Saying he ‘made a donation’ is downplaying his role. It makes it sound like he’s just some guy doing what everyone else does to participate in politics…
The 2025 donation accounted for 72% of the party’s total income last year. … According to data collected by DonationWatch, 2025 was the most lucrative year in the party’s history, netting a total of 5.58 million SEK. For comparison, the party received just 202,000 SEK in total donations throughout 2024.
Just the annual interest on his donation is more that all of their other donations for the entire year combined.
He didn’t just make a donation, he is practically their sole source of financing.
Oh shit, that has got to be the poorest political party I’ve heard of 🤣
Bankrupt morally and financially 🤷♂️
The emigration stuff makes the rest of their positions so confusing.
The leader was allegedly kicked out of the left party for liking anti fascists on Facebook, and they want free preschool, 30 hour work weeks, and a bunch of other social things.
But then the remigration bullshit. Dumb.
I mean, yeah they are a shit party, but isn’t smaller and local parties kinda what we want? I’d rather have a 20 small parties in parliament than 2 big ones with some on the side lines.
This is like saying sure he murdered the guy with his bare hands, but doesn’t society need more face to face human interaction?
No, I just don’t think the size of the party is the thing we should criticise/make fun of it for. They’re clearly influential enough to snap up a big sponsor, and will now decide to actually try and run for parliament. UKIP was never large enough to get elected into parliament afaik, but they still managed to influence politics enough to cause brexit.
These small parties are not up for a parliamentary position though. They are only active in their municipality. There are 8 parties in the Swedish parliament (though it looks like it’s going to be 7 after the election in fall).
You’re forgetting the 12% exception, but they’d probably need an even larger amount than that.
I’m not following the polls at all. Who is falling out, the liberals?
Hah, yeah. They are at ~2% or so (with 4% being the minimum needed to get seats)
Damn. I can’t recall when they didn’t make the bar last.
I mean it is funny - the incest bit I mean - but it kind of epitomises why I don’t really follow politics anymore. Our leaders aren’t serious, and for the past few decades it’s devolved into a spectacle. It stresses me the fuck out.
The past week I’ve lived with my windows wide open, so I need to take particular care that I don’t just… tip out of them. Our idiot politics don’t help in that regard.
It’s basically just one really annoying dude stirring up shit in the municipal politics of Örebro.
Make no mistake, he’s a massive piece of shit still
Did noone tell them they can just apply for funding in russia?
It seems quite small indeed
Their colors are literally red, black and white 😭
5,58 million SEK is around 600 thousand dollars. 202 thousand SEK is slightly more than 20 thousand dollars.
Mullvad co-CEO Fredrik Strömberg confirmed that neither Mullvad VPN AB, its parent company Amagicom AB, nor its sister company Tillitis AB played any role in supporting the political party.
It doesn’t mtster if the company itself was directly involved or not, the money came from the company, and from its’ customers.
yeah it’s like saying Elon is only a piss of shit on his free time so it’s okay
I’m not taking side here, but to be fair, Elon Musk is a shitty person doing shitty things both professionally and private. Mullvad VPN is at least only doing good things!
With that said. I have stopped using Mullvad VPN for now. We’ll see how this all plays out.
gonna get downvoted to hell here but making EVs and charging infrastructure is a good thing. probably bigger global impact than a single VPN provider.
still, fuck nazi elon.
Elon Musk didn’t do any of that though. Engineers did.
The only issue with Tesla is that the quality of their cars is mediocre at best, while you’re paying premium, and that Tesla is the most childish and obstinate company to work with.
We have something called Råd & Rön’s Blacklist, which is respected Swedish consumer magazine’s list of products to avoid. Tesla is one of the brands that’s listed there. Partly because of the poor quality of the cars and partly because they don’t follow the rulings from the National Board for Consumer Complaints here in Sweden.
And they don’t give a **** about insurance companies either. If something happens to your Tesla, you’re on your own buying a new one yourself. You can forget about getting any sort of help from Tesla.
