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Posted by Risse 14 hours ago

The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party(det.social)
524 points | 1166 commentspage 7
bill_mcgonigle 13 hours ago|
Left/right doesn't matter much for a no-logs VPN.

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.

culi 8 hours ago||
The Örebro Party (Örebropartiet) split from the socialist Left Party in 2014.

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

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

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

msk2k 13 hours ago||
Companies funding far-left parties seem to be much bigger problem.
microgpt 12 hours ago|
Which companies fund Deutsche Wohnen Enteignen? Let me know so I can boycott them
artisinal 9 hours ago||
Steven Schuurman (Elastic) has given millions to left parties in Germany and The Netherlands.
microgpt 7 hours ago||
Which ones? What are their policies?
Aachen 4 hours ago||
Dutch person living in Germany. I'm not aware of a party in NL/DE labeled left whose values don't boil down to that everyone (and future generations) should have a chance to live a good life, with different ways of getting there. I, too, would be curious what GP considers problematic about funding them the way that I find it problematic for any individual to fund this party/person who calls refugees parasites
pipes 7 hours ago||
This "far right" slur on any party that is anti immigration makes me immediately suspect this party probably isn't far right.

It's a shame, because real racist extremists/nazis benefit from this lumping together of legitimate concern about immigration and actual Nazis.

aoshifo 7 hours ago||
There is a difference between being anti-immigration and pro-remigration.

Being anti-immigration in a country that is shrinking is just stupid. Being pro-remigration is far-right and evil.

tumetab1 4 hours ago|||
> Being anti-immigration in a country that is shrinking is just stupid.

No, it's not.

daneel_w 4 hours ago|||
What if the focus of their pro-remigration stance is families deemed impossible to integrate due to their persisting criminal activities and rejection of functional societal norms? Because that's the exact demographic this one policy of that party is concerned with.
anukin 3 hours ago||
It’s a far left party based on what I read online. Their only right wing stance seems to be on immigration
henior 12 hours ago||
This is like the third duplicate I saw in a week
eudamoniac 5 hours ago||
Why are leftists so histrionic? If we had a thread made every time an executive espoused far left opinions we'd overload the HN servers. Why is an executive being far right even news?
iamnothere 4 hours ago|
Because their puppeteers know exactly what buttons to push when they need a good smear campaign. (And because lumpens despise the pro-labor left.)
_blk 2 hours ago||
But that Bill Gates [Foundation] is a larger sponsor to WHO than all nations short of the US (at least prior to the currently elected govt) wouldn't dare making the news this far left into the interwebs... Just sayin' - figured I'd invest a few karma points into self reflection ;) love y'all
TZubiri 8 hours ago||
The mechanism of VPN is pooling together many users and making them indistinguishable to the outside, providing plausible deniability. Outsiders can see a user belongs to the pool, but they can't tell if they are 'good' or 'bad'.

It's a similar mechanism that cryptocurrency, or money laundering uses. It's very possible for 'good' users to be recruited into the pool for no other reason than to provide plausible deniability for the 'bad' members. If I wanted to run an ilegal operation like cybercrime or drugs, I would probably use a VPN and a crypto pool, and try to get legitimate users to desire using VPNs for reasons like gaming latency, or avoiding taxes on 1K/month income.

It's well known that Mullvad provides lower than market prices when compared to competitors, and that they offer stricter no logs policies. Yeah, maybe they are providing a basic privacy right, or maybe they are providing shelter for criminals. Tradeoff old as time. But with prices possibly being subsidized, it makes sense that their incentive model is not to collect fees for usage, but to provide a wide enough user pool such that the anonimity is more effective.

What's interesting is that both far-right free-market anarchist users and far-left Not for profit Free Software socialists appear to be shocked that their anonimity pools contains them both. Kind of like how the lights went up at the club at 6 am and you realize who you've been smooching in the dark.

jeffbee 7 hours ago||
You're ignoring the other main economic foundation of VPNs: the service is in fact run by the cops, at a loss.
culi 8 hours ago||
> far-right free-market anarchist

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

TZubiri 6 hours ago||
I know what type of anarchism you are referring to, spray paint a circled A, live in a farm, free love anarchy.

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

iamnothere 4 hours ago|||
Other forms of anarchism are not real anarchism, because he said so.
culi 4 hours ago|||
You just named the fathers of neoliberalism.

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

graemep 13 hours ago||
The party in question seems to be an anti-immigration strongly secularist left wing party with Marxist roots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party

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.

microgpt 12 hours ago|
Huh, so they want free healthcare and also ethnic cleansing. That's a pretty strange combination.
eudamoniac 9 hours ago|||
It is a sensible combination to me. If you first believe that the government should provide a bunch of free stuff, but it doesn't at the moment because it's too expensive, it kind of makes sense that you would then think there need to be fewer people getting the free stuff so it remains affordable. The first people on the exclusion list would naturally be noncitizens.
microgpt 7 hours ago||
You can exclude people you don't like from free healthcare without physically removing them from the country.
eudamoniac 4 hours ago||
You could, but in practice illegals get/use a lot of public goods that cannot be reasonably gated. The "means testing costs more than just giving welfare" argument is cited. Plus things like public schools, parks, transportation don't require ID to use. Having an ID is not guaranteed, as voting advocates often point out.
Citizen_Lame 11 hours ago||||
Also they are anti EU and NATO. Lot of astroturfing here.
tumetab1 4 hours ago|||
> Also they are anti EU and NATO. Lot of astroturfing here.

At the same time, that big advertising and crony politicians are fighting to impose digital ID for all internet communications... one of the strongest privacy advocates is being attacked with non-sense.

Expect EFF to be bought or attacked.

graemep 10 hours ago||||
> Lot of astroturfing here.

The guidelines say "assume good faith"

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

graemep 11 hours ago|||
Those are left wing positions. Until 2023 the UK's Green Party's policy was to leave NATO, and there is still a lot of support in the part for that. When the UK's Labour party was socialist they were anti-EU. If you look at campaigned for what in the 1975 referendum on EEC membership its pretty clear: for example, Thatcher campaigned to remain, Tony Benn campaigned to leave. The remnants of the old left remain anti-EU even now.
microgpt 10 hours ago||
They're neither wing. A foo-wing person could want to leave the EU because it's too bar-wing for any values of foo and bar.
graemep 11 hours ago||||
its not uncommon. The overtly racist parties in the UK (e.g. the BNP has quite a lot of left wing policies (e.g. nationalisation of utilities), ending NHS outsourcing to the private sector, and free healthcare.

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

hackinthebochs 9 hours ago|||
As it turns out you can't have strong socialist policies and also open borders.
tamimio 7 hours ago|
Welp, that vanishes my support for mullvad, despite I did recommend it to many of my friends who doesn’t want/can setup their own.

Im not against people having different political opinions, I personally agree with things from each side and disagree with them both too on other matters, plus having my own third option that doesn’t fit any side. But I am certainly against a company marketing itself as a “defender of personal and human rights and freedom”, yet they are sponsoring a party that obviously doesn’t hold these values, this company will report individuals in the future to deport them maybe, 5 years later they are reporting others for disagreeing with whatever agenda that party is having, it’s always a slippery slope, never think it will end at xyz and that’s it.

Goddammit it’s like companies are ALWAYS destined to turn to evil one way or another, it’s just how long it will take is the question. It’s a reminder that you should always host your own, trust nobody, none.

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