Tekin's conclusion: "it will send a clear message to the wider Ruby community (and those who may be considering joining it) that the majority does not stand with DHH and his toxic views."
He is going to be ultra surprised to learn what the majority thinks and how it's not what he thinks it is.
Using your personal brand to espouse the values of ethnonationalism fundamentally serves the capital class wishing to divide and exploit social order among those who labor. This is so rich, coming from the guy who literally created a tool that increases the value of labor.
So, if I had to guess, the smart, critical thinkers in the _global_ Ruby community might find this whole situation reeks.
If I were an immigrant to the UK and a Rails developer, and DHH is getting re-platformed while saying crazy stuff like this, I would think twice about my career choices going forward — Or, push the Ruby community not to stand with a garbage attitude like this, even if from a BDFL-type personality. I _invested_ my life into promoting the use of your tool, while you disparage me based on skin color and country of origin for the sake of some 'ye olde country' vibefest?
Wow! When that one DHH blog went around the other day, I didn't actually pay attention to who the author was. All I saw was yet another bigoted rant and just skimmed it and rolled my eyes. (e: here it is to save people the effort: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 )
I should not have skimmed it. From your link:
> In the same post he praises Tommy Robinson (actual name Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon), a right-wing agitator with several convictions for violent offences and a long history of association with far-right groups such as the English Defence League and the British Nationalist Party. He then goes on to describe those that attended last weekend’s far-right rally in London as “perfectly normal, peaceful Brits” protesting against the “demographic nightmare” that has enveloped London, despite the violence and disorder they caused.
> To all of that he ads a dash of Islamophobia, citing “Pakistani rape gangs” as one of the reasons for the unrest, repeating a weaponised trope borne from a long since discredited report from the Quilliam Foundation, an organisation with ties to both the the US Tea Party, and Tommy Robinson himself.
This is ... disqualifying. That's the best word I can summon here to express my dismay. This is a crossed line. Absolutely nutso.
edit2: Uh wow I really should not have skimmed it. Here's one paragraph from DHH's blog itself:
> Which brings us back to Robinson's powerful march yesterday. The banner said "March for Freedom", and focused as much on that now distant-to-the-Brits concept of free speech, as it did on restoring national pride. And for good reason! The totalitarian descent into censorious darkness in Britain has been as swift as its demographic shift.
Well, if that doesn't speak volumes as to DHH's values, I don't know what does.
> To all of that he ads a dash of Islamophobia, citing “Pakistani rape gangs” as one of the reasons for the unrest, repeating a weaponised trope borne from a long since discredited report
Were independent inquiries also repeating weaponised tropes from long since discredited reports?
“By far the majority of perpetrators were described as 'Asian' by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction
from their managers not to do so.”
The ultimate problems lie in the police: they are generally terrible at handling rape cases, and in this case there are claims that they were actively complicit in some of the rapes.
Using the actions of some members of an ethnic minority to justify .. well, any action against people who were not actually personally involved, is textbook discrimination.
He makes his position clear enough in the second paragraph,
for those who know how to read between the lines.
"London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits."
This post is full of outright nonsense. I was in Central London last Saturday and watched a lot of it go down, before heading to Islington and then catching the last dregs of the crowd nearer Euston and chatting in the pub with some of them.
As a "native Brit" and "native Londoner" that DHH wouldn't recognise as such, he can absolutely do one.
Yeah, it was funny the first time a YouTuber[0] did something like that but now I feel like the joke got out of hand a bit, I blame the uptrend of opinionated configs to turn code editors into bona fide IDEs[1][2][3] for this.
Welp, looking forward to the holy wars between people running different influencers' configs five years from now. Who knows, maybe we'll see premium versions of those too.
Not all _that_ surprising. From where I see things, pretty much every time you see "Cloudflare" and "free speech" in the same sentence, it always end up being about Cloudflare supporting free speech for nazis or white supremacists. DHH's racist and xenophobic views are totally on-brand for them.
This comment is so off the rails I'm not going to bother responding to it, but it does make me think about why political discourse is so deeply broken today.
When someone lives this far into an alternate relatity it leaves basically no room for discussion. The amount of work that has to be done just to get everyone back to some relative place of sanity is damn near insurmountable. It leaves no time or energy left to have an actual discussion.