I stopped reading what you wrote after your first sentence. There are so many other issues than that with Tesla, what dimension are you from?
The cars since 2020 have been decent quality. What you are paying for is an EV with good range and good power. Tesla definitely pushed the U.S. ev adoption ahead by a number of years.
I’m curious about how that board works - is it a judicial system that other car manufacturers follow? What kind of rulings have they made against Tesla? I found that Tesla follows their own warranty quite well, and after that I don’t think any a car manufacturers will fix stuff for free.
And what support do you expect to get regarding insurance? You can buy a bew car like anyone, can’t you?The cars since 2020 have been decent quality
https://www.adac.de/news/tuev-report-2026/
German source, since murica doesn’t have mandatory safety inspections. Literally no other car brand has a higher failure rate than Tesla, and the car with the highest failure rate was the Model Y, which released in 2022
Interesting. Seems that most the failures are the breaks because the pads get rusty with non-use because of the regenerative breaking. The Tesla manuals say to use the breaks fully every once in a while, but of course people don’t read the manual. And it just make then grunchy - they work fine. The suspension issues are real and I think the problem is that they start to go but it’s not obvious. Tesla will change them in warranty no problem but you have to notice the extra play and sounds, which is quite subtle. I wish we had annual safety inspections in Canada, they only do that for older cars.
The cars since 2020 have been decent quality. What you are paying for is an EV with good range and good power. Tesla definitely pushed the U.S. ev adoption ahead by a number of years.
I guess everything is relative. Tesla is still a crappy car in terms of quality here, with tons of unresolved issues with faulty cars that Tesla refused to help their customers with.
I’m curious about how that board works - is it a judicial system that other car manufacturers follow?
Råd & Rönis is an independent, non-profit consumer magazine owned by the Swedish Consumer Agency. Their funding comes from subscriptions and government grants (no advertising and no corporate money). They test products, expose bad companies and protect consumers. Their “Black List” (Svarta Listan) is highly influential, and being on it can destroy sales completely.
Customers can file a complaint at The National Board for Consumer Disputes (ARN), a government-run arbitration(?) service. Their decisions are not legally binding, but companies that ignore them get publicly shamed (and often blacklisted by Råd & Rön). Tesla has ignored basically every single case. Any remotely serious company here in Sweden comply with ARN. We take ARN very seriously here.
What kind of rulings have they made against Tesla?
Our law is equal for everyone. We don’t care if you’re some local dude selling hotdogs or Elon Musk selling Teslas.
I found that Tesla follows their own warranty quite well […]
That’s the issue. Their warranty basically means that they ignore you and will fuck you over, even if the issue is their own fault. People have ended up with repair costs close to what a new car costs, and even if it’s Teslas fault, they refuse to do shit.
[…] and after that I don’t think any a car manufacturers will fix stuff for free.
Of course they have to, if the issue is their own fault.
Sounds like a good system. But I guess it only works if people pay attention to the blacklist so it’s a good threat since it’s not enforceable. I haven’t heard of Tesla not honoring drivetrain issues under warranty here in Canada. They wouldn’t do a second windshield replacement on my wife’s T3 because what they said was evidence of a rock chip, but that was kinda fair.
Those things were happening before him and continue DESPITE him. If you get downvoted it’s because you insinuated he had anything to do with that.
Rooftop solar is definitely not something Musk can take any credit for.
EVs maybe, but charging infrastructure that he made proprietary rather than using the open standard is not especially worthy of praise.
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I mean yeah, obviously. But Musk is very obviously excellent at marketing, and there’s an argument to be made that it was thanks to his marketing that Tesla became as popular as it did, and that that helped pull up the EV market more broadly.
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Not even EVs. The work was getting done by researchers improving electric motors and batteries. As soon as the technology was viable Elon jumped on it and marketed himself as the person behind it all. Same goes for PayPal which he stole credit for, rockets that people already worked decades on, tunnels that are just bad metros, and machine learning (AI) that people were already doing since the 70’s and only recently had breakthroughs because of the increased ability to feed it data en masse.
