Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH
407 points by diktomat
407 points by diktomat
Thank you for writing this. It is, of course, deeply sickening, but there is a certain bleak, absurdist comedy in watching a dozen tech executives hand over twelve million dollars to a man whose remaining grand technological contribution is essentially vibecoding a Linux distribution because he felt the existing ones were insufficiently hostile to the concept of gender-neutral pronouns. After he burned all of the goodwill of the Ruby community and effectively destroyed the reputation for Ruby on Rails for having a nice community.
The fact that DHH looked at a march of actual fascists and called it "heartwarming" tells you everything you need to know about the spiritual poverty of these people. They have all the money in the world, and yet they are so profoundly bored and fragile that they’ve decided to wage war on basic human decency under the guise of "being apolitical."
At least I get to shut down a lucrative 1Password contract at work, so that's something.
While I wince at the depressing landscape of people behaving "apolitically", as they euphemistically call it, as an alternative to human decency, I can't help but ask.
Why use 1Password? It's a closed-source cloud solution. Perhaps that's okay in non-cryptographic contexts, but a closed-source cloud solution with malicious intent can cryptographically decrypt anything they want, provided they design a well-obfuscated client and cover their tracks well.
I know that FOSS alternatives have their own share of issues, but I don't understand the technical motivation of choosing cloud-based proprietary secrets infrastructure.
Not everything has a technical motivation. I don’t want to add “running a password manager for more than 10,000 people” to my list of responsibilities. I want to sign a contract and let that be their problem.
Bitwarden lets you do that, though. You don't have to run Vaultwarden unless self hosting is important to you.
It does, but the original comment was
Why use 1Password? It's a closed-source cloud solution.
which does, effectively apply to the typical way you'd use Bitwarden. If the "out" (self-hosting) is infeasible or unlikely, then in "1Password vs Bitwarden", the open-source hosting option is irrelevant.
Bitwarden's clients are open source. Which doesn't make tampering impossible, but where it's almost trivial with proprietary clients, it's near-impossible with FOSS clients, and also really easy to get caught too.
With an ideal client, the worst a cloud provider can do is corrupt your data and compromise your metadata. Bitwarden likely isn't an ideal client, but it's at least GPLv3. That alone makes them better than 1Password on technical terms in my book.
(In non-technical contexts, I'd rather put my passwords in a text file than use 1P. The text file at least can't possess corrupt motivations.)
Nothing is perfect, but 1Password has really good UX and one of the better security track records. Their (reasonably well documented) security model doesn't completely preclude pushing a malicious client update to steal secrets, but I suspect it would be challenging to do without someone noticing.
1Password has really good UX
I'm sorry but you just can't say that 1Password has good UX.
Watch this:
This started happening all the time, and their technical support refuses to acknowledge there is an issue. It has so many bugs, and, for example, if you try to log into Discord, it will fill in your username instead of email.
I am so frustrated with 1Password.
Cross-platform. I use Apple's built in password manager but it's unusable on Linux. Every corporation is going to need a solution for Mac/Windows/Linux.
KeepassXC is cross-platform. The real reason for something like 1Password is convenience.
The hard problem that a solution like 1Password, LastPass, Bitwarden etc. solves is sharing passwords. Sharing between computers, sharing between people, sharing between organizations.
KeepassXC solves the easy problem of being a GUI which lets you access stored passwords. It doesn't solve the hard problem.
I've solved this problem on my end through Syncthing, which lets me share the Keepass file across hosts. This setup breaks fairly often and I fully understand why others don't do it.
Yeah, I love that solution for sharing a small password database with my wife but I can imagine it would get unpleasant quick if we had more than two people or made a lot of edits.
There’s nothing wrong in using a cloud-based proprietary password manager, if the underlying technology is sound. I don’t like their contribution to Omarchy though.
Fascism aside (not a small thing to ignore I guess), why can't a real distro like Arch get this kind of monetary support? Do we need influencers and celebrities to drum up hype for the actually important work that they and others like them do?
I suppose because the rich technofascists are all buddies.
But also, Arch has had some funding from Valve. Not quite 12 million dollars, but still.
Fascism aside (not a small thing to ignore I guess), why can't a real distro like Arch get this kind of monetary support?
I mean... when the options are:
and someone goes with the second one, it's a reasonably safe assumption that it's not the "Arch" part that's being deemed worthy of the donation but the dotfiles, scripts, and political agenda.
Looking at the high-tier donor list I'm going to go on a limb here and say it's probably not the dotfiles and scripts, either.
This isn't exactly novel or specific to the world of software. Extremist sympathisers at both ends of the political spectrum are sponsoring every sort of cultural activity all over Europe, too. The problem they're solving isn't that there's a shortage of book publishers or concerts to go to, for example -- they're sponsoring "alt" publishers or bands because those are excellent ways to bring more people into the cause. Teenagers and young adults who make the software they use their whole personality are a recruitment target of considerable value.
Investing 12M in fundamental technology doesn't have much of a ROI. Investing in future political capital is a very different story.
This was a good comment, then you had to play the "both sides" hit. Does it happen? Sure. At nearly the same scale? Hell no.
I'm not trying to play any both sides argument. I haven't commented on how much either side is doing it and, in any case, I disavow political extremism of either flavour -- as far as I'm concerned any amount of it is too much.
That being said, since I kind of understand the context this is coming in: what I also disavow is painting basic social policy topics, like access to healthcare or education, as a matter of "political extremism".
So when I'm saying "extremist sympathisers at both ends of the political spectrum" I literally mean that -- people who see violent repression against others as valid goals or means of political activity.
I'm not saying you're wrong about scale. FWIW I don't think you are, but I haven't looked into reliable data so I don't know if it's just my bias here.
What I'm trying to explain away is the software and tech bro exceptionalism, because I think it's the root of many of our industry's failures -- both technological (that's why we keep writing bad software) and social (the subject of this topic being just one of them). It's a common mechanism that predates the modern software industry, that's all.
Thank you for expanding on your thoughts. I am in agreement; it's a frustrating trope online that people use coded language to hide their real opinions and everything feels like a dog whistle because you can't tell what someone is actually saying versus signaling.
I know :(. It's making online discussions really annoying. There's every flavour of "just asking questions" and "I'm not political" so every time someone just suspends judgement on something -- not even because they're not ready to pass it, sometimes just because it's not directly relevant to what they're discussing -- it looks like they're dogwhistling or trying to lie by omission.
This was a really excellent dialogue you had, I am super impressed by how you managed to sympathize after that initial decisiveness. Well done you two!
Same as @Halkcyon :). For one thing, I completely understand where they're coming from. 90% of the time when you see someone online saying "at both ends of the political spectrum", one of the things they're talking about is nowhere near an end of the political spectrum and they're building a strawman. So I didn't even read that as overly decisive. If I'd read that from a stranger there's a non-zero chance I would've questioned it as well.
For another: it's easy for me to be sympathetic to @Halkcyon's guardedness not just because I understand it, but also -- and, I guess, primarily -- because I don't have to look moderate while also signalling what I actually think but can't say out loud to people who are "in" on it. I can just say what I think. If someone says or implies I hold some views that society at large hopefully still finds abhorrent, I don't have to get defensive about it, I can explain exactly how and why I don't hold them, in terms that should be clear and unambiguous to anyone reading in good faith.
That's part of why I find this entire debate around what this or that Internet-famous person actually means to be completely farcical FWIW. For an industry that prides itself on the highest standards of plausible deniability in security context it sure looks like a lot of us are willing to play along with piss-poor standards of plausible deniability everywhere else.
I don't want to be decisive. I want to be sympathetic, but for my stated reason and @x64k's reply, it's hard not to feel guarded when engaging with strangers online.
(Replying jointly) Yes, we are less sympathetic in these spaces... It is as @x64k says, "piss-poor standards of plausible deniability".
I think of my favorite communities; they're kind, gentle ones where feelings take precedence over (technical) matter. The act of programming is something that really engages with that: you are sympathizing with your collaborators in a codebase.. You have to find mutual understanding with past selves and stranger colleagues. It is some of the most deeply-nested complexity around in my life, and I suspect in many others'.
Kindness is a virtue that does not naturally extend from disembodied words on a screen, or deadlines & a git diff that makes no sense to you and would be nicer to reject. This makes it all the more important to be kind. I want to remember that.
I think of my favorite communities; they're kind, gentle ones where feelings take precedence over (technical) matter.
^ this. If I just wanted technical purity I'd stick to my Emacs window and not talk to people at all. If I'm going to socialize I prefer I do it properly, not as an excuse for trading code.
My experience in the industry has been along the same lines. Once the good faith threshold was crossed, the best predictor I've found for the quality of the engineering work we did in any team I've worked in was the ability to spare other people dread, angst, and embarrassment. That made engineering critique natural and productive, rather than cramped and needlessly competitive. It reliably brought out the best in us.
So when I'm saying "extremist sympathisers at both ends of the political spectrum" I literally mean that -- people who see violent repression against others as valid goals or means of political activity.
If by "violent" we mean stuff like hitting people, starving people, exploiting people... There's way less of that on the left than there is on the right. Now the radical left does support significant redistribution, often to the point of putting a hard cap on how much fortune anyone may amass. Which if applied would result in taking most of the stuff owned by some people.
And of course, that level of redistribution is depicted as "violent" by the conservative side. I mean, I've heard TV presenters compare the Zucman tax (basically a 2% annual property tax for the very richest) to "decapitation", I kid you not. I guess they'll call a cap on individual fortune a genocide of the wealthy, and compare it with the Holocaust?
Conversely, some see little violence with kicking up to millions of people out of the country: we're just showing them the door, putting them back were they belong. It's not our fault their country of origin is a war ridden corrupt backwater were your best options often are the mines, the rifle, or the brothel, right? Riiight?
The way someone frames violence, and implies its prevalence on each side of the political spectrum, is pretty indicative of where one is on that spectrum. This comment is no exception of course.
Like I said above, I have a feeling that this is true, but I've never looked at reliable data, so I don't want to call it based just on what I see on my "slice" of media. Traditional media aside (where media economy makes the figures clear and there's hardly any credible left-leaning media left) it's always hard to say how much of what you see is representative of large-scale trends, and how much is just a combo of the algorithm + what you're willing to curate.
There's an additional complication to it in terms of my own biases: despite being its unapologetic adherent, I also think it's important for the European left to confront its demons and its past on a permanent, active, and critical basis, because I grew up in Eastern Europe, so I know its dogwhistles from experience, not from history books, and I'm acutely aware of its failures, its uncanny ability to relativise, excuse or deny violence, and the ease with which it can meet the far right in the middle. But that also means I'm more suspicious of it.
What you're saying matches my experience, but I do not trust my own observations enough to pass more universal judgement here.
