RIP. He might have only been
a backer but he helped pave the way for P2P torrenting getting mainstream attention and eternally pissing off the content mafia in true hacker spirit.
muzani 4 days ago [-]
I would say he wasn't just a backer. There's not a lot of people willing to back sites like this, and even if they were, they're unlikely to meet one another. It's possible TPB wouldn't even happen without him.
ghuntley 4 days ago [-]
It wouldn't have. Without him, there would be no WikiLeaks et al.
dagw 4 days ago [-]
Do you consider using your inherited wealth to bankroll white nationalist political candidates also part of the "true hacker spirit". Carl may have been part of TPB for a small part of his life, but his true life long passion and calling was always first and foremost to be a dedicated and passionate white nationalist.
marcusverus 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
arp242 4 days ago [-]
I have to admit I have little knowledge of Swedish politics, but I read he was part of Bevara Sverige Svenskt, which went around with slogans such as "don't let your daughter become a negro toy" and "negros threaten their victims". That's just dehumanising racist nonsense.
If you want to talk about Swedish culture then sure and critique various forms of multiculturalism, then sure, that's fine. But by focusing on skin colour "white nationalism" is fundamentally racist.
timkam 4 days ago [-]
The historic reality begs to differ: Sweden covers large parts of the traditional homelands of non-Swedish people. Current reality differs as well, obviously. No matter how you twist it and turn it, the argument can only make sense for a hypothetical, geographically smaller Sweden that does not exist.
marcusverus 4 days ago [-]
> Sweden covers large parts of the traditional homelands of non-Swedish people.
How does this lead to the conclusion that Swedish ethno-nationalism is bad?
timkam 3 days ago [-]
In the ethno-nationalistic sense, Sweden is not a nation state. In its current reality, Sweden is ethnically diverse and it (partially) covers the homelands of several peoples/"nations" in the ethno-nationalistic sense. The latter issue could, e.g., be solved by giving up most of what the Swedes in the South call Norrland. This would deplete "Sweden" of natural resources and make it even more dependent on high-skilled immigration to ensure that at least the tech industry industry in the somewhat larger cities keeps running.
marcusverus 3 days ago [-]
If Sweden isn't Swedish because ~30k Sami live there, then China isn't Chinese because 50K Uzbeks live there. You're not arguing that Sweden isn't a nation-state, you're arguing that nation states don't exist, which is just silly.
timkam 3 days ago [-]
You are introducing a straw-man argument here (that obviously ignores basic facts about population sizes of Sweden and China, so it's wrong on both meta- and object-level). But following that line of reasoning, Sweden is not an ethnostate because the Swedish population is ethnically diverse. E.g., more than a third of the population are either foreign-born or have at least one foreign-born parent. At the same time, the current borders of Sweden cover more than the traditional homeland of your preferred "Swedes". So apparently, you are actually arguing for a racist empire. Demographic reality is not your friend, though. Perhaps you will have more success some generations down the road. Try to sell the same story to the ethnically substantially different group of people who will consider themselves "Swedes" then.
zaphirplane 3 days ago [-]
They as others are making the point that racism is bad, you keep justifying it because Swedish people are white
marcusverus 3 days ago [-]
Thinking that a Swedish Sweden is racist is racist. Do better.
computerthings 4 days ago [-]
[dead]
zaphirplane 3 days ago [-]
How is that not racism
southernplaces7 3 days ago [-]
By this logic I suppose you would also be opposed to black power movements or certain African nationalist tendencies? White is more than just one bland, interchangeably generic ethnicity/race. It's hundreds of millions of people of many ethnicities and they have no less right to celebrate these cultural roots than anyone else. It's a shame to see so many of them cheaply labeled as white nationalist ergo Nazis even if they might have fuck all to do with racist fascism.
tkel 2 days ago [-]
You conveniently left out the context and are looking at these issues in a vacuum, which is an ahistorical false equivalence and not based in reality. The black power movements are born out of minority resistance to a society which used to trade those humans as property. What you are describing is a "white" society extending its domination over all other people in a "nation", ergo Nazism.
tkel 4 days ago [-]
Another day, another nazi on HN
antiracist 4 days ago [-]
The joy of driving artists and musicians into bankruptcy is more important than any of that, apparently.
chimeracoder 4 days ago [-]
> The joy of driving artists and musicians into bankruptcy is more important than any of that, apparently.
