I'm Done with Mullvad
moonwriting.blog> As if it isn’t a problem that their CEO is supporting policies that go against everything that Mullvad stands for as a company.
Mullvads mission is about privacy and against mass surveillance. That mission has nothing to do with their co-CEOs personal stance on immigration. I don't necessarily see the conflict of interest that the blog talks about?
The immigration policies (or mass-deportations) that Mullvad co-CEO is supporting with political donations cannot be achieved without mass surveillance and secret police.
It is really not difficult to draw this line to spot contradiction between co-CEO's personal stance and the company's mission.
> cannot be achieved without mass surveillance and secret police.
That doesn't apply to countries with a working personal-id system.
There it's just a matter of cancelling the banking account.
Some sieving at the borders, airports, harbors.
Maybe asking around the neighbours, former work where that sucker has gone.
Grabbing, and expedite. And that's it.
Bye, bye!
Well that party wants to enact mass surveillance to protect the country from immigrants
> Making murder illegal doesn't imply that the government stalks you 24/7 to make sure you don't murder someone
If a party says they wanted to stalk you 24/7 to make sure you don't murder someone, don't support that party.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
I just checked. They haven't published their political standpoints yet so it's too early to say. They claim they will soon, ahead of the elections.
How do we know anything about them?
You tell me, you claimed to know their plans. I don't know where you got that info from?
I checked the official source, which should be considered the authoritative source imo?
Lots of discussion surrounding what ethnonationism is...
Ethnonationalism: Defined by shared ancestry, lineage, and cultural heritage. Membership is exclusive and inherited by birth, focusing on preserving a specific ethnic identity.
Civic Nationalism: Defined by shared political principles, values, and laws. Membership is inclusive and open to anyone who adheres to the state's legal framework, regardless of background.
Does the party call for remigration or a lower status for immigrants who have committed no crimes, found jobs and are not a disproportionate drain on the welfare state? To be ethnonationist, I believe they must call for that on the basis of us vs them. Perhaps someone can provide evidence of this. I haven't seen any. Seems like they are very upset about crime and welfare drain. Also they have a bunch other non immigration related positions that some might label as extreme.
"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 don't see any mention of crimes, having jobs or "being a disproportionate drain" (however you define that).
I do not speak Swedish, but I looked into this via machine translation.
My understanding is that the discussion can be found around this timestamp link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4goynP4mHYI&t=1h18m43s
According to the machine translation, Allard explicitly frames his argument around cultural assimilation, economic contribution, and behavior rather than biological ethnicity or skin color alone.
In public statements, he has routinely asserted that an individual's racial background or skin color is irrelevant to his politics.
Look, I'm not some Allard supporter. Don't know the guy, not even Swedish. Easily found some stuff on their platform which I quickly disagree with. I really doubt he's literally out there just calling for mass deportation of folks based on ethnicity. That is actual ethnonationism. Swedish people are from a nice free society and are accustomed to low crime and low problems. They've got this 2nd generation migrant issue that lots of Europe is dealing with.
The definition of ethnonationist is being used so flipantly throughout this thread.
Do your really think this guy is just standing up saying 'remigrate all dark skinned folks who got here recently'?
Even if that were his true political goals, it would be pretty self defeating to just charge onto the stage going full Nazi. He wouldn't have this much movement.
Ok, however,
> I really doubt he's literally out there just calling for mass deportation of folks based on ethnicity. That is actual ethnonationism. Swedish people are from a nice free society
If you meant that they wouldn't support racist policies, a party with neo-nazi roots is currently the second largest one; calling for mass deportation based on ethnicity might not be that unpopular.
Actually, the Swedish Democrats themselves in 2003 adopted “the idea of "open Swedishness”, meaning that Swedish identity is not biologically exclusive and that assimilation is – theoretically – possible”.
And their ideas about immigration don't seem very different to those of Örebro, at a quick glance.
The SD are described in the intersting scholarly article at https://direct.mit.edu/euso/article/21/4/583/127125/Frames-o... as ethno-nationalists.
> it would be pretty self defeating to just charge onto the stage going full Nazi
Sadly no, in 2026 going full Nazi genocidal maniac mass murderer in waiting seems to be broadly acceptable for a politician, in the next few years we can expect the "in waiting" part will be dropped somewhere.
What is Swedish? Their own royalty is a forever soup with Danish, German and French ingredients, with Norman umami added before and after. They could just say tall/white/Caucasian and stop being polite Swedish about it. But they won't, because. Not my country, not my problem, but it's just so glaring. Do police work, educate, integrate. What's done is done, move on.
