Large groups of people are easily corrupted as well.
Officer Bubba letting his friends off the hook is wrong. Presumably, he will be found out and fired. If not, his entire organization should be fired.
Anyway, I don’t see what letting your friends off the hook for breaking good laws has to do with taking a moral stand against bad laws that shouldn’t exist. Obviously, the latter is right, and the former is wrong.
I’ve never said that most depression wasn’t treatable, nor have I said medication is the only treatment for it. Nor am I continually amused of how you want to play moderator suggesting this seems to be a hijack by me concentrating on this aspect. I am questioning the number of being treated for it and the severity of their depression when the treatment for it is often administered in the form of a placebo called antidepressant medication. And although I’m skeptical of what kind of success rate there is for severe depression and its long-term results, I can’t say for sure if it has a high success rate or not. I actually wasn’t going to spend that much time on it.
But you have continually insisted that depression is what killed him, have made it a main part of this thread from the get-go, and have reminded us of this I think in every post. So unless a moderator, administrator says I need to start a new thread or that I’m hijacking it, let’s STHU about the moderation of this thread. Or report my post to them off-thread if you think you got a case for it.
The OP asked a question on how sorry we should feel for Aaron Swartz with quite a few weighing in, some blaming Aaron for his latest problems with the law and having been warned before; others may or may not acknowledge his offense as that serious, but others want to blame mostly the prosecution team to a strong or lesser degree. In various posts from the beginning you’ve said this:
A few google searches show he mentions depression on occasion in his blog about it, and even if it did, others say that wasn’t what killed him, and that it was more the prosecution that hounded him to his death that did. Yet others disagree with that assessment. But I’ll set that aside, and may even concede the point that the prosecution isn’t to blame, because I do not know the extent of it. What I am questioning is how you can determine with great confidence that it was depression that killed him. You say he wrote about it in the past before, and fair enough, but two days prior to taking his own life, his lawyer told him the news saying he was going to have to serve some prison time, and that plea bargaining for no time failed. He could still take his chances with a trial, but that was only going to mean risking a much longer sentence.
Secondly, after you continually go on about Swartz’s depression, you say “Depression is treatable the vast majority of the time.” This had me asking you what works for the vast majority of the time for truly clinically depressed people, which I gave Cecil’s column as a link to show that antidepressants as placebos are what are mostly being used to treat it. You responded to this by saying: “Different treatment approaches work for different people. For many it is a combination of psychotherapy and antidepressants and/or other medications.” You also mentioned exercise, and ECT. I probably would have been quite short with this aspect if you had commented on it the first time. But he and his family had money, and if his depression was severe, they could have had access to the best that treatment could offer, if it is treatable the vast majority of the time as you say.
I admit I knew very little of this gifted young man when I first learned of his death, and still know little. I was deepened saddened as you and most others have also noted. You also may have put in a bit more time than I have into his depression, and I’ve googled that too, but for now can’t say that is what caused him to take his life. Nor would have any treatments for it made his legal problems go away. Many have depression, even severe forms of it and don’t generally choose to take their life primarily on that AFAIK. Others when faced with bad circumstances of which perhaps they feel is now out of their control can set things into play fairly quick, I would think, even for those not really experiencing any serious mental health issues before.
Source for the following figures here.
Someone with a history of depression died by suicide. Yes there are scenarios of severe chronic illness in which suicide is not a result of mental illness, is arguably a rational decision (depending on your values). I’ll accept that suicide does not equal depression in all cases. Just in the vast majority of cases. 90% to put a number on it.
In this case there was a stressor in his life. Rank ordering this stressor probably falls below many other ones that people deal with all the time. No, I do not think that anyone without a serious mental illness would kill themselves as a rational response to being told that (s)he could either accept a plea deal that would have resulted in six months in a low security prison or fight in court and risk losing big.
