These kind of statements frustrate me. They are kind of manufactured consent statements. I likely don't agree with DHH positions as shared here, but when did we decide platforming very left-leaning positions is good, and platforming very right-leaning ones is bad? I wouldn't even mind if the position was that platforming either is good/bad. The framing here begs the question.
Well yes, thinking people should be treated equally regardless of their sexuality or color of their skin is good, and the opposite is bad. Is that the kind of "very left leaning position" you had in mind? Or something else?
Sure: importing migrants with no end in sight while shutting down any convo over what the limit should be; there is no limit and you're racist if you disagree.
And it's not a principled position on open borders nor open migration but instead part of a double standard. These same people probably cheer on the protests in Mexico City against white gringos in Condesa.
That's how I'd summarize the far left position. The far right one is probably that migrants are bad. And I suppose the middle position is that there's a problem when immigration rate outpaces cultural assimilation.
Is unlimited immigration really popular among the far left? Sounds more like a libertarian position to me.
After some quick googling I can't find any groups that support that.
I did find a poll that shows 64% of Americans support creating some path for undocumented immigrants to get legal status. I'm not sure you could call 64% a far left position though.
Here's a NYTimes article from 2020 https://archive.md/uJl8t and another from 2025 https://archive.md/5az0U.
No one wants the "open borders" label but there was and still remains many who see migrants as the source of their personal salvation.
Excellent! Thank you for finding that, my Google fu isn't as strong as it used to be.
I'm still not sure that's representative of the far left. Like I said, the more right wing libertarian position is probably the same, though for different reasons.
> Is unlimited immigration really popular among the far left?
That this is being memory-holed, much like the ill-conceived bilingual education initiatives of the 90s, is actually a good sign, as it's proof that we're winning.
If we're talking about the US, that's a straw man. There was a study that made objectively clear that the right is several times more actively violent than the left.
"Both sides" is a euphemistic fig leaf of an argument at best.
If you actually look at the data, that "study" assigned a lot of really unclear or marginal cases to "right wing". They also didn't count a lot of obvious left wing political violence as "left wing".
To be fair, neither do the right-leaning ones; the ones that do have fallen completely on their side. It's just that societal discourse has been purposefully skewed so that the mean lean is 60 degrees to the right, making it very easy for weak individuals to fall over.
> hen did we decide platforming very left-leaning positions is good, and platforming very right-leaning ones is bad?
The same way DHH can have opinions, one-man-companies forking the sponsorship momey can have some too. "We" didn't decide anything, a sponsor company decided to stop sponsoring (with no public commentary), that's all that happened.
More to the point, "platforming" is an active operation, I think anyone can decide who they want to promote and why. It's fundamentally different from censoring.
I disagree with this framing as well. There's nothing wrong with "right-leaning" statements or opinions. DHH can talk all he wants about a desire for smaller governments, opinions on gun control, or conservative fiscal policy.
However, people that espouse intolerance of others based on the colour of their skin is just objectively bad. Sometimes there is a right and a wrong side to things. The problem is that some on the political-right seem to have aligned themselves with policy or viewpoints that stand for hatred.
You would need to identify specific far left views that would be comparably objectionable. I’m not going to be upset if someone has wonky ideas about free market systems or tax codes. DHH has said some objectively racist rhetoric on his blog and called Tommy Robinson’s recent march “heartwarming”.
I think the real issue is framing blatant racism as a 'very right-leaning' opinion. It does a disservice to people who have normal conservative opinions on economic or social issues. We've moved past race as a social issue long ago. It's not a debate that should be had anymore. Racists aren't conservative or right wing - they're just bigots.
And to be clear, you can discuss immigration policy without being racist. In the blog post in question DHH gives his support to a convicted criminal, who is also a former member of an explicitly fascist political party and founder of an islamophobic hate group. That's not 'right-leaning'. It's support for a racist criminal. I'm unsure whether DHH is actually a bigot or just completely engulfed in the rhetoric common on Twitter these days. Either way he's a fucking moron pontificating on something which he has no actual experience of. Maybe when the US invades Greenland and starts deporting the Danes from the US he'll discover empathy.
I read the DHH post in question: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64. It is pretty standard anti-immigrant. It feels like it is acknowledging the fact that the populations of Western countries are in a demographic crisis, they are sub-replacement in terms of fertility but instead of fixing that he just wants to ban immigrants. It feels like fixing the fertility issue would solve the root issue.
You don't need to carry water for racists and invent more palatable explanations for what they said. There's nothing in there about not enough British people - only about too many foreigners (whom he can tell by looking at them).
> There's nothing in there about not enough British people - only about too many foreigners
It's the same thing, because the motivation for the immigration policy, per the people implementing it, is to avoid demographic collapse.
Generally too many people can also reasonably be considered a problem, if the intended solution to the social services problem is endless exponential growth. Especially on an island.
> (whom he can tell by looking at them)
There are different ethnicities of "white people" who can be told apart by looking. So "he can tell by looking" does not mean that he is applying a racial standard.
Your argument depends on a notion that English, Italians, Germans etc. "all look the same". But last I checked, people who would say the same about, for example, Chinese, Japanese and Koreans would be called racist for that.
> There are different ethnicities of "white people" who can be told apart by looking. So "he can tell by looking" does not mean that he is applying a racial standard.
damn, you are really catching the straws here to defend a racist
It's obvious he meant brown people or anyone that isn't white/european looking.
