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

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

That's very close to arguing that Communists aren't on the (far) left.

However, as long as they still work within the bounds of the democratic system that the government has they would be far left.

Eg North Korea is indeed not a "far left" government.

China is, because it is still working within the bounds of their own rules. It's technically not a dictatorship, even if it may look like one if you squint even just slightly - and there are votes happening.

Same reason why US republicans say they are the party of fiscal responsibility despite being directly responsible for most of the debt of the US

Depends on the "education".

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

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'.

No more bizarre than the idea of free speech being ceded to the right.

Apparently even air conditioning is now a left vs right culture war issue...

They have been called Marxist-Lenninist by more mainstream politicians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party#2021_bus_rap...

Your nick (for those who don't speak Swedish: 'dödslaser' is Swedish for 'death laser') seems to point at you being Swedish or at least having some tie to the country. If so, in what way does Allard seem to be such a threat to you that you portray him in this light?

On a more serious note: No, I don’t see Markus Allard or the Örebro party as a threat in isolation. The broader right-wing populist movement they are part of, on the other hand, is very concerning. The normalization of racism, vilification of independent journalism, widespread acceptance of "alternative facts," and nonchalant attitude towards the democratic processes within this movement are particularly worrying.

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.

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.

FYI early socialists invented the word libertarian to describe themselves.

Authoritarian socialism is definitely a thing, but no, they don't automatically go hand in glove.

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.

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.

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.

Seems pretty cut and dry

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

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

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.

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?

You say pogrAm, I say deporting illegal criminals, lets call the whole thing off and remigrate them.

>In europe, when was the last time a mass ejection of normal people, who've not committed crimes, beneficial?

These are not "normal people", they are not citizens, nor indigenous to Europe.

>When did it end well for either the ejectee, or the remaining domestic population?

Reconquista is one example of many.

Many governments ignored people's will for many years.

Some new political parties want to fix that, is reasonable enough.

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.

https://mastodon.online/@mullvadnet/116822244689326681

It includes a short statement from the CEO.

Any other verified sources?

>> 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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696800

So I'll assume he owns about 50%. Well, that ends my usage of Mullvad.[1] I appreciate that probably many of Mullvad's employees have different views, and obviously Berntsson has every right to his opinions and to express them, and I also appreciate that someone can have control over an opinionated company and run it for one particular set of reasons but not for other causes that someone believes in, but in the end I just don't want my money supporting anti-people causes.

[0] https://mullvad.net/en/about

[1] If it was a small amount, say less than 5% or maybe 10%, I might have decided differently. But it's still millions, so probably not.

> 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.

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

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?

"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."

Very empathetic indeed.

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.

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 have no idea why people assume immigrants are pro-immigration. They're pro-themselves.

he supports a party that flat out talks about immigrants as parasites, let's not try to paint him and a good guy, it's infuriating

You should try knowing more people

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

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.

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

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

Yes. Thank you.

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?

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.

Does that make sense?

i'm not alone in this thread in saying you're probably going to have to have a real "come to jesus" moment over this situation. godspeed.

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.

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.

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

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.

This isn't about opinions. Very large political financing is not a mere opinion. It has a much larger material effect.

I don't think it's possible to separate "mission of our company" from "large scale political financing", for purely structural reasons.

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

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.

That's an interesting angle!

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

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

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.

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.

I'm sorry to hear that.

It can only means that Daniel is setting up a trap with Mullvad.

> 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.

https://elsalvadorinfo.net/homicide-rate-in-el-salvador/

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

Was the NSDAP "extreme"? They got 43.9%

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.

I don't see any issue with your flipped argument, it's the same thing, no?

They also can refuse business due to political stance. They can even give different prices to different customers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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."

For some people, the answer is obviously yes. For others, they'll judge Mullvad purely by its track record, audits, and technical design.

Honestly, you could say the same about the CEO of ANDURIL in the US - the Oculus guy...but he just cares about the US and wants to make money by making weapon systems etc.

Is he a bad person? Is he a patriot? Who knows, I ain't gonna play the ultimate judge game - but he did release a cool gameboy clone which is literally the closest I will ever get to his work... [1]

[1] https://modretro.com

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.

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.

https://www.analogue.co/products

https://www.analogue.co/editions

I think these look a lot cooler, though they're less hackable.

