- Hi,
Mullvad has two owners, founders, and CEOs - Daniel Berntsson, and me, Fredrik Strömberg. All posts I've seen yesterday and today, including the newspaper articles, talk about Mullvad as if Daniel is the single owner, founder and CEO. It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns you're welcome to comment on this thread, or email our customer support.
See below for the response you'll get from support:
-----
Mullvad is a political company. We fight for freedom of speech, freedom of information and the right to privacy. These are firmly held values of the founders of Mullvad.
Mullvad protects the right for people to express things we don't agree with. We protect the right of everyone to access views we don't agree with.
We also live these values by being tolerant in our daily work. Everyone is welcome to collaborate with Mullvad if they share these narrow core values. As employees, contractors, customers, suppliers, lobbyists, campaign partners or whatever it might be. No matter what their other opinions are and no matter whether the founders or anyone else in Mullvad dislike them. The founders themselves fundamentally disagree on several important issues.
This is what allows us to advance our common causes. Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment is also liberating and promotes truth seeking.
The more people do this, the better a place the world will be.
It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission, in the same way that someone's opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare policy isn't.
That said, if you no longer want to be a Mullvad customer for philosophical reasons, we think it's important to honor that. In that case, reach out to support.
- So you're a political company, but you don't want people to examine the politics of the people running the company? That seems naive.
- >> Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment ...
Karl Popper said, "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
>> the same way that someone's opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare ...
We're not talking about reasonable people disagreeing about tax policy, we're talking about free expression, the entire purpose of Mullvad.
When you make a large donation to a political party whose most fundamental policy is restricting the free expression of people, that is wholly incompatible with everything Mullvad says they stand for.
When a founder and executive with influence over Mullvad policy and operations is exposed actively and financially support restricting free expression of people, it's not "tolerant" to pretend that's somehow compatible with the mission and brand of the company.
- > restricting the free expression of people
I don’t support remigration, but calling immigration “the free expression of people” is a stretch. It’s orthogonal.
You can argue that remigration isn’t protecting the privacy of those who are surveilled by the government or deported to repressive countries that surveil their population. But Mullvad’s product protects even those people (it must, because it hides the identity of who’s using it from itself).
- > When you make a large donation to a political party whose most fundamental policy is restricting the free expression of people
Where can I read more about how this is the fundamental policy of the Örebro party?
- "Rules for thee, but not for me"
Classic
- > but you don't want people to examine the politics of the people running the company
That was never stated or implied.
- "It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission."
- It should be obvious that it is utterly incompatible with the values and mission of Mullvad for a Mullvad executive to give a large amount money from Mullvad customers to advance public policy with the primary and direct intent to restrict freedom of expression.
- Do you have any links/context on how this party plans to restrict freedom of expression?
- > It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission.
No, in fact, the opposite of this is obvious.
- Is IKEA fascist? Because the founder was a Nazi supporter; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingvar_Kamprad
I'm not saying this to dunk on IKEA, but sometimes even when there's a sole founder, the mission of the company and the mission of the person who founded it do not necessarily align.
- Is IKEA's founder alive and currently donating lots of money to a political party advocating for mass deportation of "parasites"? If so let me know and I will stop buying IKEA furniture!
- You seriously didn't buy IKEA furniture 10 years ago?
I do not believe you.
Regardless: do you think IKEA did more to promote Naziism in the decades that proceeded Ingvars death, or more after?
(the answer is of course: the exact same amount, which is none).
If you're unhappy making people wealthy who you disagree with, unfortunately I'm going to have to suggest that you disengage with society, your taxes fuel wars (largely against brown people), you're forced to use technology created with slave labour in order to engage with banking applications and you're going to be really mad when you discover what goes into your food.
Taking an absolute position against one person who creates a service that would allow you to evade fascism is pretty ironic given the way the world is going regarding online speech.
- How do you figure?
- An honest question: Would you like to live in a world where company/employer exerts more control over the views that are publicly expressed?
Do you actually want voting to happen via wallet?
This whole view kinda confounds me. I don't see how you can honestly profess to be on the tolerant/right side, morally, while trying to boycott someones business over his political views. Would you have preferred early feminists or LGBT advocates to be hounded in their professional life? Would it have been better for more people to do that?
If you want to vote for or against Örebropartiet, then just do it at the booth.
Plenty of people here basically seem to indirectly advocate for company based censorship and some kind of budget-plutocracy, and no matter how "morally correct" your views are, that is under no circumstances a worthwhile endeavor.
- > An honest question: Would you like to live in a world where company/employer exerts more control over the views that are publicly expressed?
I don't really object to you asking this question, but I do object to you calling a rhetorical question "an honest question".
- > Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment is also liberating and promotes truth seeking.
Maybe you should tell that to your cofounder? His actions certainly don't reflect this. Promoting ethnic cleansing is the opposite of this.
- > Promoting ethnic cleansing
Do you have a source for this? I haven't seen this mentioned elsewhere.
- Promoting mixing is also the opposite of this.
- What is "promoting mixing"?
- What does this mean? Be specific.
- Some people claim it’s possible to make some people cohabit and not suffer violences. When there is a track record of repetition of this specific violence, promoting it is a crime.
It’s not a distant metaphor. I have two instances of this in my family. 20% of France has instances of this in their family.
See you at the TPI of La Haye.
- I have no idea what you're trying to say.
- [delayed]
- Thank you for everything you do Fredrik. Very happy to be a customer of a company that supports freedom and privacy for everyone regardless of views.
- Why does it say your comment was made 2 days ago, when the thread has only been up for 6 hours?
- It's a HN thing, not down to the commenter. Sometimes threads are reactivated if the mods think a low profile discussion is worth a second chance or boost. The submission time doesn't always reflect the original submission. Sometimes it's due to a comment move or thread merge.
- PR companies have found that getting ahead of controversies is useful, so they invented time travel.
- Hi Fredrik
I’m a long time Mullvad customer, likely paid Mullvad upward of 400€ in the past number of years, as well as recommended it to friends and family members.
What you seem to be missing in your comment, is that some of that money I paid, found its way to support an organisation that has extreme racist views.
I’ve reached out to support and requested a refund of my outstanding credit.
I’ll be moving on.
- Not just “support”, it’s literally the main source of funds for the party. >70% of donations. If it was a small donation that would be sort of controversial but maybe defendable, but here we are talking about funding pretty much the whole party
- I did the same, except I'm paying for Mullvad through the Tailscale partnership, so I reached out to them and expressed my desire for them to partner with other privacy focused VPN providers like Njalla, Airvpn and others. I don't feel great about my money funding ethno-fascists in my country.
- > is that some of that money I paid, found its way to support an organisation that has extreme racist views.
Geez, I hope you do not pay give any money to Google, Microsoft and such. They have many employees and I am sure some of them donate to causes you would disagree with using (part of) the money you gave to those companies.
And, I have to wonder, do you vet your local bakery as well on how they use their money?
- > Geez, I hope you do not pay give any money to Google, Microsoft and such.
Yes? I have been divesting from big tech. Not only do I feel good about it but the side effects have been positive too.
- Yes, I check whether my local bakery is run by people with hateful politics.
- Yet do you check the same for the company that manufactures your electronic devices, clothes, food, and provides your entertainment?
I think you'll find people tend to disagree on quite a great deal in aggregate.
- An employee is different from a cofounder.
For example, I certainly boycott anything to do with Elon Musk, for the same kinds of reasons.
You seem to be falling into the "perfect is the enemy of the good" trap. It's not possibly to perfectly boycott every person and organization that deserves to be sanctioned, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it where it is possible.
- So if Kim Jong Un ran your local bakery, you'd still buy his cakes? Or what's your point? That we need to be 100% flawless or else there is no point in doing anything at all?
- You’re telling me you wouldn’t go to the Kim Jong Un bakery? I bet it would be delicious.
Anyway, yes, I do judge you if you publicly and loudly declaim small to medium sized businesses that work really hard for your privacy while handing out money to megacorps who are directly involved in tightening the global surveillance net.
- Godspeed!
- [dead]
- Fascism is not an opinion, a thing we can simply disagree with and move on. It’s a crime.
How do you call a friend of a fascist?
- Hello Fredrik! As a heavy user of Mullvad in the past, easily spending hundreds of euros over the years, I was reserving my judgement to see what the official statement on this would be. Thank you, now I have my answer.
> It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission.
It should be obvious that what people are concerned is their money being used to support these political causes, whether it was done in a way that keeps the company out of it or not is besides the point. Daniel, of course, is free to choose what to do with his money. I am, too, and based on this I will be making a choice to not spend any more money on Mullvad subscriptions. Nothing personal, and it's a shame because I have nothing but praise for the technical side of it. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
- > This is what allows us to advance our common causes. Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment is also liberating and promotes truth seeking.
Nope, that is what will get you taken over by the assholes. Reasonable defense is necessary in reality. There ARE bad actors, they must be kept out.
- Hi Fredrik, long time user of your service.
I have to say, this is a disappointing message. The thing about intolerant movements is that tolerance doesn't fix them, it makes them worse and lets them accumulate power until they can destroy the tolerant.
I'd recommend reading Karl Popper and his Paradox of Tolerance, which he formulated after seeing this exact thing play out in his native Austria with the rise of the Nazis.
- So, you are basically saying you are disappointed because you belong to the party of tolerance that is okay preaching intolerance because the party the donations from the Mullvad founder went to is the opposition and is not as tolerant as your party?
- I don't belong to any party.
I come from a country that was devastated by fascists like the ones the Mullvad founder funds and history taught us anything but opposition is collaboration.
Go ask the millions of people murdered in concentration camps how tolerating Nazi ideas worked out for them.
- [flagged]
- The conclusions do not follow from the premise. Show actual examples of what you are afraid of?
- Fascism isn't a generic term for "things I don't like".
It is a very specific ideology responsible for the worst atrocities in history that needs to be ruthlessly stomped out as soon as it rears its ugly head again.
This isn't about opinions or tolerance. It's about preventing crimes against humanity.
- You're right, this isn't about X, it's about Y.
- People can just use language. Don't let clankers take it from us.
- [flagged]
- > against whoever is labeled as intolerant
No. that's exactly not what is said.
it only is applicable to organisations and people who very clearly express not only some disagreement, but their intolerance and their plan and intent to enforce suppression of dissent once in power. and then suppression of whatever they are intolerant of.
and the far right very clearly announces that they will "eradicate" and "put to their (lower) place" whatever. immigrants. homosexuals. transient humans. wom(b)en.
if you tolerate _that_, even pay for it, in times of ai boosted slander, you get queers in prisons, pregnant teenagers, and a few much richer very rich people.
- > When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then - yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
-- Joseph Goebbels, 1935
The whole point is that fascist movements will abuse your tolerance to build themselves up to a position where they can take it away from you. The only answer is to not tolerate the intolerant.
- How ironic this quote perfectly encapsulates the inevitable conclusion to the issue of illegal immigration, which is exactly what topic of today is all about.
Being tolerant of intolerant cultures won't make them return the favor once they constitute a substantial portion of government and populace.
- [flagged]
- > That said, if you no longer want to be a Mullvad customer for philosophical reasons, we think it's important to honor that. In that case, reach out to support.
What a dismissive way to treat your customer. Basically the equivalent of someone on the American right saying “if you don’t like it you can get the hell out”, which tracks given Mullvad’s party of choice.
Edit: Downvote me all you want but it doesn’t change the fact that ethnic cleansing is wrong and by definition counter to free speech and human rights in general.
- It’s called voting with your wallet. People in America do this, and are told to do this, all the time.
What would you like them to do? Roll over on the co-CEO and throw him under the bus, signaling to everyone that there is a “correct” point of view to have that Mullvad as a company is going to push and promote?
Individuals should be allowed to think and do what they want as an individual, as long as it isn’t compromising the company. The fact that they have 2 CEOs with differing political views seems like a healthy thing.
Freedom of speech is a political view that shouldn’t be tied to any one party.
- [flagged]
- There is a more nuanced argument against deportation as a policy. First of all it causes migrants to destroy their documentation and to be less coöperative with the immigration process. Second, some migrant countries refuse repatriation, which is currently an unsolved problem. Finally there's something to be said for immigrants to be registered regardless of status, rather than incentivising them to avoid authorities.
Now some of these problems could be solved, but there's a legitimate argument that the policy causes more problems than it solves.
- > It's common-sense, not an OPINION to deport illegal immigrants
It's not though. More immigrants mean more people buying products, paying taxes on them, supporting local business, more people contributing to the economy in general. Another important factor is that most european populations are aging, meaning that the ratio of working people versus older people who stopped working, is reaching unsustainable levels. Without migrants, our economies will be seriously hampered.
- Illegal immigrants often don't carry the same level of education as Swedes (which is unfair to Swedes), else they could just emigrate there legally, so why aren't they doing so?
I agree that immigration is important and even giving chances to people that are willing to completely assimilate, change culture and loyalty to the said country to eventually after XX years to become a citizen, but starting by saying f*ck your laws before even arriving is just blatant disrespect.
Illegal immigrants are not paying social contributions because the can't be hired legally, so they don't really contribute to the retirement issue, and very often, let's be real, they must resort to even more illegal schemes to get by because of restrictions having no-paper, it's hard to even get a SIM card, so even to get a phone, they'll need to commit a crime of some sort by stealing an ID.
I just don't understand how we can reach fairness which is extremely important with people that want to do the right thing and actually apply properly and assimilate.
- Making it easier to immigrate legally (with documentation and vetting etc...) is a different thing then just turning a blind eye to people who ignore the law. It seems the debate is "enforce vs not enforce" instead of "find some solution to a necessary but overbearing legal structure"
- All that can happen with _legal_ immigration, by people who respect the laws and processes of the country. If the first thing someone does as an immigrant is commit a crime, which is the case with every illegal immigrant, by definition, that's a bad start.
- > It's common-sense, not an OPINION to deport illegal immigrants but apparently it's up for debate
I would assume that a company which prides itself on privacy and being immune to government overreach would not enable policies that encourage the dissolution of privacy and government overreach. But ultimately I know folks don't care about privacy as long as it targets people with certain colors of skin, ignoring that they get caught in the net as well. That's really what the arguments against in this thread boil down to.
- 1. This is about ethnic cleansing, not just deporting undocumented immigrants. The party in question wants to get rid of all non-white people.
2. Even deporting all undocumented immigrants isn't a "common sense" position. Just a few decades ago Republicans in the US were in favor of amnesty and allowed tons of undocumented immigration. It is in fact an opinion, even if it greatly upsets or offends you.
3. Referring to undocumented immigration, not just not being white - something being a crime doesn't inherently mean anything. At one point, slavery was legal and it was illegal to help slaves escape, but that doesn't mean helping a slave escape was morally wrong or turning in a fugitive slave is morally right.
- Let me ask you a blunt question to understand your headspace: Am I committing a crime if I cross South Korea border and stay over there without any form of consent? And more that the technicality of the crime, is it morally fine to do so?
- No, crossing a border is not in and of itself a crime.
- Isn't that how all businesses operate? If customers don't like it then they can find an alternative vendor.
- Yeah I just expected better of Mullvad as a long standing customer. They seemed pretty politically neutral which I prefer.
- What evidence do you have that the company is not politically neutral?
- Their co-founder (not just an employee) is bankrolling a party that’s leader has called for the expelling of all immigrants. This fact is not in dispute.
- Thanks for supporting civil liberties.
- I'm pretty familiar with these right-wingers that claim to fight for "freedom of speech" they all end up fighting for "freedom of speech for the things I want to say, jail for those who oppose me." The 2024-2025 swing was pretty extreme on that front.
Political extremists are all the same, left or right, nobody should be surprised because they seek power above all else.
I had been pretty concerned about the level of advertising for Mullvad I've seen recently, that's usually a really bad sign for a VPN type company. But seeing this comment, in combination with the news article linked here, tells me everything I need to know for trust.
VPNs are all about trust. Mullvad has completely broken all trust with me.
- If you still wonder why there are sudden attacks on Mullvad, I "heard" there are Chinese (in addition to the others; dual- / triple- vendoring is key) LLM-based tools to check for swarm origins and campaigns.
- Slightly tangential on Swedish society, there are similarities between USA and Sweden. There's a large segment of society that is white and very blond, and there's a largish segment which is not. Along that same line there are all kinds of divisions: economic, education, religious, sets of values, and of access to things and possibilities. What pisses me off is that the cast of "CEOs of successful companies" live in an sphere of privilege where they really are not bothered at all by the brown people. They in fact have plenty of places to go, a vast archipelago, out of reach for anybody who can't afford a boat. Though they get all the benefits, including cheap qualified labor from people who had to leave their homelands displaced by poverty, conflict and war. I'll switch VPN provider too.
