> As if it isn’t a problem that their CEO is supporting policies that go against everything that Mullvad stands for as a company.
Mullvads mission is about privacy and against mass surveillance. That mission has nothing to do with their co-CEOs personal stance on immigration. I don't necessarily see the conflict of interest that the blog talks about?
The immigration policies (or mass-deportations) that Mullvad co-CEO is supporting with political donations cannot be achieved without mass surveillance and secret police.
It is really not difficult to draw this line to spot contradiction between co-CEO's personal stance and the company's mission.
Lots of discussion surrounding what ethnonationism is...
Ethnonationalism: Defined by shared ancestry, lineage, and cultural heritage. Membership is exclusive and inherited by birth, focusing on preserving a specific ethnic identity.
Civic Nationalism: Defined by shared political principles, values, and laws. Membership is inclusive and open to anyone who adheres to the state's legal framework, regardless of background.
Does the party call for remigration or a lower status for immigrants who have committed no crimes, found jobs and are not a disproportionate drain on the welfare state? To be ethnonationist, I believe they must call for that on the basis of us vs them. Perhaps someone can provide evidence of this. I haven't seen any. Seems like they are very upset about crime and welfare drain. Also they have a bunch other non immigration related positions that some might label as extreme.
According to the machine translation, Allard explicitly frames his argument around cultural assimilation, economic contribution, and behavior rather than biological ethnicity or skin color alone.
In public statements, he has routinely asserted that an individual's racial background or skin color is irrelevant to his politics.
Look, I'm not some Allard supporter. Don't know the guy, not even Swedish. Easily found some stuff on their platform which I quickly disagree with. I really doubt he's literally out there just calling for mass deportation of folks based on ethnicity. That is actual ethnonationism. Swedish people are from a nice free society and are accustomed to low crime and low problems. They've got this 2nd generation migrant issue that lots of Europe is dealing with.
The definition of ethnonationist is being used so flipantly throughout this thread.
Do your really think this guy is just standing up saying 'remigrate all dark skinned folks who got here recently'?
Even if that were his true political goals, it would be pretty self defeating to just charge onto the stage going full Nazi. He wouldn't have this much movement.
> I really doubt he's literally out there just calling for mass deportation of folks based on ethnicity. That is actual ethnonationism. Swedish people are from a nice free society
If you meant that they wouldn't support racist policies, a party with neo-nazi roots is currently the second largest one; calling for mass deportation based on ethnicity might not be that unpopular.
Actually, the Swedish Democrats themselves in 2003 adopted “the idea of "open Swedishness”, meaning that Swedish identity is not biologically exclusive and that assimilation is – theoretically – possible”.
And their ideas about immigration don't seem very different to those of Örebro, at a quick glance.
> it would be pretty self defeating to just charge onto the stage going full Nazi
Sadly no, in 2026 going full Nazi genocidal maniac mass murderer in waiting seems to be broadly acceptable for a politician, in the next few years we can expect the "in waiting" part will be dropped somewhere.
What is Swedish? Their own royalty is a forever soup with Danish, German and French ingredients, with Norman umami added before and after. They could just say tall/white/Caucasian and stop being polite Swedish about it. But they won't, because. Not my country, not my problem, but it's just so glaring. Do police work, educate, integrate. What's done is done, move on.
My sentiment was is that what’s must be happening but is unpalatable to be plated as such. Forgive me, I’m speaking out of school, I have never been to Sweden or its neighboring countries.
Swedish politics aside(!), I'd love to have other VPN services as exit points for Tailscale. More choice is good, and hopefully that becomes an option one day.
People who look at this from a US political perspective is going to get a lot of misunderstanding unless one look into the specifics that are the Swedish political system and laws.
The party in question is a small local government party looking to primary get seats in their local government, but with aspiration to get into national politics under a special rule that provide a single seat (1 out of 349) in parliament if the party get enough votes in a local election. The politician in question has made some comments about national immigration policy during debates, which local government has no power over, and which is what the label ethnonationalist is exclusively based on. Last election they got 7 700 votes, and they would need around 20 000 votes to get that one parliament seat.
The specific quote in question has a bunch of context. The background was a parliamentary proposition that suggest that immigrants that are on subsidy programs should be required to do some social work as part of the integration process. The opposition disagreed, arguing that this would enable the government to exploit immigrants as free labor, and that is when this politician commented that if they want subsidy but refuse to work then they should return back to their home country (often translated as deported, which is not completely wrong translation but lacks context).
The discussion around deportation from Sweden is also very different from the political discussion in US. Sweden has been deporting people for about 100 years if a person lacks permission to stay in the country, and there is no party that is advocating to stop this. What is debated is the definition used in the exception for unsafe home country, and a bit about what specific circumstances a permission to stay in the country can be withdrawn. Except for the above mentioned parliamentary proposition, I do not know of any political statements that Örebro party or their leader has said on those issues.
> The opposition disagreed, arguing that this would enable the government to exploit immigrants as free labor, and that is when this politician commented that if they want subsidy but refuse to work then they should return back to their home country.
If the opposition parties disagreed, why did this politician assume that unemployed people "refuse to work"? like what type of argument that is? He sounds like an ignorant populist repeating sound bites to spread hatred honestly. Or maybe he thinks of them as pawns with no agency, and not people.
On the topic of privacy, the reason to use an LLM to write is stylometry. If I use my own voice to write anything of significant length, enough personal mannerisms will come through, so that I can be identified by my writing. If someone were to do something subversive, and wanted to be anonymous, that's one more thing to do to hide your tracks.
Just make sure to use a local model if you're really serious about this since there is no guarantee the cloud models can't not won't add watermarks to the output.
Plenty of people were buying it before it has a marketing association with transgenderism, and then they suddenly stopped because they didn't want to give any money to transgender causes.
Neither do I, but I hate authoritarianism (and hypocrisy) even more. People are free to have different opinions than mine, and I will defend their right to do so.
