"You are being lied to about pirates," a HuffPo headline declares. They... they didn't talk like Charles Laughton? (Or Keith Richards?) No, he is talking about those nutty Somali pirates!

It is 2009 and the British Royal Navy is going after pirates. The Honourable East India Company will probably be re-founded by London merchants? These Somali pirates keep stealing ships and demanding ransoms and disrupting trade so obvs they are menaces who mut be stopped! But Johann Hari, writer for The Independent, sez maybe the pirates are not so bad! Because Somalia is basically the most failed state ever, and Europeans have been dumping nuclear waste all over the place and also stealing all the seafood. So the pirates originally started out as an unofficial coast guard, and now they've just branched out a bit.

The Somali Pirates are young capitalists, as their ransom riches dissolve the clan barriers that have caused generations of nation-destroying fighting among competing warlords. They're made up of former fishermen, who took to the seas a decade ago to protect their livelihoods as international thugs began stealing their food and dumping in their waters, and armed strongmen, who'd be engaging in yet more destructive inter-clan civil wars at home if they weren't out making money with piracy.

Also they are pirates, and we all know that pirates are very popular on the internet, like cats and bacon, so obviously they need our support.