Comments like these distract from the larger point you're making because they misrepresent the nature of the effect that TPB (and similar services) actually have had on artists, and on the historical relationship between artists and the capital class throughout history.
It's a common misconception that filesharing harms artists - that's a misconception put forth by the RIAA and its ilk because it harms them. In reality, the relationship is much more complicated, because artists aren't the ones who directly benefit from album sales anyway, and they are themselves often exploited by the record labels who are the ones directly harmed by filesharing (to the extent that you believe filesharing even constitutes harm, which is a separate and debated point).
akimbostrawman 4 days ago [-]
>It's a common misconception that filesharing harms artists
> In 2018, he was sentenced, together with his accomplice, to pay half a million kronor in damages to the two women he helped rape. But since he could not pay any damages, it was instead the taxpayers who were forced to pay it for him. This is what the plaintiff's lawyer for one of the two raped women tells Samnytt.
So the first issue was that the government stepped in to give his victims money. I hope that the government is then going after him to make that whole I don’t know since this seems to be a press release from the government criticizing the judiciary.
> The reason is that the Supreme Court has ruled that the convicted rapist may have been under 18 when he raped two women in Malmö in 2017 and was therefore sentenced to an excessively harsh sentence by first the Malmö District Court and later the Skåne and Blekinge Court of Appeal.
> The damages correspond to a compensation of 60,000 kronor per month for the 14 months that JK believes the convicted rapist was forced to spend too long in prison. The decision to give money to a rapist in this way has rightly met with strong criticism from the public, who think it is wrong for a convicted rapist to receive so much money.
While optically, politically, and emotionally it’s undesirable and reprehensible, from another perspective it’s admirable that the Swedish justice system seems to be upholding the law regardless of who it benefits. A legal system needs to protect criminal systems from the government mob just as much as it needs to protect society from criminals.
> A document examiner at the Swedish Migration Agency says in Uppdrag granskning that she has never seen a passport with that validity period before, which could indicate that it is a fake passport.
Hmm... an unnamed source.
> "I believe we made the assessment that the review that the border police did of the passport was the one we presented to the court", says prosecutor Kristina Amilon to Uppdrag granskning.
vs a formal representative of the government.
So maybe faked but doesn't sound like there's actually accepted evidence. If faked, of course that exposes him to further legal liability which should be used to prosecute him further since he defrauded the government (+ get back the money).
This is why I stay away from tabloids - the reporting quality is extremely poor & intentionally sensationalized and often precisely to try to mislead you.
ghuntley 4 days ago [-]
We just lost another Aaron Swartz. Without Carl, there would have been no https://prq.se/. Without Pauraque, there would be no WikiLeaks, Pirate Bay and a host of other big things that fundamentally shaped the world. Shit, governments were toppled.
dagw 4 days ago [-]
Do you think Carl's life long political activism outside of hosting TPB should be taken into account when deciding whether to compare him Aaron Swartz or not? Or do you think that his actions with TPB where so noble and important that it outweighs anything else he might have done before and after?
chimeracoder 4 days ago [-]
> Do you think Carl's life long political activism outside of hosting TPB should be taken into account when deciding whether to compare him Aaron Swartz or not? Or do you think that his actions with TPB where so noble and important that it outweighs anything else he might have done before and after?
Another question to add to that list: Do you think that the rest of Aaron Swartz's life work was so inconsequential compared to the one thing that everyone seems to remember him for simply because it led to his death, that it justifies this comparison? Is that not relevant in deciding whether to draw a comparison between these two individuals who could not have been more different, both in terms of political ideology and in terms of how they integrated that ideology into their daily lives and actions?
dagw 4 days ago [-]
Both Swartz and Lundström seemed to have been first and foremost passionate and unyielding about their politics and I'm sure they both considered their lifelong political activism their true meaningful work, certainly much more important than the things they're most remembered for. Both were willing to sink their considerable wealth into furthering their political causes. Both realised early that the internet would be a vital platform and 'battle ground' for spreading their politics. Both have been willing to break the law in the name of their political ideology.
I guess when I put it like that, they actually do have a lot in common.
chimeracoder 4 days ago [-]
I can tell you that Aaron Swartz would not be happy to hear that comparison were he alive today, particularly that last part.
dagw 4 days ago [-]
Oh absolutely. I think it's very safe to say that Aaron Swartz would have hated everything Carl Lundstöm stood for. I was being slightly facetious with my comparison.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4 days ago [-]
> Both have been willing to break the law in the name of their political ideology.