The only credit he should get is having the power and charisma to capitalize on the work of others. He’s a Thomas Edison and not a Nikola Tesla.
Calling him Thomas Edison is giving him far too much credit. Edison may have been a self aggrandizing asshole, but he also did have a few accomplishments to his name. Musk is a glorified venture capitalist, only instead of just taking a chunk of the profits he buys the whole company so he can steal credit for the company’s achievements. Elon Musk has never created a single thing in his life. He has in fact been a net negative as every company he has ever been involved with would have been better off without Musk’s “help”.
He didnt make shit. He saw there was opportunity and ran with it, now that he has it sustainabikity is nowhere close to his goals.
The solar tiles suck The battery is a whitelabelled product The boring company was strategic interference to stop public infrastructure development.
It is very unfortunate that ev’s and elon are linked in any way, he is not positive marketing.
Yes, but I do not give Musk credit for recognizing a good thing and then taking it from Tesla’s founders.
Elon is just a propaganda machine (see his “in 4 or 5 years we’ll have datacenters in space” bullshit, or all the other things that he promised but it didn’t happen), a shame so many people fall for it.
Yeah but it’s not exactly the south African doing those things, if anything they are doing them despite him.
I mean, to be fair, it was the engineers and founders who have done a lot of the work. They deserve the credit for making good products. Not Elon. He just profits off of them and the labor of the engineers.
An issue for those of us in the southern hemisphere, where mullvad is the only decent choice… but one of their founders is clearly not decent.
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They are? How?
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because the buyer pays transaction fees and there is no risk of chargeback so their costs are inherently lower if you pay that way?
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Monero is anonymous, so it makes sense.
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Oh! You mean crypto currencies, not crypto. I was confused there for a bit. :D
because the buyer pays transaction fees and there is no risk of chargeback so their costs are inherently lower if you pay that way?
A commonly known US analog is the Chik-Fil-A restaurant chain. They are proudly Christian and got tons of flak for donating to “traditional family” organizations that spread gay hate and so on.
They stopped, but the owner still personally donates. So every dollar you spend there still fuels those hate groups. It just takes a slightly different path.
So the question isn’t “is the company bad,” it’s “what is your money funding?”
I still call it Bigot Chicken to this day. My family who enjoys it is annoyed by me harping on the company’s general suckitude.
Too bad.
Yeah gee, shame on you for complicating their fast food gluttony with your ethical sensibility!
Funny thing about Chic Fil A is that unlike McDonald’s it’s not a BDS target
So you believe that customers of a company should have a say how the staff uses their wages?
I believe consumers have an ethical obligation to exercise their right to discontinue business with a company when its owners do something unethical.
Co-founder. Very large contribution. Very unsavoury political party.
Legally? No.
Morally? Yes. Customers give their say as to whether or not they want to give their money to some specific company every single time they engage in a business transaction. There is also nothing wrong with telling others to make the same consideration.
Morally? Yes.
How do you figure? I’d argue the opposite and state morally it’s quite litterally nobody’s business what any private person spends their money on.
Are you contending unless otherwise specified, people should be mandated to continue spending money with companies?
I’m allowed to do business or not do business with any company for any reason I like. Cofounder funding a political party with one of their goals being to brutalize immigrants? No thanks. Contractor wearing a company shirt was rude to me on the elevator? I’ll check the competition. Maybe I just don’t like the color of their logo?
I’m allowed to define my morals and what I would consider violating those morals would be with monetary support and no half baked slippery slope argument is going to change that.
What exactly is the allowed reasons for doing or not doing business with people?
Are you contending unless otherwise specified, people should be mandated to continue spending money with companies?
No. I’m just of the opinion that I’m in no way obliged to disclose to you what I spend my money on, just because I work somewhere you spend money on.
What exactly is the allowed reasons for doing or not doing business with people?
Anything, including having no reason at all, obviously.
The co-founder publicly stated he made the donation on social media. What made him obliged to disclose this? He seems rather proud of it, in fact.