(Edit: and, to be clear -- my remark above wasn't based solely on suspicion. I've seen active, real and contemporary calls for political violence in my algorithm bubble or among acquaintances, for example. I know of violent groups that aren't across the center from me, too. So while I don't trust my observations enough to comment on relative scale, I am not working from a position of purely historical doubt.)
There's way less of that on the left than there is on the right.
Interestingly it seems the opposite in Spain currently.
In that framing, I believe the spectrum has more then just two "ends".
They mostly tend to gravitate towards one side of it, though.
In the US these transfers from the uber wealthy to the merely wealthy are akin to the Saudi kings giving huge allowances to the minor princes. The donors despise many of the recipients and they know full well that the money will be spent on a music video shot in the desert where they ghost ride their decked out Mercedes with a jaguar in the passenger seat. They do it because it is the easiest way to give the illusion that the non-wealthy could also join the club if they are onboard with the social guidance of those at the top.
I think this is one of the most interesting posts in this discussion, even if I'm not sure I agree with it entirely.
I think the key thing is that for all of the people on the list, a million is not a particularly big sum of money. They're not meaningfully investing in Omarchy. It's an amount equivalent to what I might give to a coworker's charity, even if I don't particularly believe in the charity, and am not friends with that coworker after office hours.
Which is of course a problem in itself, because on the scale of an open source software project, twelve million is a lot of money.
They're not investing in the Linux distro. They are investing in DHH and his marketing ability. Omarchy's getting a fair amount of attention this month thanks to his promotion (including some undisclosed paid promotion, if the rumors are right).
It's frustrating because after many years of jokes, Linux is finally getting some real traction as a desktop and gaming OS. This is the perfect time for something like Eazel. Just not on a crummy technical foundation built by a white supremacst.
So dhh claims he contacted Arch to collaborate and they declined to work with him. If they had taken him up on his offer, my guess is he would have sent funding their way.
On what do you base that guess?
Based on https://x.com/dhh/status/2092197167662309886?s=61
I've never had success reaching anyone from the Arch or AUR teams to support them. If anyone could facilitate direct contact, I'd love to be put in touch. I think we could achieve great things together. The line is open with david@omarchy.org ✌️
He wanted to talk to the Arch people. They refused.
And on https://x.com/dhh/status/1965671630585430115?s=61
Cloudflare is hosting the ISO, the bespoke package repository, and the Arch mirror we're running. It's Cloudflare all the things!
He wanted to support the Arch package repository by serving it with Cloudflare. They refused. He set up a mirror. Even that helps them out by reducing the traffic burden on their servers.
And https://x.com/dhh/status/1962412331234672828?s=61
Since the DDoS attacks on Arch and AUR started three weeks ago, it's been a tough battle for the volunteer maintainers to keep it up. Absolutely despicable attacks on open source infrastructure. Offer to help still stands! But Omarchy also had to keep moving.
He repeatedly offered to help them. They refused.
He wanted to support the Arch package repository by serving it with Cloudflare.
Furthering the centralization of the web and increasing the dependence of Arch in a for-profit company that has repeatedly been shown to be a bad actor is not helping.
I knew someone would say that 😂
Look, you don't have to like it, but CDNs are here to stay. Everybody expects fast downloads from approximately everywhere in the world. Where do you think most packages on the internet are served from? Cloudflare is already involved in some way or the other.
I mean, desire is the origin of suffering, yes, but the path to cessation of suffering is cessation of desire...
Sorry. I know that's a pretty oblique thing to say here, though I do intend it as an answer. It's been a long day of reading all the comments in this thread and I admit to being somewhat drained by it; this seemed like a harmless way to let off some steam...
Totally, I get it. Not expecting or wanting fast and reliable package downloads, and being ok with package repositories being DDOSd all the time is definitely an alternative to having large CDNs like Cloudflare.
On a slightly tangential note, I once had a discussion here about GPL and why they don't like it even though it uses the copyright system to force a fair playing field, and their argument was they'd rather tear down the global copyright system than have to deal with GPL. In retrospect, maybe they work for an LLM company! 😂
Based on x.com/...
So we're supposed to go from this discussion on "Normalized Fascism" and click on a link to an actual Normalized Fascism site?
The irony writes itself.
You don't have to click on anything, I've quoted the full and exact content of the tweets at those links. All you have to do is read my comment.
He wanted to support the Arch package repository by serving it with Cloudflare. They refused. He set up a mirror. Even that helps them out by reducing the traffic burden on their servers.
Arch's mirrors are the usual cornucopia of university, non-profit, ISP, etc run servers around the world. Same way Debian, FreeBSD, and so on are served. There is a single master server that the mirrors get their data from but it's firewalled off from everyone else.
Arch as distro / collective of people with commit access to the base/extra repos, or the devops team would only lose volunteer work if they were to replace all of that with Cloudflare. Besides, they already do have a global mirror served by a fairly big CDN: https://mirror.rackspace.com/archlinux/
You are changing the question from why can't Arch get that kind of funding to why can't DHH fund share some of it's funding to Arch.
In the second scenario DHH gets influence over Arch. As a sibling post mentions it points to the political will behind the donation to the Omarchy foundation.
Why can't Arch get that funding directly: because the donors don't know the Arch people. They're not Internet personalities. They don't have relationships with these donors. And they don't click with the Arch team's goals and aims (to be an ultra-configurable, no-nonsense distro for Linux aficionados who like to customize). They know dhh, they like dhh, and they're excited about dhh's goal of making a Linux-based desktop OS that can bring new people into Linux.
if dhh gets 'influence' over Arch (doubtful, but for the sake of argument), what do you think happens then? Does he use his 'influence' to force them to do something they don't want to? Does he make demands of these open source maintainers? Does he threaten to withdraw funding and hang the threat over their heads?
In the history of his work in open source, can you point to any time dhh has behaved like this, ever? He has had considerable influence in the Ruby community for a long time. Has he ever forced the Ruby team to do anything they didn't want to with the threat of defunding?
After decades of work, you think he's suddenly going to behave contrary to his whole open source history and strongly expressed opinions (open source is a gift), because he has influence over Arch?
I’m surprised Felix (Pewdiepie) hasn’t given, if Arch really needs funding (?), since he used to give decently. His Arch videos were quite popular.
Just for completeness sake & context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PewDiePie (2017–2018: Media controversies and formatted shows)
"Apolitical" has never meant a lack of politics. It's meant politics that current power doesn't have to defend.
A useful signpost for future discussion of politics in Lobsters.
There is a difference between stating that this site is apolitical and saying "Some things that are off-topic here but popular on larger, similar sites: […] defining the single morally correct economic and political system for the entire world […].".
My more pragmatic complaint is that DHH is a linux noob. Why would I trust him to make a good linux distribution? The only distinguishing features I see are i3 installed by default & basecamp/hey plugs. Boring!
Or, hear me out on this, in the face of his surpassing awfulness we don't need to debate his taste in window managers. You don't need a "pragmatic" reason to hate fascists! They're bad people!
I think the generic steelman response to this would be that someone who isn't locked into a particular way of doing things is more likely to be open to thinking outside the box and trying new things, rather than maintaining a fixed mindset or leaning too hard on tried and tested tools. Of course it depends on the goal of the distribution, e.g. if it's meant to serve as a creative playground to experiment with radical new ideas that incorporate emergent tech. Even if such an endeavor would likely end up in failure, it could spawn interesting innovations that spread to other distros.
It would actually be interesting to see some funding go towards new research and experimenting within the desktop space, but I don't think Omarchy is that. Fuck just writing that is bumming me out. Imagine a few million dollars and a bunch of top tier researchers just trying out every single unhinged idea they have for a few years.
It's actually quite astonishing how little meaningful innovation and experimentation is happening with this newly emergent technology despite the trillions of dollars invested. Every major company is attaching an AI tumor to their existing products and calling it a day. It feels like we're living in an afkbrain reality.
He also chose arch as base, an absolute teenager choice. Also, i3? Not even sway?
I wouldn't go with teenager. SteamOS and the initial release of Asahi were based on Arch, with some quite serious people making those choices.
Fair, Arch does have good things from engineering standpoint, we'd need to know concrete reasons for the decision.
I was stretching of course. By teenagers I mean people who are just excited about Arch for superficial reasons, and want it everywhere.
It's extremely worrying. This seems like a pretty recent trend too; open source has always had a problem with some members having bad politics, but I don't recall seeing companies throwing money at fascist software projects like this before. Things are changing, and not for the better.
The part about this I really don't get is Framework. What do they get out of allying with this side of politics? A significant portion of their value proposition is their perceived ethics and pro consumer political stances. Isn't their primary audience people who find fascism distasteful? Do they think they can make up for lost anti-fascists by becoming the go-to fascist computer brand? Or is Nirav Patel just a bit of a fascist himself?
I think Nirav sees all these public-facing open-source figureheads having fun and wants to be part of their in-group. That and a bit of networking.
The part about this I really don't get is Framework.
The odd thing is that they weren't even included on the annotated list. I know they've given hardware and youtube time to omarchy in the past, but I haven't seen them do that lately, and they haven't appeared in the new list of donors. But they were given a throwaway mention with no citation. @brennan : can you shed light on why they were included in this piece?
Thanks. I was hoping for something more recent, as I'd kind of got the impression that they'd learned not to do that again, as evidenced by the fact that they're not in this list of 12.
I do still hold the things you linked against them, but I really hope it was "new company, needs to learn" mostly because I want the repairable laptop story they're pitching to be something I can eventually support.
I go by the most recent communication from them, which is public support and then defensiveness on their forums. They're free to communicate something else if they wish to change their perception, but from what I know, they haven't.
That's totally fair. I guess I'm not expecting a statement from them so much as improved behavior, which I'd find almost-but-not-quite as satisfying.
That's not how cancelling works. You just yell at people until they agree with your perspective and stop supporting the people you don't support. Nothing short of a Maoist struggle session will get anybody off of this list.
Please stop being a coward. Tell us your actual views. Nobody is "yelling at people" for no reason here, and implying that they do is an extremely cowardly way to argue against one set of views without acknowledging your own.
Here is a position.
Charlie Kirk was a good person who held reasonable and well-reasoned views. They are views that an intelligent person can hold, or oppose, but are not outside the window of rationality.
He's included on the original list in the original post and my comment marked Troll because the fascistic anti-fascists are in apology-not-accepted territory. We equate holding positions with killing people and thus being eligible for being murdered yourself. Charlie Kirk gets to be a fascist based on hazily remembered talking points that no longer resemble what he ever said.
So now I've shared one of my actual views.
What will you do with that?
Thank you. It is now clear that we have fundamentally incompatible views. He's a person who dedicated his life and career to, among other things, strip LGBTQ people of their rights; that's enough proof for me. I don't know what apology you believe he has made which hasn't been accepted, I can't recall hearing him apologize for anything.