Aaron Swartz did not commit any crimes. Pretty sure that's what the parent commenter was getting at.
threatofrain 4 days ago [-]
Aaron Swartz is so young there is really nothing much to say about him. This guy lived basically 3x of Aaron's lifetime.
chimeracoder 4 days ago [-]
> Aaron Swartz is so young there is really nothing much to say about him.
This is absolutely insulting, given how clear he Aaron Swartz was about his beliefs from a young age and how much he accomplished in effecting them before he died.
> This guy lived basically 3x of Aaron's lifetime.
I have no idea what this is supposed to imply.
threatofrain 4 days ago [-]
Life is short and Aaron received a fraction of that. One can only imagine what would've been had Aaron received more time.
chimeracoder 4 days ago [-]
> Life is short and Aaron received a fraction of that. One can only imagine what would've been had Aaron received more time.
You'll have to be more explicit about what you are intending to communicate by making this statement in the context of a thread about the death of a man who, when he was the same age Aaron Swartz was at the time the latter died, was a prominent member of a neo-Nazi party.
4 days ago [-]
walterbell 3 days ago [-]
We don't have text quotas, no need to weigh.
Multiple discussion threads can exist, for praise or critique.
Ideally, such threads would avoid derailing each other by focusing on specific actions, consequences or legacies.
chimeracoder 4 days ago [-]
> We just lost another Aaron Swartz.
There is a world of difference between Aaron Swartz and Carl Lindström, starting with their political ideologies (which in Aaron's case was inseparable from his life's work) and extending through the way they executed on them and their degree of involvement in the causes for which they are the most known.
I don't think Aaron Swartz would be happy to hear this comparison if he were alive today.
wyclif 4 days ago [-]
Carl Lindström's political ideology was also inseparable from his life's work.
chimeracoder 3 days ago [-]
> Carl Lindström's political ideology was also inseparable from his life's work.
I made no claim about him one way or the other in this regard.
That said, if you're going to make the claim that his political ideology was inseparable from his work (in direct contrast to most of the other comments here which say they should be kept separate), then it's worth spelling out why people would celebrating the work of a man with a documented career of being a prominent member of neo-Nazi parties, spanning over 40 years.
antiracist 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
akimbostrawman 4 days ago [-]
Yes yes we get it move along. Everybody you don't like is literally hitler.
thrance 4 days ago [-]
Are you actually fine with white supremacists? Or do you just defend them out of ignorance?
123yawaworht456 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
thrance 4 days ago [-]
Disgusting defense, there is something wrong with harassing any citizens whose face you don't think is white enough to belong to "your people", like "Keep Sweden Swedish" did.
Why would the skin color of those who lived there 1000 years ago be relevant to anything? I don't see many Americans advocating for an expulsion of all non-indians (rightly so).
Also, when was the last time a nationalist wave led to anything good for anyone? All I can recall is ruin and suffering.
123yawaworht456 4 days ago [-]
>Why would the skin color of those who lived there 1000 years ago be relevant to anything? I don't see many Americans advocating for an expulsion of all non-indians (rightly so).
it's kind of too late to expel non-indians, because there are virtually no indians left.
there's a lesson to be learned from their fate, don't you think?
>Also, when was the last time a nationalist wave led to anything good for anyone? All I can recall is ruin and suffering.
well, a fairly recent example would be Ukraine, which would be a Russian province now if it wasn't for their ethnic - yes, ethnic, not civic - nationalism.
computerthings 4 days ago [-]
[dead]
dagw 4 days ago [-]
Carl Lundström was literally an active member of a group that would literally wear Nazi symbols and openly shout sieg heil while doing the Nazi salute in public.
boramalper 4 days ago [-]
I think Carl was more of an early supporter and provided vital services without which TPB might not exist but I'm not sure if he should be considered a co-founder (or is considered so by the other three).
ghuntley 4 days ago [-]
Bingo bango and right on the money.
antiracist 4 days ago [-]
Essential reading for anyone curious about Carl Lundström's life outside of bankrolling The Pirate Bay:
> Lundström was linked to a gang of skinheads that attacked Latin American tourists in Stockholm in the mid-1980s. Over the years, Lundström has switched his support from Keep Sweden Swedish to the far-right headbangers party New Democracy - but was thrown out for being too right wing. He's currently bankrolling 100 candidates for the Swedish equivalent of the BNP.
rtkwe 4 days ago [-]
Glad he accidentally did at least one half-decent thing with his money once. Wonder what his reason was for it, it's not a stance I'd expect from someone with his political leanings.
dagw 4 days ago [-]
Wonder what his reason was for it
Initially almost certainly money. He had a history of being an entrepreneur and investor involved in all kinds of random businesses. Back when he first got involved with TPB, what they were doing (just hosting torrent links) wasn't technically illegal in Sweden, and he probably figured that getting shares in what had potential to become a massive web site in return for offering free hosting at the ISP he ran was a really good deal.