People are free to have their opinions, that doesn't mean you need to fund them. If you don't at least on some level agree with the politics, why are you giving them your money?
I fear you're hopelessly blind to your hypocrisy, there is no way you are only giving your money to people you agree with politically.
And there is more to life than politics, even though I feel it's hard to understand in the current hysterical climate of social media echo chambers and US politics. It is honestly terrifying to live in a world where most hope everyone else would conform and have the exact same perspective of the world as them, else they get accused of wrongthink.
> there is no way you are only giving your money to people you agree with politically
Obviously not. And?
> And there is more to life than politics
Obviously. And?
> have the exact same perspective of the world as them, else they get accused of wrongthink
Who am I accusing of wrongthink? Who am I requiring to conform to my exact perspective? Am I not free to chose who to give my money to? Is it not my choice to base my decision on whatever I want? Is it somehow unethical to base that choice on public information?
> People are free to have different opinions than mine, and I will defend their right to do so.
You don't seem very eager to defend my right to the opinion that giving money to Mullvad is bad. You seem to consider that specific opinion to be "authoritarian". Why?
For the record, I don't use a VPN because they are (all) useless snake oil.
Free and open society means others doing things that I don't agree with. Including private CEO donations or leaving service because of politics. By definition, it is attribute of democracy.
There's a huge difference between enforcing reasonable immigration laws and what some right-wing parties are proposing. I don't know enough about this specific party, but you'll find similar ones in other countries. And remigration is in the end about deporting even legal and well integrated immigrants.
Freedom doesn't mean just what you think is acceptable. If a society feels like they let too many people into the country they have the freedom to undo it.
To make things clear my definition of a free society is one where the society itself governs how it is run. The opposite of this is when another country, organization, or person is dictating how it is run overriding how the society wants to do things.
>Do you consider [giving] governance of [the] majority to [the] minority as a part of free society?
I do not consider that as a requirement free society. While representational democracies give governance to a small amount of people compared to the overall populace theoretical you could have a society where everyone was on equal footing and all contributed to decisions being made.
I'm supporting your position elsewhere: mentioning to avoid being dismissed as right-wing/ethno-nationalist.
However, support for migration is not a left or right issue. Accepting refugees might be (and I fully support that), but non-refugee immigration (the vast majority of it) is not an unalloyed good.
Immigration has a number of negative effects, on housing, employment and wages, inequalities, social cohesion, political direction.
Being a radical leftist and against immigration is not contradictory.
I don’t use VPNs anymore. They feel pointless now since almost every website has antibot systems, and VPN IP ranges are much easier to flag than residential proxies.
I use a VPN because I still seed 10s of thousands of torrents and have a static IP address. I don't want the swarm to see that. Most of them are from private sites I trust, but some from private sites that have a huge membership I'm not sure about. I have a lot of movies and music that isn't available anywhere else and archiving that is important to me. Kept my music collection from what.cd and a lot of that you can't even buy on discogs.
It's not great as a Mullvad user: YouTube constantly complains and also shadowbans some of my livestreaming functionality, and my X account has now been flagged as a bot, which requires me to download the app and verify myself in ways that they won't explain. And X is practically useless without a user, much like Instagram. TikTok also shadowbans you with reduced functionality.
Twitch and Discord meanwhile feel remarkably unaffected compared to their counterparts.
VPNs in the aftermath of FireSheep[1] before we got proper HTTPS, but it's not likely to be the ban or censorship circumvention tool we think they are.
It's about a popular security tech product! Sure there's a political angle as to _why_ the person has ditched it, but loads of HN news posts do. Not sure why it's flagged
Personally I welcome more parties in the Swedish Riksdag.
It is also interesting how they may get their seat.
Örebropartiet is a local party to Örebro, but because they are getting a lot of votes in the local district election they may end up in a seat in the Riksdag, which is highly unusual.
> Some key issues for the Örebro Party locally include strong secularism, a 30-hour workweek with retained pay, lowered wages for politicians, expanded social housing, abolishing preschool-fees, making public transport free of charge, ending taxpayer funding of what it sees as wasteful sculptures, monuments and art and introducing free dental care. Nationally the party has set out large-scale remigration, closing the Swedish borders to immigration, a stricter assimilation policy and ending taxes on energy and fuel as some of its key issues.
Every populist party works that way, by promising very "sensible" thing. They work like an echo chamber for trendy political ideas.
Whether or not they are actually capable or even plan do any of that it's a different matter.
Typically, they only end up being a coverup for political extremism.
In then other cases they fumble and somehow mess up the situation even more.
Conversely, the "serious" political parties work by claiming all sensible reforms are in one way or another impossible and sitting on their behinds for the duration of their terms. See Mamdani for an example of a "populist" who somehow managed to push through many sensible, "impossible", "extremist" policies without too much effort.
Uh, isn't that exactly what you'd want out of a political party? I wouldn't vote for them because I disagree with a few of their points, but if you think all of their policies are good and you trust them to uphold them, then go vote for them?
> know what they can actually achieve and promise that
Show me a single party that actually keeps their (concrete) promises and I'll show you a flying pig.
In any case, you're somehow confusing a list of "key issues" with a list of actual promises. A 30-hour workweek being a key issue, doesn't mean that the party promises they'll achieve that the next term, even if they magically would get 100% of the votes. It means it's a long term goal that they believe in and are working towards. Isn't that obvious to anyone with even a passing issue in politics?
There are social forces that are shifting the collective mindset to be more sympathetic to anti immigration sentiments. We see it in Australia recently, but the political analysis of this phenomenon is still lagging from my perspective (I am not endorsing these sentiments).
To be clear, did or did not the party leader say he would like to deport people born in Sweden to legal immigrant parents because they are not "naturally Swedish"?
