Damn. Well, if that gets confirmed I'm going to get my company off mullvad.

But that Bill Gates [Foundation] is a larger sponsor to WHO than all nations short of the US (at least prior to the currently elected govt) wouldn't dare making the news this far left into the interwebs... Just sayin' - figured I'd invest a few karma points into self reflection ;) love y'all

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.

So, where are we moving? Proton? Need some good recommendations!

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.

Fredrik,

I just wanted you to know that while I dont support Daniels views, I believe you guys at Mullvad are doing the right thing.

I despise cancel culture, but I understand people want to "vote with their wallet" . I will be staying a Mullvad customer.

Seems to be intentionally defamatory

From the Wikipedia article on the Orebro party

“ Split from the left

The initiative to found the Örebro Party was taken in early 2014 by Markus Allard, who is also the first party leader. Allard had previously held positions as substitute member of the Örebro municipal council and district chairman of the Young Left in Örebro; in December 2013 he was expelled from the Left Party and its youth wing Young Left for "liking" the Revolutionary Front, a militant revolutionary socialist and anti-fascist organization, on Facebook and refusing to disavow it when questioned.[6] Allard has stated that the real reason for his expulsion was that he was perceived as a threat to the established party bureaucracy.[7][8]

While Allard has described himself as a Communist,[9] and a Marxist,[8][10] at its founding in March 2014 he defined the Örebro Party as "broad left".[9] 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".[11]”

Colours:

Red Black

This sounds like a socialist, anarchist or Ancap group that believes in borders

This is like the third duplicate I saw in a week

Far right? It's run by a literal marxist communist.

Sigh, people that bring politics to the forefront with everything are so miserable.

[flagged]

From the wikipedia article on the Örebro Party:

"Some key issues for the Örebro Party locally include strong secularism, a 30-hour workweek with retained pay, lowered wages for politicians, expanded social housing, abolishing preschool-fees, making public transport free of charge, ending taxpayer funding of what it sees as wasteful sculptures, monuments and art and introducing free dental care. Nationally the party has set out large-scale remigration, closing the Swedish borders to immigration, a stricter assimilation policy and ending taxes on energy and fuel as some of its key issues."

And the party leader has described himself as a Communist and Marxist.

What makes them far-right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Örebro_Party

Now, the usual cry from blue sky spoiled rich kid fascists that are unable to understand that some people live in the real world, with real problems and because of that have ideas different from them.

Interesting. My friends and I were recently discussing the rise of right-wing parties and leaders around the world, and we observed that many of these controversial elected leaders also have an "Anarchist" trait. These leaders have enacted policies that deliberately cause a lot of social and / or economic upheaval - bordering on anarchy - which have ultimately resulted in mass transfer of wealth from the lower classes to the rich, and widened the gap between the poor and the rich. And, unsurprisingly, many of these right-wing parties and leaders are backed billionaires (and now trillionaires). Factor in the role of BigTech and their social media platforms, that have aided their rise, it does seem like even these corporate leaders who aren't necessarily enamoured by such political ideologies still feel the need to tacitly support them because they recognise that it provides them more opportunities for capitalistic exploitation ...

> takes inspiration from marxist ideology[42] 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 transfers that are a net negative for society

lmao This is like the song Tequila by The Champs but instead of a long instrumental it’s John Galt’s speech and instead of “Tequila!” it’s “Marxism!”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=U_JFLb1IItM

It is amazing that if you say “Marxist” after any possible combination of words some people will go “oh wow that is leftism”

Utter gibberish, like a picture of Ayn Rand wearing an ironic Hugo Chavez shirt.

Nice to see some tech leadership with strong moral fibre. I'll definitely renew with mullvad too in the future.

What did Marx write about immigration?

Yes. Until the 1WW.

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.

> IMHO 20% of voters can't be "extreme"

Was the NSDAP "extreme"? They got 43.9%

The AfD is a far-right extremist party in Germany with currently 28% projected support[0].

[0] https://dawum.de/Bundestag/

guess I'll cancel my tailscale mullvad sub

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...

If this is real I will stop my monthly subscriptions.

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

> 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

This is great news. New Mullvad subscriber here!

It is a trend now, loby your way to lawmaking. Then set the laws as you need. No surprises.

Companies funding far-left parties seem to be much bigger problem.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I don’t know anything about this tbh I was just answering your general question through my own lens. When someone does something newsworthy and I read about, I adjust, depending on my ethics and whether they align. In general I don’t seem to align with the far right since that mostly seems to be about Supremacy and exclusion and hate. I don’t have interest in those things so I move my support away from things like that.

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

Which ones? What are their policies?

Coming across information isn't the same as:

- having the emotional energy reserves left to act on it

- fully understanding the repercussions of the thing

- feeling like your actions in this case will have any affect

- many other reasons you can't stay consistent from an outsiders perspective

You're trying to apply an objective measure of reality to everyone else: if they disagree with X, they must therefore also disagree with Y, otherwise they shouldn't act on X. It's an unreasonable expectation of perfect action.

There are no alternatives to Mullvad where you _know_ that all of the founders have "better" beliefs than this guy. If you have one, share it.

What proves the point is that someone suggested moving to Proton, whose founder (not even co-founder AFAIK) is outwardly pro-MAGA. And comments calling that out are the ones that get downvoted. This shows people are just pretending to care.

It's not silly to boycott companies in general, but this specific case it's silly. Not because of the reason, but because boycotting only makes sense if it's very likely that an alternative is going to be better in the specific factor that instigates the boycott. In this case, it's not likely, you have no clue whether an alternative is going to have more or less $0.0x of your $1 going to people supporting far-right parties.

Especially when VPN companies are known to be some of the dodgiest tech companies in general. Mullvad is one of the most transparent ones.

Why are leftists so histrionic? If we had a thread made every time an executive espoused far left opinions we'd overload the HN servers. Why is an executive being far right even news?

It is getting almost impossible to consume media or use tech products without supporting a nazi sympathizer or supporter or downright nazi himself nowadays

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?