One of these days we will elect somebody who is corrupt and morally corrupt, incompetent and poorly educated and who'll promise to screw us over many times and in many positions, and we will let him just do so so that there are concentration camps for the brown people.
- Wikipedia of the party in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party#
Doesn't really sound all that far-right to me. Nationalist, sure.
I'm not Swedish though, so I would be interested in the thoughts of those who are actually affected by Örebropartiet's policies.
- Spot the odd one out:
> Some of its key issues include lowered wages for politicians, ending the tax payer funding of various sculptures, monuments and art, large scale remigration, a stricter immigration policy, and free dental care.
- For context, from wiki:
> Remigration is a far-right concept referring to ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white minority populations [...] to their place of racial ancestry
- > large scale remigration
which is literally kicking out people who don't look or sounds like me, out of the country.
Whenever that has happened it has been rather bad for most parties.
- Not really. It's mostly about reversing recent large scale migration.
If it's acceptable to have large scale migration, it should be acceptable to have large remigration.
If migration issues are not solved soon, it's going to lead to larger problems down the road because immigrants from 3rd world countries typically have very high birth rates.
- > which is literally kicking out people who don't look or sounds like me, out of the country.
Or, more accurately, people who weren't born there (particularly first generation immigrants). No one's talking about legitimately doing deportations via family guy race cards.
- Yes they are
- > "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish."
- Markus Allard
- We want everyone here to be exactly like us, but we do recognize we have bad teeth.
- [flagged]
- Split from: Left Party
So basically the left but with a stricter view on immigration?
- I think mass deportation of people with wrong skin color goes beyond "stricter view on immigration"
>large scale remigration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remigration
- It's not based on skin color though, its migration status.
Even people of the same complexion can be a net negative to the country as they feel the majority of recent immigrants are.
- they probably forget all those other promises once they get to power
- Source that every single left wing party in the 90s wanted to get rid of every single person of a non-white background?
- My life since I was born in 1979 and my entire family was democrat in CA and was against Illegal Immigration and against DEI (called Affirmative Action at the time) and so was pretty much everyone else and that's what we voted for and passed.
- Cool, what about the ethnic cleansing part? Is your family in favor of getting rid of every non-white person as well? That's what this party supports.
- [flagged]
- >In a podcast segment about immigration and deportations Allard stated his opinion and said that "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish." [54]
from the wikipedia page
- What? That's what the party is in favor of, and the thing you said every single left wing party from the 90s supported. Why can't you back up what you say? Is it because the Democratic Party did not support ethnic cleansing in the 90s?
- "It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible."
- Your anecdote is not data and your family's views are not representative of left wing political positions.
- That's fine, I was offering my opinion. For some reason people on HN want a double blind study that's been re-run 300 times since the 60s and stamped by the president for proof of anything these days.
- > Nationalist, sure.
That's pretty far-right by itself. The fact that they want mass deportations should solidify it for you though.
- It's definitely possible to be a left-wing nationalist
- [flagged]
- > celebrate that culture.
The party explicitly votes against paying for local culture
> wanting to protect
There is a big difference for wanting to protect culture, as in celebrate, educate and promote, and removing people from the land that has that culture. I would say the two are orthogonal.
For example, a huge influence on the British music scene comes from either getting pissed in Hamburg, or music coming from the Caribbean. None of which could have happened if people were dead set on "re-migration" (ie removing non "white" people.)
- You can protect your “culture” without deporting all non-White people. If your culture can’t be protected without that, maybe that culture doesn’t need protecting.
- This really depends on how many people are coming in, and the intentions and actions of those coming in.
I don’t think it’s a matter of “deporting all the non-white people.” I think it’s more about deporting the people who are there in bad faith, who have no interest in any degree of assimilation, and want to turn their new country into their old country.
- > I don’t think it’s a matter of “deporting all the non-white people.”
This is what the party leader has said they want to do. You really should look into what you're defending, because you're currently defending a party that wants ethnic cleansing.
- [flagged]
- Is that so? Instead of throwing a fit and insulting people, you could've just spent 30 seconds googling to see what the party leader himself says:
> In a podcast segment about immigration and deportations Allard stated his opinion and said that "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish."
Or is the party leader lying about his own party? How deep does this conspiracy go?
- This is quite literally what they said: "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish."
They want to deport anyone that isn't Swedish enough, even if they're native-born Swedes.
- "They" in this context seems to be, Somalian living on the social welfare state. Not "every non-white person".
> Why won't the Liberals push for deporting 100 000 social welfare-Somalis?
So, it sounds like people who showed up and are leaching off the state without giving anything back. This will put a strain on these systems for the people it was actually designed to support.
- This is exactly it. The amount of people that pretend it's about "deporting all brown people" is astounding.
- "The party has also been described as both right-wing populist and left-wing populist as well as left-conservative."
Well that clears things up
- Lol, that quote really reads like "we have terminal direction-brain and can't place these people in our arbitrary categories"
- The horseshoe still going strong
- Why doesn’t Apple just make a built in iOS native vpn that can be toggled (effectively) from the swipe down menu control and is paid monthly or part of iCloud
- I understand Mullvad has historically been a leader in privacy among the big VPN options. What are some other equally affordable and user friendly options that you all have been satisfied with? Think for someone who saw Mullvad advertised during the Super Bowl but looking to leave because of this news.
- I've been quite satisfied with AirVPN [0].
- I haven’t used Mullvad, so can’t say how it compares to ProtonVPN but I’m happy with Proton.
It is super easy to set up, even on Linux and iOS devices.
- Does Proton keep logs? I’ve heard good things.
- They don't keep logs but they've been transparent that if they ever receive a lawful court order to intercept new communications, they must comply. I honestly don't think this is unique to any VPN provider. Even if a VPN provider refuses to comply, authorities can simply backdoor or facilitate lawful interception however they'd like.
- Thanks that makes sense.
- It’s worth noting that Proton’s CEO is also known to be a supporter of right-wing causes.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. I keep along the effort, but it just continues to be impossible.
- Do you have any source on that? Whenever that’s brought up and I look into it the claims are far from credible, with little evidence of wrong doing
- Yeah - answered below. As I mentioned, a lot of the tweets and Reddit posts have been deleted so it’s hard to track down now. It was a bit of a shitstorm on Mastodon some months ago though.
- Could be, I don't follow the CEOs closely lol. Any source on this?
- Yeah. It’s trace now because many of the tweets and Reddit posts have since been (unsurprisingly) purged but it looks basically the same as what we’re discussing regarding Mullvad right now.
- https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru... - https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-tr... - https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/proton-ceo-endorses-trum... - https://tildes.net/~society/1ldg/proton_ceo_tweets_support_f...
- ivpn
- There have been multiple posts about this and hundreds of comments, so there is clearly appetite to discuss it, although none of the submitted links have been particularly detailed.
I'm going to merge the other threads into this one, which is why you'll see some anachronistic timestamps.
- Some commentary here: https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.h...
Daniel Berntsson is still involved with Mullvad and part-owns Mullvad's parent company with his co-founder.
- "Mullvad AB and its parent company Amagicom AB are 100% owned by founders [1 person] and Daniel Berntsson [...]"[0]
So I'll assume he owns about 50%. Well, that ends my usage of Mullvad.[1] I appreciate that probably many of Mullvad's employees have different views, and obviously Berntsson has every right to his opinions and to express them, and I also appreciate that someone can have control over an opinionated company and run it for one particular set of reasons but not for other causes that someone believes in, but in the end I just don't want my money supporting anti-people causes.
[0] https://mullvad.net/en/about
[1] If it was a small amount, say less than 5% or maybe 10%, I might have decided differently. But it's still millions, so probably not.
- Mullvad is a great service, and their founder in a country outside the US donates to a party he prefers? I don't see the issue.
Also why post these journalist links that require you to be a paying member to view the article? Share an archive link no one is gonna pay for that noise.
- It is rather funny how often Americans project our political context on to the rest of the world. Why should anyone from America have a strong opinion about Swedish politics?
- in a global market, principles don't stop at the border
- That's no excuse to obtusely force your principles into contexts of which you have little or no knowledge.
- A lot of people in Sweden have strong opinions about American politics.
- American politics often have a blast radius of the entire world, Swedish politics less so
- German politics weren't too important to most of the world in 1932, but they were critically important to a large part of it by 1940.
The rise of fascism anywhere should be opposed by good people everywhere.
- There are literally dozens of us that either live outside the US or are from other countries
- Yes but can you still not utilize tech for its technical merits, rather than suddenly turn it into a political question?
- There are other VPN providers, I can still use the tech, but I will for sure not give my money to a company whose owners support racist policies
- Sure you can. This is kind of like not voting and lots of people live their life like that. However, if people use their ability to shape and influence the world by voting with your ballot as well as their wallet I think that is equally valid.
- I'm just saying for me personally its even further moved into the box of "why would this bother me as a user of their service"
- To be fair, Örebropartiet can also be called an extreme left party. It’s complicated…
- Does it matter if they are left or right?
The point is, they want to round up lawful citizens and turf them out of the country because they have the audacity to be slightly foreign, or worse born to someone foreign.
that is the issue, not how much tax/spend big/little government.
- Exactly, the problem is not left/right it's the authoritarianism, which is again a huge threat to the world after being held mostly in check in Western democracies for many years.
People tend to forget about the "Last Man" part of Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man", but we are definitely in the phase of the Last Man seeking conflict and fighting against our hard-won freedoms.
- I don't see how, given their answers to simple questions as described in the "2026 run up to the elections" section, this party could ever be considered a leftist party.
- They are very pro education. But that's basically the only thing, all the other answers are enthusiastic right wing answers
- How populist party can root for education? Educated people wouldn't go in populist direction. Of course, it the education stays unbent to their views
- Why wouldn't educated people be swept up by populism? They're human like the rest of us. Maybe you should stop thinking that having an education makes you a moral person, it just means you have an education.
- They are far too small to have any chance of influencing education. The simpler explanation would be that there is a strong nationalist current. Think "our people are the best, let's make them even better and throw out the others"
- [dead]
- Horseshoe Theory strikes again:
- Horseshoe theory, rather than being as described,is actually caused by far right parties being more willing to label themselves as left. E.g. national socialists.
- [flagged]
- To add to the context. The founder of the was the chairman for the youth organization of Vänsterpartiet (English name: The left party), the furthest left party in the Swedish parliament, and he recruited members primarily from the same organization when he was kicked out. The reason he got kicked out was that he was seen praising the Revolutionary Front, a far-left extremist political and militant network in Sweden.
It should be added that the area where they are active is in the local government of Örebro Municipality, a place with a total population of 160,143 people. Looking at the political leanings of parties for a small local government with the lens of national parties might not give a very clear picture. Their strategy is also directed toward local voters, not national voters, through a strategy called the 12% line.
- Sounds like the logical evolution of left/right-populism into 'absolutist-populism' ;)
- It doesn't seem that complicated to be honest with you. That is how they self identify but none of their policies seem particularly left wing. At least not from that Wikipedia page. Extremely left wing dental care is the best I will give them.
- What about more social housing, reductions in working hours, and opposition to privatisation? Sounds left wing to me.
They have been called Marxist-Lenninist by more mainstream politicians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party#2021_bus_rap...
- Maybe we could meet in the middle and call them a nationalist socialist workers party.
- > Extremely left wing dental care is the best I will give them.
Free dental care is considered "extemely left wing" now? That's just bizarre tbh.
If a country would decide to use tax money to provide health care services for free to everybody that's not much different than using tax money to maintain an infrastructure network that's free to use (like roads), or free police and firefighting services - and I think none of those examples are considered particularly 'left-wing'.
- > Free dental care is considered "extemely left wing" now? That's just bizarre tbh.
No more bizarre than the idea of free speech being ceded to the right.
Apparently even air conditioning is now a left vs right culture war issue...
- I was being facetious. Unfortunately enlightened horseshoe centrists didn't want to hear.
- That's typical for extremist parties, AKA Horseshoe theory. IRL Erdogan's party went so far to the right that they started actually adopting very socialist/communist policies. The party names is AKP which stands for "justice and development party" but many people are calling it "Allahs Communist Party" since in Turkish communist is written with K and they are islamists doing communist stuff.
- [dead]
- I saw this a couple of days ago, here's the original article that broke the news, in Swedish: https://www.flamman.se/techprofil-ger-miljoner-till-orebropa...
It includes a short statement from the CEO.
- Their stance seems to be "people can do things on their own personal time":
- And we can choose not to fund those things.
- To the people using Mullvad I have two sincere and unpopular questions: do you actively scrutinize and examine the key people of every service and product you use, or is it just a reflexive change of footing whenever you happen upon news like this? Also, do you really switch, or is it just a heat of moment kind of thing and an opportunity to profess yourself?
- You can just say "I don't care if people have hateful politics". It's much easier.
- No, that is not what they're saying nor advocating. My interpretation is: the world is full of people whose opinions I don't share, but what are the actual triggers that make you do something about your relationships with those people? Reflexive/reactive approaches are certainly one way, but could careful, proactive consideration result in better* outcomes for you? (better = whatever you take it to mean in this context)
- So just say "I don't care when people have hateful politics as long as they're useful to me"
- When you say "hateful politics" you have revealed that you act and react to all of this without bothering yourself with reading up on the policies of the small party the story relates to. You are being the very "reflexive" type of person I'm hinting at in my main comment - seeing an "important" chance to take a public stance, but the rest isn't important enough that you can be arsed to first inform yourself about any of it.
- I use Mullvad, I have no intention of switching. The comment from the other CEO seemed perfectly reasonable, and the Wikipedia article about the political party also didn’t seem all that extreme. It mostly seemed like common sense stuff.
- > do you actively scrutinize and examine the key people of every service and product you use
No.
> is it just a reflexive change of footing whenever you happen upon news like this
Yes.
> do you really switch
Yes.
What is the implication here? That because I did not know that a percentage of the money I give a company went towards supporting a party whose I that I find disgusting, I should keep supporting them now that I do know?
- If alternatives exist some of us are willing to make changes to not support the worst of the worst when their behavior is revealed.
I used to like Musk, now I see Tesla and am disgusted. Maybe he was always like this but the personal line for me was the salutes. I’m sure many others have lines as well.
- How do you know the political party of the story is "the worst of the worst"? You don't.
- Have you considered that people are capable of reading and learning what the party supports? I assume most people here are capable of reading and can google things. Just spamming "you don't know what the party's policies are!" doesn't actually make it true, nor is it a defense for the party.
- I don't need to consider their capacity for it. Of course they are capable of it, they just can't be bothered. Their echoing of "far-right", "worst of the worst" etc. sentiment of the original article shows it. Also, I don't vote for the party, nor do I give my money to Mullvad. I don't comment in order to defend them, I comment because I feel a need to call out the moralistic knee-jerk BS I see.
- Yeah, you can keep spamming that line, but it doesn't make it true at all. Interesting that you consider being against ethnic cleansing to be "moralistic knee-jerk BS", though.
- There isn't any ethnic cleansing in their policies, neither direct nor indirect, and your veiled accusations are just disingenuous. You're not arguing in good faith at all.
- Getting rid of everyone who is not white is in fact ethnic cleansing, whether you like it or not. This is what their "remigration" policy is, and what the party leader has said. This is all out in the open, and only takes a few minutes at most to read up on. It's very ironic that you keep insisting others haven't read up on the party when you clearly haven't.
- You're willfully and in a most dishonest way misrepresenting their "re-migration" policy.
- The party leader himself disagrees with you. Frantically spamming the thread with "you're a liar!!" doesn't actually change the facts.
> "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish."
- Please stop insisting that other people didn't do any research into the party based on absolutely no evidence. It doesn't take long to look into the party.
- You're right, it doesn't take long. That's the sad part. The evidence is in them echoing just one single cherry-picked policy, in a misrepresented way, while conveniently ignoring all their other far more numerous left-leaning policies.
- Generally speaking, if the mission of a company is privacy and then the actions of the c-suite or founders indicates that they are more than willing to compromise on that, then yes. Why shouldnt you scrutinize people whose product is not aligned with their goals?
And yes I do actively switch products. I left the Windows ecosystem for Linux and I will leave Mullvad for whatever else pops up. So it goes.
- Great questions.
- Why is this an issue? Isn’t he, like any one of us, entitled to hold the political views he wants and support the candidates or parties he wants?
- Notice how these people almost never go after the management of major multinationals, or even places like car dealerships and real estate firms. It’s almost always companies and projects that are critical to freedom and privacy. That should tell you all you need to know.
- If we are going to allow elites to gather vast fortunes avoiding fair tax, and then use that wealth to exercise outsized influence on politics, it’s fair for consumers to factor this into how they spend their money.