Of course his official story was that he wasn't really involved, he mostly just let one of his employees host this side project for free on a server at the ISP he ran. And once his politics became known, the official line from the other TPB founders was that he had never had anything to do with TPB, he just happened to own the ISP where they happened to be hosting.
There is also a story that his company had been heavily fined by the BSA over some software licensing and that he was pissed off at them and saw this as a way of getting revenge.
rtkwe 4 days ago [-]
Haha so this one good thing was maybe by accident or spite, that jives.
bjoli 4 days ago [-]
BSS ("keep Sweden Swedish") were Nazis. I am old enough to remember them heiling in the streets (real proper heiling, not the kind you accidentally do at a presidential inauguration. Twice). He never really managed to distance himself from that. Not that he seemed to try.
Outside of financing thepiratebay ge spent most of his life hiding assets from being taxed. And he also lobbied an anti-tax organisation for an even-lower-tax policy.
The only good thing about the whole pirate bay court saga was that he lost a lot of money he would have otherwise used to push his far right-agenda.
chimeracoder 4 days ago [-]
> He never really managed to distance himself from that. Not that he seemed to try.
Is there any reason to believe he even wanted to distance himself from it? He ran for office just a few years ago on essentially the same platform.
ddtaylor 4 days ago [-]
TPB has paved the way for so many of us to walk. RIP Carl.
_mitterpach 4 days ago [-]
So many tragic plane incidents lately. Is there any reason for this increased occurence, or is it actually within normal margins?
selectodude 4 days ago [-]
Small planes like that crash all the time. You’re just hearing about it because we’re all on high alert - and in this circumstance, because the deceased has some fame.
jorvi 4 days ago [-]
Chartered (= small) planes crash sometimes. Helicopters crash a lot.
Big airline crashes are virtually non-existent, to the point where US airlines had 16 fatality-free years until this January, on 210 million flights. Flying commercially is mind-boggingly safe.
rtkwe 4 days ago [-]
To be a bit pedantic this isn't a chartered flight. That's a whole level above this that does require some more specialized licensure. Carl was flying his own plane so this would be good ol' General Aviation. A private pilot's license is not allowed to offer flights for pay only cost sharing (at least in the US) and only for flights the pilot would otherwise have taken without passengers (tougher to prove but easy to mess up if you're trying to skirt the law).
dharmab 4 days ago [-]
It's an open secret, borderline meme in the General Aviation community about rich plane owners being overconfident and impatient, resulting in flying into poor weather conditions and getting into trouble.
When I was much younger, my mom worked for a wealthy small business owner. Her job involved overnight supervision of pregnant horses; the foals were very valuable, and the owners of the sires were paid handsomely. Anyway, sometimes I would go along for a sleep over, enjoy the adventure of being away from home, play some pinball. Whatever.
Anyway, one day (as an adult) I met the owner, shook his hand. No big deal. But the very next day I was driving along and saw black smoke, and found out later that it was coming from a helicopter crash, and one of the victims was the man I had met and shook hands with a day earlier.
It was really eerie, and of course had a relatively direct affect on our lives, not just mentally / emotionally, but ultimately the stable changed ownership and my mom ended up having to get a different job.
If there's a point, sometimes crashes (and deaths) don't matter to us, personally (even if they matter to plenty of other people), and sometimes they do. You definitely notice the ones that matter to you personally, or are just on a larger scale than is normal.
rtkwe 4 days ago [-]
So far this year there's about the same number of General Aviation crashes you'd expect they're making the news more because there's more eyes on the situation because of the major commercial aviation crashes (which are decidedly not normal).
General Aviation is quite a bit less safe than commercial aviation for a lot of reasons; fewer engines means more risk of failure, lack of maintenance due to cost or understanding, pilots are less well trained (generally speaking of course), GA often flies at lower altitudes giving less time for recovery, etc.