Mullvad does an excellent job, and I support them.

I wonder, if you model political positions as nations, whether trading benefits you all or whether autarky leads to long term relevance.

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...

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.

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.

Mullvad does more for internet privacy than any other company. There are a lot of people saying that they will not use Mullvad anymore. What are they going to do? Support ExpressVPN or some spyware VPN with unknown owners? To achieve what – reduce the roster of companies fighting for a free internet to 0?

Remember, currently individuals elected by you, from parties ranging from goodest to kindest, are voting for passport internet and chat control, with little to no well-funded opposition.

I dislike that Mozilla is spending their money sponsoring random political organizations while asking for money here and there. I dislike that EFF is sometimes busy with American politics more than internet freedoms, and I dislike that Alexandra Elbakyan believes in some kind of esoteric stalinism.

But despite all that, I still support all of them! Because they are doing good things that nobody else does.

There is a "what kind of American are you" meme that is usually applied to people who have zero tolerance for people with different political views. Of course, it applies only to evil people???

No! If you think that "canceling" organizations on the matter that their leadership is kinda suspected of maybe supporting something that doesn't 100% align with your last ballot is a good deed, this meme is actually about you!

I'm still amused that so many people got brainwashed into thinking that VPNs give privacy :D

This "far right" slur on any party that is anti immigration makes me immediately suspect this party probably isn't far right.

It's a shame, because real racist extremists/nazis benefit from this lumping together of legitimate concern about immigration and actual Nazis.

Already had this topic discussed several times this week.

Aren’t Swedish political parties mostly publicly funded?

The Örebro Party seems similar to Bundnis Sara Wagenknecht in Germany. They are a splinter group of mostly older Linke who are anti immigrant. There is also this super weird fringe on the legit extreme left here, the Anti-deutsche antifa who are pro-Israel and islamophobic.

Frankly I am suspicious of anyone throwing money into politics; left / centre / right.

Small scale donors dont even get off without drawing my ire - finding out someone you know donated to a politician / party is like finding out they sent money to a nigerian prince to unlock their share of the inheritance.

The party seems to have some bizarre policies, but on migration can't really blame them considering how badly Sweden has failed to integrate humanitarian migrants. There is so much gang violence, so many people of migrant background marginalized and living on welfare without any hope of a better future.

I will gladly continue buying from Mullvad. There is nothing wrong with forced deportations. Without them anyone can come, claim asylum, and stay indefinitely if their country of origin doesn't want them back. That is simply idiotic waste of tax payer's money, and in case of criminals, also a hazard to public safety. Pretty much every Western European country does forced deportations, especially those of criminals.

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

The real far right are talking about melting down immigrants and using them to fill pot holes.

This guy is your best blocker to this and will surely restore balance.

lack of nuance in human affairs - is what ends up killing these conversations & making them explosive.

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.

archive link? the post got deleted

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.

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".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party

Well guess I won’t be renewing my subscription this month then.

Any other verified sources?

Once I meet a Swedish girl whose parents were from XYZ.

She went on a rant on how new refugees from XYZ were ruining everything.

That’s the immigration debate in most of the world. The moment a new immigrant gets their citizenship they often feel they’re the last good one and all pathways need to be shutdown.

I’ll switch to a different vpn. It’s one thing to donate a nominal amount as a private citizen. It’s a whole different matter to be the primary source of funding.

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.

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

A big question I suppose is what Mozilla are going to do in reaction?

As Mozilla VPN is white labelled Mulvad I think

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

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.

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

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party

I thought people were paying for Mullvad for a service. "Oh, my money is going to fund a political party I disagree with". You pay for a service, and thinking you now have a say on how the service provider decides to use the money they've received is such hubris. "But instead of using the money I gave the company to buy healthy food for his kids, he chose to buy processed food. I'm out." It's sad, almost immature.

previously discussed[flagged: 251 comments]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687508

Any suggestions for a VPN service with similar security standards as Mullvad?

Welp, that vanishes my support for mullvad, despite I did recommend it to many of my friends who doesn’t want/can setup their own.

Im not against people having different political opinions, I personally agree with things from each side and disagree with them both too on other matters, plus having my own third option that doesn’t fit any side. But I am certainly against a company marketing itself as a “defender of personal and human rights and freedom”, yet they are sponsoring a party that obviously doesn’t hold these values, this company will report individuals in the future to deport them maybe, 5 years later they are reporting others for disagreeing with whatever agenda that party is having, it’s always a slippery slope, never think it will end at xyz and that’s it.

Goddammit it’s like companies are ALWAYS destined to turn to evil one way or another, it’s just how long it will take is the question. It’s a reminder that you should always host your own, trust nobody, none.

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?

Örebropartiet is like the weirdest party in Sweden. It's named after "Örebro", a Swedish city with 125k population. The party's founder, Markus Allard, used to be far left politician before turning far right.

Their party program is all over the place. They stand for free dental care, direct democracy and deporting immigrants.

Marcus is also known for profanity and foul language in council meetings.

An oddity in Swedish politics is that if a local party manages to get 12% of the votes in a constituency they are eligible for getting a seat in parliament, and can skip the regular 4% popular vote rule.

Örebropartiet actually has a chance to get into national government next election (Fall 2026) since their local support is quite strong. Times are weird

A question to everyone who’s cancelling their subscription over this because “my money ends up financing politics I disagree with”

How many hands does the money need to pass through before it’s considered okay?

No one is free until everyone is free. Daniel Berntsson is acting against freedom, he has chosen to vote for and support a party that protects only the /freedom/ of a small part of the world and seeks to “defend” it at any cost—through racism, stereotyping, and the criminalization of people fleeing exploitation and war. Europe is rich only because every corner of the world is exploited by Europe and the US. Now the tables have turned, and they want to protect what they have stolen.

Does not feel good to support such a cause. Will cancel mine and give ivpn a go. It really is a shame, I was happy with mullvad and their mission. I just wouldn't sleep well if I kept using it

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...

