Uh, no, it’s not. It’s about two lawyers and a bikini girl. You do not actually get to arbitrarily replace words in other people’s statements and then declare them racists, no matter how much making shit up may appear to strengthen your position. The fact that someone took a highly modular joke and replaced clergy with lawyers does not make it secretly about religion, and your absurd legalistic wrangling is really not helping dispel any lawyer stereotypes.

Read the second paragraph again about “getting jail time” and stop projecting your issues onto limited info..

Also, I grew up a speciest (if there is such a word). If I had to pick from the worst of the worst of our human species to live and an endangered animal, that animal wouldn’t have a chance.

It’s sort of disturbing in my mind that people could be so dismissive of human life just because it’s plentiful (currently) on the planet. I know we should share the planet with our animal, plant, brethren, etc. (not advocating destruction of species or environments to be clear) but if it a situation between”them” or me, it’s going to be them.

In this case, if they are going round up and throw away human life to make a point, they better be getting EVERYONE in the chain, not the “face” of the problem that the media/government decided to pin it all on.

Don’t know where, don’t know when.
But I know: Whale meat again, some sunny day.

I know, a joke is in the eye of the beholder. My point was that, despite the wealth of lawyer jokes available, the silly ad hominem directed my way was just a bowdlerization of a much more offensive (or funnier — depending on if you were offended) joke. If you’re going to insult someone, don’t use the PG-13 version of an R-rated joke. 

So maybe it’s not about the taste, but the thrill of the taboo… which can be just as much motivation for the activists, particularly if they can justify it to themselves as “for a good cause”.

(Or maybe everyone just says “Meh” because they don’t want it to become popular and drive up the price!)

(I don’t know why I’m defending what was, ultimately, an off-the-cuff joke I don’t really believe has much of a basis in reality, so I’ll stop now I think…)

If we assume Swartz really did violate the CFAA, then his actions were mostly certainly not a “one-off.” He had gotten into similar trouble for yanking files from PACER, and he made it clear he didn’t feel these sorts of restriction on the usage of academic papers was appropriate.

I agree “the crime is very real” here. Does it not bother you to see 67 years tossed around casually for a non-violent regulatory violation? It is this sort of mentality, in which a person could be thrown in prison for the remainder of their life without having endangered a single human being, that enables prosecutors like Ortiz to throw the book at everyone — Swarz included.

While I haven’t tasted Sei, I have tasted a couple of other types of whale and for the most part they taste like beef, only richer and oilier. 

Slap on the wrist.

But that’s just nitpicking… the “joke” is whatever the teller makes it.  In this case, the joke is NOT about a priest and a rabbi, it’s about lawyers.  It may have started that way, but that doesn’t mean he’s guilty of some faux pas because of the problems in the original: the original has been adapted to remove those problems (of course, it still has other problems).

Here, the crime is very real, and not a one-off thing.

That said, the environmentalist in me would like to point out that while Sei whales are critically endangered, we’re not exactly running out of people.

No, it won’t.

Your point is noted: it’s wrong to throw decades of prison at non-violent people commit regulatory violations of copyright law, but it’s okay to throw decades of prison at non-violent people who commit other regulatory violations.

I’m sure your nuanced position will be overwhelmingly adopted by U.S. Attorneys across the country, and you should congratulate yourself for taking a useful stand against the culture of overprosecution. 

Well done.

Here’s hoping you get out of the bed soon.