You can scroll back through the FAA's release archive for a look at just how many incidents happen that never make the wider news you've likely never heard of unless you live in the area it happened (and maybe not even then given the state of local news).
Small 4 seater plane, flying solo, through the mountains and in bad weather. Not recommended.
davidhariri 4 days ago [-]
I had the same reaction. I wonder if it’s simply that more people are flying?
user-the-name 4 days ago [-]
[dead]
GrumpyNl 4 days ago [-]
We are getting older and so are your heroes. They just die.
ziddoap 4 days ago [-]
This would be more applicable to death by natural causes, not death by plane accident.
dysoco 4 days ago [-]
This is true but also the longer you live the more people you get to recognize at least by name.
rvnx 4 days ago [-]
It sometimes feels the more evil you are, the longer you live.
Larry Silverstein, George Soros, Rupert Murdoch, Charles Koch, Donald Trump are enjoying their best lives.
And before that, David Rockefeller (til 101 years!).
Life is unfair from the beginning.
anonzzzies 4 days ago [-]
Only the good die young. I like the Iron Maiden song.
tasuki 4 days ago [-]
Is George Soros evil? I always thought he did a lot of good for the world.
acdha 4 days ago [-]
He is not, but the extreme right likes to demonize him so they can use his name as a smear but claim they’re not anti-Semitic.
3 days ago [-]
muzani 4 days ago [-]
A lot of plane/helicopter deaths are assassinations. I'm not saying any of the recent ones are, but the data for "normal margins" is probably skewed.
You probably don't see as many assassinations from heat stroke, submarines, etc. There's a few under "self harm", but the actual self harm deaths far exceed the whistleblower "self harm" cases to the point that they're not too statistically significant.
southernplaces7 3 days ago [-]
>The propeller plane split into two after crashing into a wooden cabin in the Velika Planina mountain
Had to laugh at this though. "Velika Planina", the incredibly original name for this mountain means "Big Mountain" in Serbo Croatian and slovenian. The news article basically said "Big Mountain mountain".
Philpax 4 days ago [-]
His politics were awful, but it's still a shame to see someone who enabled TPB's existence passing away. Partial RIP, I guess.
thrance 4 days ago [-]
The amount of people rushing to defend the actions of a white supremacist in this thread is deeply disturbing. His past ties to "Keep Sweden Swedish" (a known neonazi organization) are well established.
piva00 4 days ago [-]
Carl Lundström was a financier of TPB's operations but otherwise he was a far-right nativist nutjob. Thanks for providing the money, Carl, for the rest I'm glad you are not around anymore.
dmos62 3 days ago [-]
Is hosting a Bittorrent tracker resource-intensive? Is paying for it a founder-level contribution?
NoGravitas 4 days ago [-]
Broke TrueAnon rule 3: never get in a small airplane or a helicopter.
incognito124 4 days ago [-]
This kind of dampens my enthusiasm for getting a PPL
4 days ago [-]
1970-01-01 4 days ago [-]
This may be worthy of the black bar if politics are properly ignored and the tech value/virtue isn't. RIP.
codezero 4 days ago [-]
[dead]
bhouston 4 days ago [-]
Note to self, if I ever get rich fight the urge to get into flying. I don't know the stats off hand, but the number of people that die in small plane crashes seems quite high.
rtkwe 4 days ago [-]
Commercial flying is quite safe but General Aviation is quite a bit more dangerous.
4 days ago [-]
4 days ago [-]
wertyo 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
thrance 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
sebstefan 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
tapeworm 4 days ago [-]
Just a reminder to everyone that The Pirate Bay was set up to facilitate copyright infringement on a large scale, depriving creators of significant earnings for their work. The involvement of anyone in this is both illegal and immoral.
Something to consider before lauding Carl Lundström for his contribution. Also consider that he was a white supremacist and was deeply involved in far right politics.
He was not a man who deserves a glowing eulogy.
amelius 4 days ago [-]
If big companies keep stealing my personal information and say this is normal, then I don't mind big companies are being stolen data from.
washadjeffmad 4 days ago [-]
The only thing glowing here is this comment.
akimbostrawman 4 days ago [-]
Just a reminder that your moral or political opinions aren't universally or law.
He was a man deserving a glowing eulogy.
daeken 4 days ago [-]
Piracy: not bad, unethical, or immoral.
