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 very detailed.
I've merged the other threads into this one, so you'll see some anachronistic timestamps below.
I don't think "appetite to discuss" should be a justification to override the guidelines against political submissions and discussion. There is far too much politics on HN and it leaks into unrelated discussions too. There are plenty of other places to discuss politics on the internet.
I'm aware of what you've said about this in the past. I'm expressing my disagreement. HN would be improved dramatically by a significant change in where this line is drawn.
> 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.
We try to draw the line according to principles that I've explained many times over the years. If you scroll back through the comments, for example, at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., you'll find them. If you read some of those and then still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Btw, I'm not claiming that we make every individual call correctly - that's an undecidable question anyhow since everyone will have their own evaluation of "correctly". But at the more general level of what principles to apply, I do think there's a certain consistency: they've been the same for many years, and we do our (fallible) best to follow them.
The guidelines still apply here. Comments that are inflammatory should be flagged/killed and repeat/egregious offenders should be banned.
In the case of your past account: we happily unban accounts when people establish a track record of contributing positively. We don’t hold grudges and indeed we welcome it when users reform their style of participation.
They can still comment or submit items; their posts are dead by default but can still be seen by users with `showdead` turned on and can be vouched, to make them visible to everyone. Moderators will also unkill dead posts we see that we think are fine, and the user can email us to ask for specific items to be reviewed and unkilled. The other way is to register a new account. Either way, after even just a few weeks of earnest participation we're happy to consider unbanning the main account, or provide guidance as to what further corrections would need to be made before unbanning can happen.
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.
Obviously there are not easy solutions here. Has Mullvad considered offering to buy out Daniel's shares?
The mission statement that Mullvad has promised it's users does (did) come with a duty of care.
In my eyes that mission statement is compromised, it either dies here and Mullvad is just another product financing political parties by proxy, or something is done.
I hope you find a way to protect Mullvad from actions that are counter to your mission statements.
I'm sorry to hear that. I'm not defending his choice, but consider reading Daniel's rationale in the Flamman article. There's also his blog [1], which explains some of his views. I know he doesn't share all of Örebropartiets views, but I should let him provide that nuance.
As I said in another comment, speaking for myself, I don’t like that he made this donation and I know this view is shared by many of my colleagues.
I wonder if by this thread's logic, it is now my turn to virtue signal as if I'm leaving Mullvad as a customer, because now you said that don't like someone else's freedom of conscience, and I value freedom of conscience.
Such a bad place we're in: people say they value "freedom", but then you can't choose you own political representation without being witch-hunted to death by the same "freedom" group.
(I honestly think that the perfect response in this case would be to support the cofounder, if anything, to make their own choices, and refuse to hate on the person's political leaning. But alas, the chains of freedom are super heavy.)
I still remember in 2013 to 2021 when this was happening in the US and wider internet on twitter and reddit. A lot of people in Europe / AUS / NZ thought it was some soup opera made up by the internet's few.
At 21 century, especially on a topic regarding Europe, I thought we should have long learnt the lesson from how problematic Legal Positivism and naive "freedom" is from Weimarer Republik‘s constitution.
In short, freedom should at least maintain the capability of preserving basic poltical freedom. From my understanding of that party, they are clearly against other people's existing political freedom.
The same applies to people who say they support freedom but are then opposed to immigration because their concept of freedom is tied to wealth, privileges, and the preservation of those things. But that has little to do with freedom. We are only free when everyone is free.
>I don’t like that he made this donation and I know this view is shared by many of my colleagues.
Its a strange world now where everyone is expected to have a public opinion on everyone else's opinions to keep them in line. Very anti privacy, anti freedom, and against plurality of opinion.
I didn't read it that way (but I can see multiple possible readings).
Here's my interpretation:
When someone has a shitty public opionion, we force others to MAKE PUBLIC their opinions.
And because our society is so polarized, we don't talk about opinions or their nuances; we reduce them to binary views (it's possible they are but not always), we pick a side and we light our torches.
This thread reads as an example of anything BUT plurality of opinion -- most of the people here never in their lives considered that the country in question has political discourse at all, and what's going on in there politically, so no opinion was ever present.
Furthermore, consider that the opinion-like discourse is clearly performative. We all know what the correct virtue signaling looks like, and we know that we need to ruin every person not doing the correct virtue signaling.
So it's less of a plurality-of-opinion situation, and more of a direct-democracy situation: a lynch mob.
(Not saying it's good or bad btw -- not my circus, not my monkeys. Just dishonest to say we love some sort of plurality while doing this I think.)
No, it's not everyone and it's always been this way. Nobody really cares about the opinion of random strangers.
People care about the opinions of those they're invested in (emotionally, politically, financially, etc.) and it's those opinions they want to know. People want to associate with those who share their values. It has always been this way.
Really fighting windmills with the hot takes about things that aren't true. "Sweden actually has a hidden wealth tax" and "The money supply is the real inflation!!"
Really in line with typical views of right-leaning people you see on X etc.
Curious, what’s exactly not true about these? The Nordic (and Central European) countries are surely not friendly to people accumulating wealth, and it’s a widely known fact that monetary supply got out of control especially since Covid. Data about it are all available in public.
> I'm not defending his choice, but consider reading Daniel's rationale
This is literally defending his choice. More than that it is providing direct support to the views you are apparently trying to distance yourself from by suggesting people read literature in favour of them - not in a context where they even see opposing arguments.
But as a fun aside to the people debating that his views aren't right wing... consider this quote from the aforementioned blog (translation made via firefox's swedish to english model)
> A building permit officer at a municipal city building office is primarily dedicated to preventing, making it difficult, costly, delayed and uneasy construction. He causes great damage and thus produces negative value, but still also receives his salary from the tax of others and is thus supported by others.
Can we get more right wing than claiming that imposing standards on industry so they don't go around building death traps that kill people to save a few bucks "causes great damage and thus produces negative value". Not even as an argument that this particular office is overly restrictive, but just as a statement about building permit officers in general.
How did we get to the point where suggesting that you hear out what someone has to say for themselves get equated to "literally defending his choice"?
I'm very far left myself, but I hate this tendency to equate any intellectual engagement with the right wing thought whatsoever with support. It's almost as if rightist politics were some kind of cooties that you catch simply by being in the same room or something.
I would characterise myself as being very left. Yet people who I perceive as to the right of me perceive themselves as much further left.
I have always considered compassion the driving force underlying left wing views. I really can't understand the mind of the spiteful left, it seems such a contradiction of values.
It's far better to respect people's ability to reach their own conclusions about things. If someone sends me media and tells me in advance what I should think of it, it devalues my estimation of them more than it does of the media in question (which I try to keep an open mind about).
No what I want is for people to not advocate for crimes against humanity like taking hundreds of thousands of people (in their own words) and ripping them away from their homes and sending them to a country that some of them have never even been to and won't speak that language in our have legal status in or so on.
And barring that I would like other people to not direct people to the first group of people's propaganda and writings as if it was a valuable thing to read in itself and to suggest that you might agree with them.
And barring that I would like people to not refer to the above as "intellectual engagement" and defend it on those terms when it is nothing of the sort because there is no engagement.
> It's almost as if rightist politics were some kind of cooties
Rightist politics may not be, but rightist rhetoric surely is. Consider GW Bush' statement "if you're not with us, you're against us" (or the 2025 equivalent "either you support genocide, or you're an antisemite"): where is the room for intellectual engagement in statements such as these?
Your suggested "intellectual engagement" with absolute positions such as these serves absolutely no other purpose than to lend them an air of legitimacy. There absolutely exist rationales that do not deserve to be "heard" or "considered".
Or put another way:
"Let's meet in the middle", says the unjust man.
You take a step forward; the unjust man takes a step back.
"Let's meet in the middle", says the unjust man.
Using regulations and permitting to improve safety, living conditions, and similar things to support people has always been left wing.
Using regulations and permitting to discriminate against people who you don't like is a long standing right wing tactic, but isn't the nature of the complaint I quoted above.
Really? If someone passes a law that criminalizes the activity of migrants, they say they're doing it to improve safety and living conditions. But it seems like the current people in the left-wing tent hate restrictions on migrants and view such regulations as racist.
Consider GWB's "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." For and against are not always the only options. Sometimes there are nuances, or other concerns.
Daniel made this decision as a private individual. Some of his colleagues (including me) dislike it as private individuals.
I recognize that the amount as well as his position of power within the company (co-founder, co-owner, co-CEO) make people who disapprove more uncomfortable than if it had been a much lower amount from a regular employee.
However, as others have argued, what would happen if Mullvad started weighing in on politics unrelated to its mission?
Better to see Mullvad almost like a force of nature: Mullvad believes privacy is a universal right. You might disagree but at least it's consistent, and I'd argue that's one path to trustworthiness - you know how we're likely to treat you as a customer. (equally, regardless of your political affiliation)
Obviously everyone is free to make their own choice on whether they like this stance or not.
Thank you for taking this stance. It is the mature, intellectual, and virtuous one, and with it you are on civilization’s side.
The US is currently in a very bad place politically. It’s visible not just in politicians, but in everybody’s minds, all the time. A person who believes they’re fighting for their life obsesses over “us vs them”, and forgets their every principle and even most reasoning, until the fight is over. When we spit on your principles, please know that they are our principles, too, we just are not currently well enough to remember it.
You can say Mullvad is apolitical all you want but the problem is money paid to Mullvad is eventually ending up in the hands of Örebropartiet by way of Daniel directing his compensation into his donations.
He didn't say Mullvad is a apolitical, in fact, he said Mullvad is inherently political because they fight for freedom of speech, freedom of information and the right to privacy.
You are saying something incongruent with what kfreds said!
"Mullvad is weighing in on politics unrelated to its privacy mission because money given to Mullvad is eventually ending up in the hands of Örebropartiet by way of Daniel directing his compensation into his donations."
There, better?
The crux of what I'm saying is that if you give money to Mullvad you are giving money to Örebropartiet, and that's unchanged by the first part of the statement.
I know what you’re saying sounds perfectly rational to you and I do applaud you for holding the moral position separating someone’s private life from their contribution to the company. But, think about the number of people who were let go for far less controversial actions. At some point an officer of the company doing things in their personal life becomes a distraction to the company’s goals. My question is, would you act differently if this person were not a co-founder?
If Mullvad fired an ordinary employee for donating to an anti-immigration party or pressured them into not donating, I would absolutely find a new VPN provider that doesn't do this over it.
For sure, and I think most people would agree with this. However, I also think most people treat it differently when it is someone so high up because they have a lot of control and, more importantly, accumulate a large part of the profit.
I don't think you should not be allowed to have strong political opinions in such a position. I just think that in this case, it is very dangerous to express so much support for them in such a public way. I say this because (from my perspective at least) a large part of Mullvad's "competitive advantage" is their brand image, and it just feels that a link to controversial politics probably does more harm than good to this brand image.
> would you act differently if this person were not a co-founder?
I have several colleagues who I'm fairly certain are anarcho-syndicalists, meaning they want to abolish the state and capitalism. I don't know about my colleagues, but in general anarcho-syndicalists seek to bring about their vision through organising trade unions, and use that to seize control of the means of production and distribution. I on the other hand am clearly a capitalist pig seeking to oppress my workforce. Why else would I invite them to join me on the barricades against mass surveillance and censorship? Shared values around privacy? :P
I have no business questioning which demonstrations my colleagues participate in, or what they write on their blog. As long as they are not actively malicious against me, our workplace, or their fellow coworkers.
It's getting late, maybe I'm missing something in my description. I guess that's a rough approximation of how I feel about tolerating differences of opinion.
You don’t consider supporting “remigration”, aka forced expulsion of non-white-skinned people, to be actively malicious? What if he was physically going door to door and assaulting immigrants? Would that also be out of scope for you?
Of course the distinction itself is important in its own way, but I think/hope everyone here fully realizes and accepts that he technically donated as a private individual. You can clearly see it from the headline - it does not say "Mullvad VPN AB is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party", after all. For those who have an issue supporting Mullvad after this, that is unlikely to be the point of contention. The issue seems to be simply in this case, some people clearly find the private individual's actions objectionable enough to not want to support a product that individual is deeply associated with, profits from (and then funnels those profits into said actions), etc. Fixating on this being done as a private individual just comes off like a bit of a deflection attempt from a pretty straightforward case of individual actions having consequences.
> I think/hope everyone here fully realizes and accepts that he technically donated as a private individual
In this forum, yes. Unfortunately there are lots of people who don't care to inform themselves in the least. During the weekend my impression was that most people assumed Mullvad only had one founder, owner and CEO. Some people were implying that Mullvad's workforce supported this, which of course is ridiculous. I don't want to be associated with this donation. Then there are the people who think he donated 5 million USD or EUR. Sigh.
It would be nice if people didn't resort to make things up, and instead expressed their disapprovement based on fact. That's what I'm doing. As are several of my colleagues.
> The issue seems to be simply in this case, some people clearly find the private individual's actions objectionable enough to not want to support a product that individual is deeply associated with
Yes, that is clear.
> Fixating on this being done as a private individual just comes off like a bit of a deflection attempt from a pretty straightforward case of individual actions having consequences.
Ah, thanks. That was not my intent. For sure an individual's actions has consequences, especially when you're in a position of power. In this case people are holding Daniel accountable by switching providers. They are acting according to their beliefs. That's fine.
Meanwhile I am also trying to clarify Mullvad's position on the matter. Many people understand it and still disagree. That's also fine.
And if the Örebro party decides it wants chat control or similar things? Will Daniels privacy principles stand or will it bend to suit his likely stronger beliefs in anti immigration? Has he made similar contributions to parties against chat control?
Örebropartiet is not Al Qaeda nor a terrorist organisation. They can have a controversial position, but I'm not sure it is worse than the position of the republican party in the US which has many supporters amongst CEO of big tech companies.
> However, as others have argued, what would happen if Mullvad started weighing in on politics unrelated to its mission?
A bit too late for that now, isn't it? Extreme anti-immigration stances have always been associated with anti-privacy because eventually those stances evolve into state apparatuses designed to identify dissidents and targets for deportation. What will you do when the party your co-founder supports eventually demands stripping away privacy for the sake of finding 'terrorists'? Trying to hold this thin veneer of apoliticalism outside of your privacy stance is a remarkably foolish one and one that most people can identify. Especially those who saw that progression occur in real time.
> Maybe there's a case to distance Mullvad from him, then. Not taking a stand is also a political choice.
They are making a stand. This stance that they've taken has made me decide that I'm switching from another VPN provider TO Mullvad. Not many people have the backbone to actually stand behind freedom of speech when it may cost them something. It's very admirable.
If you bought the product, the money went to the company. You don't need to take personal responsibility beyond that, and the company isn't doing the thing you hate so much. By the same token that "some of your money might end up (after many twists and turns) empowering politics you find repugnant", a much bigger share of this money is paying for the food on the table of the employees, their families and their children.
How many people unrelated with your personal gripe, people that were doing a good job since you were paying and satisfied customer, are you willing to punish in order to "send a message"?
This is an impossible standard to live by and demand from everything you buy and every service you pay for. Doubly so if you need to announce to the world you're dropping a product because of something that isn't done by or responsibility of its employees.
> If it were a small amount of money, it wouldn’t be an issue.
I'm not speaking for or against anyone's views for or against anything here, but it's worth noting that Brendan Eich's $1K donation caused quite the stir.
I am sympathetic to the sentiment, but the argument does not hold water.
> the fact remains some of my money can end up empowering politics I find repugnant
are you paying taxes? are you using gasoline? are you paying for amazon?
Some ratio of your money will always go toward something you hate. The big question is: is for a mulvad subscription that ratio bigger than for the alternative? The next question is: how is the ratio for things you like?
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.
I'm a long-time Mullvad customer, and I respect what the company has been doing and the pro-privacy political stance it openly and publicly stands for.
I agree that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission, and shouldn't be.
But what I do care about, strongly, is that Mullvad as a company doesn't bow to pressure from pro-immigration activists who are attempting to impose social and financial consequences on people and institutions like Mullvad that tolerate anti-immigration political speech. Which is of course why people are publicizing this donation and publicly stating that they will no longer do business with Mullvad because of it.
I want to state publicly that what would make me no longer do business with Mullvad is if Mullvad, organizationally, attempted to pressure Daniel Berntsson into not donating to anti-immigration political parties because it induces pro-immigration activists to attempt to boycott the company. I don't want to live in a world where people trying to run a pro-privacy VPN feel pressure to police anti-immigration speech unrelated to the core mission among people in their organization, and that's the principle that my customer dollars are riding on.
> I'm a long-time Mullvad customer, and I respect what the company has been doing and the pro-privacy political stance it openly and publicly stands for.
The speech people are objecting to isn't anti-immgiration. It is pro crimes against humanity against people who previously immigrated, and their descendants.
A stance that Sweden should reduce the amount of immigration they accept would be utterly unremarkable and never result in outrage like this.
> 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.
Immigration in the US is a completely different problem with its own crazy complex history of cause and effect. Using one as a lens to study the other seems foolish at best.
No, plenty of people in the US want to limit illegal immigration and expand legal avenues.
It’s the Democrats and Republican politicians and party activists who can’t compromise. The Democrats don’t address illegal immigration, even the easy wins like when immigrants were placed in hotels while homeless Americans were in the street and crummy shelters (Maine). Then Trump finally deports criminals, but also technically-illegal people who’ve lived decades and started families here (and haven’t commit any crimes beyond speeding tickets), and restricts and harasses legal immigrants.
There’s something wrong with politics where parties can’t even accept the most obvious exceptions to their “controversial” issues, maybe because of the stupid “slippery slope”. I expect people to fight over 1 million refugees who aren’t misbehaving but overloading systems. I don’t expect people to fight over an immigrant who assaulted someone, or a legal immigrant who is giving more than they take.
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.
> Which is of course why people are publicizing this donation and publicly stating that they will no longer do business with Mullvad because of it.
But you're doing the same thing, making the same threat. You've only escalated it from a conscientious protest to a Mexican stand off.
I'm not icked-out by immigration discussion, but I am concerned by business owners starting down a political path. VPNs are not a very glamorous segment of the industry, and Mullvad had carved out a niche in taking a neutral side and fostering trust through a transparent product. My former boss spoke well of them and visited their sites in-person after hearing the marketing line about their RAM-only VPNs. Their appeal was not in protecting politicized speech, but protecting all speech and defending it as an apolitical technological imperative.
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 your paycheck on inordinate political investments 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.
> 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.
> I don't see a meaningful difference between voicing political opinions and voting based on them, and making private donations to a political cause.
One of them is enabled by customer trust and investment, the other isn't? People wouldn't want to cut off their money if it wasn't going towards political parties. It's the connection between the business and the private donations that is causing the outrage, Mullvad's brand can't really escape that sort of conflation once their CEOs spend their paycheck on those donations. Same goes for the rest of Big Tech, look at Oracle or Meta for example.
> The reason this particular donation is making the news is because it's to an anti-immigration party
It's because Mullvad had an apolitical reputation. Maybe it was a lie, maybe it wasn't, but by either CEO investing in a non-privacy stance they're risking the brand appeal they once had. It's unfortunate, and I don't think it has to be a winners/loser mentality like you're pushing forward. These sorts of investments are the ones that erode principled businesses and divide their customerbase. Whether or not you agree with it is inconsequential, it's the political vacillation that is concerning beyond the outrage/fringe politics angle.
Today you might support them, next year you might be wishing you never gave them the confidence. I understand why many customers, even apolitically, see this as their breaking point.
> 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.
This isn't 'a person', this is one of 'THE' people. Elon Musk is technically just 'a person' at Tesla, but their actions have clear and profound effects. The same is true here.
When you're a founder or one of the c-suite your actions represent the full company. That's part of your job.
I disagree. Daniel's private actions does not represent the company. The difference between the private actions of a CEO and an employee's is that if the actions are controversial they are much more likely to affect the company's reputation if a CEO did them than if an employee did them.
Does Swedish corporate law not have the concept of bringing the company into disrepute?
In the European countries I'm familiar with, company directors are held to a higher standard precisely because they represent the company and have a duty to avoid damaging it through their private as well as public acts. Is Sweden really so very different?
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.
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.
Yeah, what's your point? Plenty of us are actively opposing the evil things our tax dollars fund all the time. If we could safely opt out of paying taxes for those things, we would.
But Mullvad isn't the government. I can get a VPN from somewhere else. I can opt out of funding something that I consider morally abhorrent.
So have I and I'm using lots of OSS by people and groups that I'm politically, ethically, morally and whatever else-ly incompatible with and yet they build great stuff for free without restricting me and my use of it. If my revenue allows for it I'll gladly donate to all of them for their work (that is also running my side gig and homelab) without looking into their spending OT donation habits.
I'll happily keep on listening to radical left punk, RAC/rock against Communism as well as anti fascist and NS Black Metal as long as the music moves me.
I can't go around judging all day. Wherever I spend money, I'll probably disagree with 99% of what the people at the receiving end will do with it.
This isn't an all or nothing approach. People can exercise the options they have without being a puritanical crazy about it. This isn't a strong argument. You can protest about how society is structured while still taking part it in.
There is a thing called political power. The local baker may be the most vile racist out there but he cannot affect my life. The CEO bank rolling a political party can
Their CEOs and the tech megacorps have been openly supporting Trump and financing both him personally and his political projects. There is no ambiguity in that at all.
Why shouldn't someone divest from big tech companies if they think they are harmful?
If I found out that my local bakery was funding regressive far-right politics, I absolutely would stop going to that bakery.
These are silly questions with easy answers if you have basic moral standards. By mocking people for having standards, you just reveal you lack them yourself.
> [Bad companies] 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.
People keep saying these things and I simply don't understand this at all. For sure some of my money goes to things I don't want to support, but for the money I can control and know where it's going without doing active research (though that approach can be also used), and even if it's just what I get as info through newspapers, forums and news sites, it absolutely shouldn't get people who I think of a re extreme rascist (regardless of whether this applies in this specific case).
