>"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?
He also despises republicans completely, given this thread alone.
I'd set equal the anger in Tptacek to the craziness in sparrowos.
It would be lovely if HN could be a place where people could express themselves civilly and not be attacked.
TheAmazingIdiot is correct BTW. Its hard to imagine Thomas posting his ridiculous views unless he is a paid shill. Probably on your team.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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)