I live in Oakland. Something I've noticed in a lot of the "THE CITY IS GOING TO HELL" commentary is that often people are pointing at visual symptoms - a homeless encampment, graffiti - as a proxy for "things are bad," and it doesn't take a lot of pulling on that thread before you get to "well just look at them," and it's real hard to cast that one in a "race-neutral" way. I've heard people complaining about hot dog vendors on the street as some kind of public nuisance, I've heard people point to wall murals as a sign of moral decay. Fine, that's your jam, that's what the suburbs are for, but if you don't like seeing poor people, make a society that doesn't create so goddamn many of them.
You need some kind of proof that a homeless encampment is bad for the city or that someone might not like to be near one for reasons that might not include racism?
I've lived in east coast cities (NYC, Boston, and Philadelphia) for the majority of my adult life and while homelessness is less of a problem in the northeast because of the climate there is still a good amount of it in the major cities. I think it becomes way too easy to tune out those commentaries and avoid the parts of the city that they apply to.
In Philadelphia, I lived a few blocks away from the Girard stop on the L train. I would just avoid walking by the station because it was a hang out for homeless people and drug users in the area. Pretty much everywhere within a 10 block radius of the station is built up, there's always people out, and it feels like all of the local businesses in the area are thriving (more recently there's been too many chains opening up which sucks but I digress), there's barely any homelessness or crime with the exception of package thieves (I just bought a $20 box off amazon to put in front of my house and never had a problem) and the occasional car window being smashed.
In NYC, especially Manhattan although the same applies to the outer boroughs, unless you live around a more touristy area then you don't even think about it. In Boston even less so besides downtown.
I don't think trying to contain people to specific areas is a good solution. There's obviously a greater social issue across the US and other developed nations and it's a very hard problem to start solving, but I would guess that most cities continue to ignore it as long as its easy for the majority of the population to ignore it.
The rate is 42/10k for non-Hispanic White and 56/10k for all others - a common definition for people of color. So about a third more likely.
To provide some intuition if the numbers aren't clear that increased risk is about the same as:
* driving while having slept 6-7 hours rather than 7+ hours[0] 1.3x
* being a teen driver with a teen friend in the car rather than alone[1] 1.49x
* the increased cardiovascular risk from being highly sedentary vs. being active[2] 1.3x
As a whole, though, 'person of color' seems to be a bad grouping unit here because Asian people are 'people of color' and have a 7/10k rate, while Black people are also 'people of color' and have a 214/10k rate. Therefore, if I were trying to understand if there are subpopulation differences this is not the aggregation unit I would use.
So let's say hypothetically we kept the number of homeless people stable in Oakland, but made them all white. You think all (most? many?) of the people currently complaining about homelessness would shut up?
No, Appalachia's sufficient to negate that hypothesis, but it doesn't mean the people currently complaining about homelessness aren't also making judgements on racial grounds. A large part of the illegibility of Oakland to outsiders is mistaking other people's cultures for urban decay.
If other peoples' cultures seem indistinguishable to outsiders from urban decay, then those cultures are probably pretty unpleasant, and it's a good reason to not want people who follow those culture to be around in your urban area.
I feel like “outsiders” is the key word here. Y’all can just go home, that’s cool. Tourists coming in and saying “the taco trucks are a menace” ain’t helping, especially when combined with an ongoing critique of African American fashion and music trends.
We can critique what we want. Your sacred cows are not ours. Blacks have a terrible culture and nobody wants to live around them but suicidal self-hating White liberals.
The way you've stated this implies a structurally-enforced causality with regards to vagrancy in such a way that, wittingly or otherwise, wholly denies the possibility of individual agency in the very people you're ostensibly trying to defend.
I'm curious where you see the levers of individual agency here, and to what degree you think the affected people have tried to pull them. What's _your_ underlying thesis?
That is beyond my proverbial pay grade. But it's not beyond my proverbial pay grade to state that believing that, systemically, “[x demographic in y location] are way more likely to be [in undesirable situation]” is completely denying agency to the individuals in question by pretending that [x demographic in y location] ending up [in undesirable situation] is something of a weighted dice roll made by unseen forces, completely outside of individual agentic influence.
Either you're willfully ignoring the American citizen's right to free movement between States, or you're actually saying that any given black person who moves to Oakland has—regardless of any life circumstances or decisions they've made, simply as a fact of their ethnicity—some arbitrary-percentage chance of ending up homeless, as some immutable localized nth-order structural outcome, regardless of any choices they make.