Mr. Swartz was 26, so just outside of the young adult range of 20 to 24 in which suicide is the cause of over 12% of all deaths (another page on that site states over 14% in 2009) and kills six times as many males as females in that age group. Third largest cause of death 10 to 24.
Having money does not assure adequate treatment. There are lots of barriers to getting adequate mental health care beyond having the money to afford to pay for it. Many are cultural and attitudinal. That’s why that quote I found on his blog made me so sad.
This bit from that link is worth posting here:
But then people will complain that the prosecutor who fired Bubba is a villain who is trying to make a scapegoat out of Bubba and it’s not right to fire people who were disobeying laws they think are wrong. If Bubba suffers from depression and kills himself he will engender all sorts of sympathy and make the prosecutor look like a monster.
Dr. Cube,
Some laws are wrong. Some laws some people think are wrong and others think are right. I certainly have some sympathy for the argument that “just following orders” is an inadequate justification for an individual’s execution of a clearly immoral law, but at the same time a circumstance in which every police officer and prosecutor is supposed to decide for themselves which laws are “correct” and which ones “wrong” and ignore the laws they personally feel are not the correct ones is both untenable and fails to correct the problem that a “wrong” law is on the books. We need one set of rules for all members of society to live by. Laws capriciously applied based on who is enforcing the law that day is not a great basis for a fair society.
Applying those issues to this case: obviously there are differences of opinion regarding what legal protections should be afforded to what sorts of intellectual property. As a society we need that one set of rules and that one set of rules is an evolving beast. For now the law is hazy with a wide latitude allowed in what punishment is sought and who is just let off. That wide latitude can result in people not being prosecuted at all (apparently the result in the PACER incident) or in severe punishment being sought (threatened in the JSTOR instance, if only as a big stick to scare Mr. Swartz into a plea bargain they felt was severe enough to serve as a future deterrent to others).
The problem in this case is precisely the result of allowing for the individual discretion you are advocating for. The problem being that he ran into people who felt that the law is just and deserved an application allowed by the law severe enough to deter future offenses by others.
Intellectual property laws should not be enforced capriciously based on the right/wrong beliefs of IP protection in the heds of whichever enforcer happens to involved that day. Letting one instance get off scott free only invites more offenses. Until someone gets the book thrown at them and is shocked that the law actually meant what it said after all.
I found the analysis here by a law professor to be a worthwhile read on this.
Here’s his basic take on it:
You wanna know a REAL good way to not look like a monster? Don’t behave like one! Any reasonable human being could see the huge mismatch between what Swartz did and the level of punishment Ortiz wanted to mete out to him. Fuck her. She gets no slack from me.
That’s a real good read.
Some other particularly cogent bits (note particularly how the behavior of the prosecutors threatening severe punishment that would never actually occur is the standard operating procedure):
There are a heck of a lot of us who are not “reasonable human beings” I guess.
DSeid, I’m still looking at the figures, and thanks for link. Did you read this one from Aaron’s blog? It’s a short read, but this is one of the rare times I’ve seen him talk about being sick, claiming at the time he was suffering from four different illnesses with a depressed mood one of them. Helps support your contention of how serious his depression may have been. It was written in November of 2007.
People going about their day doing the job they were hired to do well within the norms of that job are not driving someone to suicide. If someone ended up killing themselves and the suicide note blamed the pain of the ignorance posted to this thread, would it be fair to say that the Straight Dope drove him to suicide? No.
And it wasn’t just downloading academic papers, as already pointed out in this thread.
Repeating the same catchphrases and making the same intellectually dishonest arguments over and over does not in any way advance your argument.
Want to know a good way to look like a rational human being?
No I had not seen it. Thank you for linking to it.
I think people who ignore the threat of a 30-year prison sentence (speculation about what it MIGHT have wound up being is pointless, as we all know, American justice ain’t just, especially when the government wants you in jail) are in no position to get smarmy on the topic of what constitutes “reasonable.”