- He's entitled to his political views and just as we're entitled to potentially use or not use his service because of them :)
Not sure why it's such an issue to discuss the political views of the beneficiaries of services we use. I understand it's mostly uninteresting as far as comment sections go, but it's always bizarre to see a defense of political association when often the impetus for sharing this type of information is for people/consumers to exercise their right to associate with business based on their political outlook.
- [flagged]
- I'm Swedish, but never heard of Örebropartiet before. I tried looking into their website and it doesn't say a lot.
Translated from Swedish wikipedia: --- Örebropartiet was founded by Markus Allard in the spring of 2014, when he was recently expelled from the Left Party and the Young Left. [...] Among the party's main issues are reduced politicians' salaries, reduced bureaucracy, civil servant responsibility, assimilation policy and the repatriation of people who do not adapt. ---
I think it is very reasonable to demand that people try to integrate when coming to a new country - learn the language, get into the culture. As a Swedish person I think this is missing from our integration politics, which is an often talked about topic in the last years.
In the end this is a political question and sadly instead of engaging in dialogue the reaction to these questions feels like it most often leads to polarization and division. Inclusion means also including people with different beliefs and respecting their opinions, even if we don't share them. Through understanding comes empathy.
Can recommend "The Righteous Mind" by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt who discusses this in a book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind
Fun fact: we get a dopamine release when taking an opposing stance and then seeing (subjective) proof of our stance. It requires self-discipline and fighting your impulses to avoid polarization.
- I don't think it's reasonable to "demand" integration. What should happen is that the existing cultures should be open and welcoming enough so that new-comers want to take part. Also, I like the idea of immigrants bringing their culture with them (and in some cases, that may be the last representation of that culture) and welcoming people to learn about it.
Multi-culturalism should be about championing different cultures and not forcing everyone into a cultural homogeneity.
- Why is the burden always on the host nation and never the immigrants?
- the burden should always be on the ones who are stronger to accommodate those who are weaker.
the majority needs to welcome and support the minority.
and it's not that there is no burden on the immigrants. they still have to learn to understand the local language, culture, rule of law, etc...
we should learn from each other and take the good from each. the burden for that is on both sides.
- I appreciate the candid response. It shouldn't be so hard for people to just clearly state the premises that motivate their beliefs.
>the burden should always be on the ones who are stronger to accommodate those who are weaker.
Is this a universal principle? Does this come with any limits at all? A salient example that comes up often: classrooms tend to have a small handful of extremely disruptive students that ruin the experience for everyone else. The current thinking is to not suspend/expel these kids because they are disadvantaged or whatever. But in doing so the other kids suffer greatly, not to mention the teachers.
How do you manage different dimensions of strength/advantage? It is the weakest in society (women, children) that bear a disproportionate burden of allowing large amounts of immigration from third-world countries. Why are the rights of women and children secondary to the rights of immigrants?
- Always? Never?
There are > 190 countries in the world and many of them require immigrants to meet at least the same criteria for employment and assistance as born citizens.
- Why do people pretend they don't understand context? What do you get out of posting this irrelevant pedantic response?
- GP literally addresses your points. I think we’re very welcoming in most of Europe, adopt others’ traditions, and are not too imposing. Just, you know, leave women alone and don’t aim fireworks at ambulances.
Dismissing any amount of integration is chicanery. We’re pro-social creatures, and knowing the lay of the land makes your life better.
- compared to the rest of the world europe is absolutely not welcoming. heck, even as a native german if you move from one region in germany to another you are treated as an unwelcome outsider. less so in big cities where you are more anonymous but still. if you are lucky you can find "your tribe" and your children may be accepted if they grow up there. the only places in germany where i ever felt welcome was linux user groups, and other fringe groups which as a whole had more of an outsider status.
- > Just, you know, leave women alone and don’t aim fireworks at ambulances.
Where I'm from (Northern Ireland) harassing women and attacking emergency services have been part of the culture for as long as I remember. Would you suggest that people arriving should actively take part in these behaviours?
- I remember a discussion I had with a English teacher from UK who immigrated to Sweden during the 1990s. They said that in UK, when a government employee would visit a house regarding dept or some other problem, they would bring a large police escort and then they and the neighbourhood would had a big brawl that generally ended with the police winning and then most of the participants would go to the pub. It was just how things worked. The guy were majorly surprised that in Sweden, the government employee could just knock on the door and talk to the person with no police and no brawl.
I would assume that if attacking emergency services is the norm in Northern Ireland, so is police escorts of emergency services. That is not the norm in Sweden, through it has become the norm for certain regions where emergency services no longer feel safe going on an emergency call. The downside is that if the police is delayed, so is the emergency service, and naturally the quality of emergency service is reduce in those locations which some people say is a form of discrimination.
- That’s… a tough one. Bit of a loaded question. I would say “don’t engage in anti-social behaviour regardless of the cultural milieu”, I’m sure NI has much better traditions to partake in?
- > That’s… a tough one.
But then we're getting a bit deeper into the issue. These are things that need to be considered if you want to mandate "integration" surely.
We now want people to integrate but we also recognise that there's a higher moral code which should supersede local customs. Is that correct? Then it seems like integration isn't the actual aim, but the shaping of people into a sort of ideal which is actually removed from local cultures.
We're also onto picking and choosing between the "better" and worse local traditions. But who is the arbitrator for which traditions are good and which are bad?
- What if the purpose of integration is merely to bring people closer to the local average, ironing out the outlier kinks and helping them feel secure in society?
I did a bit of the integration course by choice, even though it’s not mandatory as a EU national. I found it fine, a bit boring because we grew up with most of these customs. The Flemish ‘traditions’ were all new to me, and I also realise I don’t follow them; but respect some if I’m invited to people’s houses.
I think we’ve made a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to integration. It’s neither super forced and awful nor useless.
- Northern Ireland is definitely atypical. An English friend of mine moved over there a few years ago as his wife is from there and her family all live in the same area. I can't imagine him being considered as "integrated" for at least a few decades.
(My experience with Irish/Northern Irish people is that they're very friendly and welcoming, but I've only been there a couple of times).
- I'm not saying that people shouldn't want to integrate, I'm saying that "demanding" it is problematic. Imagine grandparents being brought over from a different country and they don't speak the language - should they be forced to attend language school? What level of language ability would be considered the minimum and does that also include reading/writing?
By all means provide encouragement and resources so that people can adapt to their new situation, but don't demand it.
- Yeah, I know. That’s why I say that no one is ever happy with where you set the limit. I think demanding A2 in language is reasonable, for example. Yes, demanding, even if it’s in a reasonably long timespan. We demand much more out of everyone born in the country, don’t we?
- > I think it is very reasonable to demand that people try to integrate when coming to a new country - learn the language, get into the culture.
What kind of things might be involved in a mandate for people to "get into the culture?"
- It’s a hot topic, but in Belgium some people are taught how to take the bus, do their taxes, and not harass women. One of my Dutch teachers led the integration course and said this stuff was really difficult to land.
If you come from a culture of groping women, not doing is gonna be a challenge. I get it. But we’ve also built mosques and have pagan festivals and allow public servants to wear their choice of religious attire. I think it’s a balance, but nobody is ever happy with wherever you set the balance.
When I learn the local language, I’m happier; it’s nice to talk to people. Not everyone agrees.
Tja.
- TIL Belgians don't grope women.
- Or pretend not to, at school. YMMV.
- Don't we also get a dopamine release from empathy, or is it just no fun?
- I’ve read a few books about dopamine/motivation/common neurotransmitters and this has never come up. In my amateurish view I think empathy is more connected to oxytocin (which afaik does release during social connections, which The book ”The molecule of more” covers a bit).
- Depends on if Atlas Shrugged is your Bible or not.
- Is it so hard to imagine that someone willing to take such a principled stance on privacy that they start a company to provide a privacy focused vpn company that they also hold other extreme views?
It takes a certain kind of personality to become a founder especially more do for such a strongly principled company and adhere to it.
- Well guess I won’t be renewing my subscription this month then.
Any other verified sources?
- Somewhat of a verification, here's Mullvad's response to the post on Mastodon: https://mastodon.online/@mullvadnet/116822244689326681
- (Mullvad reply content copied here)
>> Mullvad is a political company fighting for free speech, free information and privacy, with two equal co-founders, co-owners and co-CEOs who fundamentally disagree on many issues. Daniel's donation to a political party is private and not part of Mullvad's mission. We protect the right to express and access views we disagree with. We welcome anyone sharing these core values, whatever their other opinions. We are happy to refund others who don't, where we can.
To be fair... I'm not sure how you could take any other position as a privacy-first VPN. By technical nature, you have to believe pretty hard in 'people's business is their own business and not mine.'
I'd rather have a founder who believes whatever, but supports others rights to disagree vehemently, than one who agrees with what I believe but is less flexible on allowing others choice.
- Thanks. Also fuck.
- The other founder made a comment on another HN submission.[1]
- Will you be creating a VPN?
- I’m not Swedish. Does Mullvad do what it says on the tin? That’s all that matters.
The CEO’s extracurricular activities are none of my business.
- Let's draw this to its ultimate conclusion.
Would you subscribe to an excellent VPN service, if it was run by [insert universally abhorred brutal dictator from history here]?
- We can easier look at conclusion people make about banks and stock options. Will people invest money into index fonds and pension fonds if those fonds invest money into companies that produce and sell weapons to abhorred brutal dictators? What about buying stocks from telecommunication producers who operate in abhorred brutal dictatorships and who helps those dictators to control their population?
- We should improve society somewhat
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
- A thought experiment:
Let's think of the other extreme as well: exactly the same excellent VPN service, is run by an almost-the-best-person-in-the-world who has just one small quirk that makes them not 100% perfect for you (they pat kittens not as often as you'd like them to do). Obviously there is a border between your extreme and mine, which border defines "use" and "no use" cases for you. And now: wherever this border is - should it be the same for everyone?
- Just like everything else in life, different people have different borders and that's fine.
I don't understand the point of this thought experiment. Are you trying to disqualify the idea of boundaries because they're imperfect (which is a very flawed argument) or are you going somewhere else I can't figure out at all?
- I agree there might be a more or les arbitrary border, and it will probably be in different places for different people.
However the original statement:
> The CEO’s extracurricular activities are none of my business.
Basically says that no border should exist, and it makes no difference at all who provided the service as long as the service itself is excellent.
That is a fundamentally different argument that I very much disagree with.
- Every time you use a kitten to support flawed logic, a kitten dies.
- I don't really understand the point you're trying to make with that thought experiment.
- Next iteration of this smear article: “Mullvad is basically HitlerVPN”
- Someone doesn't want people using the best VPN available, hmm...
- Why can't we have a VPN run by normal people?
- Because normal people don’t want to deal with the headaches. Your choices are weird people or intelligence cutouts. (Or abandoning any attempt at privacy in an attempt to be ideologically pure.) Sorry, but those are the options.
- Because there are almost no normal people. Everybody's a jerk in private, to somebody, sometime. Everybody's got opinions that half the population doesn't like.
- Okay but wanting an ethnic cleansing isn't usually one of them and even among those who do want it, most don't donate money towards making it happen
- I try to turn it other way in my head, like if Mullvad got to know somehow political views of some of their customers and say "We don't like what you say, so we decide to end our business with you. We don't want our infra to be used to spread opinions like yours."
- They could do it, some people would align with that stance, and some wouldn't. Exactly how it plays out being a customer: now we've discovered he supports a far-right party here in Sweden, I can choose to not support the CEO with my money and let others know about their political leaning to decide by themselves if they want to support him and his business aware that their money might got to far-right parties.
I don't see any issue with your flipped argument, it's the same thing, no?
- I imagine that if a company really denied a customer due to disagreement on some views there would be similar flood of comments like "my views is my problem, I pay you money you must do business with me". Maybe I'm wrong though
- Companies can absolutely refuse a customer and many do. Companies will often have public rules about not doing business with weapons manufacturers or tobacco producers.
They also can refuse business due to political stance. They can even give different prices to different customers.
- There's an enormous imbalance between company and customer that you're ignoring, not to mention the difference between a private person and a company's very public personas who own said business.
If a company was sniffing around to learn my political views, that would be a bit intrusive, wouldn't it? I wouldn't expect the same level of anonymity if I were the CEO of a company like Mullvad. There's also a disparity between "I'm taking my business elsewhere, good luck without my $10 a month!" (or whatever Mullvad costs...) and "we've decided to not allow you to use this service".
How large a disparity is depends a lot on whether a company has a lock on a market. Generally, if a vendor in a crowded market decided to turn away customers who are XYZ voters (as an example) I'd be more apt to just comment on that as a business strategy than as a "how dare they, they must accept all customers!" Like, if you are one of 20 VPN providers and you think you can be successful by turning away customers.. well, OK. Good luck with that.
If it's a provider with a monopoly that's a bit different. I live in an area with only one choice of provider for electricity. So I don't think they should be allowed to refuse service to anybody who is paying their bill, even people I vehemently disagree with.
- If the far-right parties they're supporting are similar to MAGA in the U.S., what they're doing is taking customer money and funneling it into a political effort to do just what you're describing - just in a different way. "We don't like groups X, Y, and Z, so we're going to fund a political effort to take their rights away by using government."
As I understand it, the Örebro party pushes for deporting immigrants and has a "Sweden belongs to the Swedes" policy that includes deportation for even those born in Sweden if their parents were born in, e.g., Somalia. So basically, "we don't like certain people, so we want to use customer money to force them out of our country". That really doesn't paint Mullvad as the victim, here.
- I think this is more nuanced than this article or mullvad themselves present it as. What you give to mullvad as a form of payment will end up in the pockets of the funding members which allows them to make relatively large political donations, but it's also not as deep as presented. What gets seemingly glossed over how involved large companies are in pushing parties like orebro into relevancy.
As a basic example, youtube started pushing a LOT of anti-immigrant videos. I never watched them since after few minutes it's obvious that it is clear ragebait, but I keep getting them recommended without showing any interest in them and they're all clocking in anywhere from 300k to millions of views.
There is virtually no way to resist the temptation of being anti-immigrant/racist/whatnot when you see abusive behavior exploiting the good will of the european union especially when there is state level abuse to extract additional funding from the shared support pool. This being extremely unpopular gives motivation to keep all of this under wraps as much as possible which only fuels the fire when "information" is made available on social media platforms where you benefit from blowing this out of proportion and then if you try to question it you are labeled which naturally breeds resentment.
--
Scrolled for few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6-zhxpNsVQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARKZMX4iGZ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmlI4ICp-OI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX-IKLSFH_I
- I wonder, if you model political positions as nations, whether trading benefits you all or whether autarky leads to long term relevance.
- Sigh, people that bring politics to the forefront with everything are so miserable.
- I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
- A right to say something is not the same as the right to say (and do) something without being called out on it.
He has the right to do what he’s doing. Other people have the right to react and say “That sucks, it’s against my values, I no longer trust you or want to do business with you.”
- Okay - but that doesn't mean I'm not going to weigh up what you say when I'm choosing a business to support; especially if it's not in a professional context.
- brave! but fortunately you are safe because no one is challenging his right to say it.
- There are some things that I won't ever defend your right of saying them, to be honest.
- But does this swedish Party say any things like that?
- Yes. They want to get rid of immigrants for example.
- Mass deportation like that is a terrible and destructive idea but that's well short of being unspeakable.
- That is like saying that the judicial system wants (all) people to go to prison. It leaves out the rather crucial "which people".
- Agree. This is more of a "ST Voyager 'Nothing Human'"-case.
- We need to add something to this nice rule about using services that are good from people we don't (fully) agree with.
I'm not personally inclined to be so strict about this, but there are people with objections against the Proton CEO who once agreed with Trump on twitter, or DHH (there is this one blogpost about his extreme views). Etc.
- This is not news. Mullvad has been known to be right-adjacent for a long time, it's a big reason I use them.
- What are some other ways they've been known to be "right-adjacent"?
The Örebro Party in question actually split from the Left Party and describes itself as leftwing. The founder describes himself as a Marxist.
> While Allard has described himself as a Communist, and a Marxist, at its founding in March 2014 he defined the Örebro Party as "broad left". At that time the party considered itself a "local party that wants to carry on the labour movement's ideals", and "not interested in administrating the current society".
- Forced mass deportation of immigrants and anyone not ethnically swedish (= dark skin) even if they are citizens, as well as calling anyone using social safety nets parasites, is just your standard far-right racist populism. There is zero class consciousness if you throw the weakest people with the least influence in society under the bus for your populism.
