Comment by miyoji
3 months ago
> It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission.
No, in fact, the opposite of this is obvious.
3 months ago
> It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission.
No, in fact, the opposite of this is obvious.
An honest question: Would you like to live in a world where company/employer exerts more control over the views that are publicly expressed?
Do you actually want voting to happen via wallet?
This whole view kinda confounds me. I don't see how you can honestly profess to be on the tolerant/right side, morally, while trying to boycott someones business over his political views. Would you have preferred early feminists or LGBT advocates to be hounded in their professional life? Would it have been better for more people to do that?
If you want to vote for or against Örebropartiet, then just do it at the booth.
Plenty of people here basically seem to indirectly advocate for company based censorship and some kind of budget-plutocracy, and no matter how "morally correct" your views are, that is under no circumstances a worthwhile endeavor.
> An honest question: Would you like to live in a world where company/employer exerts more control over the views that are publicly expressed?
I don't really object to you asking this question, but I do object to you calling a rhetorical question "an honest question".
The question is not rhetorical. A lot of people in this thread advocate for hurting Berntssons career for the political views he expressed with his donation.
I personally believe that a lot of those people did not think through the consequences at all: Making it acceptable/typical/common for political expression to be punished at the workplace would obviously lead to self-censorship and direct/indirect censorship by employers.
My view is that this is utterly incompatible with liberalism (but a lot of the proponents would claim to lean liberal themselves!). I have not found good counterarguments for my current view so far.
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> Do you actually want voting to happen via wallet?
Money has a huge influence on politics, and recognizing that reality isn't the same as wanting it or encouraging it.
>If you want to vote for or against Örebropartiet, then just do it at the booth.
I'm kinda confused here. The context of this is that a rich tech bro uses his money to fund and promote a political party, with our money, but we can't decide to not pay him because that's influencing money with politics (???)
What kind of bizarro world is this, he can use his vast wealth to promote racist parties but we can't collectively use ours? How about he just "does it at the booth" and donates his money to the against malaria foundation?
My point is that if you are boycotting the company despite living on the opposite side of the world from Örebro (thus being inherently unable to vote at the booth), then you are not really participating in politics, you are participating in a witchhunt (with negligible political effects).
I'm suggesting that small political progress is simply not worth witch-hunting for. If you have political concerns, engage by voting, starting your own party or advocating for your cause instead of ruining the career of a person you disagree with.
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This is about what customers are comfortable supporting. This guy doesn't just have what many consider to be unpalatable political beliefs, he's one of the biggest funders of what many consider to be an unpalatable political party. Lots of people don't want to give money to something which they feel will in part be funneled to an organization which is antithetical to their views. Realistically, I kind of doubt Mullvad is rolling in swimming pools filled with cash getting syphoned to neonazis, but that brings me to my next point...
For many, it's not just an intellectual position but an emotional one. This doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but you probably won't be able to reason them out of it. It's the same reason I don't listen to Michael Jackson. He's dead and none of that streaming revenue would go to him or to raping children but...yuck.
At the end of the day, there's an irony in this guy supporting the very freedoms on the internet which are being used to disseminate criticisms against him, and perhaps inducing people to starve one of the vehicles which helps maintain those freedoms.
I can absolutely respect the emotional argument.
The "irony" in supporting that party I believe is a stretch. I don't see how support for some neo-nationalists is inherently "anti-freedom"; would that not apply to any party arguing against open borders?
My personal belief is that professional discrimination because of political support is a very slippery slope, and I honestly think that a lot of people directly or indirectly advocating for it are not fully understanding of what this means and where that slope ends:
When asking about professional boycott for "questionable" past positions (like being gay in Turings time) I only get silence in response because people presumably realize that such witch-hunting often ends up looking really bad in retrospect.
edit: I just misunderstood your last point, completely agree.
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> what many consider to be an unpalatable political party
That description fits every political party everywhere in the world.
I don't know why your comment is flagged dead, there's no good reason it should be.
> This whole view kinda confounds me. I don't see how you can honestly profess to be on the tolerant/right side, morally, while trying to boycott someones business over his political views. Would you have preferred early feminists or LGBT advocates to be hounded in their professional life? Would it have been better for more people to do that?
Okay, first of all, early feminists and LGBT advocates were and are hounded in their professional lives. This has happened to progressives for all of human history, it's actively happening under the current US administration, and it's going to continue happening forever.
A bigger point here is that your argument is morally worthless. You're just saying that I shouldn't judge anyone, because other people have judged wrongly in the past. I disagree entirely. I wouldn't buy juice from a rapist, I wouldn't buy a computer from a murderer, and I wouldn't buy a VPN from a fascist.
The largest point however, is that your argument implies that I am compelled to spend my money on Mullvad regardless of what I think about the people who work there or what they do, and that's an obvious absurdity. I am free to spend or not spend on whatever I choose for whatever reasons I choose, and politics is going to be one of them. You'll have to get over it.
How do you figure?
Do you typically start companies that are opposed to your values, or do you start companies that align with your values?
If you are the co-CEO of a company, will you push it to align more with your values, or less?
This isn't a company founded 300 years ago by a long-dead evil man in a business vertical completely unrelated to how it started, it's a baby company with the evil founder still actively involved at the highest level of management. Maybe you can regale me with epic stories about the companies you've worked at where the founder had no ability to influence the company and its values, but that's not been my experience at all, in any human organization anywhere.
Two things:
1. People definitely start companies with a certain set of values and behaviors (as a company) and do entirely separate things in their private life. This is trivially true.
2. I don't think the personal values and the business mission in this case are even in conflict. You can be a racist and support free speech / privacy. Indeed, I'd actually say the venn diagram of "racists" and "people who vociferously espouse free speech ideals" is more union than it is disjoint.
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Money that leaves your wallet and goes to Mullvad ends up funding politicians that believe non-whites shouldn’t have speech at all, as a personal choice by a top executive of the company.
The company’s values aren’t reflected accurately if you believe your money is funding free speech regardless of race.
It's a company: the deal is that they help enable free speech of their customers, not everyone on earth or everyone in Sweden or anywhere else.
A great litmus test for the (somewhat outrageous) claims in this thread: does Mullvad refuse to provide service to non-white immigrants in Sweden? If yes, then you have a point. If no, I do not think Mullvad is the entity that is confused in this situation.
Is IKEA fascist? Because the founder was a Nazi supporter; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingvar_Kamprad
I'm not saying this to dunk on IKEA, but sometimes even when there's a sole founder, the mission of the company and the mission of the person who founded it do not necessarily align.
EDIT: It also seems that the party is extremely left leaning but is anti-immigration, as a person who lives in Swedens third largest city (which is predominantly non-Swedish, like myself: I am also an immigrant) I can understand Swedes desire to minimise this, it's not a "far-right" topic anymore.
Is IKEA's founder alive and currently donating lots of money to a political party advocating for mass deportation of "parasites"? If so let me know and I will stop buying IKEA furniture!
You seriously didn't buy IKEA furniture 10 years ago?
I do not believe you.
Regardless: do you think IKEA did more to promote Naziism in the decades that proceeded Ingvars death, or more after?
(the answer is of course: the exact same amount, which is none).
If you're unhappy making people wealthy who you disagree with, unfortunately I'm going to have to suggest that you disengage with society, your taxes fuel wars (largely against brown people), you're forced to use technology created with slave labour in order to engage with banking applications and you're going to be really mad when you discover what goes into your food.
Taking an absolute position against one person who creates a service that would allow you to evade fascism is pretty ironic given the way the world is going regarding online speech.
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