They want to cut welfare by any means, because then they can lower the taxes on the rich and powerful. Starting a war is a fantastic source of both fear for the populace (making them more willing to treat permanent loss of quality of life as a merely temporary set back) and contracts with which to funnel money to the already rich and powerful.

Don’t be fooled. Russia is a threat to the sovereignty of Ukraine and other nearby countries and we should absolutely help them defend themselves (and even push the offensive if it means ending the war). But we should absolutely not funnel money into a war machine designed only to ratchet funding further up and eventually demand a foe we can use our weapons on.

We should not start a war because we refuse to tax the rich. This journalist and this outlet should be publicly ridiculed for their pro-warfare, anti-welfare stance. Society should be about progress and strong financial security for every person is a meaningful metric of said progress.

I think your responses to this are taking extreme theoretical positions that aren’t true. So for instance, the extreme theory of “I don’t support them because one of their (still financially connected) founders is a nazi” is “I must research all company’s I support for their political beliefs” and that’s not true - that’s an extreme stance.

My real stance is “everyone should strive to be as ethical a consumer as they possibly can be - given their time, energy, and financial situations.” It’s not my job to research every company and I don’t have time/energy to research every provider of every product I consume; but I do what I can. It’s the job of the journalist to dig up these meaningful stories and distribute them to their community, that’s why that job is so important. And easily getting these stories distributed to me is why I’m on Lemmy (or back in the day reddit).

So no, I do not have to research everyone to reduce my euros from going to Nazi’s. If my options are known Nazi or unknown something - I expect a reasonable person to always go with the unknown.

And I do want to live in a society where Nazi beliefs have real life consequences, including and especially at work. The extreme stance is “all beliefs can be held against you at work” and that’s wrong. There’s a difference between a person wanting their government to tax them 2% less and a person wanting their government to expunge all black people to countries they may have never even visited. There’s a difference between being a part of the NRA and being a part of the KKK. You can be in party that worsens your country and your quality of life and makes the world slowly worse (like pre-trump modern republicans in the US or the CDU in Germany). You can’t be in party that is actively looking to dismantle civil rights, harm the out-groups, and make society rapidly worse (like Republicans, AfD, reform for britain, or the Nazi party).

Everyone should want to live in a society where, if their coworkers are racist their company does something about it. Because that gets rid of racists at best or at worst it makes them sneakier - more quiet. Their has to be societal consequences for holding societally destructive beliefs. Should they starve? No. We should have Universal Basic Income. Should they be kicked out of their home? No, they should own their home and there shouldn’t be landlords. Should they be removed from any position of power and barred from ever holding one again? Yes, absolutely. They should be “tarred and feathered”, we should put a badge on them that says “dangerous and hateful” and we should treat them as such - they only get to hold jobs which can’t hurt other people they seek to hurt.

There is a difference between ideas destructive to society and most normal ideas and you should want to treat them differently.

As another user said, IVPN or airvpn were the ones that came up in my last search. I have removed proton for them having the same trump supporting tech bros problem.

My understanding is one of mullvads primary owners and creators donates a significant portion of their country’s far right party’s annual budget. Their policies, last I checked, included things like remigration or the forced expulsion of citizens based off of arbitrary and immutable characteristics (think bloodline or skin color). They’re akin to the AfD or Republicans. Theoretically a meaningful % of money spent on Mullvad goes to a person actively trying to make the world worse, like Elon Musk or JK Rowling.

So some people, including me, stopped supporting mullvad until the person is completely financially and influentially disconnected from the company.

Hey, I’m a real person who organically discovered this news and made behavioral changes based on the news.

I am not a nazi. I do not want to support nazi policies or beliefs or people who would strengthen and distribute Nazi policies or beliefs. If someone supports forcibly relocating citizens based off their bloodline history or the color of their present day skin, I think they should be as far away from a position of power as society can possibly manage while still treating them like a human.

I believe, based on the Mullvad news, that one of the main benefactors if mullvad - meaning one of the guys who got a % for every euro I spent on the service - actively and meaningfully supports a national party with policies akin to Nazis. I want as much of my money to go to NOT-Nazis as possible, ideally 100%. So I left Mullvad for… I think it’s airvpn. Or ivpn actually, although I considered airvpn.

I don’t think this is a crazy response. I also wish it was the overwhelmingly common response.

Getting in bed with Nazi’s regardless of the benefits is an unacceptable stance in a decent society. I have not personally vetted if this guy is a nazi or not, but the claims that he are stand up more easily than the hyprland hate but I really need to do my own deep dive into both of these to speak more.

The point remains, Linux at any cost should not be the stance of our or any groups. Especially if that cost is funding or supporting people or movements that hurt, hate, and/or kill people based on immutable features.

Literally demonstrating the racism of most countries by making assumptions about their background and at the same time reinforcing the toxic psychology that it’s never systemic failures but moral and character failures of certain individuals.

“It’s the parents fault…” excuses the systemic issues every place in the world faces and ensure no progress can ever be made on fixing those problems because you can’t drain a boat of water one bucket at a time if it’s full of holes. You must address the systemic problems to lessen the individual failures within that system.

“… probably didn’t bother to integrate and learn the language…” Is a plainly racist assumption. As a white, straight, male American living in Germany I have faced nearly zero hardships despite speaking little German. Integration is not hard, even if you don’t speak the language and integration is not one person’s choice. If people were less patient with me, racist to me, even violent towards me I couldn’t integrate if I wanted to.

You ignore the problems that plague your society because you think it is personal failings, and in doing so make your society worse while blaming the impoverished and the downtrodden.

I’ll post what I said to the other guy who thought it necessary to explain stocks to me.

The comment chain was:

• I can’t believe Elon musk is a trillionaire, that doesn’t sit right with me.
• he’s not a trillionaire, his stock went down, most of his wealth is in stocks
• i downvoted because that statement sounded like a defense of the wealthy, not the TH letter (which I actually like, sorry to the people on Lemmy who seem to have a hate boner for it).

No, I do not think saying “actshully his numbers went down this month and he’s not a trillionaire” is value added or demonstrating a grasp on how wealth works. Elon will be a trillionaire again this year or next, and more importantly he will not be the only trillionaire we see by the end of this decade unless something is done about it. He will not always have his money heavily tied up stocks, and he’ll begin diversifying it. The difference between someone having 900 billion and 1.1 trillion is not significantly important, they’re both unbelievably bad.

Maybe I’m responding too much to this chain, he obviously wasn’t heavily defending him, but it is what people tend to say before they defend him elsewhere in the chain. I’m just interested in keeping these societal issue topics more focused and clean.

Billionaires shouldn’t exist. That’s the important part of this that I want to echo and protect. I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m “tilting at windmills” or making the cause seem bad, that’s not my intention.

I downloaded for defending a rich person. “His networth is tied up in stocks” is the kinda shit someone says who doesn’t understand that that doesn’t make them any less rich. A trillionaire means a trillion dollars of your shit is owned by him, houses and farmlands and workers and production capacity and art. No one should be allowed to have more than 10-20 million, at that amount they can pick someone to never have to work again in their life every year for the rest of their life. That’s too much money.