I hope your political ideals lose. I don't believe your views ought to be represented on lobste.rs. I don't believe further conversation will be fruitful.
But thank you for helping me steer clear of Void Linux in the future.
Thank you for wearing your fascism on your sleeve.
It's the core theology behind "Apology-not-accepted"
Again, I haven't seen an apology. Not from you, not from Charlie. Feel free to post one and I may yet accept it, if I believe it to be sincere and to reflect a genuine change in your beliefs.
I have seen this inversion of accusation before. Also, you should read that piece. Once (or if) you did, I want to see a quote that, if not demonstrates, at least hints at fascism. And an explanation as to why. I expect you will need a good one.
Other commenters have already said what needs to be said about your terrible, bigoted opinions. I'm just chiming in to add that the "a-ha! you antifascists are the fascists after all!" canard impresses no one.
Charlie Kirk was a good person who held reasonable and well-reasoned views.
As a conservative and as a rationalist:
Conservatism is not the enemy. Liberalism is not the enemy.
Ignorance, selfishness, laziness, and cruelty are the enemy.
Lastly, this needs to be said: Violence is almost always the wrong answer. Charlie Kirk was not a decent human being, and his existence made the world a measurably worse place for other human beings, but none of that made violence against him acceptable in any way. If we allow ourselves to adopt violence as a means of achieving justice, we will have lost everything -- including justice.
Thank you for telling us outright that you're evil. I've been unsure for a while, it's good to have it confirmed.
I guess it's either that or you don't actually know anything about him and are just some kind of giga-contrarian praising him because it's the opposite of what everyone else is doing.
I think you're a bad human being and I hope at some point you'll see that yourself and change. I know it's possible.
A struggle session is no longer sufficient to forgive you; we are now in apology-not-accepted territory.
Thank you for sharing that essay. It puts language to a lot of the things I have been feeling recently.
As someone who previously happily used a Framework 13 (no longer), they have certainly ensured that I will never be buying from them again, and will be loud about why one should avoid them to anyone who mentions interest in their products around me.
My impression is that Framework (and similar organizations/people) simply don’t see or don’t care. They look at something like Hyprland and see cool tech innovation and don’t clock that the attitude of the maintainer or community is something that matters or is even relevant. Imo they’re not even close to considering the pros or cons of fascism, it’s just not on their mind at all.
They look at something like Hyprland and see cool tech innovation and don’t clock that the attitude of the maintainer or community is something that matters or is even relevant.
Maybe this is showing my age but… I’ve been on the internet long enough to remember the “on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog” meme and it’s been relevant most of my life. Prior to all this Omarchy stuff with DHH, the last name I can really remember associated with a particular Linux distribution is Patrick Volkerding (Slackware) from the last 90s/early 2000s when I ran that distribution and was a big fan of its packaging philosophy… but I couldn’t at all tell you anything about his personal politics.
I suppose not a Linux distribution but Theo De Raadt with OpenBSD is another name I associate with a particular BSD distribution, not because of his politics but because he’s kind of a dick / I rely on OpenSSH’s security ethos every day :).
Completely agree with everything here. I am a bit confused though. None of these people would give $1M to a real Linux distro and nine of them are going to get any value out of this one. So I guess they're giving to DHH because they're friends basically?
So I guess they're giving to DHH because they're friends basically?
Yes. Or they support his political ideology. Or both.
I like this article, I hope we can keep ethics in tech, especially as the aesthetic idealism of the bay area has gone by the wayside (save for fringe ethical altruists / folks that care more about alien invasion than, e.g. food safety).
But, I don't have the sense that moral gatekeeping works, or -- they maybe it doesn't work on its own. We built lots of "best practices" around holding safe spaces but generally, I don't feel more safe. And certainly the likes of DHH aren't suffering. (despite holding bad ideas, I have a hard time comparing zillionaire DHH with ex drug addict Andreas Kling.).
And -- I disagree with the call to action as well. "We must sacrifice convenience." I don't believe we can gather the solidarity to make this happen. I want a different call to action, something on the lines of, "We must attack the inconvenience". None of these behemoth rich companies are doing great work anymore. Their open source or at least benevolent competitors have mostly caught up. Anything we can do to close that gap, reduce switching costs, etc, might be able to hurt these companies' bottom lines.
He includes Framework as an evil company here. Framework has done some fantastic work, especially in maintaining older hardware. Their Generation 1 hardware, they support just the same as the brand new stuff.
Framework was included because of their own history and involvement with Omarchy - https://lobste.rs/s/ipy9xw/normalized_fascism_open_source_12#c_hjlzip.
That DHH is a racist should be pretty obvious from his recent posts - there's the one about so-called native Brits, which drew a lot of attention. There's another, more recent and even more openly racist post, comparing "gypsies" in Denmark to wolves whose population needs to be culled. This post, which for some reason escaped the attention of the dev community, demonstrates DHH's way of looking at humanity: so-called vicious, savage, non-native people (the wolves) are predating upon us poor innocent native whites (the sheep), and therefore we must fight them in order to eliminate the threat!
I find it quite illuminating that, just a 100 years ago, exactly the same kind of rhetoric was used against eastern European Jews who were fleeing persecution in Russia: "they don't integrate, they don't speak the language, they're dirty, they're raping our daughters!" We all know how that ended, but apparently "never again" applies only to Jews...
With that said, I take exception to the use of the "fascist" label, because it's not only apparently wrong in the case of DHH (I hadn't read anything to indicate that DHH supports fascism as an ideology,) but frankly I think it's also a way to silence and delegitimize anyone who might not agree with the post: "surely you can't not support our fight against fascists and Nazis!". In that regard I feel that the use of the term "fascist" is somewhat cynical, I think it's a sensationalist term, designed to provoke a strong reaction, and for virtue signalling. I think a better, more fitting title for the article would be "Normalized Racism in Open Source etc."
It is true that Fascism and Racism are related, but those are two different words that describe different social and political phenomena. And while fascism often utilizes racism for its ends, racism unfortunately is also a feature of democratic liberal societies. For racism to exist in a society, there doesn't need to be a fascist state apparatus, and there doesn't have to exist fascist political movements that take advantage of racist sentiments in the population.
Racism is a social disease. Our kids learn it unconsciously at school, from mass media, from us their parents, and from each other. Racism is endemic, it's everywhere, and it is our responsibility to understand its roots, how its spreads, how it's instrumentalized for political ends. It is our responsibility to act to eradicate it from our societies. I fear labeling someone a "fascist" for expressing racist views is counter-productive. It doesn't address the problem by its true name, and therefore its true nature, and it also risks putting off a lot of people who might otherwise take notice and join the cause.
This is a good and important article. We should address the issue of racism head on, especially when the person involved is a BDFL of a popular web dev framework. I'm not sure boycotting the person is the right solution, but I'm quite positive we should start by using the right words.
While I agree with you that the label of "fascist" gets used without understanding what fascism truly is, I disagree that this is one of those circumstances. I know we've disagreed in the past about this, but it's not "apparently wrong" (nor is it even outrageous or sensationalist) to call DHH out as a fascist for what he's written. Someone does not need to be part of some underlying/organized political movement; it's an ideology that often leads to political action. I know that there are some competing definitions of fascism, but IMO one of the better ones is from Roger Griffin, who defines fascism as a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism. That "As I Remember London" post from last year easily falls into that definition because it echoes that myth of a golden past, of London in the late 90s, and very quickly claims that London has strayed from it because “it’s no longer full of native Brits” in his view, citing statistical changes in London’s ethnic groups. This is an obvious and purposeful feint that equates “native Brits” with “white Brits” and falls into the fascist rhetoric of their national purity suffering as a result. DHH’s entire post is a sub-textual frame for the hope that Britain can experience a national rebirth and return to a time of white purity.
Thank you. It's always a pleasure when community members say these things so eloquently, so that mods don't have to. Moderation scales a lot better when we can count on that. <3
Palmiro Togliatti opens his Lectures on Fascism with a wonderfully succinct definition:
Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most imperialist elements of finance capital.
While he might not openly side with terrorist dictatorship yet, this is certainly latent in the things he does openly avow. The shoe fits.
Palmiro Togliatti
I was trying to find Pasolini's and Gramsci's definition of Fascism but couldn't find a definitive answer. Thanks for sharing!
In the West, fascism is often invoked as the ultimate form of evil. An image American culture has heavily enforced through Hollywood.
Politicians who openly admire Mussolini and other authoritarian regimes, try to distant themselves from the term in TV, which I always thought it is kind of... Funny?
I agree with everything you wrote. It's a purely fascist ideology that leads to political action. Unfortunately for us.
Europe has always had immigrants. Historically around 6% of the population were immigratnts, same as today. And, as you note, the post uses an extremely arbitrary definition of what constitutes a Brit. An obvious slippery slope that reminds heavily the atrocities of WW2.
The irony is that this comes from someone who spent much of his life benefiting from a multicultural society (the US) yet now wants to cut down the very tree he sits on: globalisation, open borders, etc.
I wonder if it never occurred to him that he isn’t really part of the US power structure, and that his friends might eventually ask the same questions about… Danes. Who are the Danes, anyway, and why should they get to keep their oil public? Are they commies?
I hadn't read anything to indicate that DHH supports fascism as an ideology
Well, he has never said he supports fascism, but then again he has never directly admitted to being a racist either. So clearly that cannot be the deciding factor, as him being racist seems self-evident to you. Both of these labels are still too far outside of the Overton window for all but the most fringe public figures to self-identify as either.
So let's instead look at what DHH is saying. He is advocating for Danish nationalism, for European countries to use the force of the state to conduct mass remigration and for Europe to regain its "Will to Power" and return to "The Good Times". He wants Europe to have independent weapons production and be "armed to the teeth". This is not some lone racist calling people slurs on social media, it is clearly fascist ideology. Strong national identity, national self-sufficiency, strength through unity, bellicism and palingenesis, these are fascist tenets. The outwardly racist stuff is just him testing the waters and engagement bating.
I agree with most, but wanting to have independent weapons production and be armed to the teeth when war is literally next door and you have a belligerent neighbour is not a good fascist signal. We are literally witnessing limitations of not having either.
Yes, in isolation it is useless as a signal. In combination with the rest I think it does add something to the picture.
I know that this is gonna be a fringe oppinion: I think that Michael Dell is still a billionair who sees his billionair status as a good and just outcome. I think that Dell is a supremacist who believes he is supperior to the rest of us. For this reason, I don't see this donation as surprising. I think this is one supremacist giving money to another.
Every morning that Dell wakes up a billionair and looks out at the troubles in the world and thinks his untapped power is OK, is a morning when Dell himself is just as much a supremacist as DHH.