White supremacy: very bad, unethical, and immoral.
Maybe reconsider your priorities here.
Rendered at 12:54:43 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
If you want to talk about Swedish culture then sure and critique various forms of multiculturalism, then sure, that's fine. But by focusing on skin colour "white nationalism" is fundamentally racist.
How does this lead to the conclusion that Swedish ethno-nationalism is bad?
Comments like these distract from the larger point you're making because they misrepresent the nature of the effect that TPB (and similar services) actually have had on artists, and on the historical relationship between artists and the capital class throughout history.
It's a common misconception that filesharing harms artists - that's a misconception put forth by the RIAA and its ilk because it harms them. In reality, the relationship is much more complicated, because artists aren't the ones who directly benefit from album sales anyway, and they are themselves often exploited by the record labels who are the ones directly harmed by filesharing (to the extent that you believe filesharing even constitutes harm, which is a separate and debated point).
Case in point EU study proving that.
https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...
The TPB AFK documentary is quite good about the trial.
Crazy that they got harsher sentences than a lot of rapists in Sweden - like the guy who got only 14 months and then received ~$80k USD from the government: https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/skri...
So the first issue was that the government stepped in to give his victims money. I hope that the government is then going after him to make that whole I don’t know since this seems to be a press release from the government criticizing the judiciary.
> The reason is that the Supreme Court has ruled that the convicted rapist may have been under 18 when he raped two women in Malmö in 2017 and was therefore sentenced to an excessively harsh sentence by first the Malmö District Court and later the Skåne and Blekinge Court of Appeal.
> The damages correspond to a compensation of 60,000 kronor per month for the 14 months that JK believes the convicted rapist was forced to spend too long in prison. The decision to give money to a rapist in this way has rightly met with strong criticism from the public, who think it is wrong for a convicted rapist to receive so much money.
While optically, politically, and emotionally it’s undesirable and reprehensible, from another perspective it’s admirable that the Swedish justice system seems to be upholding the law regardless of who it benefits. A legal system needs to protect criminal systems from the government mob just as much as it needs to protect society from criminals.
So he had fraudulently received that money too.
Hmm... an unnamed source.
> "I believe we made the assessment that the review that the border police did of the passport was the one we presented to the court", says prosecutor Kristina Amilon to Uppdrag granskning.
vs a formal representative of the government.
So maybe faked but doesn't sound like there's actually accepted evidence. If faked, of course that exposes him to further legal liability which should be used to prosecute him further since he defrauded the government (+ get back the money).
This is why I stay away from tabloids - the reporting quality is extremely poor & intentionally sensationalized and often precisely to try to mislead you.
Another question to add to that list: Do you think that the rest of Aaron Swartz's life work was so inconsequential compared to the one thing that everyone seems to remember him for simply because it led to his death, that it justifies this comparison? Is that not relevant in deciding whether to draw a comparison between these two individuals who could not have been more different, both in terms of political ideology and in terms of how they integrated that ideology into their daily lives and actions?
I guess when I put it like that, they actually do have a lot in common.
Aaron Swartz did not commit any crimes. Pretty sure that's what the parent commenter was getting at.
This is absolutely insulting, given how clear he Aaron Swartz was about his beliefs from a young age and how much he accomplished in effecting them before he died.
> This guy lived basically 3x of Aaron's lifetime.
I have no idea what this is supposed to imply.
You'll have to be more explicit about what you are intending to communicate by making this statement in the context of a thread about the death of a man who, when he was the same age Aaron Swartz was at the time the latter died, was a prominent member of a neo-Nazi party.
Multiple discussion threads can exist, for praise or critique.
Ideally, such threads would avoid derailing each other by focusing on specific actions, consequences or legacies.
There is a world of difference between Aaron Swartz and Carl Lindström, starting with their political ideologies (which in Aaron's case was inseparable from his life's work) and extending through the way they executed on them and their degree of involvement in the causes for which they are the most known.
I don't think Aaron Swartz would be happy to hear this comparison if he were alive today.
I made no claim about him one way or the other in this regard.
That said, if you're going to make the claim that his political ideology was inseparable from his work (in direct contrast to most of the other comments here which say they should be kept separate), then it's worth spelling out why people would celebrating the work of a man with a documented career of being a prominent member of neo-Nazi parties, spanning over 40 years.
Why would the skin color of those who lived there 1000 years ago be relevant to anything? I don't see many Americans advocating for an expulsion of all non-indians (rightly so).
