>> Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment ...
Karl Popper said, "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
>> the same way that someone's opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare ...
We're not talking about reasonable people disagreeing about tax policy, we're talking about free expression, the entire purpose of Mullvad.
When you make a large donation to a political party whose most fundamental policy is restricting the free expression of people, that is wholly incompatible with everything Mullvad says they stand for.
When a founder and executive with influence over Mullvad policy and operations is exposed actively and financially support restricting free expression of people, it's not "tolerant" to pretend that's somehow compatible with the mission and brand of the company.
> restricting the free expression of people
I don’t support remigration, but calling immigration “the free expression of people” is a stretch. It’s orthogonal.
You can argue that remigration isn’t protecting the privacy of those who are surveilled by the government or deported to repressive countries that surveil their population. But Mullvad’s product protects even those people (it must, because it hides the identity of who’s using it from itself).
Örebropartiet policies directly target and restrict the religious, educational, and cultural expression of people who legally reside in Sweden.
Their polices focus on the way people dress, the languages they speak in public, the institutions and schools they build, the traditions they practice.
People would be forced to self-censor their speech, their beliefs, and their behavior.
It's not a "stretch". It's the whole program.
> Their polices focus on the way people dress, the languages they speak in public, the institutions and schools they build, the traditions they practice.
Do you have sources and quotes for this? Wikipedia only says “remigration”, although another comment mentioned that the translated Swedish word implies “assimilation”. Trying to restrict what people (even immigrants) do goes against free expression: deporting those based on ethnicity is immoral for other reasons but does not.
The words "immigration" or "remigration" do not appear in the comment you are replying to. That's wholly your own construction.
It does not, but does appear on the party's English wikipedia page that they support 'remigration'. However when switching to Swedish, it seems they are pro (forceful) assmilation, rather than remigration.
I don't know enough of Swedish politics or social issues to determine which one is the more correct characterization of the party, but even that is a serious difference in policy.
> I don’t support remigration, but calling immigration “the free expression of people” is a stretch. It’s orthogonal.
Far right political parties have a marked tendency to severely restrict freedom of expression once they’re in power. They routinely call for it when they’re the underdogs, but that often changes fairly quickly once they get their way.
In some cases you can see hints of that before they came into power. In France for instance, our main far right party (Rassemblement National) supports drastic budget cuts to state-financed media, and I believe a more direct control of said media from executive power.
One would have to check whether the Swedish Örebro party is similar of course. I personally no absolutely nothing about that party. Still, it is not a stretch for me to strongly suspect that a party that calls for deportation (let’s call it what it is, okay?) is also a party that is, or at the very least will be, against freedom of expression and freedom of information.
If it is, then Mullvad’s co-founder has a serious conflict of interest, and I would have no choice but seriously lower my confidence in their VPN.
I hope their sister company, Tillitis, is mostly free of such. Though even if it too is tainted, their TKey is fully open source (schematics and all if I recall correctly), and simple enough to be independently audited. They even have an unlocked version you can burn yourself so you don’t even have to trust their provisioning process. That’s the difference with a VPN: a VPN is like a Palantir, you kinda have to trust Sauron will do right by you. The TKey is more like Nemik’s astro-navigator: the user can verify themselves they are its sole master, once they did they can trust it even if it was manufactured by the Empire itself.
I mean, I love my TKey. I don’t care if Elon Musk and Peter Thiel themselves oversaw its manufacture, now it’s mine, and there’s no way I’m letting the enemy have exclusivity over it.
This is an over-generalization: you even mention that you “have to check” the party’s policies, which seem to be far-left except for the immigration part.
I actually agree that many far-right parties seem to restrict freedom of expression when they have majority power, but so do many far-left parties. Far-right may be generally statistically worse, but again, this says nothing about Örebro specifically who aren’t typical.
I'm always wary of people bringing up the paradox of tolerance; most of the time, it's just used as an excuse to justify censorship while claiming to be opposed to it. "When you censor me, you're being intolerant and that's wrong; when I censor you, I'm doing it in the name of tolerance, so I'm correct".
