US politics has been pretty fascist lately. The state is filling up concentration camps, engaging in mass state violence against people on the basis of racialized traits, deporting them to random countries without any respect for habeas corpus, exerting state pressure on the free press to censor speech critical of the current administration, and Trump is openly floating the idea of an unconstitutional third term.
Fascism is clearly on the rise, and they’re winning more and more power. None of this is far removed from us in the FOSS community – there are a number of fascists working in FOSS, same as the rest of society. I don’t call them fascists baselessly – someone who speaks out in support of and expresses solidarity with fascists, or who uses fascists dog-whistles or promotes fascist ideology and talking points, or boosts fascist conspiracy theories – well, they’re a fascist.
If one consistently speaks in support of a certain political position and against the opponents of that position then it is correct to identify them with this political position. Facts, as it were, don’t care about feelings, namely the feelings that get hurt when someone is called a fascist. Fascists naturally do not want to be identified as such and will reject the label, but we shouldn’t take their word for it. People should be much more afraid of being called out as fascist than they are afraid of calling someone a fascist. If someone doesn’t want to be called a fascist, they shouldn’t act like one.
It’s in this disturbing political context that I saw an odd post from the Cloudflare blog pop up in my circles this week: Supporting the future of the open web: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy. Based on Ladybird’s sponsorship terms we can assume that these projects received on the order of $100,000 USD from Cloudflare. I find this odd for a few reasons, in particular because one thing that I know these two projects have in common is that they are both run by fascists.
Even at face value this is an unusual pair of projects to fund. I’m all for FOSS projects getting funded, of course, and I won’t complain about a project’s funding on the solitary basis that it’s an odd choice. I will point out that these are odd choices, though, especially Omarchy…
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Instead of 3 full paragraphs of stuff everybody already knows, why not start by explaining why you think Ladybird and Omarchy are”run by fascists”?
i will continue to say that kling is just a pretty offline guy, and also very much unaware/uninterested in america. most people around me are saying the same things about the kirk shooting and i would not consider them even close to what americans would probably call “centrists”, but here is called “right-wingers”. people here had just never heard of him or any of his opinions before last week.
kilng strikes me as a man who has never had politics happen to him before he started working in open source, and he is being treated like he shares american values and american cultural knowledge just because he speaks english online.
i don’t agree with his stances at all, but it’s the norm where he and i live. “åsiktskorridoren” was a political punching bag for a reason.
He commented directly on the Charlie Kirk situation. If he jumps in, he will have to deal with people’s reactions
right, by saying “nobody deserves to die for their opinions”, which is what most tv pundits are saying.
RIP Charlie Kirk
I hope many more debate nerds carry on his quest to engage young people with words, not fists.
This implies Kirk was a debate nerd. He wasn’t. He was a prolific propagandist with a vast, well-funded operation. He pretended to debate here or there in-between monologues of fascist propaganda. TV pundits aren’t the people who you want to look up to as bearers of objectivity on the matter, given they’re threatened with being taken off the air. It’s no accident they talk about the person but don’t talk about what he said or wrote. Maybe Kling is mislead by them. Maybe not.
i’m not talking about american pundits.
the media here has never shown any kirk debate, and has only talked about him as a “american right-wing debater/influencer”. personally i was aware of him only as that too, and only saw how heinous his opinions actually were when i googled him after the event. and i, along with most other swedes, have a fairly high regard for our public broadcasting institutions, and since most american internal squabbles don’t influence us until they become external, we don’t really care to dig deeper. i did because i’m active here, but kling probably didn’t.
Wow. Some people really think we’re in the 80s and rely on “media here” to deflect from being mislabeled.
He’s somehow so far away from US politics he’s funded almost exclusively by US companies like Cloudflare, FUTO, and 37signals.
Does your media or public broadcasting talk about FUTO and 37signals a lot that they got in contact to setup sponsorship? Doesn’t he also stream in “English” on "YouTube"catering to the English speaking world but somehow he shielded himself with all the crap from these platforms. He must not be a human.
Even a cursory skimming of kirks name would be enough to reveal what his quest was.
But this defense is fucking weak. Try harder.
just because you are active in some internet circle, does not mean you are active in every internet circle. I’d say the Right to Repair movement or Cloudflare are more “worldwide” than Kirk.
An “offline guy” who develops a web browser.
Is this comedy, funny coincidence or purely bad faith?
the guy is an ex-drug abuser. he started doing serenityos as therapy, and serenityos needed a browser. until you get to the modern stuff, it’s basically just a paint-by-numbers api implementation on top of his existing code base.
You missed that he was a WebKit developer for god damn Apple.
https://2025.stateofthebrowser.com/speaker/andreas-kling/
What’s with all this apparent obliviousness to paint him as a rags to fame personality?
i never said he was destitute or self-taught. you need skills to be an os dev. the first few paragraphs there is what i based my post on.