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 lets only boycott small and inconsequential companies like Mullvad that are easily replaceable. However not companies like Apple, Intel or Nvidia etc. whose CEOs have expressed their personal admiration of Trump and supported him financially because it would not be very convenient?
To be fair that seems to be reasonably rational i.e. anthropomorphising lawnmowers is a fool’s errand while its feasible to actually make a difference in cases like this
I don't use Apple, Intel, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Microsoft, Nvidia, X, Starlink. I'm working on dropping Google currently, since I made the mistake of listening to a friend and switching to Gmail years ago. I don't own a car.
I know that I'm an outlier but that doesn't matter to me. People can express their own moral (or immoral) choices, I can't control that. But don't tell me there's nothing you can do.
What you seem to be missing is that every single € you've spent on virtually anything in the past number of years, some of it has found its way to support organisations that have extreme racist views.
But as someone that has been in a similar situation to you, I understand it's tough to end up building something big with someone who's politics you do not agree with. I would seriously urge you to consider building something new that rejects this kind of politics explicitly.
Oh, I definitely agree with some of his political opinions, the obvious ones being around free speech, free press, and privacy.
There are important issues where we don't agree. His values around empathy stretch to most sentient beings, and he believes I commit torture when I eat fish for lunch. And he's still willing to associate with me.
You presume wrong. He has nothing against immigrants as a group. He sees open borders as the ideal, and have since he was a teenager. As far as I can tell the only reason he doesn't actively advocate for it at the moment is because of mismanagement of the government. Something like that. I don't want to say more because I don't want to misrepresent his views.
Unless you happen to be of Somalian descent in Sweden. Then you should be ripped away from the only home you've ever known, indeed possibly the only country you've ever been in, and sent to a foreign country you have no citizenship in, where you have no home, don't understand the language, know no one, and be forced to try and survive.
Most of those children wouldn't be able to communicate with their own parents, if that were the case.
Somalis are usually not spread out among the natives. They tend to clump together in ethnic enclaves where it is very easy to learn Somali (and where life is unpleasant for the unfortunate child who doesn't learn it).
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.
Not just against it for children, at this point they might be grown up attending university or even working. In theory it would even apply to my colleagues which have become citizens but do not speak Swedish.
I don't believe that integration has worked well either, but it doesn't mean that I think we should "send back" people that were born here and don't have any other citizenship.
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.
Fredrik, thank you for a clear and honest statement of Mullvad's position rather than corporate word salad.
> 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.
> That said, if you no longer want to be a Mullvad customer for philosophical reasons, we think it's important to honor that
Combining the above statements, would you have any recommendations on VPN providers for people who choose to leave Mullvad? As you will agree, anonymity and privacy are under attack the world over and even people who leave Mullvad deserve have access to tools enabling the same.
The VPN space is a cesspool of shady operators who seem to spend more on marketing than technology and it's really hard even for the HN audience to know which providers are legit. This is where your background and experience are really valuable, so any recommendations would be very welcome.
Yes, I am aware that the ask here is to endorse a competitor, however if someone has made up their mind to leave Mullvad, they are going to do so anyway. Enabling them to do so while retaining their anonymity and privacy will go a long way in advancing the political aims Mullvad stands for.
Hi! No worries. I haven't spoken with Nick Pestell of IVPN in ages, but he's always struck me as genuine and empathetic. We met the first time at RightsCon in 2018 I believe. TunnelBear and ExpressVPN were also there. We all wrote this thing together: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2018/10/17/signals-trustworthy-v...
Since those conversations I've always thought that IVPN is closest aligned with Mullvad's values. Again, I haven't spoken with Nick in ages, so I don't know what IVPN is doing now.
That's great and all but can I have a refund for the portion of my mullvad subscription that went to supporting organizations who think that people like me don't deserve to live?
Can you point to the charter where the Örebro party ever said that you don't deserve to live?
The embellishments of what people actually believe is extremely exhausting.
FWIW, I'm an immigrant in Sweden and if they gained power I would be affected, but we talk about people with differing views to us as if they're actively violent in order to shut down conversation.
This catasphrophising language will eventually not help your cause, because ordinary people start to feel numb to it and the hard-right will not be defeated by it.
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.
Which is a direct result of the right-wing conservatives complaining about them taking locals' jobs. There are some exceptions like for Ukrainian refugees.
By the way this is only during the validation of their asylum-seeker status. Once they get permanent residency they can work.
Q: When people seek asylum, is the expectation that they should return when its safe?
Or is taking in 10% of population mean that you have a permanent minority population that is part of a permanent underclass similar to how black people have it in the US?
> That you consider immigrants to be automatically part of an 'underclass' is very telling of the stigmatisation of asylum seekers.
What? Motherfucker I am part of the underclass, it's brutally hard to escape the underclass and unfortunately if you turn up to a country with no connections, no safety net, no money and no applicable skills then: YOU ARE PART OF THE UNDERCLASS.
Why are all the Foodora drivers Arab? do you think Arabs are pre-disposed for food delivery? No, it's because gig-work that barely pays the bills is the only option for many: this is disgusting servitude, barely surviving like this.
> Some of them are doctors and scientists especially from places like Syria.
Doctors from Syria who don't speak Swedish, need to pass a bunch of Swedish certifications to practice and cannot take female patients aren't going to get along well.
It's a valid point and one I would grant you, but it's very true that the observed reality of things is that asylum seekers are the most vulnerable in society.
Pretending they're not doesn't make this not the case.
It's worth reminding people that gaining citizenship by birth location is NOT even close universal around the world and that people inherit citizenship from their parents is not some radical far right notion.
Have you ever listened to what some Muslims say about us? Not someone who died a long time ago and whose political views (which were mostly about the Treaty of Versailles and the Greatness of the Germans) but people who live here in Europe right now?
They even have a couple of books -- that some of them take very seriously -- that document what they intend to do to us.
What you said makes sense, but what the founders do matters. I'll never buy a Tesla car because of Elon's actions. I cancelled my Amazon Prime subscription because of Bezos' actions.
There are plenty of people for whom it doesn't matter, but for some it does.
Indeed. It matters to me. In fact, most of my political opinions have atrophied, or rather I have self-censored. Daniel believes that is not the right trade-off to make in this case. I understand his point of view, and disagree.
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.
> is that any individual is able to pour millions into a political party of any persuasion.
It's an even bigger problem that political parties are heavily subsidized by the state, which favours the establishment.
This goes beyond purely monetary subsidies. Some people employed by the state have an essentially political function or have a large political influence over the population and they have been hired (and incentivized) by the established parties over decades.
> It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission
Why should this be obvious? I don't think that's obvious at all. The owner of a company could very easily decide to one day use their company to further their political beliefs/ideologies (see: Twitter, FaceBook, etc..). Why would Mullvad be any different?
To answer your question, we started building this organization in the summer of 2008 for idealistic reasons, and we are still idealists who think privacy is fundamental to a civilized society.
The best strategy for achieving societal impact through entrepreneurship is consistent, long-term, and value-based ownership. For us, this disqualifies taking outside investment, either through venture capital or going public. Mullvad has instead been growing organically without outside investments.
Our principles have withstood the test of time. Our conviction has remained unchanged through multiple serious offers of acquisition and outside investment. Words are cheap of course, but consistent action over the course of almost two decades is not.
Mullvad is about privacy. Neither Daniel nor I have used Mullvad's brand to promote our personal opinions.
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...
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.
> 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.
Everyone has their own definition of a bad actor. The fact that you're implying to know how to spot them says a lot about your tolerance for differences in opinion.
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'm sorry to hear that. For what it's worth I think there's nuance in his decision that most people don't see. Of course that doesn't mean I think it was the right decision to make.
Here's something worth considering: why would someone whose ideal is open borders, who has been an animal rights activist, and someone who has led Mullvad for 17 years (with the track record it has), choose to donate to this party? If you like what Daniel and I have done together over the past 17 years, and now vehemently oppose his choice to make this donation, doesn't that make you just a little bit curious?
It made me curious. It didn't change my ultimate stance, but it did temper my emotions about it.
>Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment is also liberating and promotes truth seeking
I agree 100%, which is why the dehumanizing intolerance of the Mullvad CEO completely disqualifies your organization from being on the same side as that statement.
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.
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.
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.
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. transgender 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.
Is it 'extremist' to want to avoid your country from harboring criminals with incompatible views on freedom and expression? I don't think most people would call Ukraine politically extreme for defending their country from Russia, but what do I know.
The more people tolerate the far right, the worse the world will be because they will take your good faith and use it to extinguish tolerance for anyone but themselves. This is literally textbook. I don't know how you can invoke the word tolerance without understanding this.
You may try to unsuccessfully hold this distinction, but at the end of the day money that I give to your company ends up being used by far-right politicians to oppose Mullvad's supposed mission.
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.
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.
It's a company: the deal is that they help enable free speech of their customers, not everyone on earth or everyone in Sweden or anywhere else.
A great litmus test for the (somewhat outrageous) claims in this thread: does Mullvad refuse to provide service to non-white immigrants in Sweden? If yes, then you have a point. If no, I do not think Mullvad is the entity that is confused in this situation.
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.
The question is not rhetorical. A lot of people in this thread advocate for hurting Berntssons career for the political views he expressed with his donation.
I personally believe that a lot of those people did not think through the consequences at all: Making it acceptable/typical/common for political expression to be punished at the workplace would obviously lead to self-censorship and direct/indirect censorship by employers.
My view is that this is utterly incompatible with liberalism (but a lot of the proponents would claim to lean liberal themselves!). I have not found good counterarguments for my current view so far.
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.
The "irony" in supporting that party I believe is a stretch. I don't see how support for some neo-nationalists is inherently "anti-freedom"; would that not apply to any party arguing against open borders?
My personal belief is that professional discrimination because of political support is a very slippery slope, and I honestly think that a lot of people directly or indirectly advocating for it are not fully understanding of what this means and where that slope ends:
When asking about professional boycott for "questionable" past positions (like being gay in Turings time) I only get silence in response because people presumably realize that such witch-hunting often ends up looking really bad in retrospect.
edit: I just misunderstood your last point, completely agree.
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.
>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?
My point is that if you are boycotting the company despite living on the opposite side of the world from Örebro (thus being inherently unable to vote at the booth), then you are not really participating in politics, you are participating in a witchhunt (with negligible political effects).
I'm suggesting that small political progress is simply not worth witch-hunting for. If you have political concerns, engage by voting, starting your own party or advocating for your cause instead of ruining the career of a person you disagree with.
>if you are boycotting the company despite living on the opposite side of the world
If I'm living at the opposite side of the world and my money was indirectly influencing Swedish politics then I'm doing Sweden a service by discontinuing my payment. After all the only thing I'm doing is reduce the power of corporations in a democratic process, I literally cannot take any Swedish vote away. That's exactly what you asked for.
> If you have political concerns, engage by voting, starting your own party or advocating for your cause
I do all of that, I'm an active member of a European political party and engaged far beyond just voting. 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. That is money in politics. If there was no money in politics, these people wouldn't be able to spread their hate. All of these parties on our continent are funded and supported by oligarchs across the world.
> 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).
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.
EDIT: It also seems that the party is extremely left leaning but is anti-immigration, as a person who lives in Swedens third largest city (which is predominantly non-Swedish, like myself: I am also an immigrant) I can understand Swedes desire to minimise this, it's not a "far-right" topic anymore.
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.
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.
Of course you would set up another strawman for this. Yes, very intelligent, declining to support a business when their founders have odious politics is exactly the government's thought police enforcing wrongthink violations.
People are not permitted to question the notion that their culture and demographics should completely change in a generation or two otherwise they are odious and we should destroy their business until they step down.
There are so many worse people but lets not care about that, because one of the men who founded something that permits people to escape censorship did something that we should censor him for.
He dared support other opinions than the prevailing groupthink.
Jesus wept, this whole thread is a fantastic recruiter for the right wing. Anything less than unfettered migration is “disgusting”, how can any person reasonably have a conversation in this environment, someone in this thread even indicated that the Mullvad founder “promoted people who didn’t want him to live”.
This hysteria is fucking laughable.
within a single generation 12% of the Swedish population was imported, if we did the same thing to an african nation we would rightly consider that a problem. I’m not saying it’s a problem, but drowning out more moderate politicians from being allowed to speak about it is exactly why SD (a party of racist retards) starts gaining credible support.
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.
>> 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.
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).
Örebropartiet policies directly target and restrict the religious, educational, and cultural expression of people who legally reside in Sweden.
Their polices focus on the way people dress, the languages they speak in public, the institutions and schools they build, the traditions they practice.
People would be forced to self-censor their speech, their beliefs, and their behavior.
And what does the "religious, educational, and cultural expression" you're talking about says about others outside that group? Maybe your arguments support Örebropartiet more than you want to admit.
> Their polices focus on the way people dress, the languages they speak in public, the institutions and schools they build, the traditions they practice.
Do you have sources and quotes for this? Wikipedia only says “remigration”, although another comment mentioned that the translated Swedish word implies “assimilation”. Trying to restrict what people (even immigrants) do goes against free expression: deporting those based on ethnicity is immoral for other reasons but does not.
It does not, but does appear on the party's English wikipedia page that they support 'remigration'. However when switching to Swedish, it seems they are pro (forceful) assmilation, rather than remigration.
I don't know enough of Swedish politics or social issues to determine which one is the more correct characterization of the party, but even that is a serious difference in policy.
> I don’t support remigration, but calling immigration “the free expression of people” is a stretch. It’s orthogonal.
Far right political parties have a marked tendency to severely restrict freedom of expression once they’re in power. They routinely call for it when they’re the underdogs, but that often changes fairly quickly once they get their way.
In some cases you can see hints of that before they came into power. In France for instance, our main far right party (Rassemblement National) supports drastic budget cuts to state-financed media, and I believe a more direct control of said media from executive power.
One would have to check whether the Swedish Örebro party is similar of course. I personally no absolutely nothing about that party. Still, it is not a stretch for me to strongly suspect that a party that calls for deportation (let’s call it what it is, okay?) is also a party that is, or at the very least will be, against freedom of expression and freedom of information.
If it is, then Mullvad’s co-founder has a serious conflict of interest, and I would have no choice but seriously lower my confidence in their VPN.
I hope their sister company, Tillitis, is mostly free of such. Though even if it too is tainted, their TKey is fully open source (schematics and all if I recall correctly), and simple enough to be independently audited. They even have an unlocked version you can burn yourself so you don’t even have to trust their provisioning process. That’s the difference with a VPN: a VPN is like a Palantir, you kinda have to trust Sauron will do right by you. The TKey is more like Nemik’s astro-navigator: the user can verify themselves they are its sole master, once they did they can trust it even if it was manufactured by the Empire itself.
I mean, I love my TKey. I don’t care if Elon Musk and Peter Thiel themselves oversaw its manufacture, now it’s mine, and there’s no way I’m letting the enemy have exclusivity over it.
> In some cases you can see hints of that before they came into power. In France for instance, our main far right party (Rassemblement National) supports drastic budget cuts to state-financed media, and I believe a more direct control of said media from executive power.
What does defunding state-funded media (aka propaganda) have to do with the freedom of expression?
This is an over-generalization: you even mention that you “have to check” the party’s policies, which seem to be far-left except for the immigration part.
I actually agree that many far-right parties seem to restrict freedom of expression when they have majority power, but so do many far-left parties. Far-right may be generally statistically worse, but again, this says nothing about Örebro specifically who aren’t typical.
Okay, let’s just focus on the "remigration" thing, then.
Sure, Örebro is not typical, and may indeed be an exception.
But.
This apparent racism remains cogent evidence that they are also against freedom of expression — even if perhaps not openly. Also, I have yet to know of one political party who sincerely advocates for both deportation and freedom of expression.
I'm always wary of people bringing up the paradox of tolerance; most of the time, it's just used as an excuse to justify censorship while claiming to be opposed to it. "When you censor me, you're being intolerant and that's wrong; when I censor you, I'm doing it in the name of tolerance, so I'm correct".
I'm not Swedish, so it's possible there's something that I am missing. But skimming the wikipedia page for the party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party#), I don't see anything that says the party is pro censorship.
No political party is going to say they're "pro censorship".
But if they promise to target specific groups of people to close their schools, regulate how they dress, ban their prayers, and suppress their art, it's all about restricting their freedom of expression.
> No political party is going to say they're "pro censorship".
There are plenty of political parties that proudly claim to oppose "hate speech".
> But if they promise to target specific groups of people to close their schools, regulate how they dress, ban their prayers, and suppress their art, it's all about restricting their freedom of expression.
I could be wrong, but it looks like their plan is to cut public funding, not to censor those things.
The "paradox of tolerance" is only a paradox to people who can't tell the difference between words and actions, anyway. There's no paradox in tolerating the words if you draw the line at action to implement those words.
So far as I can tell, the main source of this claim is the comment you are responding to, and similar.
I think the real issue is this: "The party is heavily opposed to political corruption and high politician incomes and wants to reduce the wages of politicians and senior officials." (from Wikipedia, among other sources.)
> 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.
I think most criticism of this party is probably around "large scale remigration" and "stricter immigration policy", which are often nice ways to word "getting rid of everyone that doesn't look like us".
But if you want to play this little game, I can play too. Personally I think the real issue people have with this platform is the free dental care. Big tooth obviously doesn't want to lose profit.
Is it? They appear to be some sort of hardcore pseudo libertarians with some nationalistic vibes. To an extent that seems to overlap with Mullvad’s declared value?
> 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."
It's weird he said that, given that at the time there were many examples of intolerant societies that had become increasingly tolerant. So the statement is factually incorrect, and, given how educated he was, he knew this. In other words, the statement is a lie. But very useful if you manage to put yourself in the position of being the one to define what is intolerant, and which things are so important to tolerate that they should be beyond democratic decision-making.
That said, I don't disagree that private donations can be incompatible with (or more accurately, counter-productive to) the stated mission of a company. And it's not unreasonable for journalists to report on it, on the logic it may affect consumer choices. But I'm not familiar with Örebro, and nothing in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party#Policies indicates they're against online anonymity or free expression. But maybe I missed something?
> 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."
yeah i'm sick and tired of hearing this, because it gets applied very asymmetrically.
we routinely tolerate certain kinds of intolerants and silence other, and that sucks.
people happily tolerate lgbt-intollerant people, afraid of being called islamophobic and/or intollerant, and but we do not tollerate at all people that have been calling that risk out for years.
so yeah, popper's writings are being grossly misused, and i'm sick and tired of seeing that come out in every discussion on these topics.
---
Also: if only mullvad is taking that kind of political stance (no-log vpn etc)... maybe you should think twice about who is actually on your side.
>"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."
does that fight against "intolerant" also include fighting people from other culture that are systematically and religiously opposed against your current society and its tolerance and will undermine it within the next couple decades by reproducing more? nvm im aware asking for self awareness is too much.
More tolerant of race presumably, less tolerant towards other people being bigots.
The big problem with discriminating against other people you disagree with is that you have to be right, or you are the bigot (doubly so!).
Just consider boycotting someone like Turing for being gay a century ago. That is a double self own with hindsight, that a lot of people (back then) could have been baited into.
So I'm advocating for not boycotting peoples careers until you are absolutely sure (even then you might be wrong!).
Also consider: How much social progress did we actually achieve with witch hunts? Would you really be comfortable crediting those with the repeal of Jim Crow laws? And how often, on the other hand, did they end up in a Salem-situation?
I cannot speak for Daniel. I know there are some policies he likes and there are things he doesn’t like. Personally I am not a fan.
This morning Daniel explained his rationale to most of the company. Speaking for myself, I don’t like that he made this donation and I know this view is shared by many of my colleagues. Speaking as the co-CEO of Mullvad, we will continue to protect the universal right to privacy. People should feel safe using Mullvad regardless of their political affiliation.
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?"
I don't see him saying he doesn't want people to look into that. What I see is an explanation for why he thinks the company is better for having a multitude of views and opinions on their staff, a correction of some lazy reporting in the media and stated tolerance for people who no longer want to use said company's products for perceived value incompatibility (which he also seems to disagree with though).
Accusation: "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."
Supposed evidence: "It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission."
But the second quote has nothing to do with the accusation. He never said that he was against people examining the politics of the people running the company. Not even hinting at it.
This hasn't anything to do with you, but I also notice that people are flagging and [dead]ing completely reasonable comments in this thread, making any kind of decent conversation quite hard. What is the point of being in a comment thread, if we figuratively "kill" every person who doesn't follow only one allowed view. Are hackers doing this because they are the same type of persons who would literally kill people with differing views if they had such opportunity and power?
https://hackersmacker.org is pretty great. It allows me to not waste effort. After using it for a while now, there's incredible consistency with people I mark making the same shallow types of comment/inability to think. I think tribalism is just more pronounced in some people.
sorry but your argument is sophomoric and disingenuous. and your absurd complaint about "killing" makes it pretty clear you're not engaging in good faith.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Refusing repatriation of your own people is a hostile act something a bit short of a declaration of war, in my opinion. Which is why I assume that origin countries are cooperating with deportations from the USA, but not from Europe. Because they know there can be hell to pay if they outrage the Americans.
> 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.
I'm sorry to hear that. We didn't mean to come across as dismissive. We're simply saying that if you disagree with our stance on the matter, you are welcome to reach out to support, and they can hopefully sort out a refund.
One could argue that 'politically neutral' could also be a policy they apply to their employees at all levels; i.e. if everyone gets along at the office and does their job, that's really all that matters.
If anything, respecting an employee's personal life privacy seems fairly in-line with the values one would want in a privacy-focused VPN company.
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.
"I'm surprised the co-founder of a freedom of speech company is contributing to a political party that wants to force religious charter schools to close."
