This "Let's avoid politics" is just "Let's avoid conflict resolution and let things fester until it all boils over and goes to shit"
If you break the social contract of granting everyone a common baseline of respect and civility, such as by identifying with those that explicitly wish to violently purge entire peoples from the planet, I no longer am obligated to grant them the decorum outlined in that same social contract, as they've violated the accord.
Time and a place. I only see these kind of online spats refracted through people’s reactions like this one. Invariably I find myself asking how someone’s unattractive idea even came up there in the first place…
Over my time in the world I have chafed against the boundaries of “professionalism” and “courtesy” and “a valid topic but not what we’re here to discuss right now”… but… sure seems like those might help here.
Maybe it’s the old-school small-l liberal in me, but I feel like we lost something socially constructive in dissolving the boundaries between public and private thoughts, school and work and home and pub and church thoughts, the office and the flawed human occupying the office…
People openly signaling they don't care about your feelings and rules are rarely missed. But as a former antisocial outcast myself, I always try to be nice to everyone and show them the light, prefer warnings to kicks and kicks to bans. Politics is really not that serious, decent people can have wildly different views.
There is a difference between saying that people are ethnically native, and that they only properly belong if they are ethnically native. What DHH is doing is the equivalent of saying that white (or black or Asian, or whatever) people are not real Americans (and should be deported to Europe, Africa or Asia).
I totally agree that one can decide for themselves to be nice or not nice to anyone, but I wonder as adults is it the right course of action to block/kick someone out as soon as they disagree with you or say, write something you don’t like or when just simply have a difference of opinion. I think that’s very childish and when did we stopped simply to agree to disagree and move forward.
The example in the post is quite obvious with Nazi symbolism. But what if someone express their opinion, which is very conservative, or nationalistic like as an example I love Switzerland and I want Swiss people to prosper and have everything. Would that be incentive because they are excluding rest of the world?
> The example in the post is quite obvious with Nazi symbolism.
Why can't we be adults and agree to disagree on Nazism? If I think Hitler did nothing wrong and you think Hitler was the most evil man on this planet, why can't we just treat this as a difference in opinion and just build cool stuff together?
I think in that case I would agree to disagree and move forward our separate ways. We both can have difference of opinion, that’s fine because everyone is entitled to their opinion, but doesn’t mean we have to work/build anything together
Yes, however, the adult thing would be to still work together instead of excluding the other person from whatever you are working on. So, why wouldn't you be willing to overcome this difference in opinion, and work together with this person to build something awesome?
Because that’s personal preference. Everyone has their own personal preferences and that should be respected as well. Otherwise it would like I’m being forced to do something that I don’t like to do
So, we have that you differ in opinions, and you'd prefer not to work with him. That's fair, you don't have to work with everyone. But if I understand you right, you'd happily build something with someone who disagrees with you, say, a patriot of another country who'd put their own nation above all, Switzerland included. So what is it about "Hitler did nothing wrong" specifically that puts it on the other side of a line that one doesn't cross?
Perhaps it's because thinking a genocidal maniac "did nothing wrong" says a lot about your character, your views on society, and what kind of "stuff" you find "cool".
It's always been political and always will be, whether people believed or not. And now matter what is being done on the ground to make it otherwise, it will always be in vain.
I am one of these people that DHH says in not "native British". I agree he is an unpleasant racist.
I do think that the case of the person using a Nazi avatar on a forum is comparable. The former is something they are doing withing the community, DHH's behaviour is outside the community. Its not clear how much people should be sanctioned for holding unpleasant views.
The problem with the article is clear in this passage:
"Sometimes a political party or a person decides to oppose shared human values like the importance of care, kindness, inclusion, or the simple value of welcoming people who are different from you. Maybe they oppose the equality of all people. Maybe they think some people do not deserve human rights."
That very quickly becomes a subjective and partisan judgement. Its very easy to say everyone who votes for a different party is "opposed to equality", or that people who do not share you culture or language and vocabulary or vote for any other party are those you should not be nice to. Very often the inclusive becomes exclusive and even culturally imperialist. Foreigner who uses the wrong words because they do not have the same implications in their culture? Excluded. This is not made, but, but something I have seen people get angry about.
You seem to be betting on this strategy that words can keep being changed to mean anything you want depending on the political context, forever, but at some point it will just make you look insane. "Native British" is not something ambiguous that's a matter of opinion or that goes into quotes, any more than Native American ever was.
There is no definition of "native British", just as is the case for most of Europe. The "native" population has changed repeatedly for thousands of years. This isn't like America where there was a native population that was largely displaced in the past 400 years
Being displaced has nothing to do with native or not native. If nobody ever got displaced and there was just a small minority of European-descended Americans concentrated in one place, the common understanding of which ones are the native Americans wouldn't change.
The fact that the native population of Britain changed repeatedly thousands of years ago doesn't seem very relevant either. Are you saying that if new evidence showed that the native populations of America or Australia were the result of multiple ancient waves of migration rather than just one, that would change anyone's mind on which ones are truly the native Americans or Australians? That's obviously absurd.