Uncontrolled migration needs to stop.

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.

Did you think of that word salad yourself or you copied it from somewhere?

So you’re being extremely unjust by accusing me of something while presenting yourself on the moral high ground? Checks out.

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.”

There, is that better? More palatable?

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.

The CEO’s extracurricular activities are none of my business.

Would you subscribe to an excellent VPN service, if it was run by [insert universally abhorred brutal dictator from history here]?

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?

However the original statement:

> The CEO’s extracurricular activities are none of my business.

Basically says that no border should exist, and it makes no difference at all who provided the service as long as the service itself is excellent.

That is a fundamentally different argument that I very much disagree with.

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?

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

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

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.

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?"

all this “cancel mullvad!” nonsense is 2020 cringe all over again

It sounds like once the party gets actual influence, its real funding will be determined by the Swedish people.

Doesn’t this make the situation less harmful, or at least fundamentally different from say Elon Musk?

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.

The party was founded after the founder was thrown out of the Left party for liking a far-left extremist group on Facebook and not backing down from that. Since then the party has evolved to also include goals traditionally attributed to the right, like large scale remigration and a stricter immigration policy.

The party also seems inconsequentially small, even at the municipal and regional level. They have 0 seats at the national level

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

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.

I am not sure "far right" is an accurate label. Maybe populist? Its a mix that would probably get a lot of support in other European countries.

The guidelines say "assume good faith"

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

Expect EFF to be bought or attacked.

Its a combination that appeals to the worst off who compete with unskilled immigrants for jobs and rely on free healthcare etc.

The other owner replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696800

Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20260629105534/https://det.socia...

So who do people recommend now?

I see no problems

Right wing should be boosting immigration to give businesses cheaper labour and erode worker rights.

Explains why they UK immigration rose massively with the tories.

Many parties outright lie about this to grow their voter base, but the difference in policy vs promise is huge.

Here is a recent interview with Markus Allard (the party leader for Örebropartiet): https://samnytt.se/markus-allards-plan-for-sverige-utvisa-kr...

Where he says:

> 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.

> Stricter immigration: The party supports significantly tighter immigration policies than Sweden has traditionally had. More recently, it has also advocated policies encouraging or expanding the return of some migrants to their countries of origin.

> Anti-establishment and anti-corruption: A central message is that established political parties are wasteful and disconnected from ordinary people. The party proposes reducing politicians' salaries and cutting what it considers unnecessary public spending.

> Protecting core public services: It argues that savings should come from administration and projects it views as non-essential, while prioritizing healthcare, schools, elderly care, and other local services. Free dental care: This has been one of its more prominent welfare proposals.

> Social conservatism and secularism: The party is generally described by political scientists and reference works as socially conservative and nationalist, while also supporting a secular state.

I asked more about the immigration point which seems to be the only right-wing position here and even that seems based around reducing immigration from culturally incompatible (and often far-right) countries and migrants who are an economic burden to Swedish tax payers. Which would be weird to brand far-right? Maybe slightly right-wing, but hardly unreasonable.

ChatGPT seems to think they're neither really right-wing or left-wing, but more populist which seems to be a better description if this is a good summary of their beliefs?

Asking because I don't really trust MSM sources to be unbiased against populist parties and I know ChatGPT has it's biases and issues. Would be nice if a Swede can explain if this is actually a far-right party, or just "far-right" by Swedish standards.

<Explanation>

Now if someone could give us a trustworthy explanation."

...as long as they don't have opinions that differ from ours, in that case we might punch em in the face...

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.

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?

[0] I suppose unless they have a very influential position and it's about a matter that contradicts main company goals

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.

Nobody is calling for violence though?

In a free democratic society nobody is forced to do business with anybody they don't agree with, and free speech means they can talk about their decision without fearing repercussion.

https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/richard-spencer-pun...

Is that somehow undemocratic?

Is anyone censoring the guy?

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.

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.

Of course, you have to trust the company on that.

> 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.

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

Explain why remigration is 'extremist' and 'evil' when applied to those who refuse to assimilate and/or integrate into their host societies, who never learned the language of those societies, who express disdain over those societies, who claim their own culture is superior and will prevail, who never became self-supporting but continue to depend on the state for their upkeep? Let alone those who commit crimes?

