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Comment by ejohansson | Hacker News Reader

Ouch. I was not aware. Cancelled.

It's rough that it's so hard to be an ethical consumer these days. Mullvad gone, Kagi gone.

FWIW I don't think anything Kagi is doing is unethical. If I did - if I did feel it was unethical to spend money at a company that is in a country that does war crimes - I'd also have to feel that almost all spending was unethical, including things like buying lunch.

On a secondary point, if we want more ethical things to exist, we have to create them. If we want an ethical alternative to Mullvad it's on us to do it.

I think the situation you're in affects what you can reasonably do and hence what can be considered "ethical". You cannot opt out of paying taxes (and buying lunch), but it is possible here for me to avoid funding this war and try to seek better alternatives.

Did you go out of your way to buy a non-Chinese-made phone? You technically have a choice there, but not much of one. About as much of a choice as you have in the search engine business.

Chinese phone-makers and Yandex are behaving pretty differently. China and Russia are also behaving pretty differently.

There's no clear reason why someone couldn't have qualms about one but not the other.

Like I wrote, and what you seem to say again here, I agree that it is unfortunate how tough it is to be an ethical consumer these days.

Were there the days when it was easy for you? Do share the memories, please.

"there is no ethical consumption in capitalism"

Google? Microsoft? AWS?

Damn, what did Mullvad do?

Founder and CEO funded a Swedish far right party. They stood for roughly 72% of what that party took in.

https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.h...

Mullvad has tried to paint it as, "this does not represent Mullvad the company, this is a private political donation" and stuff like that. I don't buy it. Funding Mullvad funds the CEOs.

This comment is just unbelievable. With Kagi "canceled" you're back to use your regular search engine powered by the sociopaths destroying the world. But hey, at least your 5 bucks didn't go to Kremlin!

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