It's almost definitionally entirely the opposite of Marxism, since that's precisely about recognizing social conflicts caused by things like immigration and poverty as a bourgeoisie plot to divide the working class, to deflect it away from the actual problem. That's why rich people donate to far-right parties in the first place, it's in their class interest to do so.
- Looks like cancel mobs are back on the menu
- Mullvad has always been a bit suspect with regard to their settings or lack their of, however what are you trying to insinuate? That founders are not political? That one "wing" of some hypothetical bird is in some way disconnected from its mirror wing? Regardless making something such as a VPN is and has been commoditiezed in current year to such an extent that whatever may be your motives, you can only do good by encouraging the userbase to not pay for said services.
- Örebropartiet is not a extremist far-right party. All their policies is extreme far-left except immigration.
- Seems more complicated than that, in reading the wiki.
- Wild. I spent about 3 months living in Örebro while on contract with a company based there.
- [flagged]
- Try radical populist left-economic-leaning nationalists
- Nazbols then? Equally bad.
- There are many flavors of national socialism, in reality nazis should be called hitlerians because of this.
- >they're pro-ethnical cleansing of people already living there
source?
- From the wikipedia article linked above...
> In 2026 ÖP party leader Markus Allard sparked controversy on several occasions. In a debate hosted by Studio3 with Liberal member of parliament Martin Melin, Allard asked: "why won't the Liberals push for deporting 100 000 social welfare-Somalis?" and in the same debate said that "Sweden belongs to the Swedes. We have to make sure that we take care of our own damn people and we must deport these damn parasites who sit and live at our expense."
- There aren't even 100 000 Somalians living in Sweden, so it would be quite hard to deport 100 000 social welfare-Somalis. People born in Somalia is the 7th largest group of immigrants, and makes up for the largest group if we only look at African nations.
The real number is around half, 67000.
Now if we assume social welfare-Somalis is a derogatory generalization of all kind of immigrates, including non-Somalis, then it is likely to be more than 100 000 immigrants that is on social welfare. They just won't all be Somalis, or even be the majority of them.
- "ethnic cleansing" is an emotionally charged term that conjures genocide in the popular imagination. It is not a good descriptive term for what can rightly be described as regressive or ultra-nationalistic migration policy.
- Kicking out an ethnicity from your country is ethnic cleansing. There is no other way to put it.
- You are essentially calling for a civil war. Reason why Russia pushes these ideas under fake "patriot" accounts.
- Would it be a civil war if it was a law passed by elected government?
- Wasn't that secession? If part of Sweden decides to separate then we could discuss it in that context I guess.
- Are you trying to respond to a different comment? I'm not sure what this has to do with what I said. P.S. Fuck Putin, Slava Ukraini!
- [flagged]
- Leaving aside the fact you’re a white supremacist racist as some of your other flagged/dead comments make abundantly clear, I’ll nevertheless engage with your first point.
> A country has the right to determine who lives within it.
This is obviously true and every country has laws in place governing immigration and different laws in place governing handling of refugees. Given in most countries the ratio of immigrants to refugees is very high, what is it you’re objecting to? Countries can change their laws and often do, after a change in government. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with arguing for specific levels of immigration. But what you really shouldn’t do is retrospectively change the rules so that people who immigrated legally and settled in their adopted country are now threatened with expulsion.
It seems to me that in a lot of the discussion around immigration there is a subtext of “I don’t like how they behave/think/choose to live.” Which would be fine if people were honest about what they want - in which case, feel free to agitate for laws governing citizens’ behaviour. Don’t be a bad sport however if such laws don’t get passed. Another thing that apparently worries some people is criminality (as if that’s a function of race). By definition, something is criminal if it’s against the law. So enforce the law. Laws are typically not racist and criminals come in all flavours.
- It's about keeping people like you from letting people that can't maintain a competent society ruin our societies that have taken centuries or millennia to build.
> Laws are typically not racist
They explicitly are in every liberal shithole (Canada, UK) because the goal isn't equality it's letting brownoids shit up the place because you people are culturally suicidal.
The Muslims in the UK right now are not culturally compatible with the UK. They need to leave, they do not belong.
- This is the definition from wikipedia: "Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous."
How does what Allard said not fit this definition?
- I don't have a horse in this race, but all the quotes here were based on nationality, not on the characteristics listed in your quote: the party wants to deport illegal immigrants and immigrants who are not "economically integrated", because Swede is not an ethnicity.
Being left and anti-immigration is not an oxymoron.
Though I must say, based on some comments here, that people who are defending the party's ideology do seem to read it in terms of race...
- Well Allard does not see nationality and ethnicity how you believe it. One line further in wikipedia: "In a podcast segment about immigration and deportations Allard stated his opinion and said that "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish.""
Also Swedes are an ethnicity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedes
- Thanks for providing further context: as I mentioned, I was going off of the available quotes.
Given the party's other points', I'd still say he's not talking about Swedes as an ethnicity but as a nationality, similar to how other non-far-right, conservative parties express their beliefs. I checked the page, and that quote is provided without the context, and since Sweden does not have birthright citizenship, I don't know if he's talking about non-naturalised kids or naturalised people.
Further complications come from the fact that stripping "bad" immigrants of nationality is now an acceptable talking point for liberal parties the world over, and that position is very popular with people of all origins, not just the ethnic Europeans. I'd even argue it's less popular among ethnic Europeans than those of other ethbic backgrounds.
But I'll acknowledge that defending that party's position requires giving tons of benefit of the doubt...
- Swede is ethnicity in same way as Dane is ethnicity, Swedish and Danish is nationalities. Ethnic Sámi, while living on their ancestors land can be Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish or even Russian in nationality.
- No, a Somali who immigrated to Sweden is nationality wise Swedish and ethnicity wise Somali. The quote clearly says to expel Somalis and makes no distinction between ethnicity and nationality. Why do apologia for racism anyways? Weird stuff dude.
- > Why do apologia for racism anyways? Weird stuff dude.
Don't put words in my mouth.
> No, a Somali who immigrated to Sweden is nationality wise Swedish and ethnicity wise Somali
You seem to misunderstand the concepts of nationality and ethnicity, and how naturalisation operates.
- Well you are doing apologia for racism. I’m not putting words in your mouth in calling out your behavior.
Please go ahead and define nationality and ethnicity. I’m happy to allow you to entirely define the terms to your ends and make an argument within those bounds. Please also tell us how the quoted statement calls out “naturalization” and “nationality” because it’s critical to you “not” doing racist apologia that both your definitions and the quoted statement are coherent.
- My friend.
If you ctrl f my username on this page, you'll find I'm arguing against racism and Islamophobia in another thread.
Let me make an assumption: you're an American liberal. Like many American liberals, you talk without knowing much about anything, with the purpose of feeling righteous, and appearing pure to others.
The world is more complex than what you read on the news.
I suggest you read "How immigration really works", by Hein De Haan, a book that explains why immigration is not a left or right issue. I also suggest you search definitions for these terms: nationality, ethnicity, naturalised immigrant.
- My mistake. You definitely couldn’t be doing racist apologia if you’ve made statements against racism in the past. That’s convincing enough to me, an apparent American liberal!
- Is Allard advocating for removing everyone from immigrant backgrounds? I got the impression that Allard only wanted to remove criminals and net tax recipients, e.g. not removing law abiding, tax-paying, assimilated members of Swedish society, regardless of ethnicity/race/background.
- Ethnic cleansing is an emotionally charged term, yes, because the crime against of humanity of deporting an entire population is absolutely horrific and a very close neighbour to genocide.
The proposed policy here is squarely what Rome Statute, Article 7 (1)(d) is intended to prevent. Sweden is a party to the treaty.
- [flagged]
- This sounds very much far right and not left at all to me
> Markus Allard takes inspiration from marxist ideology[32] and unites the "productive" classes of society against the "Transferiat", with the "Transferiat" being a term coined by Allard to describe the classes of society that lives off of transfers that are a net negative for society such as those who, despite having an ability to work, live off of social welfare benefits, as well as those who work "made-up services"[33] that the party deems serve no societal function, such as bureaucrats, consultants, public sector communications specialists, strategists and HR-specialists.
It's practically a copy and paste of the ideology behind "doge".
- Sounds like a branch of the Technocracy movement which Musks grandfather helped found.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_N._Haldeman
"The technocracy movement proposed replacing partisan politicians and business people with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy"
- Whoa whoa whoa. I don't think it's at all fair trying to throw Technocracy under the bus. The guilt by association doesn't look great! But Technocracy was interesting. It had some hopes & values, and it wanted people thinking and working materially, scientifically, having a perception of the world better than just money. It had some real neat idea. Wild & absurd? Yes that too. But I don't enjoy the casual drive by shoot down!
- Weird, I didn't think I was throwing technocracy under the bus. What makes you say that?
- This is just a rephrasing of the lumpenproletariat, coupled with the professional-managerial class. You could also refer to the latter as a modern version of the lumpenbourgeoisie (although this term is applied rather broadly). It sounds more like pro-labor, pro-work, anti-lumpen Marxism. In no way “right-wing” unless you want to call North Korea “right-wing”, which is a very ultra-left thing to do (what orthodox Marxists call left deviationism).
- By your logic USSR was far right.
- No, I'm fairly sure you could not find a quote like that about the USSR.
- You would be wrong. The people you described were called "тунеядцы" in USSR. With a possible exception of bureaucrats who existed as a result of centralized government but were also called "a barrier for the working class" by Lenin etc.
I also highly doubt USSR would accommodate people who move in and don't bother to integrate into the culture and speak Russian. Ask people from entire countries where Moscow did Russification, and those people didn't even move in from outside they already lived there.
- The trial of Joseph Brodsky is a fascinating insight into the workings of the USSR https://www.nytimes.com/1972/10/01/archives/the-trial-of-jos...
They had strong opinions of what was deemed "socially useful" work and were not above abolishing those pursuits they deemed to be useless.
All able-bodied people were expected to work (in approved roles) and you would be provided a job if you couldn't find one but if you refused to work they would deem you a "social parasite" and prosecute you if you didn't reform your behavior.
Somehow, people seem to forget that Marxism is an ideology of workers.
- >Somehow, people seem to forget that Marxism is an ideology of workers.
Not really, Marx and company were nobles, lawyers, etc. The ideology concerns provoking a civil war and taking over, workers rights is just the rhetoric to cause the revolution. The worker’s paradise never materializes because it’s not actually about that.
- This is true but the ideology was packaged and sold as a movement for the working class. My observation had more to do with the modern interpretation of it as somehow being a license to not work, which appears comical when compared with how it was instituted.
Not all of the component parts of the ideology are necessarily false due to their introduction and popularization by Marx. Personally, I find his writings obtuse and his beliefs abhorrent. There is, however, merit in the idea that the state should benefit its people, a large percentage of which are the productive working class, but it shouldn't be ruled by the working class. The state is its people and their culture, it shouldn't oppose their interests or subjugate and exploit them for the advancement of ideals alien to them.
- Whoever downvotd you is unaware that the USSR tried a seven day work week. It was not about workers.
- This is actually very far left, just not the current wealthy-urban-lgbtq far left. USSR marxists and Maoists held the same views, where the individual's main function was to work and refusal to work or low productivity required either reformation (aka often, Gulag) or hunger.
"Those how do not work, do not eat" - Mao
Interestingly, psychoanalysis in the USSR was aimed at helping the patient to go back to work, for instance.
- Marxism, communism and socialism are all extreme far-left ideologies.
Being anti-immigration doesn't automatically swing the party to the right. As written on Wikipedia, "left-conservative" is probably the best label.
The Swedish far-left loves to, for instance, brand the governing party in Denmark as far-right, but they are actually also left-conservative.
It is possible (shocker) to be liberal and progressive, whilst also being pro-assimilation, pro-deportation, anti-immigration.
- > Marxism, communism and socialism are all extreme far-left ideologies.
Yes, but the behavior in that quote, cutting social services, is none of the above. Using language associated with far left movements while promoting far right policies leaves you as a far right party.
> Being anti-immigration doesn't automatically swing the party to the right
Literally nothing in the quote I quoted is about immigration (though they hit that checkbox as well and it absolutely does swing you to the right).
- > cutting social services
By providing free healthcare and dental care or at least reducing out of pocket costs?
- National Socialism in a nutshell.
- In the U.S., before Trump was elected, immigration control and deportating illegal immigrants were things that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ("left" politicians) campaigned on.
- I guess emotions/politics are more important than facts?
A very quick search yielded this short clip of Hillary Clinton:
https://youtube.com/shorts/Zsq32nNjNoE (no endorsement of overlays/etc intended, just the first result in the search)
- The wikipedia article about the party is pretty interesting [1]. "The party has also been described as both right-wing populist and left-wing populist as well as left-conservative"
The party was founded after the founder was thrown out of the Left party for liking a far-left extremist group on Facebook and not backing down from that. Since then the party has evolved to also include goals traditionally attributed to the right, like large scale remigration and a stricter immigration policy.
The party also seems inconsequentially small, even at the municipal and regional level. They have 0 seats at the national level
- Great, I will definitely go out of my way to purchase their products.
Uncontrolled migration needs to stop.
- What does that mean?
- Nothing, it's just an empty platitude that can be used for justifying any kind of abhorrent act against "others".
It's why it's so effective as a rallying cry, it means nothing substantial, can be molded into whatever the speaker wants it to mean, it's an empty vessel for the bearer's hatred.
- So you’re accusing me of abhorrent acts based on what I said?
Did you think of that word salad yourself or you copied it from somewhere?
So you’re being extremely unjust by accusing me of something while presenting yourself on the moral high ground? Checks out.
- Any suggestions for a VPN service with similar security standards as Mullvad?
- Damn. Well, if that gets confirmed I'm going to get my company off mullvad.
- It's confirmed. And the party in question is quite extreme, at least by Swedish standards.
- [flagged]
- According to polls[0] the party gets ~20% votes in their region. IMHO 20% of voters can't be "extreme" [0] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/orebro/orebropartiet-nast-... (swedish)
- The AfD is a far-right extremist party in Germany with currently 28% projected support[0].
- > IMHO 20% of voters can't be "extreme"
Was the NSDAP "extreme"? They got 43.9%
- They got 43.9% in what Wikipedia marks as "semi-free yet questionable election". Also more correct question IMHO would be "was the NSDAP extreme in 1933?" and the answer is probably "no as much as by today's standards".
- What you're actually asking is whether people knew they were extreme. But this makes your overall point circular: we can't say a party is extreme if the majority of people don't call it screens.
- They were definitely extreme by the standards of the time. Their aim was explicitly to completely revolutionise European politics, culture, religion.... everything. One comment I heard recent (on The Rest is History podcast, I think Tom Holland said it) they were the most radical movement in European history.
Their ideology implied at the very least getting rid of whole populations. They wanted to reset to an imagined ancient culture and rewrote history to justify it. Mostly imagined, anyway - Sparta was the one real example they looked to.
- They were extreme by the standards of the time, but the Overton window at the time did go further to the extremes, so they were considered less extreme than they would be today.
- previously discussed[flagged: 251 comments]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687508
- Thanks, we'll merge that thread hither.
- Including a statement from the other founder.
- This one's gone too.
- Aren't far-right parties opposed to government control and censorship? Ideally a provider should be politically neutral, but I'm wondering if it's preferable to have one that is opposed to government control and censorship.
- > Aren't far-right parties opposed to government control and censorship?
Not more consistently than other parties.
- Such a convenient time frame with all think-of-the-children bs wave to point fingers at the one of the best VPN services our there with spotless reputation and raise a hysteria with duplicated stream of posts, isn't it?
Surely just a coincidence.
- Oh yes, sure, the party started by avowed Marxist Markus Allard is 'far-right'. For those who can read (or know how to translate) Swedish here's an article [1] on marxist.se - well-known hidey hole for far-right extremists - on how the expulsion of Markus Allard from the communist party (they call themselves 'the left party' but they're one of several communist parties in Sweden) is an 'attack on the left'.
Allard is a traditional leftie, someone who thinks in terms of class struggle and power to the people. He also happens to be rather outspoken about the failure of Swedish parties on all sides to handle the problems related to the excessive migration Sweden and Europe have been dealing with for the last few decades. This has put a target on his back for the everyone-I-don't-agree-with-is-Hitler crowd so his party is of course 'far-right'. Well, if that is what 'far-right' means it doesn't seem all that problematic so I wonder why people always complain so much about the claimed rise of the 'far-right'. See what that leads to, you obsessive labellers of those who dare to question the desired narrative? When everything is far-right the term has lost its meaning just as claims of 'racism' or '*-phobia' have lost theirs.
[1] https://marxist.se/uteslutningen-av-allard-en-attack-mot-van...
- does it change your trust in the company?
For some people, the answer is obviously yes. For others, they'll judge Mullvad purely by its track record, audits, and technical design.
