cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8915892
(original article in Swedish that reported this)
Posting this because I hadn’t heard about it before and I’m probably not the only Mullvad user here, so might as well.
The party claims to stand for a “class-conscious populism” which according to party leader Markus Allard takes inspiration from marxist ideology and unites the “productive” classes of society against the “Transferiat”, with the “Transferiat” being a term coined by Allard to describe the classes of society that lives off transfers that are a net negative for society such as those who, despite having an ability to work, live off social welfare benefits, as well as those who work “made-up services”[…]
The party differs from modern day left-wing parties by seeing the working class as co-dependent with people working in enterprise and business and instead sees the classes that “live off transfers”, as specified, as a large economic net-negative and an obstacle for a functional society.
Their ideology is nonsense fake-marxist revisionism to redirect anger at capitalism and turn it against immigrants and people who need social welfare (though they do back some generally left oriented social policies, their main thing appears to be racism)
Even if you’re comfortable with funding this, it still begs the question of just how trustworthy Mullvad actually is.
I guess this still beats any of the dozens of Israeli VPNs that definitely spy on you, but it’s not great
I don’t care about Mullvad, but this is an interesting philosophical question. How far does that chain of money carry responsibility? Like, what if you donate to a hospital, and a nurse at the hospital uses their wages to buy bread, and the owner of the bread factory is problematic?
Definitely some fraction of my donation went to the bread factory owner’s politics, but is it my responsibility? Should I withhold donations to the hospital until they’ve pressured the nurse to buy a different brand of bread, or let them go?
Definitely the bread factory owner has a bunch of money, and money is power, and that money was given by customers in exchange for bread, so at some point if we want their power to diminish steps must be taken. But is the hospital donor’s money the right lever for that? Does it outweigh the benefits?
What if the bread factory’s owner is fine, but has a worker who spends their money on a problematic cause. Is it still the hospital donor’s responsibility?
Without spoilers, The Good Place is a good show.
In your hypothetical, it would be similar to a person buying a rose from a flower shop for their mother, but the money they earned supported a company that funds another company that bombs children and the flower came from a retailer that orders flowers from a garden in another country that uses child/slave labor to harvest the flower.
At what point is the person who bought the birthday gift responsible for the bombs dropped and the enslaved children?
But, essentially, this is the same question posed when looking at a health insurance CEO. He didn’t kill 640,000 people each year directly. Nor did the employees directly. Nor did the hospital or doctors refusing treatment without payment. The illness or injury did. But the health insurance CEO did make the decision to deny coverage as much as possible and to pay as little as possible for procedures and medications that would have saved lives.
At what point was the CEO responsible for the 640,000 deaths each year due to lack of health insurance coverage?
The difference, I believe, lies in severity. The person buying the rose does not have a severe impact on the outcomes of the choices made by these companies. They have a very high likelihood of not even being aware and that may even be on purpose, as the PR for said companies would do their best to avoid consumers understanding this. Thus is your nurse ans bread scenario. The choice is minimally severe and the individual is likely unaware of the greater mechanisms involved, meaning they won’t be making a fully informed choice. Once informed, they likely could make a choice, and that could be the only bread they can afford or maybe they’ll switch to a local baker, etc.
The healthcare CEO almost certainly is aware of the impact of his decision and he is able to have a large impact on the direction of the company and on the massive amount of harm caused. He is fully informed and makes his choice anyway out of selfishness and greed.
The nurse and the rose gift buyer shouldn’t be held fully accountable. The CEO is, in my opinion, most certainly accountable.
In the end though, there’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism. Does that mean we should forfeit our survival and/or not attempt the best we can through the methods that we can control? (A lot of comments I’ve seen say you have no choice and it’s stupid to think about. Or better yet, even with extra knowledge, they say it’s “based” to “remove those invaders” and “need to support them more, it’s not like lefties support privacy and free speech.” Fuckin wild stuff from the r/SomeOrdinaryGmrs sub.)
Great video from philosofree on the ethics of vigilante counter-terrorism. YouTube took it down and now it looks like even Patreon did too.
I don’t think it’s as hard to draw a line as you are portraying it. The hypothetical nurse and bread factory is a non-issue, we’re talking fractions of the bottom line of any of the involved parties. This mulvad thing is the majority of the financial backing of a party by one high level person, who’s made his money from this organization.
I’m quite comfortable putting them under the same umbrella, and quite comfortable ignoring the hypothetical.
But think there might be a philosophical question here, but I kinda think this is begging for one a bit.
This is just one step, though. Money to Mullvad goes in part to the cofounder who is a racist piece of shit.
But to your question, I think the “dilution” question has a different answer for everyone. Have you seen “The Good Place”? Philosophy is the major theme and this is one of the major philosophical questions they deal with. Great show, recommended if it’s unfamiliar to you.
I believe responsibility is a personal choice. How much something matters depends on how much it matters to you. The more important thing is that you ask the relevant questions to actually assess what matters and how you address issues that arise between what you’re doing and how that affects the world around you.
Do you consider the fraction of your hospital donation that goes to the nurse to be significant enough to change how you donate? And do you consider the nurse’s bread purchases to be a significant enough portion of the bread factory’s profits? And do you consider the significance of that to outweigh the significance of the nurse having enough to eat? And if something about this does reach that level of significance to you, is changing your donation to the hospital the method by which you want to address the issues with the bread factory owner, or is there another action that might be more effective?
It’s difficult to address these issues in daily life due to their emergent complexity, but the more we can do to be ethical, the more of a positive impact we can have on the world around us.
That’s kinda similar question I had while learning about veganism. It’s not possible in absolute sense to get rid of animal cruelty, there’s always going to have some indirect connection cause the way we have designed our system. So the general answer for me is; as practicable as possible and not letting perfect be the archenemy of good