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This makes me upset. Its upsetting because while yes, information freedom is a very important topic and needs to happen, but it does not trump human freedom.
by binarymax 14y ago
This makes me upset. Its upsetting because while yes, information freedom is a very important topic and needs to happen, but it does not trump human freedom. I'm not sure if this is a straw man or not - but how can they justify working with an entity that has such a horrid human rights record?
- youngerdryas 14y agoFree movies.
- arbuge 14y agoI feel the same way. I personally think there have to be priorities in life and they might have lost some perspective about things here: http://www.businessinsider.com/survivors-liken-north-korean-prison-camps-to-holocaust-2013-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/survivors-liken-north-korean-... http://www.fastcompany.com/3006452/fast-feed/north-koreas-concentration-camps-are-growing http://www.fastcompany.com/3006452/fast-feed/north-koreas-co... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_North_Korea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_North_Korea
- rikacomet 14y agothe justification is what they say, that if that said body is ready to mend its way, then it shall be helped. Pirate bay has been offered, they haven't accepted it for now.
- chimeracoder 14y ago> but how can they justify working with an entity that has such a horrid human rights record? As pointed out yesterday on the Bradley Manning discussion, the US is starting to get to the point where it can't credibly criticize other countries for their human rights abuses, given what goes on in this country. I don't want this to turn into a discussion of whether the US is worse than North Korea, but both have abused - and continue to abuse - human rights in abysmal ways.
- arthulia 14y agoWow. I'm happy to turn this into a discussion. North Korea has it worse. There is no way in hell, you are going to convince me that the US is a bigger domestic human rights violator.
- burntsushi 14y ago> There is no way in hell, you are going to convince me that the US is a bigger domestic human rights violator. Good, because the grand-parent wasn't trying to.
- arthulia 14y agoAh, I apologize. It seemed like the poster was making a comparison between the US and NK when he said that the US could no longer credibly criticize NK for human rights violations, and that "both have abused [...] human rights in abysmal ways".
- burntsushi 14y agoThat can be true. But that doesn't mean the US is on the same level as NK. Maybe the poster could have been clearer, though.
- kragen 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_North_Korea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_North_Korea says, "The total number of prisoners is estimated to be 150,000 to 200,000." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_the_United_States says, "According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,266,800 adults were incarcerated in U.S. federal and state prisons, and county jails at year-end 2010." It seems like the United States is about an order of magnitude worse, even if you subtract the tiny fraction of US prisoners who are locked up to keep other people safe. And that's not even getting into how the countries' respective foreign policies violate human rights outside their borders, but I suggest reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War to start to get a handle on that. It's not that the Korean rulers are more moral than the US rulers. It's just that they're less effective.
- AznHisoka 14y agoPerhaps it's as simple as... money?
- bad_user 14y agoDon't really know why or if they are doing this, but the PirateBay's primary purpose is to stay up. If they are pushed to such extremes as to go to North Korea, then it's ultimately your fault, the citizen of a Western country, for allowing your government to take such drastic anti-copyright measures that ultimately lead to corruption and censorship. Kind of ironic that Internet freedom will be increasingly achieved in our countries by befriending our enemies.
- Karunamon 14y ago>it's ultimately your fault, the citizen of a Western country, for allowing your government.. Yeah, no. I didn't vote for these assholes. If you think even part of the nonsense professed by the MafiAA organizations has popular support, you're terribly deluded. I don't take kindly to being told I'm at fault for something I oppose and took every positive and reasonable step available to me to oppose.
- bad_user 14y agoI used a generic you, not you per se. My hat is off to the minority of people that care, but we are a minority.
- INTPenis 14y agoI think this can help you understand their mentality, PRQ, the hosting company behind TPB, have hosted pedophiles. I don't know if they still do because I haven't kept track, but they did for sure host pedophile message boards in 2005-2006 where pedophiles discussed things like raising children for sex. Why? I can only guess that it's because they believe in freedom of speech over everything else.
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- icebraining 14y agoDo you think child raping pedophiles will stop raping children if they can't host their boards at PRQ?
- tg3 14y agoJust because something will continue to occur does not justify your contribution to it occurring.
- icebraining 14y agoNo, but it means they aren't choosing freedom of speech over child abuse, like GP was insinuating. And I find the accusation of supporting child abuse rather unfair, unless one plans to accuse Tor and Freenet node operators (like me) of the same; after all, we all know actual child porn, not just talk, probably goes through our machine. The obfuscation just offloads our moral dillemas, it doesn't change the facts.
- INTPenis 14y agoI see it like this. Anyone can have freedom of speech, but it's up to the people if they want to listen. If a pedophile started preaching their beliefs in town square to a group of people, it wouldn't be long before they would be run out of town or beat up. The same goes for any services offered to people who's ideology you don't agree with.