Oh, I see the confusion - in America, we use the word “free” to mean both “allowed to” and “doesn’t cost money,” which leads to the kinds of odd circumstances where one is “free” to do something, but that thing isn’t “free,” so if they lack the money or resources to do so, they’re not actually able to do it. It’s a confusing part of our language and our system.
Similarly, we’ve got a bunch of cases where the law says X, but actually conforming with the law, or proving what you’re doing is legal, also costs money, and is therefore not “free” either. That one catches a bunch of people.
Does anyone else here know what this guy is talking about? I think he completely misread my post. I was asking if a black American citizen moving to Oakland had some arbitrary percent chance of becoming homeless after living there for awhile, based on his ethnicity and whatever structural factors Oakland has going for it alone (as implied by the rhetoric elsewhere in the thread). He then turned it into some kind of tirade about the ambiguity of the English language, or something, rather than answering my question?
What is presented is a very short list of separate issues. It could easily have said "widespread shoplifting, potholes"; it is not insinuating that one causes the others, just like shoplifting clearly does not cause potholes.
I dunno have you been to Vesterbro (he is talking about Copenhagen afterall)? Especially around H17? It's pretty gross. It's also spitting distance from Tivoli Gardens where you might want to take your kids out for the day.
The most objectionable thing about his post is that he's calling out gypsies specifically, but also Denmark relatively recently passed sweeping anti-begging laws kind of specifically targeting Roma people...
No assumptions being made here. Denmark, like most of Europe, has a long history of Roma discrimination. It's been well-written about, discussed by the media, by members of the Folketing, and even in the European Court of Human Rights.
I'm not a Dane but have spent significant time there and well understand the spectrum of views Danes hold on immigration and Danish politics in general.
I wasn't even passing any kind of judgment, but bringing this up because DHH was discussing a topic that comes up locally (even though he doesn't even live there anymore) but sounds crazy if you don't have the context.
Visual disorder is real harm, not a proxy or suburban preference.
Encampments produce fires, needles, waste, blocked sidewalks, and local crime spikes. Surveys show high mental illness and substance use rates among the homeless. Mild climate plus weak enforcement concentrates the problem beyond local poverty levels. Treating every complaint as coded racism blocks diagnosis.
Unpermitted vendors create safety and fairness issues for taxed businesses. Illegal graffiti is vandalism that costs owners. Oakland fines them. Murals are different.
Pure tolerance by the left produced tent cities. Enforcement and treatment shows recent drops in both homelessness and crime.
People who want orderly streets are not required to absorb the costs. Working neighborhoods take most of the hit.
"Fine, that's your jam, that's what the suburbs are for, but if you don't like seeing poor people, make a society that doesn't create so goddamn many of them."
Hear hear! I have $5 left over this month after rent and food. Where do I donate it to change the world.
I do find the author position to be incoherent in the following regard:
1. believe a statement can be true or false, and false should be called out.
2. believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken.
I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed. That eliminates margin for corruption and lenience. A strong law also creates incentive for the population to care about the letter of the law and reforms, since it becomes a known fact that such law will be followed through.
The worst of both worlds is a situation like in US or EU where immigrants "more or less" can settle, but live under constant pressure knowing there is no legal framework to support them, and deportation may come at any moment.
> believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken.
Except that that author didn't say that at all. They said "deport only the lawbreakers", while expressing dismay at a blogpost which (apparently*) said "deport everyone".
> I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed.
Quote from TFA: "Any kind of mass deportation plan would have to change [the law], which would be legally tricky to say the least. However, enforcing the existing laws requires no legal action, and could start tomorrow if the relevant executive wanted it to."
*Other comments have argued that the post didn't actually say that.
To establish oneself in a country (for the majority if not all the western world) without an appropriate visa is already breaking the law.
Not saying this is the only way, or what should be - but it's what it is, selectively breaking the law is ok - "as long as they behave". It implies that immigrants must live in the limbo and under undue psychological pressure, knowing one day their whole life may be uprooted for any transgression (or even none). This to me is some medieval mindset.
He also means Danish citizens who might be second or third generations Danish but came from background he doesn't like. Oh and of course you can see it - their skin.