I normally don't comment on threads like this, but I really hope people wake up and start donating to causes they care about. I recently donated a paltry $USD2,000 to various causes, some software.
Also check if your employer offers some kind of donation matching program. Where I work, we have Benevity for this purpose.
Concur. Most of us make far more than we need to survive, and there is a lot we can do in the immediate term to improve the world around us.
The concern about radical hateful views is valid, I think it deserves attention.
The problem with posts like this one is that it does stretch the definition of fascism too far to include anything that's not in line with author's left ideology. It erodes the difference between truly malicious bad guys, and someone who has a different political taste from you, was accidentally misunderstood or misinformed.
What was a great opportunity to have an honest, respectful and inclusive discussion becomes a provocative rant that only damages that discussion. If you're using "political right" and "political left" as synonyms for "good" and "bad", you're incapable of having a discussion, and you're the primary problem. Cheering for your ideology is not ethics discussion, it's just that, cheering.
Left and right are at odds, but neither is all good or bad. It's an eternal conflict between personal vs. collective, one's autonomy vs. public good, performance vs. fairness.
There's a general lack of understanding that all groups of cooperating humans have a wide variety of different opinions on things - but can typically agree on what they want to cooperate on. You don't necessarily have to agree with someone else's religion, style of dress, taste in music, or even unrelated politics. Especially when working with strangers over the internet that you never have to see in person.
Making inclusivity part of your group's values is very sensible. And I think some of the dispute boils down to whether requiring a positive affirmation of that inclusivity sabotages the conditions that make the cooperation work in the first place.
However, none of this applies to DHH, who knew exactly what he was doing writing his little piece on Roma people. He's provoking people on purpose.
I really dislike all of this. On the one hand you have people actively provoking by spouting their hateful politics in what ostensibly ought to be a (mostly) technical venue, and on the other hand you have people trying to character assassinate anyone who seems to even vaguely be on a different political wavelength than them.
And if you even suggest that tech should be free of politics, ho boy better hold on to your hat because there's a shitstorm about to descend on you from both sides.
character assassinate anyone who seems to even vaguely be on a different political wavelength than them.
No, I don't think that's what's happening here. I can happily coexist (in tech or non-tech related spaces) with folks of all sorts of political wavelengths. We can discuss and we can also agree to disagree on many topics such as environmentalism, social security, labor rights, education, use of AI, data privacy, urban planning and so on.
This is not what this is about. Fascism fundamentally seeks to unite an in-group in pursuing the elimination of an out-group which is thereby also removed from political agency altogether. There is no coexistence, no "agree to disagree" if you're on the receiving end of that.
I'm actually in favor of keeping public FOSS projects mostly apolitical, but there has to be a base consensus, and this base consensus has to include a full rejection of fascism. The same way that a public forum dedicated to "absolutely free speech with no restrictions" will eventually devolve to a cesspool of CSAM, if you make an "absolutely apolitical" space it will end up being a nazi bar, because no other space will take them.
In other words, we can have a "no politics" social norm, but not above all else. It's also socially unacceptable to be noisy in a movie theater, and that's a good norm. But calling out fascism is the equivalent of yelling "Fire! Fire! Fire!" when the theater is on fire. It is (to me) clearly more important than obeying the social norm.
My point about character assassination was referring to how Andreas Kling gets heaped on the same pile as DHH, just because they seem on "the other side" of the political spectrum. While DHH is loudly trolling the public with his thinly veiled nazi posts, it seems to me (at least from this description) like Andreas Kling just wants to be left alone and doesn't want to be dragged into a political correctness campaign.
It's all very much "if you're not with us, you're against us".
I also don't think it's especially effective or useful to respond with mach 10 aggro to every minor transgression. If I start with "you're completely wrong you fucking idiot" then you're not very likely to listen to anything I have to say, no matter how right it may be. In general being a dick to people tends to drive people away from your viewpoint.
You would have thought that after seeing Trump win a second time and seeing the rise of the far-right continue unabated in Europe, might spark a notion of "hm, maybe our strategy of attacking everyone with maximum aggression at the drop of a hat with zero nuance wasn't too effective, perhaps time to reconsider our approach a bit?"
That's a weird conclusion to draw from recent developments. No, being mean to people online is very very far from "attacking with maximum aggression". Compare this the way people responded to far-right movements in the 1930s and it's basically nothing. Also note that that particular historic event actually played a major part in stopping the rise of fascism in the UK.
Not everyone with some vague right-wing notions is Oswald Mosley looking to overthrow democracy. Lobbing everyone in one category with no nuance is exactly what me and sjamaan are talking about. You're doing it now. This is what we're talking about.
I have no illusions this will convince anyone, but I guarantee you that this sort of moral purity campaign of assholery does exactly nothing to advance anything and only serves to hurt your own cause. I think you seriously underestimate just how unpopular this is across the wider population and how badly it's turning many people off, including many people who are broadly on-board with progressive social causes.
Well, I have given a data point of something that has worked at least once. I am unaware of any recent or historical examples of a fascist popular movement being defeated through nuance, respect and rational debate, but I'll hear you out if you have any.
And absent any such evidence, is this approach actually a good idea or just a pleasant hope? I'm as conflict-averse as the next nerd, so I would love to believe in it, but right now I cannot.
To your point:
Not everyone with some vague right-wing notions is Oswald Mosley looking to overthrow democracy.
DHH is no Oswald Mosley, but he did support a violent white nationalist march in the UK where, among other things, Elon Musk called for a "dissolution of parliament", saying "whenever the next election is, it’s too long". I think his conduct is far closer to Mosley's than being publicly called a nazi online is to getting beat up in the streets.
I'm not talking about – much less defending – DHH or Elon Musk. You are twisting my words in to something I never said. I am literally saying that "DHH has crossed the line" in another thread here. I'm also not talking about fascist movements, but people who are vaguely right-wing such as Andreas. You keep trying to pull it back to that "they're all fascists" and my entire point is they're just not. There's even a difference between DHH and Musk, with Musk clearly being much worse (DHH "only" seems racist, as near as I can tell).
Almost all post-war social progress has come through debate, democracy, and at times compromise. Sometimes that debate has been harsh and forceful, but generally people have been able to say what they wanted without being lobbed in with the worst of the worst and being completely ostracised. Up to some limit, of course, but the limit is now so low that it's become counter-productive. There are degrees of things. "Arson, murder, and jaywalking".
I'm also not talking about fascist movements, but people who are vaguely right-wing such as Andreas.
Personally, I'm just taking Kling's support for DHH on his own word.
Musk clearly being much worse (DHH "only" seems racist, as near as I can tell).
Musk is just what DHH aspires to, as near as I can tell. Musk was able to get involved in helping a government do the kinds of things DHH says he wants a government to do.
To be clear, taking that action is worse than just saying shit, but the action Musk took matches the shit DHH was saying. I can't give any credit for that difference.
« and only serves to hurt your own cause »
I think this is an interesting position. I’ve seen this argument used countless times against anti-fascists and people who fight LGBTQ+ oppression and/or racism. Having the luxury of holding this position means that you are not concerned whatsoever with the direct consequences of the actions of the fascists, racists, and homophobes/transphobes. It has no impact on your daily life. This is such a privileged and narrow point of view. What we are talking about here is an urgent matter. It is an imminent and immediate peril that hovers some of us. In a few years, we might not have the right to express ourselves, go and be visible in the world, marry, bear children, raise those children, have the right to decent lives and dignity, drive a car, and so on. This is what this is about for some of us. Not just some debate on the internet. I say it again, immediate and imminent peril for our lives and dignity. How could we be hurting the cause by fighting thoroughly and fiercely against that? What kind of militants would we be if we were making any concessions with dignity?
And if you even suggest that tech should be free of politics, ho boy better hold on to your hat because there's a shitstorm about to descend on you from both sides.
I hope it's not "a shitstorm." But if, by "a shitstorm" you mean that people from both sides will disagree with you, well, that's true. Because tech is inseparable from politics. But there's quite a difference between polite (or even strident!) disagreement and "a shitstorm" in my view.
Because tech is inseparable from politics.
for i in *; do
grep -ci @dijit $i;
done
How political is this? Do you think I was thinking of anything political when originally writing it?
Or, is it possible that not everyone thinks beyond what they're trying to achieve and that sometimes what they're trying to achieve is political... As in, it's likely more the exception than the norm.
Most people just use tech to solve problems, sometimes that problem is getting paid, sometimes that problem is making sure people can communicate without government interference, and sometimes that problem is to see how many occurrences of their name there are in some files.
grep was invented to analyze The Federalist Papers, a somewhat political thing. Maybe you weren't thinking of anything political when writing this snippet, but there's plenty of politics that led to you being able to write those three lines you just did.
sometimes that problem is getting paid
"Getting paid" is rarely the end goal though, why is someone paying you to do that action? Why are they getting paid to pay you to do it? And so on. There'll ~always be something political if you yank the chain of whys hard enough.
Hell, why are you in a precarious situation that you consider "well, at least someone is paying me to do it..." to be a valid motivation for you to do it? That's also political!
I mean… yes… I suppose if you’re looking for it, “I go to work every day and get paid so that I can afford a house and food” could be considered political… I don’t personally see it that way, I see that as “I live in a capitalist democratic society and I’m totally fine with that”.
I don’t have any particular interest in changing that, nor, honestly, much at all about my local neighbourhood. If you really want to, you could say that that’s because I’m in a privileged position where I don’t have to spend much of my time thinking much about how I’d want my own life to be different. You’re welcome to think that, but I’m probably going to carry on just living my life and being OK with the fact that I do reasonably well in the society I was born into and don’t really have much to complain about.
Democracy is a political system. The idea that liking democracy isn't a political opinion seems very strange to me.
Sure. It’s not that I don’t think about the democracy I live in as a political system. It’s that I don’t think much about it at all.
I think it was Zizek (a leftist) who characterized totalitarianism as something that requires you to actively declare support for the party line (USSR, Nazis, North Korea). Not just disagreeing, but going "don't involve me in your politics, I just mind my own business, and no, I don't want supreme leader's portrait in my bedroom" makes you an enemy.
People who bash those who are asking to keep politics out may find they share something with the original fascists.
That "I think" is doing heavy lifting. Zizek would resent anyone claiming he uses the term "Totalitarianism".
Even if you were paraphrasing, his opinion is the exact opposite. In his view, authoritarian governments don't care how you feel about visiting your Grandma, just that you do it.
More charitably, there's a different between not caring about politics (the normal way to be tbh) and rejecting people pushing for change under the guise of calling their action "political" and the defense of the status quo "apolitical".
You're right, I probably quoted someone else.
I'm familiar with that famous speech about posmodernist father and visiting grandma, it was about authority (not only from government), I don't remember if he specifically called it authoritarian or totalitarian.
