An honest question: Would you like to live in a world where company/employer exerts more control over the views that are publicly expressed?
Do you actually want voting to happen via wallet?
This whole view kinda confounds me. I don't see how you can honestly profess to be on the tolerant/right side, morally, while trying to boycott someones business over his political views. Would you have preferred early feminists or LGBT advocates to be hounded in their professional life? Would it have been better for more people to do that?
If you want to vote for or against Örebropartiet, then just do it at the booth.
Plenty of people here basically seem to indirectly advocate for company based censorship and some kind of budget-plutocracy, and no matter how "morally correct" your views are, that is under no circumstances a worthwhile endeavor.
The question is not rhetorical. A lot of people in this thread advocate for hurting Berntssons career for the political views he expressed with his donation.
I personally believe that a lot of those people did not think through the consequences at all: Making it acceptable/typical/common for political expression to be punished at the workplace would obviously lead to self-censorship and direct/indirect censorship by employers.
My view is that this is utterly incompatible with liberalism (but a lot of the proponents would claim to lean liberal themselves!). I have not found good counterarguments for my current view so far.
>If you want to vote for or against Örebropartiet, then just do it at the booth.
I'm kinda confused here. The context of this is that a rich tech bro uses his money to fund and promote a political party, with our money, but we can't decide to not pay him because that's influencing money with politics (???)
What kind of bizarro world is this, he can use his vast wealth to promote racist parties but we can't collectively use ours? How about he just "does it at the booth" and donates his money to the against malaria foundation?
My point is that if you are boycotting the company despite living on the opposite side of the world from Örebro (thus being inherently unable to vote at the booth), then you are not really participating in politics, you are participating in a witchhunt (with negligible political effects).
I'm suggesting that small political progress is simply not worth witch-hunting for. If you have political concerns, engage by voting, starting your own party or advocating for your cause instead of ruining the career of a person you disagree with.
>if you are boycotting the company despite living on the opposite side of the world
If I'm living at the opposite side of the world and my money was indirectly influencing Swedish politics then I'm doing Sweden a service by discontinuing my payment. After all the only thing I'm doing is reduce the power of corporations in a democratic process, I literally cannot take any Swedish vote away. That's exactly what you asked for.
> If you have political concerns, engage by voting, starting your own party or advocating for your cause
I do all of that, I'm an active member of a European political party and engaged far beyond just voting. But I'm also not going to stop to make sure my money as far as I can control it does not go into the pockets of millionaires who single handedly decided to bankroll 70% of the funding of a party that runs on ethnic hate. That is money in politics. If there was no money in politics, these people wouldn't be able to spread their hate. All of these parties on our continent are funded and supported by oligarchs across the world.
> But I'm also not going to stop to make sure my money as far as I can control it does not go into the pockets of millionaires who single handedly decided to bankroll 70% of the funding of a party that runs on ethnic hate.
My view is: its not your money that goes to a party you dislike, its Berntssons; money doesn't stink, and it's not your responsibility how some fraction of it is spent after you paid someone for a completely unrelated purpose.
You basically try to avoid a second order effect (Örebropartiet getting money) by leaning on an inherently anti-liberal mechanism (applying pressure via workplace).
You might think the end justifies the means here, but I strongly disagree; legitimizing discrimination at the workplace based on political beliefs is in my view much worse than anything that Örebropartiet could ever achieve.
You are obviously completely free to do business with whoever you want, but if you are advocating for boycott here (=> pro corporate censorship) you are directly doing more damage to liberalism in my view than some swedish local party ever could.
I'm confident in this view because I'm certain that politically motivated workplace discrimination is/was/would have been absolutely horrible for tons of people that turned out "right" (=> secularists, feminists, LGBT advocates, ...). Nothing that could be realistically achieved by such boycott appears even close to worth the trade to me.
Crucially, almost everyone ever believes his own moral compass to be "correct", but many turn out (somewhat) "wrong" decades or centuries later. So allowing more avenues to force views on others is always a risky proposition because those avenues are not just accesible to people that you believe to be "right"-- you also open them to people that you know to be wrong (i.e. rightwingers that want to get you fired for being an anti-nationalist traitor or w/e).
This is about what customers are comfortable supporting. This guy doesn't just have what many consider to be unpalatable political beliefs, he's one of the biggest funders of what many consider to be an unpalatable political party. Lots of people don't want to give money to something which they feel will in part be funneled to an organization which is antithetical to their views. Realistically, I kind of doubt Mullvad is rolling in swimming pools filled with cash getting syphoned to neonazis, but that brings me to my next point...
For many, it's not just an intellectual position but an emotional one. This doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but you probably won't be able to reason them out of it. It's the same reason I don't listen to Michael Jackson. He's dead and none of that streaming revenue would go to him or to raping children but...yuck.
At the end of the day, there's an irony in this guy supporting the very freedoms on the internet which are being used to disseminate criticisms against him, and perhaps inducing people to starve one of the vehicles which helps maintain those freedoms.
The "irony" in supporting that party I believe is a stretch. I don't see how support for some neo-nationalists is inherently "anti-freedom"; would that not apply to any party arguing against open borders?
My personal belief is that professional discrimination because of political support is a very slippery slope, and I honestly think that a lot of people directly or indirectly advocating for it are not fully understanding of what this means and where that slope ends:
When asking about professional boycott for "questionable" past positions (like being gay in Turings time) I only get silence in response because people presumably realize that such witch-hunting often ends up looking really bad in retrospect.
edit: I just misunderstood your last point, completely agree.
I think I wasn't as clear as I could have been in that last part. The irony I was referring to is that this guy is doing more than most people to support freedom online, and that very freedom he supports is being used by people who disagree with his political position to potentially organize a boycott of Mullvad and possibly deprive everybody of a tool which helps protect freedom online.
It's like people who think Americans shouldn't shouldn't have first amendment rights. The irony is that the first amendment protects their ability to criticize the first amendment.
For better or worse, the internet and all its collective outrage is now the world's HR department.
I don't know why your comment is flagged dead, there's no good reason it should be.
> This whole view kinda confounds me. I don't see how you can honestly profess to be on the tolerant/right side, morally, while trying to boycott someones business over his political views. Would you have preferred early feminists or LGBT advocates to be hounded in their professional life? Would it have been better for more people to do that?
Okay, first of all, early feminists and LGBT advocates were and are hounded in their professional lives. This has happened to progressives for all of human history, it's actively happening under the current US administration, and it's going to continue happening forever.
A bigger point here is that your argument is morally worthless. You're just saying that I shouldn't judge anyone, because other people have judged wrongly in the past. I disagree entirely. I wouldn't buy juice from a rapist, I wouldn't buy a computer from a murderer, and I wouldn't buy a VPN from a fascist.
The largest point however, is that your argument implies that I am compelled to spend my money on Mullvad regardless of what I think about the people who work there or what they do, and that's an obvious absurdity. I am free to spend or not spend on whatever I choose for whatever reasons I choose, and politics is going to be one of them. You'll have to get over it.
Do you actually want voting to happen via wallet?
This whole view kinda confounds me. I don't see how you can honestly profess to be on the tolerant/right side, morally, while trying to boycott someones business over his political views. Would you have preferred early feminists or LGBT advocates to be hounded in their professional life? Would it have been better for more people to do that?
If you want to vote for or against Örebropartiet, then just do it at the booth.
Plenty of people here basically seem to indirectly advocate for company based censorship and some kind of budget-plutocracy, and no matter how "morally correct" your views are, that is under no circumstances a worthwhile endeavor.