As a result, people feel they may have a moral obligation to not funnel money to him. Your stance also doesn;t really line up with your examples like
Or say your customer base for any reason is in large part Vegan, should you tell your employee’s to stop buying meat? Should they stop taking money from the non-vegan customers? How is anyone going to navigate this?
You don’t mention the specific problem you have with this, which would be mandated disclosure. By your own words, this is perfectly fine since people can chose the reasons “Anything, including having no reason at all, obviously.” to not do business with someone so I’m not sure why it’s a slippery slope to you.
No. I’m just of the opinion that I’m in no way obliged to disclose to you what I spend my money on, just because I work somewhere you spend money on.
That’s not what you said though. I don’t think anyone is arguing that employees of a company are obligated to disclose their spending habits, that would just be ludicrous. However, if that information was available or if the company itself made donations/purchases it’s perfectly reasonable as a customer to decide not to support that kind of behavior by continuing to do business with that company.
Just as one example Chick-fil-A is rather famously anti-lgbtq and regularly donates part of their profits to anti-lgbtq organizations. As a consumer it’s entirely reasonable and moral to refuse to do business with them in order to reduce the money being funnelled to morally repugnant organizations.
That’s not what you said though.
Where do you feel I’ve deviated from this point exactly?
Keep in mind that this is the question at the top of this particular thread we are responding to:
So you believe that customers of a company should have a say how the staff uses their wages?
To which loke responded, among other things:
Morally? Yes.
To which I responded what you then replied to.
I’m not quite sure where you see space for interpretation, but I feel i’ve been pretty solid with my point.
You have that backwards. Customers of a company get to decide whether or not they want to give that company their money for any reason they fucking please
I’d also argue that no one would care if this were some mid-level manager making a donation. This is the owner of a company, not “staff.”
On one hand, no, they shouldn’t, on the other hand they’re free to voice their opinion and choose a different service if this is the breaking point.
Problem is, it’s hard to find a good VPN service that doesn’t fuck with alt right chuds and isn’t US based.
Try being in the southern hemisphere and trying to achieve those goals… servers are scarcer here.
Time for me to reassess ivpn, and airvpn I guess
I’ll take the moment to plug icedrive and icevpn. They have been good to me.
Do they offer wireguard or openvpn configs? They don’t list a Linux client on their website, so I’m not sure if I can use them at all.
You dont need the client. They have the config . openvpn, I think
Its a bit annoying but it works. I wish they had a client tho cuz to change country you have to go log in the web portal for Linux desktops. Mobile devices it has an app that works fine
And all you mfers were on about Andy Yen making a single tweet glazing Gail Slater.
Hilarious, isn’t it?
Turns out lots of people can be shitty at once.
It also wasent a single tweet. It was tweets plural, with him also raging about how the GOP was immune from the influence of big tech (ultra mega LOL) and would take them too task (a stunningly, knee slappingly stupid), then him using right wing phrasing and talking points to defend himself before finally defaulting to the same defense as Mullvad just did. “We are a political company that should not say political things, I.e. we have shitty political opinions that will cost us money once people find out about them so we will shut up now.”
That an edited timeline that leaves out many of his Reddit comments, but it still doesnt paint him in a good light.
Everything he said about the Trump admin was wrong flat out, and not once has he acknowledged it. A very convenient stance he took, praising them and now opting to “not say anything.” Its almost like that just leaves the praise of the GOP with no rebuttal from Proton.
Neither right or left but mostly not left. Bunch of fuckers.
How can you try to defend VPN usage and privacy if you need to collect data to identify migrants or descendants of migrants to strip their citizenship and deport them? It’s not like we don’t have examples of fascists using technology to profile and identify their targets: nazi Germany and IBM, Israël and Azure, or the DOGE that siphonated as much data as they could…
that’s the infuriating thing about all this. with Mullvad all you are to them is an account number. that’s it. no email, no name, no address, nothing. you go to the site and they give you an account number and that’s that. hell you can pay for the damn thing in cash.