I'd say it is those people who are extremist, not the host societies who are fed up with hosting unwelcome guests.

Anyone who still listens to these people after the last decade is hopelessly gullible.

Hey guys, ever wonder why your masters never get you to swarm the actually clearly evil businesses? Too scared to fight the real bad guys or what?

Not more consistently than other parties.

They say they are, but their behaviour once they get into power suggests otherwise.

[0] https://airvpn.org/

Mullvad, like most other VPNs gave in in the end and removed port reservations.

It is super easy to set up, even on Linux and iOS devices.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. I keep along the effort, but it just continues to be impossible.

https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-tr...

- https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru... - https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-tr... - https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/proton-ceo-endorses-trum... - https://tildes.net/~society/1ldg/proton_ceo_tweets_support_f...

> Dems had a choice between the progressive wing (Bernie Sanders, etc), versus corporate Dems, but in the end money won and constituents lost.

And they're using this to say, Republicans are 'more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.'

That seem significantly more nuanced than supporting the right wing.

One of the articles you linked[1] also seems to debunk it.

[1] https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-tr...

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

> 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.

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?"

In reality they're based in Panama, and their parent company is Dutch: https://support.nordvpn.com/hc/en-us/articles/19441152966161...

It takes a certain kind of personality to become a founder especially more do for such a strongly principled company and adhere to it.

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.

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..

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".

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.

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.

So no, it's not just companies that are "critical to freedom and privacy".

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.

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.

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.

There's no such thing as rightwing anarchism. In the entire history of anarchism, it's always been a strictly and explicitly leftwing movement.

but what about free market capitalism, anarcho capitalism, the austrian economic school, the chicago boys, Milton Friedman, Javier Milei..

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

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

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

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index

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

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.

Left-anarchism is more prominent and more developed, sure.

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.)

Can you find me a single example of a sizable anarchist community that doesn't explicitly reject capitalism? Try actually familiarizing yourself with anarchist spaces

- https://old.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/

- https://raddle.me/forums

- https://itsgoingdown.org/

- https://libcom.org/

- https://theanarchistlibrary.org/

Hell, even try asking an LLM. The acceptance of "ancap" as anarchism is an extremely niche and disingenuous position.

---

The attempt to co-opt language is not just typical language evolution. It's purposeful. Here's, Murray Rothbard in The Betrayal of the American Right

> one gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy

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

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

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

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

Murray Rothbard, who popularized the term, and who I quoted above explicitly admitted that its an example of co-opting leftist language. It is not a "branch" or "deviation" of anarchism. It's a wholly independent movement that does not borrow from any existing anarchist thinker.

Doesn't really sound all that far-right to me. Nationalist, sure.

I'm not Swedish though, so I would be interested in the thoughts of those who are actually affected by Örebropartiet's policies.

To me too, then I got to the leaders quote on TV: "We must deport these damn parasites who sit and live at our expense."

Yeah, okay. I know some politicians who speak like that, I feel I get the picture.

I was caught quite off-guard by this new "open borders" perspective. It doesn't seem sustainable at all.

Look at the huge jump due to his policies: https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20240127_EPC...

The same was not true for Obama, who was actually much better than Bush.

Trump: "Border is closed. We're deporting people, starting with mostly those that have committed serious crimes."

How did it do that?

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 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?

- https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-didnt-cause-border-crisis-pa...

- https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-didnt-cause-border-crisis-pa...

- https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-didnt-cause-border-crisis-pa...

(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)

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.

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.

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.

I think there's probably some leftist argument against this system on account of how we're taking advantage of poor countries and something something workers rights, but I think removing the ability to leave, to go home is the worst of both worlds.

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

For example the Bible defined borders of "The Land of Israel" which are still fought over today: https://www.biblica.com/bible/?osis=niv:Ezekiel%2047:13%E2%8...

The "Eternal Treaty" between the Hittites and Egyptians defined spheres of influence and position of various cities

The Peace of Antalcidas defined the border between Greek and Persian influence and assigned various cities to different powers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Antalcidas#Effects

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.

I will take your word for it either way! Just genuinely curious. How was it all handled before passports and birth certificates and such?

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.

> 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.

https://platform.dsausa.org/foreign-policy/

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.

It's a very prevalent idea among US immigration activists and left-leaning people.