Maybe they don't fancy the idea of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submission_(novel) ?
I know I don't.
My sentiment was is that what’s must be happening but is unpalatable to be plated as such. Forgive me, I’m speaking out of school, I have never been to Sweden or its neighboring countries.
If you don't fancy it, maybe, don't obsess on it either, given that it's bs?
Is it? Funny you're saying that, since there exists a guy called Yasha Mounk, who stated very similar things in public TV multiple times, about performing an experiment regarding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_t...
Which wiki calls as debunked, and 'conspiracy theory'. Fkn rturds!
Other comments about that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48977236
Swedish politics aside(!), I'd love to have other VPN services as exit points for Tailscale. More choice is good, and hopefully that becomes an option one day.
People who look at this from a US political perspective is going to get a lot of misunderstanding unless one look into the specifics that are the Swedish political system and laws.
The party in question is a small local government party looking to primary get seats in their local government, but with aspiration to get into national politics under a special rule that provide a single seat (1 out of 349) in parliament if the party get enough votes in a local election. The politician in question has made some comments about national immigration policy during debates, which local government has no power over, and which is what the label ethnonationalist is exclusively based on. Last election they got 7 700 votes, and they would need around 20 000 votes to get that one parliament seat.
The specific quote in question has a bunch of context. The background was a parliamentary proposition that suggest that immigrants that are on subsidy programs should be required to do some social work as part of the integration process. The opposition disagreed, arguing that this would enable the government to exploit immigrants as free labor, and that is when this politician commented that if they want subsidy but refuse to work then they should return back to their home country (often translated as deported, which is not completely wrong translation but lacks context).
The discussion around deportation from Sweden is also very different from the political discussion in US. Sweden has been deporting people for about 100 years if a person lacks permission to stay in the country, and there is no party that is advocating to stop this. What is debated is the definition used in the exception for unsafe home country, and a bit about what specific circumstances a permission to stay in the country can be withdrawn. Except for the above mentioned parliamentary proposition, I do not know of any political statements that Örebro party or their leader has said on those issues.
> People who look at this from a US political perspective is going to get a lot of misunderstanding
Honestly you’ve summed up 90% of social media outrage.
> The opposition disagreed, arguing that this would enable the government to exploit immigrants as free labor, and that is when this politician commented that if they want subsidy but refuse to work then they should return back to their home country.
If the opposition parties disagreed, why did this politician assume that unemployed people "refuse to work"? like what type of argument that is? He sounds like an ignorant populist repeating sound bites to spread hatred honestly. Or maybe he thinks of them as pawns with no agency, and not people.
On the topic of privacy, the reason to use an LLM to write is stylometry. If I use my own voice to write anything of significant length, enough personal mannerisms will come through, so that I can be identified by my writing. If someone were to do something subversive, and wanted to be anonymous, that's one more thing to do to hide your tracks.
Just make sure to use a local model if you're really serious about this since there is no guarantee the cloud models can't not won't add watermarks to the output.
I'd hate to use my own voice to discuss my own views...because someone could think they came from me!
If you were gonna do something that really pissed the wrong people off, you'd not want them to find you.
Previous discussion: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party 695 points | 1784 comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469)
It also has a comment from the other founder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696800
Welp I'll be moving from Mullvad. Shame they have a no friction service.
it would be impressive if even 5% of the people loudly claiming they will move on will have done so.
It's not like consumers aren't spoiled for choice of VPNs.
>Mullvad discusses its ideals of “a free and open society,”
A free and open society does not mean that law and order cannot exist. Nor does it mean that immigration laws cannot be created or enforced.
Free and open society means others doing things that I don't agree with. Including private CEO donations or leaving service because of politics. By definition, it is attribute of democracy.
There's a huge difference between enforcing reasonable immigration laws and what some right-wing parties are proposing. I don't know enough about this specific party, but you'll find similar ones in other countries. And remigration is in the end about deporting even legal and well integrated immigrants.
Freedom doesn't mean just what you think is acceptable. If a society feels like they let too many people into the country they have the freedom to undo it.
I guess we're all just using our own definition of freedom. It'll make reasonable discussions incredibly difficult however.
To make things clear my definition of a free society is one where the society itself governs how it is run. The opposite of this is when another country, organization, or person is dictating how it is run overriding how the society wants to do things.
Do you consider governance of majority to minority as a part of free society?
>Do you consider [giving] governance of [the] majority to [the] minority as a part of free society?
I do not consider that as a requirement free society. While representational democracies give governance to a small amount of people compared to the overall populace theoretical you could have a society where everyone was on equal footing and all contributed to decisions being made.