So then the co-founder donates to a political party, with users money, that likely wants to do what you just said. How can I support that? my Mullvad subscription ends in like 2 hours today, i’m no renewing. And NOW I gotta spend the day finding a decent non-US based vpn. fantastic.
I saw people in another thread say AirVPN might be an ok replacement.
But yeah, I really like how much Mullvad doesn’t seem to even want my data, and the ID number system is great. I’m not aware of any other VPNs that currently do that.
Canada okay? Try Windscribe. No user information collected, generates an account hashed value akin to Mullvad’s account number. You can pay by crypto, but their payment gateway collects an email address only to notify you of payment status from crypto. They’ve also got an ample number of servers. There is also no device limit like Mullvad has. Their Android app is pretty good too. I’ve been trying them recently after this Mullvad debacle and the connection and privacy seems pretty good.
Do you people actually know anything about this party or are you just getting your panties in a twist over a nothingburger?
I could say that any party in the Swedish government is controversial, does that mean you are going to boycott everything Swedish now?
i do.
Party is run partly by an ex narc cop that got
firedbought out for being a far-right assacab
Far-right doesn’t mean anything these days, it’s just something people default to saying when they’re not really interested in debating political views(God forbid you have a slightly different view).
Having a difference of opinion is like “no Margaret, I’m glad you enjoy buttercream frosting but I’m going to stick with this apple pie.” That’s a difference of opinion.
“Non-whites are subhuman and don’t belong in the same country as me” is not a difference of opinion, Internet Explorer.
And nobody has said that, you’re just making stuff up. So just because you disagree, are you not going to have an honest discussion?
Örebropartiet espouses assimilation, not integration. They push for remigration of people who don’t assimilate.
That’s worked out wonderfully under our current Tidelagsregering, no? We’re sending home children who we’ve raised, educated, and given jobs, to countries they’ve never been to, because their parents fucked up, be that by accident or on purpose. Sins of the father, and all that.
I’m not disagreeing with tjänstemannaansvar, or reduced salaries for politicians, or free dental care. Those are all low-hanging fruit though, obvious to any working class person. The stickler is the extremely racist rhetoric that comes with it.
That isn’t a difference of opinion, it’s plain bigotry and dehumanisation.
There is nothing wrong with wanting people to assimilate or get sent back. Integration does not work with certain cultures which we have seen for the last 20 years. If you come to Sweden you are a guest and you should behave like one, right? Then if you do intend to stay you should be supportive of our values and our way of life. There is also no denying that certain people in office hold plain racist views and we have to work hard on kicking those people out of any institutions we have.
So a difference of opinion in this case is what to do with people who come here that don’t contribute to society, don’t follow our societal norms, and break our laws. It doesn’t have anything to do with race.What I do agree with is how they have really messed up with some cases in regards to people growing up in Sweden and then getting sent to a country they have never been in, but that is on the people in the government for not doing their job correctly. Remigration does not have to mean going all-in or doing nothing, there is a nice middle ground where you can do things on a case-by-case basis.
Also there was an article written by a seemingly reputable outlet, so yeah I’ll choose to believe them. And there’s also the fact that the CEO denied nothing. You would think he would clarify the party’s stance once the backlash started coming, if everyone were wrong.
Well you should not believe everything you read in articles. Even reputable outlets will be wrong when they write about something outside of their area of expertise. I think most people in here will just read the headline and some comments saying “far-right!” and believe that is true. Go to the Wikipedia pages for the Örebro Party and read them. I’ll link both the Swedish and English pages for you so you can compare them. I’ll also link to their own website, it is only in Swedish so you’ll have to translate it yourself. But you’ll see that nothing is out of the ordinary and the whole thing is blown out of proportions.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebropartiet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party
https://orebropartiet.se/large-scale remigration
Thanks, didn’t need to read any further (still did)
Would you like to elaborate? There’s is nothing wrong with not liking it, but that does not put the party into some far-right category that people seem to be making up.