Do you believe that even morally wrong laws should be enforced and followed? A lot of the segregation and jim crow laws were pretty odious. Women weren't allowed to have bank accounts and credit cards in multiple countries (even the US until 1974). Women were not allowed to legally vote (one Swiss canton kept this until 1990!).
Do you believe that these laws should be enforced and followed despite most people believing that they are morally wrong?
> believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken.
I (the author) do believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases. For example, there are laws governing which people can be deported and for what reasons. Deportations that violate those laws are morally wrong. What I spent the whole article arguing against was the idea that people should be deported even when the laws say their deportation is illeagl. (It would be illegal to deport the vast vast majority of Roma in Denmark.) The other thing I argued for in the article is enforcement of the law against people who break it.
Something I was told when started building in fintech was that the laws are in such a way that its impossible to be 100% compliant in every interpretation.
The law is huge, complex and can often have conflicting aspects.
This is assumed by some to be "by design". When the law is such that everyone is breaking it, then the power shifts to whoever can bring people in "front of the law".
So, in every case with strong beliefs such as yours, IMMV and it's easy to voice an opinion when you feel "not in target".
I think some of the trouble here is that the application of the law cannot be guaranteed to be free of discrimination or bias, regardless of the letter of the law itself?
Well then fix the laws, and/or advocate to fix the laws. Laws must exist in order to have a society, and no defeatist attitude will ever fix them. Laws won't fix by themselves, a majority needs to need them fixed. And then APPLY them.
> That eliminates margin for corruption and lenience.
Lenience and mercy are critical components of a system of a just criminal justice system. We have judges issue sentences in large part because we want a human being with good judgement to decide how serious the punishment for an offence should be based on the circumstances.
A person who shoots their partner who has been abusing them for years should probably receive a different punishment than a person who pulls out a gun in traffic and shoots someone for cutting them off. Mercy or "lenience" are not inherently flaws in the justice system, though of course there's always "too much of a good thing."
> I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed.
I read an article some years back that really changed my mind about this. It made the point that society evolves through the imperfect enforcement of laws (those some kinds of imperfection, like selective enforcement, are distinctly harmful). That is empirically true, but for some reason I hadn't realized it until the article pointed it out to me.
I think DHH's comments are pretty mild given the subject. However, I think it is how he frames his comments that cause offensive - lumping a (potentially) problematic (arguably) ethnic group of people in with animal control...
I noticed your respectful and thoughtful writing which is why I don't think it should be flagged. It starts the discussion in a nice way, and as I said at the time there weren't even any rule breaking comments that were flagged.
In many places, on Reddit especially, anything remotely referencing Travellers (UK), Roma, Gypsies will get flagged, locked, and taken down very quickly. To a degree there is brigading and to a degree a large number of people are unable to discuss them calmly.
Personally, I didn't flag the article but I think it might be right to be flagged - just; I think you have discussed the issue calmly, but I find the article to be faux respectful and presenting itself as being neutral where it is not. To me the article reads as posturing and signalling, and using the headline (cancelling Hey) as a thin cover for discussing something else entirely (the blog post, the disagreements with it, and the political disagreement with DHH). Note that HN says anything off-topic should be flagged, and the definition for off-topic starts with: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime...". If it had been, I'm cancelling Hey.com due to revelations about the owners DHH <link>, its cost me $x and was good and now I'm going to $y then I think it would be on-topic.
That all said; the topic you are really discussing is one that is very hard to have a reasonable conversation with people about. It has been unreasonably politicised, and is aggressively pursued as such; to a degree that distorts the basic facts and denies the real harms and impacts. One of my early roles involved physical security systems, and during it I encountered a large number of people suffering from related issues while the police both didn't have the power to resolve it and were not willing to wield the power they did have. I am deeply concerned about the widespread censoring of these discussions.
I didn't intend to present myself as neutral. I was explaining why I disagreed with him. But I do agree with you - having seen the site guidelines, it makes sense why it was flagged.
I used to admire that guy. I don't understand why anyone still works at Basecamp with posts like this to be honest. How do people justify it to themselves? Maybe it's just harder to switch jobs now with AI, I don't know.
Maybe a lot of people actually agree with him, and would rather we expect more of people, rather than simply defining criminal activity as an unconscious effect of one's being somehow oppressed, or one's great-great-grandparents being oppressed, or whatever.