I will be buying a Mullvad subscription because of this. Keep up the good work! Private individuals should have the right to free speech/expression, whatever that is, and that is a value I admire this VPN company for standing up for.

Too many companies pay lip service to the current political fad du jour, and it's annoying. I like an apolitical company that does its thing and doesn't pretend more.

Oh no :-( but why the far right? You can sponsor sensible politics and politicians so that we get more of those.

I am a very happy customer since the service is extremely very good, the vpn problem was solved and I am so sorry but the smallest amount that I pay even if it is 0.01 cent cannot go to support the far right(or the far left).

Sorry.

But now the problem is to find a decent vpn service that is not private equity or malware.

I am anti-racist, son of immigrants, son of a mixed race couple, yet what scares me is the mobbing of people against other that have a different opinion than yours, as seen in this thread.

Plenty saying they cannot in good conscience support Mullvad, while directly and indirectly giving money to people like Bezos, Musk or Cook, among others, or supporting politicians from both aisles, who have the power to do much worse at a greater scale. I call this hypocrisy, and it is widespread in social media driven mob mentality. Intolerance about intolerants turns you an intolerant.

I like Mullvad the company, and I know that people might support politics I find despicable. Such is life outside of silly internet echo chambers.

There's nothing wrong with promoting or protecting the interests of native or indigenous people over those of immigrants or foreigners. This is not a far-right fringe belief, though some are trying to paint it so.

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?

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]

[1] https://modretro.com

Calling it a political startup is not that unfair.

I would add that in practice it is even less significant that one may think. Parties for local government has an incentive to make loud declaration of national policy in order to present themselves as more legitimate compared to national political parties. However, local government do not have any actually power to implement such policies. Local government decide things like "should we build a new public bath house", or "should we create a local investigation if the that one large road through the city should a speed limit or 30 instead of 40". In terms of practical immigration policy, what a local government control is things like encouraging access to housing, specific integration initiatives that is local to that region, and other details for when immigrants arrive to that specific municipality. In this case we are talking about a municipality the size of 160 000 people.

Thus this funding may increase the probability that they will get more than the 5 seats out of 65 that exist in Örebro County Council, which they got from a total of 7000 votes in the latest election. If they manage to get 12% of the 160 000 votes, they will also get one bonus seat in the parliament which is a special rule in the Swedish election system. That single seat out of 350 could in theory do some harm if the election results happens to also be very close between the two blocks of left and right wing parties.

I believe their motivation leans towards tackling advertising based exploitation.

Thanks for the shoutout!

Look into dehumanizing language used by political leadership over history and where it tends to lead. Especially when paired with extremist, evil policies like remigration.

Other forms of anarchism are not real anarchism, because he said so.

You just named the fathers of neoliberalism.

Perhaps you can start here if you're actually interested in anarchism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_anarchism

Anarchism is David Graeber, mutual aid, Makhnovshchina, The Conquest of Bread, Zapatistas, Rojava, James C Scott, the Mexican Revolution, the IWW, etc.

You will not find "anarcho-capitalism" on the Anarchist Library because it has absolutely nothing to do with the Anarchist tradition. It's a total neologism and misnomer.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index

Anarchism has always been explicitly and critically opposed to capitalism and capitalists (literally often assassinating them) and market-driven hierarchies

really? how would/did you see others use it?

> I use Mullvad because it physically prevents anyone from logging my 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 actually physically prevents them from logging your data, and this entire series of statements from you mean nothing because it still boils down to "you have to trust the company". A statement which is true for every VPN provider.

So nothing prevents them

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 would argue that right-wing people are now the left-wing people from like 30-40 years ago.

Yes. They want to get rid of immigrants for example.

Abolishing the state isn't the definition of anarchism. If it were, then Marxists would also be anarchists.

At first I was going to say maybe these don’t exist because individualist anarchists and rightward tend to be loners, but then I remembered the Union of Egoists, and a search actually turned up a number of real world voluntaryist and ancap groups.

The Free State Project is mostly libertarians, but there’s a large ancap presence. You could also argue that many of the attempts at things like seasteading and crypto-communities are primarily ancap affairs, especially the seasteading concepts that revolved around building a “raft” of independently owned vessels. Apparently there was also something called the Acadian Community that has later been regarded as ancap.

The voluntaryist groups tend to be small local communities, and quiet online, but there are several of them in Western states. Apparently there were several that became publicly active during Covid, providing mutual aid. There was at least one online community run by a voluntaryist free speech absolutist (it was similar to Reddit but without rules except “don’t get the owner arrested”) and it had a respectable user base until he eventually disappeared and shut it down, for predictable reasons.

There’s also the bizarre case of national-anarchism, whatever that means! I doubt this has any real-world examples. Perhaps some backwoods enclave in Idaho that doesn’t exist publicly.

Maybe the problem is that anarchists don’t have words like “revisionist” and “deviationist” to describe similar ideologies that use the label, but which don’t fit your understanding of it. Like, Posadism is certainly some kind of communism, but it’s also certainly both revisionist and deviationist according to basically all other communists. Muslims who fight other Muslims are takfiri, but both are Muslims; liberals distinguish “classical” liberals from the mainstream, but both are liberals; etc.

Wait what? I see the exact opposite, and what is the 'far right'? You mean anything republican/conservative?

Whatever what you say and so, it doesn't change the fact a part of my money is going to end up in an absolutely disgusting political party and other potentially terrible stuff. After so many years, I'm done with Mullvad.

Fredrik, can we expect you to start a new company with the same values without the bullshit?

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.

This response completely fails to address what is the issue for me and many others, and frankly I find it quite offensive. The Örebro Party uses racist and transphobic rhetoric and dog whistles, and openly advocates for ethnic cleansing. Their political actions have already hurt people I care about. Berntsson's donation is explicitly meant to support the party in bringing their politics to the national level. This would bring material harm to me, to family and friends, and to many others.