The quote (from someone else) I gave was about the difference between authoritarian and totalitarian. Totalitarian demands you constantly declare support for the ideology, while authoritarian tries to do it in subtle ways, and often even prefers that you stay out of politics and mind your own business while they tweak election procedures in their favour. USSR was totalitarian, Putin's Russia is authoritarian. The irony still holds: guys accusing others of fascism share the totalitarian approach with the fascists.
About your last point. When you don't want to care about politics and it's pushed onto you at the venues you care about and like the way they were without it, you can object to politics being there without objecting to the political people doing it elsewhere. It's even stronger when those are venues you own, like your repo. I think claiming that politics is not appropriate at a certain venue is closer to "keep me out of politics" than "I'm against the political change you're pushing, you should not do it anywhere". I can be fine with the change, just do it at your politics coference, lobste.rs post with a matching tag, not on my work desk.
I'm not familiar with the piece in question. I wrote the comment based on authors tone and some familiarity I had with other cases.
DDH may be a fascist or a white supremacist, but the article's exposition is so one sided and palpably dishonest that I don't see it as something that can help me know if he is. Which is unfortunate — if he was a white supremacist, proving that should have been easy in an honest way with all the ifs and buts in place.
Maybe I'll go and do my research to find out, but most likely I won't, it's just not that high up on my Todo list. What was a chance to tell people something the author finds important turned to a cheap act of farming approval from people who already agree with him.
I provided my views, as well as links to other people's analysis of DHH's own words. It was easy and honest.
It may have been honest in terms you honestly telling us what your final view is.
It's not honest as an ethics discussion: telling us why you had those views, why, say, I could adopt those views too, where those views are based on some universal ethical principles and where they're based on your tastes.
To me, the piece reads as taking your tastes and views and insisting on them being universal and self-evident. Also omitting important details and reservations that don't align (Vaxry case lacks some critical details, for example).
The problem with posts like this one is that it does stretch the definition of fascism too far
There was a post going around where someone said "1Password Supports the Ethnic Cleansing of Europe". The issue with this is that I really don't think 1Password is supporting that, but also that DHH is not either. I don't agree with DHH's political views and writings, but you need to perform quite a bit of willful misreading of what he wrote to assume quite such an extreme viewpoint.
A lot of the challenges with having a civil discourse right now is that a lot of folks all across the political spectrum are catastrophizing all the differences. I wouldn't be too surprised that if someone on the polar political opposite to DHH would find themselves in a room with him, would probably find more common ground than things that divide them.
DHH is not either. I don't agree with DHH's political views and writings, but you need to perform quite a bit of willful misreading of what he wrote to assume quite such an extreme viewpoint.
No, you don't. Read this piece.
He literally says:
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.
That is very directly supporting "removing gypsies," aka ethnic cleansing, in Europe.
We must mention DHH's tweet being angry because an AI denied to translate his post. If it was't wasn't for real, it would be top comedy.
I read his piece and it frustrated me. That said, the context of this piece is very clearly that DHH sees immigration of begging Roma to Denmark to be an issue and he wants to see them deported.
And on this particular topic, Non Danish Roma (eg: Spanish, Romanian etc.) that cannot sustain themselves in Denmark are can and are supposed to be deported if they no longer quality for Directive 2004/38/EC, Art. 7 back to their original EU country. If they are not EU citizens in the first place, they are unlikely to have any legal ground and can be deported.
There is an entire separate discussion to be had about what it means to be a foreigner or not, something I wrote about in more detail I really don't want to get into.
But what DHH asked for in this blog post in many ways is just asking for the execution of what legally is already supposed to happen. The largest number of deportees out of Austria are in fact to other EU countries. I'm sure it's not too different in Denmark.
Comparing human minorities to wild animals that need to be shot is at the very least a racist dogwhistle. Come on.
As I said I read his post and it frustrated me. I also wrote a response to one of his posts before. I don't support his views and I don't share them. But i still believe it's better to engage without quite as many emotions and without talking in extremes.
How do you engage with someone equating people to animals that need to be shot? And your response doesn't exactly read like you are in disagreement with him.
How do you engage with someone equating people to animals that need to be shot?
That is hard. One of the reasons I even decided to write that response to (his earlier) blog post is because it took me a while to reason through it. You have to start with the premise that the person on the other side actually has good intentions. Without that, it's going to be hard.
And your response doesn't exactly read like you are in disagreement with him.
I find that baffling considering you're replying to a comment of mine that literally links to a length post that disagrees with him.
That is hard. You have to start with the premise that the person on the other side actually has good intentions.
Are we reading the same thing? He is directly comparing, even equating, Roma to Wild Animals that cannot be controlled and take over spaces while using a racial slur for them all in the name of "self-preservation".
Where are the good intentions here?
I find that baffling considering you're replying to a comment of mine that literally links to a length post that disagrees with him.
Have you read your own post? You start by writing that you greately respect DHH and that you agree with his premise before writing long about how you disagree but that he has a point.
Where are the good intentions here?
I would say DHH falls into a similar trap that lots of people fall into: they grew up in a certain world that is rapidly changing, he's observing a failing Europe. Because he has children, he's thinking about that future and has some, from my perspective, quite misguided ideas about how to address them. But it comes from a place of caring. He might not extend that care to everyone, but it does not come without reason.
Have you read your own post? You start by writing that you greately respect DHH and that you agree with his premise
I agree with his premise that Europe has a problem ("Europe is in trouble and it needs to become much more capable of building"). It would be weird for me not to share that premise considering I have been vocal about sharing my experience of Europe's challenges on my blog. I disagree with his ideas that this has anything to do with foreigners, climate change let alone that you could solve any of Europes problems through deporation.
DHH is powerful, and with great power comes great responsibility. He's not some raving lunatic at the local pub; he's a rich and influential public figure. It is important and appropriate that we hold him to a higher standard and expect him to know better and do better. He should be processing his fears quietly and being much more careful what he says in public, and if he took greater care I don't think he'd hold the same views and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
But it comes from a place of caring
I'm sorry but wile you can defend any white nationalist arguments with this kind of line, you shouldn't.
This is basically defending from "the banality of evil". They were a nice person, a good friend, a pleasant neighbor, but also a genocidist. But hey, since they meant well, since it came from them loving their family, could it really be so bad that they were a Nazi?
but you shouldn't
maybe you should? I mean take for instance personal hero Daryl Davis who's a pretty famous black musician and has convinced hundreds of KKK members that they're wrong. (here's a nice radio piece about him).
I mean, maybe Daryl is also wrong. But are you aware of the efficacy of ostracism vs acceptance with regards to convincing anyone to change their mind?
Engaging with empathy someone directly or trying to change them can happen, and it is extremely difficult, but it won't happen on a comment forum trying to convince the rest of the people around that someone is doing something from "a place of care".
If someone on lobste.rs were to, in a thread that brought up someone who wasn't a famous programmer and was just a run-of-the-mill KKK member, and they said "well they did and fought for all these terrible things and did it from a place of care", would that be an effective tactic? What kind of change does it enable?
There is a lot of material out there on de-radicalizing hate. I've gone through a lot of it. I'm open to changing people and etc. But what we are seeing in this thread is not the right tactic.
love the framing of the simple forum reply as being, like ~80% showing off to everyone else. I totally buy that's a large problem with this type of discussion in this type of context.
I ... I do wish that for every dollar of anger we had against a villain, we had at least like 25 cents of sadness for the whole situation. When we start empathizing with villains, we start having better ideas about how to prevent the bad behavior.
it comes from a place of caring. He might not extend that care to everyone, but it does not come without reason.
So he cares only for his in-group? Isn't that generally a problem?
Why are you spending so much energy standing up for a very privileged man who can stand up for himself? Wouldn't it be better to stand unequivocally with the people that he's comparing to wild animals? You know, someone on Mastodon said, in response to your posts here, that you are a fascist. I think on important issues like this, clearly standing with the most oppressed people (which DHH is not) is more important than nuance or correctness on fine details.
"It frustrated me" is the same type of non-denial that Trump supporters use when he does something indefensible and they're not going to let it affect their support. It doesn't read as disagreement at all. Especially when followed by a "but" and an actual defense.
Most people here don't personally know DHH and aren't interested in being charitable to his fascist-shaped writing to try to stay on good terms with him or appease a social group that includes his supporters.
How did you manage to read my post and you walked away with the idea that I agreed with DHH? This is really quite baffling.
I didn't say you agree with him on this. But you're arguing in this thread that people are exaggerating his views, and you would prefer us to all shake hands and have a cordial discussion about whether Roma people are like wild animals with the "fuck you" guy. I just don't think your suggestion is productive either.
To continue my analogy, a lot of people "don't support" the various things Trump does but continue to normalize and vote for him anyway while making sad noises about it. By doing so they demonstrate that any moral line he has thus far crossed is not a deal breaker for them. Like it or not, the "you should have a polite chat with DHH" appeal you're making is basically the same thing.
Well for sure I do not agree with the idea that keeping a dialog open to people I disagree with can be seen as "doesn't read as disagreement at all". It just means I'm willing to engage in dialog. I happen to think we need more of this. I also don't have a problem talking to Trump supporters, but that won't make me agree with their views.
But you're arguing in this thread that people are exaggerating his views, and you would prefer us to all shake hands and have a cordial discussion about whether Roma people are like wild animals with the "fuck you" guy.
I think in an ideal world DHH gets to see that he's wrong in the way he both expresses himself, or in what his proposed solutions are. I just don't think that will happen because people throw ever escalating description of him into the ether. So yes, I do think people should discuss more but I think it's hard.
I think it's important to keep the dialog open because what else is the alternative? Surely our goal should be to leave the world behind a better place, and if nothing else then its precisely that the people with power and a platform should be encouraged to change their ways.
The alternative is to not try to change DHH's mind, which seems unlikely and tends to normalize him by being overly charitable, but to repudiate him and his abhorrent views and language. If you think that's counterproductive, that's fine, but I will say that I for one only heard about DHH's views because people were talking about them in a negative way and sharing that broadly - not because people were trying to politely engage him. So, the approach worked for me at least.
I also don't have a problem talking to Trump supporters
Edit: to be clear, I don't have a problem talking to Trump supporters either and know and am close with many of them. I also don't mind talking to someone who thinks DHH is a really cool guy. The analogy here would be more like talking to Trump himself and trying to keep a "dialog" to change his mind. I don't think that's likely to work out.
What's frustrating is this insistence on moderation and hand-wringing about how you disagree (but not too much! wouldn't want to be an extremist!) in the face of obvious racism.
Racist? Yes. As extreme as call for ethnic cleansing? No.