I'm not Swedish, so it's possible there's something that I am missing. But skimming the wikipedia page for the party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party#), I don't see anything that says the party is pro censorship.
No political party is going to say they're "pro censorship".
But if they promise to target specific groups of people to close their schools, regulate how they dress, ban their prayers, and suppress their art, it's all about restricting their freedom of expression.
That's the whole program.
> No political party is going to say they're "pro censorship".
There are plenty of political parties that proudly claim to oppose "hate speech".
> But if they promise to target specific groups of people to close their schools, regulate how they dress, ban their prayers, and suppress their art, it's all about restricting their freedom of expression.
I could be wrong, but it looks like their plan is to cut public funding, not to censor those things.
>"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
does that fight against "intolerant" also include fighting people from other culture that are systematically and religiously opposed against your current society and its tolerance and will undermine it within the next couple decades by reproducing more? nvm im aware asking for self awareness is too much.
> When you make a large donation to a political party whose most fundamental policy is restricting the free expression of people
Where can I read more about how this is the fundamental policy of the Örebro party?
So far as I can tell, the main source of this claim is the comment you are responding to, and similar.
I think the real issue is this: "The party is heavily opposed to political corruption and high politician incomes and wants to reduce the wages of politicians and senior officials." (from Wikipedia, among other sources.)
This is disingenuous.
From Wikipedia:
> 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.
I think most criticism of this party is probably around "large scale remigration" and "stricter immigration policy", which are often nice ways to word "getting rid of everyone that doesn't look like us".
But if you want to play this little game, I can play too. Personally I think the real issue people have with this platform is the free dental care. Big tooth obviously doesn't want to lose profit.
> restricting the free expression of people,
Is it? They appear to be some sort of hardcore pseudo libertarians with some nationalistic vibes. To an extent that seems to overlap with Mullvad’s declared value?
> Karl Popper said, "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
It's weird he said that, given that at the time there were many examples of intolerant societies that had become increasingly tolerant. So the statement is factually incorrect, and, given how educated he was, he knew this. In other words, the statement is a lie. But very useful if you manage to put yourself in the position of being the one to define what is intolerant, and which things are so important to tolerate that they should be beyond democratic decision-making.
That said, I don't disagree that private donations can be incompatible with (or more accurately, counter-productive to) the stated mission of a company. And it's not unreasonable for journalists to report on it, on the logic it may affect consumer choices. But I'm not familiar with Örebro, and nothing in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party#Policies indicates they're against online anonymity or free expression. But maybe I missed something?
> If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
yeah i'm sick and tired of hearing this, because it gets applied very asymmetrically.
we routinely tolerate certain kinds of intolerants and silence other, and that sucks.
case in point: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/17/hamtramck-mi...
people happily tolerate lgbt-intollerant people, afraid of being called islamophobic and/or intollerant, and but we do not tollerate at all people that have been calling that risk out for years.
so yeah, popper's writings are being grossly misused, and i'm sick and tired of seeing that come out in every discussion on these topics.
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Also: if only mullvad is taking that kind of political stance (no-log vpn etc)... maybe you should think twice about who is actually on your side.
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I see... so the people boycotting companies over jim crow policies in the civil rights era were the intolerant ones?
Sounds like myrmidon would have gleefully bought a Volkswagon Bug in 1941.
More tolerant of race presumably, less tolerant towards other people being bigots.
The big problem with discriminating against other people you disagree with is that you have to be right, or you are the bigot (doubly so!).
Just consider boycotting someone like Turing for being gay a century ago. That is a double self own with hindsight, that a lot of people (back then) could have been baited into.
So I'm advocating for not boycotting peoples careers until you are absolutely sure (even then you might be wrong!).
Also consider: How much social progress did we actually achieve with witch hunts? Would you really be comfortable crediting those with the repeal of Jim Crow laws? And how often, on the other hand, did they end up in a Salem-situation?
Got it. If the diner says "whites only" we should wait a few years to see if racism is actually good, otherwise we are discriminating against racists.