If you really want to turn this apparently simple discussion about the common meaning of words into a matter of first-principles definitions, I guess I could give it a try, and it would probably have to bring in things like whether the waves of migration retained a significant identification with their place of origin. But it seems totally unnecessary.
> if new evidence showed that the native populations of America or Australia were the result of multiple ancient waves of migration rather than just one, that would change anyone's mind on which ones are truly the native Americans or Australians?
Not if they were truly ancient because they would still all have been there tens of thousands of years.
If you can find a still distinct pre-Columbian group who migrated to the Americas in the last millennium or two I would agree they are not an indigenous population.
> The fact that the native population of Britain changed repeatedly thousands of years ago
Not changed repeatedly thousands of years ago. kept changing repeatedly all the last few thousand years. Britsh history simply makes it impossible to come up with a sensible definition of indigenous, so any definition of native has to be very different from the American one, and will be a lot less clear cut and impossible to reach a consensus on. I would expect quite a few Welsh people to argue that the English are not indigenous.
One of the British politicians who DHH likes quoted stats about the number of people in the country who are not ethnically white British. The definition he used classifies people like the King and Winston Churchill as not British. He became very evasive when ashed about this in an interview https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/07/rupert-lowe-rest...
>If you can find a still distinct pre-Columbian group who migrated to the Americas in the last millennium or two I would agree they are not an indigenous population.
That's not really what the argument is about, it's about whether such a group would invalidate the concept of "native American" entirely such that it wouldn't be meaningful to distinguish between the native Americans or the non-native European Americans. That's effectively what you're arguing for Britain, and it's absurd.
>Britsh history simply makes it impossible to come up with a sensible definition of indigenous
Taking the example of the Normans that you mentioned somewhere else in the thread, what's the difference between them and your hypothetical pre-Columbian group? Why does the Normans make it impossible to come up with a sensible definition of indigenous when another migration wave arrives, while the hypothetical pre-Columbians don't?
I agree it's subjective. For now, I think that amplifies the need. If people have conflicting views, fine, state yours as you are kicking out the Nazis and other genocidal turds. Be clear.
If that starts cutting the wrong way: so be it. The wrongness (not good) itself should be visible even if the kicker is doing this practice. Their "good" will not be so believable, it will damage the kicker too.
This is a post about someone marketing their personal values: asserting their importance, suggesting we should all share them, and suggesting that certain alternative values should be rudely suppressed.
It’s not an argument, though. I don’t come away with any reason not to NICELY oppose Nazi sympathizers.
I am not especially nice, and I don’t trust most people who behave nicely. But this post is banal. You can do better.
That is not all he said, and the context of the UK and the US is different - for a start there is no clear divide between native and not. Are the Germanic English native, or Normans, etc? Does anyone say that white Americans are not proper Americans. Does DHH hate American cities because native Americans are a minority?
More importantly he said a lot more. He objects to London (that has always been a cosmopolitan city, especially in its centre) having too many people who are not ethnically "white British" and quotes numbers that excludes everyone who is not pure English, Welsh or Scottish - he excludes even the Irish, and, of course, people of mixed race.
The claim that London has greatly changed in nonsense. I grew up there and it feels exactly the same as it did in the 1980s. He talks about "A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now." i.e. he seems more brown faces than he likes. The interesting thing is that none of my childhood friends from London have a problem with this.
He supports and quotes various bigots (such as Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe) and takes what they say as fact. These are people who believe in white replacement theory, and are anti-immigrant to the extent of wanting ethnic cleansing.
Well black people can be citizens, they can be born in the UK. In additon, which "Native Brits" are indigenous to the UK, and do we need to look at how much French/Roman blood etc.?
White Europeans are of course not native to US or Australia.
Look, either you loosen your understanding of native to be the region you are born, or you tighten it to mean precisely indigenous.
None of the populations of North America, Australia or the British Isles are indigenous by any neutral definition of the term. Populations have migrated and settled these regions over thousands of years.
You are a native of a nation if you are born within its borders. It is that simple.
It shouldn't even be a term, it sounds fake politically correct, as does "First Nations". It's "indigenous". They were here, someone else came ashore and the Comanche got horses and Winchesters.
Not like the Comanche and the Apache were besties, nor the Iroquois and Mohican. What about the Inuit? They are like Siberian expats, but still indigenous, but somehow not on the list? Just musing here.
Can you clarify why? I believe native anything is a flawed concept since a human, let alone an entire ethnicity, does not grow from the soil. Populations have moved, migrated and settled throughout our entire history.
Because DHH openly calls for murder of "immigrants" (read: non white people, even if they've been there for decades and been more productive members of society than DHH has ever been.), and it's not even a dogwhistle anymore.
>When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.
(in addition, the concept of Native <any european country> is nonsensical. Europe is at the confluence of migrations and has been for millenia. Attributing "whiteness" as a distinctive attribute of europeans is at best ignorant, and at worst another racist rally point. Go tell the greeks they're white, see how they like it.)
Americans have a problem understanding this because race and racism is so embedded in their culture. I just been reading and hearing about American *historians" who claim "Anglo-Saxon" is a racist term (in the context of discussing medieval history) because they anachronistically see it through the modern American lens of "whiteness" that is a result of American history and politics.