The "yes" part is the one that needs discussion and possibly an assessment. By calling it "ethnic cleansing", one replaces it with something it's not, and makes the core thing that needs assessment more difficult. Racism is bad. But there's different degrees of bad, and it's not a favour to anyone to exaggerate the degree here. Racism is bad enough.
Imagine how much clearer, less confused and less back and forth this branch would have been if nobody mentioned ethnic cleansing. "Here's a quote from DHH, it sounds racist." "Yeah, what a jerk." Point made, not much to discuss.
You are wrong. What you're saying is wrong. Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area. Saying that "When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them" is absolutely, 100% calling for ethnic cleansing of "gypsies", and those are DHH's exact words. He has called for ethnic cleansing, very directly.
No, it's not. The words are not what the message actually says, it's the meaning behind them. Your responsibility as a reader is to find the interpretation that was meant, not the first one that came to mind.
Is he literally proposing
# (a)
deport([x.ethnicity() == "gipsy" for x in country.population])
? This would also deport a naturalized gipsy who is a citizen, who leads an orderly life and behaves in public spaces in accordance with what DHH finds acceptable. And this would require some legal grounds to allow deporting your own citizens, which is impossible.
Or is he proposing to deport foreign citizens who don't follow what he thinks is a reasonable conduct in public places, i.e.
# (b)
deport([x.public_spaces_behavior() == "bad" and x.citizenship() == "foreign" for x in population])
? But he happens to choose racist phrasing and call such people gypsies, and ends up saying
# (c)
gipsy = lambda x: x.public_spaces_behavior() == "bad" and x.citizenship() == "foreign"
deport([gipsy(x) for x in population])
This interpretation is sensible, precisely because there is legal framework for deporting foreign nationals who fail to meet the expectations set for them by the immigration ministry.
The (a) would be a call to ethnic cleansing. The (b) is a normal right for any citizen, if their idea of acceptable conduct in public places is sensible. The (c) is a racist phrasing of (b), where he uses gipsy as a label for immigrants with bad conduct. Saying he meant (a) is hard to justify, you'd also need to believe that he's either preparing to turn legal system upside down or he's so stupid that he is not aware of how deportations work. I believe he said (c), and my verdict is this: he's guilty of choosing a racist label. What supports it is that, (c) without the racist phrasing is precisely (b), which is a normal, sensible opinion on immigration.
About the wolves analogy. When someone draws an analogy between X and Y, they're hinting at some very specific properties of X that they imply Y has. Wolves that are being shot have many properties, needing to be killed (according to DHH) is one, having fur is another, causing problems that need getting rid of is another. Which of these did he mean apply to gypsies? Hard to say from here. The rest of the speech does hint at causing problems that need a decisive solution, I buy that. The thing about needing to be killed has no other hints, so I'd buy it as much as I buy him implying gypsies are covered in fur.
The analogy is dehumanizing, and is racist. He could have chosen a ton of other things that cause problems that don't involve animals or killing, so he probably chose this one to be edgy and make people like you upset. I see two instances of being racist, and once instance of being edgy, but no calls for ethnic cleansing.
We have real displacements based on ethnicity in history, which were clear (a), not (c). However much I dislike racism, real calls for ethnic cleansing are orders of magnitude worse, we need to know the difference between the two, and should not call things (a) when they're actually (c).
DHH is a big boy. And he is, as far as I can tell, neither stupid nor inarticulate. He meant what he said.
He knew the words to say (b) or (c) but chose the ones that said (a). Don't split those hairs for him; let him do that himself. He's told you what he's calling for. Believe what he said.
But what DHH asked for in this blog post in many ways is just asking for the execution of what legally is already supposed to happen.
Racists trying to enforce (and expand the scope of) racist laws written by racists doesn't suddenly make them not racist.
I disagree that deportations under the EU freedom of movement restrictions are racist. It's a fundamental mechanism under which the EU even allows this level of freedom to exist. It would require a much tighter internal integration of the EU to allow you to settle anywhere without being able to support yourself. But as the EU has been working since it's inception the freedom of movement is contingent on some ground rules and it has limits.
We can debate if that system can or should be improved.
I believe most European countries had racist laws banning Jews and Roma access to their countries - and much of Europe gleefully assisted sending minorities to the nazi death camps.
Enforcing modern laws that essentially make a culture and way of life illegal - is also ethnic cleansing.
Enforcing modern laws that essentially make a culture and way of life illegal - is also ethnic cleansing.
There's lots of cultures and ways of life that are impossible or illegal in our modern day society and there's very little wrong with that.
Could you give some examples?
What comes to my mind are countries were same sex marriage is illegal - but I gather that's not what you have in mind?
Cannibalism, stoning, lynching, ritual sacrifice, female genital mutilation, slavery, child abuse, vendettas and actually duels in general, just off the top of my head, have all been culturally sanctioned at some points in some societies.
Could you give some examples?
Austria (where I live) and many other European countries have mandatory schooling. Plenty of cultures are trying to evade it or don't place a lot of focus on it. That applies to some very orthodox religious folks as well as the Roma that are mentioned in the article. Female genital mutilation is culturally very strong in some communities. I know that plenty of schools over here are warning whenever parents from certain backgrounds are traveling with their children over summer to their home lands.
Schooling is indeed a tool for genocide - as seen eg in Canada and Norway. But typically not merely compulsory public schools - but rather forced residential schooling.
I don't see how prevention of child mutilation amount to genocide - which etchnic groups in Austria are you concerned are threatened by extinction du to these policies?
I believe most European countries had racist laws banning Jews and Roma access to their countries
Thankfully nowadays we have the European Convention on Human Rights which sets up some pretty good baselines rules for all of Europe. If you can support yourself, you can live in any EU country and that right extends to your family. So a debate of the dark ages of Europe do not really matter here, because we have come a long way.
I am pretty sure most Europeans would agree that it's the responsibility of the individual EU countries to take care of their citizens if they require a safety net. Changing that fundamental rule of how the EU works would be a pretty big shift.
without being able to support yourself
Is Charles Windsor supporting himself? Is Farage? Is DHH?
They don't have to if they are citizens of the country they live in, but the answers are: no (but could), yes and yes. Also, Charles does not live in EU country (no idea if DHH still doesn't either) so EU laws are irrelevant for him anyway.
If he's just asking questions and wants the law carried out, then what's with talking about shooting wolves immediately prior? You're ignoring a lot of historical and social context to miss that he's not just talking about carrying out reasonable deportation laws.
I read his piece and it frustrated me. That said, the context of this piece is very clearly that DHH sees immigration of begging Roma to Denmark to be an issue and he wants to see them deported.
He's performing the same tiresome trick all (nowadays mostly right-wing) politicians do. They say something that, read literally, is defensible (meaning they could be defended by someone, although certainly not me). But put it in a context that strongly suggests they're saying something far more extreme.
And then they watch the discussion ensue.
Jordan Peterson loves to do this; Noam Chomsky loved to do this. AfD and FPÖ politicians love to do this whenever they "accidentally" use Nazi slogans.
It's the oldest troll trick in the book. It's calculated, and I'm so incredibly tired of the people who are dumb enough to either get worked up by this, or stick to the literal good-faith reading of it. This is a person who is trying to make people angry. They are obviously not arguing in good faith.
This is a person who is trying to make people angry.
He's been doing this from the start. I'm old enough to remember the "fuck you" talk 20 years ago (jeez, has it been two decades already? I really am getting old...). He gets off on trolling people he disagrees with. And I suppose he realized how well it works to drum up attention (and money!).
Twenty years ago, I think we were still able to reassure ourselves that these were the antics of a few immature nerds with poor social skills. That there was a mature, civil society out there where these people were not taken seriously.
Nowadays, the trolls have taken over mainstream politics.
Everybody in Rails loved it as long as it got them the adoption.
Maybe everybody still using Rails is a "fascist" since they are enjoying the fruits of this guy's work?
Non Danish Roma (eg: Spanish, Romanian etc.) that cannot sustain themselves in Denmark are can and are supposed to be deported
He doesn’t say this though. He doesn’t say “who can’t support themselves” and he doesn’t say “non-Danish.” I appreciate that you’re trying to engage with what he’s saying in a good faith way, but in order to do that, you’re adding whole clauses. He says “When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.”
The only way I can read that is as calling for deportation based on race.
But what DHH asked for in this blog post in many ways is just asking for the execution of what legally is already supposed to happen
I think that is not immediately clear. He does not reference any existing laws in almost anything he writes. His rhetoric, however, aligns with people in the US who are now celebrating the deportation of immigrants into random, unrelated countries that are not their country of origin.
I’m sure if you engage respectfully then DHH will clarity his position if you ask him.
That doesn't seem worth the risk. I'm mostly pointing out that you're assuming something about his position here.
I'm not assuming much as in his post in which he literally said he wants to deport gypsies.
You are assuming he is mainly advocating for deportations under the existing legal framework. Other people, I think, assume he is advocating for deportation into third countries as well (with or without legal basis). Ultimately we will never find out because the people who are "engaging with him respectfully" are IMO not interested in digging deeper either.
You are assuming he is mainly advocating for deportations under the existing legal framework. Other people, I think, assume he is advocating for deportation into third countries as well
Primarily what I'm saying is that even under existing legal rules deportations both within the EU and into third countries are possible, legal and in many ways intended. What people are jumping at is DHH's quite repulsive comparison to wolves and are insinuating worse things than there stand. I don't think DHH's choice of words and comparisons is an accident and I heavily dislike it for that reason, but even from there to assuming he's advocating to ethnic cleansing is a step too far removed.
Ultimately we will never find out because the people who are "engaging with him respectfully" are IMO not interested in digging deeper either.
You could be that person that engages with him respectfully if you are interested in digging deeper.
but even from there to assuming he's advocating to ethnic cleansing is a step too far removed.
No, it isn't. He's said:
When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them
"Ethnic Cleansing" is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area
He is very clearly calling for ethnic cleansing of "gypsies", precisely! There's no need to engage. He said it.
I think you're trying too hard to take things in good faith. I don't mind some of these topics DHH chooses to highlight. I even agree with some of it. In general I'm all for taking things in good faith and not spend too much time gazing over specific words. But the language he consistently chooses to use is, well, ugly. You can be against immigration or Roma beggars without dehumanising people – it's not especially hard.
I agree that paraphrasing it as "Ethnic Cleansing of Europe" goes too far and borders on the hysterical, but I also think you're going too far in ignoring the language he consistently chooses to use. If he had done it once: okay, lets not look too deeply in to it. If he had apologised: okay, I'd be able to look past that – live and learn. But he does so repeatedly and unapologetically. At some point I need to say it's going too far. The line in the sand may be vague, but it is there. For me, personally, I think DHH has crossed that line.
you need to perform quite a bit of willful misreading of what he wrote to assume quite such an extreme viewpoint.