"We have worked extremely hard to ensure that your internet browsing cannot be retrieved by the police, even with a warrant, and that you can be anonymous online" is not at all "politically neutral"
Like, I agree with and support their politics, but that doesn't make something politically neutral.
Can you show me a source where this party or Mullvad founder(s) are against non-white? Cite an exact statement please.
I don't think anyone gives a sh*t about skin color, but of course it's legitimate to care about cultural background and education, not wanting uneducated people with vastly different culture that doesn't align with the host country is a valid stance and it makes sense to maintain proper equilibrium in the said country.
The party he's donating money to (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party) is an advocate of "remigration" that is a policy of forced deportation including of citizens on the basis of ethnicity. They're also it should be added self-declared Marxists, so in this case that's not a hyperbolic usage of the term, it's literally a kind of national socialist party.
Personally I'm not going to not continue to pay for Mullvad any longer. I've never been super squeamish when it comes to disagreements about policy but when you're unironically starting to sound like the NSDAP I'm out.
Just to bring some of the quotes from that wikipedia article to this thread
> 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." [57]
> 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."
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.
Do you think any of the people publicly claiming that they will no longer do business with Mullvad because Daniel Berntsson donates to an anti-immigration political party, wouldn't make donating to that party an illegal, jail-able legal offense if they had the political power to do 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
Lets remember for a second that Mullvad has enabled people on all side of the political spectrum to communicate online, anonymously. This is more noble than almost anything else. Mullvad has enabled freedom for yourself, and millions of others, regardless of their political or personal leans.
I'm sorry to hear that. Yes, Daniel and I own 50% each.
> obviously Berntsson has every right to his opinions and to express them
Indeed.
> 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
That is exactly the case.
> but in the end I just don't want my money supporting anti-people causes.
As is your right. Daniel made his choice and now you make yours, as a number of other people in this thread has done. Some believe this party is left-wing, others right-wing. Some approve of it, others don't. Personally I don't, and as I've said elsewhere in this thread I wish he hadn't donated. As do many of our colleagues. To be fair though, there are also colleagues who do seem to approve. And then there are those who don't seem to care either way.
Still, I'm glad you recognize the possibility that Daniel and I are able to keep our personal opinions separate from the mission of our company. This is something we live in our daily work as well. As a workplace I'm glad we're not a monoculture of 100% like-minded individuals.
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?
I've known pretty far right people that are empathetic. That doesn't matter, given what they support, though. I think you're focusing on the wrong thing.
And given the party Daniel supports, saying he doesn't want a monoculture... it seems like you are being naive. There are lots and lots of right-wing people in the USA that over the years never said far right things... but their actions have shown a different story.
I think you need to judge Daniel on his actions, not his words or your gut.
You set the focus. I was simply responding to your comment, same as I am now.
Again, I'm not defending his choice, but no, I'm not being naive. Over the 20 years I've known him he has demonstrated his values through consistent words and actions. I'd share details but that's not my place to do. You may choose to believe me or not.
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.
I would like to add one note: if I were an activist in Iran, or in any other way my livelihood would depend on strong privacy services, I might keep using your service and even be (slightly) more certain of the company's resolve to keep my privacy protected. Although I would be very aware of the irony. But choosing for one's own safety can override other concerns. Very few things in life are black and white.
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.
If y’all were maximally “business-rational” you would have taken the NPV of under-anonymizing your customers already and selling the data. Sure, it would tank the business in the long run but the short term profits could probably have been re-invested in the stock market or other endeavors for excellent returns. Plus once the reputation hit started coming home to roost you could have sold Mullvad to one of those large VPN umbrella holding companies.
I’m upset about this to, but honestly I don’t know what other VPN holds Mullvad’s reputation for genuine anonymity. When I learned that y’all take cash by mail, I realized that is fundamentally incompatible with bundling and selling customers data.
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.
In some business, political and legal roles, we deem certain structural relations to be a conflict of interest regardless of what people on those roles actually do..
The mere potential for excessive improper influence arising from the structure of their relationships and roles is what creates the deemed conflict.
As the owners of a company making substantial profit like Mullvad, you always had the potential capability to financially influence political outcomes on a scale which most your customers cannot, in ways that may seriously harm some of your customers and to be potentially against the stated mission of your company.
I think the relationship between running a company with an openly advertised public mission, or even an implied mission in the minds of customers, while in another role (wealthy private citizen) being able to make a substantial material action against the same mission, should be recognised as inherently a conflict of interest. But obviously it's one we can't avoid, as long as we allow people to get rich from a mission-driven company.
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.
We generally favour free speech, including political donations. But when the money for very large political financing comes mostly from customers who, by virtue of the advertising and marketing of the company's mission, are led to believe they are supporting the company's mission?
In my view, at that point the customers are being tricked into paying for something while their money is paying for something else which opposes the thing they thought they were funding.
At the least, it should be dealt with in a similar way that conflicts of interest are dealt with when, for example, directing multiple companies: By making sure everyone knows, so other people are able to consent or not on the major conflict issues those other people might have a view on. The analogy for customers is their consent shown by their informed decision to become or remain customers.
In Mullvad's situation, that would mean Mullvad should explain to customers, embedded clearly within it's public marketing of the company missions and values, that one of its current major owners receiving customer funds by way of profit, is the main financier of a political party which sponsors remigration in Sweden. Because that is clearly a thing some customers care about when evaluating whether to pay for Mullvad's services from now on. You know that, I know that, so there's no legitimate excuse for not letting customers who would care know.
Then, as you said, customers will be free to choose.
> 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.
I take my choice of VPN very seriously, and have used Mullvad for a long time. But now I cannot help but wonder whether the principles the two of you founded Mullvad on, to quote you from above: "because of our political convictions about free speech, free press, privacy, mass surveillance and censorship" are more important to Daniel than the views of his party.
He clearly is willing to spend large sums on the party's views, and if he can use his influence and access in Mullvad to achieve his party's stated goals, will he?
It is asking a lot to trust someone who espouses what he does to maintain Mullvad's founding values, and not to exploit Mullvad in pursuit of ideas he values at a very high monetary level.
I have zero confidence someone supporting what he does and thinks the way he does will protect my traffic, and I sadly cannot use or recommend Mullvad any longer.
> if he can use his influence and access in Mullvad to achieve his party's stated goals, will he?
Not a chance. He is probably the most principled individual I know. Consider our consistent refusal to use Mullvad's platform to promote anything but messaging around free speech, free press, mass surveillance, censorship and privacy. Or our consistent refusal to sell to the horde of venture capitalists, private equity and competitors who have approached us through the years. We're doing this for a small set of political issues, on which we share values.
> It is asking a lot to trust someone who espouses what he does to maintain Mullvad's founding values, and not to exploit Mullvad in pursuit of ideas he values at a very high monetary level.
I'm biased, and have more information than you, but I disagree. We have a 17 year track record.
> I have zero confidence someone supporting what he does and thinks the way he does will protect my traffic, and I sadly cannot use or recommend Mullvad any longer.
> Some believe this party is left-wing, others right-wing. Some approve of it, others don't.
For a company that puts political principle so fundamentally at the core of its marketing strategy, it's astonishing to see this kind of stance being taken.
The man who owns half the company seemingly choosing to funnel his share of its profits to a political party that advocates the mass deportation of people is, in that context, something with significant consequences.
I understand how awkward the position you're in must be, but it's obscene to present this as somehow being a thing that one can be morally neutral on. In the context of rising fascism across the continent, it's dismaying to see a company that a lot of us rely on so decisively pick the worst possible side.
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
> Mullvad's position is that privacy is a universal right
this is kind of a confusing statement considering the source. if you hold that privacy is a universal right, but you profit from gating access to it (along with someone who appears to have directed this profit to an appalling political project), are you saying that this right should only be afforded to those who pay for it? or are you just cloaking your business model in a moral shroud?
> are you saying that this right should only be afforded to those who pay for it
Not at all. When we say we believe privacy is a universal right, we're saying that e.g. states and corporations that actively violate your privacy are in the wrong. We're not saying that Mullvad, you or anyone else are obligated to work for free in order to provide privacy as a service.
After thinking about it, my advice is to start a new company with the rest of Mullvad folks who don't support this:
Markus Allard has voiced support for the idea of large scale remigration on multiple occasions. On one occasion, in a debate with a Liberal member of parliament, he asked why the Liberal party "does not wish to deport 100 000 social welfare-Somalis?"[19] In the same debate Allard also claimed 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."[20] Regarding deporting those born in Sweden, Allard said in a podcast 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."
I will be happy to continue giving you my money then. Keep in mind the situation also sucks for all of us who have been recommending Mullvad for year, only for our money to go towards that kind of hatred. It is a betrayal. Now I have to start advising against it and explaining the money goes to neo nazis.
> People who failed so spectacularly that the country became the rape capital of Europe and has more crime than El Salvador today.
> the rape capital of Europe
I’ve read that this is because Sweden changed how rape is counted - instead of multiple votes instances within the same relationship being counted as “one rape”, each instance of non-consensual intercourse is counted individually.
> and has more crime than El Salvador today
I couldn’t find any reliable data here other than Sweden’s homicide rates are a little higher than historically, but still pretty low. And the comparison to El Salvador is off the mark in general because the murder rate there has fallen dramatically from where it was historically.
I think you'd be surprised at how quickly that sentiment has moved from the far-right to close to the center. People are (rightly, in my opinion) pretty upset at their governments for letting mass migration happen with pretty much only downsides for their actual citizens. People are all about the idea of helping the downtrodden when it's just an ideal, but when they realize it's having negative consequences for them that can easily change.
> Markus Allard initiated heavy debate in 2025 by claiming that Sweden is "the land for/belongs to the Swedes"
> 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.
I don't think it's particularly hard to figure out what these are dog whistles for, and equating my vehement disagreement with it as being in favor of "open borders" is absurd.
I am confused. Are you using multiple HN accounts or something? I was not reply to the saghm account and your saghm account isn't even present up the thread.
It doesn't sound much of a dog whistle? More pretty plain spoken. I think Sweden had one of the lowest crime and high trust societies and then admitted a lot of Somali refugees and now has gang warfare and much rape from the guests. Not sure it's that ridiculous to suggest they go home?
Radiolab (the podcast) did a good series on border policy that was pretty informative.
IIRC, the US-Mexico border was never open, but it was quite porous. People would come to the US, work for a season to make some money, then go home.
Then once border security started to be tightened, leaving was too risky so people would stay leading to a huge increase in the number of undocumented people living in the US.
Strict borders have only existed for ~100 years, and many were drawn without much regard for the people living there, often constructed with intention of religious segregation, and to maintain europe's global superiority
They run counter to the notion of sovereignty and local agency which we value greatly in the US
The irrationality of strict country borders and heavy migration controls will emerge as a heavy global challenge due to economic and climate migration and aging populations
I don't think we have a good answer for what replaces them, but I don't believe there's enough evidence to state that hasty decisions made after WWI and WWII should forever govern global human freedoms - and we need a better approach than war to renegotiate some of this
Part of the reason this thread and this topic is so fraught is there are many people, like you, who are willingly and confidently lying about history. Strict borders have existed since ancient times. There are physical markers of them all over Europe that are more than 1000 years old. You can see other borders from space. This idea that only in the 20th century did this idea emerge is so wrong that it’s got the history completely and totally inverted. Why make stuff up like this?
Specifically, assuming a succesfully policed border, how did one prove their nationality, if they had such a thing, or their legitimacy otherwise for crossing it?
I will take your word for it either way! Just genuinely curious. How was it all handled before passports and birth certificates and such?
For identity away from people that knew you or your relatives you had to rely on physical letters of introduction from trusted, well know people.
But usually you were proving that you were entering (or leaving) for a legitimate purpose rather than identity exactly. There is a long history of travel documents for this, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport#Antecedents
Worth noting that once urban centers formed travel became the exception rather than the rule. There were traders who traveled trade routes and knew that requirements on those routes but for more exceptional travel you had to rely on these introductory letters in many areas of the world.
Mass migration events were different of course - and were always problematic.
The concept of a passport didn’t emerge out of the ether. If you were traveling on official business, for the state or the military or as a merchant, you’d be carrying papers that said as much. Much of it relied on trust and reputation, and assuming we’re talking about say medieval Europe possibly the signature or word of a Lord. As for enforcement, violence was common.
One of the biggest drivers of strict borders was tax collection: they defined who could collect tax from which subjects. This was a common source of conflict and so anywhere feudalism was practiced strong border definitions were strongly enforced.
It's possible the grandparent is talking more about the idea of limiting travel across those borders. That is a more defensible position but even then it was more about the the costs of enforcement.
Trade routes had very strong border enforcement because the borders were places taxes were collected for example, and there were limits on who could travel various routes.
For example Venice, Genoa and the Ottoman Empire jealously protected European end of trade routes linking to the spice road.
A lot of but certainly not all Dems (for example, Jayapal) support essentially unlimited asylum claims admitted to the US while claims are processed (i.e., not "Remain in Mexico"). This is a de facto open border policy; the vast majority of claims are bogus, but the claim gets you into the country and then most who are denied will overstay illegally as well.
The obvious solution to the problem of abuse of the asylum system (which is in fact a real problem) is to hire more immigration judges so that claims are processed in a timely manner. Apart from getting rid of the asylum process entirely, that's the only long term solution. It's something Joe Biden made progress on (though he did overstate his progress), and Donald Trump reversed.
It doesn't show up in the short term numbers because it is a long-term solution. But Americans aren't interested in long-term solutions.
Tell me, how do you, as an immigration judge, actually judge someone that says their life is at risk due to x,y, or z but you have no way of actually verifying that? Especially when they crossed quite a few countries to get here? I don't see how that's an actual solution to the problem.
One could easily argue that Trump made for more progress as far as the immigration courts being backed up by simply not having an almost completely open border like we did with Biden.
Not better, just different? GP's chart includes two prior administrations for context; yours includes Trump 2, which also provides additional context (but excludes Bush and Obama).
Biden: "Here's an app where you can make an appointment to illegally cross the border. Our system will be so backed up that you won't need to go to actual immigration court for years, and even then if we tell you to leave and you don't we probably won't go after you. You'll have plenty of time to make an anchor baby. Oh, I can't close the border without a bipartisan bill that essentially enshrines a certain level of illegal immigration. Can't be done."
Trump: "Border is closed. We're deporting people, starting with mostly those that have committed serious crimes."
The mandatory trigger at 5,000 encounters/day (or 8,500 single-day) implied acceptance of very high volumes—potentially ~1.8+ million encounters/year—before full expulsion authority kicked in. That expulsion authority only lasted for 3 years. It also codified/expanded release authority for asylum seekers under certain "operational" conditions.
The main point is that Biden acted like his hands were tied and Trump showed that they clearly weren't, and that we already had the tools to effectively shut down illegal immigration (through the border, at least).
the graph actually makes it look like the jump was due to Trump's policies, since the spike started in his term. if anything the graph shows that Biden policies arrested it shortly after. I recall reading deportations were actually very high during Biden's term.
Biden, his party, and some Republicans worked for years on the toughest border legislation ever endorsed by a Democratic president. Trump demanded it be shot down so he'd still have an issue to campaign on.
Biden's executive actions resulted in the loosest de facto border in recent memory. That he later worked on some legislation that was ultimately ineffective isn't a great defense. He could have just directed the executive branch to be less lax the whole time!
> That he later worked on some legislation that was ultimately ineffective isn't a great defense.
The in-effectivity was due entirely and directly to Trump interfering in the matter. How can a president sign legislation that doesn't reach his desk because the party in control of the legislative body is in the pocket of a man who cares more about his career than the nation's well-being?
(Also, FWIW, those immigration surges were good things (for the US), and likely helped the US stick the "soft landing" instead of slipping into a post-covid recession)
The current Mayor of New York City and three candidates that just won congressional primaries in the city belong to a political party called Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They will be joining two more DSA members in congress. This is the DSA's platform on immigration:
> Allow workers to freely migrate between countries to seek employment without restrictive immigration controls. Demilitarize the border, end all immigrant detention and deportations, immediate amnesty for all immigrants regardless of current immigration status, and provide access to jobs, labor rights, and social services to all immigrants.
In other words, give labor the same mobility as capital. Nothing inherently unreasonable about that.
Note they say “to seek employment” and “without restrictive border controls”, not “for any purpose” and “without border controls”. This does not mean they’re advocating to let in convicted murderers or people who just want to migrate for welfare benefits. Calling it “open borders” is an exaggeration in absolute terms, though it is for sure accurate as a relative comparison to what we have now.
Also, their political party, as such, is the Democrats. DSA is not a political party. But yeah they are members of DSA as well as being Democrats.
Well, some people are far more affected by it than most people. I'm in an area with a huge influx of Somalis in proportion to our population and I've heard many vague hushed conversations about it but our newspapers are filled with stories about how great our diversity is.
What are the specific factors that make you, in measurable terms, a person affected by this issue?
And from your perspective, what makes this issue so significant compared to others?
Structurally speaking, being left and pro-open borders is incoherent. The left is about collective power controlling labor supply and using it to tamp down corporate overreach. Open borders and H1B that allow corporations to side-step local worker bargaining power are squarely antithetical to being Left.
I think 'liberal progressives' that are mainly concerned with identity representation, not working class power, are rhetorically bundled as 'far-left'. To people who buy that, Bernie Sanders (a Leftist) and Kamala Harris (a Third Way liberal progressive) are both far-left. It's incoherent but rhetorically potent.
I'm not sure I've heard anyone claim that Harris is "far left" (other than people arguing against her during an active campaign, which doesn't really say much)
Biden wasn't "far left". The "far left" in US politics is basically Bernie Sanders and AOC's "squad", neither of which have ever come close to running the country.
The Biden admin was not far-left. Biden was basically a mainline Liberal Democrat and much closer to the center than far-left. The far-left basically hates mainline Liberal Democrats like Biden.
nobody wakes up in syria and thinks "drowning in the mediterranean sounds like a fun way to fulfill the far-left's desire." people leave because the alternative is worse, and the alternative being worse is often something the west had a hand in. quick tour of the "desire" pipeline: iraq 2003, invaded over weapons that didn't exist, army disbanded, vacuum becomes ISIS. syria, proxy-funded civil war, 6+ million refugees, the actual engine of the 2015 europe wave. libya 2011, NATO topples gaddafi with no plan for after, failed state and migration corridor. afghanistan, twenty year occupation then an abrupt exit. the migration is downstream of the bombing. you don't get to set the kitchen on fire and then file a complaint about people leaving the building
and that's before the boring stuff that drives migration everywhere and always, wage gaps, no economy, dead farmland, family already abroad, the same reasons europeans showed up in the americas by the tens of millions without anyone filing it under "desire." you can have a real argument about capacity and integration, how many people a system absorbs and how fast, thats legitimate. but "it's the far-left's desire" mistakes the symptom for the cause, the people making that trip have their own reasons that have nothing to do with anyone's domestic politics
I think, all pretty recently (atleast in the 'States), there's been much news and noise about the abuse and fraud of these systems designed to help the downtrodden.
Now whether that's all true, has always been true, is propaganda...whatever, but it's easy for me to understand why sentiment has been changing as the spotlight is focused more and more on the abuse of the systems as opposed to the benefits.
I also think there's some 'hierarchy of needs' going on here, where as the economy shifts and more and more Americans are struggling to afford housing, groceries, and other necessities, it's easy to feel like you should be putting yourself first over strangers. Combine that with the prior point, and you have a great recipe to build resentment. Selfish, maybe, but I can understand how you get there.
This is NOT to say 'There is no xenophobia' or anything...racism in general is alive and well in the USA... but I have pretty sound-minded people around me starting to echo this mindset, and this is my best understanding of what's been brewing.
For what it's worth, the most effective propaganda is that which reinforces latent biases.
Humans en masse are selfish, self-serving, and tribal, so it's incredibly easy to believe that there is massive abuse of social services like SNAP/EBT, those delivering services are incompetent, and that we should investment more in fraud reduction.
However, the reality is that the US spends $3.75 for each $1 of fraud discovered. And, "fraud" includes clerical errors made by the government, so the actual ROI of enforcement is even lower.
So much of the propaganda -- "immigrants steal benefits paid for by hardworking US taxpayers, so we should ramp up enforcement spending to make more room for [white] citizens" is designed to simply reinforce our biases because it's just so darned believable to a cynical and tribal people.
In reality, spending more on benefits enforcement just loses taxpayers more money while cutting more US citizens off from benefits they both need and are eligible for. It results in the opposite of its stated goal and this is well known to any policymaker.
So if saving taxpayer money, and punishing those guilty of fraud, isn't the actual objective of all this toxic propaganda, you have to ask yourself what is.
every $$ spent on this "abuse" is a $$ not spent on tax evasion while giving an impression of "finally someone is doing something" and the $$ that could be made in plugging corporate tax evasion by gar outrun the $$ saved on the no income side.
Comparing the US and Sweden, it's also useful to know that the proportion of refugees accepted by these two countries is wildly different. Sweden has historically taken in many refugees (including draft dodgers from the US). In 2015 (an outlier) they accepted rouhgly 1 refugee (163k) for every 60 people (~9.4m) in the country. At its peak in 2024, the US admitted 100k refugees, significantly fewer than the Swedish peak. The impact of refugees is much more visible (also in budgetary allocations) in Sweden than the US because of this difference.
Why are you just comparing refugee numbers? That's incredibly disingenuous. A very large portion of the US's population is here illegally, and it would be significantly larger if we didn't have birthright citizenship.
Migration in my part of Europe (Holland) has largely been workers for jobs the Dutch won't do. These people are abused as a sort of semi-serf labour mainly in the farming sector.
Some groups are a big net benefit to our (looking at the income the group benefits / social support costs) and others slight net negative. But once you take the economy into account it's positive.
