[pemulis]

If he was advocate for more open access to government records, why is it surprising that he would be concerned about the Aaron Swartz case? I agree that this letter could be seen as part a larger battle between Republicans and the Obama DoJ, but does that mean that questions about Aaron Swartz' prosecution are only valid if they come from Democrats?

[jacoblyles]

I think tptacek's point is that he hates Republicans.

[sophacles]

This is silly and disingenuous partisanship. It isn't at all a "anti-republicans" thing in his comment. It is a "hey this guy may be doing this good thing, but don't go about declaring him 'a good guy strictly on our side' (for whatever side that happens to be), he's done these other things that a lot of people are against". Its a sanity check.

[jacoblyles]

Let's repost tptacek's comments, to see how partisan they are:

>"Expect to see lots of superficial genuflection from Republicans towards the Swartz case; the GOP is in a constant low-grade conflict with the Democratic DoJ."

Any show of support of the GOP for Aaron Swartz is "superficial genuflection" driven by partisan conflict. Doubtless, Democratic support would be considered genuine.

>"Here, let me put it this way: what do you honestly think Aaron Swartz would think about this clown using his name to score political points?"

A Senator with a history of support for Open Access is a "clown" that is so odious that Aaron would be upset to have his support.

This is partisanship at its worst. tptacek is dehumanizing Republicans in a way that kills rational thought. A Republican can't even do something tptacek agrees with without receiving his scorn.

Is that reasonable to you?

[sophacles]

What's reasonable to me is: not putting any politician on a pedestal. They all suck for a lot of reasons.

Unfortunately, you see it on web forums all the time that people have no medium or long term memories: basically they see some politician agreeing with them on some topic and there is much raving about how awesome that person is. Two weeks later, the same politician is against the prevalent view on some other topic, and they are the devil incarnate.

Further there is a trend in these discussions to turn everything into "this guy is from this party, so that party is on my side!" craziness, and piles of confirmation bias start happening.

So I see comments on how various parties will spin any event and posture themselves towards it, with references to a larger political climate - such as the one you quoted first - not as "anti-$PARTY" or "hate", but as a reminder that the politicians are always playing, a "here is the game now" statement.

Similarly, regarding your second quote, calling a politician a clown, is not anti republican anything. The senator has a history of open access, but also has a questionable history in larger civil liberties contexts. The senator posturing himself as a champion of Aaron Swartz because of the open access issue, is just that. We've seen a lot of stuff lately reminding us of Aaron's stance on, e.g. Chomsky and the concept of manufactured consent. This politician is in fact doing what Aaron didn't like in the manufactured consent game. It is a reasonable statement to point it out. Note: when the framing of this as "Obama's DOJ" and other types of strong political gaming that will occur around this, no one will mention Ortiz has been a US Attorney since 1997, and therefore doing this sort of action for many administrations. It will turn into a discussion of which party is responsible, rather than a reasonable discussion about what should be done about an actual problem.

In this context, it is reasonable for anyone who wants to address the problem, rather than the politics, to take steps in discussions like this to remind everyone that the person in question may in fact agree with them on this issue, but they, and the party they represent certainly don't agree on every issue. This is a giant problem - the thinking that any party agrees whole-heartedly with your stances, or that any given politician has the right answers to all problems.

Finally it should be noted that tptacek gets accused of hating just about every single group that exists at some point. It seems he is in that rare place of "he thinks for himself", and so gets these sorts of "super partisan" accusations about hating the democrats a lot too. Isn't it great when your knee jerk defense of your chosen favorites causes you to attack someone who regularly gets attacked for being too much on your side?

[jacoblyles]

I'm an issues guy, not a party guy. When a politician does something good, I like that. Even if I don't normally agree with them, that means I have the opportunity to build a larger, more effective coalition towards my goal.

For you and tptacek, when a politician does something good, that's a bad thing because they are trying to dupe us. I'm not a Chomskyite, so I can't twist my brain in those kind of knots.

[sophacles]

I never said I was a Chomskyite. Nor did I say it was a bad thing. You are being disingenuous. I was merely supporting the idea of being an issues person, not lionizing any politician on a single stance of theirs. But whatever, you would rather see me and apparently tptacek (although we are not on the same side about a lot of things either, I've gone toe-to-toe with him on this forum before), as enemies rather than people who support an issue you also support. It's actually funny how hypocritical your statement is - you say you're an issues guy, but then demonize people who are saying "yeah support this politician on this issue, but be careful of their stance on other issues, and notice their general behavior in case they do the politician thing and subtly change what they say".

Basically, I have no idea how you can claim to be an issues guy, but attack people for being partisan when they warn people to be cognizant of all issues when supporting a single politician. To build a coalition you need to be careful that side effects of the "pro my issue" people aren't "against my other issues".

[TheAmazingIdiot]

Tptacek is pretty much a nutjob. He was going on and on against 1st sale doctrine about reimportation, how is it evil and such.

He also despises republicans completely, given this thread alone.

I'd set equal the anger in Tptacek to the craziness in sparrowos.

[jhancock]

Your post is very rude. I don't always agree with 'tptacek or anyone else, even some of my own past comments. However, I have seen enough of his comments to know I'd be happy to have a beer with the man. If Thomas is a nutjob in your mind and sparrows are crazy, I can't begin to imagine how you might describe some of my perspectives.

It would be lovely if HN could be a place where people could express themselves civilly and not be attacked.

[spinlocked]

It would be lovely if HN could be a place where people could rise above their petty self interests and help the community move forward. Thomas is at the wrong end of this spectrum.

TheAmazingIdiot is correct BTW. Its hard to imagine Thomas posting his ridiculous views unless he is a paid shill. Probably on your team.

[anigbrowl]

His point is that the Obama administration actually did revamp the federal FOIA policy and got no credit for it, I think. But that's kind of by-the-by.

[danso]

That wasn't my point...and while Obama has opened some new doors, the thinking in the journalism community is that his administration is actually more closed when it comes to raw request numbers:

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/156227/obama-ad...

This is of course a quantitative measure...but given that Obama wrote a very direct order to officials to err on the side of openness, it's striking that that order is being ignored so casually...I don't think it's hard to make a case that the culture of the bureaucracy is not particularly mindful of openness.

[anigbrowl]

In that case I can't figure out what your point was, but this is all sort of incidental anyway.

[danso]

Yeah, I was just meandering. The parent post had argued that this was little more than a hypocritical political ploy. I was saying, 'probably', because there's not much to politically gain from it other than to give the DOJ a black eye and because, I guess I just see Swartz as still being a "niche" issue to most people outside of the tech/academic senator.

But I thought it was fair to point out that Cornyn is no fairweather public-records fan. But of course, Swartz's JSTOR incident was not just a case of open-access (as it was in the PACER case). There's enough nuance here that I would've just assumed that a senator of Conryn's level would leave it be as there are many other political shitstorms going on (gun control, debt ceiling, etc etc)