The mainstream media plays into this for sure. But I think there is a lot more to it. I think most of us on this platform have cosmopolitan leanings. We're educated and have some job mobility. I've worked overseas because I got an engineering education and did well in it. But wage stagnation, job insecurity, housing costs, low rental vacancy all play into this dynamic. There are a lot of people who don't like seeing their country change in its demographics. That is partly racism, but its also fear of change. I don't like it but I can understand it. When material conditions devolve, there will be a lot of people who blame the "other", even if its misidentifying the cause. I think Australia is lagging behind the right wing populist movement of the UK and US but we are on the same trajectory, and the major party policitians still don't understand how to address it. And most left wing people won't attempt to understand it because they at stuck using rationality and ethics as their rhetoric, and don't understand that emotion and grievance are going to trump that in politics.
If you have any disagreements I'm keen to hear them. These are just my own observations so I want inputs from others outside my own echo chamber. If you CBF that's fine too though.
It's a complex issue, but in short, I think that some of the concerns about immigration are often legitimate.
Progressive people, being more keen on altruism, tend to think that the good reasons immigrants have to migrate should overshadow the problems that immigration can cause.
And sometimes there's maybe also a view that a strongly multi-ethnic society is something to aspire for, because of the increased understanding of different people and hopefully a reduction of racism that it can lead to.
Progressives tend to think that everyone should be as tolerant as them, and that can lead to only looking into the problems, and finding solutions, up to a degree.
I saw that in the shift from arguing for integration to arguing for tolerance and a multi-cultural society, for example, where inadeguate integration efforts faiiled.
---
On the other hand, right wing/conservative parties often enact policies that compound the immigration problems, rather than improving them.
In part that's due to a preference for securitarian policies, rather than looking for the root causes.
And in part that's because immigration problems most often lead to increased votes for them, so it's in their interest to not actually solve them.
All this, in the end, can create a space for parties standing for drastic solutions such as mass deportations; however immoral, dangerous for everyone and hard to realize they may be.
---
The way forward, in my opinion, should be for progressive parties to stop dismissing the problems that immigration can lead to, and to do their utmost to improve them all, rather than pretending for everyone to be as tolerant as them.
The actual middle/long term solution would probably be ensuring that the new potential immigrants are willing to integrate to a sufficient degree, and most of all to look into what pushes them to migrate in the first place, and work for improving the causes of that.
The latter can seem utopic, but it's better than the alternatives, in my opinion.
Being this sensitive to company leadership political activity is going to exhaust a person and time would be better spent being careful to buy products with minimal value added from authoritarian nations with a history of gross human rights issues.
Lots of counties don't want immigration, especially after they let a large group in and deal with integration challenges. The CCP forcefully places ethnic Han into minority homes to function as de facto informants. The Russians broke up Finnish/Ukrainian families en masse, moving them to the other end of Russia to minimize the likelihood of dissent in occupied areas.
There are a lot worse ideas at play in the world than some of the more extreme suggestions that this very infant-sized Swedish party flirt with. On a scale of 1-10 heinousness, barely registers on the global stage.
My thinking goes more like this:
This product I bought from this nation... Does that Nation tend to value human rights, freedom of expression and liberal values? Sweden... Check.
I can buy Swedish products all day. They make nice jets and mobile artillery that push back on the really bad ideas. One CEO's affiliation with an anti immigration populist party which honestly doesn't seem that serious... They've got some Marxist ideas in there. I really doubt these guys go much of anywhere in their current form. It's a capitalist society. Some of their ideas will stick but the party is immature. I wouldn't worry so much.
You are telling me that this party's platform is literally that Swedish decent people are superior... Full stop... Because that is the ethnofascist(Nazi) position.
You lose one of the largest advocates of a free internet, and what you gain is... more people knowing that it's not acceptable to be anti-immigrant under any cicumstances
... While, Elon Musk still owns everything and in my opinion he's worse.
It's also very easy to sympathise with Mullvads co-founder here, so you help make the conditions for the next 2016 "surprise, an actual Fascist gains power!" election, which is what's happening in Sweden right now as SD (founded by dyed in the wool actual Nazi's) has become the second largest party in Sweden.
But yeah, go off king! You got this, show them who's boss! We'll all be better for it! (/s)
“Ignoring this bit of gutter racism is the only way to move forward.”
No fucking thanks. Not an inch. Here’s a politically savvy idea: maybe somebody should make an immigration-skeptical party that’s not frothing at the mouth about ethnic cleansing.
Also, it’s just one VPN out of hundreds. The free internet will somehow survive, I’m sure.
it's always funny how the hardline advocates of the free internet (especially outside of the US) are subject to this kind of unpersoning.
It's enough to consider that there's something malicious going on.
But I guess we should use one of the VPN providers that aren't pushing for systems transparency[0] and are dubiously everywhere across all of youtube advertising despite that being provably the place where the scummiest of companies go.[1].
Not wanting unfettered and uncontrolled migration (when it has proven to massively increase crime - which was the context) is not racism, that's stupid.
If 15% of the population of Japan had moved from the UK in the last 10 years and committed a disproportionate amount of crime, it would cause racism, but talking about it as a problem that needs to be solved is not itself racism.
No conspiracy, just someone who loathes white supremacy with every fiber of my being. And yes, this is exactly the core platform of any Western party pushing for ethnic cleansing and “remigration.” (Deportation of anyone considered not Swedish/British/etc. enough even if they’re squeaky clean and integrated into local culture.)
Sorry, but we’re all in this together. Anyone who disagrees won’t get a cent from me.
You tend to trust people because they have strong opinions even if those opinions are completely psychotic? Does that mean you would have trusted the German dictator if you were alive back then?
4) he was running a country, not a company thats entire purpose was to protect peoples privacy
5) had people taken privacy seriously, there would be a lot less dead people in Europe, famously the dutch kept meticulous records of their populations which is part of why the Nazi's were so effective.
If you care about privacy why do you support the political party that wants to use mass surveillance and AI processing to find the "imposter" non-Swedish people in Sweden?
I assume you're talking about the co-founder, because while I live in Sweden (and hold a Swedish passport, despite not being born here) - I do not support populist parties such as the Örebro party. (They aren't even a thing as far as I can tell in Malmö, where I live.)
