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Fuck Spez
I really love it when you do that to me
Swartz wasn’t involved in the origins of Reddit. He got involved when Y Combinator combined his company with Reddit (something along those lines?). He was not an actual founder, just an early influencer. In many ways, decoupling him from the shitshow that Ohanian and Huffman have engendered is a good thing.
This is very similar to the argument of Musk being a founder of Tesla.
Also Swartz had a section of his homepage defending child pornography as "not necessarily abuse" and that possession & distribution of it should be a first amendment right. He also advocated for a violent overthrow of the US government. Here's a cache of one instance of him defending it. Aaron did some really great tech stuff, but he's not a person that should be regarded as some hero as he had a lot of views that were misguided at best.
That website has been the same since it’s first archive on 2002-12-17. Aaron Swartz had just turned 16 a month earlier. I know I had some seriously immature opinions at that age. As well, that website was still up as of this January, a decade since his passing. http://www.aaronsw.com/ is also still up, and it doesn’t look like it was updated since 2002 either. Neither is any of this referenced on his wikipedia page, nor on it’s talk page. This feels like such a reach…
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.
I don't know if that's the reason CP is actually banned, but his logic is even worse and dumber by a mile.
I mean, the article linked in that page (albeit horribly long due to useless info) does raise a point against current laws on viewing illegal material.
But sharing it? Yeah that’s a bit of a stretch. Thinking that isn’t going to lead to more actual children being exploited is extremely naive.
Thinking that isn’t going to lead to more actual children being exploited is extremely naive.
That particular argument doesn't hold water. We don't generally subscribe to this kind of argument.
The general principle behind the specific argument you bring up here is this: All expression which is likely to inspire someone toward illegal action should itself be illegal.
CP is likely to inspire some people toward child abuse. Child abuse is illegal. Thus the distribution of CP should be illegal.
We don't do this anywhere else.
Descriptions of non consesnual violence are likely to inspire some people toward non consensual violence. Non consensual violence is illegal. Thus the distribution of all descriptions of non consensual violence should be illegal.
If we take this seriously, we have to ban action movies. And I am not even getting into the whole porn debate...
No, the only valid reason for banning the distribution of child porn which I can think of, lies in the rights of the victims. The victims were abused, and their image was used without their consent. Without them even possibly being able to give consent to any of that, or the distribution that follows.
So anyone who shares child porn, is guaranteed to share a piece of media which shows someone being subjected to a crime, while they couldn't possibly give consent for that to be recorded, or shared publicly. Making it illegal to share someone being a victim of a crime, without them being able to consent to that being shared, is a reasoning which has far fewer problems than what you propose here.
That particular argument doesn't hold water. We don't generally subscribe to this kind of argument.
The general principle behind the specific argument you bring up here is this: All expression which is likely to inspire someone toward illegal action should itself be illegal.
CP is likely to inspire some people toward child abuse. Child abuse is illegal. Thus the distribution of CP should be illegal.
We don't do this anywhere else.
Yes we do. Plenty of stuff is banned by federal law. Snuff films, for the same reason as CP/CSAM. Obscene pornography (stuff showing abuse or degradation, even if it’s just acting) isn’t illegal to posses, but it is illegal to buy, distribute or carry across state lines. Ivory is illegal, unless you have a certificate proving it is from pre-1989. These are all banned to stop demand.
And that’s not even getting started Americas long history of banning books.
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You raise a few valid points, but the problem with the action film thing is that it is fiction, and thus protected by free speech rights.
That's actually the main argument against lolicon being illegal: depictions of other crimes, including heinous ones like murder and rape, are not illegal.
Ultimately it comes down to inconsistency in the law, and sensationalism makes it very difficult to discuss rationally.
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I sure love it when people use a single opinion to smear a person's entire legacy, he was great not only for the tech stuff but his stance on scientific articles piracy and a lot of other stuff too.
I won't say that that his opinion on cp is a great one (there is no doubt at least for me that distribution should always be illegal), but he wrote it as a 16 years old and it was guided due to his extremism for free speech over the internet, regardless, it's not like he himself was an evil person distributing child pornography, to paint him as an overall shitty person for an opinion like this seems idiotic imo
This is q bit personal and maybe slightly unrelated, but it reminds me of when people defend non-offending pedos (as in they are attracted to children because yhey are born that way but have not offended, nor groomed, nor harmed a child) saying the stigma should be erased because that would allow us to actually help this people who constantly hide it, therefore reducing the harm to children. This position has unironically got me called a pedophile and a lot of horrible stuff over the internet, and I would draw parallels to this situation, no matter how you slice it this opinion should not be used singlehandedly to state he is someone that shouldn't be respected. Especially since he is not defending the harm itself being done to children (as in the production of CP) which would still be a crime under his view. (Although distribution of course grows the market so it's idiotic not to go after that too), but as I said, it's a bad opinion but that doesn't make him a bad person.