Honestly, you could say the same about the CEO of ANDURIL in the US - the Oculus guy...but he just cares about the US and wants to make money by making weapon systems etc.
Is he a bad person? Is he a patriot? Who knows, I ain't gonna play the ultimate judge game - but he did release a cool gameboy clone which is literally the closest I will ever get to his work... [1]
- It's not only about trust, but also about not wanting to give money to an entity that will pass it on to a political party you don't want to support.
- Yes, not only trust but my willingness to contribute money towards his paycheck. I don't want my money to end up in far-right parties.
- Look at Zuck and Musk. Their platforms are still used by millions. It's only "us" that care about the pedigree of our tech founders, most people couldn't care less.
- I commend your correct use of “couldn’t care less”. It’s so rare to see people get this one right these days.
- really? how would/did you see others use it?
- they mean it's pretty common to see the less-correct "could care less"
- I’d say entirely incorrect. It means exactly the opposite. I don’t buy the “it’s popular usage now so that makes it right” argument - it’s like saying 4 now equals 5 because more people use 4 to mean 5.
- There has to be some reason that so many projects are started by right wing people. Something in their personality that makes them both RW and willing to start lots of projects.
- I would argue that right-wing people are now the left-wing people from like 30-40 years ago.
- Don't think so. When did left wing people want remigration?
- Right wing thought patterns tend toward believing in oneself; predicating the worth of the individual on their objective behavior or output; valuing individual achievements; and also believing that effort is likely to result in those achievements.
Left wing thought patterns are biased toward less agency, e.g. the individual is a product of the system; systemic discrimination holds people back; one's trauma or neurodivergency is a valid anchor that makes achievements very difficult; failing to achieve is okay and doesn't reduce one's intrinsic value.
- I'm aware that left wing patterns position individuals as moulded by systems but I'm not aware of any that explicitly deny the power of the individual to try weird stuff, especially in a low-barrier-to-entry industry like software. I guess maybe the overall level of that is somewhat lower and maybe low enough that it doesn't really happen?
- In some ways I would say it could even increase trust: if the guy is a privacy absolutist, ultra-libertarian, "my business is not the state's business" type, his VPN products are likely to be pretty good.
On the other hand, he might have other strong right-wing views that users don't agree with, and which might take precedence in one's set of priorities. If I like football and they like football, but they also want to kill me because of <other reason>, I don't think I'd want to give them my money.
- Wanted to mention the Analogue since ModRetro was mentioned.
https://www.analogue.co/products
https://www.analogue.co/editions
I think these look a lot cooler, though they're less hackable.
- [dead]
- I am surprised that people are surprised, all these services are by people for people who are marginalized. Therefore, they are either far-right or far-left. When its business, its more likely to be a far-right since they are more business-oriented. The far left folks usually make a repo and give it away or try to organize some collective effort.
- > for people who are marginalized. Therefore, they are either far-right or far-left.
There are many types of marginalised groups, and many other reasons to want to use VPNs. Putting everything on a left-right political axis seems more than a tad reductive.
- Sure but far left and far right is a crude default way to generalize, the left folks will be especially annoyed by this but its still useful when the specifics don't matter.
- A headline and 20 comments and no mention of what this party actually stands for. Only simple labels such as "far-right". Ehh. The Republican Party in America is EXTREMELY far right by Swedish standards. So maybe one should base this on the actual substance rather than labels?
- Already had this topic discussed several times this week.
- Why a shame? Is far right bad? Are far left good then? Genuine question, not a troll, because I keep hearing opposite things.
- When it is about paying money for a commercial service I think it is valid point to vote with your wallet. Otherwise if it was a free service, it would not really matter as the whole VPN provider industry is dubious and comes down to the same tech stack and outcome.
- Left/right doesn't matter much for a no-logs VPN.
Up/Down (authoritarian/libertarian) is what matters there.
If he has high allegiance to the extant power structure then promises should be questioned.
If he is for radical decentralization and antiwar then I'm more likely to trust promises made about privacy and autonomy.
Then there's international confusion about left/right. Scandinavia is known as a good place to run a business because businesses regulation is much lighter than places like the US which are heavily regulated. In the US business regulation is "left wing" in Scandinavia it's "right wing".
We'd use a 14-dimensional vector for political positioning if we wanted to be studious but most folks are just looking for a friend/enemy distinction. Even many of the comments here looking to dump a well-regarded service if either "tastes great" or "less filling" is confirmed. The false dialectic as means of control and all that jazz.
- The party in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party. Doesn't sound extremist far-right to me. Many of its positions would be considered center-left or even far left in much of the world.
- "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish"
For all the stuff about free dentists this sounds pretty right wing to me.
- What's wrong about it? You expect me to be a jap citizen if I just over-stay there and have my children born there?
- You? No, not for that alone.
But if your kids spend the first dozen years of their life in a country, they should get to stay in that country.
- This is like the third duplicate I saw in a week
- Discussed three days ago (251 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687508
The other owner replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696800
- If this is real I will stop my monthly subscriptions.
- Please stop this high school cafeteria witch hunt bullshit. It's played out. Either use their stuff and support them or don't.
- It's not a "witch hunt" to be against ethnic cleansing and not want to financially support that.
- I've never really gotten the impression that Allard or the Örebro party support ethnic cleansing. What makes you say this? I'm not sure if any of their suggested policies would even be considered that controversial outside of Sweden.
- The Örebro Party (Örebropartiet) split from the socialist Left Party in 2014.
Some of its key issues include lowered wages for politicians, ending the tax payer funding of various sculptures, monuments and art, large scale remigration, a stricter immigration policy, and free dental care.
> While Allard has described himself as a Communist, and a Marxist, at its founding in March 2014 he defined the Örebro Party as "broad left". At that time the party considered itself a "local party that wants to carry on the labour movement's ideals", and "not interested in administrating the current society".
- archive link? the post got deleted
- They might be having some capacity issues, it was 404 for me for a while but now it's back.
Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20260629105534/https://det.socia...
- thanks, i got to the actual article that was linked: https://web.archive.org/web/20260628170131mp_/https://www.fl...
- Swede here. That's not even close to accurate. Örebropartiet is not extremist, but I would absolutely label them radical populist left-economic-leaning nationalists. Please do some research and make up your own mind. They're a tiny local party active in Örebro municipality where their founder and leader loudly points out clearly wasteful use of government funds, or more or less corrupt decisions made by leading party figures in other parties on local matters. The party leader is known for ridiculing competing parties party members on debates.
Where the Örebropartiet (Örebro Party) usually are called extremist is in questions regarding immigration. They are of the opinion that people that move to Sweden should not integrate but also assimilate, and quickly, find a job. For some people, this might sound extreme, but I would argue that more than half of the Swedish population (and its parties) nowadays share this view, similar to how Japanese people and society broadly want people that move their to assimilate.
- > similar to how Japanese people and society broadly want people that move their to assimilate
And it's super racist there too, I can assure you. My father in law is Korean but lived in Japan his whole life. There's no way to describe what he experienced except racism. People just hated him for being Korean.
I have no respect for people that concern troll about some vague cultural purity to disguise their prejudices.
- A friend of mine who is a non Japanese Asian lived in Japan and when asked said there's no racism. There's mild cases but if you are careful to follow the customs and speak the language, you are generally accepted as a Japanese in daily life.
- > A friend of mine who is a non Japanese Asian lived in Japan and when asked said there's no racism
Well I'm convinced.
- :shrug: same back to you?
- No, there's a fundamental difference between what we both wrote. There's a difference between saying "I know someone who has experienced racism" and "My friend says there's no racism in X country." One is a personal experience, the other invalidates the experiences of everyone else. They are not two sides of the same coin like you are implying. If you take the phrase "There is no racism in Japan" at face value, you are either pushing an agenda or falling for someone else's.
"We just want assimilation" is the palatable marketing term for "We would be fine arresting people at their immigration hearings if they are brown enough." Just look at the U.S.
- Rewrite my comment to say "my friend experienced no racism". Not more than in his home country at least.
What you said is the same. One is according to what your relative said another is according to what my friend said.
I don't think it's crazy to expect assimilation. We are fascinated with different countries and cultures and we generally consider it's a good idea they exist and are different. Diversity is strength. But they can only be different if they have their own culture and traditions. Would everyone be so fascinated with Japan or Korea if it was not for their culture? Would they be the same without high trust society that is made possible by it?
- > I don't think it's crazy to expect assimilation.
What's that mean to you? In my city, immigrants work, run businesses, pay taxes, have kids and send them to local schools, ride the bus, complain about the weather, practice their religion. I guess the only thing they don't do is complain as loudly about the government as (many of) the rest of us. What more could they be doing to assimilate?
- Probably nothing. Looks good to me, they speak your language, have jobs (don't abuse welfare), pay taxes, live legally. Reading about the party it seemed that they want to kick out people far from what you described (which can be still wrong, idk, but I'm not sure it's so outrageous I would boycott a business over its owner's preference). If they campaign to kick out people who are like what you described then I would think harder.
- One note: I didn't say anything about the language they speak, and what language other people speak is none of my business.
- How do you know they complain about the weather, if they don't speak your language?
- That is maybe the biggest fear mongering dogwhistle you've dropped so far.
That's a rhetorical example of a human, every day conversation someone might have.
The fact that you took it literally and express concern about its veracity is very revealing. I don't generally police what my neighbors talk about.
- No, it's a reasonable question. Language is how 90% of communication happens. 如果我用中文說話，你根本聽不懂我在說什麼。只有聽得懂鄰居和社區裡的人在說什麼，我才會感到自在；如果聽不懂，我就不會有這種自在感。I've a significant chunk of my life in places where people don't speak my language and it's not a comfortable situation to be. Sure I have some anxieties but everyone does and if you say their feelings are invalid then I'm not sure which of us is more intolerant.
- > Not more than in his home country at least
So in other words he did experience racism?
> I don't think it's crazy to expect assimilation
What qualifies as assimilation is completely up to the reader. To some people, it means holding a job (although I don't know of any white people that get deported for being laid off). For some, it means not committing crimes.
For many, it doesn't matter if you have a job or if you're even born here. There is no standard of assimilation you can meet if you are ethnically different enough. That is why, again, the U.S. is currently arresting people at their immigration hearings. This is what far right politicians really want, they don't give a fuck about assimilation.
> Would everyone be so fascinated with Japan or Korea if it was not for that culture and high trust society made possible by it
Buddy, come on. Most people I know are not fascinated by Japan, they are fascinated by a romanticized idea of Japan that has been filtered through Reddit posts and Anime. They cultivate a one-dimensional understanding of the country specifically so they can daydream about it. A lot of Americans that "love" Japan would lose all interest the second they were told they can't dump their trash outside.
- > So in other words he did experience racism?
Not according to him.
> Most people I know are not fascinated by Japan, they are fascinated by a romanticized idea of Japan that has been filtered through Reddit posts and Anime
Somehow people I know who rave about Japan just don't watch anime that I know of. They just go there and like how everything is. The anime nerds I know don't talk about real Japan much.
If you don't have that fascination, fine. I was fascinated by tons of things there. I think most people were. And most people would say it's a horrible idea destroying that culture.
- You are completely dodging the topic of assimilation. You are implying that Japan is great because it's culturally homogeneous, and the reason it's culturally homogeneous is because people assimilate, and therefore Sweden deporting teenagers is morally right because they are protecting their own culture from people that don't assimilate.
You have no specifics on how immigrants don't assimilate, and what part of the culture is worth preserving, or how you can even assimilate to a culture that is constantly developing. If I am ethnically Japanese and grow up in Japan, but I don't act like others, that is not a "lack of assimilation." That is me actively participating in a shift of the culture, and that's how everyone would see it. But if I were a different ethnicity in the same situation, I would be a problem immigrant anchor baby who is trying to destroy the culture of the country. Do you see the difference?
This idea that culture is able to be frozen in time and preserved is paradoxical. It's a cudgel used to bludgeon disadvantaged people who are perfectly functioning citizens, and even harm people who could make the country better, not worse. How do you expect immigrants to introduce new ideas to a culture if you elect politicians that will demonize and deport them if they are not sufficiently "assimilated"
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- Racism != rightism. It is even possible to be both Communist and racist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union
Racism is one of those things that unfortunately crosses political and social boundaries. Some groups just hide it better than others by enforcing anti-racism as a group norm.
- Racism definitely crosses all boundaries, but deporting people on the grounds they are not culturally aligned is what we'd call a positionally right policy. That does not mean left wing parties can't do it. It means it lies right on the political spectrum.
That's not a subjective opinion I made, that is just a textbook definition of what we consider authoritative right. Left and right mean things, and they don't mean what traditionally progressive or conservative parties happen to be doing at that time.
- Left and right refers to where the Girondins and the Montagnards/Jacobins sat in the French revolutionary assembly. We’ve bastardized this into imaginary delineations of political positioning and for some reason we keep bolting on arbitrary positions as Girondin or Jacobin.
I don’t care what textbook you are looking at, I’m looking at (or maybe writing) a different one. Left and right do not actually “mean things” if you intend for “meaning” to be universally or even widely agreed upon. I suppose for you “meaning” may only be relevant if a certain group or class agrees upon the meaning, but the rest of us will continue to say and believe what we want!
- You are being needlessly contradictory, in a pointlessly academic way. I can assure you nobody thinks of left or right as the French revolutionary assembly, any more than we think of "Wednesday" as the day of the Norse god Odin, or "a sandwich" as the Earl of Sandwich's gambling snack. The Etymological origin doesn't determine current meaning.
> but the rest of us will continue to say and believe what we want
Who is we? These definitions are mostly settled, and where they aren't, there are fuzzy differences, not huge gaps of disagreement. It's a shared language of understanding where people lie on a quadrant of politics. It's socially useful to have that language when posing political theory. Again, this does not mean political parties are permanently stuck to their quadrant. What do you think Republicans mean when they call themselves right wing? Nothing?
> I suppose for you “meaning” may only be relevant if a certain group or class agrees upon the meaning
What? You seem to be stuck on an idea that I am making some kind of partisan statement by saying a certain policy is left or right wing. That is not a value statement on whether it's good or bad. I don't know why you are so heated about this.
- There is no shared language anymore, and I’m tired of pretending that there is. The 20th century notion of left and right, which was itself a fantasy, has been turned into a tool of propaganda. It does nothing but muddy the waters.
“Right-wing” politicians are arguing for nationalization in some cases and wielding industrial policy like they’re FDR. We may see price controls and even capital controls before long. The oil market interventions alone would make Stalin blush. Meanwhile they are jumping on regulation in other places, such as AI “safety”, and have floated hate speech bans (to combat antisemitism).
“Left-wing” pols (admittedly in the face of immense hate from their base) are coming out for free market solutions gently guided by the government and deregulation so we can build faster. Outside the US, you have bizarro world Labour policies in the UK (they seem to be aiming to absorb the Tories), China’s roaring Communist economy that’s the global hotbed of economic activity, etc.
The traditional categories still seem to hold in Latin America, for some reason. But that’s it.
What exactly does the left-right distraction provide except for an easily abused method for enforcing a (tenuous, completely malleable) group orthodoxy? These days it seems like people just use it as shorthand for “enemy”. Any heterodox position is automatically of the other wing, preventing adaptation to real-world circumstances. Some positions (like a land value tax) are somehow both left and right wing depending on who you ask. It’s infuriating.
- You are taking me to say left means Democrat and right means Conservative, and acting like it's a gotcha when they criss cross. I already said all of this was possible.
> “Right-wing” politicians are arguing for nationalization in some cases and wielding industrial policy like they’re FDR
Nationalization is a policy lying on the left. State ownership of industry is the textbook left pole
> The oil market interventions alone would make Stalin blush
Price controls on markets are authoritarian left
> are coming out for free market solutions gently guided by the government and deregulation so we can build faster
Economic right, mildly libertarian
> What exactly does the left-right distraction provide except for an easily abused method for enforcing a (tenuous, completely malleable) group orthodoxy?
No, they provide categorization to resist group orthodoxy. People are going to categorize, that is human nature. Without these, the only way to categorize a policy is what the parties happen to be doing at the time. That causes a group orthodoxy. There are people describing themselves as "more left" or "more right" as a shorthand to reject group orthodoxy. There are people describing a policy as left or right, regardless of which party is doing it. You're not sparing anything by resisting policy categorization, you are making things less specific and more likely to default to broad buckets.
That doesn't mean you can't talk about the policies in specifics, it means they lie on a very flexible and descriptive map.