It has been shown repeatedly in multiple studies (you might have heard a very prominent one from Denmark) that Non-European/Non-Western migrants are a net loss for the economy during their lifetime and also their children are a drag on the economy. Meaning the money spent by the government to support them is never made back (from the working) during their whole lifetime.
So no, most migrant groups are not a big benefit. Especially considering that this is only taking the economy into account. When you take into account the societal disruption and anti-values that they bring with them, then its clear how negative they have been for Europe.
You'd have to stop importing the things you're not paying people enough to produce, otherwise your own products will be more expensive than the next nation over that has no qualms about poor pay for agriculture or whatever.
It all sounds great until the last 40+ years goes away, with the apples year round and bananas, etc.
Going back to just what you can produce in your country is gunna be a rude awakening for billions.
No they weren't, 50 years ago is when they were working very hard to get people in from Turkey/North Africa to do those jobs because they wanted to pay peanuts and the natives had options.
These are all hyper exploitative industries based on capital exploiting the poor. Which is something we both agree on.
I think it's phrasing and the phrase "damn parasites" that makes it far-right.
The idea of changing immigration policies is not unique to any political party. However the quote isn't that, it's trying to stir up an angry us/them reaction at a large group based on national/racial lines. Also "damn parasites" is somewhat dehumanizing (whether you apply it to billionaires or immigrants).
Sentiment hasn't moved from far-right to the center. If it feels like that to you, it sounds like your perspective changed because you moved from the center to the far-right.
It does appear that the Overton Window has shifted far to the right on immigration, such that far-right views are mainstream enough to be highly visible, and found in representatives of formerly or otherwise centrist parties. I consider this shift deplorable, but it's clear that it has happened.
No. That sentiment didn't "move toward the center".
What happened is that the far-right -- and, lets not use euphemisms like "the far right" here, we're talking about fascists and literal Nazis (ethno-fascism is Nazism) -- have successfully taken control of much of our mass media. They've also more or less captured the government of one of the world's super powers. Those two things put together have allowed them to make their views appear mainstream.
This is exactly what happened during the 1920s and 1930s prior to World War II. And similarly, you were finding Nazi views expressed openly and proudly and being given a veneer of respectability. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Squ...)
But they are no less extreme now than they were then. They are still fascist and Nazi views. And they still ought to be abhorrent to anyone who considers themselves a decent human being.
It's beyond incredible that anyone thinks that the far right has taken control of the mass media. It's clearly the left that has control of most of the media, which makes sense. People in cities tend to be on the left. Journalism majors tend to be on the left.
The days of a scrappy newspaper or local market newscast are over. Reframe your statement from "People in cities tend to be on the left. Journalism majors tend to be on the left" to "People who own media firms tend to be on the right. People who set journalistic standards for their outlet tend to be on the right."
NPR. NBC. ABC. CBS has decided to try being moderate, so we'll see how that goes. MS NOW or whatever they call themselves now. The New York Times. The Washington Post. Politico. USA Today. Vox. Slate. The New Yorker. Huffpost. The Atlantic. Much of the gaming media, weirdly. Reddit. Twitter was. Bluesky is. Wikipedia, if that counts as media.
Allsides even lists the AP as left leaning, though I don't ingest enough direct AP stuff to verify. I'd disagree with them listing the BBC as neutral on quite a few topics, nowadays, and put them towards left - but that's just me.
Sure, there are right-leaning places like The National Review, but apart from the opinion section of the WSJ and Fox News as a whole they're pretty small.
Washington Post is owned by Bezos, so at best center-right. CBS (and its associated properties like Paramount) are owned by a family of far-right oligarchs, who will also soon own Warner Bros Discovery. Said oligarchs appointed a far-right political commentator as a political officer to control editorial content at CBS.
A lot of the rest you list are not left leaning, but centrist (derogatory).
Another point of the Rwandan genocide that's important to remember, is the party who eventually committed the genocide spent months talking about how the other side was about to use extreme violence and they were really the victim. This allowed them to preemptively use violence "in self defense."
At least from a US perspective, the problem is that the downsides are the deliberate policy goals of the political class. Immigration was but one tool used to achieve them, and now the immigrants themselves serve as a convenient visceral scapegoat for releasing the grassroots political pressure. We finally built enough political capital to do something about the economic vise most Americans find themselves in, only for it to be squandered on performative vice signalling.
How can you be sure the opinion moved to the center and not that the center moved to the right?
Migration is all a distraction anyway. Brown people existing doesn't hurt you. Whenever you think they drive up rents or whatever, that has nothing to do with the brown people, that has everything to do with the system that sets rents.
This may shock you, but not all numbers greater than zero are equal. Something might cause a price to go up by some amount, but something else might make it go up by an even larger amount, so stopping that first thing might not stop it from still going up higher than people want.
So for housing it depends on the local laws (1), but for labor this has actually been heavily studied, and the general consensus (2) is actually higher demand for native-born labor. All of those immigrants need goods and services, after all, so they increase demand. Focusing on immigrants providing labor without mentioning that they buy things as well is assuming your conclusion.
And the demand is not just for doctors and other highly credentialed labor. The most nativist work on the Mariel Boatlift (3) (by Borjas) only found a decrease in wages for native-born high-school dropouts, and the general consensus of other economists seems to be that his work was faulty. The general consensus on Mariel (cite fn2 again) is that it was good, economically, for the native-born people in the Miami labor force when an additional 7% of the labor force suddenly arrived as immigrants over the course of a few months.
1: How much housing can be built legally is the key factor here. Immigrants can drive up the prices if no more housing can be built but that's just another way of saying that "no more housing can be built" is a really terrible policy that is enormously destructive. If building housing is relatively easy, then it doesn't drive up prices. In fact, immigrant labor is often used to build this new housing. Don't let your area become like the Bay Area and you'll be fine.
2: Wearing my physics hat, I am not comfortable saying that anything in economics is actually proven.
When people are added to the economy, demand increases, including demand for more labor.
The downward pressure on wages that one might intuitively expect from immigrant labor is basically erased by those increases in demand. It's self-reinforcing.
Some economists theorize that a long time Mayor of Boston (James Curley) used economic populism (taxing wealthy people of English descent and redistributing to poorer, usually of Irish descent) and anti-British rhetoric to reshape the electorate in ways that benefited him, even if it didn't benefit the city as a whole. The theory goes, he had a plan to drive out the wealthy people of English descent so the poor people of Irish descent would make up a larger share of the electorate and he could win more elections.
My understanding is that even most economists think that this isn't actually real. It's largely a couple of economists building a mathematical model, and then looking at cherry-picked examples, e.g., minority mayors during the 1970's and assuming that it was the result of a dastardly plan by the minority mayors rather than the result of larger social forces driving White Flight from cities.
In general, I think that mayors might make dumb decisions, but they largely do it because they think it will be good for the city and are wrong, not because they are twirling their mustache and cackling away.
I think it's pretty clear. You think that rapidly increasing demand for housing without an equivalent (impossible) increase in supply isn't the cause of price increases.
I'm sure you'll justify it by saying we should have price controls or something that would further limit supply increases and be an absolute disaster, or some pie in the sky "just build more houses" as if that's a switch that can just be flipped and we can crank them out of a replicator. The rest of us live in the real world where economics matter.
Can you please not post in the flamewar style? You crossed into that here and it's the opposite of what we're trying for on this site. You're welcome to make your substantive points thoughtfully.
In Sweden, brown people are heavily overrepresented in violent crime, so many people are getting hurt.
Obligatory disclaimer: the problem is not caused by skin color, but by a complex mess of poverty, lack of opportunity, societal attitudes within and against immigrant groups, etc. But voters hearing about a steady drum beat of robberies, rapes, drive by shootings (yes, in Sweden!) don't really care.
Culture's a thing too. If you admit a bunch of Somali warlords they may keep behaving like Somali warlords irrespective of the other factors you mention.
Indeed, but scapegoating people who are Different(tm) has a long history of being a successful political tactic, at least if you measure success solely in terms of getting elected.
Why did you feel the need to say "Brown people" instead of migrants? Are you trying to play the racist card? Poles are white and when they migrated en mass to Britain they were also making locals very unhappy.
Yes, existing doesn't hurt. But when you import mass amounts of people who don't talk your countries language, have no intention of learning, and have no intention of getting a job, and on top of it are intensely religious supporting a religion which is antithetical to your values, then it DOES hurt.
Western Europe has simply allowed too many Muslim immigrants in than they could ever successfully have integrated. Now Europe is full of ghettos of Muslim immigrants who don't get jobs, don't learn the languages, and sap resources which the countries cannot afford.
Note: this isn't about being racist or not, it's just common sense. There is a limit of how many immigrants a country can take, financially and culturally.
So is the religion the biggest problem or just a symptom?
I'd agree immigration must have limits and don't recall any prominent voices calling for unlimited migration or even limitless compassion.
Being a union, one can hope the load of migrants fleeing wars and violence would be spread among all the states, in proportion to their ability. Economic migration is a more complex matter since everyone benefits from it up to some threshold. Where it crosses into an undeniable problem is subjective. If it negatively affects me personally then it's bad, especially if I can overlook all the benefits I accrued (like lower prices of commodities and services).
> How can you be sure the opinion moved to the center and not that the center moved to the right?
I'm pretty sure he meant that what used to be a far-right view is now considered mainstream. Which is true, since even the EU Parliament has now begun passing laws vs migrants, and governments all across Western Europe are now taking steps against migrants.
> Brown people existing doesn't hurt you.
Correct, and I'm one of them. Unfortunately some abhorrent elements of our culture, traditions and values hurt erstwhile peaceful societies.
Considering the history of labor unions and their support for the banning of Asian citizenship in the US, I think the right frame is that migration support / opposition has something to do with other things but not entirely. There are only a few ways to come to the US and the employment-based approach is probably the most widely used by unconnected foreigners seeking to live in the US and that pathway is intended to be abolished by Senator Bernie Sanders with no replacement planned. I think it's hard to describe that senator as particularly right-wing.
Likewise, it was a labour union in Georgia that lobbied to get Koreans deported from the US. It should be unsurprising that those who hold to the Lump of Labor economic school should oppose immigration and that's quite popular among the left-wing.
There is one person/bot here with well over 30 comments in this comment section making all about race and racism even though the topic is migration. Don't you have any guidelines about that?
I don't assume you are omniscience, but I do expect you have at least minimal tools/stats where you can see things getting of charts. You did have to find the comment to which you replied and reminded the author of not starting religious wars somehow too.
Well, if you expect us to see everything you see which deserves moderator attention, it amounts to the same thing - since "you" here means every user (obviously you're not just asking for yourself personally). That's what I mean by moderator omniscience. It's far beyond our ability.
When this comes up, it's usually because someone (yourself in this case) saw X getting moderated and Y not getting moderated, and derived signal from that, when in fact it is nearly always noise.
By deriving signal, I mean bogus conclusions such as "the mods treat X side harder than Y side", or "the mods must secretly be aligned with Y". This is all non sequitur. Overwhelmingly, what you're seeing is randomness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion) - but especially easy to overinterpret because of the strong feelings generated by the underlying topic.
Thank you for the link I will use that next time. Regarding everything else, you assume way too much from a single comment. I don't care what side you are on or what side are you reprimanding. On a tech site I do expect you having a certain amount of tools helping you find questionable content and I know you do rate limiting at least for some people.
I do like a good political debate, but it was a bad call unflagging a politically charged topic which has no chance to develop into a productive discussion if minimum moderating standards can't be met.
A "free speech" HN is just HN. It would end up with the same cryptic way of describing replacement theory, because it's not for the purpose of evading censors. It's for the purpose of cosplaying having "dangerous opinions". The idea of left-wing censorship on Paul Graham's website is a joke.
You have to consider the context which is that Sweden does have an awful lot of fake refugees mixed in with the real refugees. "Parasite" is harsh but unfortunately all too accurate for some of the migrants who are essentially gaming a system intended for people in real distress.
I think it’s quite important to understand in what context that have been said. The ”parasites” are immigrants that have not integrated, entire families and generations living off welfare and the ethnic group basically have a super high unemployment rate of maybe 50% or more.
I’ve listened a lot to talks from the party leader of Örebropartiet, and while I think he would benefit from slowing himself down, yell and insult less, I really can’t see he being racist or far-right. More leftist actually. I think he’s simply VERY motivated/obsessed around questions like to get government less corrupt, much more efficient governence, and to stop major ethnic groups from very poor parts of the world get an unreasonable high amount of the governments welfare spending.
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.
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.
> 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.
To understand why there might be a desire to limit spending on art;
There was a recent case where city of Malmo was building a hospital; during the building of the hospital it was decided that a splice of the oldest tree in the world would be installed.
A very expensive life-support system was developed and an enormous amount of money paid for the splice. (not including the life support system, which was also an inordinate amount).
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.
> Remigration is a far-right concept referring to ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white minority populations [...] to their place of racial ancestry
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.
Trivia: there is a country in America where people can be stripped of their nationality for "treason", which amounts to go agaisnt the government. This means people can be left without civil rights, and can't enter the country if they were abroad.
All born inside the country, born from both national parents or naturalized are elegible. This year they declared acquiring the nationality of another country also made you elegible to be barren from their native country.
Nicaragua is really something weird, but all humans are capable of dehumanizing other people.
> Look how the Gulf states deal with citizenship and they manage to control much bigger immigrant relative to the native populations.
The gulf states, really? Why am I not surprised that you point to one of the largest modern day slave states as an example. I will not grant you the assumption of ignorance. For anyone else following this conversation, ReptileMan here is pointing to this system - https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/modern-day-slavery-... - one widely recognized as slavery - as an example of a good way to control large immigrant populations.
I'm queer, you racist dipshit. It's illegal for me to even exist in Dubai.
Even without that, I keep my head on a swivel in any lower income areas - migrant or otherwise. It will shock you to learn this, but crime is not a phenomenon that is unique to brown people.
If the gulf states are your north star, then you are straightforwardly advocating for a return of systemic wage theft, indentured servitude and slavery, all under threat of execution.
Which of those do you most prefer?
Would you also like an ethnic caste system, or should it be based solely on national origin, or a combination?
Or perhaps the original European model, where only non-christians may be enslaved?
I'm not sure there's a point diving into this wilful ignorance. Maybe try reading the conditions to enter Sweden and an article or two about slavery before using the term "mass importation"
In 2022, 20% of the population of Sweden was born outside of Sweden. I'm not the one engaging in willful ignorance. And unless you are saying that these people are slaves, the only purpose of mentioning slavery is character assassination
Following your lead, I haven’t researched Örebro’s proposed policies. But I would find it surprising if “large scale remigration” really was scoped to an everyman’s definition of “few years”. I would expect that their targets for “large scale” exceed three or four years’ worth of immigration.
Even if you scope it out to "everyone that's not a citizen or has the equivalent of a green card," is that so evil? If a country accepts immigrants they should be able to send them back at will unless they become citizens. That shouldn't be controversial. You can argue if it's a good or bad policy, of course, but it's not ethically wrong to do so. Yes, they'll be in more danger and have worse lives when they go back to wherever they came from, but again - a country should exist to serve its citizens, not the entire world. It's not sustainable.
Re-migration almost always targets children _born_ in the country.
In this thread a speaker of the party is quoted as talking about people who had Swedish passports i.e. citizens.
Would you not see it as ethically bad to split the citizens into "true" citizens who can't have their citizenship stripped and second tier citizens who can?
> Would you not see it as ethically bad to split the citizens into "true" citizens who can't have their citizenship stripped and second tier citizens who can?
Potentially. I'm not familiar enough with their system to have an opinion. In the US system, I feel like actual citizenship is the hard line. With everything else you're here at our convenience, though I'd say if we were to kick out greencard holders en masse (for some reason) it should just be that they don't get renewed, not immediately kicked out.
Yes, it is very much accepted and pretty uncontroversial that it is unethical to send someone away who’s made a new home in some country. Tearing them out of the local community and kicking them out against their will is immoral.
xAI's Grokipedia is 100% more biased, given who controls it and its known tendency to manipulate results. Finally, there are lots of cases where it completely fails. And I didn't even get to the "porn" stuff. Hell, even it's creator says it's trash.
It's incredible that someone can come to that conclusion when given direct evidence to the contrary. Which blurb is closer to Merriam-Webster? Or are they biased as well.
I just skimmed both Wikipedia and Grokipedia's articles on remigration. Wikipedia has effectively no positives or reasons why people would want remigration listed at all. Almost the entire page is criticism, including a large section of tenuous links to nazism. Grokipedia lists BOTH positives and criticisms of the policy. Which one is designed to push an agenda and which is there to inform and let people make up their own minds?
Larry Sanger (one of the Wikipedia cofounders) was just blocked by Wikipedia indefinitely for trying to balance the ideology back out.
The immigrants they are specifically looking to remove are middle eastern and african. they certainly dont have canadians in mind when coming up with these policies.
the west is incredibly extractive of the rest of the world and the “mass migration” from the rest of the world is a result of that. want people to go back home? stop bombing their countries. stop stealing their resources. stop abducting and assassinating their leaders. stop propping up governments that sell out the country for a bag of cash with dollar signs on the side.
i dont think it’s that useful to think about it in terms of individual countries. like its a nice rhetorical trick to go “look at how innocent sweden is”, ignoring the fact they are indeed a nato member, but they are part of the greater western capitalist bloc aka “global north” that benefits from these actions. we suppress wages in the rest of the world to keep manufacturing cheap (and then wonder why there are no factory jobs anymore…), we install leaders who sell our companies natural resources for pennies on the dollar, we control the flow of global trade by mandating that goods need to trade in our currencies.
like let me put it to you this way - you buy a shirt made in vietnam. how much would that cost if it was made in sweden? well why shouldnt that money go to vietnam if it was rightly made there?
It's not trick. We weren't before invoking collective responsibility. But if now we are, fine. (Leave it alone that Sweden has been in NATO for, what, 18 months? ) Two follow-up questions, then:
1. Does the "east" have the same responsibility, or should the "west" bear it all?
2. Are Middle Eastern and African countries that much more peaceful than western countries? If so, then I suppose you are right. If not, should we at least consider that as sort of an offset to the responsibility?
As far as the shirt made in Vietnam goes: I think that the manufacturer in Vietnam is getting paid for it. Am I wrong?
Literally none of this is real. It is a repackaging of material from a trillion dollar propaganda campaign of the decadent dying corpse of the Soviet Union.
> The immigrants they are specifically looking to remove are middle eastern and african. they certainly dont have canadians in mind
Well, of course. Canadians generally don't cause trouble in the countries to which they immigrate and are not net fiscal burdens.
Who country did Sweden bomb and steal resources from? Why should a Swedish political party be concerned about the collective guilt of "the west"?
Furthermore, is your position that large-scale migration from the third world into developed Western economies is a punitive action designed to correct historical wrongdoings (whether or not that's legitimate)? Because that's certainly how not it was sold to the populace.
Do you believe in punishing the son for the sins of the father, or the great-X-grandfathers?
To be fair arguably there is no other country in the world which benefited as much economically from its interactions with Nazi Germany and face so little consequences for it.
A less flamebaity response is that the Soviet Union ended up as one of the winners of the second world war. They lost a lot people (Stalin didn't care) but almost all of that was because of Stalin's incompetence (having killed most officers shortly before the war + sent millions to war without proper boots, uniforms, weapons, and ammo).
Does Sweden have a single Canadian there under 'asylum' policies?
Yeah, sure, people probably wouldn't care if they were Canadian, because they wouldn't be committing crimes at far higher rates, wouldn't be pushing for more religious rule, and the majority wouldn't be on welfare. That's not what's happening though.
As for your second paragraph - do you really think the governments of the countries these people are coming from are any better? Should every US citizen that wants be able to immigrate to Afghanistan and take a good portion of their GDP as welfare? What about Japan? Should US and Chinese citizens be able to move there if they want and relatively quickly become the majority, right? They need the population, no?
I certainly don't agree with a lot of our Middle East policies, but that doesn't mean European governments should throw open their doors to mass migration. Governments are supposed to exist to help their own citizens. Sometimes that means bombing someone. Sometimes that's the right thing to do, sometimes it's not, but it's pretty damned clear mass migration from third world countries isn't helping their citizens.
Accepting for a minute that the comment on economic extraction is true (it isn’t), you are admitting that mass migration from low-trust/dysfunctional societies is in fact a deserved punishment for “the West”. I wish more people spoke with this clarity when it comes to immigration debates, because it cuts through all the noise about needing lots of different cuisine options.
The North African and middle eastern immigrations have the unique talent of driving up the crime statistics wherever they land. Sweden naively let them in to become a humanitarian superpower, which failed spectacularly. What kind of refugees attack and steal from the country that has given them refuge?
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.
Define "good." The people immigrating aren't suddenly going to behave like Swedes - we've seen that. Will the geographic entity that is Sweden maintain or grow the population? Sure. Will it still be Sweden? No. If the majority of people are from, say, the middle east, it'll be run like a country there. I don't think that'll be good for the existing Swedes.
If you could somehow pick the best and brightest from those regions to immigrate - sure, great, probably good for your country. Existing countries are the way they are because of their people. When you shift your demographics to such a degree, your country will also become that. I don't know why this is such a hard concept for people to grasp. It's the same base concept that explains why the US policy in the middle east has failed so badly over decades. The people there largely don't want US-style democracy. Some do, sure, but the majority either don't care or like the system they have.
This presupposes many things which are not reasonable to suppose. Like these immigrants being economically useful instead of fiscally negative their whole lives, or that people are just interchangeable economic units and forcing together separate groups will not cause any trouble.
This might sound facetious but I'm completely serious -- why does this "problem" need a solution, and especially this solution? If the Swedes have collectively decided they want less fertility, who's to judge them?
Of course you can comment on a country's problems, and I apologise if the wording I chose sounded aggressive. My point was just that the Swedes might decide to bite the bullet and bear the consequences, and it looks like we agree on this.