> what do they support exactly

Generally speaking, that people can move anywhere, if they want to. This article/interview/book covers it in more depth:

https://www.nyclu.org/podcast/the-case-for-open-borders

Bernie Sanders (since you're presumably talking about the US) doesn't even support open immigration or H-1Bs, let alone open borders.

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.

To think “the west” could make so many messes and not worry about cleaning up after ourselves - the absolute hubris!

> 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'm having trouble grokking your statement, but "open borders" is not a pejorative. It's a belief that people, more or less, should be able to freely flow across borders and live where they like.

Again, I am speaking from a US perspective. It may carry different connotations in other countries. It's too prescriptive to apply the same immigration policies at a global level. There's too much nuance and geographical differences.

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.

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.

in Germany we talk 350Mio€ vs 10Bio€ y/y

the us numbers will have a similar ratio

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.

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.

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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 our abhorrent culture, traditions and sometimes values hurt erstwhile peaceful societies.

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.

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.

Why do we know they won't? Because nobody ever called for expelling all Canadians from a country, even the leaders who did mass expulsions.

Adjusting for purchasing power parity, GDP per capita in Poland isn't far behind the UK.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don't make the mistake of assuming moderator omniscience (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)! - we don't see most of what gets posted to HN, and we mostly don't read the threads sequentially.

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.

There's a well-established process for letting the mods know about posts that might need moderator attention - see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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.

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.

Scapegoating entire skin colors for systemic failures doesn't seem like it's going to make things better for anyone.

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.

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).

BBC:

    About 58% of men convicted in Sweden of rape and attempted rape over the past five years were born abroad, according to data from Swedish national TV.

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.

A lot of the rest you list are not left leaning, but centrist (derogatory).

You could make an argument that some of them are "classical liberal" or "neoliberal", but that was the center in the US and everywhere else it is center-right.

Definitions are helpful here.

"Classical liberal" is what the US was founded as. It was a liberal Republic. Classical liberals value political freedoms, civil rights, and free markets. They are anti-monarchy and anti-authoritarian. Most of the revolutions of the 1700s and 1800s were driven by Classical Liberals seeking political freedom

In the origination of "left" and "right", Classical Liberals were "center left". "Center right" were the moderate constitutional monarchists. In the US where we have zero interest in constitutional monarchy, Classical Liberalism was always the center.

Since World War II, that center became a settled question in much of the western world. The answers are "Yes, constitutions", "Yes, political freedoms", and "Yes, civil rights". Though in many places, civil rights were incompletely extended and so much of the argument has been about extending them fully.

The other side of the argument is "the social question" which got rebranded as "economics". It boils down to how much do we allow power and wealth to concentrate. This became more and more of an element of the revolutions starting in the 1850s -- the revolutions of 1848 were the first to really feature a true left as it is understood today: socialist, communist, and anarchist. (At the time, it was just socialist. Communism as a theory didn't exist yet and anarchism was nascent.). And just to be clear, the "left" refers to Classical Liberals as "Bourgeoisie liberals" -- capitalists and capitalist defenders -- and does not consider them to be part of the left.

The center in the US since the 70s has been a neoliberal consensus which argues for allowing the Capitalist markets to do their thing with minimal intervention. And most of the debate has been about how much that minimal invention should be -- with the two sides mostly arguing between "almost none" and "minimal".

Neoliberalism is more or less a form of libertarianism (US Libertarianism edges into Anarcho-capitalism).

For all of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, Neoliberalism was the center and was the entirety of both the Democratic and Republican parties. The "left" vs "right" argument was focused on things like foreign policy and whether we complete the extension of civil rights to everyone.

For most of those decades, all of those sources you just named arranged themselves squarely around that center. They were all Neoliberal. They all took rotating positions on foreign policy, aligning with each party based on the political winds of the moment. Many of them did include arguments in favor of the continued extension of civil rights, but many of them also included arguments against it. Few of them whole-heartedly endorsed that extension until after the fact.

We've never had much of a truly left mass media to speak of.

In the last decade and a half, authoritarianism, fascism, and neo-Nazism have seen a resurgence world wide. And in the US an explicitly fascist movement with Nazi elements captured the Republican party and then the government. Anyone with a political science background taking an honest, empirical look at the MAGA movement will identify it thus. That movement directly pulled from the Nazi playbook in their rise to power. Trump has often cribbed directly from Hitler's speeches, barely even paraphrasing them.

