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Re: Help Iranian dissidents



On Sunday 21 June 2009 03:08:40 pm Martin Fick wrote:
> --- On Sun, 6/21/09, Chris Humphry <humphry.chris@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > My only 'issue' is human rights and to  me politics
> > plays no roll in that. 
>
> Well, unfortunately that just isn't the case.  Many
> people have different (political) opinions on just
> what exactly human rights means.  It is not so simple
> as you would think (I wish it were).  For example, this
> declaration (which is used by the UN) is full of
> political (and even contradictory) ideas, and "rights".
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights
>
> Again, I am not trying to start a debate about what
> human rights should be (this is the wrong place for
> that), but just to point out that unfortunately it
> is pretty hard to make the "non-political" claim
> you probably wish were true.

Indeed. "Human rights" mean different things to different people. But it 
is perhaps worth pointing out that the very EXISTENCE of TOR as a public 
project is a political act. There is no way to keep politics out of the 
TOR project, since the very idea that anyone who can connect to the web 
should be able to communicate anonymously is a highly contentious idea. 
(And if you don't believe that this should be the case, what rationale 
do you have to support TOR in its present form?)

There is a great deal of sense in not publicly aligning TOR with any one 
political group or movement. Moreover, what movement could TOR be 
aligned with? There are both proponents and opponents of anonymity of 
every political stripe. It is, after all, a decidedly mixed bag...

But let's not kid ourselves that TOR can ever be "politically neutral," 
even if it cannot be comfortably shoe-horned into any political 
movement.

Oh, and hello to OR-Talk from a former lurker. :-)

- Pyotr

-- 
Long live the fighters!

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