It can be perfectly reasonable to remove people who are being completely inappropriate and/or egregiously insensitive. I think reducing it to simple politics is a distraction though. At the end of the day, people who are making everyone around them uncomfortable and causing everyone else to feel excluded/hated/marginalized probably deserve to learn that behavior is not tolerated, because that's often one of the only things that can get it to change.
Their opinions don't have to be political and your opinions don't have to be political. If someone is making the space worse for everyone, then maybe they're not good for the space. Maybe the space is not good for them. You would be doing good for both sides by stopping them from harming the space, and stopping the space from further enabling the problematic behavior.
I have personal experience with not changing until it became clear enough that certain behavior was driving away everyone and everything I care about. It didn't matter to me how much people told me it was bad, or tried to convince me to stop. What worked was seeing people leave over it, over and over, until I couldn't take it anymore. I had to change. You would be helping these kinds of people, and the community at large, by seeing to the consequences of their actions.
What if the space becomes a bit of an echo chamber when it comes to some topic and a person shows up with wildly different views, asks sharp questions and it becomes clear the community not used to having its beliefs argued doesn't have good answers? Negative valence arises through no fault of anybody. I've seen this happen multiple times. Utilitarian solution would be banning them, but it feels unjust.
I think the manner in which you ask the questions is important, but I also think that community response is important too. Some questions just could be phrased a lot better, and some communities just could be a lot friendlier to curiosity.
The right solution for that specific situation varies:
- if the questions are valid but they're just phrased in a very uncomfortable way, I'd like to see someone work with them on how to ask better. Note that by "better" I don't mean that there's an objectively better or worse way in general, but just that some communities are friendlier to different approaches, and for example, you can often get a lot more mileage out of trying to understand someone's current approach first, rather than immediately asking why they don't use yours, or immediately raising a bunch of issues you see with it. I may be misunderstanding what you mean by "sharp", but I've seen and helped with this before.
- if the discomfort just comes from generally questions existing or alternative views being expressed at all, then sometimes the community's just not a good fit for those views. Some communities are pretty closed to alternative approaches, and sometimes that's just the way it is. I mean, the way you describe an "echo chamber" can of course imply that it's pretty harmful to its participants (one example is polarization on social media), but you can't always just invade those spaces and expect to change the status quo. You can't help everyone, and a lot of people feel insulted when you even imply you might know better. Sometimes, outsiders just stop asking questions or expressing alternative views at all, just to avoid being ejected (one example is how cancel culture can be incredibly harmful to developing minds). I think that should be avoided if possible, of course... trying to fit into a group that doesn't accept you is usually a recipe for disaster, especially if you've already established things about yourself that they have problems with.
There are probably more variations on this, but those are the two biggest possibilities I see. Either the behavior of the individual is a problem, and should be addressed (there's usually no need to remove them immediately, if there's a way to address the behavior instead), or the behavior of the community is a problem, and the individual might be better off looking elsewhere.
Why is your bar that they must be hurtful to everyone? What do you suggest to do when they direct the same behavior only a certain group in the space? You say that it does not have to be political and I agree, but what if it is? What if they see that group as a legitimate target for political reasons?
It's easier to make my point about behavior that is unquestionably harmful, like what's discussed in the article. Nothing I said can't extend to less clear-cut cases; honestly my entire point is that you should weigh decisions like this based on whether behavior is harmful to the community (or vice versa) rather than based on either side's "politics".
> What if they see that group as a legitimate target for political reasons?
It doesn't matter. I wouldn't engage with whether or not they think they're acting in a justified manner. If the behavior won't stop, the behavior is harmful, and the community would be better off without it, then sometimes you just have to kick someone out.
The reason why I say politics are a distraction is because I don't think you need to bother to explain that someone is politically incorrect or how you are less so. You can, but none of that is actually relevant in a majority of cases. Removing someone from a community is not about being more correct or about them being incorrect, it's for the good of the community (and/or the good of whoever you're removing).
For the better part of two decades I frequented a particular forum, and one of the most common reasons people tended to eventually get banned wasn't because of any particularly egregious political opinion, but because whatever opinion they held they tended to turn every thread they participated in anywhere into either a thread about that or a thread about them.
I've got a family of all colors (with half-black and half-asian nephews) and we speak many languages at home.
I do believe however we should be allowed to criticize religions and I do believe we should be allowed to criticize religions without being labelled "racist".
For example I'll point out the incredible hypocrisy of the left in the west who raised me, in an atheist school, with the notion that christianity was a scam and where christians were being made fun of all around me (by my parents, by my friends, by my friends' parents, by my teachers, etc.).
And that same left in the west, who celebrates that christianity lost its grip on the people, is now bending over backwards over islam.
Another gigantic hypocrisy in Europe (and in the UK) is that free speech is not a given. And hateful speech is definitely not allowed... Unless it's hate speech protected by the fact that it's in a religious book.
And another, totally off the chart, hypocrisy in the west is the feminist and the LGBTQ2S+ movements who are constantly after heterosexual male... Unless they're muslims, in which case it's suddenly all cool to put a veil on your wife(s) (polygamy being allowed, but only one man / several women and not the other way round: oh the hypocrisy here) and daugther(s) so that they're safe from the looks of other men.
