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26% Positive
Analyzed from 2085 words in the discussion.
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#party#mullvad#swedish#https#sweden#don#immigration#allard#more#controversy
Discussion Sentiment
Analyzed from 2085 words in the discussion.
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Discussion (44 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
That said, the fact that the person involved is the founder of this company (not a regular employee) does change things though. I don't know anything about the politics involved, but (with the exception of recent American executives) I would imagine you would want the people who run your company to be more neutral as to prevent controversy (or at least do so quietly).
I want them to be strongly biased in favor of free expression.
But they take my money and use it restrict how people dress, how they pray, what customs they are allowed to follow, what they teach their kids.
The agenda they support is anti-free-expression, and that's worse than neutral.
most people wouldn't even know the controversy happened nor care. with the response, you now trigger various human instincts that draw attention, promote further gossiping and wondering where the fire is with all the smoke.
I'm fine supporting companies that have people with poliical views I initially interested in Mullvad for political reasons and one of the founders giving a significant amount of money to a political group that wants to restrict the rights of other people is too much for me.
Not everyone is cynical. Some of us have actual values we act on.
How this is represented by people is different than that, and its hard for people who don’t speak Swedish to listen to the original sources, but be assured that in Sweden there is an actual party founded by Nazi sympathisers and it is the second most voted for party.
I get not wanting to support someone you think has immoral views, but check the facts first before blacklisting a company that is filled with people trying to push for a more open, private yet transparent internet.
Also, there are ways to keep companies from using migrant labor to undercut wages that don't involve mass deportation.
[1]: https://xcancel.com/markus_allard
Sure, you find the odd reasonably put politic position. But, mostly, it is memes. Screaming. Ranting. Insults. Calling the head of the Swedish police a "crying bitch". Retweets of posts from who are not even shy in terms of being bigots and racists. The man is a toxic toad and I would rather have seen him paid to shut up than anything else. Yes, we need diverse viewpoints to be heard and we should be respectful and careful to shut them down. But, Allard is not this person and he is just ruining public discourse even further and waging an insane culture war (in my mum's constituency at that). Call me old-fashioned, but I expect representatives to at least try to strive towards holding morals and behaviour above the mean of society.
I have read Mullvad's blog post, but not Berntsson' yet (it is bloody long and I am at work, but skimming it, I saw nothing arguing why "public discourse arson" is warranted and just "something needs to be done, this is something"), so maybe I am missing some context. But if the answer to your question is "Bank-roll Allard", maybe it is time to take a step back and ask yourself what on Earth your question was in the first place? Because it seems to me like you are playing with fire and risk burning all that we hold dear to the ground. Do your views not have a Johan Norberg-like [2] character (something very rare, a Swedish Libertarian that has contributed to public discourse for over twenty years) that you can support instead? Or is the direction you want to see only professed by people that behave very close to what I would describe as the very worst our species have to offer?
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Norberg
The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Ă–rebro party (118+695 points, last month, 3+1588 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/
Obscura by definition is the same or better than Mullvad because of the multi-party relay. Similar with iCloud Private Relay but that's only for Safari which is inadequate.
Nym looks promising but mixnets haven't been tested as much as the Tor network.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446899
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party
The party has been variously characterised as left-wing and right-wing, as well as populist, nationalist and conservative.
The message from the CEO about the donation: https://dberntsson.info/And for those who may not be old enough to remember the last time this happened in the techsphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...
Personally I wish people like his had the balls to stop hiding behind that kind of thing, we all know what someone is about when “immigration is the main problem” in their viewpoint.
Own it. Or if it’s something to be ashamed of… accept the shame.
Progressives fuck this up continually across the policy spectrum, by having no answer other than "no you're wrong/immoral/stupid" to people who express concerns in categories that have strong orthodoxy requirements.
Blaming immigrants is easy because you get an immediate base amongst racists (the immoral). They'll perk up at the sound of your dog whistles, and immediately start barking shit like "finally someone had the bravery to say what we're all thinking". That amplification of your message then reaches the reactionaries, who accurately look around at the world that is hell bent on destroying them, but are a little too dense to understand the web of systems that make up that world, and thus are eager for a simple explanation (the stupid). And once your message gets embedded in the zeitgeist from that lot, normal, relatively detached from politics people start hearing all this talk about immigration being a problem, and believe it (the wrong).
The same way you can't be frugal to make up for making poverty wages, you can't shrink the pool of disadvantaged workers to make them advantaged.
Marine Le Pen's party in France leans socialist on econ but is painted as 'far right' for the same reason.
Go look into what the soviets did to trade unions.
Play radical games, win radical prizes. The last place I want my money going is towards radical authoritarianism, a cause that I thought Mullvad would thoroughly oppose.
> Self-censorship out of fear is an even bigger dampener than direct censorship.
Bullshit. Self-censorship is a self-preservation mechanism, a VPN doesn't change the consequences of saying illegal or offensive things. Direct censorship is an abuse of the monopoly on power, and much more inhumane than just feeling insecure about your edgy ideas being attached to your identity.
[insert Paradox of Tolerance quote here]
And the most extreme position they have stated is that "it doesn't matter if you're born here, if you commit crimes and don't respect the culture you should probably leave".
That is an extreme position, but it's not as black as people seem to paint it, which implies heavily that the party is just simply racist against non-swedes.
The actual racist party is the second most voted for party in Sweden, I think because of how intolerant the society has been about talking about the issues caused by migration. That is my own opinion though, as a migrant, living in the city with the most migrants in Sweden.
That's where it gets messy, at least in the States.
note: I have family in Sweden that are non-white but I've never discussed the issue as it felt a bit too "delicate"
'In 2026 Ă–rebro Party leader Markus Allard sparked controversy on several occasions. In a debate hosted by Studio3 with Liberal member of parliament Martin Melin, Allard asked: "why won't the Liberals push for deporting 100 000 social welfare-Somalis?" and in the same debate said that "Sweden belongs to the Swedes. We have to make sure that we take care of our own damn people and we must deport these damn parasites who sit and live at our expense."
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."'
The context in this case is that he was directly asked:
"What about the people born in Sweden who commit so many crimes and do not integrate at all, live their whole lives on welfare, as we are seeing in the statistics it is mostly the second-generation who are most represented" (I am adlibbing and translating, but this is the question).
Allard then said, as you put it: that being born here is not protection.
Now, that is an extreme position, nobody else would say such a thing, and to be totally clear: it's not possible in the Swedish constitution to strip someone of citizenship (even if they have a claim to another by blood- which is the most common method of attaining any citizenship btw) - it's also against international law to strip someone of a citizenship to leave them stateless.
However there's only 30,000 people (of 2.1M) foreign born people in Sweden whom are otherwise stateless (Palestinians; Balkans who did not reapply after the fall of Yugoslavia), and there is a huge issue with crime and integration.
There are no solutions, but it's kind of valid for Swedish people to be looking at people to ask difficult and stomach-churning questions in some way.
I can't even find the right words to describe how wrong this sounds to me