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Comment by spockz | Hacker News Reader

Is it so hard to imagine that someone willing to take such a principled stance on privacy that they start a company to provide a privacy focused vpn company that they also hold other extreme views?

It takes a certain kind of personality to become a founder especially more do for such a strongly principled company and adhere to it.

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What counts as an "extreme view" is relative. If my country had seen such a surge in gang violence as Sweden has, I too would support mass deportations of migrants with a criminal record, and much harsher migration policy. It's not that extreme of a stance considering how bad the situation has got in Sweden. I don't want to live in a society where teenagers are regularly hired as hitmen and shootings & explosions are a weekly, if not daily thing.

For real tho, I think the current crime wave has more to do with power struggles in the drug market than anything else.

Sweden has had terrible integration policies coupled w segregating all immigrants in the suburbs.

The drug consumption of everyday Swedes is fueling the crime wave. Cocaine consumption is at an all time high. The former prime ministers son was caught w coke at home. But only the marginalized are penalized for it and forced to work supplying the rich inner city kids who get off the hook..

You may be right. In addition to stricter migration policy & better integration, I also think it would make sense to legalize drugs. Make it a state monopoly like booze, and there will be much less money for criminal organizations.

There was lots of reporting on the difficulty integrating in Sweden when I grew up there. We were supposed to have the highest educated taxi drivers in Europe if i recall correctly. Having a foreign surname meant getting sorted out first in the application process for any job. This was in the late nineties and the situation did not get better w the 2008 financial crash. There are generations of ppl who have been kept outside.

Can it really be called "extreme" anymore? Europe is swinging strongly towards being anti-migration at the moment. Other parts of the world like Japan are also going through such swings. Many countries never opened their borders to begin with. This political party sounds like it's closer to the average than people would like to admit.

They're so populist, in fact, that they require CEOs to donate them millions of dollars to constitute the backbone of their party. Oh wait, that's what political interest groups do.

I was mostly going by the “far-right” classification in the title. If indeed the whole spectrum has switched it will be less extreme when viewed from within the spectrum.

Mullvad's principle was that they protected speech. It wasn't a political imperative, and they enjoyed business from all sides of the political aisle perusing this product.

Now the apolitical appeal is fading. It's not hard to understand why VPNs, one of the most commodified businesses on the internet, struggle to find customers without that kind of niche reputation that Mullvad once had.

This comment reminds me of Sweden < 2015, where any critique of immigration labeled you as a supporter of the Swedish Democrats (SD) and possibly a Nazi.

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