Also, when was the last time a nationalist wave led to anything good for anyone? All I can recall is ruin and suffering.
it's kind of too late to expel non-indians, because there are virtually no indians left.
there's a lesson to be learned from their fate, don't you think?
>Also, when was the last time a nationalist wave led to anything good for anyone? All I can recall is ruin and suffering.
well, a fairly recent example would be Ukraine, which would be a Russian province now if it wasn't for their ethnic - yes, ethnic, not civic - nationalism.
https://www.theregister.com/2012/09/21/pirate_bay_fascist_ba...
https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/26/pirate_bay_neo_nazi
> Lundström was linked to a gang of skinheads that attacked Latin American tourists in Stockholm in the mid-1980s. Over the years, Lundström has switched his support from Keep Sweden Swedish to the far-right headbangers party New Democracy - but was thrown out for being too right wing. He's currently bankrolling 100 candidates for the Swedish equivalent of the BNP.
Initially almost certainly money. He had a history of being an entrepreneur and investor involved in all kinds of random businesses. Back when he first got involved with TPB, what they were doing (just hosting torrent links) wasn't technically illegal in Sweden, and he probably figured that getting shares in what had potential to become a massive web site in return for offering free hosting at the ISP he ran was a really good deal.
Of course his official story was that he wasn't really involved, he mostly just let one of his employees host this side project for free on a server at the ISP he ran. And once his politics became known, the official line from the other TPB founders was that he had never had anything to do with TPB, he just happened to own the ISP where they happened to be hosting.
There is also a story that his company had been heavily fined by the BSA over some software licensing and that he was pissed off at them and saw this as a way of getting revenge.
Outside of financing thepiratebay ge spent most of his life hiding assets from being taxed. And he also lobbied an anti-tax organisation for an even-lower-tax policy.
The only good thing about the whole pirate bay court saga was that he lost a lot of money he would have otherwise used to push his far right-agenda.
Is there any reason to believe he even wanted to distance himself from it? He ran for office just a few years ago on essentially the same platform.
Big airline crashes are virtually non-existent, to the point where US airlines had 16 fatality-free years until this January, on 210 million flights. Flying commercially is mind-boggingly safe.
https://www.faa.gov/media/19371 "get-there-itis"
Anyway, one day (as an adult) I met the owner, shook his hand. No big deal. But the very next day I was driving along and saw black smoke, and found out later that it was coming from a helicopter crash, and one of the victims was the man I had met and shook hands with a day earlier.
It was really eerie, and of course had a relatively direct affect on our lives, not just mentally / emotionally, but ultimately the stable changed ownership and my mom ended up having to get a different job.
If there's a point, sometimes crashes (and deaths) don't matter to us, personally (even if they matter to plenty of other people), and sometimes they do. You definitely notice the ones that matter to you personally, or are just on a larger scale than is normal.
General Aviation is quite a bit less safe than commercial aviation for a lot of reasons; fewer engines means more risk of failure, lack of maintenance due to cost or understanding, pilots are less well trained (generally speaking of course), GA often flies at lower altitudes giving less time for recovery, etc.
You can scroll back through the FAA's release archive for a look at just how many incidents happen that never make the wider news you've likely never heard of unless you live in the area it happened (and maybe not even then given the state of local news).
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/statements/accident_incidents
>From 2015 to 2020, there were a total of 7,294 accidents
>From 2015 to 2020, there were a total of 2,220 fatalities
https://flyfright.com/plane-crash-statistics/small-airplane-...
Larry Silverstein, George Soros, Rupert Murdoch, Charles Koch, Donald Trump are enjoying their best lives.
And before that, David Rockefeller (til 101 years!).
Life is unfair from the beginning.
You probably don't see as many assassinations from heat stroke, submarines, etc. There's a few under "self harm", but the actual self harm deaths far exceed the whistleblower "self harm" cases to the point that they're not too statistically significant.
Had to laugh at this though. "Velika Planina", the incredibly original name for this mountain means "Big Mountain" in Serbo Croatian and slovenian. The news article basically said "Big Mountain mountain".
Something to consider before lauding Carl Lundström for his contribution. Also consider that he was a white supremacist and was deeply involved in far right politics.
He was not a man who deserves a glowing eulogy.
He was a man deserving a glowing eulogy.
White supremacy: very bad, unethical, and immoral.
Maybe reconsider your priorities here.