- That isn’t at all useful. If a party adopts a few platform items that are “left” and some that are “right” (as all parties do), what good is it to point out that X party has adopted Y-wing stance on this issue? The only purpose that this could serve is to give ultras (left or right) ammunition to enforce orthodoxy to these “standard” categories. Meanwhile in the real world, as I mentioned, all parties and candidates adopt mixed platforms, and if you care at all about pragmatism and responding to real conditions, those positions should be evaluated individually on their merits rather than slapping on a left or right label.
This tendency to force everything into a black or white frame is what gives us politicians who run without platforms, on party label alone, and who then adopt unpopular or harmful positions when in office.
At some point we decided that platforms don’t matter, and if platforms exist, they must be orthodox. This is a problem!
- All white nationalist parties describe themselves in these neutral terms, of course. I've yet to find a hardline anti-immigration party that is not also virulently racist.
- Still waiting to cancel Big Tech for donating to Trump [0] and they donated more than a million+.
So why haven't we cancelled Big Tech yet?
[0] https://www.commoncause.org/articles/big-tech-is-donating-mi...
- The mechanism of VPN is pooling together many users and making them indistinguishable to the outside, providing plausible deniability. Outsiders can see a user belongs to the pool, but they can't tell if they are 'good' or 'bad'.
It's a similar mechanism that cryptocurrency, or money laundering uses. It's very possible for 'good' users to be recruited into the pool for no other reason than to provide plausible deniability for the 'bad' members. If I wanted to run an ilegal operation like cybercrime or drugs, I would probably use a VPN and a crypto pool, and try to get legitimate users to desire using VPNs for reasons like gaming latency, or avoiding taxes on 1K/month income.
It's well known that Mullvad provides lower than market prices when compared to competitors, and that they offer stricter no logs policies. Yeah, maybe they are providing a basic privacy right, or maybe they are providing shelter for criminals. Tradeoff old as time. But with prices possibly being subsidized, it makes sense that their incentive model is not to collect fees for usage, but to provide a wide enough user pool such that the anonimity is more effective.
What's interesting is that both far-right free-market anarchist users and far-left Not for profit Free Software socialists appear to be shocked that their anonimity pools contains them both. Kind of like how the lights went up at the club at 6 am and you realize who you've been smooching in the dark.
- > far-right free-market anarchist
There's no such thing as rightwing anarchism. In the entire history of anarchism, it's always been a strictly and explicitly leftwing movement.
- Companies funding far-left parties seem to be much bigger problem.
- Did anyone actually look into the "far-right" party that this purports to be?
The Örebro Party (Swedish: Örebropartiet, ÖP) is a local populist political party in Örebro, Sweden, led by Markus Allard. It holds seats in the Örebro municipal and regional assemblies, focusing on local populist policies such as reducing politicians' salaries, stricter migration, and free dental care.
Sweden has undergone a horrible transformation in the last several years where gang warfare and especially bombings have skyrocketed. Most of the new gang violence in the last several years is from migrants from North Africa and the Middle East, after Sweden implemented a generous immigration policy.
https://nct-cbnw.com/an-explosion-a-day-in-sweden-what-is-go...
There's nothing to indicate that this party is "far right" at all. It's a populist-based party but the stance on immigration is definitely linearly correlated to the violence that was brought in by immigration. Lowering politicians' salaries and free dental care doesn't sound very far right to me.
- Gosh, why do I not believe you, who is blaming black and brown immigrants (from multiple countries, even, as if they were coordinating) for violence
Your own link says,
"The defenders of Sweden’s once generous immigration policy will point out that, according to a report released in February 2024, 88% of the 14,000 people deemed to be active in criminal networks are Swedish citizens, and only 8% of these are dual citizens. 11% are non-citizens, and the remaining 1% was not known. An additional 48,000 people in Sweden were deemed to be linked to criminal networks, although not actively involved."
And it links to the report.
Did you think people wouldn't read it, or what? (Assuming you are not a bot, ofc. There seem to be a lot of them flooding every platform talking about this.)
The article you linked to also says:
"In an interview with SVT in January 2025, the Swedish Police’s Erik Lindblad said that they had seen an increase in what he termed “instrumental violence” where it is not people that are targeted but instead “fixed objects such as staircases and businesses”.
The reasons for the bombings are, in several cases, “suspected to be motivated by extortion against businesses or people linked to businesses and their families”, according to the Swedish authorities’ crisis information website. Mr. Lindblad also noted that the attacks can often be part of wider criminal conflicts, although these cases are often an exception to the rule, in their opinion.
Serious crime and the actors within those networks are often behind the attacks, according to Mr. Lindblad. “They use violence to get their way, irrespective of if it is revenge, or a battle over a drugs market, or extortion,” he said.
Thankfully, given that the explosions normally target doors, staircases, or businesses, the explosions do not always result in injuries and rarely kill people."
In any case, I do not actually care whether they are "far-right" or "far-left" or whateverthefuck. Left vs. Right is an infamously limited, binary horse-race way to talk about politics, one that groups disparate issues together arbitrarily. If you somehow convinced me they weren't fascist (though they are), I would not suddenly change my opinion of them just because the label changed.
The thing that actually matters is that they want to forcibly expel innocent people (including sending 2nd generation immigrants who were born and raised in Sweden to a country they have never lived in and have no connections to or familiarity with) from their homes en masse because it's convenient to blame them for all the nation's problems, based on zero evidence and maximum racism. There is no way to suggest something like this that is not monstrous.
Mullvad's mealy-mouthed defense of this is pathetic. There can be no tolerance for intolerance.
- Additional context here is that they donated 75% of *all donations* to that party last year. 3x everyone else combined.
And that party is not just "kind of right wing", they believe in large scale "remigration" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remigration), which, to save you clicking the link, means "a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry".
There is a wealth of difference between when random companies throw a few thousand at whatever the leading parties are, and this.
- It's funny how remigration never involves sending white folk back to europe.
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- You certainly see a lot of tourists and expats. And it is easy to see the worst behaving ones especially in parts of Asia.
- I daresay that Australia and New Zealand are places that white people invaded and then put up barriers to stop too many other people (of any colour) coming to live there.
> There's a real racial asymmetry in the world between whites and nonwhites in terms of building countries people wish to live in.
I think your framing is incorrect - the asymmetry is far more to do with money and power than a shade of skin.
- I meant from the Americas
- There's only two white countries in the Americas, the United States and Canada, which got that way by being Anglo settler-colonies whose governments were founded by white, mostly-English people who conquered the land from a relatively sparse native American population and did not intermix with that population in great numbers.
Every other country in the Americas was originally founded by Spanish or Portuguese or other non-Anglo European colonial powers, who generally had much larger native American populations, and did have substantial population intermixing; which is why today people in the US and Canada consider the entire racial category "Latino" - which was formed by exactly that admixture event - to be nonwhite, even though in Latin America itself individuals vary widely in exactly what proportions of white, native American, and black ancestry they have.
There are people, often native American nationalists or far-leftists sympathetic to native American nationalists because they are nonwhite, who do support remigration of whites from the United States and Canada. The most fundamental problems with this argument are that 1) the number of white people in these countries is much larger than the number of actual indigenous people and has already demographically swamped the indigenous many centuries ago; and 2) there was never any native American government with anywhere near the state capacity to even have immigration laws, let alone enforce them, at any point in history. Modern levels of state capacity are basically an invention of Western European technological modernity and came out of the same half-millenium-old process of historical development that lead to the conquest of North America by non-admixed whites to begin with. The very land areas recognized by international law that we label the United States and Canada are themselves white creations; there's zero indigenous American political or cultural continuity involved with them (which is indeed a major political grievance of native Americans and their political allies). There's no prior indigenous state that could be returned to after the expulsion of whites, if that were even physically tractable.
- This of course means that all of those latter countries need to import millions of people from the other countries because this is bound to increase the quality of the good country, somehow.
- >ethnic cleansing via mass deportation
"ethnic cleansing" is an emotionally charged term that conjures genocide in the popular imagination. It is not a good descriptive term for what can rightly be described as regressive or ultra-nationalistic migration policy.
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- I use Mullvad because it physically prevents anyone from logging my data.
What a co-owner does with his personal money in a local Swedish municipal election has zero impact on the code protecting my traffic.
Did a quick research - calling a party that campaigns for a 30-hour work week and socialist dental care 'far-right' just because they have a strict immigration policy shows how carelessly people throw labels around these days.
- How does it physically prevent Mullvad from logging your data?
- They're known to run everything in RAM, nothing gets stored. You pull the plug and everything is gone.
Of course, you have to trust the company on that.
- So nothing prevents them
- By that logic, nothing prevents your ISP, your OS, or your hardware manufacturer from logging you either. Ultimate trust is an illusion in tech.
- Correct and we know several of these parties do log you.
- The party in question seems to be an anti-immigration strongly secularist left wing party with Marxist roots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party
I am not sure "far right" is an accurate label. Maybe populist? Its a mix that would probably get a lot of support in other European countries.
- Huh, so they want free healthcare and also ethnic cleansing. That's a pretty strange combination.
- Also they are anti EU and NATO. Lot of astroturfing here.
- > Lot of astroturfing here.
The guidelines say "assume good faith"
- Those are left wing positions. Until 2023 the UK's Green Party's policy was to leave NATO, and there is still a lot of support in the part for that. When the UK's Labour party was socialist they were anti-EU. If you look at campaigned for what in the 1975 referendum on EEC membership its pretty clear: for example, Thatcher campaigned to remain, Tony Benn campaigned to leave. The remnants of the old left remain anti-EU even now.
- They're neither wing. A foo-wing person could want to leave the EU because it's too bar-wing for any values of foo and bar.
- its not uncommon. The overtly racist parties in the UK (e.g. the BNP has quite a lot of left wing policies (e.g. nationalisation of utilities), ending NHS outsourcing to the private sector, and free healthcare.
Its a combination that appeals to the worst off who compete with unskilled immigrants for jobs and rely on free healthcare etc.
- It is a sensible combination to me. If you first believe that the government should provide a bunch of free stuff, but it doesn't at the moment because it's too expensive, it kind of makes sense that you would then think there need to be fewer people getting the free stuff so it remains affordable. The first people on the exclusion list would naturally be noncitizens.
- You can exclude people you don't like from free healthcare without physically removing them from the country.
- As it turns out you can't have strong socialist policies and also open borders.
- Disgusting. You cannot trust a racist with your privacy.
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- OK, but please don't post low-substance comments on HN. Telling us you “don't care” about a topic achieves nothing other than instigating a generic tangent, which is against the guidelines. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- I used Mullvad before this because they passed a bunch of tests and legally denied claims to user data. I don’t have the reference but it was on HN.
So who do people recommend now?
- Proton
- Disappointing if true. I can't read the original article[1], but the translation seems to agree. I've paid for Mullvad for _years_. Looks like I'll be taking my money elsewhere.
[1]: https://www.flamman.se/techprofil-ger-miljoner-till-orebropa...
- Article by a news media outlet that is considered very far left (communist). Try finding the same claim or description in any national Swedish media. You won't.
- I'm still amused that so many people got brainwashed into thinking that VPNs give privacy :D
- If my house isn't a fortress I should just leave my doors open :D
I'm so clever, everyone else is stupid
- Nah. But for the supposed "privacy" you swap one "dumb pipe" for another pipe, which you have no clue about its operations beyond "trust me bro". Of course they may behave with good intentions and actually keep their promises but that's a rather huge IF.
And then quite often people will still use their regular tracking-browser to access tracking-websites xD
- I love how we pretend to live in a free democratic society where everyone is free to make up their own mind and vote for what they believe...
...as long as they don't have opinions that differ from ours, in that case we might punch em in the face...
- And everyone is free to chose not to buy products from people who have opinions that differs fundamentally from their own?
And some opinions cannot be tolerated in a democratic society. An obvious example is anti-liberal/anti-democratic opinions as they threaten the system itself. You cannot have a free democratic society if a majority removes the freedoms of a minority.
- You have freedom of speech to advocate for your politics. The rest of us have the freedom of association to not want to be involved with you in any way.
These are not contradictory - they are both essential freedoms.
- For most people, the concern is the money, not the voting. People don't want wealthy people reshaping politics to fit their interests through their wealth. They can vote for whomever they want.
- This sounds a bit irrational. Where does "wealthy" start? Mullvad co-CEO donated ~ $500K, would him donating $100K have the same effect? What about $10K? What if a Mullvad _employee_ donated $500K?
- What about work in units of median annual household disposable income, which are at least somewhat responsive to the distribution of money?
What % do you think a reasonable voter should accept a person donating to a political campaign before it causes concern about the donor's influence vs the median household's voice?
Off the top of my head, I'd guess 500k USD is about 1000% / 10x median annual household disposable income in SE, which I think would give the median voter pause.
For what it's worth (my own view): I think about 10% (~5k USD) is obviously acceptable, and I expect most anyone would agree that donations at that level are fine. I think your proposed 1000% is obviously unacceptable, and I expect most people would agree with me on that as well.
I'm not sure exactly where the level is that opinion would flip, but I feel pretty confident about those boundaries.
- A company shouldn't be able to fire an employee over their opinion,[0] so that wouldn't matter to me. For a major owner, the donation amount starts to matter to me around $5-10K, but YMMV.
[0] I suppose unless they have a very influential position and it's about a matter that contradicts main company goals
- What's wrong with choosing who you give your money to?
Is that somehow undemocratic?
Is anyone censoring the guy?
- > "punch em in the face"
Very weird interpretation of "voluntarily choose to not continue supporting them financially"
Presumably you want everyone to be forcibly compelled to finance the political parties they disagree with? And you would define this as a democratic society?
- Punishing a company because someone does something in their free time with their own money ....
- The guy owns half the company, so a significant part of the money I'm paying is involved. Yes, it is quite ethical to decide based on matters like that. It's not an employee or minor shareholder.
- Not doing business with a company (for any reason btw) is not 'punishment'. Nobody is taking away anything from the company or any people involved with that company.
- That's how markets work. People have the right to choose to do business, or not, based on whatever criteria they value.
- > in that case we might punch em in the face
Nobody is calling for violence though?
In a free democratic society nobody is forced to do business with anybody they don't agree with, and free speech means they can talk about their decision without fearing repercussion.
- So far in this thread you’re the only one mentioning punching anyone in the face.
- The Nazis are sad that people want to punch them in the face.
https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/richard-spencer-pun...
- Surprised it took that long for a Godwin.
- Haters will now say that the far right will destroy exactly that: "our" democracy. The Western morality is a joke, and many HN readers comment like an infant. I feel ashamed.
- Everyone is free to make up their mind and vote for what they believe.
And if I disagree strongly enough then I am free to take my business elsewhere. Especially if the money I hand over might go to support speech and parties I fundamentally disagree with.
Freedom swings both ways, and freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from people thinking you're an asshole and not wanting anything to do with you. That's their freedom.
- > The Örebro Party (Swedish: Örebropartiet, ÖP) is a political party in Sweden. The party was initially only a local party in Örebro, Sweden. Markus Allard is the party leader. According to Allard the party cannot be placed anywhere on the traditional left-right spectrum. Some of its key issues include lowered wages for politicians, ending the tax payer funding of various sculptures, monuments and art, large scale remigration, a stricter immigration policy, and free dental care.[3][4]
I see no problems
- Any of the Swedes in here can corroborate the claims in the article about this right wing group? Especially about the extreme anti-immigration statements and put that in full translation and context?
Also what this group leader has done in Örebro to contextualize this quote
> ”I hope they will do similar things on the national level as in Örebro”, writes Daniel Berntsson to Flamman.
- Tried to find something from the party itself, but found nothing on their homepage other than that they plan to publish a party programme "gradually, starting some time during the summer of 2026".
- The claims in the social media post is pure bullshit. The party is a tiny (read: one person elected) radical populist left-economic-leaning nationalists. They have gained popularity for pointing out wasteful use of Örebro's municipalities resources, and their leader's fondness of lengthy ridiculing other parties politicians in lengthy debates, that he often publish on Instagram and YouTube.
- Thank you for providing context.
Are his public stances on immigration precisely stated as remigration, or does he describe a thing such as remigration without explicitly naming it as such?
About his quote from wikipedia "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish." which links to this video tweet https://x.com/AllardKlipp/status/2060109271635771457 can you give full context/translation?
- He says what is quoted when talking about criminals with immigrant roots. "Those [criminals] - they should get out, even if they were born in Sweden, because they do not have a connection to Sweden. They received a swedish passport but they have not become swedish [as belonging to swedish culture]. They are not interested [in becoming swedish] and here I'm ready to go on corpses...". Overall his stance on immigration (taken from this video) is not as extreme as one can imagine reading HN comments. It is extreme but not to the extent that he's ready to push out anyone whos granddad was not Andersson.
- It is an extreme point of view, it's just that far right is booming everywhere.