Immigration is not a solution to low fertility. It might be a solution to labor being expensive, particularly if you’re a capitalist, but it doesn’t solve the problem of low fertility among a native population.
A country is not just a random set of people. They have to be linked by a common set of values. Importing people who don't want to assimilate, or importing more people that can be assimilated will lead to disaster in the long term.
Additionally, immigration is not a solution for low fertility. If they assimilate, they will also have a lower fertility rate, pushing the problem down the line. If they don't assimilate, and keep a high fertility rate, they will replace the population.
Immigration is a positive thing, but it needs to be low and open only to like minded people.
> 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.
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.
>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]
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?
DPRK is arguably one of the most successful national socialist states in existence.
(You might look at it and think, "if that is success, then how you define failure"? but don't forget, it took all of 12 years for the German Nazis to go from taking full control to having their country completely devastated.)
In what ways is North Korea socialist? In practice it appears more a hereditary autocracy with an elite class and everyone else barely surviving on the scraps.
German Nazis were socialist in name only, to appeal to the working class.
Just as a note on a historical curiosity, the early NSDAP had a left wing that never seemed to be very important, and they got rid of the corresponding intellectuals (Strasser brothers and friends) even before getting into power, and the corresponding brutes (SA) afterwards.
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 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.
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?
And you know very well that he said all of this in the context of families who for years have refused to integrate in favor of sustaining themselves and their children exclusively on crime and systemic welfare fraud. Their party manifesto clearly elaborates on this topic. You are just highlighting an isolated part of his spoken paragraph while sweeping all the rest in under the carpet hoping that unfamiliar readers will take your word for it. Frantically spamming the thread with "It's ethnic cleansing!!" and "They want to deport every non-white person from Sweden!!" doesn't change the facts.
I'm a non-white non-native who came to Sweden with my family just over 35 years ago. Go ahead and ask me if I or my family fear their policies, and I'll tell you why we don't. Or, just relativize and say something like "well that's not the same thing" and I'll tell you the real reason why my family and I aren't the same thing as the demographic your comments relate to.
> 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.
Limiting immigration along with generous government benefits for citizens is an interesting new space for political parties not fitting the traditional left right axis.
Well let's be clear, the Nazis did care about making life better for workers - if those workers were "pure-blood" white male german workers. It's sometimes pointed to by apologists to claim they weren't all bad, that they helped the little guy. But they ignore that everybody else got killed or oppressed. Even women had their hard-won civil rights revoked.
It's important we talk about these things with detail. Quite a large portion of the US wouldn't mind living in a white patriarchal society. We need to remind people what kinds of people make those societies, and what happens in them, lest they be repeated.
My point is that even those favored groups ultimately suffered terribly in the longer term, as a result of their government starting a war with half the world and refusing to seek peace before being utterly destroyed.
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They are a really strange party revolving around their leader who got a personality. It can be seen more as Trump where ideology isn’t as important as what the leader says.
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.
What's the relationship between race and immigration status?
It's not entirely clear what the argument which unites them is supposed to be. This unification is always in the mind of the white matry not the person opposing immigration. In the UK polish immigration was opposed, en mass, poles are white.
SUPPOSE there are large numbers of poorly assimilated people in a country, whose culture of origin is very different than that of the host country. What does the minor coincidence of their common lack of european ancestry show, other than to prove the point, they lack such ancestry?
White skin evolved in europe, with the peoples of europe, as with european culture -- that whiteness tracks this culture is a conincidence. (There's less-and-less european diaspora in america -- which, if imported en mass, might also enrange europeans).
The refusal to treat large scale immigration as a cultural and economic phenomneon, to try and insult opponents of this position with a slander of racism -- this tactic doesnt work any more.
All you are doing is driving those people to say, "OK, so its racism. We'll vote for that then." And the result is real racists are elected.
Do you have any analysis of the issues people opposed to large scale immigartion, from non-western cultures, and who would reverse at least some of it -- do you have any arguments that engage the issues they actually raise?
It is strange, because this party’s platform seems to mirror the positions of the blackest Swede I know (Malcolm Kyeyune, a Marxist writer who is also often accused of being a right-winger). I suspect that the divisions in Sweden are much deeper than race.
So suppose there's a large group of people arriving into your country en mass, you poll them about eg., women's rights and you find that 80%+ of them hold highly regressive views that were rare and fringe in even in the last 100+ years of your own country. Indeed, women would be warned about them even in the antebellum south. Now suppose they're a different colour than the present inhabitants.
Which fact is most salient in your analysis of whether to retain their presence, or admit more?
If its the latter, then I think there's racism in play here, but not of the kind you imagine. Namely, it seems you'd think feminism is only for white people. Or perhaps that human rights are a white things. Others, of course, disagree.
Assuming you have an accurate individual level test, and the policy action you suggest is to not administer the test to each applicant and instead treat them all as homogeneous group and reject them based on older test results?
Right, so what's the state policy you advocate here?
Import 1 million people, 800,000 of which are racist, sexist, homophobic and militantly conservative -- and you'll do that because the policy to prevent it is, as you say, "Racist" ?
You may think these imports are on your side for now, because of the cross you've nailed yourself to -- but be assured, as you see today in the US, their cultural conservatism comes out when their social position is safe.
You are importing the very people you claim to despise : racists, sexists, misoginsits, and the like. And you're doing it why?
I said it was "discriminatory" (which it is), I never said "racist" (but that case could easily be made).
How are you determining this group that holds these views? What criteria? Because I don't know any group that matches that description exactly. Could you be specific?
I think a human is a human and is deserving of the same rights as any other person. I don't believe this position is radical in any way; it is what most doctrines of fairness are based upon.
Again, who are these people? How are you lumping them together (their views or their religion or their race?) because no large group is a hegemony of exactly the same ideas or views; all groups have a diverse set of individuals and ideas among them (both progressive and regressive).
It’s a little befuddling that you are pretending it’s not possible to simply observe the nature of the countries from which these people arrived and make high probability conclusions about the mean views on, say, women’s rights. Is your belief that any particular view can and does get patched like software when someone passes through customs and stamps their passport?
It's a little befuddling that you are pretending there are countries where every person in that country share the exact same thoughts, ideas, and beliefs. Where is this mythical place?
Are we determining an individual's potential, liberty, rights and character based on group population polling now, or do we believe in individual autonomy and potential?
Anyone claiming an entire country holds one singular view (on any topic) is not truly discussing in good faith.
No one has claimed that. You're the only one claiming a border immigration policy needs to correctly quantify over the universal non-citizen class.
No state in the world today, nor in all of history, has that view. Nor is it, on the face of it, even really coherent. There is nothing to be said about the "All" of the others. Only that we don't owe them much.
If you're not claiming entire nations think and act the same way, then what you're describing (a blanket ban on entire nations of people because of some arbitrary numbers in a theoretical poll) is, without a doubt, discriminatory.
How is that not arbitrarily discriminatory on its face?
>How is that not arbitrarily discriminatory on its face?
A nation discriminating against non-citizens is not arbitrary, it is the core feature of the citizen classification. What you are implying is that the concept of "citizen" is unjust, therefore the concept of countries and borders are unjust. Of course when its put into these words few people will cop to this viewpoint. That's why there's endless obfuscation in these discussions, to avoid articulating the plain truth of your views.
It is arbitrary if you believe all humans should be afforded the same basic human rights and should not be judged simply by the country they come from (rather than the content of their hearts, minds, and character).
Do you believe that if a country can discriminate or harm non-citizens, then it should do that? Is it morally/ethically correct to treat non-citizens less than other persons?
Do you hold beliefs that apply to all people regardless of what group they come from or only your own tribe?
It really does simply boil down to whether or not you believe all humans should be afforded the same basic rights and considerations. The "citizenship" argument is essentially a legal loophole to claim that whatever the law says is the moral/ethical path, which it is not.
Laws can be (and often are) immortal/unethical, so grounding your argument in what is currently legal or not is a bad look (as it has always been); just ask former slave owners about the morality/ethics of the law, and see where that gets you.
>It is arbitrary if you believe all humans should be afforded the same basic human rights and should not be judged simply by the country they come from (rather than the content of their hearts, minds, and character).
So to be clear, you are admitting to the idea that the concept of citizen (and countries and borders) is unjust? That seems to be the inescapable conclusion of your points. At least have the courage to own the logical conclusion of your views.
>Do you believe that if a country can discriminate or harm non-citizens, then it should do that? Is it morally/ethically correct to treat non-citizens less than other persons?
It is morally correct to treat non-citizens as non-citizens. This doesn't mean they can/should be actively harmed. But this limits the obligation a nation has to non-citizens, i.e. in terms of active intervention to improve their lives.
>Do you hold beliefs that apply to all people regardless of what group they come from or only your own tribe?
My universal moral views are all in terms of negative rights, i.e. the right to self-determination, non-interference, free expression, etc.
This gets back to the salient point of this whole post/thread/comments: do all persons residing in Sweden (as citizens) deserve negative rights as you understand them (namely the freedom to not be harassed/deported simply because someone believes they are not assimilating "properly" or fast enough)?
The secondary local conversation is whether it is discriminatory to treat a whole group the same based on ideas held by some percentage of a subgroup of that group (and ignore individual differences/persons)?
I would call that discriminatory and unethical. What are your thoughts on that (regardless of what laws/citizenship of the persons)? I'm asking in the abstract as an ethical exercise.
>namely the freedom to not be harassed/deported simply because someone believes they are not assimilating "properly" or fast enough
Are these legal citizens of Sweden we're talking about? If not, then they have no right to stay in Sweden beyond whatever courtesy Swedes have decided.
>The secondary local conversation is whether it is discriminatory to treat a whole group the same based on ideas held by some percentage of a subgroup of that group
In isolation that would be unjust discrimination. When it comes to immigration policy, a nation has no obligation to discern incoming immigrants true views for compatibility. They can set whatever policy they want regarding who to let in. If the widespread views or cultural traits of some population renders immigration from that population more risk than reward, that is to no fault or demerit of the host nation. Immigration as policy is exclusively for the benefit of the existing citizens. Anything more is purely at the courtesy of the host nation, to be revoked at will.
Of course I am talking about people legally in Sweden (if they weren't there legally, this wouldn't be a conversation).
>> "In isolation that would be unjust discrimination."
You could have just stopped there. It is unjust discrimination no matter how you try to justify it (legally, practically, ends support the means, or otherwise).
The discussion isn't about what a person or country CAN do, the discussion is about what is fair and ethical behavior.
Legally in Sweden means they fall under the protections of Sweden's legal system and should be granted protections under the law, so it is a distinction without a difference.
Your context changes nothing: it's just one long "the ends justify the means" or "that's the way it is" and fails to address any of the ethics of the statements being made.
>> "When it comes to immigration policy, a nation has no obligation to discern incoming immigrants true views for compatibility."
Why? All immigration systems I know take the person's views into consideration (for obvious reasons).
>> "They can set whatever policy they want regarding who to let in. If the widespread views or cultural traits of some population renders immigration from that population more risk than reward, that is to no fault or demerit of the host nation."
They can't do that without disregarding the equality of all humans as a universal principle. And no, it very much is the fault of the nation/people making a discriminatory policy, not the fault of those being discriminated against because of that policy.
>> "Immigration as policy is exclusively for the benefit of the existing citizens. Anything more is purely at the courtesy of the host nation, to be revoked at will."
Is that an ethical/moral position? Does that conform with belief in universal human equality?
You just made a bunch of statements about what they can do and failed to address if the behavior is moral/ethical or otherwise... so it isn't even worth engaging with in a discussion since you just made a bunch of statements with no ethical rationale surrounding them.
All you're saying is "this is how it is or should be" which tells me nothing about whether those positions are discriminatory/unethical (but it seems clear they are unjust and arbitrary discrimination and unethical).
>Your context changes nothing: it's just one long "the ends justify the means" or "that's the way it is" and fails to address any of the ethics of the statements being made.
Is it asking too much of you to drop these thought ending cliches and actually try to argue your case? Ultimately ethical claims must bottom out at premises that can't be further supported. Here's the ethnical principle at play in my view: the freedom of association is a core principle as is its corollary, the freedom to dissociate. Just as I can exclude anyone from my home in principle, we can collectively exclude anyone from our collective land. This is the principle that justifies a nation discriminating based on citizenship. Of course, scaling from kinship groups to mega societies requires scaling these processes to something impersonal and ideally fair. Laws are the solution to this, but laws just are a representation of collective action and so inherit their justification.
>Why? All immigration systems I know take the person's views into consideration (for obvious reasons).
Yes, nations take stated/purported views into account. The issue is that it is impossible to accurately determine each immigrants personal views at scale. The inherent uncertainty involved is a risk, one that a host nation need not accept.
>They can't do that without disregarding the equality of all humans as a universal principle.
Universal human equality does not trump the right to free association/dissociation. Just because I see you as morally equal to me in principle does not mean I must suffer your presence around me. Of course, interpersonal relationships are different than laws. But laws are inward facing. That is, they create duties to and between people who are part of the same body politic. Outside of that body politic one has limited duties to each other. A right implies an obligation; a positive right is a claim to the effort/resources of others. I deny the legitimacy of universal positive rights. The only legitimate universal rights are negative rights, i.e. freedom from interference, assault, etc. But this doesn't imply freedom of movement across political borders.
The reason you are having a hard time understanding these points is because you genuinely don’t believe that nation states should exist. You may not think this explicitly, but that is the logical conclusion of the moral/ethical haranguing you are doing. What are you expecting as an acceptable counter argument here? Someone to develop the justification of the nation state from first principles? Your argument is that there is a universal principle of equality which disallows countries discriminating in favor of their own citizens. This is unworkable because the whole point of the nation state is to discriminate in favor of its own citizens.
I believe in universal human rights and equality/fairness in application of laws. You seem like you don't and you're contorting yourself into a pretzel trying to justify discrimination and unethical behavior towards other humans.
Why are you continually making up a strawman to argue against? If a country has regressive views that are one standard deviation more regressive than the mean view on that topic in Europe, and you allow 1 million people from that country to migrate, has Europe gotten more or less regressive in it’s views on that topic? Has it stayed the same? Notice that I am not making a claim that 100% of the population hold only 1 view, and no one else is making this claim either, but that these view exist on a distribution that has been repeatedly modeled.
Your views about individual autonomy etc are, while probably good rules to live by in your personal interactions, not really relevant to migration at the population level.
That's exactly my point. No group is a homogeneous whole, so why are you trying to blanket ban certain nations (which discriminates against individuals based on "polling" on topics). Shouldn't we determine this based on the individual, not arbitrary groupings based on "polls"?
But okay, let's get specific then. Which country are you talking about and what views?
This is a weird argument, because it presupposes that there is a positive right a priori to migrate to a country, and that it’s on the target country to come up with a reason to keep someone out. Setting aside for a moment that this is not how it works today, nor is this ever how these rights have been managed, and also setting aside the lack of a mechanism to screen for this (are you making everyone take a lie detector test or something), how about Pakistan?
Also, we are not saying the same thing at all. I am making a claim, which is true and very very visible, that when you allow large scale migration the country being migrated to begins to resemble the country being migrated from. And this is unsurprising. How could it not? There is no magic passport stamp that updates someone’s views and attitudes upon entry. As a meta comment this whole debate is really fucking strange because my position is the nominal position throughout basically all of human history, and yours is an extreme version of the blank slate hypothesis. Strange to encounter, to say the least.
I think judging any group of individuals as if they are all a single entity (be it through the lens of a particular majority view or a particular race) is discriminatory to the individual (hence discriminatory overall).
In your example (with made up numbers), if 20% are being denied citizenship and opportunity simply because they once resided in the same geographic region as another 80% (with different views), then that is discriminatory because they are not being viewed as individuals but are guilty by simply existing as part of a larger group that they have no choice over.
This is why we screen individual applicants, view each person as a single human with their own thoughts and needs, and judge everyone as an individual and not as a group; to avoid the wrong of discriminating against entire classes of people.
State policies do not operate in this fashion. See, for example, the reality of importing 1 million people.
The existence of a state pressuposes two "classes" of people: citizens and non-citizens.
Citizens are those who have lived and died, who have laboured and been taxed, and have made the very state which is constituted by them -- and they are owed, by that state, a society they wish to live in.
Non-citizens are everyone else. They are owed very little, at best, not to be killed elsewhere; but certaintly, not even to be aided. Unless you want to divide the wealth of every nation by 8bn and watch all of it disappear.
In any case, to non-citizens nothing is owed. Certainly not being carefully scruitnized under a microscope to see if a border agent can detect a lack of cultural or ethical fit.
And in any case, such a fit can be determined by citizens themsevles. And polled, overwhelming, citizens of western nations have spoken. And they have seen your dice rolling at the border, and havent appreciated its concequences.
THe presumption you have on the consent of your fellow citizens to give what you eblieve is owed to other citizens of other states -- this presumption is extraordinary, obniouxous, and short-lived. And much of your attitue here is shortening it.
What state policies are you referring to? Laws/rights should apply equally to all people or else they are not really rights (are they?).
No, Enlightenment principles come from the idea that rights and laws belong to all people (citizen or otherwise) and the founders believed that to be "self-evident" and "unalienable" to all humans. The US Supreme Court has ruled as such again and again (non-citizens have protections of the US Constitution), and Enlightenment thinkers (and any decent person) would agree.
Your entire argument (and everything after) can be ignored because your premise is not just flawed, it is entirely incorrect (false) and goes against any principle of human rights that I'm aware of.
Are you saying the population in Africa should not be provided healthcare? I fail to see your point here. If your argument is economic scarcity, then that can be solved eventually (and should be).
If citizenship isnt a line between two classes of people to which states owe obligations, then why isnt the USA obligated to pay for the healthcare of everyone in the world?
Because we don't live in a perfect world... yet. But we should always be working towards more prosperity for all, greater access to resources/services, more sharing of knowledge/assets, and improving the lives of all people on the planet (not just our preferred groups/tribes). Don't you think?
I think preferential attachment and the Pareto process world that we live in, means, that its in the nature of wealth to accumulate in proportion to wealth. And the only way to make the world rich is to exploit that process effectively.
Dividing the wealth of nations between all, even if it could be done, would be ruinous to all our weatlh.
We are a species of ape to whom the fruits of our labour acrew in proportion to those fruits. And we operate that way because reality does so. So nature has prepared us well to have familial and ethnic feelings which do well to preserve our wealth, or else, we'd all be ruined.
You may well hate that, and hate the world and our species for it. But bankrupsy and fables for children arent state policies.
If the Pareto principle holds naturally, why are you pushing for laws/policies to gate keep access to opportunities and access to wealth to force inequalities? Why do we need to make policies that discriminate against some, while benefiting others? (Isn't that antithetical to free markets and a denial of the Pareto principles' universality/inevitability?)
Nobody has discussed dividing the wealth of nations (including me, a rising tide raises all ships), but even if such a thing occurred (distribution of global wealth), it would be a hard case to make to call that "ruinous to all our wealth" (Whose wealth? Ruinous to what groups? What history/science is this view based on? Do more people gain in wealth than lose wealth?)
We are a species of ape (and often act like it as can be surmised from the tribalism proudly on display here) but that does not mean we should idolize apes and act as if we are apes in all areas of our existence.
Nature is a poor teacher of morality/ethics, which is why we have religious text and ethical treatises on how to act that does not recognize nature as the ultimate source of correct action, or else assault, rape, and murder would be legal (unless you deny those are worthy areas of thought and guidance?).
I respect evidence and truths, I do not believe the ideology you're pushing is supported by reality or necessity. I believe your ideology comes from fear of change and worries of scarcity, rather than any logical conclusions from first principles.
Here is a truth for you: The world has benefited greatly from the sharing of information and resources across borders (including human resources) and trying to deny hundreds of years of enlightenment progress flies in the face of all available evidence that the world is becoming more prosperous, more wealthy, more open, and providing more opportunities than was afforded by the protection closed nation-states that came before.
Recent Supreme Court decisions are nowhere near your position. They have given the President a lot of leeway to deport non-citizens. If everyone geographically in the country had equal standing, this would not be possible.
The Supreme Court historically matches my argument (which is all that matters). The recent controversial rulings do not negate that the US has for hundreds of years extended the protections of the US Constitution to all peoples that are on US soil (including non-citizens).
I know of no progressive that supports unlimited immigration with no screenings, that is a right wing talking point based on nothing factual.
I do see a lot of people on the right, some conservatives, and some libertarians calling for blanket bans on entire groups of people based on dubious claims and hypotheticals.
It's a hard argument to make that banning an entire country from opportunities/immigration is "treating everyone as an individual".
"you find that 80%+ of them hold highly regressive views"
Question is, does this info come from reputable pollsters? Or is it just a factoid propagated by right-wing media?
Also, impossible to square with a conservative white base *also* holding similarly regressive views. (Speaking from a US perspective, not a Euro one, but the same people yelling about regressive immigrants are also genuinely trying to disenfranchise women in favor of male-headed family units, and other things in this vein.)
It's not right-wing propaganda. Surveys from reputable sources like Pew Research have consistently shown that people from many countries in the Middle East and parts of Africa hold significantly more conservative views on women's rights, gender roles, and related issues than the European average.
so... when individuals from those regions migrate to Europe, they often bring those "attitudes" with them. Without meaningful assimilation, those views tend to persist in the next generation as well, this is literal y documented.
My posteriors are based not on some perceived virtue of brown immigrants (wat) but my experience with nativist parties: they are, to the last, full of despicable, immoral hucksters who will stop at nothing to accrue and consolidate power, including blasting out endless streams of vile propaganda that eventually takes hold on a population level. So forgive me for demanding some fact-checking before considering any action based on this sort of nebulous "polling."