It's a very long article saying that people who oppose islam are basically deranged.
Now I do profundly believe that unless you've read the quran, you shouldn't comment on islam.
I did read it and I suggest you do the same and then make up your own mind.
Now as I'm not nice I'll put it blundly: I think the quran is just as bad as Hitler's Mein Kampf. But because it's "religious", the hate speech it contains is protected and allowed.
And we're basically at a point in Europe where if you point out that the quran is full of hate speech, your criticism is considered hate speech. But the real hate speech is totally cemented and impossible to attack because it's "religious".
You should at the very least read the quran and see where I'm coming from.
The world CIA factbook (not published anymore) estimated that 30% of all muslims worldwide had extremist views. I understand that 30% is not 100%, but 30% of nearly 2 billion people is a very big number.
To be very clear: either the muslim beard or the veil are already extremist readings of the quran and its hadiths.
Go read the book for yourself.
It is not normal that after 1200 teenagers who were dancing at a music festival were slaughtered by islamist terrorists, a big part of the world celebrated.
We're talking about tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of people who were genuinely happy that "evil jews got what they deserve" because it was "justified resistance".
I'm not talking about what came next: I'm against killing people, no matter who does the killing.
Now I'm not saying that that UK dude who wants to "ban islam" is a good person.
But there's really a very big spread spectrum between "ban islam" and "there's zero problem with islam growing in the west".
And there's definitely an issue when speech is censored, but the absolute worst form of hate speech is protected because it's a religious holy book.
I think you’re mistaking “agreeing with Islam” with “standing against prejudice.”
No liberal I know agrees with the tenants of Islam. But they might have Muslim friends who catch a lot of flak for no reason other than belonging to an outgroup.
> They accused me of being 'political' – the very thing an open source project shouldn't be, I'm told. It only divides people. Let's just focus on the technology. Surely we can all get behind building amazing, fast, cool websites!
I would argue that picking an obviously Nazi-coded avatar is in itself political.
It is a deliberate decision to select such an avatar. Nobody picks that symbol by accident. They know exactly what it signals, they know how people will react, and they know that the laissez-faire culture of tech is a perfect ground to normalize this shit.
If there is a not being political rule, then it is perfectly reasonable to ban people like this because they obviously are political.
> DHH, you're not welcome in the Nuxt community, because you say that Black people aren't 'native Brits' and call for the mass deportation of 'gypsies'.
100% agree. Niceness is NOT for white supremacists, and no, I am not debating whether DHH's politics are fascist-adjacent or what % of them are pure fascism.
DHH's politics and the man himself will get only shunning and ridicule from me. He's, after all, one of the weird little guys of FOSS: https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/
I have no idea why I clicked on that link, but honestly, it must be exhausting to try to care about that stuff consistently. Maybe I’ve gotten old, or have other priorities in life, but I can’t think of being so much into anyone’s yet alone FOSS people’s lives/choices/politics/etc.
Half of these people are trying to actively make life worse for you, or someone you know. We care about that stuff because otherwise people like DHH will want to get you shot if you're black, or people like Stallman will want to sexually harass you if you're a woman.
If you have the privilege of being able to forget about it: congratulations. If you're part of those potentially at risk: closing your eyes just makes their jobs easier.
Rossmann might be a useful tool in fighting against companies, that doesn't change the fact that he's a gigantic asshole who regularly harasses people he disagrees with. In the same way, if Stallman could stop eating his toenails in public and saying that Epstein's victims were totally willing, maybe he would avoid being on that list.
Of course I agree with OP that one can't be nice to Nazis. But he should have also mentioned that one should not be nice to anyone who kills innocent humans. Not just the Nazis.
EDIT: is there something wrong with my statement? Don't be a coward and downvote silently. Tell me how what I wrote is wrong?
Fully agreed.
This "Let's avoid politics" is just "Let's avoid conflict resolution and let things fester until it all boils over and goes to shit"
If you break the social contract of granting everyone a common baseline of respect and civility, such as by identifying with those that explicitly wish to violently purge entire peoples from the planet, I no longer am obligated to grant them the decorum outlined in that same social contract, as they've violated the accord.
Time and a place. I only see these kind of online spats refracted through people’s reactions like this one. Invariably I find myself asking how someone’s unattractive idea even came up there in the first place…
Over my time in the world I have chafed against the boundaries of “professionalism” and “courtesy” and “a valid topic but not what we’re here to discuss right now”… but… sure seems like those might help here.
Maybe it’s the old-school small-l liberal in me, but I feel like we lost something socially constructive in dissolving the boundaries between public and private thoughts, school and work and home and pub and church thoughts, the office and the flawed human occupying the office…
People openly signaling they don't care about your feelings and rules are rarely missed. But as a former antisocial outcast myself, I always try to be nice to everyone and show them the light, prefer warnings to kicks and kicks to bans. Politics is really not that serious, decent people can have wildly different views.
> Politics is really not that serious, decent people can have wildly different views.
What kind of views we're talking about are and how serious said politics are can vary greatly from situation to situation. From TFA:
> I kicked someone from the Nuxt Discord who had chosen an avatar (for the second time!) of a man in a Nazi uniform.