During that movements rise to power, we have seen large elements of the wealthy elite that controls much of the media align with that movement.

At this point, most social media sites are controlled by actors who either have explicitly aligned with the US fascist movement or have effectively acquiesced to it.

Meta has added fascist aligned members to its board and put fascist aligned people in executive positions through the company. They've also voluntarily acquiesced to the regime's requests to silence anti-regime activists.

Twitter is explicitly fascist. Elon Musk is a core member of that movement.

TikTok has been captured by that movement through an orchestrated buyout.

Most of our media is social media, and right there you now have the biggest source of news and information for the vast majority of people fully captured by the fascist movement.

As for traditional media, CBS has been captured. Bari Weiss is a part of the fascist movement and her elevation was part of their pressure campaign.

The Washington Post is owned by Bezos who has aligned with that movement and is explicitly exerting editorial control.

News Corp (Fox News and the WSJ) is aligned with the fascist movement and is arguably one of its originators. Sinclair group, which owns most local TV stations, is also aligned with that movement.

And to be clear, I watched this happen. I've long made a habit of subscribing to sources from across the spectrum and made a hobby study of political science and trying to identify source's biases by political taxonomy vs the frustratingly simplistic left / right spectrum. I used to subscribe to The National Review, Reason, The American Conservative, the Weekly Standard, and others. I've largely tried to avoid those that are blatant, ingenuine propaganda (which Fox News has always been) in favor of those making earnest well founded arguments. And one by one, I've watched them fall to the fascist movement over the last decade. Reason is the last hold out, truly committed to civil liberties and libertarianism -- though it hasn't yet recognized the fascist movement for what it is (or hadn't last I checked in on them -- I haven't had the time to read as much lately).

It's pretty clear that you're in the fascist propaganda bubble, based on your posts and where you put things, and that is badly skewing your perception of where the center is.

I would strongly encourage you to get out of that bubble.

I personally have individual beliefs that align with both of our two major political parties, which is something very few people can actually say, for what it's worth.

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."

https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/04/1135902

Highly recommend the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast on it - https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-lions-led-by-donkeys-podc...

Its 4chan politically incorrect. https://boards.4chan.org/pol/

And yeah, its as terrible as you can possibly imagine. And then even more so.

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.

The Dutch were happy to do those jobs 50 years ago.

After every single "jobs the natives won't do", there's an unspoken "for the dogshit pay we offer."

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.

You could force people to accept the low wages by removing all welfare but that has its own problems.

These are all hyper exploitative industries based on capital exploiting the poor. Which is something we both agree on.

They're effectively the same thing.

Nationalism is a right wing concept.

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).

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.

Nobody is calling MacKenzie Scott a parasite.

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.

Firstly, you should probably cite that. Searching for it leads here. Hopefully, you didn't manufacture it.

But, while the language is unfortunate, do you really think natives should tolerate migrants who are not a net positive?

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

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

>"class-conscious populism" which according to party leader Markus Allard takes inspiration from marxist ideology

which would have been called far left not long ago. Still I guess "far-right" means anti immigrant these days?

> 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.

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).

The tree didn't take, and needs to be replaced.

It's called "Spruce Time": https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/region-skane-har-lag...

> Remigration is a far-right concept referring to ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white minority populations [...] to their place of racial ancestry

And what of the ones who are citizens?

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.

Terrorist/Nazi Concentration Camp Guard lies on immigration forms, decades later is found out and gets the boot

The fact that people can say this without immediately noticing the problem is absolutely mind-blowing.

Look how the Gulf states deal with citizenship and they manage to control much bigger immigrant relative to the native populations.

The only real refugees in Europe are Ukrainians.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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?

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.

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).

It’s pretty radicle to remove people who have lived in your country for generations.

Wikipedia > Slopipedia.

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.

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.

That's a lie. He, someone who hasn't been involved with Wikipedia for 25+ years, was blocked for breaking the rules of Wikipedia.

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?

And if the country only serves the former...

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.

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.

Scroll to the bottom...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Grenade_attacks_by_co...

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

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

which is literally kicking out people who don't look or sounds like me, out of the country.

Whenever that has happened it has been rather bad for most parties.