Equal to what?
I'm supporting your position elsewhere: mentioning to avoid being dismissed as right-wing/ethno-nationalist.
However, support for migration is not a left or right issue. Accepting refugees might be (and I fully support that), but non-refugee immigration (the vast majority of it) is not an unalloyed good.
Immigration has a number of negative effects, on housing, employment and wages, inequalities, social cohesion, political direction.
Being a radical leftist and against immigration is not contradictory.
I don’t use VPNs anymore. They feel pointless now since almost every website has antibot systems, and VPN IP ranges are much easier to flag than residential proxies.
I use a VPN because I still seed 10s of thousands of torrents and have a static IP address. I don't want the swarm to see that. Most of them are from private sites I trust, but some from private sites that have a huge membership I'm not sure about. I have a lot of movies and music that isn't available anywhere else and archiving that is important to me. Kept my music collection from what.cd and a lot of that you can't even buy on discogs.
It's not great as a Mullvad user: YouTube constantly complains and also shadowbans some of my livestreaming functionality, and my X account has now been flagged as a bot, which requires me to download the app and verify myself in ways that they won't explain. And X is practically useless without a user, much like Instagram. TikTok also shadowbans you with reduced functionality.
Twitch and Discord meanwhile feel remarkably unaffected compared to their counterparts.
VPNs in the aftermath of FireSheep[1] before we got proper HTTPS, but it's not likely to be the ban or censorship circumvention tool we think they are.
So what does a political blogpost have to do with HN or tech?
What a blogpost about Mullvad has to do with tech? When easily half of all HN submissions have no relation whatsoever to tech?
It's about a popular security tech product! Sure there's a political angle as to _why_ the person has ditched it, but loads of HN news posts do. Not sure why it's flagged
Nothing except for the link with the well-known and -regarded VPN provider Mullvad. The ban on political articles here is not complete nor unbiased.
I've been recommended https://airvpn.org. Any opinions?
Not audited. IVPN is what I would use if I didn't use Mullvad.
Personally I welcome more parties in the Swedish Riksdag.
It is also interesting how they may get their seat.
Örebropartiet is a local party to Örebro, but because they are getting a lot of votes in the local district election they may end up in a seat in the Riksdag, which is highly unusual.
> because they are getting a lot of votes in the local district election
Or because they're getting a lot of money through Mullvad subscriptions
> Some key issues for the Örebro Party locally include strong secularism, a 30-hour workweek with retained pay, lowered wages for politicians, expanded social housing, abolishing preschool-fees, making public transport free of charge, ending taxpayer funding of what it sees as wasteful sculptures, monuments and art and introducing free dental care. Nationally the party has set out large-scale remigration, closing the Swedish borders to immigration, a stricter assimilation policy and ending taxes on energy and fuel as some of its key issues.
Seems very sensible.
Every populist party works that way, by promising very "sensible" thing. They work like an echo chamber for trendy political ideas.
Whether or not they are actually capable or even plan do any of that it's a different matter. Typically, they only end up being a coverup for political extremism. In then other cases they fumble and somehow mess up the situation even more.
Conversely, the "serious" political parties work by claiming all sensible reforms are in one way or another impossible and sitting on their behinds for the duration of their terms. See Mamdani for an example of a "populist" who somehow managed to push through many sensible, "impossible", "extremist" policies without too much effort.
I would not call Mamdani a populist, but I don't follow the political situation in usa that closely
That sounds "We're for everything good and against everything bad so vote for us pls"
Uh, isn't that exactly what you'd want out of a political party? I wouldn't vote for them because I disagree with a few of their points, but if you think all of their policies are good and you trust them to uphold them, then go vote for them?
You want them to know what they can actually achieve and promise that, not promise the world.
> know what they can actually achieve and promise that
Show me a single party that actually keeps their (concrete) promises and I'll show you a flying pig.
In any case, you're somehow confusing a list of "key issues" with a list of actual promises. A 30-hour workweek being a key issue, doesn't mean that the party promises they'll achieve that the next term, even if they magically would get 100% of the votes. It means it's a long term goal that they believe in and are working towards. Isn't that obvious to anyone with even a passing issue in politics?
seems very populist.
Most of the current comments here are in favor of Örebro, when did tech become so disgusting?
There are social forces that are shifting the collective mindset to be more sympathetic to anti immigration sentiments. We see it in Australia recently, but the political analysis of this phenomenon is still lagging from my perspective (I am not endorsing these sentiments).
why are you rhetorically laundering illegal immigration or nebulous refugee loopholes through the reputation of legal immigration?> sympathetic to anti immigration sentimentsTo be clear, did or did not the party leader say he would like to deport people born in Sweden to legal immigrant parents because they are not "naturally Swedish"?
whatever you're referring to, "nebulous refugee loopholes" are a legal way to reside in a country, to be clear.