> Politics is really not that serious
Really?
[dead]
By this logic every person born in North America is a Native American.
Of course, this criticism is very popular amongst Scots who live in Scotland which is still overwhelmingly Scottish even in the major cities.
“Native American” is not used in the way that you are using it
There is a difference between saying that people are ethnically native, and that they only properly belong if they are ethnically native. What DHH is doing is the equivalent of saying that white (or black or Asian, or whatever) people are not real Americans (and should be deported to Europe, Africa or Asia).
Sounds like the paradox of tolerance. Being tolerant of intolerant people just gives them a platform to spread their intolerance.
I totally agree that one can decide for themselves to be nice or not nice to anyone, but I wonder as adults is it the right course of action to block/kick someone out as soon as they disagree with you or say, write something you don’t like or when just simply have a difference of opinion. I think that’s very childish and when did we stopped simply to agree to disagree and move forward.
The example in the post is quite obvious with Nazi symbolism. But what if someone express their opinion, which is very conservative, or nationalistic like as an example I love Switzerland and I want Swiss people to prosper and have everything. Would that be incentive because they are excluding rest of the world?
> The example in the post is quite obvious with Nazi symbolism.
Why can't we be adults and agree to disagree on Nazism? If I think Hitler did nothing wrong and you think Hitler was the most evil man on this planet, why can't we just treat this as a difference in opinion and just build cool stuff together?
I think in that case I would agree to disagree and move forward our separate ways. We both can have difference of opinion, that’s fine because everyone is entitled to their opinion, but doesn’t mean we have to work/build anything together
Yes, however, the adult thing would be to still work together instead of excluding the other person from whatever you are working on. So, why wouldn't you be willing to overcome this difference in opinion, and work together with this person to build something awesome?
Because that’s personal preference. Everyone has their own personal preferences and that should be respected as well. Otherwise it would like I’m being forced to do something that I don’t like to do
So, we have that you differ in opinions, and you'd prefer not to work with him. That's fair, you don't have to work with everyone. But if I understand you right, you'd happily build something with someone who disagrees with you, say, a patriot of another country who'd put their own nation above all, Switzerland included. So what is it about "Hitler did nothing wrong" specifically that puts it on the other side of a line that one doesn't cross?
> "Hitler did nothing wrong" specifically that puts it on the other side of a line that one doesn't cross
Basically supporting mass murder of innocent people or seeing nothing wrong with killing innocent people
Perhaps it's because thinking a genocidal maniac "did nothing wrong" says a lot about your character, your views on society, and what kind of "stuff" you find "cool".
Would you feel the same way if somebody thought Caesar or Scipio Aemilianus were cool?
If a technology is not considered political that should be the very first thing we should change about it.
It's always been political and always will be, whether people believed or not. And now matter what is being done on the ground to make it otherwise, it will always be in vain.
I am one of these people that DHH says in not "native British". I agree he is an unpleasant racist.
I do think that the case of the person using a Nazi avatar on a forum is comparable. The former is something they are doing withing the community, DHH's behaviour is outside the community. Its not clear how much people should be sanctioned for holding unpleasant views.
The problem with the article is clear in this passage:
"Sometimes a political party or a person decides to oppose shared human values like the importance of care, kindness, inclusion, or the simple value of welcoming people who are different from you. Maybe they oppose the equality of all people. Maybe they think some people do not deserve human rights."
That very quickly becomes a subjective and partisan judgement. Its very easy to say everyone who votes for a different party is "opposed to equality", or that people who do not share you culture or language and vocabulary or vote for any other party are those you should not be nice to. Very often the inclusive becomes exclusive and even culturally imperialist. Foreigner who uses the wrong words because they do not have the same implications in their culture? Excluded. This is not made, but, but something I have seen people get angry about.
You seem to be betting on this strategy that words can keep being changed to mean anything you want depending on the political context, forever, but at some point it will just make you look insane. "Native British" is not something ambiguous that's a matter of opinion or that goes into quotes, any more than Native American ever was.
There is no definition of "native British", just as is the case for most of Europe. The "native" population has changed repeatedly for thousands of years. This isn't like America where there was a native population that was largely displaced in the past 400 years
Being displaced has nothing to do with native or not native. If nobody ever got displaced and there was just a small minority of European-descended Americans concentrated in one place, the common understanding of which ones are the native Americans wouldn't change.
The fact that the native population of Britain changed repeatedly thousands of years ago doesn't seem very relevant either. Are you saying that if new evidence showed that the native populations of America or Australia were the result of multiple ancient waves of migration rather than just one, that would change anyone's mind on which ones are truly the native Americans or Australians? That's obviously absurd.
If you really want to turn this apparently simple discussion about the common meaning of words into a matter of first-principles definitions, I guess I could give it a try, and it would probably have to bring in things like whether the waves of migration retained a significant identification with their place of origin. But it seems totally unnecessary.
> if new evidence showed that the native populations of America or Australia were the result of multiple ancient waves of migration rather than just one, that would change anyone's mind on which ones are truly the native Americans or Australians?
Not if they were truly ancient because they would still all have been there tens of thousands of years.