- fleitz 14y agoYes, definitely, we should not stand by while companies host their content in countries known to use torture to extract information, hold prisoners with out trial, hold prisoners with out charge, allow their leaders to execute citizens summarily, execute minors and the mentally retarded, incarcerate people at a rate higher than any other country on earth merely in order to serve as slave labour for the state and state sponsored corporations. Even worse is many of the citizens of this 'republic' have been brainwashed by a compulsory education system that they actually live in a democratic republic.
- powertower 14y agoIf you think you can legitimately compare the living conditions, political environment, and human suffering in North Korea that with the USA, you might have also brainwashed yourself (it happens when you take everything you have for granted). In NK you'd be lucky to get 1 meal a day. Over here poor people are morbidly fat. And at the end of the day, you're not a prisoner, if you hate it here so much, you can leave this country any day you want to. But can't say the same for people in NK.
- fleitz 14y agoHow is it that you think I was talking about a country other than NK? Is there a country other than NK with such a piss poor human rights record? Generally when someone murders one person we regard them as a horrid individual we don't say their not that bad because they only killed 1 instead of 10 like that Ted Bundy guy. I didn't say I was living in a police state, the country I live in hasn't executed anyone in 40 years, and we certainly didn't think it was a big deal to destroy our nuclear weapons arsenal, stop stockpiling nuclear weapons, or ban landmines. I simply said we should stop hosting websites in countries with numerous years of history of horrid human rights abuse. Imagine living in a country where as recently at 1960 that certain classes of people were forbidden from eating lunch with other classes of people. I find your definition of police state interesting, would you say that NK would stop being a police state with different emigration policies?
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- powertower 14y agoThe primary function that the Pirate Bay serves is to illegitimately take other people's work and give it away for free - ohh, while displaying ads. Why would you hold them up to a higher standard?
- angersock 14y agoYeah, not like those social networks or anything.
- easy_rider 14y agoI agree. Comparing the right for free information to freedom of speech is debatable. But comparing it to freedom of individuality and the right of existence does not strike me funny at all. Joke or not.
- nmbr 14y agoI don't even know how to approach the moral quandary of seeking asylum in a concentration camp. Am I supposed to be impressed by the Fresh Young DPRK? There is no opening of relations here, just PR. Have TPB truly been hunted to the darkest corners of the Earth? In the end all this means to me is that I'm going to save the $65 that I was about to spend on a PB hoodie. Assuming TPB are paying for their NK servers, I'd rather not risking providing funds for lil' Kim's holocaust.
- breck 14y agoKeep in mind that our news media reports only the facts that fit their story of "NK is evil" and don't report any facts to the contrary. I assure you without a doubt it's a lot better place than our media makes it seem. Sure, their undemocratic system of government is a bad one, it's a CVS system when the rest of the world has moved to Git, and they will be A LOT better off when they switch, but the place has a lot of good going for it, and the reports we see are almost always chosen not for their objective value but to support the one sided argument that our media has been telling for years. To point to a specific example, yesterday I watched George Stephanopoulos interview Dennis Rodman after Rodman's NK trip and George made some comment about the human rights record and to back it up he mentioned that NK has 200,000 folks in prison camps. Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with 2.2 million people in prison right now. NK has a bad system of government. Their human rights record leaves much to be desired. But so does the human rights record of every country on earth, including the US.
- eurleif 14y ago>Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with 2.2 million people in prison right now. The US also has 13 times the population. And conditions in US prisons are not comparable to conditions in North Korean prisons.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoBull. Shit. North Korea is a totalitarian hell hole where there has been an ongoing holocaust of citizens for 6 decades.
- binaryatrocity 14y agoAnd the entire western hemisphere is an imperialist hell hole where there has been an ongoing holocaust of (native/indigenous) citizens for 6 centuries.
- pyre 14y ago| Rodman's NK trip If you ever bother to read about any of these accounts, they are all practically cookie-cutter. NK visits are practically on rails. It's not definitive proof of anything, but neither is the lack of visits to NK producing 'smoking gun' photos from prison camps. | Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with | 2.2 million people in prison right now. 1. The US doesn't throw entire families in jail to punish the actions of a single person. 2. Your logic about the numbers doesn't take into account the portion of the population. The US is a lot larger than North Korea. If we translate those numbers into percentages, North Korea has 0.81% of the population in prison, and the U.S. has 0.69% of the population in prison. 3. As bad as the US prison system is, I don't think that it's reach GULAG / Auschwitz levels, which by all accounts NK has. | Their human rights record leaves much to be | desired. But so does the human rights record | of every country on earth, including the US. That's like saying that GW Bush started a war in Iraq. Hitler started a war in Europe. They both started wars, therefore GW Bush == Hitler! My logic wins! [ Note: Nobody wanted to believe that the Holocaust was real in Germany until the troops started liberating the camps. IIRC, there were rumors, but most people basically said what you are saying, though there was probably more out of disbelief that human beings could do such a thing. ]
- baby 14y agoyou mean America? on a more serious note, your country is pushing them to leave their own country. Where to go? To your enemies of course.