You think advocating for large-scale forced displacement of non-white citizens does not put the party into a far-right category? I feel like you’re the one who’d need to elaborate.
I want to make the point that it doesn’t have anything to do with skin color, that is a made up thing by people who don’t like it. Coming to Sweden and getting to stay is not a human right. That applies to everybody no matter where you’re from. So no, I do not think wanting people to remigrate makes the party far-right.
Private wealth is a mistake
“I don’t like co-owning a nazi bar.” Well, boohoo, grow a spine and do something about it.
lol. Yes.
I will sign up for Mullvad tomorrow if he actually does something meaningful about it.
I haven’t even looked up the price, but I’ll keep my word.
Only I won’t have to, because the odds are this guy is another spineless piece of shit.
“donation”? this is called lobbying. And it should be illegal.
If it was illegal to donate money, these money would still reach the recipients - but without anyone’s knowledge.
good, then make the punishment heavy enough so that even if a few are caught, they are made examples of. I am thinking if the illegal lobbying money is higher than a certain amount he is forced to step down and the company is run by a board of truestees for a year. Will they be able to find ways around it? Sure they are resourceful and have an army of lawyers shamelessly trained at finding loopholes, but it will be much harder than now which is basically a walk in the park for them.
he is forced to step down and the company is run by a board of truestees for a year
What company? Daniel Berntsson used his personal funds.
Political parties need donations and membership fees to survive because the alternative - where political parties receive funds from the state - makes them dependable and controllable by the state. There are many laws that regulate such donations. Did he break any law? If not, should the law be stricter? It’s up to the debate.
The idea that we should make everything illegal and punishable and that will solve every problem is just naive.
where political parties receive funds from the state - makes them dependable and controllable by the state.
Lol, what so you think its easier to implement a fair support scheme for political parties through private means than govermental means? You prefer political parties be dependent on whims of private companies who only make these donations with strings attached? You think donations don’t make parties controllable by their donors if they are private? There is simply no logic to this statement.
I am sure you are gonna make an argument along the lines of “but look what if all these donations depended on the current US goverment, surely it couldn’t be worse than a private company”. That means you are missing the big picture and how Trump got into goverment in the first place. Pointing at a government that is so shit because it has million strings attached to other entities including zionist lobbies and tech giants and then saying being dependent on goverment for election funds is dangerous is just bad logic. It is also quite delusional to think that one could have a fair donation scheme where interest of private companies are involved. Lobbying has been the menace of democracy for well over a century.
Also the very fact that politicial parties need on the order of hundereds of millions of dollars for campaigning is already outrageous enough. Things like super PACs is just another loophole to get the party with more connections in power. All of these can be much better regulated with laws and not letting private companies run rampant on politics.
What company? Daniel Berntsson used his personal funds.
All you are doing with this statement is you are pointing at a loophole. Does not matter, personal funds can still be used to do lobbying for a company. So whatever stricter implementations one should come up with it should try to cover and punish loopholes like this to reduce frequency of it happening.
There is simply no logic to this statement.
Yes, but only because you invented this statement in order to heroically ‘beat’ it.
I am sure you are gonna make an argument
It seems you’re having a lot of fun arguing with yourself. I’m not gonna interfere 🤝
Hmm calling a direct quote from you a made up statement… Seems like you have some issues to sort out.
Sounds like a seriously bad argument against laws…
“You’re saying I can only murder people in secret? I thought this was America.”
Racist co-founder. Let’s just start calling a spade a spade. He’s a racist.
Frustrated. I signed up for protonvpn because I was using their services. Then dropped their services and moved most things to self hosting and moved the vpn to mullvad. Now mullvad is in the shitter so I guess I have to switch again. Where to go? Suggestions?
It seems that IVPN is getting a lot of new customers. I have never heard about them before though. Don’t take this as any sort of recommendation or anything.
Örebro is certainly an interesting party. Forked off of the very leftist “Left Party”, it’s a mix of Marxism, Populism, Swedish Nationalism, Anti-Corruption, Anti-Establishment and Eco-Socialism. Part of the Nordic Green Left Alliance.