If you can find a still distinct pre-Columbian group who migrated to the Americas in the last millennium or two I would agree they are not an indigenous population.
> The fact that the native population of Britain changed repeatedly thousands of years ago
Not changed repeatedly thousands of years ago. kept changing repeatedly all the last few thousand years. Britsh history simply makes it impossible to come up with a sensible definition of indigenous, so any definition of native has to be very different from the American one, and will be a lot less clear cut and impossible to reach a consensus on. I would expect quite a few Welsh people to argue that the English are not indigenous.
One of the British politicians who DHH likes quoted stats about the number of people in the country who are not ethnically white British. The definition he used classifies people like the King and Winston Churchill as not British. He became very evasive when ashed about this in an interview https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/07/rupert-lowe-rest...
>If you can find a still distinct pre-Columbian group who migrated to the Americas in the last millennium or two I would agree they are not an indigenous population.
That's not really what the argument is about, it's about whether such a group would invalidate the concept of "native American" entirely such that it wouldn't be meaningful to distinguish between the native Americans or the non-native European Americans. That's effectively what you're arguing for Britain, and it's absurd.
Its not what I am arguing at all
What are you arguing then?
>Britsh history simply makes it impossible to come up with a sensible definition of indigenous
Taking the example of the Normans that you mentioned somewhere else in the thread, what's the difference between them and your hypothetical pre-Columbian group? Why does the Normans make it impossible to come up with a sensible definition of indigenous when another migration wave arrives, while the hypothetical pre-Columbians don't?
Of course it is. Give me a definition of "native British" that is as clear as the meaning of "native American".
You are trying to a complex reality into as a simplistic (American?) world view.
Also, its normal to use quotation marks when quoting someone.
Someone who built Britain before the jet age.
I agree it's subjective. For now, I think that amplifies the need. If people have conflicting views, fine, state yours as you are kicking out the Nazis and other genocidal turds. Be clear.
If that starts cutting the wrong way: so be it. The wrongness (not good) itself should be visible even if the kicker is doing this practice. Their "good" will not be so believable, it will damage the kicker too.
This is a post about someone marketing their personal values: asserting their importance, suggesting we should all share them, and suggesting that certain alternative values should be rudely suppressed.
It’s not an argument, though. I don’t come away with any reason not to NICELY oppose Nazi sympathizers.
I am not especially nice, and I don’t trust most people who behave nicely. But this post is banal. You can do better.
It is disturbing how all of these people in tech like DHH and Elon have been so vile and all dropped the facade at the same time.
When the tides inevitably turn, where will they go? The bridge is fully burned; no takebacksies for white supremacy.
Why is DHH's comment on black people not being native brits so controversial?
I've got a feeling that the author does not hold the same opinion when it comes to white europeans not being native americans.
That is not all he said, and the context of the UK and the US is different - for a start there is no clear divide between native and not. Are the Germanic English native, or Normans, etc? Does anyone say that white Americans are not proper Americans. Does DHH hate American cities because native Americans are a minority?
More importantly he said a lot more. He objects to London (that has always been a cosmopolitan city, especially in its centre) having too many people who are not ethnically "white British" and quotes numbers that excludes everyone who is not pure English, Welsh or Scottish - he excludes even the Irish, and, of course, people of mixed race.
The claim that London has greatly changed in nonsense. I grew up there and it feels exactly the same as it did in the 1980s. He talks about "A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now." i.e. he seems more brown faces than he likes. The interesting thing is that none of my childhood friends from London have a problem with this.
He supports and quotes various bigots (such as Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe) and takes what they say as fact. These are people who believe in white replacement theory, and are anti-immigrant to the extent of wanting ethnic cleansing.
Sounds like Americans projecting their problematic racial relations to the rest of the world.
Well black people can be citizens, they can be born in the UK. In additon, which "Native Brits" are indigenous to the UK, and do we need to look at how much French/Roman blood etc.?
White Europeans are of course not native to US or Australia.
Look, either you loosen your understanding of native to be the region you are born, or you tighten it to mean precisely indigenous.
None of the populations of North America, Australia or the British Isles are indigenous by any neutral definition of the term. Populations have migrated and settled these regions over thousands of years.
You are a native of a nation if you are born within its borders. It is that simple.
“Native Americans” is a term that is not directly comparable to “Native Brits” and you know it
It shouldn't even be a term, it sounds fake politically correct, as does "First Nations". It's "indigenous". They were here, someone else came ashore and the Comanche got horses and Winchesters.
Not like the Comanche and the Apache were besties, nor the Iroquois and Mohican. What about the Inuit? They are like Siberian expats, but still indigenous, but somehow not on the list? Just musing here.
What's a native Brit? Robyn Hood? A Viking? :)
Can you clarify why? I believe native anything is a flawed concept since a human, let alone an entire ethnicity, does not grow from the soil. Populations have moved, migrated and settled throughout our entire history.
Because DHH openly calls for murder of "immigrants" (read: non white people, even if they've been there for decades and been more productive members of society than DHH has ever been.), and it's not even a dogwhistle anymore.
>When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.