"People" have differing opinions, but the one I mostly see from the left is that they want Palestinians to live in the land they owned before Israeli colonisers invaded it and forced them to relocate to subhuman conditions. What I haven't seen is the desire to expel the Israelis currently living there, as long as they agree to let the Palestinians lead a decent life.
Do you think that the long-term answer to the Israel-Palestinian dispute is for Arab states to absorb the Palestinians, for there to be two states, Israel and Palestine, or for Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians?
When the Israeli government says it, they mean removing or exterminating all Palestinians on "their" land. When Palestinians and their allies say it, they mean they want to live in their land without fearing for their lives.
Not sure what land is “their” land in the first sentence but the are as many Palestinians citizens of Israel as there are Palestinians living in Gaza - and I don’t think the former fear much more for their lives than other citizens of Israel.
Maybe you don’t think that most college-age people in the US - who according to that survey would like Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians rather than see a two-state solution - are allies of Palestinians but surely they are not allies of Israel.
Oh this sort of thing is far from new for DHH, there's long been a desire to oust him from Rails or fork it, but it's never quite came to fruition, and unless Shopify were to back it, it is unlikely it would survive :-\
I guess I wasn't aware since I'm not really involved in the Ruby community. I always knew he was kind of an oddball from a few of his posts I've seen and podcasts I've heard him on. Never would have guessed it was this bad.
Until now I thought his craziest idea was that dynamic typing is better than static typing. (Just a joke, not trying to start a war over dynamic vs static lol)
As a fellow Scandinavian, DHH is just writing what the vast majority of us think. And it isn’t racist. That word is being misused until it soon has no value left; you sure you want that?
I've been thinking about whether "$some_country rape gangs" seems racist to me. I've come down on "yes".
The reason might seem odd. But it ocurred to me that if you want to use immigration to reduce crime, including rape, the obvious solution is to ban all male immigration.
That shocked me because it seems so wildly discriminatory. Yes, most violent crimes are committed by men. But very few men commit violent crimes. Banning male immigration would punish a large group for the appalling actions of a few. Making it about "$some_country's men" doesn't seem a whole lot better. It's still unjust to punish someone for someone else's crime.
If anyone is curious about the exercise, I recommend trying it. It was disconcerting to sit with the idea of banning male immigration, really seriously consider it and realise how viscerally shocked I was by the idea.
Edit: for context, in the UK right now, phrases like "rape gangs" are part of the debate/argument about immigration.
Your solution of banning male immigration makes perfect sense to me. Maybe not ban it entirely but at least ensure a 1-1 ratio of men to women (male surplus has a tendency to turn countries into shitholes).
Disallowing someone from immigrating is not a punishment because there is no right to immigration anyway. In fact I believe we should go even further and see immigrants as investments. If the immigrant is unlikely to have a net positive tax contribution (or at least not being a rapist, for a more realistic target), I don't see any reason to allow him or her to be here. If you accept this idea, there is nothing wrong with training a neural network on characteristics of existing immigrants to predict the future value of a particular potential immigrant.
The Grooming Gangs feature a lot of nationalities, but some more than others.
There's nothing racist about the facts. How one responds to it can indeed be racist -- ie. "all people of one of said nationalities are like these ones" would be racist. But observing that a nationality of immigrants are vastly overrepresented is just using your eyes to observe reality.
I'm happy to say that ~80% of Sweden and Norway don't vote for right wing populist parties like SD and Fremskrittspartiet, so "vast majority of us" might be a bit of a stretch.
That's a misrepresentation of statistics though. FRP is the second largest party this election, with 23,8% of votes, only second to AP who got 28%. But many people won't vote based on the immigration issues, because so far, other issues are more pressing.
But my point was that I am absolutely sure the majority of Norwegians _want Norway to remain a country that retains its cultural history_ while not being exclusive to one ethnic group. It's about retaining a majority.
I don't understand why that sentiment is so problematic here on HN, because simultaneously people are clamoring for a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people.
Why can't Norway have a Norwegian state for the Norwegian people? Or Denmark? Or the UK?
> That's a misrepresentation of statistics though.
I can't speak for Norway, but in Sweden the only party worth keeping an eye on that adheres to the usual combination of pro-Russia, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, anti-EU rhetoric etc is Sverigedemokraterna (formerly Bevara Sverige Svenskt, a party based solely on the idea of an ethnostate). They're hovering around 20%.