The culture in question have been infamous for centuries for their value system which is incompatible with most others. Just as it's okay for devout Islamists to find the whole American value system disgusting and want nothing to do with it, it's okay for DHH and other Westerners to find the Roma value system disgusting. It's a belief system they choose, it's not something like skin that people cannot change.
In America there's a lot of ethical ambiguity given how recently most current residents' ancestors arrived. But in Denmark? Did the Roma build that society? (Possible) EU citizenship aside, I find it hard to judge Danes who feel that ethically, they don't have a right to degrade that society with crime and vagrancy. Same as I don't blame English people who don't like certain things going on there.
The article being referred to says "When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them" - it doesn't say "you deport everyone of that race," it's about the people causing problems. If you allow literally any behavior, no matter how antisocial, bad actors will ruin everything for everyone. Only the most obtuse person doesn't recognize the truth of that, deep down.
> if I give someone inaccurate medical advice, that is not only false, it is false and harmful
I don't understand what's so special about legal and medical advice that it's so singled out in certain parts of the world. All kinds of advice people give can be harmful, such as eg cooking and dietary advice. Yet it's ok to tell people how to cook, but for whatever reason it's not ok to tell people to make sure they stay well-hydrated when they have a cold.
[Edit:] But gee does the rest of the article hit hard. The "missing mood" in particular.
I think it's hard to do significant harm with bad cooking advice. Unless the advice was absolutely terrible like "eat only raw potatoes". But that's pretty rare. On the other hand many people can think of someone who was harmed seriously by bad medical advice. Steve Jobs is a famous example. (I'm the author of the article)
Generally speaking, bad medical or legal advice has much higher potential to have far-reaching consequences - much more so than giving bad cooking advice.
But also good medical advice has a high potential to have far-reaching positive consequences. Telling people not to forget to hydrate shouldn't be controversial. Shouldn't we be on the side of good advice rather than on the side of no legal or medical advice?
There are a lot of people who thrive in high trust societies and suffer in chaotic alternative. Pretending that diversity doesn't have a cost is plain wrong.
The way you've written your comment implies "high trust societies" and (presumably ethnic) "diversity" are opposites. The terms high- and low- trust society come from Fukuyama, who considered ethnically homogenous countries like Korea low-trust, and ethnically diverse countries like the US and Germany high- trust. Please, go more into what you mean about social trust and how it relates to diversity.
> ethnically diverse countries like the US and Germany
Less true in 1995, when both were Whiter countries.
> In his 1995 book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, political scientist Francis Fukuyama
> In 1995, the white population made up approximately 73.0% to 73.6% of the total United States resident population
> In 1995, Germany had a total population of approximately 81.8 million people. Official German demographic and statistical agencies do not track or categorize the population by "white" race; instead, official statistics record population data by citizenship and migration background. Historical demographic estimates place the approximate share of the indigenous white/European ethnic population at roughly 93% to 94% of the total population at that time.
And both countries were definitely higher-trust in 1995. Which makes sense since there are proportionaly less White people now, and White people are objectively the least in-group biased race:
"diversity" is a weasel word (often commits the motte-and-bailey fallacy) because it can easily mean different things at different times, making it prone to use as a political catch-all slogan.
"Diversity is our strength" -- what kind of diversity? Within a company, diversity of purpose is not a strength, because you can't have people working at cross-purposes with one another. It's the same for countries, local communities, and families. "Diversity" can easily be used to describe what ultimately is "division", making it contradict the old saying in the USA "United we stand, divided we fall".
Diversity of strengths/weaknesses, personalities, backgrounds (including ethnic), etc. all do make us stronger provided we maintain and prioritize a practical unity in a shared purpose.
'high-trust society' is quite often the same, as a sibling demonstrates. These two terms pretty much never appear simultaneously in an argument except as a dogwhistle.
It's not strange at all. For example if your money are used for political causes you don't like then you should absolutely send the money to alternatives instead.
I think DHH's opinion is a very common sentiment in Europe. "Gypsies" are a very European thing. I wonder if there's anything similar in the US? For context for US readers; they generally exist outside of the usual social norms, and have a pretty bad reputation because of it.
This is not a defence of DHH, just providing context to his comments.
There isn't really a direct point of comparison in the US, because by and large the US is much more loosely attached to the concept of having a specific "Our culture" that others are expected to assimilate to. Rather, US culture is more of an admixture of whoever happens to be in an area. That isn't to say that it's all peaches and roses, but our racism tends towards "this group is intrinsically worse than mine" rather than "this group is trying to conquer our homeland".
