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The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party

det.social

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Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party

#931
post #928

Admittedly I had never heard of this party before, but after looking into them calling them far-right seems to be quite a leap. If you didn't know, Sweden used to be extremely welcoming to asylum seekers and refugees about a decade ago. What they got out of it were gangs, their youth being exploited to enact crimes (due to leniency towards minors), and neighborhoods that even the police doesn't dare drive through. Ha…

You're confusing causation and correlation. There are no links between asylum seekers, refugees and gangs, and crimes. What leads to crime is not welcoming refugees, it's leaving people on the back in a state of precariousness.

>There are no links between asylum seekers, refugees and gangs, and crimes.

Criminal statistics and per capita would disagree

Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party

#932
post #928

Admittedly I had never heard of this party before, but after looking into them calling them far-right seems to be quite a leap. If you didn't know, Sweden used to be extremely welcoming to asylum seekers and refugees about a decade ago. What they got out of it were gangs, their youth being exploited to enact crimes (due to leniency towards minors), and neighborhoods that even the police doesn't dare drive through. Ha…

You're confusing causation and correlation. There are no links between asylum seekers, refugees and gangs, and crimes. What leads to crime is not welcoming refugees, it's leaving people on the back in a state of precariousness.

> leaving people on the back in a state of precariousness.

What do you mean? Don't they benefit from Sweden's generous educational and welfare systems in addition to extra support for migrants?

Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party

#933
post #419
post #310

Wikipedia of the party in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party# 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.

>Doesn't really sound all that far-right to me. 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.

It's funny that reading the Wikipedia has they have:

>"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?

Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party

#934
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parties get goverment funding based on election result, with a minimum floor of 2.5% votes in national elections. This party is way too small for that, and is primarily focused on local election.

Ok so it’s basically a political startup. 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?

Calling it a political startup is not that unfair.

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

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

Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party

#936
post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The speech people are objecting to isn't anti-immgiration. It is pro crimes against humanity against people who previously immigrated, and their descendants. A stance that Sweden should reduce the amount of immigration they accept would be utterly unremarkable and never result in outrage like this.

> A stance that Sweden should reduce the amount of immigration they accept would be utterly unremarkable and never result in outrage like this. I don't believe this claim, because immigration is a live political issue in my country (the United States) just as it is in Sweden; and people absolutely claim that reducing the amount of immigration the US accepts is immoral and genocidal. Seriously, claims of this nature a…

No, plenty of people in the US want to limit illegal immigration and expand legal avenues.

It’s the Democrats and Republican politicians and party activists who can’t compromise. The Democrats don’t address illegal immigration, even the easy wins like when immigrants were placed in hotels while homeless Americans were in the street and crummy shelters (Maine). Then Trump finally deports criminals, but also technically-illegal people who’ve lived decades and started families here (and haven’t commit any crimes beyond speeding tickets), and restricts and harasses legal immigrants.

There’s something wrong with politics where parties can’t even accept the most obvious exceptions to their “controversial” issues, maybe because of the stupid “slippery slope”. I expect people to fight over 1 million refugees who aren’t misbehaving but overloading systems. I don’t expect people to fight over an immigrant who assaulted someone, or a legal immigrant who is giving more than they take.

Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party

#937
post #298

Is it so hard to imagine that someone willing to take such a principled stance on privacy that they start a company to provide a privacy focused vpn company that they also hold other extreme views? It takes a certain kind of personality to become a founder especially more do for such a strongly principled company and adhere to it.

What counts as an "extreme view" is relative. If my country had seen such a surge in gang violence as Sweden has, I too would support mass deportations of migrants with a criminal record, and much harsher migration policy. It's not that extreme of a stance considering how bad the situation has got in Sweden. I don't want to live in a society where teenagers are regularly hired as hitmen and shootings & explosions are…

For real tho, I think the current crime wave has more to do with power struggles in the drug market than anything else.

Sweden has had terrible integration policies coupled w segregating all immigrants in the suburbs.

The drug consumption of everyday Swedes is fueling the crime wave. Cocaine consumption is at an all time high. The former prime ministers son was caught w coke at home. But only the marginalized are penalized for it and forced to work supplying the rich inner city kids who get off the hook..

Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party

#938
The Örebro Party seems similar to Bundnis Sara Wagenknecht in Germany. They are a splinter group of mostly older Linke who are anti immigrant. There is also this super weird fringe on the legit extreme left here, the Anti-deutsche antifa who are pro-Israel and islamophobic.

Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party

#939
post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not taking it far enough. What if Mullvad has someone you disagree with as a customer, and does nothing about it. Does this mean that Mullvad is supporting them? Does this mean that you have to stop supporting Mullvad? What about Mullvad’s landlord? The company that provides them their electricity? Their internet provider? Their internet provider’s internet provider? Should you boycott the entire internet beca…

What are you trying to say with this? This is absurd. The outrage has nothing to do with Mullvad itself supporting people with certain opinions or not. The problem I and many others have, is that if the founder takes our money and gives it to causes that I (edit: or rather we) find reprehensible, we don't want to give them our money anymore. Simple as that. I will not try to stop you from using Mullvad by any other m…

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

> the founder takes our money and gives it

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

Re: The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party

#940
post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not taking it far enough. What if Mullvad has someone you disagree with as a customer, and does nothing about it. Does this mean that Mullvad is supporting them? Does this mean that you have to stop supporting Mullvad? What about Mullvad’s landlord? The company that provides them their electricity? Their internet provider? Their internet provider’s internet provider? Should you boycott the entire internet beca…

It's almost like there's a difference between selling services to someone and directly donating to a political party.

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