Yes, and in this case, “Sorry Swedes” means an apology to the people of Sweden, for certain preceding comments.  Which were about “Sweden,” not “Swedes.”  Which could be interpreted to mean the landmass, the people, the government, the constitutional entity, or the album by the Mountain Goats (had to check the WP disambiguation page for that one).  I wonder which makes more sense in this context, given that it’s a discussion about actions taken by the Swedish justice system, which is a branch of government.

Also – people are getting more excited about this than the Dotcom fiasco in NZ?  Which people have you noticed getting more excited?  Are they Swedish?  This is the first I’ve heard of the story, and 12 hours after the fact, the BB thread has all of 16 posts on it, and very little hand wringing.

On a positive note I’ve seen a lot of free Julian Assange posters about my town recently – which is a relatively small town, and certainly not particularly politically active, in a visual way at least.

People are irked.  They’ll only stay irked for so long.

From my perspective it feels like the government (and I mean that collectively, across many western nations) represents its people a little less every year, it won’t be long until they’re just another enemy.

My point, which you seem to have missed entirely, was that as far as countries go Sweden is pretty staunch on protecting personal liberty and it seems like this everyday occurrence (company accused of supporting piracy gets raided and servers confiscated) is being completely overblown because of the particular parties involved (tpb, Sweden) and not because of objective or balanced outrage.

Yes – this is not a very cool move, and I’m not arguing that. What I’m saying is I don’t remember masses of people acting with such incredulity when the US government pressed the Kiwis to break NZ law in order to seize servers and arrest Kim Dotcom. That was par for the course and maybe people are responding more in this case because they expect better of Sweden, but the fact remains that we’d probably all live more freely there than in our respective countries and so it looks pretty silly when we are telling them to be better.

If my sarcastic, excited exclamation marks weren’t clue enough; I don’t do elegant.

According to torrentfreak, Pirate Bay is down for unrelated reasons and isn’t hosted there anymore.

Sorry, Swedes.