> But my point was that I am absolutely sure the majority of Norwegians _want Norway to remain a country that retains its cultural history_ while not being exclusive to one ethnic group. It's about retaining a majority.
Is the existence of history dependent on the ethnicity of the person reading it? I'm sure you've met non-native people who are in all other respects very much Norwegian.
Unless you mean to imply that culture is constrained to genetics. I deeply hope that that is not what you meant.
> I don't understand why that sentiment is so problematic here on HN, because simultaneously people are clamoring for a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people.
How many Norwegian cities were leveled by bombs this year? How many were murdered by foreign military?
> Why can't Norway have a Norwegian state for the Norwegian people? Or Denmark? Or the UK?
Frankly, I might be sympathetic to this view, except for a few countries: The US, the UK, France, Belgium and maybe a few others. The US is a country of immigrant, so none of that cultural history nonsense holds, except maybe for the Native Americans. As for France and the UK, yeah no one told them to go colonize a bunch of countries around the world and impose their culture on them. They don't get to complain about retaining their cultural history. Belgium doesn't get to complain either after the atrocities they committed in Central Africa.
The word racism is not diluted. It is that just some full on racists feel like it says something negative and thus don't want the label put on racists stuff they like.
So do you consider what the Danish PM said racist?
> There are really a lot of us Danes who believed that when people came to this ‘world’s best country’ and were given such good opportunities, they would integrate. They would become Danish, and they would never, ever harm our society. All of us who thought that way have been wrong.
That's objectively observed reality in Denmark. And in Scandinavia in general. It's not about race, it's not about skin color, it's about cultural heritage and values.
All we're saying is that to retain a country's cultural heritage and carry it -- and obviously shape it -- into the future, you have to retain a majority of that heritage, and integrate newcomers. Otherwise it's no longer Denmark.
you have to retain a majority of that heritage, and integrate newcomers. Otherwise it's no longer Denmark.
what you are asking is not possible without rejecting immigration.
that is the delusion. it is the same all over europe. people expect 100% integration. yet at the same time, prejudices will reject them if they are not completely invisible. that is not possible, and it is not the integration i would want. i have written about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746099
London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.
Copenhagen, by comparison, was about eighty-five percent native Danes in 2000, and is still three-quarters today. Enough of a foreign presence to feel cosmopolitan, but still distinctly Danish in all of its ways. Equally statistically evident on streets and bike lanes.
But I think, what would Copenhagen feel like, if only a third of it was Danish, like London? It would feel completely foreign, of course. Alien, even. So I get the frustration that many Brits have with the way mass immigration has changed the culture and makeup of not just London, but their whole country.
no it isn't because everyone has a different idea what limited, controlled immigration means. for some 20% is ok, for some 10% is to much. and for some only those who can integrate to 100% and become invisible is ok. practically speaking, for most people controlled immigration means: only allow the people that we like, and don't allow any of the people that we don't like.
We will never solve the scale of what's acceptable or not. That will always require dialogue and will change over time with the economic state of a country and many other factors, including culture.
However this argument is usually used to imply "there should be no limits", and that's obviously not practical nor ethical for anyone involved.
yes, the limits are economical. not cultural. you can't control the effect on culture by limiting immigration. economics is a different issue. the problem of course is that these issues get mixed, and people use economics as a reason when culture is their problem. and they are blaming their own economic situation on to much immigration when often that is simply not true.
germany has 200.000 open positions in IT right now. what would happen if we invited 200.000 experienced IT people from india? half the people without a job would complain that the indians are taking away their jobs. and lots of people would rant about how all these indians change our culture.
and what about the civil war in syria that produced 5 million refugees leaving the country? or ukraine, another 5.7 million refugees?
do you want to reject them just because you feel they threaten your culture?
since you claim that not having a limit is not ethical, let me quote the german chancellor merkel at the time: "The fundamental right to asylum for the politically persecuted knows no upper limit; that also goes for refugees who come to us from the hell of a civil war."
when merkel said "everyone is welcome" this was literally the first time in my life that i was proud of germany. and you should know that in germany being proud of germany is a politically very sensitive statement usually associated with extreme-right groups.
so when it comes to refugees there can't be an upper limit.and beyond that, the limit depends on the economic situation. if we need the workers, the limit goes up. it has to. culture doesn't factor into it at all. you can't have it both ways.
