People who want to something to be done, or are ordering something to be done, which will be done at some point anyway, but who want the executors to get a move on, have adopted the locution "sooner rather than later" to describe what they're after: "we should file the thingum sooner rather than later in order to frobnicate the geezer", or whatever. An adaptation of "sooner or later", obviously. Sometimes, evidently, people who are advocating stupid positions will use this locution seemingly without realizing quite what they're saying:
The NIH proposal “will sooner rather than later destroy the commercial market for these scientific, technical and medical journals,” Ralph Oman, a copyright lawyer from George Washington University Law School, told the subcommittee (Chronicle of Higher Education).
Well garsh, if the commercial market is going to be destroyed anyway, shouldn't you offer an additional argument for why that destruction shouldn't be done in some managed fashion right now?
The CHE article contains another odd line from Oman: "Later, during a question-and-answer session, the lawyer got a laugh by asking whether we really wanted "the hairy snout of government" poking around in science publishing."—like, say, by passing a law preventing an grantmaking institution from imposing conditions on the grants it gives? If the law under discussion "forbids federal agencies from conditioning funding agreements -- like NIH grants --- on a requirement that authors make copies of their peer-reviewed articles public", that seems like governmental involvement too, does it not? (So, for that matter, does government funding in the first place, though who knows if Oman also wants the NIH to be shuttered and the government to stop providing funds to universities.)
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