And Berntsson's ability to fund ÖP in doing that harm is directly linked to the financial success of Mullvad. Whether you or Mullvad agrees or disagrees with Berntsson or ÖP is irrelevant. Thanks to Berntsson, more money to Mullvad means more harm to us. So why on Earth would I pay you anything?! On the contrary, it would quite obviously be in our best interests if Mullvad fails as a company, if possible to such an extent that Berntsson is ruined financially and can no longer fund "nationalist socialist" parties such as ÖP.

It just doesn't matter whether Mullvad believes in free speech or not, not when Berntsson is making it so that giving you money causes us to be persecuted and harmed. And to be perfectly honest, I find your framing of this as "philosophical" to be profoundly appalling, and it tells me that you do not at all understand what is actually going on.

> 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.

Why does it say your comment was made 2 days ago, when the thread has only been up for 6 hours?

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.

Thanks Fredrik, will actually be switching to Mullvad.

It’s time to create nullvad, Fredrik.

People in this thread are slowly (or maybe not so slowly) realising "… this was also a business after all… just with a different "model"… huh". There's caring, there's caring PR, and then there's caring theatre.

> We fight for freedom of speech, freedom of information and the right to privacy.

OK, but the far right, like all totalitarians, has an agenda that is thoroughly opposed to this. That leads to the tolerance paradox: You must be intolerant to agendas that would put an end to tolerance.

FTR. The reports I have seen have always made it clear that Mullvad has two owners/founders/CEOs. And while the donations may be private, they obviously come from money earned as part of being one of the founder/owner/CEO of Mullvad and thus raises questions on corporate responsibility.

[flagged]

I was mostly going by the “far-right” classification in the title. If indeed the whole spectrum has switched it will be less extreme when viewed from within the spectrum.

They're so populist, in fact, that they require CEOs to donate them millions of dollars to constitute the backbone of their party. Oh wait, that's what political interest groups do.

Mullvad's principle was that they protected speech. It wasn't a political imperative, and they enjoyed business from all sides of the political aisle perusing this product.

Now the apolitical appeal is fading. It's not hard to understand why VPNs, one of the most commodified businesses on the internet, struggle to find customers without that kind of niche reputation that Mullvad once had.

This comment reminds me of Sweden < 2015, where any critique of immigration labeled you as a supporter of the Swedish Democrats (SD) and possibly a Nazi.

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.

> 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.

This sounds like you expect very few people to do this. I can't speak for others but this was exactly the first thing I did upon hearing about it, and

> Where the Örebropartiet (Örebro Party) usually are called extremist is in questions regarding immigration.

is exactly the conclusion I came to, based on their statements about "parasites". Not the integration aspect indeed...

Perhaps you should talk to customer support and try to get your money back. Even if it won't work, there's no faster way to reach the company to make a stand than to have an explicit paper trail to customers that are leaving them because of this.

What is the issue with Proton?

IVPN, NymVPN

Recently? Some people have been saying foreigners are bad for 30 years.

Thank you! I wasn't even aware that IVPN existed.

It's stupid when one of the CEOs of a private VPN company decides to fund political actors. That's just PR issue bound to happen. Funding bad actors bites you every single time - so maybe have a chat about if you have seen this coming - and if not why were you blind to this?

On top of this don't change your service based on this outrage. If you change it, then you will prove that Mullvad is malleable by political pressure. You can guess what happens next...

Muslim fascists and Western fascists are on the same side here. They both want the same thing... a world defined by hatred of the other.

There is zero contradiction on opposing both of them.

Have you ever tried to seek for basic rights and support for migrants in EU ? I help lot's of immigrants in France. I'm always told that France is very generous and that it's easy to have healthcare, easy to go to a doctor for free.

Yet, in my experience, it's horribly difficult and expensive.

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.

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?

Every time you use a kitten to support flawed logic, a kitten dies.

The Mastodon post itself. I get a 404 error. It was fine when this reached the frontpage yesterday or when was it. Looks like the author deleted it.

EDIT: nvm it's rate limited

> From an HN point of view the idea is to give the discussion a place, since the community obviously wants to have it

So where do you draw the line?

Just this week I saw multiple offtopic Epstein schizoposts by 10+ year old accounts that were alternately flagged and vouched. Should we allow that too?

My takeaway is this is a highly politically charged rant on a niche social media site — exactly the kind of discussion we're meant to avoid.

Things are rotten below ground and you give an inch, they'll want a mile.

And to be sure, I agree Daniel is entitled to his opinions and the right to do with his money as he pleases. Of course there may be business consequences for doing so in terms of how the user base reacts.

I think the bigger problem -- and I don't know the rules for political donations in Sweden -- is that any individual is able to pour millions into a political party of any persuasion. In the US this situation is made much worse since a Supreme Court ruling known as Citizens United which opened the floodgates for the ultra-wealthy to bankroll politicians. But that's another discussion altogether.

> But you're doing the same thing, making the same threat. You've only escalated it from a conscientious protest to a Texas stand off.

Yup, because I want the people attempting the conscientious protest to have less power to influence businesses and the people businesses employ. An apolitical firm is less likely to bow to pressure from one group of activists if they know that another, opposing group of activists is paying attention to how they respond to pressure from the first group of activists. Really, this has nothing at all to do with Mullvad specifically, except it does happen that I am a long-time customer of theirs.

> Now more than ever, it's hard for me to believe their brand identity. You're allowed to have political opinions, voice them and vote for them when you're a CEO. But spending customer money on political campaigns is how you ask for a boycott. It's how I would feel about any political investment that their CEOs make, and its already tarnished the Mullvad brand for me.

I don't see a meaningful difference between voicing political opinions and voting based on them, and making private donations to a political cause. Any money at all that an owner of a company spends on anything, down to their groceries, comes from their ownership of the company; just as any money at all that an employee of a company spends on anything comes from their salary.

But also lots of CEOs of companies make all kinds of political donations, many of which I think are bad. The reason this particular donation is making the news is because it's to an anti-immigration party rather than a pro-immigration party or NGO or some other cause; and a lot of people want to exert social pressure to make that specific political stance dangerous. Those are exactly the people I want to lose.

> But you're doing the same thing, making the same threat.