Sure, i mean there's lots of highly credible polling. I didnt choose the hypothetical carelessly. Western states are by far and away the only places that maintain these liberal island of virtue, and even so, vanishing and small. The idea that eg., homophobia isn't omnipresent in the vast majority of the world is a level of head-in-the-sandism which, of course, must necessarily accompany the sentiment of "let's import massive amounts of homophobia"
Either way, it's a hypothetical to be taken literally. Suppose it, then what's your analysis? Is the coincidence of their race salient?
I'd point out that pointing at those largely powerless people is a tactic used by domestic power centres that have their own regressive views and policies which they want to draw discourse away from.
I'd ask for a comparison of how these arrivals have led to worse policy outcomes in terms of women's rights, and how that compares to the policy behaviour and outcomes of domestic groups.
I'd close out with a pointed question about which group it is that should be treated as a greater threat.
> The refusal to treat large scale immigration as a cultural and economic phenomneon
> and insult opponents of this position as racist
On the other hand, you treat the negative effects of current immigrant milieus as eternal and innert to their ancestry (dare to say: genes).
This way, you can look at integration as if it has to happen in a single generation and also, allows you to ignore the more important part of diminishing social mobility, which effects the natives as much.
Look at germany, where after WW2, alot of turkish "guest workers" were invited and stayed. After several generations the descendant of those immigrants are as german as you can be. They are still soft muslims, drink alcohol, engage with german bureaucracy, have a heavy turkish accent -- some of them are even candidates for the far right AfD. Please note, they migrated into an economic boom.
Isnt that utterly ridiculous? When time proves you wrong, it reveals your narrow mindedness.
And when you reduce immigrants to percieved negative innert properties, isnt that racist? When you broaden your scope, youll see the bigger problems are elsewhere, dont get distracted by bigotted populists, that are as clueless about problems or their solutions.
> 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.
I think racism comes from a cognitive bias, that eg, lets you read a text without ever engaging with the broader explanation offered (social mobility, time scale of integration) but instead engange with a side remark about genes.
GP ties negative properties to entire groups without differenciation, this is by definition racist.
To end on a constructive upside, if GP was really concerned about eg womens rights, any kind of stateful intervention should only target that. By being racist and eg trying to associate this issue with brown skins, stateful intervention becomes sweeping. By being more precise, migration politics that targets them all becomes social politics wich only effects some.
> By being racist and eg trying to associate this issue with brown skins
I have only seen you associate cultural issues and non-integration from mass immigration as being race-related. I have no idea who you think you're talking about when you say people are doing this.
>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?
Congrats, you touched my time scale argument, the other commenter didnt engage with anything important. Unfortunately you didnt touch the systemic problem of social mobility, which is much more striking.
To return the facor, the "moral impetus" comes from not elevating your culture as the only origing of truth, goodness, etc., but instead codify common basic needs, human dignity, etc. into law and sanction/integrate nased on this.
Im not saying that immigrarion is frictionless, the same way you non-racist arent saying, some undesirable negative traits (like crime) cannot emerge in the native population without immigration. The solution to native or migrant crime is identical.
Why you should take the hassle and hopefully adress social mobility and organize integration? Because of demographics and economic contribution -- the bigger picture yet again.
>To return the facor, the "moral impetus" comes from not elevating your culture as the only origing of truth, goodness, etc.
A country doesn't need to see its culture as an objective ideal to justify protecting its citizens from non-citizens that would victimize, cause discord, or otherwise strain the social fabric and institutions. A government's first and most important mandate is to act in the interests of its citizens. What impetus does a nation have to help non-citizens at the expense of the prosperity and comfort of citizens?
Immigrants economic contributions are net-positive, its not at the expense of anyone bc economies are no zero sum games. This is scientific consens.
Protecting citizens with closed borders and potentially harming them in the long term with or protecting them with capable institutions based on individual cases? (Hope you see the racism trick question here.)
There was a study done in Sweden on the economics of immigration during the large immigration crisis of 2015, and the result was a significant net-negative of 7 800 € per person per year. Taking in a large number of refugees with significant lower education and overall wealth compared to existing populations, with a welfare and healthcare system that Sweden has, cost significant more than what it produce in increased taxes.
There is the concept of social dumping where municipalities try to get immigrants on welfare to move to other municipalities in order to reduce costs and balance the budget, and those other municipalities are now complaining loudly that their budgets have major deficits because of this strategy. Schools also complain about this issue since a large influx of low-income citizens put an increase budget costs without any increase in tax revenue, meaning higher costs and fewer teachers per student.
A more recent study in 2025, ordered by the government, calculated that the cost per refugee today to be around 2 500€ per year per person, while work related immigration gave a positive benefit of 4 800€ per year per person. This report however do not account for increase crime, integration initiatives, increased cost to the education system, health care and other things.
It should also be mentioned that only about 1/3 of refugees ever becomes economical self-sufficient.
Your comment comes across as very dishonest. You provide alot of subtext without clear statements.
> Taking in a large number of refugees with significant lower education and overall wealth
Implies education and wealth is needed for the workforce. It is not. Just a strawman.
> healthcare system that Sweden has, cost significant more than what it produce in increased taxes
How profitable are swedish schools? Rhetorical question to highlight your dumb-think. Services cost money, they are not meant to produce anything else.
> There is the concept of social dumping
> Schools also complain about this issue
Which can also be explained with regular budget pressure from neoliberal fiscal hawks. I dont know the swedish specifics.
> This report however do not account for crime ...
Which allows you to vaguely gesture / associate yet again.
Unfortunately, you didnt link any studies. Searching for "economic contribution migration" on any scientific platform, comes out as unanimously net-positive.
> It should also be mentioned that only about 1/3 of refugees ever becomes economical self-sufficient.
First generarion? And yet again you just glimpse at it without explanation. Whats the subtext here? Lazyness? Genetic inferiority? Without an explanation, this isnt an argument for anythig, yet tou yield it like it was. And that is dishonest. So understand better, i could use it as an argument myself, "see how bad systemetic discrimination is!?"
The internet abuses cognitive biases around cultural self-identity and foreign disgust and in the end, people group together, thinking they are the reasonable ones, the more educated...
> Immigrants economic contributions are net-positive, its not at the expense of anyone bc economies are no zero sum games.
It's at the expense of women and their safety, for example. Between years 2010 and 2015, 60% of rapes in Sweden were perpetuated by people of foreign origin: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8330751/. That was back when foreigners made up about 20% of their population, which I think is now over 30%, extrapolating, the immigrant rape problem is likely even worse. At what point do we stop putting economic growth over the well being and safety of citizens?
This is just another example of Americans projecting the unique American context to the rest of the world. As the other commenter stated, immigrants aren't universally an economic benefit to the host country. The particulars of the immigrant and the context are highly relevant to outcomes.
Aside from that, this elevation of economic concerns as paramount is a strange outgrowth of Americas unique position of economic powerhouse with shallow cultural roots. You cannot expect other countries to also see economic growth as the metric that subsumes all other concerns. Harm is multifaceted and is very much up to local sensibilities to determine what they value and how to preserve it.
> a vast archipelago, out of reach for anybody who can't afford a boat
No. That is just false. There is a very well developed ferry/commuter boat network. [1] The cost on some lines are included in the Stockholm public transport pass. A five day ticket is €12/day. No need to buy a boat.
Sweden wasn't like USA until politicians decided to make Sweden a "humanitarian superpower" by establishing the most liberal refugee policy in the world, without thinking of how they can actually integrate and offer a better future for all those refugees. I guess the real motivation may have been getting cheap labor, rest of the society be damned.
In any case, Sweden's policies on humanitarian migration have been an utter failure, and I can't really blame Swedes for wanting to make it stricter. Obviously refugees are not the ones to be blamed here, but politicians who took in more than they could successfully integrate.
> 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.
Do you have a source for that? I tried searching, but didn't find anything supporting this notion. I can find numerous sources pointing to the high prevalence of blonde hair in Sweden and other Nordic counties, but the US rarely even makes an appearance in those rankings. If anything, it seems like a point of difference rather than a similarity
>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.
There are no similarities at play here. Swedes are the native, indigenous people to Sweden. "White people" in the US are not native nor indigenous to the US.
Your confident claim here piqued my curiosity. It seems there's at least some amount of controversy about it. At least in finland it has been suggested that the sami may have been pushed north by colonization around the 14th century.
In any case your statement clearly doesn't hold for the northern part of sweden.
I lived in Stockholm for seven years. One of the biggest mistakes was not buying a boat. They‘re not as expensive as people make you believe; you can get a really nice day cruiser for around $10k, which you can sell again for $9k after a few years. Used boats have very little depreciation. Yes, you can go fancier; a nice weekender like a Nimbus 250 sets you back $60-70k, but that’s just like cars. You can get an Audi or BMW, or you start with a Kia.
The problem with boats isn’t that they’re expensive - the Stockholm archipelago can largely be considered like a lake, not like the sea. It’s education. And I don’t mean university.
I mean: which boat is appropriate? How do I navigate? On which cliffs can I stop, and how? How do I prepare for a nice day out? Which insurance do I choose, which parts need repair and when, what Mai tweets must I do myself vs pay someone, how much should I expect in upkeep costs, etc
These are all very manageable things to learn, but if you’re not used and not exposed to boat culture you won’t do it.
But the problem isn’t money. $10k isn’t free, but it’s less than most used cars, and annual upkeep is less than a car, too.
It took me 5 years to get the boat - a 22ft daycruiser with toilet. That was 15 years ago, haven't looked back. Got a daycruiser from the UK. Drove there, bought a trailer there, drove it home. Arbitrage during the financial crisis - half the price of the same boat in Sweden at the time.
I do not have a horse in this race. I am the exact opposite of what you have in mind. I simply suggest that instead of being hypocrites or cry babies, you guys maybe choose not sponsor a civil war that ends up displacing millions of people. If you take one step into it someone is going to pull the other leg which is what happened.
I do not think it's bad or evil that people want to protect what they have or protect even the idea of what they used to have. It's just that you need to have some level of intellectual honesty. That's hard, as you can see from your reaction.
They make perfect sense, here is a short explanation: the origin country of said immigrants was unpleasant specifically because of the people there (eg: rapes, murders, criminality, etc), and if you import the people from there then your country will similarly become unpleasant (eg: more rapes, more murders, more criminality, etc.)
The civilizing process occurred in Sweden with Swedish people and it has been observed that a similar civilizing process is not occurring in the same country (Sweden) with different people (MENA immigrants) even over N number of generations.
Ergo: to make Sweden more pleasant, uncivilized immigrants must leave by crook or hook.
Why do 'pro-remigration opinions' make no logical sense? They very much do for those people who:
- categorically refuse to assimilate or integrate into the host country's culture
- refuse to learn the language(s) of the host country
- ...which makes these people unemployable other than in government services dealing with other people from their own cultural and linguistic area
- ...which makes them a burden on their host societies
- ...not to mention the group of people who just refuse to accept employment because they get so much welfare from the state and local council that they don't see the need to do so (which goes against the culture of working when you can so that those who really can not work can be supported by those who can and do, the original concept of generous welfare states like Sweden)
When I moved to Sweden I did a few things, on my own accord and at my own cost. I bought a box of second-hand books (dirt cheap at Red Cross shops) including an encyclopedia, I started listening to Swedish radio and I enrolled myself in a Swedish language course at the open university. Within a few months I understood most of what I heard on the radio, I could speak well enough Swedish to not have to switch to English every third sentence and I had finished the box of books including the encyclopedia. I volunteered at the 'vägförening' (private road community, something you get to deal with when living in the countryside where the communal road network has not penetrated), volunteered as a swimming instructor at the local swimming school, help my neighbours fixing their tractors and other agricultural implements while borrowing some of theirs, etc. I still do things differently from the average Swede, e.g. I'm more likely to speak my mind and less wont to avoid conflicts. If I had moved to Canada as I originally planned I'd have done the same (i.e. I'd have learned better French than I currently speak) and I'd have assimilated mostly into that culture while keeping some of my specific cultural traits. Had I moved to, say, Hungary or Finland I'd probably have had a bit more trouble learning the language but that'd only have added a few months to the process. When in Rome, act as the Romans. When in Sweden, act as the Swedes. If you insist on antagonising them by acting very much unlike them, by refusing to learn their language while abusing the overly generous welfare system for years it should not surprise anyone that people start calling your bluff.
> Had I moved to, say, Hungary or Finland I'd probably have had a bit more trouble learning the language but that'd only have added a few months to the process.
Probably a lot more than just a few months. You underestimate how similar Indo-European languages are to each other -- and that you already have a background in English and French.
Maybe a year or two. I don't doubt you would have learned Hungarian/Finnish but it would not have been as easy as you seem to think.
In the mid 2000's, before the Big Crash, we suddenly had lots of work immigrants from Africa in Denmark. They were such a breath of fresh air in comparison to our Somalis. They actually spoke English before they came, they behaved civilized, and a lot of them managed to learn some Danish -- on their own, similarly to what you did with Swedish but without the Open University enrollment, so they did it even more on their own than you did.
That's what proper immigrants do, even if they are only here temporarily.
Maybe, haven't tried so it is hard to say. I do have a background in Greek and Latin as well but I suspect those won't be of much help either nor does the fact that I speak Dutch, German, English, Swedish and French and know some rudimentary Russian get me anywhere.
Spelling and grammar in both Finnish as well as Hungarian seem to be quite regular so it would come down to learning a new dictionary, a bunch of suffixes and the rules when to use which. The dictionary would probably be the hardest since it won't be related to anything I know.
Spelling won't be a problem with either language, pronunciation will (likely) not be an issue with Finnish (depends on how well you handle phonemic vowel length).
Vocabulary will be tough. There are surprisingly many Germanic loanwords in Finnish, both new and very(!) old, but most of them are not obvious until you've studied the language for some time.
Grammar will also be tough. It's not just "a bunch of suffixes".
Some people can communicate really well without being good at the language they are using. I bet you are one of them!
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.
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.
> Translated from Swedish Wikipedia [...] I think it is very reasonable
When I looked into this party when news broke a few days ago, I was surprised to find that the English article was comparatively longer and included the more appalling statements. Seems worrying that their narrative on the native version appears to be working
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.
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?
clearly state the premises that motivate their beliefs
thank you for recognizing that. i believe this helps us have a reasonable discussion about this topic. let me also add that neither my beliefs nor any premises they are based on are set in stone. they are open to be challenged provided the challenge makes a good argument or presents new evidence that i was not aware of. i have certain goals in mind or rather a vision of how our society should develop that influence my beliefs, and maybe we should talk about those too, but for now let me address your direct comment.
Is this a universal principle? Does this come with any limits at all?
universal, maybe, unlimited, i don't think so. it's more about balancing. on average minorities are weaker, have less strength to protect themselves or to lobby for their needs. etc. maybe accommodate is not the right word, probably support is a better way to express what i have in mind.
but how we accommodate or support depends on the circumstances. allowing kids to disrupt the class because they are disadvantaged is not accommodating or supporting them. what we actually need to look at is why they are disadvantaged, and fix that. not an easy task. but for the classroom example specifically there actually exists a proven solution, namely montessori. without going into details montessori allows teachers to accomodate each child individually without requiring a better teacher student ratio. one montessori teacher can handle 30 children.
but let's get back to integration in society. if you allow me to read that into your comment, your choice of example suggests that you understand accommodating as lowering our standards. (and that's why i now think accommodating was a bad word choice)
i definitely do not believe that we should lower our standards. we should be less rigid maybe, and less punitive and more educational when standards are violated.
but as the majority we also need to learn about these minorities, their background, their culture, why they came here, etc. we need to approach conflicts with an attempt to understand and work with them to find a way to live together.
btw, i moved to a developing country precisely because i wanted to get a first hand experience of the culture there and understand where these people are coming from, what attracts them about europe or other developed places, and what is holding the local development back.
It is the weakest in society (women, children) that bear a disproportionate burden of allowing large amounts of immigration from third-world countries.
i am not comfortable with that statement. first of all what would the burden be that children have to bear here? are you talking about problems in school with classes being dominated by children that do not speak the local language? if that is it then well, the solution is to invest more money in education. train teachers, realize that it doesn't make any sense to teach children in a language that they do not understand, etc. the need for education reform has been discussed elsewhere, and that's a global problem. the challenges caused by immigrant children only make that reform even more pressing.
as for the burden of women, again, please explain what you mean. if you are talking about violence at least in germany the majority of violence against women still comes from germans, and even though immigrants are over-proportionally represented in the statistics, most cases of violence happen at home which means that they are not cases of immigrants against german women. those cases are the absolute minority but they are grossly over-represented because local women are much more likely to report such violence than immigrant women and furthermore are the causes for violence more likely the socioeconomic status of immigrants, and their lack of integration (many young refugees come without their family and are not only not integrated locally, they are not integrated at all, so immigration itself is not the root cause) therefore i do not see that as a fair claim that women bear a disproportionate burden through immigrants. unless you mean something else, but then please share what you mean here.
as i said, i am open to have my beliefs challenged, so feel free to question anything i say. i am here to learn and i am looking forward to an educational discussion.
Montessori kids tend to have parents that produce better kids (both in the genetic sense and in terms of how they are raised).
It's a selection effect (also on the teacher side), not because they have a magic way of turning disruptive/dangerous/criminal kids into little angels.
"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..."
And there is the problem. You see, in modern Sweden (and many other European countries) it's entirely possible for migrants to live for decades without learning the language, understanding the culture, or even respecting the rule of law.
The majority needs to welcome and support the minority AND the minority needs to do their best to integrate. Right now the latter part is badly failing in Sweden, which is the reason for extreme amount of gang violence and social inequality plaguing Sweden. It's not even fault of the Swedes or the migrants, it's a systemic problem. The migration and integration policy is broken.
I think one issue with thinking this way is that who is stronger and who is weaker isn't always so easy to suss out, particularly on the margins.
To give an example from my own life/experience, I'm an American and Canadian woman, but I'm also a disabled lesbian. I feel uncomfortable when I go places (e.g. Ikea) and see Muslim families where the men are dressed in Western clothing and the women are niqabis, because it's an outward signal to me that they follow an interpretation of religion that is sexist and homophobic and are likely to be hostile to my existing.
There can be power overlap between the weakest members of the stronger community and the strongest members of the weaker community.
For the record, I don't have those feelings around all people of Middle Eastern descent or people who are visibly Muslim but not displaying an adherence to a particularly conservative interpretation of their religion (e.g. a hijabi in Western clothes or a group where some of the women are hijabis/niqabis and others aren't). I do have those feelings around white people who similarly display such conservative religious leanings (Amish, Haridem, etc.). It's purely ideological, not ethnic or racial.
The thing is, as a native, I don't have a choice to be here, whereas immigrants do. So why am I assumed to be the 'stronger' one, and why should ethnicity and religion override any other power dynamic?
I feel uncomfortable when I [...] see Muslim families where the men are dressed in Western clothing and the women are niqabis, because it's an outward signal to me that they follow an interpretation of religion that is sexist and homophobic
but that is very subjective and projects a fear that in my opinion has no basis in reality. i have felt the discomfort myself, even as a man, and i have asked myself where does this discomfort come from. my conclusion is a bit difference than yours.
first of all it helps to look into the history of this culture. as you notice that this is not specific to muslims, but is in fact historic to our own culture as well, what the amish are doing today was the norm in the western world just a few centuries ago. we all did it, and therefore it is not an immigrant problem.
the headscarf in particular was commonly worn by women even less than a century ago. there is nothing sexist or homophobic about it. it's culture. correlation is not causation. i'd argue that most women in the western who still wear these do it by choice, not because they are forced by their husband. for many it's a fashion statement. an outward representation of their personal belief (as an islamic or amish woman).
if you look closer you will also find that many muslim women in the west do not cover their hair, but normally you can't see them because without the headcover you would not even know they are muslim.
it is also worth considering that in part the intention of covering up was for the protection of women. the scary part for me is who they needed protection from. but our western society is plenty misogynistic still, we have just become better at hiding it.
and are likely to be hostile to my existing.
this i find completely baffling. why would they be hostile to you? i believe if you talk to these women and get to know them and learn their motivations that will help you get a better perspective, and alleviate your fears.
The thing is, as a native, I don't have a choice to be here, whereas immigrants do
which choice are you referring to here? the choice to not cover their head? the choice to go against their own beliefs? the choice to disagree with their husband/family? those that have the choice and and to do it, are doing it. those that don't either don't have the choice or choose not to. it's up to us to get to know them to understand the difference.
why am I assumed to be the 'stronger' one?
stronger in numbers. we are the majority still.
why should ethnicity and religion override any other power dynamic?
which other power dynamic? religion still is the strongest power dynamic in every society. even in the west. atheism is effectively a religion too. it's just another belief. trying to suppress religious expression means to remove religious freedom. do we really want that? what if it is your beliefs that are being suppressed? you would not want that. we have to allow for others to follow their beliefs even if they contradict ours. but we have to learn to get along because rejecting people for their beliefs only pushes them into extremism.
I gave the example I gave specifically: I'm well aware of the history of the head scarf, and the difference between a hijab and a niqab (as well as between the different forms of dress - I know the difference between an abaya, a chador, etc.) I also specified it is specifically when I run across families/groups where the women and men are dressed very differently: I don't feel that way when I encounter groups where men are in thobes and women are in abayas + hijab or niqab. I don't feel this way when there are outward signals that the woman is wearing the hijab primarily for cultural reasons, such as when she's keeping company with women who don't cover or when it's blended with an acceptance of Western culture.
I really dislike the idea that my discomfort has to come from ignorance. It doesn't. I've actually spent time in the Middle East (and yes, I wore a hijab). I am aware that the idea that the niqab is compulsory is not held by the majority of Muslims and it's a particularly conservative reading to consider it compulsory. I'm also aware that some women choose to be niqabi, which is why if it's one or two in a group it doesn't bother me - that's indicative of it being a choice, and if the niqabi is accompanied by hijabis or uncovered women it signals that she accepts variance in interpretation. When it's every single one, though, that tells me that it's likely that group of people has conservative Muslim views.