Pretty much all over the place, at least on paper.
I don’t know, it sounds to me like the kind of party Lemmy should enjoy.
Or else enjoy finding dirt on, and discussing them.
Sort of a “national socialist” party, one might say?
Fascists coopting the language of socialism is as old as fascism. That people continue to fall for it amazes me.
Their website literally doesn’t have a party programme. From the looks of it they get their votes by spreading propaganda on facebook, which I guess is easy given the donation of five mil. Bananas.
As a Swede I get clips of Markus Allard in my feeds from time to time. It is always clips of him debating other politicians in their city council. Like it or not it is certaintly not propaganda, it is recordings of him doing his job.
I’m tired boss……
Just when you think you find good companies to support they end up being run by shitbags.
Ok, where to next for my VPN needs?
There is no such thing as an ethical corporation. I’m going to tell you now, if you cannot ever compromise then learn subsistence farming as soon as you can.
You don’t have to agree with the chef in politics to enjoy their food.
Acting like that zealously would make you quickly run out of options if you actually talked to most chefs.
And contributing money to shitbags allows them to keep funding terrible values. See Musk.
True but the only thing these fuckers understand the minus to their wallet.
There’s a difference between a chef having an opinion and a high-ranking decision maker having an opinion and the money to amplify it.
If the chef thinks he shouldn’t have to make food for immigrants, that’s too bad. He’ll have to do his job anyway. If the CEO thinks his establishment shouldn’t serve immigrants and donates to politicians that promise to let him segregate his diner, that might actually have an impact far greater than the chef’s opinion.
It’s more a question of “know where your money is going.” You can stick your head in the sand and pretend not to know if you wish, but don’t presume to lecture others who won’t.
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely ", unfortunately. I heard that studies have shown the neurophysiology of a person changes the longer they are in power and influence.
That’s interesting, but did they control for becoming a raging K-head?
I think the response makes it obvious that a company is not it’s co-CEO, and a co-CEO is not a company.
Granted a tiny amount of your fees may make their way to a political party you vehemently oppose, but I think you’re also supporting a lot of other people in the organisation that are on your side.
It’s not a “tiny” amount of money, this dude is the CEO who makes all of the money in the company and any money going to Nazis is problematic especially when the Nazis in question are almost digitally funded by this CEO and yes the CEO is the face and moral driver of a company.
Pretty ironic saying the company supports free speech when the biggest money maker is bankrolling a group that specifically gasses free speech and I doubt the other working there have even a sliver of speech that the CEO does.
Before your fee gets into a CEOs hands it pays for people’s salaries and the costs of the company. That’s what I mean by a tiny amount. It’s only what’s left after that that the CEO can benefit from.
I highly doubt you’ll find any company composed solely of people that support ideologies you agree with. I know that sounds flippant and dismissive but ultimately we should support the best options we have. Or I guess you can roll your own solution and trust that you have the skills to stay ahead of the opposition.
There’s a big difference between a CEO that openly hates unions and has affairs or a software developer making 100k a year that racist AF on Facebook vs a CEO that’s literally keeping a bunch of Nazis afloat and giving them an outsized voice.
Also, there’s no best option when it comes to Nazis because if you give them an inch, they’ll subvert democracy and human decency.
I agree, but there’s a difference between simply differing opinion and dumping a boat load of money, presumably some of it from Mullvad subscriptions, into a party that advocates for “remigration”. If the dude just had some weird opinions I wouldn’t necessarily switch, but I don’t like the idea of my money directly helping with helping the far right. Honestly, I wouldn’t even remotely care enough if one of the founders was part of a “normal” European neoliberal or conservative party, I have plenty of friends across the political spectrum. But I don’t like giving extremists my momey
Not using a VPN feeds other companies valuable data. Or are you suggesting we all become hermits on public land?
Everything you see, use, touch, eat every day has been made possible by capitalism. If not for capitalism, we’d all still be farming and dying by 40.