I am one of the imposter people you reference.
That said, I don't actually see much to corroborate what you're saying either, they don't seem to be implying use of AI and mass surveillance.
I think you've decided something you don't like is bad and now are trying to tie other things you don't like to it?
You strongly implied you supported the Örebro party because they have strong opinions and you support people with strong opinions even when they are bad opinions. (Which is populism, by the way - it's another way of saying you're a populist.)
If you give money to Mullvad you're giving a percentage of it through to Örebro. That's why people are boycotting Mullvad.
No I don't think it's a honeypot, unless it's a total lie to begin with. If it's true, it's an unforced error by Mullvad. There are other VPNs you can use that allow port forwarding.
> I think you've decided something you don't like is bad and now are trying to tie other things you don't like to it?
I support the co-founder - I believe that he would defend my views that he would disagree with more now that I know he has disagreeable views himself and runs a platform based on free speech -- it gives him "skin in the game" for privacy; and the more I see people screaming about how everything that isn't 100% globalism is actually a Nazi is making me even more sympathetic to him.
Can you show me where you got the idea of mass surveillance and AI (since you're claiming you didn't make it up)
From what I've learned (from these threads) the leader of the Orebro party said he wanted to expel those who commit crimes, even if they were born here (if they have no "natural" connection to Sweden).
It's an extreme position.
Yet it's also now two degrees moved from the founder of Mullvad; who has not expressed these opinions nor issued direct support for them specifically, nor do they imply all non-Swedes as you imply.
I'm not sure how you go from "Mullvad founder gave money to a party" to "that party leader said something extreme about criminals and welfare-abuse" to "the mullvad founder wants all non-Swedes deported".
I listened to it, because of these threads. (My Swedish is passive rather than spoken, understanding it isn't the problem.)
That quote is his answer to a question about people born here who commit crimes and live long-term on welfare; whether they can also be made to leave. It's not a freestanding statement about everyone born in Sweden to immigrant parents.
And the passage continues past where your excerpt stops:
"They have not become Swedes. It says Sweden in the passport, but they haven't been interested in becoming part of Sweden. That's a qualitative difference."
"Have not become" only works if becoming is possible. So the criterion he's stating is failed assimilation, not ancestry; and the write-ups of the same interview describe his programme the same way: remigration for criminals and the long-term welfare-dependent.
To be fair: that's still a subjective judgement about people's inner attitudes, which I've said elsewhere in this thread is arbitrary and I'd oppose. He also says he's prepared to "walk over corpses" on this, so I'm not selling him as a moderate. Extreme, yes. Ancestry-based, no. Those are different accusations, and only one of them survives contact with sources.
Anyhow, "criminals" is a way too vague concept for expelling someone from a country, especially when your party could come to power and criminalize anything you want.
And, Show me the man and I'll show you the crime: most people commit something illegal relatively frequently, sometimes without even realizing that it could be (e.g. copyright violations, libel, slight violations of obscure little-known laws...).
They'll typically never face consequences for that; but if you target them, or if it becomes more interesting for law enforcement to find any violation of the law on the part of someone, more often than not something will be found.
Come now, this is a response to very obvious criminal situations, parties like this (and SD) don't just pop up in very egalitarian, sectarian and liberal societies like Sweden for no reason whatsoever.
I empathise with the point you're making, and I suspect we agree on a lot more than you expect, but there is a serious issue with crime as it is currently defined.
It could be a response, but the point I was making was that while saying "criminals should be expelled" might sound reasonable to many, defining what exactly you mean with criminal is extremely important.
If the party comes to power and the law they'll actually enact says "If you violated any law you can be expelled", it would make anyone easily expellable.
this kind of slippery slope is why I hate vague rules on forums, let alone national laws.
Selective enforcement of those you find disagreeable is a way of bullying people with impunity.
That said, I'm curious on how you would solve the issue that Sweden is faced with. It is a very outsized, pronounced, issue and the legal system in Sweden is not equipped to deal with it.
The Swedish legal system prioritises rehabilitation, but the scale of the problem and the reoffending rate being what it is for serious crimes of foreign born persons does need to be answered somehow.
Ignoring it will make the problem worse, people will keep reaching further right.
I don't know very much about Sweden's issues, but if you say that the legal system is not equipped to deal with them, maybe that's what should be fixed?
Do search for the causes and strive to solve them, I doubt that the only possible solution (if it were a solution) is mass deportations.
Insufficient integration efforts could well be at the root of a lot of the immigrant crime problems; I agree with striving to integrate immigrants, to the point that I agree to a lot of what I see at https://web.archive.org/web/20200120174720/http://www.orebro... (2020, not on their site anymore).
I think you should demand committed acceptance of some core values to new immigrants, and I can agree with expulsion after serious enough violations of those.
And I'm not a fan of having as much immigration as possible.
My guy, he contributed 70% of the party's funds. That's pretty strong support. And he's smart enough to keep an apparent firewall between him and the party to deflect criticism.
Having a home, kids, a pet, a job and being part of a community that is integrated into the social fabric of the country.
"Values" get thrown around a lot, but equality of women and acceptance of homosexuality is a big deal to Swedes, so if you shun those things then I wouldn't expect acceptance.
I'd feel hungry and on the way to work I might grab something from one of the many Espresso Houses in Malmö, I know this because I've skipped breakfast many times and it's just one aspect to my environment.
A better question might be:
A) How does it feel to have the president of the galactic federation of planets outlaw cybernetic implants because they are used to harvest cloned Mycinian DNA illegally - despite such a law preventing the commercial use of home based medical technology.
or
B) How did it feel to be Plato, during the ostraca.
--
My point is: I know that the environment my great-granfather lived in is quite literally unknowable to me, despite a living person being able to talk to me about his experiences - it was also barely knowable for him.. "you had to be there".
The same way trying to explain to someone about our upbringing (no cell phones, paper maps, you had to stick to your arrangements because once out of the home there was no communication possible) is very difficult, imagine not having cars, air travel, all news being via the paper (which not everyone purchased) and everyone you know is a labourer.