(in addition, the concept of Native <any european country> is nonsensical. Europe is at the confluence of migrations and has been for millenia. Attributing "whiteness" as a distinctive attribute of europeans is at best ignorant, and at worst another racist rally point. Go tell the greeks they're white, see how they like it.)
Americans have a problem understanding this because race and racism is so embedded in their culture. I just been reading and hearing about American *historians" who claim "Anglo-Saxon" is a racist term (in the context of discussing medieval history) because they anachronistically see it through the modern American lens of "whiteness" that is a result of American history and politics.
Isn't DHH just not being nice?
Oh no, it only works one way. When one starts signaling virtue, there's nothing wrong he can possibly do
It can be perfectly reasonable to remove people who are being completely inappropriate and/or egregiously insensitive. I think reducing it to simple politics is a distraction though. At the end of the day, people who are making everyone around them uncomfortable and causing everyone else to feel excluded/hated/marginalized probably deserve to learn that behavior is not tolerated, because that's often one of the only things that can get it to change.
Their opinions don't have to be political and your opinions don't have to be political. If someone is making the space worse for everyone, then maybe they're not good for the space. Maybe the space is not good for them. You would be doing good for both sides by stopping them from harming the space, and stopping the space from further enabling the problematic behavior.
I have personal experience with not changing until it became clear enough that certain behavior was driving away everyone and everything I care about. It didn't matter to me how much people told me it was bad, or tried to convince me to stop. What worked was seeing people leave over it, over and over, until I couldn't take it anymore. I had to change. You would be helping these kinds of people, and the community at large, by seeing to the consequences of their actions.
What if the space becomes a bit of an echo chamber when it comes to some topic and a person shows up with wildly different views, asks sharp questions and it becomes clear the community not used to having its beliefs argued doesn't have good answers? Negative valence arises through no fault of anybody. I've seen this happen multiple times. Utilitarian solution would be banning them, but it feels unjust.
I think the manner in which you ask the questions is important, but I also think that community response is important too. Some questions just could be phrased a lot better, and some communities just could be a lot friendlier to curiosity.
The right solution for that specific situation varies:
- if the questions are valid but they're just phrased in a very uncomfortable way, I'd like to see someone work with them on how to ask better. Note that by "better" I don't mean that there's an objectively better or worse way in general, but just that some communities are friendlier to different approaches, and for example, you can often get a lot more mileage out of trying to understand someone's current approach first, rather than immediately asking why they don't use yours, or immediately raising a bunch of issues you see with it. I may be misunderstanding what you mean by "sharp", but I've seen and helped with this before.
- if the discomfort just comes from generally questions existing or alternative views being expressed at all, then sometimes the community's just not a good fit for those views. Some communities are pretty closed to alternative approaches, and sometimes that's just the way it is. I mean, the way you describe an "echo chamber" can of course imply that it's pretty harmful to its participants (one example is polarization on social media), but you can't always just invade those spaces and expect to change the status quo. You can't help everyone, and a lot of people feel insulted when you even imply you might know better. Sometimes, outsiders just stop asking questions or expressing alternative views at all, just to avoid being ejected (one example is how cancel culture can be incredibly harmful to developing minds). I think that should be avoided if possible, of course... trying to fit into a group that doesn't accept you is usually a recipe for disaster, especially if you've already established things about yourself that they have problems with.
There are probably more variations on this, but those are the two biggest possibilities I see. Either the behavior of the individual is a problem, and should be addressed (there's usually no need to remove them immediately, if there's a way to address the behavior instead), or the behavior of the community is a problem, and the individual might be better off looking elsewhere.
Why is your bar that they must be hurtful to everyone? What do you suggest to do when they direct the same behavior only a certain group in the space? You say that it does not have to be political and I agree, but what if it is? What if they see that group as a legitimate target for political reasons?
It's easier to make my point about behavior that is unquestionably harmful, like what's discussed in the article. Nothing I said can't extend to less clear-cut cases; honestly my entire point is that you should weigh decisions like this based on whether behavior is harmful to the community (or vice versa) rather than based on either side's "politics".
> What if they see that group as a legitimate target for political reasons?
It doesn't matter. I wouldn't engage with whether or not they think they're acting in a justified manner. If the behavior won't stop, the behavior is harmful, and the community would be better off without it, then sometimes you just have to kick someone out.
The reason why I say politics are a distraction is because I don't think you need to bother to explain that someone is politically incorrect or how you are less so. You can, but none of that is actually relevant in a majority of cases. Removing someone from a community is not about being more correct or about them being incorrect, it's for the good of the community (and/or the good of whoever you're removing).
For the better part of two decades I frequented a particular forum, and one of the most common reasons people tended to eventually get banned wasn't because of any particularly egregious political opinion, but because whatever opinion they held they tended to turn every thread they participated in anywhere into either a thread about that or a thread about them.
I've got a family of all colors (with half-black and half-asian nephews) and we speak many languages at home.
I do believe however we should be allowed to criticize religions and I do believe we should be allowed to criticize religions without being labelled "racist".
For example I'll point out the incredible hypocrisy of the left in the west who raised me, in an atheist school, with the notion that christianity was a scam and where christians were being made fun of all around me (by my parents, by my friends, by my friends' parents, by my teachers, etc.).
