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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

What does defunding state-funded media (aka propaganda) have to do with the freedom of expression?

You familiar with separation of power? Like Judges being funded by the state, and yet, somehow able to stay independent? Shocking, I know. Here’s even more shocking: media are like that too.

I mean, okay, they aren’t always. In France for instance they fluctuated from straight up propaganda tool, to very independent, and now back to being less independent. Unfortunately it’s not being recognised as a fourth power, worth cleanly separating from the other organs of the state (executive, legislative, judiciary). Still, the separation is there to some degree.

Anyway, freedom of expression.

The practical effect of stopping state funding of media, simply means all we’d have left as mainstream media goes, are those owned by a tiny number of very rich people. And the overwhelming majority are either neoliberal, or pretty far to the right — some squarely fall into the far right. Precisely the kind of propaganda tool you seem to expect from the state, only even more pronounced. Oh sure you’re "free" to express leftist ideas. On your tiny YouTube channel. Nobody is going to listen to you from their TV or their radio.

Kinda suits the far right parties, doesn’t it?

We speak of freedom of expression, but really that is taking it from the wrong end. What we really need is freedom of information, that is, actual, practical access to a broad enough range of ideas. And with curation too. Stupid stuff like Flat Earth should be relegated to the rank of cute entertainment. Dangerously false stuff like climate change denialism should be mostly ignored by recommendation algorithm, and moderated away from any kind of mass media. Hate speech, like, "trans 'people' are abominations that deserve a bullet in the head, let’s grab our AR-15", should be prosecuted.

Anyway, what is said is much less important than what is heard, and to what extent. We can keep a nominal freedom of expression all right, but it doesn’t matter if all people hear all day is pro-genocide, pro-billionaire, anti-regulation, anti-queer, and anti-science.

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A note on vocabulary: it’s kinda hard to communicate how things work here in parts of the EU, because you just don’t have the word. I want to talk about publicly owned media, as in owned by the people, but this clashes with "public company", which means owned by shareholders.

So I have to resort to "state funded", except now you think it means "state controlled", because of course if you fund something you control it… except no, see judges, and the funding doesn’t even have to go through the state — or at least, not the executive branch.

It’s like explaining someone who’s just been told all their life that the sun rises from the East and sets to the West, means something different now than what it meant 2 thousand years ago. It doesn’t fit in a simple comment.

that seems schizophrenic. either state funded media can be abused and there should be none of it, or we find a way to prevent abuse, but then that should also work for the press.

even more so as nowadays press is also digital and there is really no difference between a website from a newspaper and a website from other news media. but one can't be state funded, but the other can.

Well, now they do to some extent, and that’s a problem, because for retirement for instance, they apparently refusing to even think of raising the rates even a little bit, and few discuss ways to raise the salaries themselves. All they can think of is making us work later, which doesn’t work because whatever pressure you relieve from the retirement funds, goes straight to the unemployment fund. Oh wait, there’s a solution: kick people out of unemployment insurance.

Anyway, something like that could be devoted to various media. I believe it would work best if it was done through an independent organisation (or federation thereof, we still want local media). And of course we want that organisation to be democratic, but I haven’t thought through the details where the devil lies.

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Note: I spoke of the independence of judges above, but if I recall correctly, in France we have much fewer of them than in Germany (per capita). They are overworked, justice takes ages to be served, and there are signs that it is on purpose. I suspect one reason is it allows the executive branch to set the priorities for the justice system, undermining its independence at a deep level.

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.

Sure, Örebro is not typical, and may indeed be an exception.

But.

This apparent racism remains cogent evidence that they are also against freedom of expression — even if perhaps not openly. Also, I have yet to know of one political party who sincerely advocates for both deportation and freedom of expression.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

Where can I read more about how this is the fundamental policy of the Örebro party?

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.)

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.

I cannot speak for Daniel. I know there are some policies he likes and there are things he doesn’t like. Personally I am not a fan.

This morning Daniel explained his rationale to most of the company. Speaking for myself, I don’t like that he made this donation and I know this view is shared by many of my colleagues. Speaking as the co-CEO of Mullvad, we will continue to protect the universal right to privacy. People should feel safe using Mullvad regardless of their political affiliation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipope

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