Uhh, have you read what he's written? You just literally read the words he wrote and can see with your eyes DHH is advocating for ethnic cleansing. The most recent example, the AI even told him he was advocating for ethnic cleansing and he did zero reflection, just whining about tech companies.
I wouldn't be too surprised that if someone on the polar political opposite to DHH would find themselves in a room with him, would probably find more common ground than things that divide them.
I understand your point in the abstract but to say this about DHH of all people, a person with an impressively well established reputation of being disagreeable and agressive to people even before we get to his politics.... I wouldn't bet on it!
Like obviously there are plenty of "fellow travelers" to DHH's declared views. And maybe you can make some argument that he's merely being open about his views and that his internally believed views are not far off from that. But plenty of people with very nasty internally shared opinions who tone them down before putting them out to the world, right?
I do think that blog titles and the use of terms like "ethnic cleansing" then lead to discussions about whether that's the right term. But I think these discussions shouldn't lose sight of what DHH has laid out himself on the details. The fact that some random person maybe used the wrong term doesn't really change what DHH himself is thinking and advocating for, right?
This guy has, IMO, spouted kinda uniquely heinous shit (at least for this industry as a whole) and if we're not allowed to think "I don't want to be associated to him" then we really don't have any choice in the matter....
Right wants kings. Left doesn't. I am not willing to make any concessions on the matter of having kings. If you believe we should have some amount of kings there will be no discussion. Only me trying to convince you that you are being actively harmful to both me and you.
If you wish to have nuanced discussion about political spectrum and the extreme forms, please read up. I suggest this intro. Have a machine translate it for you.
Because I suspect you see half of liberalism mixed in with conservatism and other half with socialism and you insist on being centrist when you are in fact simply liberal leaning and we might in fact trivially agree that we both lean away from conservatism and all you are trying to say is that having small time capitalists is a good idea with which most socialists would generally agree, provided you acknowledge unions and anti-trust are a good idea to balance things out.
I am the sort of person who would type out a post about how "fascism" is overused and doesn't mean anything, and then delete it because obviously this isn't the audience and I'd just get accused of something ridiculous. Upon reading this article, I pattern-match it to an article archetype I have been reading for over a decade now, whose message of "we can get rid of the ideas we don't like through social ostracization" one would hope two elections had disproven by now.
But DHH's post was actual straightforward disgusting racism. Reading it made me think "I want to stay away from this guy" and question the integrity of those who threw their hat in with him. It actually surprised me to read racism in one of these things, after a hundred million shrill screeds against people who just don't want to be involved with political movements. But he very definitely wrote in favor of deporting lifelong citizens based on their race because of some actions taken by some members of that race.
Which is why the least useful thing you could be doing in a post like this is taking a bright-line example of true racism, and without even so much as quoting it in context, jumping off into criticizing the Hyprland dev and the Ladybird dev and talking about Charlie Kirk and bringing up a weird political fork of X that nobody uses. If I hadn't already seen DHH's article, this would not have convinced me to look at it. This would have convinced me that DHH probably did something as inoffensive as the Ladybird dev, and to write everyone criticizing him off as another annoying scold. Most people do not actually look up controversies, so this is almost certainly how plenty of people did react to reading this article; people know when they're reading a Gish gallop (again, after a decade of practice).
The institutional support for DHH in the wake of a racist rant is bizarre and more people need to know about it. It disappoints me that this article might actually result in fewer people knowing about it.
So, like, the thing about that is there is no approach an essay like this could take to avoid being pattern-matched in that way. This is an adversarial task. No matter what strategy people pointing out evil take in doing so, some people will do it better than others, and all the worst-written, least-clear examples of that strategy will be found and highlighted by proponents of evil and cliches and preconceptions will form around those examples.
I'm weighing in as an individual with this particular comment, not as a moderator. I normally refrain from doing that in a thread I am also actively moderating, but I don't see people make the point I'm making here very often and I wanted to get it in. I hope it's useful to you. If not, no harm no foul.
DHH is way worse than i thought is an example of an article that IMO actually worked to convince people who didn't see DHH that way before.
Yes, that piece did a good job, but I don't see it as a thing that there's any recipe for reproducing. It just happened to catch a bunch of people in the moment when they were receptive to that particular thing, which I see as basically luck. Perhaps better writers than me will disagree, but I don't know how I could achieve an effect like that in any repeatable way.
I agree that you can't choose who you share opinions with, and no matter how eloquent and convincing you are, there will be someone much worse that the enemy can quote instead of you, and maybe smear you by association. But while the worst can be highlighted by the proponents of evil, what would get highlighted among the people who use their brains is a different story, and higher-impact. Both because the proponents of evil have limited reach outside filter-bubbles, and because, like I said, you know when you're reading one of these things. If there is some worse form of this article from another author, it failed to top lobste.rs.
I don't see how that changes what I said. You referenced an "archetype" which colored your opinion of this article until you dug deep on it, due to preconceptions you acknowledge holding. I'm pointing out that that archetype is subject to cultural tug-of-war. You seem to agree about that. I simply don't know what you think any author could do to avoid such things.
Why is this flagged as off-topic and spam? I feel it goes right to the core of the culture tag.
I think it's off-topic in the most literal interpretation of the site's content policies, and I'm sure there's a mixture of literalists and also some people abusing flags as downvote because they think DHH is a fine fellow. I'm very happy to see that the community is generally supportive/approving of the post regardless.
I got the impression Andreas Kling's initial pronoun response was just a knee-jerk, ham fisted reaction to annoying PRs... I wouldn't be surprised if it was this type of absolutist rhetoric that makes people more extreme to the right.
I don't think centrist or non political people cared about pronouns or renaming 'git master' to 'git main'. It was all just tiring to update our git workflows.
After all of that, it must also be tiring to be called a fascist every day for not supporting assassination of who seemed to be a youtuber. Even if I granted that it is a moral crime to passively support Charlie Kirk by not saying he was evil - you aren't really persuading centrists with language like this.
ham fisted reaction to annoying PRs
It's only annoying if you don't think this stuff is important. Healthy open-source communities aren't just about code.
centrist or non political people
The article explains how "non political" isn't really a thing. You can decide you're okay with the status quo, but the status quo is actively harmful to some people; not taking a stance doesn't mean you get to ignore that.
you aren't really persuading centrists with language like this.
I think that often the discussion around things like this is quite hyperbolic and exaggerated, but that doesn't mean the underlying issues are any less important or real, and I feel like most people are willing to look past the presentation. It's quite difficult to always communicate in a calm and persuasive manner when the state is trying to get rid of you.
It's only annoying if you don't think this stuff is important.
There are people in this world who are not privy to, and consequently could not care less about, US-native culture wars. So yes, there are people who don't really think this stuff is important, and that does not make them "fascists".
You're replying to someone living in Wales! I don't think it's just about the US; transgender people exist everywhere in the world, and moreover accepting small changes to make things more inclusive (at minimal cost to everyone else) signals that you care about making people feel welcome.
I personally wouldn't go so far as to call people fascists for not doing that, but I would steer clear of their project.
You're replying to someone living in Wales!
Yes. Implication is not commutative.
I don't think it's just about the US; transgender people exist everywhere in the world
Obviously. I know a bunch, and am close friends with one. I also know that not a single one of them is offended by insufficiently gender-neutral documentation.
So yes, transgender people, and many other important minorities, exist everywhere, but so far it would seem that the performative inclusivity (and culture of cancellation over objection to such) is indeed mostly about the US left.
I also know that not a single one of them is offended by insufficiently gender-neutral documentation.
Hello, non-binary person here! I'm not "offended" by insufficiently gender-neutral documentation, but it sure is distracting! Also, as a non-US person, the constant use of "he/she" and "his or her", is a dead giveaway that said person is from the US, or learned English from primarily US sources, as outside the US, I've found just using they/them to be more common and viewed as more correct.
but so far it would seem that the performative inclusivity (and culture of cancellation over objection to such) is indeed mostly about the US.
Cancellation is itself a fake idea (I sure do hear a lot of yelling from people on large platforms about how they were "cancelled", while they are being repeatedly handed a megaphone and a pile of cash), but the performative inclusivity sure isn't US centric. I've seen plenty of it, and been subjected to it.
Around 2013 when I entered the field, most documentation and writing guidelines that I came across suggested using she/her as the default. Even back then I thought that they/them was a better choice, but it has taken many years for opinions and guidelines to change. I remember a fair amount of pushback and resistance towards the use of singular they/them.
When I started writing professionally (my first book was published in 2007), the recommendation from the publisher was to alternate gendered pronouns when discussing people in examples. I find this weird and confusing: 'the reader will do this, then he does this, then she does this' reads like either the reader changed gender in the middle of working on an example (I've known very few people who were that genderfluid), or that it's talking about two different people.
My fix for this was to use the second-person pronoun throughout when talking about the reader. Conveniently, English no longer has gendered second-person pronouns.
it's possible i'm misremembering, but i think the alternating gender thing was supposed to be quantized to chapters or sections or some other boundary like that
not in the same sentence/paragraph
Cancellation is itself a fake idea
Cancellation is a very real phenomenon. Even for “people on large platforms handed megaphones and a pile of cash”.
The only people I have seen be cancelled in any effect manner have been minorities, and they certainly don't get a megaphone and a pile of cash.
Are you saying cancelled minorities never get a megaphone and a pile of cash, or cancelled non-minorities always do?
In other words, do you mean the specific minorities you saw be cancelled who were the only people you've seen be cancelled in an effective manner didn't get a megaphone and a pile of cash, but some cancelled minorities do get those things along with some cancelled non-minorities?
Or that you've never seen a non-minority be cancelled in an effective manner because all cancelled non-minorities in your experience end up getting a megaphone and a pile of cash?
I'm a minority myself in multiple ways, for what it's worth. I dislike a lot of the cancelled people myself. I'm not even making a value judgment on cancellation itself, where the boundaries should be if any, etc.
I'm not even disagreeing that cancellation and who's shielded from its consequences is disproportionate (that's part of why it's often so odious to people, because it's not based on an idea's truth, but its popularity and the popularity or social standing of its proponents or opponents or beneficiaries or victims or casualties).
But ignoring the example in the article, don't you think who you have seen be effectively cancelled is an anecdotal evidence with selection and other biases that would be massively at play?
I also want to clarify that your statement doesn't contradict my point that cancellation is a very real phenomenon, even for people on large platforms handed megaphones and a pile of cash.
(And there are definitely people I dislike who I think are dishonest who are being handed megaphones and piles of cash by very rich people.)
I say cancellation is fake because the way people talk about it, and who they think it actually applies to rarely, if ever, face real life-changing consequences. Minorities, and other marginalised groups (i.e. the poor, women, etc.), do face consequences, and end up significantly worse off than before, but this is closer to unpersoning than "cancellation" in my view.