There is no genetically pure or distinct native British phenotye to set apart other europeans.
Europeans have been mixing themselves for centuries, he obviously knew what he was talking about (non-whites)
Promoting sustainable fertility is good in my books. We need sustainable fertility like we need sustainable environmentalism, and similar things.
I strongly believe that low fertility causes immigration backlash because some governments try to maintain their population by importing immigrants rather than fixing the fertility issue and a low fertility causes the domestic population to be insecure (e.g. "replacement theory") in the face of the immigrants. Some immigration combined with sustainable fertility is the solution.
I'm sorry but if DHH posted some inflammatory articles maybe it's better to post those articles for people to judge themselves, than to post what someone else thinks.
Having read stuff from DHH for a long time, this does not surprise me in the least. It just feels like he picked the right time, zeitgeist-wise, to fully come out of the closet.
I distinctly remember a specific Twitter comment, maybe 7ish years ago, that solidified my view on DHH as a person. It was a thread about remote work. Someone from South America commented trying to be nice to David, saying something like "you should work remotely from Chile, it has a great Ruby community" etc, to which his response was "I've no interest in living in a 3rd world country".
Notch-esque politics aside, that was mean-spirited, inconsiderate behavior which should not be applauded. From that day I strongly sensed that was who he truly was.
Umberto Eco gave a pretty well-reasoned definition of Facism, and I think it's pretty straightforward to apply this definition to the situation in London (and DHH's commentary thereon): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
The question was "Why was "platforming" DHH bad?". Some people disagree with the views represented in that linked blog post, and do not wish to sponsor events that showcase him.
Personally, I think DHH is a troll and would never be interested in sponsoring, or attending, an event that involved him.
Pushing everyone who doesn't have a 100% positive opinion on mass immigration under the label of "racist far-right" actively contributes to the strengthening of said "racist far-right". I hope you're aware of that.
> Because the link he posted shows that the third of London he calls Native British is just White British.
The table doesn't distinguish "British" from "non-British" for non-white people, so it would be rather hard to account for that.
But if he's referring to an ethnicity (really a narrow group of ethnicities) rather than a nationality then of course that would entail a range of skin tones what people would normally call "white". And yes, that thinking would necessarily exclude Idris Elba.
But then if this is really about worrying about "white people", then why is he also excluding the non-British white people from his figure? Can it really not just be that there exists an English ethnicity (and Scottish and Welsh) that has been there for centuries and has nowhere else to go?
> This isn’t about mass immigration, it’s just about immigration as such.
There is no such distinction.
You ask "after how many generations are you native British"; I can equally well ask "after how many immigrants is it mass immigration".
The point is that the rate of immigration has been sufficient to completely overwhelm the native birthrate, causing a rapid demographic shift.
When the UK colonized India in the first place, the population did not become minority-Indian at all, let alone within the space of a couple of generations.
I'll note I'm white, but not native British, and none of the people in question tend to object to me being here. Often they make that explicit, by e.g. telling me that I'm "one of the good ones" or similar.
What instead often happen when they hear I'm Norwegian is a complete mask-off moment where they start explaining their favorite racist thinking to me, assuming that since I'm from a group they like, apparently I'm expected to agree with them (I do not).
My main exposure to anti-immigrant thinking face to face in London over the last 25 years have been repeated incidences of people who "just have concerns about immigration" revealing their racist motivations to me without me even asking them.
In other words: I don't buy it for a second when people try to insist it's immigration they care about, rather than seeing non-white faces.
> In other words: I don't buy it for a second when people try to insist it's immigration they care about, rather than seeing non-white faces.
Have any of them ever proposed to you to expel the established black families? If they're just being racist, you should naturally expect it to extend that far, right?
No, the entire claim is that DHH actually means "British" when he says "British", rather than meaning "white" because people say he does, because he's supporting Tommy Robinson, who also means it that way, because reasons.
David Heinemeier Hansson, also known by his initials DHH, is a Danish programmer, writer, entrepreneur, and racing driver. He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a web framework written in Ruby.[1]
He's regurgitating racist tropes. Whether he knows that or not I don't know. He might be racist, it might just be Dunning-Kruger around whether he can speak authoritatively on social issues (in his post there's no attempt at original thought, just copy-paste).
But...it makes it a little difficult to build an inclusive open source community with that at your head.
Yes, it clearly does. The point of that comment depends on the supposition that Trump was praising objectionable groups, so as to liken DHH's behaviour to that. But it is well established that Trump did not, in fact, praise objectionable groups. And reading the full text of Trump's interview reveals nothing objectionable about what he was saying.
People are free to lean left or right. Unfortunately bigotry and racism has been rebranded as simply being right leaning politically. Reading some of his recent articles he's neither left or right - just a bit of a racist bigot.
Agreeing that words like DHH used are code for some kind of racist bigotry, has become a "left-coded" argument; while taking arguments e.g. about high rates of immigration from places with very different norms and culture at face value has become a "right-coded" argument. (Quotation marks because the slang still seems awkward to me.) This is glossing over the fact that everyone ITT has been linking examples of DHH's speech that seem to come from after people got upset with him.
You say "has been rebranded" as if this happened naturally. What I see happening is that it's left-wing political strategy to push that rebranding, and right-wing political strategy to ignore it and/or claim it's absurd.