And that same left in the west, who celebrates that christianity lost its grip on the people, is now bending over backwards over islam.
Another gigantic hypocrisy in Europe (and in the UK) is that free speech is not a given. And hateful speech is definitely not allowed... Unless it's hate speech protected by the fact that it's in a religious book.
And another, totally off the chart, hypocrisy in the west is the feminist and the LGBTQ2S+ movements who are constantly after heterosexual male... Unless they're muslims, in which case it's suddenly all cool to put a veil on your wife(s) (polygamy being allowed, but only one man / several women and not the other way round: oh the hypocrisy here) and daugther(s) so that they're safe from the looks of other men.
It's a very long article saying that people who oppose islam are basically deranged.
Now I do profundly believe that unless you've read the quran, you shouldn't comment on islam.
I did read it and I suggest you do the same and then make up your own mind.
Now as I'm not nice I'll put it blundly: I think the quran is just as bad as Hitler's Mein Kampf. But because it's "religious", the hate speech it contains is protected and allowed.
And we're basically at a point in Europe where if you point out that the quran is full of hate speech, your criticism is considered hate speech. But the real hate speech is totally cemented and impossible to attack because it's "religious".
You should at the very least read the quran and see where I'm coming from.
The world CIA factbook (not published anymore) estimated that 30% of all muslims worldwide had extremist views. I understand that 30% is not 100%, but 30% of nearly 2 billion people is a very big number.
To be very clear: either the muslim beard or the veil are already extremist readings of the quran and its hadiths.
Go read the book for yourself.
It is not normal that after 1200 teenagers who were dancing at a music festival were slaughtered by islamist terrorists, a big part of the world celebrated.
We're talking about tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of people who were genuinely happy that "evil jews got what they deserve" because it was "justified resistance".
I'm not talking about what came next: I'm against killing people, no matter who does the killing.
Now I'm not saying that that UK dude who wants to "ban islam" is a good person.
But there's really a very big spread spectrum between "ban islam" and "there's zero problem with islam growing in the west".
And there's definitely an issue when speech is censored, but the absolute worst form of hate speech is protected because it's a religious holy book.
Go read the quran, now.
I think you’re mistaking “agreeing with Islam” with “standing against prejudice.”
No liberal I know agrees with the tenants of Islam. But they might have Muslim friends who catch a lot of flak for no reason other than belonging to an outgroup.
> They accused me of being 'political' – the very thing an open source project shouldn't be, I'm told. It only divides people. Let's just focus on the technology. Surely we can all get behind building amazing, fast, cool websites!
I would argue that picking an obviously Nazi-coded avatar is in itself political. It is a deliberate decision to select such an avatar. Nobody picks that symbol by accident. They know exactly what it signals, they know how people will react, and they know that the laissez-faire culture of tech is a perfect ground to normalize this shit.
If there is a not being political rule, then it is perfectly reasonable to ban people like this because they obviously are political.
> DHH, you're not welcome in the Nuxt community, because you say that Black people aren't 'native Brits' and call for the mass deportation of 'gypsies'.
100% agree. Niceness is NOT for white supremacists, and no, I am not debating whether DHH's politics are fascist-adjacent or what % of them are pure fascism.
DHH's politics and the man himself will get only shunning and ridicule from me. He's, after all, one of the weird little guys of FOSS: https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/
I have no idea why I clicked on that link, but honestly, it must be exhausting to try to care about that stuff consistently. Maybe I’ve gotten old, or have other priorities in life, but I can’t think of being so much into anyone’s yet alone FOSS people’s lives/choices/politics/etc.
Half of these people are trying to actively make life worse for you, or someone you know. We care about that stuff because otherwise people like DHH will want to get you shot if you're black, or people like Stallman will want to sexually harass you if you're a woman.
If you have the privilege of being able to forget about it: congratulations. If you're part of those potentially at risk: closing your eyes just makes their jobs easier.
Sure, but I kinda have other priorities in life which is more important to keep up, than FOSS influencers.
Your little unperson list loses all credibility when you include people like Louis Rossmann and Richard Stallman
Rossmann might be a useful tool in fighting against companies, that doesn't change the fact that he's a gigantic asshole who regularly harasses people he disagrees with. In the same way, if Stallman could stop eating his toenails in public and saying that Epstein's victims were totally willing, maybe he would avoid being on that list.
Where's the list for people who would compile and publish a list of people who believe things they don't believe and call them "weird little guys"?
Of course I agree with OP that one can't be nice to Nazis. But he should have also mentioned that one should not be nice to anyone who kills innocent humans. Not just the Nazis.
EDIT: is there something wrong with my statement? Don't be a coward and downvote silently. Tell me how what I wrote is wrong?
Some types of mass murder is justifiable if it's done by the correct people
I don’t have much nice to say about this article.
Comparing DHH to a Nazi, which you obviously intended by choosing your “unrelated wink wink start example, is just bullshit.
“Black people are not native Brits” so very obvious facts are now radical?
White people are not allowed to have a homeland.
> 'unaware.' [...] I think that is a little bit of what it is to be nice.
Me, not being nice: Don't use language to be priggish and confuse. We got enough of that going already.