In terms of listening to people, I've also listened to ex-Muslims and queer people from Muslim backgrounds. I've found a lot of 'sit down and listen to X group' presents you with the most privileged takes from that group: You want me to listen to the Western revert, not the women from Afghanistan.
And again, I do feel uncomfortable with white people/people of my own ethnicity who outwardly display signs of belonging to fundamentalist/conservative religious groups. I don't like fundamentalist Christians, super Orthodox Jews, etc. I'm judging them by the same standards I judge anyone else. If anything, giving them a pass feels rather like the racial version of benevolent sexism.
I was referring to the choice on where to live. Unless they're refugees, immigrants make a choice about living in their new country and they have the option to leave/go back to a place where the culture agrees with them. I can't leave.
> religion still is the strongest power dynamic in every society.
Strongly disagree. I'd put class and sex up there alongside religion, personally. Those are strong power dynamics that exist even in societies where everyone is of the same religion/ethnic group.
I don't say anything to any of these people and I do live with the discomfort, but my point is to say that in this situation someone is going to be uncomfortable. It's either going to be me, knowing that they think I shouldn't exist, or them, feeling like they can't express themselves. There is also another lens for looking at this, which is freedom of speech. They have the right to express their beliefs (non-verbally) that I'm a degenerate who's going to burn in hell, and I have the right to express my belief that their beliefs are extremely off-putting and I'd rather not be around them.
my apologies for assuming ignorance. stating your actual experience does make a big difference (and just a hint that you have been in the middle east for some time would have made that obvious). it does change my understanding. you also add a lot of context now that i find very helpful, thank you for that.
no time now to respond in detail. i'll come back to that. but it appears you have a great deal of experience to share, so i'd like to ask up front to please share more.
just one thought that may indicate where my response might be going. being uncomfortable with other some people is something that makes me question my own feelings and beliefs first of all. why do those people make me uncomfortable, and what can i do about it? but to understand your discomfort i would really like to learn more about your experience.
another aspect of this discussion is the question of where the future of our society is going and how we best deal with conservative elements that reject change. anyways, i'll probably need a day or so for a more thoughtful response.
I do think context is important and I appreciate this response acknowledging it.
Other context: I live in Michigan, and there are actually Muslim majority towns and cities here - I don't live in one, but I do travel to/through those areas and where I live does have a Muslim population and there's nothing unusual to me about seeing a hijabi/visibly Muslim people out and about, so I'm coming from the point of view of those populations establishing places where they are the majority. And they've also used the power they've accrued on the local level to display hostility towards queer people. It's not a theoretical I'm making up in my head to enrage myself.
Specifically, I spent time in Jordan, which is a country that has a wide variety of people and people practicing Islam in different ways, so I'm definitely not under the illusion that all Muslims are the same or are extremists.
I definitely agree that we should question how and why something or someone makes us uncomfortable, and I agree that the first step should be interrogating our feelings and determining if they have a basis or if they're just knee-jerk displeasure towards change or something different. I have actually sat with these feelings for a while specifically because they're so taboo in left leaning spaces, and all I have heard is similar to what you say: That I'm bigoted, don't understand, etc. That's one reason I actually did go out of my way to learn and understand more: I wanted to interpret that criticism in good faith, and I agreed that I should know more before judging.
I have major theological and moral objections to central parts of all 3 of the Abrahamic faiths, even outside of the 'do you believe in God?' question.
Another piece of context is that I'm a 38 year old lesbian woman and I grew up in an environment where conservative religious movements were actively and openly hostile to me. I remember reading articles when I was 6 years old about how damaged and sinful I was, I remember the reactions to Matthew Shepard, etc. If anything, I've grown more comfortable with religious expression over time: when I was younger, I viewed any open display of religious faith as signaling that person was dangerous to me. I've also spent most of my life hating that I'm a lesbian and wanting, desperately, to be at least bisexual so I could be normal. I still struggle with this.
The question of larger society is one reason why I feel uneasy about the situation: I think the most likely path towards assimilation/acceptance for the Muslim community is doubling down on the conservatism and becoming allies with the Christian right. The fact that the Muslim community is full of people who think that my life should involve me being married to a man and unable to say no to sex/being raped repeatedly fills me with horror and makes it very hard to want more of them in my area. That's why I'm pro-assimilation: it's self-preservation.
If Muslims want to live in America and wear hijab, pray five times a day, observe Ramadan, etc. I don't care, but I draw the line at ideologies that perpetuate sexism and homophobia. (And again, I don't want fundie Christian immigrants or fundie Jewish immigrants either, and a white conservative Muslim family isn't any more acceptable to me.)
To me, when I see families/groups that are openly displaying conservative Muslim values, they are openly saying they don't want me in their society and if they had a choice, they'd get rid of me. Why wouldn't that make me uncomfortable? If you went out and about and saw people wearing 'castrate all men' shirts or a symbol that represented 'all men can be made to like cock if you ram it up their ass while they scream until you break them down', you would be comfortable with that? With those people existing in your city?
If you want me to live a life where I'm sexually assaulted regularly to please your God, I'm entitled to view that as a threat. If you openly express affiliation with that, I'm entitled to consider you hostile to me and not want to 'get to know you'.
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.
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.
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.
It takes a lot longer if the immigrant groups are (locally) large. They are a lot more than just locally large in Sweden. It also takes a lot longer if the state bends over backwards to accommodate the immigrants, which Sweden does.
> What should happen is that the existing cultures should be open and welcoming enough so that new-comers want to take part
I'm an immigrant to the EU/NL (naturalized, now a citizen), and I also lived in Sweden for a short stint. If Swedes are anything, they're open and welcoming, I'd even say too open and welcoming, which is part of why these issues keep cropping up.
Some context so I'm not immediately written off as ignorant or as carrying some kind of agenda: I grew up in Indonesia. My family is largely atheist, but we lived in Aceh (look up Qanun Aceh, it's Sharia law territory) and various other places around the country. I've been immersed in Islam, every sect of Christianity, Buddhism (I went to a Buddhist school as a kid), and Balinese Hinduism. I went to an international school with people from literally everywhere, and I'm still close with many of them, scattered across the globe as they now are. I say this to establish that I've actually lived among a wide range of people, cultures, and religions, this isn't an abstract opinion.
This isn't unique to EU immigrant communities either, I've seen the exact same pattern in Indonesia. Many (I want to stress: many, not most, but certainly too many) immigrant groups are remarkably insular and resist integrating in any meaningful way, even multiple generations in. They don't learn the language, don't adopt the host country's customs, and make essentially zero effort to become part of the society they live in. This gets worse where there's already a large existing community of the same background, those often calcify into enclaves where you're functionally not living in the host country at all anymore.
At a certain point, we also have to admit that some immigrants are the source of the problem.
Where I land is this: host countries should expect integration from long-term and permanent residents, and should actively support it via language access, civic education, real investment in helping people become part of the society they're settling into, rather than leaving newcomers to sort it out alone or quietly tolerating permanent parallel communities. What that integration looks like has to be specific to the country in question, because "host culture" isn't one universal template, integrating into Aceh's legal and religious framework is a very different thing from integrating into Sweden's secular, liberal one, and I'm not pretending otherwise.
But in both cases, multiculturalism shouldn't mean a one-way street where only the migrant's culture is expected to remain untouched and is treated as a holy thing while the host culture is expected to bend indefinitely until it, too, warps into something it never was. If you've chosen to build a life somewhere, the society you've moved to should welcome you in, but you should also be expected to actually become part of it. We shouldn't have to walk around on eggshells when we say that people should integrate, this should be the expectation for anyone looking to form a permanent life in a country they live in.
Refugees are a different case, since they didn't choose displacement, but even there once return is no longer realistic and a person has built a long-term life in the host country, the same logic on integration eventually applies to them as well even if the urgency and framing should differ from voluntary migration.
On a side note (and this is more of my own personal problem), I'd rather not see any kind of Sharia-like culture anywhere near me ever again, that crap is stone-age level bullshit that deserves to go extinct forever.
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.
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.
I think that most people arguing for integration are fine with grandparents being left to their devices. Where they get antsy is when the next generation grows up self-segregated into their own distinct culture.
> Imagine grandparents being brought over from a different country and they don't speak the language - should they be forced to attend language school?
Yes.
> does that also include reading/writing?
Yes.
> What level of language ability would be considered the minimum
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?
A2 is a pathetically low bar. I say this as someone who had to do A2 Dutch to pass the citizenship exams, it is a pathetically low bar to pass. I have some friends who passed the citizenship exam and can barely order food at a restaurant, yet alone hold/follow conversations.
I think most liberals have the intuition that laws should apply equally to citizens and non-citizens, and I think that's where a lot of the discomfort comes from when we talk about immigration. A citizen who doesn't meet those demands imposed on non-citizens (e.g., language, cultural assimilation, etc.) will never be at risk of deportation, simply because they were lucky enough to be born in the country.
However, it does seem that this Swedish party is willing to "repatriate" even Swedish-born citizens, so at least they're consistent.
It doesn't say that at all, Swedish-born citizens means at least one of the parent IS already Swedish, they aren't citizen at birth if none of the parents are swedish and that's just normal almost everywhere in the world.
You wouldn't expect your child to be Pakistani if you get birth over there as 2 German individuals.
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.
> 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.
This is standard for most of the world. Really, only some countries, all of them developed, are exceptions to this.
unlikely. friendliness is experienced from the first moment you meet someone. my personality can hardly influence that. asians and americans are simply more polite and friendly in their approach to people they have never met. of course if you are unfriendly then that may change their approach. but if that was the measure then people should be friendly to me in europe too. but they aren't.
and i don't know what XI has to do with that. politics doesn't affect how people interact. not that quickly anyways. i was around when the big exodus happened in the mid-10s, and after covid china opened up instead of closing down. i don't even need a visa anymore if i just want to visit china. so even by that measure china has become friendlier. but that's not the kind of friendliness i mean.
> 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?
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 don't think it's reasonable to "demand" integration
Yes, it is reasonable to demand people who come into a country adapt to rules - written and to a certain extent also the unwritten, of which Sweden has many - of that country. When in Rome, act as the Romans. This adaptation will never be 100% but that is not the point, what is most important is that newcomers learn to assimilate to such a level that the natives are open and willing to maybe integrate some parts of the newcomer's culture.
People who 'are the last representatives of [their] culture' can write a book about it while becoming part of their new culture since it is clear that their old one did not stand the test of time. They're much better off that way instead of living like cultural fossils for the likes of NPR and PBS to make documentaries about. By all means document what that extinct culture had to offer but life is for the living and culture is the commonly agreed upon set of rules how to live it.
Multiculturalism is a pipe dream, something dreamt up by people who listened to one too many version of John Lennon's Imagine. It has been shown not to work time and time again, it makes it harder for people coming in to a new country to assimilate and integrate because there is no clear target to aim for. Culture is not a fixed thing, it evolves through time by adopting new things and getting rid of old customs. Multiculturalism does not call for cultural evolution, it calls for revolution: here's a whole new culture, now deal with it. Revolution hardly every works and when it does it tends to go badly for those on the wrong side of it.
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.
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).
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.
Of course after his admission modern Objectivists began to predictably denounce Greenspan (Ayn Rand's favorite boy) with various "No True Scotsman" arguments.
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.
And what does that have to do with the guy leaning right? He runs a VPN. If you care about privacy, that should be sufficient to support it, his other opinions aside.
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.
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.
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.
What counts as an "extreme view" is relative. If my country had seen such a surge in gang violence as Sweden has, I too would support mass deportations of migrants with a criminal record, and much harsher migration policy. It's not that extreme of a stance considering how bad the situation has got in Sweden. I don't want to live in a society where teenagers are regularly hired as hitmen and shootings & explosions are a weekly, if not daily thing.
For real tho, I think the current crime wave has more to do with power struggles in the drug market than anything else.
Sweden has had terrible integration policies coupled w segregating all immigrants in the suburbs.
The drug consumption of everyday Swedes is fueling the crime wave. Cocaine consumption is at an all time high. The former prime ministers son was caught w coke at home. But only the marginalized are penalized for it and forced to work supplying the rich inner city kids who get off the hook..
Can it really be called "extreme" anymore? Europe is swinging strongly towards being anti-migration at the moment. Other parts of the world like Japan are also going through such swings. Many countries never opened their borders to begin with. This political party sounds like it's closer to the average than people would like to admit.
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.
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.
+1 on AirVPN. They are amongst the handful of companies which successfully resisted the war on torrenting (targeting VPNs that allowed persistent ports) and still allow for port reservation.
Mullvad, like most other VPNs gave in in the end and removed port reservations.
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?
I've used both, and for me mullvad has worked a lot better. They seem more focused on VPN as core to what they do and don't leak data when reconnecting to a different server, and with proton I often experience that my connection stops working if my laptop gas been closed for some time, and the only way to make it work again is to reconnect to a new server. And then it leaks connections for a few seconds.
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.
I don't think it's a coincidence that supporters of positions that are broadly considered extremist in their respective countries are also the ones who end up running services like private VPN and email.
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.
There have been many shitstorms, but whenever I looked at the actual tweets or sources, there was not much actual evidence. More often it showed the founder being a poor communicator, but not right-wing.
I also think that there's significant overlap in the venn diagram of "I want to provide a privacy service" and "I hold some right wing views." If you're launching a no-logs VPN service, you probably have some distrust of institutions, lean closer toward techno-libertarian views which are increasingly getting absorbed into the right, have some form of belief in a free market, which is also starting to become a center/center-right view as the left is seeking a post-capitalist society that may or may not have a free market. The modern left is also unfortunately inching closer and closer to wanting nanny state style policies, so it's not surprising to see right wing views among privacy tech CEOs.
For left wing VPNs there's riseup, but it's not the same category of product as Mullvad, it's a free giveaway that you have to request access to, and intended for your personal use only - no excessive bandwidth like torrenting.
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.
I think they're relying on the fact that "Nord" sounds like "Nordic", so consumers think "they must be a Swedish company, I hear some Swedish techies are hardcore on freedom, e.g. the PirateBay is Swedish!".
By any chance are you using any Apple products and are you a supporter of Donald Trump? Because if the answer is yes and no singling out Mullvad seems be rather hypocritical?
Based on his actions Tim Apple openly is an ardent supporter of Trump. So effectively everyone here who has a MacBook was supporting a company run by by a pro MAGA ceo...
Of course greed and corruption might be considered a mitigating factor by some people (instead of seemingly doing it purely due to one's personal convictions and without any coercion which is presumably the case here
Without wishing to defend Tim Cook at all, there is a difference between a corporation donating to an incumbent government that seems unusually receptive to bribes (including to be left alone) and an individual CEO being the main financial backer of a local fringe far right party he wants to make a national force, presumably because of his enthusiastic support for their policies which include the 'remigration' of citizens deemed excessively brown...
I don’t remember Tim Apple or any other tech CEOs almost literally groveling at the feet of any other president besides Trump.
> They don't have to also be the main supporter of some ethnic cleansing party
True OTH that party is mostly inconsequential and has no direct power. Tech companies enabling and legitimizing MAGA by openly supporting the movement arguably results in way more damage on aggregate even if they are only financing through outright bribery.
The other presidents were law-abiding and weren't going to throw random tariffs or executive orders that could ruin these CEOs' businesses.
Pathetically the CEOs' concern was their company's market value/stockholder satisfaction, they "couldn't afford" any principled stance against tyranny, small or large.
"Oh you're commiting genocide with our SaaS? Well, if we do anything against that, your lobbyists will tell our government to fuck us; So, would you like any API changes to help with your work?"
Admittedly I had never heard of this party before, but after looking into them calling them far-right seems to be quite a leap.
If you didn't know, Sweden used to be extremely welcoming to asylum seekers and refugees about a decade ago. What they got out of it were gangs, their youth being exploited to enact crimes (due to leniency towards minors), and neighborhoods that even the police doesn't dare drive through. Having a party that calls for integration and adaption to Swedish values, and at worst remigration, seems rather tame. Especially so if you just take a look across Øresund and see what's happening in Denmark.
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.
That article calls the party far-right, which for US based readers will imply they have the same ideology and policies as the US “far-right” concepts.
Is that actually the case? I’m not familiar with this party, and it’s difficult to get a grasp on whether they are Nazi-level pure evil, or an otherwise reasonable party with stricter views on immigration policy.
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.
As long as its not a protected class, by the letter of the law you’re right, but we’re not discussing law: we’re discussing human response.
If you were kicked off of a VPN provider (or, even a site) for financially supporting a non-proscribed political organisation: how would you talk about it.
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.
You’re not taking it far enough. What if Mullvad has someone you disagree with as a customer, and does nothing about it. Does this mean that Mullvad is supporting them? Does this mean that you have to stop supporting Mullvad? What about Mullvad’s landlord? The company that provides them their electricity? Their internet provider? Their internet provider’s internet provider? Should you boycott the entire internet because Mullvad has not been given the BGP death penalty?
What are you trying to say with this? This is absurd.
The outrage has nothing to do with Mullvad itself supporting people with certain opinions or not.
The problem I and many others have, is that if the founder takes our money and gives it to causes that I (edit: or rather we) find reprehensible, we don't want to give them our money anymore. Simple as that.
I will not try to stop you from using Mullvad by any other means than my arguments. Hopefully you understand now where we are coming from and agree. If not, just do your thing.
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.
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.
When it comes to publishing anti-human, genocidal rhetoric, I hope they would say "we don't want your blood money."
Flipping that back around, I'm glad I'm not a Mullvad customer that would say "I'm okay with a portion of the money I give you being used to call for genocide."
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.
mullvad's mistake was to respond. it's all universally performative, the only reason it elicits reactions (1000+ comments here) when the view of a megacorp don't is because people anticipate the ability to elicit a response from a smaller company like mullvad.
rule number one: ignore any and all political controversies, don't respond in any way. deviation is nearly always punished. unless it's part of some PR campaign with a side-risk of backfire.
> mullvad's mistake was to respond. it's all universally performative, the only reason it elicits reactions (1000+ comments here) when the view of a megacorp don't is because people anticipate the ability to elicit a response from a smaller company like mullvad.
You're underestimating the large influence of paid actors/FUD here. It's no coincidence that in this very thread, normally supposedly intelligent people conveniently forget that about half the companies they buy stuff from have blatant MAGA-like CEOs. HN didn't suddenly suffer from a 20 point IQ drop.
Mullvad did not respond, as far as I'm aware. One of the owners has chimed in with their opinion, but I have not seen any official acknowledgement from Mullvad, the business entity.
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".
"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!
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).
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.
> I also highly doubt USSR would accommodate people who move in and don't bother to integrate into the culture and speak Russian
USSR was schizophrenic in that regard. Early on, it had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia, which was quite literally about de-russifying the local elites and promoting local languages. Then Stalin did a hard 180 on that, like he did on so many other things (e.g. re-criminalizing abortion and homosexuality, or reintroducing paid high school). I don't think it's unreasonable to argue that under Stalin, the USSR truly switched from being a left totalitarian dictatorship to right totalitarian.
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.
I mean, if you subscribe to democracy, the only way this would not be true is if said democracy was somehow subverted into a caste system where only some people are de facto eligible to be elected.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.""
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.
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.
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.
He's not just the CEO, he's a co-owner... Meaning that the profits from the business acrue to him...
and therefore enable this party.
So, it's a question of "am I ok paying for this service, knowing that a portion of that money will flow to this political party and how do I feel about the results of that funding?"
How do you feel about providing value to Hacker News, a plattform made by Y Combinator funding several startups, many of them destroying our society and benefiting from mass surveillance? You can do this argument with every company.
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.
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?
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
There are special ethical investment funds with policies like no military manufacturers, no fossil fuel producers, and so on. They will generally pay less, have higher management costs, but they do exists. You do have a choose in which funds and stock options you buy, including which pension funds you invest in.
A bank account is not a legal requirement in Sweden, which I know for a fact since I know a person in Sweden who do not have one. The agreements between the government and some banks is that banks must accept customers who ask for a bank account. They can't however force a person to go into a contract with a private bank against their will.
I will give you that it is a more significant choice to choose which companies one want to invest ones savings on, in contrast to spending a few bucks on a vpn. I would however argue that the moral impact from the amount of money invested in funds and pension plans are more important then the choice of a VPN, thus hold a bigger ethical question.
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?
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.
Most people in the world wants some form of ethnic cleansing - that's why you get 'ethnic quarters' in most large cities, people generally like to be around their own 'kind'.
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.
Everyone hating, I hope you check every company you use to make sure their political stance align with yours.
No AWS or Google Cloud if you're pro-abortion, for example:
"Together, Amazon, AT&T, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Comcast, CVS, General Motors, Google, T-Mobile, Walgreens, Walmart, Wells Fargo and Verizon have spent at least $15.2 million to support anti-abortion politicians, according to publicly available political spending disclosures." from https://truthout.org/articles/companies-like-amazon-and-cvs-...
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 matters because a lot of people will only read the headline and then get a skewed view of the political landscape.
I did not post my comment to defend him or the party. All I wanted was for people to understand the situation a bit better than they would by just reading the title and post content.
> 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."
> 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.
Wait wait, that's the clipped video people are basing this controversy on? Repatriation grants and was considered Nazi ideology 10 years ago, look what our politicians are discussing now. What Allard said during that clipped video is not far from what normal citizens are already talking about today.
>The point is, they want to round up lawful citizens and turf them out of the country
The US isn't the only country in the world. Sweden does not have birthright citizenship. Many (most?) of those to be remigrated are not Swedish citizens.
> 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?
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 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"
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.
I just assume that once people start seeing how the dots connect in some areas, they will be able to quickly see that the populists' dots are all over the place. I believe the educated populist are only the ones that try to drive move, not participate in one.