"I'll boycott you if you keep supporting free speech" and "I'll boycott you if you stop supporting free speech" are hardly the same thing, especially when aimed at a company whose business is all about free speech, which at the dismay of some people also includes speech you don't like.

> less likely

how so?

Why would we? There are plenty of us that believe in free speech, but would rather not see our money go towards bankrolling further destroying public discourse like you see Allard doing. It is perfectly possible to forward your opinions without setting the public square on fire. The kind of rhetoric that you profess here is dangerous and I see it all too often in the US. If no side attempts to hold the high ground, all we will have is a race towards the bottom and at some point arguing that it is high time to send the other side off to the camps and that is not a future I want to see.

Racial discrimination is illegal where I live, and I believe that's a good thing. Political parties that advocate racism are simply antithetical to the whole concept of liberal democracy.

Any? As in one of them? Maybe. I think it’s incredibly unlikely though, and I think you’re making a huge and questionable leap. Boycotting a business isn’t normally a precursor to fascist dictatorship.

And for anyone who treats Atlas Shrugged as a Bible, I hope you're aware that Alan Greenspan was almost surely more of a true believer than you are, and his legacy is pretty well summarized by having to admit that his practically religious belief in Randian ideology led to the most severe global economic downturn since the Great Depression.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5lZPWNFizQ

Of course after his admission modern Objectivists began to predictably denounce Greenspan (Ayn Rand's favorite boy) with various "No True Scotsman" arguments.

Even if they do, it's none of your business.

Not all monocultures are created equal.

You may be right. In addition to stricter migration policy & better integration, I also think it would make sense to legalize drugs. Make it a state monopoly like booze, and there will be much less money for criminal organizations.

> you should probably cite that.

I got it from reading the Wikipedia article linked in the comment I was replying to. Specifically here, third paragraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party#Immigration_...

The statement has a citation but I did not follow it.

I think government art projects the western world over would fare better if they went through a reasonably local direct democracy type process. Instead we get unelected bureaucrats with absolutely bizarre tastes commissioning wildly expensive projects that the majority don't really appreciate. Even though that only describes a minority of cases I think it shouldn't be any surprise that it results in backlash and defunding.

I hope you don't think that is the odd one out.

Fair enough. (And white)

The guidelines say that most political articles are offtopic. Most != all. The question is what should be in the setdiff of all - most.

About that, there are lots of past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Edit: more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48724830 in this thread

Oscar: "Look it doesn’t take a genius to know that every organization thrives when it has two leaders. shakes head Go ahead, name a country that doesn’t have two presidents. A boat that sets sail without two captains. Where would Catholicism be without the popes?"

When Mullvad's revenue is used to harm people, why should its customers feel safe?

TIL Belgians don't grope women.

Indeed. What I hear you saying is that you recognize there is a kind of consistency, and benefit, to Mullvad's position.

I'll admit holding the line like this, when most people don't understand the nuance, and most of those who do don't value it, is irrational from a business perspective. Then again we founded the company because of our political convictions about free speech, free press, privacy, mass surveillance and censorship.

I respect your choice to leave, and also appreciate that we're both making an effort to understand each other. I wish all disagreements were like this.

Iranians use VPNs simply because they want to access the internet. Mullvad services are too expensive for what average people make so i don't think it really matters.

My understanding is that the party leader, Markus Allard, is basing his political ideology on some new kind of Marxist analysis.

You can read more about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Allard

>he's still willing to associate with me

Presumably because you are not an immigrant (or the child of an immigrant).

You would have been so much better off just ending on the, already obvious BS, part about how his views aren't the companies. Instead, you went on to downplay the obvious problem.

Mullvad was one of the last products I felt I could honestly recommend, and feel good about. Never falling for this garbage again. The world is complete shit right now.

I think you're just bad at identifying assholes

> I think the legal and fiduciary concept of Conflict of Interest is relevant here, but perhaps only by analogy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest is quite informative.

That's an interesting angle!

> What we can do, is recognise that if someone actually takes a large material action against the company's mission, then they have gone a step further and demonstrated the conflict of interest.

As far as I understand Daniel doesn't believe his donation materially harms Mullvad's mission. I am undecided and need more information. I highly doubt he would donate if he believed it would be antithetical to Mullvad's mission, given that the company is founded on our shared values around privacy. I'll ask him.

Well argued

Where is the part that remigration would only happen to excessively brown people? I read the party leaders speeches etc but could not find it.

That's not a quote from Mao, it's from the second epistle to the Thessalonians, attributed to Paul and Timothy.

> For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: If any one will not work, let him not eat.

> 2 Thessalonians 3:10

You’re absurd. There have been many moral outrages about companies simply having some undesirables as customers/users, like Twitter and Cloudflare, where the companies are shunned and accused of “supporting” said customers/users.

> the founder takes our money and gives it

No, you give your money to Mullvad, who uses it to pay expenses, including salaries to people who do work for Mullvad, and profits to shareholders. It has then long stopped being “your” money, and you can’t reasonably be upset at what happens after that, unless you want to apply the same reasoning I demonstrated, at which point you have a lot of boycotts to adhere to.

> A stance that Sweden should reduce the amount of immigration they accept would be utterly unremarkable and never result in outrage like this.

I don't believe this claim, because immigration is a live political issue in my country (the United States) just as it is in Sweden; and people absolutely claim that reducing the amount of immigration the US accepts is immoral and genocidal. Seriously, claims of this nature are a huge amount of contemporary American politics and this is obvious to anyone who has seen the name "Donald Trump" in a news publication talking about the US in the past decade. Also I've read Bryan Caplan's argument that not having open borders is morally equivalent to Jim Crow, and read plenty of other people who think similarly to him.

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!

I was acknowledging gpvos position, as well as that of others, and then stating my own position on the matter. I as an individual understand that there are people who see this party as left-wing or right-wing. That doesn't mean I agree. I as an individual don't approve of this party or its rhetoric. Others do. None of this is Mullvad's official position.