I think we can call most of these social forces Putin (although there are real problems with immigration).
Ok, in Australia they can probably be called Murdoch
The mainstream media plays into this for sure. But I think there is a lot more to it. I think most of us on this platform have cosmopolitan leanings. We're educated and have some job mobility. I've worked overseas because I got an engineering education and did well in it. But wage stagnation, job insecurity, housing costs, low rental vacancy all play into this dynamic. There are a lot of people who don't like seeing their country change in its demographics. That is partly racism, but its also fear of change. I don't like it but I can understand it. When material conditions devolve, there will be a lot of people who blame the "other", even if its misidentifying the cause. I think Australia is lagging behind the right wing populist movement of the UK and US but we are on the same trajectory, and the major party policitians still don't understand how to address it. And most left wing people won't attempt to understand it because they at stuck using rationality and ethics as their rhetoric, and don't understand that emotion and grievance are going to trump that in politics.
I largely agree
If you have any disagreements I'm keen to hear them. These are just my own observations so I want inputs from others outside my own echo chamber. If you CBF that's fine too though.
It's a complex issue, but in short, I think that some of the concerns about immigration are often legitimate.
Progressive people, being more keen on altruism, tend to think that the good reasons immigrants have to migrate should overshadow the problems that immigration can cause.
And sometimes there's maybe also a view that a strongly multi-ethnic society is something to aspire for, because of the increased understanding of different people and hopefully a reduction of racism that it can lead to.
Progressives tend to think that everyone should be as tolerant as them, and that can lead to only looking into the problems, and finding solutions, up to a degree.
I saw that in the shift from arguing for integration to arguing for tolerance and a multi-cultural society, for example, where inadeguate integration efforts faiiled.
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On the other hand, right wing/conservative parties often enact policies that compound the immigration problems, rather than improving them.
In part that's due to a preference for securitarian policies, rather than looking for the root causes.
And in part that's because immigration problems most often lead to increased votes for them, so it's in their interest to not actually solve them.
All this, in the end, can create a space for parties standing for drastic solutions such as mass deportations; however immoral, dangerous for everyone and hard to realize they may be.
---
The way forward, in my opinion, should be for progressive parties to stop dismissing the problems that immigration can lead to, and to do their utmost to improve them all, rather than pretending for everyone to be as tolerant as them.
The actual middle/long term solution would probably be ensuring that the new potential immigrants are willing to integrate to a sufficient degree, and most of all to look into what pushes them to migrate in the first place, and work for improving the causes of that.
The latter can seem utopic, but it's better than the alternatives, in my opinion.
Ok, that wasn't so brief xD
The true hackers have long left this site, I'm afraid.
What's left is an audience devoted to power, money, and being the boot that stamps on a human face.
This post seems like an overreaction to me.
Being this sensitive to company leadership political activity is going to exhaust a person and time would be better spent being careful to buy products with minimal value added from authoritarian nations with a history of gross human rights issues.
Lots of counties don't want immigration, especially after they let a large group in and deal with integration challenges. The CCP forcefully places ethnic Han into minority homes to function as de facto informants. The Russians broke up Finnish/Ukrainian families en masse, moving them to the other end of Russia to minimize the likelihood of dissent in occupied areas.
There are a lot worse ideas at play in the world than some of the more extreme suggestions that this very infant-sized Swedish party flirt with. On a scale of 1-10 heinousness, barely registers on the global stage.
My thinking goes more like this:
This product I bought from this nation... Does that Nation tend to value human rights, freedom of expression and liberal values? Sweden... Check.
I can buy Swedish products all day. They make nice jets and mobile artillery that push back on the really bad ideas. One CEO's affiliation with an anti immigration populist party which honestly doesn't seem that serious... They've got some Marxist ideas in there. I really doubt these guys go much of anywhere in their current form. It's a capitalist society. Some of their ideas will stick but the party is immature. I wouldn't worry so much.
It's not a minor political activity, they're literally the main funding source of Sweden's Nazi party.
You are telling me that this party's platform is literally that Swedish decent people are superior... Full stop... Because that is the ethnofascist(Nazi) position.
If so, I'd be keen to see clear evidence of that.
You really don't have to look far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party#Immigration_...
I wrong long text, never again.
> can be called populist,nationalist, conservaive, anti-immigration, and radical, but it can't be called right-wing without explanation.
You just said the explanation.