In that context, with a global political landscape, and a local-first community of folks who could only articulate ideas amongst themselves... Man, I have no fucking clue how I would feel. Just like they'd have no clue about the concept of Espresso House or what would be possible in 2026.
History is really really easy in hindsight. If I have conservative opinions of any sort it's because I prefer to choose options personally that leave us with more choices later.
If this level ethnic replacement happens to be wrong, then it's already too late to do anything about it. That's just true, 15% of a country is already here and there's nothing anyone can do about this humanely.
Asking me how I'd feel if I was born 100 years ago is extremely uncompelling, because I could ask you how my family from then would think about things are today and I can guarantee that they're not going to agree with your perspective on the right approach.
You're comparing something that happened 100 years ago with something that happened 2400 years ago (also, what does "during the pottery (ostraca)" refer to?) and some science fiction scenario? Does Sweden not include WWII in the history education anymore, or are students just not recommended to try to insert themselves in the stories at all?
> the environment my great-granfather lived in is quite literally unknowable to me
Okay, not many things seem to be knowable to you then.
I can’t recall things my ancestors experienced. Even when they tell me: just like I will have a difficult time conveying how it felt to live during COVID (the uncertainty, the different countries behaving the way they thought best, why Sweden didn’t lock down and Italy did- the death of it) and why anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers are a thing.
Just like explaining how nobody could see the 2008 financial crisis, just like explaining to my children (or great grandchildren, remember that its many generations removed for me and you)- how it felt to fly by air before 9/11.
How can you explain it, you would reach for lossy comparisons like coach travel (will coaches even be a thing? not like they are today, not like they were in 1980 already)
This intellectual dishonesty is maddeningly stupid or an expertly crafted troll, neither are making me think you are engaging seriously.
> This intellectual dishonesty is maddeningly stupid or an expertly crafted troll, neither are making me think you are engaging seriously.
Well, I could say the same about refusing to even imagine what life was like 100 years ago. It seems simply absurd to me to not be capable of imagining a simple hypothetical scenario. Most people are capable of answering hypotheticals such as "if you got a million dollars, what would you do?" or "if you lived in the USA, would you vote for Trump?"
How can you know? Its quite literally impossible, psychologists believe you can hold approximately 8 competing facts in your head at once, and we are mentally scarred with spoilers, every decision is known and has been talked about to death.
My great grandfather was 17, had to flee Poland (never to return), fought for a brigade in exile in Scotland against the Nazis.
He was also the most racist man I know, prejudiced against people from the next town over in his adoptive home.
He eventually forgot his own native language some
time after marrying a woman born in scotland to a predominantly irish migrant family.
So, clearly not a nazi, clearly in support of some kind of migration- but his whole thing is that he made painful efforts to be a great guest in his home, but he never put down his prejudicial mindset. How can this be?
I don’t really know what thats like, even the simple warmth of being able to Video call my mum at a moments notice gives such a significant respite to the crippling loneliness you experience living in another country, its enough salve to keep you going. I can call anyone on earth, summon practically any facet of known human history in seconds, calculate complex mathematics and I have barely felt hunger, scarcity, famine or displacement in my life.
I have his perspective, as barely digestible as it is, and his is one perspective among millions- people who never saw a car until they were already on the other side of a continent- people for whom a job was a lifelong affair, who had tiny close-knit and isolated communities that were forced open by famine or war.
Man, I understand the details, but I can’t put myself in his shoes, theres too many variables and too many perspectives.
And, even though this man fought Nazi’s and assuredly killed people: he did so not knowing about the atrocities being committed- this fact came out very late into the war by his word.
It matters a lot because we can judge easily in hindsight, and because we won.
I’m not a nazi, I don’t agree with their philosophy in hindsight, but lets take the Bolsheviks- who slaughtered people too, who’s values I sort of still believe in.
Would I have been part of the coup in Russia during that time? Would you? How could you fucking know?!?
> Would I have been part of the coup in Russia during that time?
Well, let's just think logically. Do I today have the time, energy and inclination to be a part of a group of radicals plotting a coup? No. If I lived in Russia in the early 1900s would I have had that? No.
Sure, it's possible to say that if "I" lived then I would have had an entirely different childhood, but that's not how hypothetical scenarios work. What would the concept of "I" even mean? Would I have to account for different genes as well? Would I have to account for "me" being an entirely different person? You quickly get into a meaningless philosophical conundrum where nothing means anything and the only thing you can know is "cogito ergo sum" .
You might find that energy if the alternative is starvation, pestilince and war because a weak king was living in luxury.
You will never know, because you are ignorant to that situation, which is totally fine. Understanding your own ignorance is not a weakness, its a strength- it allows you to be open enough understand other peoples convictions and what confluence of actions may motivated them.
However you’re having a hard time with me specifically because you believe that because you are on the “right side” (an in-group bias more than actual convictions) today, that those values and motivations have always been the right side despite the benefits and biases of hindsight.
Every bigoted person in history genuinely believes they are right, they are righteous - and if only they could push the world to understanding or force people to live by those values, that it would be a better place.
To be clear, I am calling you ignorant and bigoted, because you claim to understand the value system of a person born in the 18th century while uou exist based on a comfortable, peaceful, plentiful life never knowing their environment, conditions, familial ties, how they thought about the world outside, technology or even their own tribal assertions.
Funny. Every bigoted person in history drank water too. Every non-bigoted person also believes they are right. Tell me, who would do something they believe is wrong?
I have no idea where you're getting that I'm trying to "force others to live according to those values" or whatever. Seems like you're fighting your own windmills rater than me. Chill out with the name calling and swearing, you're really just coming of as a bit deranged.
I tried to explain that even people living contemporary lives can be completely out of touch with one another (it's why rich people become so unrelatable that we get memes about "how much can a banana cost, like $10") and so imagining what life was like 100 years ago, or 100 years from now, is for all intents and purposes impossible. You went off about understanding individual single differences, which totally misses the point: it's the confluence of those differences in their totality that constitutes an environment, and environments shape opinion.