Mullvad only concerns itself with its mission. Our customers and employees represent a wide spectrum of opinions. You may not like some of them. Regardless, Mullvad's position is that privacy is a universal right, regardless of political affiliation.

> I understand how awkward the position you're in must be

Yes. Thank you.

That's different. Loads of animals will be unhappy if they see others being given something they're not. We have a lottery which 3 million people (in the tiny Netherlands) are subscribed to only because you win as a street, and you won't want to miss out if your street wins right? Can't see your neighbors have more than you for no good reason!

The feelings of missing out and unfairness are deeply ingrained and stock markets give you stuff. At Mullvad, you buy something instead. If that's a life-essential product you can't otherwise get then the situations would be comparable. There's loads of VPN providers though, maybe not all as good but I would also be considering my options if I were a customer and hear this sort of thing (I'm not a customer of any VPN service). For stock markets and banks, on the other hand: whatcha gonna do, just not have a pension and work until you know roughly how much longer you'll live and that your savings will last till death? Assuming you earn enough to put money to the side in the first place, virtually all options are going to end up being partially invested in things you disagree with. A bank account is a legal requirement here (there's also agreements between the government and some banks to provide basic accounts so you can't be excluded from society like that). I find it much harder to fault people for wanting essentials; the situations are not the same

We should improve society somewhat

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

It is a consensus among sociological studies. Statistics are not studies. It means nothing.

There is. But Mullvad has not donated to a political party, now, has it?

It's possible to support all of the same policies without referring to human beings as "parasites," and I don't think we should be flippant about what language is used. It's relevant. It reflects a state of mind.

I personally do not ever see myself voting for (or otherwise indirectly supporting) a politician that speaks like that, regardless of whether you can steelman it with more neutral language.

Isn't that what every politician who ended up doing an ethnic cleansing said?

No, we just want them to not hate us and our culture. People in general are tired of being tolerant to the intolerant.

Interesting, but what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

The billionaries don't need/care about sympathy And most importantly, the billionares don't do hard work for minimun pay.

Billionaires always have the option to un-parasite themselves, quite trivially.

Nobody is calling MacKenzie Scott a parasite.

Well I find the 'Eat the rich' slogan equally disgusting.

Won’t somebody please think of the poor oppressed billionaires!

For more context, from wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...

Sweden is the only country I'm aware of that has a Wikipedia page specifically about this incredibly niche local phenomenon which by the way has no correlation to anything being discussed here at all.

Do you typically start companies that are opposed to your values, or do you start companies that align with your values?

If you are the co-CEO of a company, will you push it to align more with your values, or less?

This isn't a company founded 300 years ago by a long-dead evil man in a business vertical completely unrelated to how it started, it's a baby company with the evil founder still actively involved at the highest level of management. Maybe you can regale me with epic stories about the companies you've worked at where the founder had no ability to influence the company and its values, but that's not been my experience at all, in any human organization anywhere.

Money that leaves your wallet and goes to Mullvad ends up funding politicians that believe non-whites shouldn’t have speech at all, as a personal choice by a top executive of the company.

The company’s values aren’t reflected accurately if you believe your money is funding free speech regardless of race.

This is entirely false, not every country is the USA. Sweden does not have birthright citizenship. Most Somalis and their children in Sweden are not Swedish citizens.

To add, they all retain their Somali citizenship.

> don't understand the language

Seriously? It's not like the Somalis have been in Sweden that long.

I've known Daniel for 20 years. He's one of the most empathetic individuals I know. Neither he nor I wants to make our workplace a monoculture.

I get that you disagree with his choice, as do I. But please recognize that we've built this company together over 17 years. To suggest that you know better than me that he wants to create a monoculture at our workplace is ridiculous.

I'm not sure why you're arguing this point though. It seems we both believe he made the wrong choice?

> But if you're tolerant of someone in your workplace that wants to make it a monoculture, and then succeeds in doing so, will you remain glad?

Isn't that exactly the argument Örebro would make about islam and europe.

aka the paradox of tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Or: We're cherry picking ideas from all sides where applicable.

It's all a Louis XVI seating chart anyway.

I'm not paying to use HN. I'm jaded and opposed to techno-optimism, so if anything by just expressing my honest opinions here I'm wearing away at those startups' power by challenging their most critical base of supporters.

I wonder how AirVPN doesn't run out of ports since you reserve a static port number across all nodes (which is also a fingerprint). They seem to be almost all allocated. Do they just plan to never have more than 64512 customers?

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.

Not that strange, Malcolm Kyeyune is a member of the Örebro Party, and he’s had a podcast together with the party leader, Markus Allard, since 2015.

https://poddtoppen.se/podcast/985799618/markus-och-malcom

Kyeyune was one of the members - along with Allard - who were kicked out of the Left Party’s youth organization in 2014 for supporting the Revolutionary Front.

One thing to remember in Swedish politics is that the old idea of the Folkhemmet ("the Home of the People") is always lurking in the background: a political mix of conservatism and socialism - Sweden as a home for Swedes, but also an egalitarian home. Some view, both on the left and the right, Folkhemmet as peak Sweden.

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.

> Many (most?) of those to be remigrated are not Swedish citizens.

You say tomAtoe, I say pogrom, lets call the whole thing off

In europe, when was the last time a mass ejection of normal people, who've not committed crimes, beneficial? When did it end well for either the ejectee, or the remaining domestic population?

Nah, it works, it's just a higher level of political abstraction, but we still tend to use left and right because those words seem to be accurate enough to be worthwhile.

We could use something like the political compass, but on that model we still tend to ignore the authoritarianism axis and just say everything to the left is the left and everything to the right is the right. Left is progressive, right is conservative.

> The above isn't believable.

Ok. Let me try. Please note that I am in no way defending Daniel's decision nor Örebropartiet. I'm simply responding to your claim that my previous statement is not believable.

> He gave $500,000 to a political org that has explicitly called immigrants "parasites,"

That sounds horrible.

I looked it up. Here's [1] a video of that debate in the municipal government. FYI, I would characterise the website as quite right-wing and generally not very trustworthy, but there is a video of Markus Allard along with the quotes.