The nazis (national socialists) were running on full on the extreme left talking points, right down to socializing several industries, providing everyone a job (via state) etc pp.
After they got to power they ultimately abolished the democracy - that cannot be called either left or right leaning, because neither side would want that... And what they did up to that was actually very close to what they ran on. They did give everyone a job. State sponsored. Etc.
From a objective perspective, they were left. At least until the Kristallnacht.
The left just successfully rebranded them to right over the next decades, because they could and it was expedient for their bottomline.
I think it's worth pointing out that - if things were reversed - the political right would've done the same.
Realistically speaking, the Nazi were neither "left leaning" nor "right leaning"
They were just populists which told the population what they wanted to hear, which was left leaning propaganda - and delivered enough of that to establish itself successfully. But the dismantling of the democracy is proof that they were outside of the political spectrum. They were dictators, neither left nor right.
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.
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.
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.
> 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'.
You could, just as long as you keep it at that. The term actually does describe a valid political ideology: socialism combined with nationalism instead of the more common socialism combined with globalism, i.e. internationalist socialism ('workers of the world, unite' etc.). The association with Nazism makes it close to impossible to use the term in a 'neutral' way but in itself it just describes a nationalist movement which espouses socialist ideas.
Yeah, and their leader just happens to be a man disgruntled with the inefficiency and bureaucracy of democracy, mostly famous for his intense emotional political speeches, who blames most if not all of society's problems on his political opponents and/or ethnic minorities.
You're talking about the leader of the NSDAP while I was talking about a political ideology which aims to implement socialism at a national scale. These are not the same things and the concept I describe does not have 'a leader' just like e.g. market capitalism does not have 'a leader'.
It's impossible to use in a neutral way because all such parties are inevitably authoritarian brand of socialist, and any time you have authoritarian nationalism, crimes against humanity follow.
The point you're trying to make here is the difference between Hitler and the Strasser brothers, which is valid, but irrelevant in this context - if the latter had won, the pile of bodies they'd produce would still be immense.
Socialism and authoritarianism go hand in glove so that is not the difficulty here. It is also not the combination of authoritarianism and nationalism which leads to crimes against humanity, for that any form of authoritarianism - nationalist, internationalist, religious, secular - is sufficient. Nor am I in any way relating to Hitler or Strasser, what I am referring to is an ideology which aims at implementing socialism at a national level, within the context of a nation state, without the aim of implementing socialism outside of the national borders. For that you do not need to refer to Hitler or Strasser or anyone related to the German party which ended up under the control of Hitler.
This is what I meant when I said it is close to impossible to use the term in a 'neutral' way, the nearly inevitable association with what happened in and around Germany when the NSDAP came into power.
>> 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.
This discussion is completely and irrevocably poisoned by the lack of general understanding of the distinctions between citizens, non-citizen permanent residents, legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, economic immigrants, and war refugees under temporary EU protection (Ukrainians). Especially the differences between the situations in the US and the EU. This whole comment section is, sadly, full of people writing pure nonsense. Please educate yourselves on this big and important topic before posting.
I disagree. This thread contains tons of empathetic people who seem to understand each other, and disagree with each other. It's a breath of fresh air. Sure, there are also some angry posters who don't seem to lean into curiosity, but together we can make them the minority.
Given your understanding on these topics, can you give your opinion on whether this party (in particular their immigration stance) is as far-right extremist as the articles claim?
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 could, but in practice illegals get/use a lot of public goods that cannot be reasonably gated. The "means testing costs more than just giving welfare" argument is cited. Plus things like public schools, parks, transportation don't require ID to use. Having an ID is not guaranteed, as voting advocates often point out.
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.
> Also they are anti EU and NATO. Lot of astroturfing here.
At the same time, that big advertising and crony politicians are fighting to impose digital ID for all internet communications... one of the strongest privacy advocates is being attacked with non-sense.
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.
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.”
It's wrong. It's about "problem immigrants" and, to be honest, I didn't research further than that. It depends on the exact definition whether I agree or not with the proposal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where in the world is calling refugees parasites considered a neutral statement? Legit curious where this "much of the world" would be since I can't imagine this of an average person
Few countries have jus soli citizenship. Even many countries regarded as relatively open and welcoming would not permit locally born minors to stay indefinitely if their non-citizen or non-PR parents lose grounds for residency.
Jus soli is all about birth, so I'm not calling for that. I'm saying if a country is your home from your first memories until some time in your teens then regardless of legal status you are from that country and it's bad to kick you out.
No, I'm asking for something significantly less generous.
Instead of being in the country the day you're born, it's being in the country for something like 90% of your life from birth until somewhere in your teens.
Yes, “somewhere in your teens” includes people who are still minors, and again, if their parents have no grounds for residence, it is typical even of more open countries that their children don’t either.
IF those children live according to the laws of the land, speak the language of the land, don't espouse views which directly go against the culture of the land and ended up becoming self-supporting there certainly is a good case to be made for them to be allowed to stay in the land.
If they don't speak the language because their parents actively kept them from integrating into the land's culture which they (the parents) consider to be bad in some way, they (the children) violated the laws of the land and have well-filled rap sheets, they go out of their way to voice their dislike of the culture which allowed their parents in and they live on welfare because working is for 'svenner' they are very much invited to leave on the first ship or train of plane whether they like it or not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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"
> You have no specifics on how immigrants don't assimilate,
I haven't been to Sweden. I take the word of people who have been there or live there elsewhere in this thread.
But elsewhere I definitely have seen communities of immigrants which don't speak local language and treat local population as less than themselves because they are of different religion.
> If I am ethnically Japanese and grow up in Japan, but I don't act like others
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!
> 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...
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
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 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
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
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.
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.
> what scares me is the mobbing of people against other that have a different opinion than yours, as seen in this thread.
I am dismayed by the anti-intellectual climate in the world as well, but HN is an oasis of empathy and curiosity compared to other platforms. Look at the people I've engaged with. Many of them vehemently disagree with Daniel, and with my position. They understand it, compliment Mullvad, and say they unfortunately have to leave. That's the way political discourse should work.
> 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.
Good point. We should probably be more open about how much good Mullvad has done over the years. I've been so focused on just doing stuff, and not telling people about it.
> 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.
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.
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]
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’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.
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?
I think it's just that rightists value personal success more and also think it's more attainable from their own efforts, so they make these efforts more often. Or it may be inverted, that privilege/success leads to right wing beliefs.
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.
I get that this is in the news (or at least the nerd news), but really...do y'all canvass the companies you buy things from, figure out on net who the people who work for them support in politics, ask whether that's what you like, and move your business around based on that?
It seems crazy to me. Part and parcel of having a pluralistic society is that we treat each other the same in public-facing parts of life without regard for stuff like sex, political positions, etc.
You gonna refuse to accept mail from the postman who supports something you don't like?
What about the ice cream shop?
I don't know the verb canvassing (I'm not a native speaker) but assuming you mean something like vetting each company I buy from: that seems impossible. One can only do so much. Seems important to do what you can, though. I could understand the viewpoint that this person's earned money is theirs to spend; I can also understand people that don't want to fund this and are happy to have heard of it (even if the damage has been done now)
The argument, if I've understood it correctly, sounds a bit like the common pattern of asking someone who tries to buy ethical products whether they're impeccable/perfect themselves. Like asking someone who is in favor of a local wind turbine whether they've ever flown or such. You can only do so much as an average individual
It's different. There are things you can reasonably vet, and things you reasonably can't vet. For example, "is the diamond in the wedding ring I'm buying lab grown". "Is the fish I'm buying endangered". In many countries, "what kind of conditions did the chicken who laid these eggs live in". "Is this shirt I'm buying made to last or going to fall apart after a few washes".
Whether $0.01 of every $1 you spend to a company goes to someone who donates to far-right views, is absolutely impossible to vet and this news changes nothing about it. Would every $1 given to ExpressVPN lead to less $ ending up with someone who promotes such views? The truth is, we have absolutely no clue, we can't know, and there are so many factors in play here that this news doesn't move the needle. Pretending otherwise is performative behavior to make one feel better about themselves.
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 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.
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!
> 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?
Exactly. This blatantly obvious fact being conveniently ignored by hundreds of comments here, is not organic.
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?
It is getting almost impossible to consume media or use tech products without supporting a nazi sympathizer or supporter or downright nazi himself nowadays
What if the focus of their pro-remigration stance is families deemed impossible to integrate due to their persisting criminal activities and rejection of functional societal norms? Because that's the exact demographic this one policy of that party is concerned with.
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.
Dutch person living in Germany. I'm not aware of a party in NL/DE labeled left whose values don't boil down to that everyone (and future generations) should have a chance to live a good life, with different ways of getting there. I, too, would be curious what GP considers problematic about funding them the way that I find it problematic for any individual to fund this party/person who calls refugees parasites
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
Parties get goverment funding based on election result, with a minimum floor of 2.5% votes in national elections. This party is way too small for that, and is primarily focused on local election.
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.
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?
Sad that I had to scroll down so far to see someone pointing this out. This is the least organic comment section I've ever seen on HN. Also very convenient that the manner of moderation has kept this on the front page for most of 3 days, quite unheard of.
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".
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.
Why? It is perfectly possible to be a legal immigrant and a parasite. It's even possible to be a completely homegrown native and a parasite. Wouldn't you call essentially all career criminals parasites?
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.
> 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.
The trust in Mullvad was put to a test two years ago when Swedish police raided their headquarters with a warrant to seize customer data. They left with absolutely nothing because the data didn't exist to be seized.
Furthermore, Mullvad doesn't even keep an email address or a credit card on file. You sign up with a random number and can pay with cash in an envelope. If a company doesn't know who you are, uses only RAM servers, open-sources their code, and successfully clears a police raid, it's no longer just a matter of blind trust
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
I am leftist [1]. It’s not a coincidence that leftist groups in the world always devolve to infighting and splintering, while right-wing parties have no issue getting their radical ideas through because they don’t spend all their energy deciding who is part of the ingroup and who should be cancelled for wrongthink.
1: this is why I don’t usually label myself as such, as I am aware that the world is more complex than red and blue thinking.
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
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.
> 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
No. Daniel made this donation privately. I own and lead the company too. Both I and several of my colleagues don't like that Daniel made this donation. You are misrepresenting the facts.
> 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.
You can choose to believe that, but it doesn't make it true.
> 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.
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.
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
You're ignorant for claiming that being able to separate political opinion from creating good products (and standing for privacy) is ignorant. And you're proud of it.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Neoliberals mentioned above have never even attempted to call themselves "anarchist". Anarchists have been explicitly and diametrically opposed to neoliberals since their inception.
This whole thread is a bizarre conversation. It's like, saying I will list out some progressives and I include Margret Thatcher in that list. Thatcher never even attempted to call herself a progressive.
I agree that the neoliberals listed are not anarchists, but individualist anarchists and ancaps certainly are some form of anarchist. Not according to the left-anarchist definition, sure, but a broader “anarchist” label certainly fits in the sense of abolishing the state, and if those people use the label to refer to themselves, then it doesn’t make sense to just say “no you can’t do that”. To do so makes discussion impossible.
Left-anarchism is more prominent and more developed, sure.
You’re dancing around the issue. Some groups you disagree with use the word “anarchist” to refer to themselves. They fit with the colloquial term for anarchism and ordinary people are going to refer to them by that term. Like it or not, they are now some kind of anarchist just based on how language is used.
Nobody except left-anarchists accept the narrowly politicized definition of the term “anarchy”. Attempting to impose this definition against consensus is decidedly non-anarchist.
You should stick with bespoke terms like mutualism and syndicalism that have a distinct meaning.
(It is annoying how humans do this with language, especially when it’s forced, but I guess that’s just how it goes.)
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.
Anarchism has always been explicitly and critically opposed to capitalism and capitalists (literally often assassinating them) and market-driven hierarchies
> 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]
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
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.
> 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!”
Love all the Godwinning in this thread, it just shows normal people how ridiculous it all is.
(By the way: I doubt most privacy advocates care much about this. Those of us who travel in the underground are used to running into not-so-great people, many of whom seem to do way worse things than donating to political parties! But feel free to expend more resources on your campaign.)
If you know that he will spend his money in support of that party, and you still buy services from him, you are helping him promote whatever views he holds. As simple as that. There is no cop out.
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.
What? I don't support a lot of the things they say, but to my knowledge, that is not what they have said. Are you Swedish, or did you come to that conclusion solely from a Wikipedia article?
> Markus Allard stresses that he does not see immigrants who behave themselves as a problem. On the contrary, he believes that the debate too often focuses on people who are already functioning well in society, while politicians fail to deal with the groups that are responsible for crime or long-term benefit dependency.[0]
> According to him, the focus should be on those who create problems for Sweden, not on people who work, follow the laws, and are a functioning part of society.[0]
He also explains that he believes that being born in Sweden alone should not automatically make someone Swedish, and that it should instead be based on ties such as culture, history, and identity. You can machine translate the article because I feel this comment would be too long otherwise. It should be pretty close to what he is saying.
and:
> He therefore advocates a greatly reduced influx of immigrants, repatriation for criminals and long-term welfare-dependent people, and reforms that make it easier for productive Swedes to start a family and have more children.[1]
--------
And here are the original statements in Swedish:
[0]:
> Markus Allard betonar samtidigt att han inte ser invandrare som sköter sig som något problem. Tvärtom menar han att debatten alltför ofta fokuserar på människor som redan fungerar väl i samhället, medan politikerna misslyckas med att hantera de grupper som står för kriminalitet eller långvarigt bidragsberoende.
> Enligt honom bör fokus ligga på dem som skapar problem för Sverige, inte på människor som arbetar, följer lagarna och är en fungerande del av samhället.
[1]:
> Han förespråkar därför ett kraftigt minskat inflöde av invandrare, återvandring för kriminella och långvarigt bidragsberoende personer samt reformer som gör det lättare för produktiva svenskar att bilda familj och få fler barn.
We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and ignoring our request to stop.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
That's because there are no nonwhite countries in the world that white people immigrate to en masse because living conditions there are better than in their own countries. There's a real racial asymmetry in the world between whites and nonwhites in terms of building countries people wish to live in.
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.
The people who have managed to build countries people wish to live in are Euros or East Asian. Nothing intrinsically to do with their skin colour, of course, but it is a fact that some peoples have done it again and again (and again) and the rest haven't.
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" 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.
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.
An important part of making "vote with your wallet" work is that people need an awareness of what their wallet is voting on. Telling people not to talk about problems with companies lets companies get away with way too much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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]
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".
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?
> I hate how right wingers are constantly trying to normalize viscous, abhorrent rhetoric like this. Ironically, they often claim to be religious...
I mean, have you seen the political discourse on the left? they want to literally eat the rich. They rejoice every time a right-wing exponent gets shot and they defend all kinds of criminals.
The left is no better than the right in this sense.
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.
Given that VPN services are essentially an unalloyed commodity, the only differentiator they can provide is their politics. Mullvad has made this a loud and clear part of their branding (again, because they’re selling a commodity), so to me this seems like a pretty natural counterpart to their business strategy.
In other words: if you use politics to differentiate yourself in a market that lacks natural differentiation, you probably shouldn’t be surprised when your consumers have opinions about your politics. Especially when those politics are, at least on their face, noxious.
No I cannot. When my money is being used to sow hatred and division in the world, I will take my money elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the list of unusable services is growing by the day. But to me standing up for what I believe in is more important than the convenience of using a good service.
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.
Why set the bar at cofounders? Why not company donations, which are much more direct than a cofounder donating personal funds? Or why not CEOs? In terms of "support ethnic cleansing", indiscriminate ICE raids arresting people based on ethnicity sure sounds like a form of it. Why not include those too?
Oh right, because if we'd start with that, most people in this thread would have to stop using the device they're currently using, and that's inconvenient. Better put the goalposts exactly so that there's no such inconvneience!
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
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.
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”?
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?
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?
> 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.
"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?
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 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.
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.
The relevance of this story does not come from a obvious "wrong" in the support of political value X. Infact Mullvad is clearly politically active, supporting "individual-privacy" in legislation processes multiple times. This is expected. The 'problem' is build from multiple assumptions.
1. Owner, Co-Owner, director, etc. Have direct immediate unchecked control over "the product"
2. The actual content of far-X Politics in inheritly unpopular. Else it wouldn't be "Far" from anything. This is also why propaganda and populism are necessary.
3. Far-X politics DEPENDS on direct control (information and excercise) because of (2.)
Therefore --> Owner Opinions become Company opinions. And owner(company) supports ideological politics that are fundamentally opposed to product and broader HN views.
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.
A bit naive, but I'd guess that privacy supporting projects might tend to attract people on the political extreme so you see people are more passionate about this?
The average person who wants (or sells) a car probably doesn't have many strong feels on politics. The average person who goes out of their way to be to buy a specific privacy focused VPN is probably a bit more in tune politically and likely to have stronger feelings.
I know people who don't eat at Chick-fil-a because the owners are homophobic and donate to right wing politicians all the time. I also know people who don't shop at Hobby Lobby because the owners are right-wing christian extremists who materially supported ISIS by illegally buying antiquities. Both of these have been extensively covered in the news.
So no, it's not just companies that are "critical to freedom and privacy".
Those are more mainstream activists and boycotts, I’m not talking about those people. Those campaigns are organized by larger groups, usually don’t focus on individuals, and often have the goal of a change in policy (rather than a change in leadership). I mean the kind of obnoxious ultra-left hyper-online sort who participates in this kind of campaign. Closely connected to the pro-doxing crowd who constantly cites Karl Popper as if it’s a new revelation to anyone at this point.
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.
> Isn’t he, like any one of us, entitled to hold the political views he wants and support the candidates or parties he wants?
He's perfectly entitled to hold whatever loony political views he wants. I haven't seen anyone calling for his arrest.
But customers are also entitled to decide whether or not to keep supporting a company for whatever reasons they choose, including the political ideology of its CEOs.
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.
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.
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?
There's nothing wrong with acting on new information as and when it surfaces in your life without obsessively staying up to date with every entity you engage with. That's the reasonable, pragmatic approach to trying to do the right thing without overwhelming yourself with the burden of being perfect.
It's not a gotcha if you're inconsistent from an outsiders perspective, we're all doing the best we can with what little insight we have into reality.
> There's nothing wrong with acting on new information as and when it surfaces in your life without obsessively staying up to date with every entity you engage with.
So you're saying the majority of the people here who say they're leaving Mullvad, have:
1. Not heard of Bezos' funding of the Trump family, or don't use Amazon at all 2. Not heard of Zuckerberg/Meta's [insert countless despicable things here], or don't have Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp installed at all 3. Not heard of OpenAIs free pass on the Trump administration using their models for war purposes without limitations, or don't use OpenAI at all 4. And so forth?
Clearly, no. Because it has nothing to do with coming across information without obsessively staying up to date with every entity. The same people have come across much of the above information, yet continue not to act on it, despite most of them being magnitudes worse than this case.
It gives me an excuse to really examine why I started using their product or service and take the time to research alternatives. If the alternative is better, great. If not, what am I willing to lose? Money, convenience, reliability? These are questions you don't want a happy paying customer asking.
I think that's what a lot of people in this thread are missing. There are alternatives to Mullvad, so it's pretty easy to take your money elsewhere if you're unhappy with where it's being spent right now.
The counter-reaction to the reaction is so dumb. If you think it's silly to boycott a company because of a co-founders political donations, fine. But it's just as silly to try to argue people into not boycotting. Live and let live.
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.
Your point is relevant, but it’s not the whole story.
A rational actor will act on available information. It’s entirely possible that someone unhappy with Mullvad switches to an alternative that is even worse (on whatever dimensions they care about), and they just don’t know it. The question is whether they could’ve expected that outcome on a balance of probabilities.
I feel like the default assumption for a company in the privacy space is that they are close to politically neutral (0). Certainly skewing libertarian, but probably not more right (+1) than left (-1). So, if you see that your money is explicitly being siphoned to right-wing political parties (>0), and you don’t like that, it’s rational to switch to an alternative (expected value = 0).
Also, “very likely” to be better isn’t necessary, because switching costs are minimal.
Also also, saying that Proton’s founder is “outwardly MAGA” is really oversimplifying things. I’m not sure what your viewpoint actually is — maybe you’re just expressing someone else’s — but I’d encourage you to read: https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-tr...
> 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.
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.
You've both broken the site guidelines badly in this thread, not just in this tit-for-tat spat but generally.
Please don't perpetuate flamewars on this site. Please do review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, regardless of how divisive a topic may be or how provocative you feel someone else's comments are.
You've both broken the site guidelines badly in this thread, not just in this tit-for-tat spat but generally.
Please don't perpetuate flamewars on this site. Please do review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, regardless of how divisive a topic may be or how provocative you feel someone else's comments are.
I hear you! If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here...not even close. You can always help by flagging it or emailing hn@ycombinator.com about egregious cases.
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.
The "really bad one" is a policy calling for what in the Swedish debate is now termed "re-migration" of families who sustain themselves and their children, in their entirety, solely on crime and fraudulent extractions from the welfare system, while actively rejecting integration, education and employment. The misrepresentation is that the policy is strictly about non-white residents, all of them, on the sole merit of race and ethnicity.
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.
When it's about boycotting a product like Bud Light or Mullvad, there are so many equal offers from competitors that it isn't difficult to boycott and switch to another product.
Maybe companies in those kind of markets will simply bite the bullet and start marketing their products as for one side or for the other in politics instead of trying to be for everybody. Then they can lock-in strong goodwill from "their side", and stand on more certain footing. Or maybe most customers do not care as much as online activists.
same here. and the so-called political left is anyway mostly pro surveillance and censorship to curb what they consider fake news or agitation. (so-called b/c the terms left and right are actually pretty meaningless nowadays imo)
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.
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.
I've merged the other threads into this one, so you'll see some anachronistic timestamps below.