I wasn't alive before Hitler. I can't imagine what it's like to not have a figure like him in my history, along with the collective lessons we took from two world wars. As a consequence of those wars, European war to me may as well be as far removed as the US civil war or the English Wars of the Roses, except for one thing: I got to speak to someone who lived it, briefly.
My brain can't really picture Europe at war (I've seen movies, but even modern combat movies aren't accurate and sell 1% of the reality). I've only ever seen peace, the longest peace Western Europe has known. That's my entire reality, and it's as different from my ancestors' as theirs was from anyone's before them: a completely different understanding of history and what that might mean next, and totally different access to information and to opposing ideas from people as far away as the other side of the planet. Fog of the future.. right? https://youtu.be/NVGuFdX5guE?t=166 Everything is obvious in hindsight.
Being called a nazi sympathiser for admitting I can't know this (by people who are certain they do) is what I find hard. If you're resolute that you're right, and that you needn't consider the totality of a situation before assuming someone's motives, then you can look coldly at what you believe and judge people on that one aspect alone.
It's a closed loop. If the challenging arguments are the ones you won't engage with, you'll never meet one that moves you.
I'd rather ask myself "what if I'm wrong" and see whether I can attack my own position... maybe the other person has context I don't, or paints a different picture with the same facts. That's usually the more interesting conversation.
Anyway. I'm sorry I called you names. I was trying to shame you into seeing it, which was never going to work and was wrong of me regardless.
I don't know enough about this specific party, but a quick look at the Wikipedia page about them shows this quote, which to me does seem to suggest that the label is defensible:
> In a podcast segment about immigration and deportations Allard stated his opinion and said that "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish."
Sweden doesn't appear to have birthright citizenship (jus soli), so people whose only connection to Sweden is being born there are in fact not swedish. If this is your definition of ethnonationalism, then most of the world is already ethnonationalist.
> If this is your definition of ethnonationalism, then most of the world is already ethnonationalist.
The user you were replying to wasn't claiming that you're an ethno-nationalist state if you don't have birthright citizenship, or an ethno-naionalist if you're against it.
What are they claiming then? Allard says that people whose only connection to Sweden is being born there are not Swedish (which is correct) and that they would have to leave. I don't see the connection to ethnonationalism here.
One of us doesn't really understand English, do explain me how "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish." without context doesn't say that.
Alright, it was hard to make sense of your comment, anyhow the only way to have no connection to Sweden (besides the birth itself) despite being born there would be to have left it as an infant.
And, to be fair, I also haven't integrated perfectly well (I scarcely speak Swedish)- but I pay a lot of taxes and I don't do any crimes.
I would suspect that the Orebro party doesn't really have a problem with me, though they would start to have an issue if I started bringing my home countries problems with me, or if I started trying to bend society to my will- or if I never paid any taxes and had to live my entire life on welfare... or if I committed crimes.
I can't say for sure, since the only thing I know about the party itself is learning about it from this incident, but based on my conversations with conservative SD supporting Swedes, this is probably the case.
If so, then unfortunately, I (and many other immigrants, especially those from the Balkans in the 90s) likely support this idea.
I am a migrant FROM Sweden(to Switzerland) and the Swedes absolutely want you to speak Swedish. At least this has been my experience living in Switzerland. They prefer that
I speak broken German rather than English. Even many who speak English flawlessly.
But you will be tolerated if you are overall a net contributor, that is right.
Yes, that's fair, I think tolerated is the right word.
I'm tolerated for not speaking Swedish, but I would not be tolerated if I was a criminal, went directly against Swedish values loudly or was a net drain on society in some other way.
What does "otherwise integrating" mean, and do you really want to expel everyone who receives tax money (so the entire government) and everyone who is unemployed?
There may be people in the party who want to expel folks just because they are not 'Swedish'. I doubt that's the official party line. If it is, perhaps you can find me a citation on that.
The distinction is that a person can be ethnicity agnostic while being very strict about deporting immigrants who commit crimes. In the case of Sweden, it appears to me that the evidence indicates the primary concern is folks born to non-native parents. See the exert below from their Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention:
"The proportion of the various groups registered as suspects for any type of
crime are as follows:
• 3.2 percent of persons born in Sweden to two native-born parents (4.8
percent of men, 1.5 percent of women).
• 5.9 percent of persons born in Sweden to one non-native parent (8.6
percent of men, 3.1 percent of women).
• 10.2 percent of persons born in Sweden to two non-native parents
(15.3 percent of men, 4.8 percent of women).
• 8.0 percent of persons born abroad (12.2 of men, 3.9 percent of
women)."
If I am a true-blue ethnonationalist, I want all non-Swedish ethnicities deported/remigrated or relegated to lower social status. This would be the Nazi position... White skin blue eyes = superior.
If I am a tough on crime migrant skeptic, I call for deportation of non-native's who commit crimes without concern for their specific ethnicity/origin. I can't be in the Nazi party, because I don't think German descent people are superior. I think anyone who migrates to our country and then commits crimes is undesirable. I would just as easily call for the deportation of any ethnic background.
I looked into this a bit, because I was curious if there was actual evidence driving these political movements. As it turns out, there is and it has been studied. The primary pain point(crime) comes in when the 2nd generation doesn't economically assimilate. If a non-native family economically assimilates they then apparently actually have lower likelihood of criminal activity than a native family.
You go against the established leftist narrative? You get called all the possible names: ethnonationalist, fascist, nazist, racist, whatever.
It got stale and it's giving a lot of people fatigue, even more so considering that we all lived in a shared reality and we can all see that the narrative around immigration does not survive the basic reality checks.
