Swartz was acting to make locked-up information (information derived from research largely paid for with tax dollars) free, because he believed it was an injustice to charge people for it.

Stanley was hacking Paypal and defacing other people's forums and websites, for the lulz.

While I think it's safe to say both committed crimes, I'm a lot more sympathetic to Swartz than to Stanley. Anonymous is a bit more grey: they perhaps exposed things that needed to be exposed, but they were often indiscriminate and hurt people in the process.

This isn't politics or hypocrisy; it's thinking critically about different circumstances and applying common-sense ethics and morality.