At least, in my eyes, cancelling requires a platform and clout to begin with, but I've yet to see those be seriously taken away from someone, and them left alone and destitute. Until I do, I will say cancellation is a fake concept cried by the right for facing any pushback to their horseshit opinions.
I say cancellation is fake because the way people talk about it, and who they think it actually applies to rarely, if ever, face real life-changing consequences. Minorities, and other marginalised groups (i.e. the poor, women, etc.), do face consequences
I mean, the article addresses at least poor / non-famous people:
- Fame [ed: and extreme wealth or financial backing] lets people avoid [the wider impact of] social repercussions, but that doesn’t mean those repercussions don’t exist for ordinary people
As for racial minorities and women being successfully cancelled and white people or men or white men not, I'm sure there are some interesting stats to explore there (I wouldn't know them), but again, don't you think who you have seen be effectively cancelled is an anecdotal evidence with selection and other biases that would be massively at play?
Obviously. I know a bunch, and am close friends with one.
Would they appreciate you speaking for them? I know I wouldn't. I'd be ticked off if I knew a cis person were using our friendship for debate points like this.
You see, we’re friends in the first place because they see me as a friend rather than a “cis person”.
So yeah, more than they’d appreciate someone getting offended on their behalf :)
You're reading too much into my wording. I wrote "cis friend" initially and then changed it to "cis person" because it read redundantly with "friendship". Old proofreading habits die hard.
You're using your friendship with another trans person to dismiss the concerns of the trans people that you're replying to in this thread. Your friend isn't party to this conversation, and their beliefs one way or the other are unfalsifiable from our perspective. Nor are they relevant to the individual perspective that you replied to initially: "I feel this way" is not contradicted by "well I have a friend who feels differently".
Us non-Americans who care about these things just want to protect ourselves from fascists where-ever they are. Unfortunately there are many fascists outside the US so these things are always relevant everywhere.
It's only annoying if you don't think this stuff is important. Healthy open-source communities aren't just about code.
I think its entirely possible to be annoying while trying to do good things.
Ever heard of vibe coded bug fixes? What about people who block traffic or throw paint on art as forms of protest?
I find all of those annoying, even though I am probably sympathetic to the root cause of all of them.
Maybe you might get frustrated and tell a vibe coder to get lost one day and close their PR. Next thing you know there is an angry mob writing about how much they hate you online somewhere for the next few years. They probably would say you hate bug fixes.
People are being called fascists for a reason, this term is not being used lightly. I don’t even know what « assassination » you’re talking about. You might as well be clear instead of cryptic if you have a point to make.
The post specifically mentions the assisination of Charlie Kirk and seems to imply that Andreas Kling is a fascist for not supporting it.
That is absolutely not what the post did or implied. The post pointed to (and linked) explicit support of Kirk.
This is the post:
RIP Charlie Kirk
I hope many more debate nerds carry on his quest to
engage young people with words, not fists.
People can judge for themselves I guess.
Every time this Kling tweet appears, I have to reiterate: Kling was either naive or disingenuous to write that.
Charlie Kirk was not a principled free speech defender in the least. He literally formed a far-right group called Professor Watchlist to target and silence academics based on spurious and inaccurate grievances.
Whitewashing a fascist is bad. If you don't want to seem like a fascist, you shouldn't do it. Like, Charlie Kirk wasn't a debate nerd, and he wasn't on a quest to engage young people with words.
He wanted black people to be oppressed, he wanted people to die in societal gun violence.
It is not possible to engage with Charlie Kirk's work in good faith and come to this conclusion about his beliefs.
His beliefs simply had nuance instead of being an absolutist my way or the highway take.
I think it's reasonable? Whatever your political views I think we can all agree killing someone like this is not something we want. Calling someone a fascist for only this seems disproportionate. I will not assume that's the case, and I imagine there are other things there people are pulling from to make that claim however.
This isn't just a "it's sad that kirk died" post, this is a post praising his legacy. His legacy was that he died doing what he loved: lying about trans women because he was a genocidal monster.
You don't have to praise someone to condemn their assassination.
thank you for posting the reference that I also was missing. Ezra Klein (~center left) got ratioed for a similar take despite clearly being on the other side of the political spectrum.
And I buy your ground argument: "you're not converting centrists".
On the one hand, I'm very sympathetic to this argument. I basically don't believe in punching nazis (although I certainly believe in punching back and maybe -- "preemptive self defense" let's call it). I mean -- it's clear to me that we have very different politics, and that's why I want to hear from you.
You seem to understand the author's intention, and you sound like a centrist. What kind of argument would you want to convince yourself?
For me the most compelling part of the article was, "look at all the billionaires and how they're avoiding taxes with some non-profit circle jerk".
Right now I see a bunch of people circle jerking about their lame distro and another group of people screaming about how its an existential threat to us all.
From an uninformed position the distro people seem far less threatening and more reasonable to be honest.
I didn't know anything about DHH beyond he was an edgy rich guy, but I had at least watched Andreas Klings Serenity OS development videos a few years ago and he just seemed like a normal programmer. This disconnect from what I observed with my own eyes makes me trust the whole post far less than I otherwise would have.
If I feel like people are misleading me about one person, why should I trust them about another?
Right now I see a bunch of people circle jerking about their lame distro and another group of people screaming about how its an existential threat to us all.
I've yet to see anyone "screaming about how its an existential threat to us all", in regards to the distro, instead I've seen people talking about the man who "made" (vibecoded) the distro, and how he's a fascist, with sources. This is either the most naive reading of the situation imaginable or, you've being disingenuous.
He's just being "centrist" and "apolitical". Look how apolitical and uncaring he's being while he replied to everything on the thread with tired right wing talking points about the culture war.
The main thing I care about here is the character assassination of someone I followed on youtube (Andreas) who I thought was a pretty cool dude. That's about it.
I also saw Charlie Kirk get shot in the neck and thought it was shocking. Guess I am a bad guy too according to you.
I asked @ac how he saw the situation, and this was his response. So let me try to interpret:
@ac sees calling DHH a fascist "screaming about how it's an existential threat" e.g. By calling some small-fry rich guy with a vibe coded security-ridden linux distro a Fascist is like calling the "Soup Nazi" a fascist.
I buy this.
Maybe the right-toned response is, "hey, this guy is an asshole, unnecessarily abrasive and mean. His new distro is full of significant security holes. Isn't it sad he could raise so much money from all these other enshitifiers?"
... but would you click on an article that didn't call him a fascist? I don't know. We're all fucked. The news is either too abrasive or too boring.
Just calling him an asshole, abrasive and mean downplays that he is using his position to enable the harm of real people
So what was I trying to do there? Is it be a DHH apologist and downplay what he said?
No.
I was attempting to reach someone with a different opinion.
It's clear, reaching for "Fascist" when talking about DHH (or, especially Andreas Kling) ruined the ability to convince someone with a different opinion anyways. But can we at least agree on "asshole"? Or at least, factually: Racist? Bigot? Transphobe? Islamophobe? (maybe more subjective: caused some of the worst quality software since the invention of "null" all on the shoulders of a good webcast?)
I just... I have enough people in the real world who have similar opinions. I want to use my opportunity interacting with people with different politics / ethics to figure out why they disagree with me, rather than telling them that they're wrong.
My point is it's hard to convince me to go digging through all these sources when I immediately disagree with the one that I already knew about.
It's like I got 'boy who cried wolfed' to the point I got desensitized to it all. I wasn't planning on using omarchy anyway though, so I guess no difference.
My point is it's hard to convince me to go digging through all these sources when I immediately disagree with the one that I already knew about.
This post starts with dhh, and doesn't get to Andreas until after that, and to top it off, the first two links (after the author links to a previous post of their own) are to dhh's own websites. Not much digging to do there.
It's like I got 'boy who cried wolfed' to the point I got desensitized to it all.
If someone saying "hey, this guy is doing some rather right-wing things" about someone you like is enough for you to be "desensitised" to people pointing it out about other people, you might want to do some introspection on why that is or, again, you're being disingenuous.
Like I said, I didn't really care about DHH - I skimmed it until I saw it mention someone I knew and posted about the part I am familiar with. I'll at least agree that some of DHH's posts seemed bad. I probably wouldn't post stuff like that myself.
If someone saying "hey, this guy is doing some rather right-wing things" about someone you like is enough for you to be "desensitised" to people pointing it out about other people, you might want to do some introspection on why that is or, again, you're being disingenuous.
Maybe I am more evil than you - I dunno, it is a spectrum. Maybe I am undiagnosed autistic? I care more about correcting what I considered misinformation than how bad you think I am for telling the truth.
Please reread that fragment. It does not imply that in any way. You did the classic jump to the other extreme of an issue without any supporting facts. Not supporting someone doesn't mean you support killing them.
People are being called fascists for a reason, this term is not being used lightly
Clearly that is not always true.
Please, tell us why you think the people in this article being called fascists wouldn’t be fascists ?
Strongly disagree with putting the git default branch name on the same level as respecting people’s pronouns. The former was a virtue signal that nobody asked for, the latter is being a decent human being.
Yes, it's virtue signalling, and it turns out that signalling virtue is really useful and powerful where some people will get genuinely incensed at it.
I wouldn't either - but it apparently upset a lot of people for some reason. Or at least that was my impression during those confusing times.
In September 2025, DHH published "As I remember London", mourning that London is "no longer full of native Brits"—a claim that redefines "native Brit" to mean "white."
41% of London population (including me) are not born in UK. 70% of children born in London (including my childen) have at least one foreign-born parent. We are not native brits. It is safe to say that most of London are not native brits.
Large percentage of those people are not white and have culture very different from traditional UK culture. I do not want to idealize past British culture, IMO it is quite trash when you are looking past upper-middle classes. But things are at least very different to what they used to be, and I can imagine DHH feeling more comfortable in a more traditional european culture. I don't find this controversial, since the same can be said about people bringing their culture to UK, they bring it (instead of adopting new one) because they feel more comfortable with it.
(disclaimer: I'm not from London nor UK.)
What it means to embrace the culture of a country as an immigrant was not the takeaway or throughline of the original blogpost, I'd say and it's not even close to it. It's that British should be white again, and Europe should also follow. The post paints fighting back(by any means) at minorities as something that is just.
If London had a larger % of white people(British or not) that post would've never been written. It's thinly veiled racism, made digestable in the way it's written through nostalgia and news stories. One can say it's an uncontroversial opinion, but even if(it's not) that was true, it's a trash post because it assumes that "UK culture" is white, even though UK's history is intertwined with immigrant culture for....a long time now? It lacks nuance and experience.
See also: https://paulbjensen.com/blog/2025/09/17/on-dhhs-as-i-remember-london/