I need to find it but i have read a few years ago a sociological paper about how criminal organization consolidating and increasing in strength will lead to harder drugs being pushed, more human trafficking and an increase in unauthorized immigrant crime participation. It was about French crime families and how their presence increased in the northern part of the country (mainly Paris) in the late 2000, early 2010s. Basically the best way to reduce violence is to go for the organization and their leaders, and the people profitering.
More than any other country... I'm not too sure about that, there are a lot of countries on this planet. What period are you looking at? I assume relative numbers.
I'm also skeptical about your other claim that it's all linked to people that came to Sweden through refugee programs. Do you have any sources to back up your claims?
Mind linking some of them? I'm in my own information bubble and haven't heard of it. What's common knowledge and obvious to you, isn't for the rest of us.
These are basic facts to anyone who has had any experience with Swedish society for hte last years.
If YOU are claiming that the meteoric rise in violence in Sweden is not related to the insane levels of refugees from the middle east that came during the same period, the burden of proof is on YOU.
NO country has gone through the same level of demographic change, unwanted by the Swedes, mind you.
The Swedish population was never in favor of this politics and explains the meteoric rise of Sverigedemokraterna, a party founded by literal Nazis(Gustaf Ekström, a Waffen-SS volunteer).
Why this happened, can be discussed in eternity. Probably to understand you should read The New Totalitarians.
I have migrated from Sweden and frequently return for work and for family visits. It's still a great country, if you avoid "certain areas". Weird, that these "certain areas" are predominately populated with strangers from a different part of the world who enjoy welfare benefits but either don't want, or can't integrate.
If they are basic facts, then it should be easy to provide evidence, no? Every time anyone asks for evidence, they’re shot down. That’s unhelpful for public discourse.
The same way I don't have to provide "facts" if I make a statement that the sky is blue, I don't need to provide the "facts" if I claim that the massive influx of mostly male immigrants from dysfunctional, clan based societies, is detrimental to society.
It is the person who claims otherwise who must provide the contrarian evidence.
BBC, November 2023, "Spread of gang violence wrecks Sweden's peaceful image". Over 60 gun deaths in 2022 (the record), 140+ explosions in 2023, violence spreading out of the low-income vulnerable areas into quiet suburbs, gang leaders directing from Turkey and Serbia. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67342368
AP (via Euronews), September 2023 — three killed overnight in shootings and a bombing during the Foxtrot gang feud; the rival factions led by a Swedish-Turkish dual national operating from Turkey. https://www.euronews.com/2023/09/28/3-killed-in-shootings-an...
Al Jazeera, September 2023 — Kristersson calling in the military; police estimate of roughly 30,000 people involved with or tied to gang crime; violence spreading from major urban areas to smaller towns.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/29/swedish-pm-seeks-he...
NBC News, September 2023 — same events, plus the framing that the coalition won the 2022 election partly on the promise to stem gang violence.
> Sweden has, more than any other country, faced an astounding and shocking rise of intense violence and organized crime, with shootings in the middle of cities and cafés, all linked to people that were openly accepted through its refugee programs.
You claimed two things that I took issue with:
The rise of intense violence and organized crime is higher than in any other country.
All those crimes are linked to people openly accepted through its refugee programmes.
A student thesis about "The Ripple Effect of Gang Violence" does not back up these claims.
I am well aware that Sweden has had an increase in intense violence and organized crime in recent years, but that is not what you claimed. You were more specific.
You didn't link it because it was an interesting thesis, you linked it to back up your claims when I asked for a source. Which it didn't do. You still need to provide a source for your claims. You can also retract your claims of course, that's fine too.
Sure, pick one of their sources to support your claims. If they already did the job for you it should be very easy.
To reiterate your claims:
> Sweden has, more than any other country, faced an astounding and shocking rise of intense violence and organized crime, with shootings in the middle of cities and cafés, all linked to people that were openly accepted through its refugee programs.
1. Which link proves that Sweden has had a more shocking rise of intense violence and organized crime than all other countries in the world?
2. Which link proves that they are all linked to people that were openly accepted through its refugee programs?
Regarding 1. it would also be interesting to know which time period you are referring to, because that's pretty much a prerequisite for a claim like that.
Sorry but this is a ridiculous request for something that has been so widely reported on over the last two years. You can search for all those news articles if you are interested. For something like this, there is no burden for me to prove anything to you.
>all linked to people that were openly accepted through its refugee programs
Large increase in gang violence yes. But this is a pretty strong and specific claim, I live in Sweden and have not seen this in the news. Some of the gangs part of the gangswars are MC related clubs like Bandidos which seem to be mostly ethnically Swedes, and they've been an issue for decades.
Arguably part of the problem is our emulation of US war on drugs, it failed there and its obviously failing here and allows gangs to have large income. Together with bad integration and prospects for children of immigrants/refugees allows gangs to influence and exploit them to do crime and attacks for them.
You use a very vague language to tie violence in Sweden to immigrants.
Then you link a study without really going much about how the study supports your claims, as if that is evidence of what you suggest.
You are gesturing to one thing - "there's a study on gang violence in Sweden" - and presenting it as evidence of another thing - "immigrants are to blame for gang violence".
So I decided to engage with it and read the damn thing; I suppose you did not (or if you did you are hypocritically linking it hoping no one else does:
> One of the most consistent findings in research on societal responses to a
collective threat is the tendency for the majority population to seek culpability, often by
attributing blame to an outgroup perceived to be associated with the perpetrators (Frey,
2022; Ramirez and Kim, 2024). This process, known as scapegoating, is a psychological
coping mechanism in which individuals displace frustration or anxiety onto an entire
group (Frey, 2022).
3) Brå's register study puts the relative risk of being a crime suspect at 2.5x for the foreign-born and 3.2x for the second generation, with excess risk remaining after controlling for age, sex, income and education
The most dangerous, then, are "Swedish" persons with a migrant background, born and raised in Sweden- I'm not sure how to answer that, but that's really uncomfortable.
4) None of this is a fringe reading. Magdalena Andersson (Social Democrat, then PM) said in 2022 that integration had failed and produced parallel societies feeding the gangs... Kristersen as PM (right wing) said the same thing a year later.. so it has some broad bipartisan agreement.