Well that comment wins my Billy Madison comment of the day.
We’d be dying ethically, though! I’m kidding. Did you not know this place is an extreme-left echo chamber?
I know it is. I’ll still interact with it and say my opinion. Don’t really care about the down votes.
not really extreme left tbh, thats .ml hexbear and grad.
I don’t know what those are - I just waded into Lemmy on a very large instance but I constantly see large numbers of people who proceed as if we’re all in agreement that capitalism is a proven evil and should definitely be put behind us in favor of a Marxist economy. This is what I consider extreme left. Now is it the uttermost tip of extreme? Surely not. But literal communism is not moderate left, or center left, it is far left. We could probably argue over the semantics of this for a long time.
yeeaah it’s all thanks to the feudalism 2.0 that we live in. long live the parasitic bourgeoisie. life is absolutely perfect nothing to see here
This is basically a list of things that are wrong with the U.S. or problems in the world.
I don’t understand how this proves that capitalism is bad. If the world still hasn’t solved all its problems, then capitalism is inherently bad?
By all metrics, the world is much much better now than it was 100 years ago. And it’s mostly thanks to market economy.
All countries that have tried something different have had to resort to some flavour of capitalism in order to have any meaningful development.
Also, nobody said our economic system in its current form it’s perfect.
fucking lol
Not using a VPN feeds other companies valuable data. Or are you suggesting we all become hermits on public land?
What info?
If you encryption & use DoH for DNS resolution, they can see the IPs you are connecting to, yes a sufficiently motivated ISP can use reverse DNS lookups to tell what sites you are accessing, but if you’re ISP is that bad, find a new one.
do you trust your ISP or some guy that donated to political parties that want to kick out immigrants more?
There are many parts of the world where the ISPs really are that bad, and consumers don’t have the choice to switch to a competitor that isn’t equally bad.
Switch to what, starlink? Because that’s the only other option for the majority of rural America. You think this issue, Elon musk, or my Trump ass kissing aligned isp is the lesser evil?
Sometimes a VPN is more trustworthy, it’s just wild that people think they are always better, giving money to the main guy funding a far-right party or Comcast, seems like an easy call.
I guess there is a difference between the founder being a shit head and one of the rank and file being a shit head. Would be nice if just a few of the CEO class weren’t psychopaths.
In particular, privacy-oriented services seem to occupy an amoral zone. Probably because if you’re truly going to deliver on privacy promises, you have to be okay with giving them to everybody, including nefarious people doing bad things with them.
Hey, so long as you don’t use X, any Meta product, Google, or Amazon, (or any Musk-infected garbage, obvs), or Protonmail then sure, cancel Mullvad and trash talk the guy silly.
However. I very much doubt that’s the case.
If it’s not the case, that means this is performative. a.k.a. Bullshit.
I hope Mullvad buys him out, distances themselves as far as possible. But they are far from the only tech company with some right wing cunt mixed up with them. If you’re gonna be pure you gotta go full-stack FOSS and a lot of us aren’t there yet. So let’s not pretend like all of us are.
This is a bad attitude. It’s like saying being vegetarian is performative if you aren’t full vegan. And for the record, I use Mullvad (for now), I don’t use any of the other services you mentioned, and I am vegan ;)
Loving the “hey, man, you’re completely wrong! But yes i agree” replies
This is not an all or nothing situation, people can criticise this for what it is, even if they’re using any of the products/companies mentioned by you. Navigating a tech-fascist ecosystem is difficult and every criticism here is valid and important.
(Not using any of the aforementioned products/companies btw)
It only benefits Mullvad if I walk away right now. I’ve got ~200 days left on my prepaid account. Hopefully in the next 200 days i’ll find a better or equivalent VPN service with CEOs that have yet to come out as complete shit-bags.
I believe they said they would offer refunds if that’s what you’re referring to by the 200 days
https://piunikaweb.com/2026/06/30/mullvad-browser-vpn-options-after-controversy/
Unfortunately that doesn’t apply if you used a voucher 😞