I'm not saying Aaron was 100% bad, my point is that I don't really think he's some modern-day hero either. And I've already replied to someone that dismissed the his child porn views as a forgotten childhood comment. It wasn't merely a poorly thought out comment he made at 16 and forgot about, he maintained and edited that page until his death, even restoring it after a server crash deleted it.
If you want to celebrate his tech contributions or his views on scientific piracy I'm all for it. I just don't agree with this view of him getting spread that he's some hero co-founder of Reddit that is being unfairly erased from history when that's inaccurate at best. He's just a dude that did some great things, had some great views, had some really really shit views, and never gave a shit about reddit.
i heard that Ohanian and Huffman have people out there trying to suggest that he was a pedo or some shit, what about that
I'd say you can read Aaron's own defense of child porn on his website and draw your own conclusions. If you're trying to suggest that I'm somehow defending Ohanian and Huffman, far from it. I can think Swartz shouldn't be considered a modern folk hero and still not like the other two.
Huffman was a mod for the jailbait subreddit.
Here's an interview with Ohanian after CNN reported on the jailbait subreddit which caused Reddit to close it down. Alexis blames CNN for "making up jibber jabber" and the children who allowed images of their abuse to be posted online.
This type of view was apparently support by all the original Reddit folks, just because Swartz has a better reputation now doesn't mean he didn't also share those views.
He was 16 years old when he posted this. The statement is disgusting and not really defensable by itself, but I wonder if this was a dumb naive teenage take, or if he still thought this way up until he died.
I also don't know if he was actually a pedophile, or if he just thought freedom of information on the web should be taken to the extreme. I would lean towards the latter since he seemed to have a relationship with an older woman at some point, but I don't think I will ever truly know for sure.
The statement is disgusting and not really defensable by itself
I hate it when this happens. Why do feelings always play into this discussion? "The statement is disgusting", is not an argument, and should never be part of any discussion.
No matter how disgusted a statement might make you feel, if it has a good argument behind it, it should be regarded as true.
I agree that the argument doesn't quite work. And that's that.
I just meant that it makes me feel gross. I imagine many people feel the same. I guess the statement itself isn't disgusting, but what it is advocating for is. On the other hand,
the argument doesn't quite work.
is putting it a bit lightly, in my opinion. Mostly because pedophilia is a generally despised act that should probably not really be argued for in the first place.
That archive date I linked is from shortly after his death. If you go through the various archive dates you can see that he made changes to the page over the years. He added the bit about wanting a violent overthrow of the government when he was 18 or 19. In 2007 when he would have been 21, the archive just shows a note that he had a server crash and the site is gone but you can email him if you want a copy of it. By the time he was 22 he'd put the site back online. He made more edits visible through the following years until his death. So yeah we don't know his thoughts but we do he continued to maintain that page, even choosing to restore it after a server crash, until the point he killed himself. It's not as though it's an online post he made as a kid and forgot about.
Thank you for the clarification there. I was not aware of the history of that cringey page. I had no idea that he kept it up and running like that.
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It's why all the appeals to "what would Aaron think" with the whole API thing were really off the mark.
spez and kn0thing were college buddies. Swartz was kind of pushed onto them by YC. I've never had the impression that they felt any particular attachment to him; he was a business partner that became involved at the behest of the people funding them, who left in the first couple of years.
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Fuck Spez
Obligatory FUCK SPEZ.
He's a cunt.
It should have been spez
Please God, give us Aaron Schwartz back and take Spez. Thanks!
This disgusts me.
Aaron Is one of my heroes. He died standing up for something he believed in.
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Aaron was reddit, and since his passing its shit now.
RIP Mr Swartz, you are sorely missed.
I need a history lesson. Who is Aaron, what's his deal?
One of the cofounders of Reddit. Killed himself. Here's his wiki. Aaron Swartz
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Watch the documentary The Internet's Own Boy. It's very much worth the watch.
Honored to teach you about Aaron Swartz,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
He was the best of us and the jack boots murdered him. Free flow of ideas and knowledge, we cant have that. And reddit went to shit after... Again he was a poet warrior, I wish he was still here.
Nobody cares about u/spez !
I looked into this more. Reddit (created by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian) merged with Infogami (created by Aaron Schwartz). There are people calling Aaron Schwartz one of the founders, but that doesn't seem entirely accurate.
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As a silver lining maybe it's best people don't associate him with what the site has become. He was a piece of its history, but he wasn't trying to found what Reddit has become
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Ok. Now that is truly fucked up. Someone needs to check in on that fucker, he's not mentally healthy.
Fuck spez... But where is Alexis on all of this? Does he comment, or just cashes the checks now?
At the End of the day: The greedy man's gonna have nothing, literally nothing. For Aaron his legacy will continue.
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They just decided that because Aaron fought for free speech, this fact doesn't fit their agenda anymore so they removed it. Amazing.
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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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