For non-Swedes, all the links with the domain "bra.se" is the government department for prevention of crime, and as part of that role has been given the objective from the government to collect crime statistic. They provide data, conclusions and advice the government on how to effectively combat crime. They also have direct access to police and court databases in order to achieve their objectives.
They are the official source for crime statistics in Sweden.
Should be noted that for years(decades?) they didn't do any statistics regarding the heritage of criminals because of the taboo, while a massive influx of migrants was coming.
I find it fascinating that people in this thread are arguing against raw government crime statistics and are asking for further evidence of this problem.
The claim made was that all crime is linked to refugees.
We can agree that the 'all' part was just the original commenters own biases, but that 'refugee' part is still unfounded based on your quotes.
Refugees are a small minority of immigrants (historically around 10%, don't know what it is in Sweden). The quotes you cite are about immigrants, and the few nationalities mentioned are Turkey and Serbia: neither is a country where refugees originate (except maybe LGBT people, but I'd be very surprised if Sweden is in the thrall of gay Turks...).
So the assertion about immigrant backgrounds seems to hold, but nothing says it's related to refugees, otherwise the large majority of these criminals would be Afghan, Syrian, Eritrean, etc., which doesn't seem to be the case.
The problem is that those statistics are doing something sensible. There are uncomfortable statistics related to immigrants, and your point #4, the thing about integration not being properly done creating parallel societies is a real problem that can and should be addressed properly.
But that's not what the person I replied to was doing - "all linked to people that were openly accepted through its refugee programs"
No, the study says that a foreign-born person is "2.5x" more likely to be a "crime suspect". That can mean a lot of things (e.g.: how many of them were actually convicted). Also, they are minority. Presuming all of them are convicted, it's still a minority that has about double the odds of being criminals. The logical consequence is that a lot of Swedish people are criminals if there's an explosion of gang violence.
Maybe the problem is the Swedish approach to guns? I live in a country that has a shitton of immigrants and is not seeing this surge of gun violence.
You see, we can discuss this properly without engaging in ethnonationalist bullshit.
We can, but there is always a large amount of people who struggle to articulate their emotions and would prefer to label and condemn- true of basically every “side” on any topic from what I can tell.
This has been especially true in Sweden, and I’ve seen it, the way people talk about migration is: if you talk about it, you are a nazi.
This seems to have taken the sting out of supporting actual Nazi parties (SD)…
So while you and I can debate the facts, the larger trend in society is not due to us as individuals, its how much society permits this dialogue to happen at all before trying to shut it down with bad faith and unreasoned statements.
That's the curse of democracy, and I don't say this as a way to tarnish it. I prefer living in a democracy anyway.
We can't expect everyone to be informed and educated. I perceive most people as being guided by basic emotions - Mostly their fears.
> if you talk about it, you are a nazi.
Part of the problem I perceive on the left was unwillingness, for a long time, to engage with it at all. For a long time in the past decade, and in many ways to this day, the whole immigration discussion was dominated by people that were just annoyed that there's too many brown people walking around nowadays.
And that's how you poison the well of discussion. If you accept immigrants, you should expect people to behave in a certain way. In many ways a visa is a privilege, not a right. But how can you even start this conversation when a mouth breather will come out of his hole branding about claims about all crimes being tied to immigrants?
First, I’m not your buddy, and that kind of condescending language doesn’t really help the discussion. Second, I assumed these issues were common knowledge since the frequent shootings in broad daylight that have rocked Sweden in the last couple of years have been from immigrant gang violence, and I mistakenly assumed everyone was aware of these news reports. But perhaps it’s only most obvious here in Europe.
There are other comments in this thread that are expressing the situation better than I am.
I don't know what an "ethnonationalist" is but it sounds derogatory, and replacing "buddy" with what I assume is an even worse insult is not helping the discourse here.
I do not live in Sweden, but the gang violence and problems reported there are in the news and I read about it frequently. The was the point of my original post, which is that there is a context to this discussion that many probably aren't getting because they have no direct links to the society there. I think some of the other comments in this thread do a better job of underscoring this point than I am.
Some of the other commenters here (from Sweden, it seems) are doing a better job than me at explaining the problem, so I defer to them:
Just have some balls and call him a cunt if you're going to insult him, at least there will be no misunderstanding.
I can't stand these kind of passive aggressive middle-of-the-road insults, you clearly think he's a scumbag, stand by your beliefs instead of speaking like you work in HR.
Pointing out the context for an argument and the many articles and discussions that have taken place on that subject in the news is not the same thing as participating in or taking sides in the discussion. I take offense that you have made this personal.
Yeah, I know the deal. It's the school of "I am just a concerned citizen" and "I am just noticing things". It gets tiresome super fast.
You could have noticed that the nationalities mentioned in the study (as pointed out in other comments, Serbian and Turkish) are not nationalities where refugees typically come from. Those are very specific.
You could also have considered other things - why are other European countries that had large immigration in recent decades are not seeing the surge in crime such as Sweden. Might it have other causes, such as Swedish approach to guns? Other structural issues?
No, you preferred to just claim some outlandish bullshit (all crime is tied to refugees), then get all touchy and snowflaky about being labeled an ethnonationalist.
You want your argument to be taken seriously, then you should think seriously about the shit you are writing and the consequences of it.
I see you have been triggered by this discussion and my apologies if I've contributed to it, but you ascribe qualities to me that are not true and I find your discourse unreasonable.
I will comment on this discussion elsewhere, but wanted to mention your contributions here have been disgraceful: providing a source that does not support your second (bigoted) claim, obviously feeling caught in your lies, and then weaseling out of it by claiming it's common knowledge repeatedly and copy-pasting that answer about other commenters being more eloquent. Flagged.
Mullvads mission is about privacy and against mass surveillance. That mission has nothing to do with their co-CEOs personal stance on immigration. I don't necessarily see the conflict of interest that the blog talks about?