The title of the video is something about a proposal regarding long-term unemployed individuals. He seems to be talking specifically about long-term unemployed immigrants, 10-20 years. He's complaining that he doesn't think it's right to allow them financial living assistance while Örebro is defunding social services for older people. I have no idea about the actual truth value of any of his statements.

Horrible way of talking about people, but in this case not immigrants in general, it seems. Within the context of people who have supposedly been unemployed for 10-20 years, I understand (but don't agree with) why he says those individuals are parasites.

> dehumanizing phrasing that mirrors Nazi speech and has been used to justify mass murder.

Indeed. His choice of words is dehumanizing.

> Saying he supports open borders at the same time is just a flat non sequitur.

Daniel has a blog that goes back to 2016 where he talks about waste of tax payers' money. What he expresses in his blog is consistent with classical liberalism, which in turn is consistent with freedom of movement.

Where is the flat non sequitur?

[1]: https://www.friatider.se/kaosdebatten-allard-kallar-sverige-...

> That your friend only makes moral choices ..?

No. I observed that they liked Mullvad and now considers it complete garbage. I shared some priors with them, suggesting that there is evidence that they haven't seen yet. This evidence didn't change my stance on the party, or Daniel's donation. It did make me understand, which is not the same as agreeing.

A political discourse which only knows 0 or 1, GOOD or BAD, Nazi or Good, is not a healthy discourse. There's almost always something to learn, if you lean into curiosity instead of just labeling things right away.

One Reddit thread that wasn't even on my first page isn't saying much. Top comments are mostly that mass deportations and forced removal are what's problematic, not limiting entry or reducing immigration in the first place.

a rhetorical question, sure. i didn't really need to include the first question to make the point of the second one.

What about kicking people out who don’t believe in equal rights for women?

Because, that is pretty core to the Swedish cultural identity.

> 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.

Someone doesn't want people using the best VPN available, hmm...

The existence of the Sami does not falsify the following fact: Swedes are the native, indigenous people to Sweden.

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!

I was being facetious. Unfortunately enlightened horseshoe centrists didn't want to hear.

> 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...

They're all left-wing

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

i keep coming back to this... what's the difference between the countries listed vs. Sweden singled out further down? Recency and context?

And we're led to believe that Sweden has been under sustained attacks pretty much annually, except for the years between 1994 and 2002...?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...

> 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).

I find it amusing that westerners are only now discovering that left wing politicians can be not just authoritarian but socially conservative as hell.

USSR notably banned abortions for 20 years under Stalin, and homosexual intercourse for most of its existence.

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.

> 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."

Seems pretty cut and dry

> create unnecessary controversy, based on nothing but lies.

given how much Sweden likes to preen it's past about being right and just, the WWII neutrality and taking all of denmarks jews over night, to then have shit like "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden" seems pretty opposed to what sweden likes to think it's self as.

Now if my quote is lies, I will retract it, but the source is here: https://x.com/AllardKlipp/status/2060109271635771457

As someone who grew up in Russia in the 90s, I've seen it firsthand that the red/brown horseshoe is not a theory. It was often difficult to tell which one was which; even when it came to religion, our commies have all suddenly found a love for Eastern Orthodoxy.

The fallacy is that there's only one direction, so to speak. You can be left without being an authoritarian. Of course, the same goes for the right.

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.

> 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.

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.

Maybe we could meet in the middle and call them a nationalist socialist workers party.

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.

The truth is, assimilation is usually a process that takes a generation or two. First generation immigrants don't assimilate very well. Many never manage to even learn the host country's language.

Assimilation really happens at the level of their descendants, who grow up entirely within the host country, going to their schools, consuming their pop culture, etc, and think of themselves as Swedes or Americans or whatever.

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.

Do you let anyone come into your home ? If you did, you'd no longer have a home, and therefore would not be able to offer hospitality anymore. Don't you expect people who come to your home to abide by at least a few rules ?

It's the same for a country. It's because it has borders, rules, and a strong culture that it has something to offer that immigrants might be interested in.

No, I'm fairly sure you could not find a quote like that about the USSR.

> 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".

> Do you actually want voting to happen via wallet?

Money has a huge influence on politics, and recognizing that reality isn't the same as wanting it or encouraging it.

>If you want to vote for or against Örebropartiet, then just do it at the booth.

I'm kinda confused here. The context of this is that a rich tech bro uses his money to fund and promote a political party, with our money, but we can't decide to not pay him because that's influencing money with politics (???)

What kind of bizarro world is this, he can use his vast wealth to promote racist parties but we can't collectively use ours? How about he just "does it at the booth" and donates his money to the against malaria foundation?

This is about what customers are comfortable supporting. This guy doesn't just have what many consider to be unpalatable political beliefs, he's one of the biggest funders of what many consider to be an unpalatable political party. Lots of people don't want to give money to something which they feel will in part be funneled to an organization which is antithetical to their views. Realistically, I kind of doubt Mullvad is rolling in swimming pools filled with cash getting syphoned to neonazis, but that brings me to my next point...

For many, it's not just an intellectual position but an emotional one. This doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but you probably won't be able to reason them out of it. It's the same reason I don't listen to Michael Jackson. He's dead and none of that streaming revenue would go to him or to raping children but...yuck.

At the end of the day, there's an irony in this guy supporting the very freedoms on the internet which are being used to disseminate criticisms against him, and perhaps inducing people to starve one of the vehicles which helps maintain those freedoms.

I don't know why your comment is flagged dead, there's no good reason it should be.

> 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?

Okay, first of all, early feminists and LGBT advocates were and are hounded in their professional lives. This has happened to progressives for all of human history, it's actively happening under the current US administration, and it's going to continue happening forever.

A bigger point here is that your argument is morally worthless. You're just saying that I shouldn't judge anyone, because other people have judged wrongly in the past. I disagree entirely. I wouldn't buy juice from a rapist, I wouldn't buy a computer from a murderer, and I wouldn't buy a VPN from a fascist.

