nations are like what we used to have before corporations... remember?
Surely the only take-away from this is that McDonald's is a terrible place. Didn't we all know that already?
It's still helpful to try and do as much damage as possible with this story (ideally getting some money or at least an apology for the victim), but make no mistake that the company structure will make this vanish into the æther in no time.
-- c@<my HN username>.com.