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

Parallel societies have never been found to be a positive thing as far as I can tell.

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/25/sweden-pm-ivf-...

Because a demographic crisis is a real problem:

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

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

Because there are 3 solutions to this problem:

1. Improve Technology so that a smaller working age cohort can support a larger elderly cohort

2. Increase the birth rate, which no developed country has managed to sustain

3. Increase migration

1 and 2 are theoretical - no has proved that this can work.

It’s perfectly fine for the Swedes to decide that 3) is not for them.

We’re on a discussion board - Why wouldn’t I be able to comment on a country’s policies?

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.

As somebody from a country near Sweden, I sure as hell hope not.

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.

- Markus Allard

So basically the left but with a stricter view on immigration?

>large scale remigration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remigration

Even people of the same complexion can be a net negative to the country as they feel the majority of recent immigrants are.

from the wikipedia page

That's pretty far-right by itself. The fact that they want mass deportations should solidify it for you though.

https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/110357

(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.)

German Nazis were socialist in name only, to appeal to the working class.

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.)

This is what the party leader has said they want to do. You really should look into what you're defending, because you're currently defending a party that wants ethnic cleansing.

> 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?

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.

They want to deport anyone that isn't Swedish enough, even if they're native-born Swedes.

> 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.

Well that clears things up

There's a reason the Nazis included "socialist" in their name. It's not because they give a crap about the plebs.

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.

In any case, regardless of inevitability, I think it's important to remind people that the Nazis as they actually happened were a disaster for virtually everyone in Germany, just to preempt any statements about the Nazis actually being good for certain groups.

Limiting immigration along with generous government benefits for citizens is an interesting new space for political parties not fitting the traditional left right axis.

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.

You may not owe people who you feel are wrong better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You may not owe people who you feel are wrong better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The rise of fascism anywhere should be opposed by good people everywhere.

Some of its key issues include lowered wages for politicians, ending the tax payer funding of various sculptures, monuments and art, large scale remigration, a stricter immigration policy, and free dental care.

> While Allard has described himself as a Communist, and a Marxist, at its founding in March 2014 he defined the Örebro Party as "broad left". At that time the party considered itself a "local party that wants to carry on the labour movement's ideals", and "not interested in administrating the current society".

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

So why haven't we cancelled Big Tech yet?

[0] https://www.commoncause.org/articles/big-tech-is-donating-mi...

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.

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.

- having the emotional energy reserves left to act on it

- fully understanding the repercussions of the thing

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

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

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

and another relevant one: don't have the resources to switch. (cost of research and moving)

and: depend on other people whose mind you are unable to change.

i haven't found any other vpn providers that work like mullvad for example. (i think one has been mentioned here but i'll have to research that one first before i can consider it.)

i can't switch away from whatsapp or wechat because too many people are on there that i can't reach in any other way. my customers are using AWS or google and i am not in the position to change their mind, and i don't have the luxury to fire customers over this.

Yes

>or it just a reflexive change of footing whenever you happen upon news like this?

No (only when my personal screening didn't already flag it)

>do you really switch

Yes, where it's feasible

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.

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.

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...

That assumption here is wrong, because VPN companies in particular are known to be a lot dodgier than average. Maybe if we were talking bakeries, then I'd agree.

> 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...

One can make very similar arguments for this specific case. Saying that the party in question is far-right is simplifying things. On top of that, a co-founder making a private donation to a party (two layers: 1. private 2. party) is less directly related to the company than a founder directly tweeting an ideological point (1. public 2. direct).

Honestly, the party sounds insane, I wouldn't be caught dead supporting them and would hope that any Swede reading alone avoids them with a ten-foot pole. But the response in this comment section is absurdly exaggerated compared to what any of the Big Tech corps that get talked about daily on here, and whose

I don't believe it's organic at all. Recently there's the biggest push in history of "think of the children" online surveillance, with remote attestation and mandatory identity coupling being rolled out at scale. Mullvad is known to be one of the top privacy-preserving VPN providers in the West, with a large userbase on HN, and now you get this very disproportionately negative reaction to what is realistically a meaningless issue: "$0.01 of every $1 spent on Mullvad might end up with someone who donates to a radical party, if even that" - just like, almost certainly, every other $1 you spend elsewhere does.

Source very much needed.

Founder and CEO.

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?

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.