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- cross-posted to:
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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…
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.
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.