The largest point however, is that your argument implies that I am compelled to spend my money on Mullvad regardless of what I think about the people who work there or what they do, and that's an obvious absurdity. I am free to spend or not spend on whatever I choose for whatever reasons I choose, and politics is going to be one of them. You'll have to get over it.

I think I wasn't as clear as I could have been in that last part. The irony I was referring to is that this guy is doing more than most people to support freedom online, and that very freedom he supports is being used by people who disagree with his political position to potentially organize a boycott of Mullvad and possibly deprive everybody of a tool which helps protect freedom online.

It's like people who think Americans shouldn't shouldn't have first amendment rights. The irony is that the first amendment protects their ability to criticize the first amendment.

For better or worse, the internet and all its collective outrage is now the world's HR department.

> what many consider to be an unpalatable political party

That description fits every political party everywhere in the world.

Yes, we must cleanse every provider of wrongthink, especially those who might help us to speak without being censored or moderated, and tracked with ID.

We must make sure that they follow our politics.

It was more an observation on what happend to the Sàmi. Which rather backs up your point really.

What I don't understand is why integration is so poor in sweden(and the netherlands) compared to the UK. Outcomes for second generation swedes immigrant are terrible in education and employment.

Now please explain to all of us what made you come to that conclusion from what I just wrote. Explain in detail, referring to the actual statements I made, not just vague hand waves.

Its not that they start to feel numb, they didn't care in the first place. I have had random co-workers start talking about how they don't want foreigners in Finland and that in Sweden immigrants (maybe you) get free money and don't work.

Talking about how entire races of people deserve to be deported is active violence

Canada's (mainstream) nationalism is also part of its political left.

I mean it's definitely possible to call yourself that, but I'd argue no, it's not possible to actually be that.

No-one defines what they mean by "nationalist" so it could apply to a rock.

And some parents do learn Swedish so their children might not know their parents native language. Or have you inspected every Somalian family in Sweden? It might not be that many, but doesn't make his point any less true.

> hand, you treat the negative effects of current immigrant milieus as eternal amd innert to their ancestry (dare to say: genes).

I don't think they did say any of this. I don't understand why people who debate against limiting immigration (and it often is only this way round) continually mis-represent the person's clear, stated concern and try and replace it. It is a completely transparent attempt, and no one is fooled. This isn't 2015 when an accusation of racism was taken seriously, because who would mis-accuse someone of such an awful thing? Well, it turned out millions of people would do that. The US President would do it[0].

As for the genetics comment, this is ridiculous on its face as well. Race and culture are in no way tied. But culture survives for many generations, particularly when the immigrating group is large enough. This is obvious. Germans in the 1900s could move almost anywhere in the world and become the best brewers in the region, not because they have the genotype of a brewer, but because they had (and still have) an incredible brewing tradition handed down from parent to child. Culture doesn't change because you move into another country. It moves because you assimilate, make lots of native friends, and learn the language. Lots and lots of people are not doing that.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kyle-rittenhouses-mothe...

You actually need to demonstrate that though. I have seen no evidence of Mullvad (again, as a company) behaving in a racist or anti-immigrant manner. Until that has been demonstrated, you cannot just say "this guy behaves this way so that is what his company does".

Regardless you can always say "I don't want to give this company money because that indirectly is gonna funnel money to an anti-immigrant political party in Sweden", and that is a perfectly valid position to take. But a lot of people in this thread are clearly going a step further than that, ostensibly in an attempt to give them a greater sense of moral superiority than is necessarily deserved.

You're in a a shitty no-win situation.

Your choices are to either end a 20 year friendship and enormously fruitful collaboration or defend someone who has demonstrated quite clearly that he holds repulsive, despicable beliefs.

Imagine you were of immigrant background and your closest friend gave millions of dollars to a party whose sole platform is to strip you of citizenship and kick you out of your country.

"Some amount of controversy" means that your confident portrayal is a form of intellectual dishonesty. Not everyone would agree with your statement as written.

> But I'm also not going to stop to make sure my money as far as I can control it does not go into the pockets of millionaires who single handedly decided to bankroll 70% of the funding of a party that runs on ethnic hate.

My view is: its not your money that goes to a party you dislike, its Berntssons; money doesn't stink, and it's not your responsibility how some fraction of it is spent after you paid someone for a completely unrelated purpose.

You basically try to avoid a second order effect (Örebropartiet getting money) by leaning on an inherently anti-liberal mechanism (applying pressure via workplace).

You might think the end justifies the means here, but I strongly disagree; legitimizing discrimination at the workplace based on political beliefs is in my view much worse than anything that Örebropartiet could ever achieve.

You are obviously completely free to do business with whoever you want, but if you are advocating for boycott here (=> pro corporate censorship) you are directly doing more damage to liberalism in my view than some swedish local party ever could.

I'm confident in this view because I'm certain that politically motivated workplace discrimination is/was/would have been absolutely horrible for tons of people that turned out "right" (=> secularists, feminists, LGBT advocates, ...). Nothing that could be realistically achieved by such boycott appears even close to worth the trade to me.

Crucially, almost everyone ever believes his own moral compass to be "correct", but many turn out (somewhat) "wrong" decades or centuries later. So allowing more avenues to force views on others is always a risky proposition because those avenues are not just accesible to people that you believe to be "right"-- you also open them to people that you know to be wrong (i.e. rightwingers that want to get you fired for being an anti-nationalist traitor or w/e).

> GP ties negative properties to entire groups without differenciation, this is by definition racist.

Only if they're racial groups, and you're literally the only one trying to box people up by their skin colour.

>On the other hand, you treat the negative effects of current immigrant milieus as eternal and innert to their ancestry

A bad faith misrepresentation of the issue. The issue is why should existing citizens have to suffer the backwards views of the immigrant population while immigrants "assimilate over multiple generations"? Why should the host country have to absorb increased crime, feeling less safe, having their culture changed, etc for the sake of the immigrant population? Where does this supposed moral impetus come from?

> cultural and economic phenomenon

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.