- > read: one person elected
No, they have 8 people elected: 3 in the region, 5 in the municipality.
They got 4,46 % of the votes in the region, and 7,92 % in the municipality. And who knows, maybe they'll use that 5 million SEK to get more seats in this years election.
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- It seems like there is someone or some group, that doesn't want people using the best VPN available.
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- I live in a "white" country and I like my nonwhite neighbors, some immigrant, some nth-generation, even ones who mostly socialize within their ethnic/cultural enclaves. I believe they belong here as much as I do. I don't want to give any money to racists who want to expunge them for some perceived ethnic transgressions. These parties are one step removed from extolling the virtues of the glorious Aryan race, and we all know where that leads.
- >I believe they belong here as much as I do.
This sentiment is just so utterly foreign to me that I can't comprehend how someone could rationally think this way. I mean, I'm a black man whose ancestors have lived in America since the slave ships, and I easily recognize that some people are more American than others. And Americans only have like 1% of the cultural and ethnic identity that most European nations have. Why are you blind to the importance of the deep historical roots that bind a nation together? Why do you think the very force (namely kinship ties) that has driven humanity forward for the last hundred thousand years has, in the blink of an eye, become irrelevant?
- I come from a family of recent immigrants. We're considered white so we get a pass for behaviors that our nonwhite peers get side-eye for. My ethnicity has its own enclaves. Those enclaves get treated as a cute cultural artifact rather than a threat -- even worth visiting on a tourist trip. My ancestral culture lives under the protective umbrella of "Western culture," but in practice, the overlap with prevailing Protestant/Anglo culture is minimal along almost any axis.
And yet, we are all American by almost any reasonable definition. If anything, the people beating their chests for having some random ancestors on the mayflower or whatever are the impostors here. What have they actually done for this country?
Also, I'm kind of surprised that you believe these things as a black man. You do realize that a large percentage of the country doesn't consider you "true" American either, right? They can't kick you out, but they will do everything in their power to disenfranchise you and turn you into second-class citizens. The signaling could not be any more clear.
- Yes, it is hard to pinpoint exactly what makes one an American. It is not hard at all to pinpoint what makes one an X for any given European nation. It is strange how much Americans project our weak identity to the rest of the western world.
- Except: exactly the same rhetoric is being used by the far-right in America as it is in Europe and the Anglosphere. Strength or weakness of identity is irrelevant to the white nationalist project.
- What epistemic value does "similar rhetoric" have? The relevant question is whether something is true and/or defensible. Identity does matter, to some nations and historical contexts more than others. It is silly to project the particulars of the US historical context to the rest of the world.
- The exact same argument would apply to the racial politics of Nazi germany or the Jim Crow South.
- That doesn't answer the question. Identity does matter. Because Nazi Germany came to the wrong conclusion does not invalidate every premise used in their justification.
- What was wrong about their conclusion that isn't equally wrong about the conclusions of these other white nationalist parties?
It's pretty clear to me that all these parties have racial animus (not ethnic identity) as their core, and we all know where that leads.
- > This sentiment is just so utterly foreign to me that I can't comprehend how someone could rationally think this way
For someone who is so befuddled by the idea of being unbothered by a heterogeneous culture, you don't make any convincing argument against it. Why are you complaining about leftists who see immigration as inherently "good" if you can't even explain why it's bad? If it's so obviously bad, surely you can outline what will tangibly happen?
> I'm a black man whose ancestors have lived in America since the slave ships, and I easily recognize that some people are more American than others
If it's so easy to recognize, then what is it? What makes you American, and what makes you not American enough to be worthy of deportation? You aren't "easily recognizing" anything, you are having a feeling about people different from you and trying to rationalize it afterwards.
There is an obvious argument for immigration as an inherent good. It brings business, it brings talented specialists, it brings new ideas, it brings a bigger market. We are one of the most powerful countries on earth. If immigration was so obviously bad, do you think a nation of immigrants would be able to get to this point? Culture is our main export. We are a cultural powerhouse. We are envied by other countries for our soft power. That's what the Riyadh comedy festival was about. We are strong arguably because we are such a melting pot, and we have a rich cultural tapestry. Black culture exists specifically because people didn't assimilate to white culture, and it's fascinating to enough people that Koreans halfway across the world are emulating it.
The idea that we suddenly have a homogeneous "way to act" that is easily identifiable, and we need to deport people that don't act that way, is farcical and stupidly self-defeating. It's also laughably overconfident for a country that can't make cars or keep employed, tax paying citizens from drowning in medical debt. We should probably play to our strengths, not self-sabotage.
- >Why are you complaining about leftists who see immigration as inherently "good" if you can't even explain why it's bad? If it's so obviously bad, surely you can outline what will tangibly happen?
This is just a bad faith misrepresentation of the context. Note the context of the OP is Swedish nationalism.
> You aren't "easily recognizing" anything, you are having a feeling about people different from you and trying to rationalize it afterwards.
It's not really that hard. Some traits off the top of my head: speaks English, values meritocracy and the rule of law, individualist over collectivist, ecumenical/egalitarian over sectarian, culturally Christian or downstream of it.
> If immigration was so obviously bad, do you think a nation of immigrants would be able to get to this point?
This point only makes sense if you assume immigrants are an undifferentiated lump. But of course this isn't true.
- No it's not a bad faith interpretation, it's what you said. It doesn't matter if it's about Sweden, you said that about leftists.
> Some traits off the top of my head: speaks English, values meritocracy and the rule of law, individualist over collectivist, ecumenical/egalitarian over sectarian, culturally Christian or downstream of it.
Lol. Assuming you are talking about America, because that is what I referenced, this is ridiculous. You do not need to be Christian or believe in the rule of law to be American. Just look at the president. You are American if you are here. Quit being a shill for propaganda.
> This point only makes sense if you assume immigrants are an undifferentiated lump. But of course this isn't true.
No it doesn't. Not when you're arguing for a homogeneous culture.
- >You do not need to be Christian or believe in the rule of law to be American.
A comically bad faith reading of what I said. Clearly no point in engaging.
- You must be confused on what you were quoting, because I was directly asking what traits are so American that deviating from them is worthy of deportation, and those are the traits you wrote. Were you answering something else?
- If the nation of immigrants is so great, why are so many people protecting themselves with guns and why are there so many lawyers to compensate for the absence of social trust?
And why are so many people still talking and being unhappy about race and ethnicity if that's a total success?
Having a good cultural distribution channel doesn't mean that it's inherently good. Japan has a great cultural soft power too, however I don't know if many people would tolerate life in Japan (for real). On the other side most people can't locate Denmark on a map but would love the life there.
- > If the nation of immigrants is so great, why are so many people protecting themselves with guns
I think you'll find that's a particularly American problem - the UK, for example, is a nation of immigrants and we have basically zero guns (compared to the US.)
> And why are so many people still talking and being unhappy about race and ethnicity if that's a total success?
Because they have been told that immigrants are bad, that immigrants take their jobs, that immigrants sponge off the state[0], that immigrants are eating their pets, etc. All easily fact-checked and debunked but people, alas, are easily lead by media-driven bigotry.[1]
[0] Schrodinger's Immigrants: simultaneously taking your jobs whilst also sponging off the state.
[1] Now this we -do- have in the UK, largely from the same Murdochian sources.
- The UK is historically not a notion of immigrants. The recent immigration carried massive problems (mass rapes among them), and a brutal authoritarian repression of free speech. The anti-weapon laws are systematically directed against the immigrants - I doubt that white british people threaten their neighbors with "ninja swords" or throw acid at the women who marry outside of their community.
> Because they have been told that immigrants are bad, that immigrants take their jobs, that immigrants sponge off the state[0], that immigrants are eating their pets, etc. All easily fact-checked and debunked but people, alas, are easily lead by media-driven bigotry.[1]
The fact that it applies too to black people, who are not really immigrants show that your argument is false. Besides, your point 1) is easy to refute, as the State can subsidize migrants to allow them to accept lower wages than the natives. By giving them free housing, for instance.
How many british girls will need to be raped so that you will start to see the reality? The only biggot here is you, along with the ones who allowed Henry Nowak's murder to happen. You are just an enabler for the british elite, who hates its native proles and has no problem replacing them with more obedient ones.
- Hear hear
- Americans have had guns since its birth, even if they live in one of the safest neighborhoods in the world. White suburbans buy whatever they think will keep them safe, even if the most dangerous thing they did in the last decade was drive to Target.
> And why are so many people still talking and being unhappy about race and ethnicity if that's a total success?
Because people who are citizens are being shipped to Texas even with their papers? A friend of mine was called the N word to his face by an ICE agent. Why would the existence of racism in the U.S. be evidence that immigration is bad? That's evidence that some people are racist and will blame all their problems on people that don't look like them. Nobody is denying that.
> Japan has a great cultural soft power too, however I don't know if many people would tolerate life in Japan
That supports what I said. They are a famously homogeneous culture that is difficult to live in, but still draws admirers through soft power. If you care about the values of your culture, it would behoove you to be seen favorably, and not run by fickle children who think 5% of the population is responsible for all their problems.
- > Americans have had guns since its birth
Like any other country. And "white Americans" are right to be somewhat cautious, USA is a dangerous country indeed.
> Because people who are citizens are being shipped to Texas even with their papers?
DEI and so on predate Trump and the current ICE behavior. A lot of American culture revolves around racism, not just white-on-others. It mainly appears that everyone is racist (or, "race-realist") against other ethnicities. Even "I don't see race" types of behaviors are denounced by activists[0].
As an external observer, it seems always bizarre to me that Americans are so upset at the "n" word (it's not even allowed to SAY what it is! Unlike other four letter words which are used profusely), while black music is full of it and black people use the word to call each other out.
> If you care about the values of your culture, it would behoove you to be seen favorably, and not run by fickle children who think 5% of the population is responsible for all their problems.
What if the values of your culture are what makes your society fail? South Africa is a good example of rosy-glasses rainbow socialism gone very wrong. Maybe the Europeans and the Zulu should have stayed appart? Non withstanding the Indians who stole 30% of the GDP. [1]
[0] for instance: https://ideas.ted.com/why-saying-i-dont-see-race-at-all-just...
- This is such a bizarre soup of dog whistles it's not really worth replying to, but I will say it's very funny to admit you aren't from America but say, with a straight face, that the suburbs are so dangerous you need guns. That is some premium propaganda you are huffing.
- As a blacker man whose ancestors found their way to the Americas before the year of our Lord Jesus, what are you even talking about? America has never had "deep historical roots" to bind us together.
- You'll notice my mention of European countries in my comment. You might have guessed that my point about deep historical roots was in reference to that.
- What happens when they start to see their ethnicity or culture as political and fight to impose it, including using violence? Because at some point it will happen - democracy incentivizes clientelism and tribalism.
The USA, which is often touted as a "successful" melting pot model, is rife with similar problems.
- Civil strife? If it comes to violence, I (a white person) certainly won't be on the side of the white nationalists. Same for most of my peers.
Many of us love living in multicultural societies and will fight to protect our neighbors and our way of life.
- Why is "civil war" the default situation here? How about domestic terrorism for instance?
Will you be on the side of the muslim terrorists who beheaded teachers and priests (among others), and killed 132 concert-goers (and injured 413 others) at the Bataclan in 2015? Will you tell the french people who were slaughtered that it was the price to live in a multicultural society?Damn.
Even if you don't go as far as terrorism, it's simple: multi-ethnic societies favor either identity politics (aka clientelism) or authoritarianism (only way to avoid it). The USA is a great example for this: the previous administration played identity politics to the maximum, and the new one used it to impose authoritarianism. It's very hard, if not impossible to escape this loop once you are in a minority-only society.
And of course you have to deal with collapsing social trust. The USA isn't the ultimate lawyer society, and the most armed one by pure chance. It's a logical consequence.
- What do the Bataclan terrorists have to do with 99.9999% of the Muslim population? Absolutely nothing. (Or, at least, as much as neo-Nazis have to do with the native white population.) Fact is, most people are extremely normal and just want to live in peace.
I'll be on the side of my nice Muslim neighbors (who did nothing wrong to anyone) against the red-faced white supremacist mobs. It is very obviously the correct moral position and will be viewed as such by our descendants.
In the US, the most heavily armed communities also tend to be the least diverse. It is largely a consequence of insular paranoia and hatred stoked by right-wing media.
- > What do the Bataclan terrorists have to do with 99.9999% of the Muslim population?
They share the same religion and ethnicity. French muslims were actually a large contingent in Daesh forces. This is a classic "no true scotsman" fallacy. Every muslim will tell you that the Charlie Hebdo covers about Muhammad were "haram" - because that's exactly what their religion says.
Not that they are all bad people, just like you had nice soviets, or I'm sure that there a nice North Korean Juche party members, too.
You seem to be acting like an ostrich, putting your head in the sand to avoid problems. Face reality and read about Islam, which is inherently a political religion. Read also about the Muslim Brotherhood (or similar orgs).
> US armed communities.
How about latino gangs? Are they operating with nerf guns? Besides, the safest places in the US are those that are monoethnic, such as New Hampshire.
- Your observation about multi-ethnic societies is rather interesting (though I would add slme caveats), but then you unfortunately are blinded by your preconceptions. The parent comment is right about 99.9...% of Muslims not being in any way related to terrorism.
A large country with 10% of Muslims being a large minority in a small terrorist force is not surprising. I would bet that Americans and foreigners in general are a large minority in Canadian far-right groups, for example.
The drawings of Muhammad were objectively haram, as you say, but almost none of the people who'd agree to that would also agree that murder was the right answer.
You can be anti-immigration without descending into racism and Islamophobia, actually it would greatly reinforce your points.
- > The parent comment is right about 99.9...% of Muslims not being in any way related to terrorism.
Yet there are no country with a majority of muslims where the minorities were not pushed out in the 20th and 21st century. Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Irak, Iran, and so on. Have you read the Quran?
If course, I guess that Iran mullahs and their supporters are not representative of Islam. Not are Talibans (widely supported). Nor are Daesh. Nor are Saudis (who pushed salafism). Nor are Hamas members. Nor ar Al-Qaida. Nor are Boko Haram. Nor are Philippinos islamic groups (>400 deaths between 2000 and 2007). Nor are Jemaah Islamiyah. C'mon this is ridiculous.
I grew up in beautiful and prosperous village in the Alps, the town next to us had a mosque that sent jihadists to Syria. I guess they were not real muslims?
> A large country with 10% of Muslims being a large minority in a small terrorist force is not surprising.
There are many Portuguese in France, you don't hear about the behadings by Portuguese people. Same with Italians, Germans, Spaniards, and so on.
> The drawings of Muhammad were objectively haram, as you say, but almost none of the people who'd agree to that would also agree that murder was the right answer.
A teacher was beheaded 10 years after because he showed them in class. "Almost none" is doing a lot of work here. If that was true, every year teachers would show it as a way to discuss about religion and french laicity. But they don't because they know that there is a real risk to get a terrorist attack.
And everywhere in Europe it's the same. Theo Von Gogh was murdered for the same reason in 2004. Recently a guy burning a Quran in Sweden got stabbed by a bystander in the street. At which point are we allowed to say "enough"? It's obvious how it will end, in France for instance left-wing islamists open talk about taking power. Even after all of those bloody crimes.
- A racist white guy knifed a bunch of innocent people in the UK recently. When do we say "enough" to that?
- A country owns their home-grown lunatics. They have no responsibility for the rest of the world's lunatics.
- I share the same(-ish) religion and ethnicity as white supremacist terrorists. Does this make me complicit in their degenerate world views? Obviously not.
All the same stuff was said about Jews in pre-Nazi Germany. It's always bullshit. Neither Muslims, nor Jews, nor white people, nor any broad group of people ever acts as a united bloc. Again: most people just want to live in peace and ensure a good future for their children.
- The difference is that white supremacist who do domestic terrorism usually don't blow up in a concert hall crying "Jesus is great".
Violent white supremacism is a symptom of multiethnic societies. There is no reason to be one otherwise.
> Neither Muslims, nor Jews, nor white people, nor any broad group of people ever acts as a united bloc.
You don't understand. Quran says that you have to convert everyone to Islamic faith (and chariah law), and use force if necessary. It is forbidden to try to interpret what is written : the text is sacred.
This is why you have islamic terrorism in every muslim country, and countries with a large minority of muslims. White people in Thailand and other countries don't commit domestic terrorism because they don't have a proper reason to and do not share a common ideology or religion.
> Again: most people just want to live in peace and ensure a good future for their children.
Big fallacy here. I open a box of chocolate, and poison 10% of them. Then you have to eat 5 of them. Would you do it? After all, most are totally safe, I don't see why you are being such a bigot!