And look at Germany now. I have friends and family there. Merkel’s utopian naïveté has certainly not benefited Germany at this point. It went way too far.
I can’t believe people are like this. But it explains why Europe is more and more split on this topic: It’s two irreconcilable worldviews and one of them requires ignoring observed reality.
you are completely missing the point. what exactly should germany have done? let those people suffer? stick them in crowded refugee camps?
you do not get to turn a generous humanitarian aid gesture into blaming germany for being dumb to let all these people in.
this is not ignoring observed reality. observed reality is a consequence of people not being welcoming enough. of not being supporting and considerate of the foreign culture and not doing enough to befriend these people. as i linked in my other post, i wrote about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746099 we are not letting these people integrate in a way that allows them to keep some of their culture while giving them an opportunity to learn about our culture.
yes, the current reality may be rough. but those are growing pains. and they are consequences of war, and not consequences of allowing to many people to enter the country. by sharing the consequences of these wars germany becomes an ally to the victims, and that is a good thing. rejecting refugees would have turned germany into a villain and an ally of the perpetrators. i'd be ashamed if that happened.
I’m sorry, but not being welcoming _enough_!? Seeing the incredible, life altering strain the German model has put on the lower and middle class while they’ve bent over backwards to be more welcoming to strangers that share none of their values and consistently and purposefully alienate themselves from the general German population, I simply cannot agree we are observing the same reality.
Full disclaimer: Some of my friends are also immigrants from the 80’s. And they’re equally exacerbated by the state of Germany because the country and culture they love is deteriorating out of suicidal empathy.
i have traveled and lived in countries all over the world. first in europe and western countries. already there i found there is a gradual change of friendliness the farther south i went. among western countries the US is the most friendly. despite their issues with racism, the people are welcoming to foreigners and immigrants.
then i visited asia, and i was shocked how much more friendly and welcoming people are there. if you haven't been there it is unimaginable. same goes for africa. seriously. on a global scale, europeans are the worst in being welcoming. so, yes. germans are not welcoming enough. they are principled however, and it is those principles that made them invite those refugees.
the state of germany is not deteriorating because of empathy, but because of the unwillingness of some people to adapt and adjust to the new reality. this lack of adaption leads to confrontation, and that confrontation is the cause of any deterioration. the culture is not destroyed by immigrants. it is destroyed by lack of tolerance and unreasonable expectations.
No it's not. Stop diluting terms. You're making this problem worse for everyone, even the people you think you're on the side of, whoever they might be.
Tekin, what makes a Turk less white than a Greek or Spaniard?
If it's cultural (religion, music/sports related subcultures and codes) then it's chosen. Nobody can force you into a subculture in the West. As soon as you turn 18 you can essentially do what you want, most likely even way before that.
You can chose your subculture, how you dress, style your hair, talk and are read by the mainstream society. Actual racists go by skin color and ignore your cultural choices, fuck them.
Not really, racists often include ethnic features such as hair texture or even nose shape within their criteria for racial exclusion.
While in certain cultural contexts Turks may be read as white, within Europe there is a history of excluding them from whiteness and presenting them as a threat to European culture, mostly due to Islamophobia
The last paragraph is funny because Turks themselves use the expression White Turks to refer to the modern/secular/Western (as opposed to the Black Turks, conservative/Islamist).
Ethnic features = things you can nothing for, same category as skin color.
I was talking about the culture you chose and the stereotypes that go along with it. Stereotypes override ethnic features unless you actually deal with real racists.
DHH might not be street smart enough (like most people in tech) to see through those stereotypes on the streets of London.
I'm not sure I completely understand what you are saying.
You start your original comment by asking what makes Turks non white which I answered, and from what I understand you believe that choosing to participate in a culture from the diaspora you are a part of means that you have to bear the burden of the stereotypes about that culture, even if they are racist in nature?
And furthermore, you believe that people that believe these stereotypes are not real racists because real racists only care about skin color?
Again, I could be misunderstanding, but I don't think that you need to only care about skin color to be racist. I think that DHH's anxieties about replacement of naitives being mostly focused on MENA people feels like a pretty clear sign he believes that non European (aka non white) immigrants are a problem, which to me, is racist.
