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…

    • exu@feditown.comEnglish
      37·
      3 months ago

      That’s explained in the blog post just below where OP stopped quoting

    • HouseWolf@pawb.social
      17·
      3 months ago

      Only thing I know about Ladybird is the lead dev didn’t want to include gender neutral wording in the documentation, because he “didn’t want it to be political”

      That’s kinda old news now and not sure if anything came of it.

  • majster@lemmy.zipEnglish
    30·
    3 months ago

    A new online crusade. Once again heavy accusations with very weak supportive evidence. It became a pattern already.

  • lime!@feddit.nu
    17·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • YaBoyMax@programming.devEnglish
      30·
      3 months ago

      Interpreting a PR which changes “he” to “they” as pushing political ideology is not an apolitical stance. I don’t know a ton about him and I’m not convinced this makes him a “fascist” by association, but the fact that he seems to be ideologically aligned with the ones in power on America is troubling at the very least.

      • lime!@feddit.nu
        19·
        3 months ago

        so i’ve talked about that event at length before and i don’t have the time to dig up my old comments right now but the short version is

        1. sweden has a weird history with gendered pronouns in that our english language higher education recommended using male pronouns up until very recently, and the language itself just recently got a gender-neutral one which still isn’t in general use.
        2. the documentation was rewritten to use second-person pronouns (and a much friendlier tone) shortly after, sidestepping the entire discussion.
      • lime!@feddit.nu
        9·
        3 months ago

        right, by saying “nobody deserves to die for their opinions”, which is what most tv pundits are saying.

        • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
          22·
          3 months ago

          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.

          • lime!@feddit.nu
            17·
            3 months ago

            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.

            • 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              6·
              3 months ago

              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.

              • TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe@lemmy.world
                6·
                3 months ago

                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.

              • lime!@feddit.nu
                2·
                3 months ago

                they’ve never talked about him at all except in the aftermath of the shooting.

        • CrocodilloBombardino@piefed.socialEnglish
          9·
          3 months ago

          Kirk wanted ppl to die for their race, gender, and other things that weren’t even opinions. While Kling’s statement is technically fair, he didn’t speak out for anyone else. Why weigh in on a white supremacist, transphobe who made many ppls’ lives worse?

    • Kami@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      13·
      3 months ago

      An “offline guy” who develops a web browser.

      Is this comedy, funny coincidence or purely bad faith?

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
    10·
    3 months ago

    If we want to use the Nazi bar analogy, Cloudflare is like a company that bought up so many bars in town that some end up not vetting for Nazism well enough, letting it slip through, not necessarily playing favours towards or against fascism but they would technically be a ‘Nazi bar’ under the analogy’s definition. Cloudflare is so big that they probably don’t have controlling interest about the pet projects they kick some pennies towards.

    If you want to boycot Cloudflare itself, that’s fine and noble and all, but also staying away from anything they’ve ever donated to, you’ll put yourself in a bind. Like if Cloudflare donated to animal welfare, should one be against animal welfare simply due to second-order links to fascism?

    Also there is a lot of reading into the comments used to link the two projects to the fascist regime. Very much a stretch.

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
      7·
      3 months ago

      Check this. Bit more than a comment. Wouldn’t call it nazi. But sus nontheless. We’ve seen plenty people write or say similar stuff over the years that graduated to fash later on.

      But yeah agreed about CF. I take this kinda info more as a mental note on the individuals. CF is a corpo which is gonna corpo.

    • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
      25·
      3 months ago

      At the very least, someone celebrating Charlie Kirk and whining about white men being discriminated against is not someone I’m interested in supporting, and if the future of the open web is in their hands I’ll just stick to lynx.

      • ronigami@lemmy.world
        2·
        3 months ago

        The good news is that ladybird is nowhere even close to implementing the full web. It’s maybe 0.5% there. There’s no danger of it becoming some centralized power at least in the next 5 years. Especially barring any license shenanigans.

        As for Lynx, well it’s really hard to take that comment seriously.

        • cabbage@piefed.socialEnglish
          6·
          3 months ago

          More seriously from a technical side, I’m also not a huge fan of the browser and the engine being the same thing. To me they should be kept separate. So personally I’m cheering on Servo.

    • TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe@lemmy.world
      3·
      3 months ago

      Some politicians or activists unfortunately use hyperbole too frequently and sometimes even maliciously. It gets them attention but at the cost of deepening the trenches in the political discourse. Drew thought he’s doing the right thing by calling a fascist out, but realistically this will be remembered as “The woke activists are calling us fascists for saying that nobody should be killed for their opinion.” in the right wing circles. Where the term “woke” is basically the right wing equivalent term to the left’s “fascist”.

      • ronigami@lemmy.world
        3·
        3 months ago

        I don’t know if you have been paying attention but nothing you do or say will leave the Republicans with a good memory of you no matter what if you are “woke,” so it almost doesn’t matter what you say.

        • TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 months ago

          I guess you can’t really convince the ones on the other side of the political spectrum. You only have a real chance to convince the “in the middle” people. But when doing so, it’s better not to give free munition to the opposing party to be more convincing than you.

          Also I am kinda hoping that it (not using hyperbolic labels and overall being “nice”) helps create a place where people can be nice to each other even when they don’t agree on politics.