Overall the solution is simple: muslims can have their own countries where they can do what they want, and other people can have their own countries with their own rules. It's hardly painful for anyone. I don't see why we should absolutely mix everyone everywhere.
- "Quran says that you have to convert everyone to Islamic faith"
Hey, remember the Crusades? This is not unique to Islam. Any religion can be made into a tool of peace or a tool of war. Wicked leaders will interpret their sacred texts however needed to further their political goals.
"Violent white supremacism is a symptom of multiethnic societies."
All modern societies are multiethnic societies. Once white supremacy is done with the obviously foreign-looking people, it will start to eliminate those who are not white enough, resulting in an existential and violent battle over determination of the "volk". As a descendant of white immigrants whose ancestors would not have been considered fully white in my country, I would not want to live in this environment. No doubt that I would be on the chopping block at some point for not sharing x% blood with some arbitrary progenitor.
"Overall the solution is simple: muslims can have their own countries where they can do what they want, and other people can have their own countries with their own rules."
Well, as a white person in a historically white country, I say Muslims are welcome to be my neighbors, and anyone who disagrees can go live somewhere else.
- Crusades were 900 years ago, at a time most people didn't know how to read. Now people don't need leaders to interpret texts. Do you have more recent examples?
> All modern societies are multiethnic societies.
No? Most European societies weren't multiethnic 50 years ago. Poland doesn't have Islamic terrorism, because it has very few muslims. Guess we found the solution for avoiding Islamic terrorism?
> Once white supremacy is done with the obviously foreign-looking people, it will start to eliminate those who are not white enough, resulting in an existential and violent battle over determination of the "volk".
You are using an American definition here. In Europe you don't have "white" people, but French, Germans, Swedish and so on. White people are not inherently bad and what you describe applies better to muslims who have genocided or expelled non-muslim minorities of their countries. See Armenians for instance, or Christians. Or Jews. Or Yezidis. And so on.
"white person in a historically white country" and what happens when you are a minority and you are asked to pay the Jizya? Will you pay? Will you veil your daughter?
- I mean, OK, to echo Capricorn2481, "this is such a bizarre soup of dog whistles it's not really worth replying to." Big scary mooslems gonna eat your babies. Blood libel all over again.
I prefer to keep living without this quivering fear of my neighbor and will continue to vote for multiculturalism. See you at the polls.
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- I'm actually a Christian from a conservative branch of the faith, but thanks for your input.
- >democracy incentivizes clientelism and tribalism
Cite your peer reviewed sources.
- This is a good intro by recognized researchers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook
If you want me to be more precise, I would say that clientelism and tribalism are especially rewarded for politicians in a multi-ethnic society.
Also a good definition: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/clientelism/E23ABE88...
- "Michael C. Moynihan reviewing the book for The Wall Street Journal stated that the writing style is similar to that of Freakonomics."
Ouch. If someone said that about a book I'd written, I would simply move to a forest and never write a single word again. Quite the damning review.
- I told you that it was an intro. Here is the more serious book, by the same authors:
https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/2425/The-Logic-of-Pol...
And there is nothing wrong with vulgarization, aside from comments from pedantic HNers.
- > And there is nothing wrong with vulgarization
My comment wasn't about vulgarisation - it was about Freakonomics' loose approach to rigour and consequent debunking of, IIRC, most of the book.
A quick search for "Bruce Bueno de Mesquita" throws up similar debunkings[0] and yeah, I'll not be reading his books after seeing how grandiose his claims are compared with the actuality of what happened.
[0] Including one which recommends Dan Ariely - somewhat awkward nowadays.
- > It's always taken as an axiom by leftists that immigration is an unconditional good, but never actually defended.
I'm not sure that is correct. Before Trump, "left" politicians (in the U.S.) campaigned on controlling immigration and deporting illegal immigrants.
- Not in my experience, at least not at the national level. It's been said that Obama deported more illegals than anyone that came before. But Democrats couldn't run on that record because it was toxic to the progressives.
- The USA has never had a leftist president. No president of the USA has ever sought to end capitalism.
I think you know that, and that you are alluding to that with quotation marks. But I'm not sure how the person you are replying to is using the term "left." I feel it is important to clarify when discussing how the Left views immigration.
Clarification aside, I agree with what you said.
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- Yes, some immigration is good. That doesn't mean all immigration is good. Are you willing to identify positive traits and limit immigration to those with those traits? Or do you balk at being selective? The defense of immigration always treats immigrants as one undifferentiated lump. But this is just the lumping fallacy.
>The "homogenous countries" started 2 world wars, one of them to "preserve their culture, ethnicities, identities". Would this not support the worldview that immigration has net benefits?
Oversimplification to the point of bad faith
>Also, can you explain how ethnic cleansing preserves culture and identities?
Obviously a disingenuous question
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- Not a defense, but rather support for your opinion, just take one look at Europe. Previously, they welcomed Syrians and middle Easterners escaping conflict. But in the last years, right wing majorities have emerged and grown based on increased crime and general nuisance, many are now against immigrants. Just yesterday the Danes are insisting on eliminating these nuisance loud "calls to worship" from Mosques. Immigrants that are not really being hired by locals, or not successful starting their own legitimate businesses, too often turn to organized crime - - they have to make a living somehow. Witness the violent protests recently in Ireland against immigrants. Witness all the bombings in Sweden, and of course the rapes of local women. Many of these immigrants come from less lawful countries, where it's often "dog eat dog" for survival.
- I can't speak for Europe but in the US crime has been on a downward slope since the 90s, all while the percentage of immigrants in the US has gone up.
A few studies have shown that immigrants have a lower incidence of crime, especially undocumented ones. I don't know of any reputable studies (in the US) that show otherwise.
- The violent protests in Ireland were explicitly enflamed and coordinated by Musk and other right-wingers over social media: https://newrepublic.com/article/211936/elon-musk-race-war-be...
- I don't want to speak for European countries. Never lived there, and I think people living there should be responsible for deciding how they navigate such issues.
In the USA, where I live, there is not much of an ethical or cultural defense to prevent immigration. The dominant culture, white people, are themselves immigrants. To deny others the right to live and work here is selfish at best. If some people are allowed here and some people are not, the only logically coherent next step is to return all land and resources back to Native American hands. If we do not have the stomach for such a bold transition, then the next best thing is to welcome everyone. To do otherwise means allowing and denying people a life here on extremely arbitrary, hypocritical reasons (and usually racist reasons, frankly). So, at least in the USA (and I believe more broadly, North and South America), the political Left must necessarily be pro-immigration if they wish to be anti-racist.
Speaking even more broadly, Leftists have generally be in favor of internationalist cooperation (a la the famous song The Internationale). But how exactly that relates to immigration policies is debatable.
- Thanks for replying. I can see your point of view.
- Legal immigration to the US for an every day person is nearly impossible. You can’t just decide one day that you will move to the US and try to make a life there. European countries are orders of magnitude more open than the US.
- I agree, legal immigration is much too difficult and I think that's awful!
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- NetBird doesn't use Mullvad
- They are considering which is enough for me to not use Netbird.
- I am now open to suggestions for a good VPM that isn't Mulvad. Or Proton.
Why not Proton: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/07/25/proton-mail-adds-a-bitcoi...
- ssh -D
(really, that's what I do)
- :/
Perhaps the alternative is to self host, but my friends can't do that.
It is about time we compile a list of VPNs to avoid.
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- Don't be silly, everyone knows that left wing extremists are broke, and have no funds.
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- Yes very far left.
"They should also be deported, even if they were born in Sweden, because they don't have a natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedes. I am prepared to walk over corpses here, and that is what separates me from these other damn politicians." [1]
- I hate how right wingers are constantly trying to normalize viscous, abhorrent rhetoric like this. Ironically, they often claim to be religious...
If any of my peers spoke like this, I'd cut them out of my life in an instant.
- The quote is taken out of context. The sentence starts with "Youngsters that are criminals - they should get out". And before "walk over corpses" he says that "they got swedish passports but have not become swedish [culturally]. They are not interested in it".
- How much context do you need for a quote that uses "walk[ing] over corpses" as a virtue???
- Some
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- Just don't be surprised when your children refuse to talk to you.
- Fortunately I brought/bring my kids to ethnic ghettos and homeless encampments at early ages so they are not helplessly sheltered from the truth of these matters. We are not so rich that we can afford all the luxury beliefs. I also have skin in the game so to speak. How old are your children?
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- Uh, according to Wikipedia this party wants to kick out all the non-native Swedes from the country (aka "remigration"). That's definitely far right.
- Left wing parties historically are not pro immigration as it increases the labour pool and reduces individual worker powers.
Right wing should be boosting immigration to give businesses cheaper labour and erode worker rights.
Explains why they UK immigration rose massively with the tories.
Many parties outright lie about this to grow their voter base, but the difference in policy vs promise is huge.
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- Surely you can see the difference between “the personal life of founders” and “the founder of this company is by far the largest donor to a party in favour of ethnic cleansing and thus I don’t want to buy his products”?
- What?
The reason he has those millions to give is because of the money he made from Mullvad, no?
If he separates that, I’ll happily separate my judgement as well.
- you are saying that if that founder earned from scam websites while running Mullvad, then it would have been fine to sponsor that association with the crime money, but not Mullvad money, yes?
- I’m saying it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to not want to support Mullvad if part of their money indirectly goes to that association.
- There's "personal life" and then theres being 75% of the funding of a party calling for ethnic cleansing...
- You have sources about Ethnic cleansing or you are just talking about immigration which has nothing to do with ethnicity? Of course criminal immigrants that just cross the border should be deported, that's common-sense. You would really cross Japanese border right now and genuinely think you aren't committing a serious crime?
Can you give some sources regarding the Ethnic cleansing?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party
> Some of its key issues include [...] large scale remigration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remigration
> Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white minority populations
- How can you "remigrate" Swedish citizens? They are citizens. Are you talking about immigrants (who are guests in the country)?
- > How can you "remigrate" Swedish citizens? They are citizens
This is answered in the first para of the linked Wikipedia article. "remigration" is not the parent poster's term, your misunderstanding of it is not on them at this point.
> Are you talking about immigrants (who are guests in the country)
No. and also, that statement about immigrants is false as a categorisation.
- how can you deport Swedish citizens? is there any mechanism in the law allowing to deport their own citizen? If not, then this whole talk is solely about immigration.
- >how can you deport Swedish citizens
"You" ? Again, I ask you to do the reading and/or query the people advocating for such policies, and not me or the parent poster. Why do you persist in misunderstanding? We might be constrained by the bounds of law and making sense, but I do not think that the people advocating for such racist policies are.
> this whole talk is solely about immigration.
It is not, do not derail.
> is there any mechanism in the law ... If not
Are you ... are you seriously unaware that the party in power can literally make new laws? Or otherwise work around existing laws? Really?
- > Are you talking about immigrants (who are guests in the country)
The party advocates for deporting people who are born in the country.
- Who speak the language of the country and work productive jobs?
- Yes, this the gist of this proposal by the ethno-nationalist right. That is what it says in the linked article above, did you read it? If you did, why do you ask more? If not, how is it that you care enough to ask?
- why do I care what random social media says about their policies if I can read what Wikipedia and Swedes say about it.
if they really want to deport regular integrated members of society who only differ for their color then I probably wouldn't agree with that policy of theirs if I was Swedish.
- > why do I care what random social media says
The linked article above is literally Wikipedia. You are wasting everyone's time.
- Then you didn't read it clearly
- Why would being born in the country give you citizenship or the right to stay? The citizenship is inherited by blood in large majority of cases in the world, the child has the nationality of the parents, not just the country where you "give birth", if I stay in Thailand with my wife and she suddenly give birth there, you expect the child to be Thai even if both parents are European? :/
Deporting parents (thus with their children) is normal if they are staying in the country illegally without any sort of valid visa or permit, what's the alternative? Give citizenship to anyone crossing the border?
- > Deporting parents (thus with their children) is normal if they are staying in the country illegally without any sort of valid visa or permit, what's the alternative? Give citizenship to anyone crossing the border?
We are not talking about families or parents who visit a country for a few months and give birth, and you know that. We are talking about taking 15 year olds who have only known life in that country and deporting them to a country they've never been to.
> Why would being born in the country give you citizenship or the right to stay?
Because Sweden seems to think so? Many countries offer citizenship if you are born on soil, and while Sweden isn't one of them, it offers expedited paths to citizenship if you have lived in the country for a while. Because most people intuitively understand that there's no sense deporting someone who is more connected to Sweden than they are their home country.
- The ones that have been in the country for 15 years should have a permanent residency already (if they don't, then it's very likely they came illegally), which is a valid long-term VISA, in which case I agree that they should not be deported, but the ones that don't have any valid visa, they should be, in what world do we allow people to stay illegally and then what, must steal IDs and forge docs to live correctly and get a job... I feel it also teaches wrong values to our children (it's fine to just stop renewing visa and overstay or just plainly cross another country's border without permission), it doesn't feel right
Only ~16% of countries are having right of soil, it's not really the norm and it's mostly actually with many conditions for most, a ton of people are against what's happening with immigration so it's not really Sweden thinks so type of deal here, it's mixed opinion, similar to the US.
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- Politics is how a society organizes itself. That seems relevant to a message board that discusses society and technology.
- It's monday and people don't feel important enough commenting on the weather. And I'm betting the topic as a whole isn't important enough to set them on a journey to inspect the "moral alignment" of everything else they spend money on. They just felt like burping here and now, most of them probably without reading up on all the other (quite leftist) policies and stances of the tiny local political party of the story; among the many things the leader of this party has made himself known for, the most famous detail is that he publically shames and scolds big-time politicians for their misbehaviors and not taking their responsibilities to the people seriously.
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- People who engage in these antics would quickly find that there isn’t a single company where all the employees align with all their values. They would then either need to accept their hypocrisy or reject society completely to live in the forest somewhere.
- I think that’s the point
- Revealing that capital is catastrophically misallocated to people whose deep desires are to inflict suffering on others? Oh no, please don't do it, that would be terrible. We could almost figure out a solution to this capital problem. Maybe something involving a common ownership and a sense of class.
The one time HN is accelerationist in the right one. Be proud, comrade, you're making the world better even if you don't know it
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- Considering their CEO is only supporting a party whose primary goal is mass deportation of undocumented and documented immigrants as well of legal citizens, it's going to be one of the easiest purity check of my life. A good fascist is a dead fascist.
- You quite literally invented almost all of your comment just to create a strawman you could get mad at, then morally grandstand about.
- This is a bizarre thread.
People are surprised that a privacy-oriented businessman is right-wing is very strange.
"Millions" in the title is also misleading in this context - it's millions in Swedish Kronor, which is roughly $500K USD. A lot, but the title seems intentionally misleading.
I've also never really understood the cycle of boycotting things because you don't like how an individual spends their own money. Almost every company will employ people who have values you severely disagree with, and put money toward those causes. And turning to Proton as the alternative is... a choice?
- You're mischaracterizing what most people are taking issue with. Being dense, honestly.
- You're misinterpreting what I said. Being dense, honestly.
The start of this thread was primarily people saying they were taking their money elsewhere - and then suggesting Proton, whose CEO was in the hot seat for praising the Republican party. It makes no sense to have such a violent reaction to something like this and not consider that competitors could be similar.
The reality is that in general, your money is always going to somebody you don't want it to go to.
- Oh so let's just be reductive about the issues that are important to us. Let's just throw our hands up in the air and say "Pobody's nerfect!" BFFR
- Far right isn't good enough for these people. They are radical-ultra-far-hard-alt right.
- What's going on? Proton faced a similar scandal recently. I think in their case sponsored a video by a far right vlogger. After that I saw people recommending Mullvad as an alternative.
- Tweet from Proton's CEO last year: "10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned."
He repeatedly said his statement was politically neutral.
- Cherry on top of a killer VPN service. Never looking back. Conservatives deliver.
- Just a friendly warning from an American; surveilling you is a bipartisan effort.
- I pay for and use Mullvad VPN. I believe they value everyone's privacy and I believe they are competent technologists.
I don't care about politics. I will continue to buy and use Mullvad VPN.
- you value privacy, but you don't think privacy is a political topic? VPNs, encryption, and other privacy tools are regularly under attack or protected by legislation and policy that is actively debated and lobbied for.
I think that you do care about politics, you just don't care about this particular topic or policy. That's your prerogative of course, but don't pretend you are wholly above the fray. I suspect if a company's founder had donated millions to a party aiming to mandate backdoored encryption you would suddenly find yourself to be a very political person.
- Agreed. I use mullvad because I believe they are the best off the shelf choice. If I stopped using things because of the owners opinions, then I'd live in a cave.
238 points by Risse 7 hours ago | 602 comments