So when is someone going to acquire a copy and leak it to Wikileaks or similar? Once it's out it's out, and this now-months-long saga of trying to justify censorship will become moot.

In Saudi Arabia, 99% of the time no one dares criticize the Prophet Muhammad... and so nothing happens. So I guess it's a free country and people have the freedom to say whatever they want, right?

You still haven't explained what's "wrong" with this.

...and I'll say it again: Why do these centralized, single-point-of-failure websites even exist? I thought people learned from Napster back in the early 2000s that decentralized, peer-to-peer was a lot more resilient? And as p2p networks have been disrupted by the cartels and governments, people have further moved to encrypted p2p networks and the so-called "dark web."

What you're seeing here is someone losing a battle because they went up against a modern military... using a longbow. Or maybe even just a sharpened stick. It's 2012, censorship tools and techniques have evolved significantly, as have anti-censorship countermeasures. These guys were stuck in 2001.

Hopefully all the copies of the content that library.nu and ifile.it amassed haven't been seized, and they or someone else can upload all this stuff to a safer place. :)

I don't know of a single sport where if you don't follow the rules, men with guns force you to (or haul you off to jail if you still refuse). That's what the state does to people who won't follow their regulations or pay their taxes.

And don't say people can just "opt not to play" the free market "sport" like they can with baseball or football if they don't like the rules. Unlike such sports, this free market "sport" provides things that both the "players" can't do without---their livelihood---and the "spectators" can't do without---things you probably buy like food, medicine, shelter, &c..

And if you do say people who don't like the rules ought to just opt out, then I hope you cheer every time some corporation moves their entire operation overseas and lays off a bunch of American workers: That's exactly what they're doing. They're sick of crushing regulations and confiscatory taxation, and they're voting with their feet and getting out.

There's a clear line between the hitman example and laissez-faire economics: The latter, which is what I'm talking about, permits companies to engage in any kind of consensual transaction that they wish to. If companies want to charge any price they choose, fine; if customers don't like it, they won't pay. If companies want to conspire together to lock out a third competitor, fine; that's just two entities mutually consenting to an agreement. Hiring a hitman or poisoning competitors' employees moves into the realm of committing acts of violence---using actual force and aggression (the kind of things governments are good at).

Price still seems to be $0.00 on The Pirate Bay...

If a company charges too much, they're guilty of "price gouging."
If they charge too little, they're guilty of "dumping."
If they charge the same as their competitors, they're guilty of "price fixing."

Welcome to the "free market."

Anybody about to say "Doctors shouldn't be able to do that!" better not support the patients' right to refuse vaccines. And anybody supporting patients' right to refuse vaccine better not say doctors can't do this.

So-called externalities could be accounted for if environmental damage were treated as private-property damage against whoever owns or has an interest in that property. If I come into your yard and dump a tank of old motor oil all over your lawn, you have a claim against me for property damage. I'd end up paying you directly for the damage I caused. That concept ought to be applied to broader environmental damage caused by pollution, dumping, &c..

But instead of developing property rights to deal with purported environmental issues, what we have are politicians and bureaucrats creating new regulations (more control over their subjects) and new taxes (more wealth confiscation by the aforementioned parasites)---using externalities as an excuse to justify these regulations and taxes.

The "green scam" is not a plausible scenario because the ones doing it would be complete incompetents.

This is a false dichotomy. One can be an incompetent snake-oil salesman: One just needs to peddle snake oil long enough to make a profit, and then get out before the business collapses as people get wise to the scam.

Yup. And what it is is yet another idea sold to us using guilt and shame. Our inventions are ruining the environment, poisoning the earth, bringing us ever closer to disaster---and we're horrible, horrible people for it, they say. In order to feel good about ourselves and atone for our sins we need to be ashamed of ourselves and what we create, they say. And by sacrificing our worldly creations and making our lives more difficult we can make things better, they say. And who are "they"? Businessmen peddling "green" scams and politicians peddling new regulations, new taxes, new policies---people who will gain more power, more control, of us, and our wealth.

Does this story sound familiar?

Sorry, environmentalists, but if I wanted to feel good about myself by feeling bad about myself I'd (re)join a religion---one older and more interesting than yours, too. If I want to sacrifice, I'll go slaughter a goat or a ram rather than give up my gasoline-powered car for a bicycle or durable plastics for "biodegradable" junk. And if I want to believe the end of the world is near, the Book of Revelation is a lot more intriguing than the Book of Global Warming. :)

I do support sustainable development and using renewable resources---but only when it improves the standard of living for humanity, makes our lives better, or lowers our costs---not when it does the opposite. Solar energy is good for us because it relies on an (effectively) infinite resource, and removes our dependence on government- and corporate-controlled, centralized energy grids run on nonrenewable coal or oil. Same goes for wood-based heating vs. propane or natural gas. But these green initiatives stand in stark contrast to replacing useful, durable products with more expensive, failure-prone ones, which serves no purpose but to give the companies peddling this junk more control over us as we're forced to waste money buying their products over and over again.

And just wait until the government bans non-"paper alloy" plastics. For our own good, of course.