This plays out with things like US culture being pretty well tolerant of ethnic enclaves (Chinatowns, Little Italies, Solvang, etc) compared to what I've seen in my travels abroad, while preferring to bulldoze those enclaves when a new freeway needs to be built, and foods emblematic of certain areas being Flanderized versions of various foreign cuisines (Take a look at California's burritos, or a Chicago style pizza, or a New York style pizza).
There are in a lot of EU countries sets of laws to integrate gypsies, but it's a hard problem, e.g. schooling kids who move town every three months.
I think the gypsies he's referring to might be a particular set of organised beggar gangs exploiting gypsies from Romania, Bulgaria and generally central Europe in European cities since the early 2000s, and not the usual seasonal workers from these and other gypsy communities. But I haven't been to Copenhagen in a while.
I don't understand your comment - the social norms I refer to are paying tax, sending your children to school, integrating with the local community, living in areas/accommodation that is legal/not transitory. It can be argued how many of those are valid criticisms, but that is what generally refer to.
His opinion that their behavior is undesirable and should be dealt with is common.
His comparison to them as wolf-like predators (and you shoot wolves), previous posts about mass deportation and forced remigration ... no, most Europeans aren't veering strongly into hard-right territory.
Yeah, the title is really misleading. I thought the same at first, and then I also thought that this will be a review of the actual “Hey” email client.
It is sad that such a song and dance is required when anyone with half a brain can read the racism in DHH's post.
Imagine a scenario that a black family moved into your neighborhood and started causing a bunch of problems. There are no other black people in the neighborhood.
It should take you a picosecond to figure out which one of these is obviously racist and which isn't:
"We need to remove the black people from our neighborhood"
"We need to remove the new family from our neighborhood"
People like "well he has a good point they are causing problems" so technically the set of "black people" and "people who are currently causing problems in our neighborhood" are the same set. This is irrelevant.
Back when I lived in a homogeneous country, I used to believe in those progressive ideas "don't be racist", "discrimination is the source of issues", "we have to resolve poverty through investments in public infrastructure", yada yada all of that. Then I moved into a black neighborhood of a multicultural country, had my things stolen twice, witnessed three shootings. Honestly, at this point I don't understand what's wrong with being racist and admitting that some groups of people are just less civilized and they're not going to change unless we eradicate their culture.
I have a friend who tries to get me back on being progressive. Obviously, he lives in a 100% white neighborhood.
Islamic terrorism is pretty much a recurring theme in Germany yet mainstream parties are still utterly baffled how is it possible that AfD is surging. I wonder when things boil over and a developed democracy elects a government that openly implements racist policies in order to improve public safety. Because we can clearly see the public discourse changing - things we are able to say now were unimaginable even 10 years ago.
"Well, my understanding of Denmark is that they also don't have the will to start doing mass deportations of EU citizens, and DHH is advocating to change that. "
I think the author is taking umbrage with DHH using the word "gypsies" where it might have been "junkies" or just "homeless".
I see it in Berlin, rise of agressive, smelly begging in U-Bahn (I witnessed a beggar actually attacking passengers, hitting a woman). People walking around having fully shit their pants. This, I presume, is tolerated in the name of individualism, that the individual is free to choose how they present themselves in the public, and walking around with pants fully shat must be some inalienable right.
Area around Kottbusser Tor reeks of urine, and there's junkies fully out of it constantly screaming and fighting. Is somehow pointing this out is shameful and racist?
“Gypsies” are a race of people. “Junkies” and homeless people are, at an individual level, not.
Homeless people and drug addicts may well be victims of circumstance or victims of society depending on your point view - or even victims of their own choices or actions - but there’s a difference between saying “this race of people is problematic” and “this class of people is problematic”.
Hypothetical: A group of people from a specific race and culture recently came into a country and make their living primarily by stealing the wallets of tourists. If you had to guess, what are the chances that they are Japanese people?
Not that I disagree, but to play Devil's advocate for a second...
I think DHH was trying to refer to junkies and homeless people most of whom happen to be immigrants. The immigration status is the particular attribute that invites usage of the term "gypsies" to signal that the problem with those particular junkies and homeless could be solved via immigration enforcement. At least in his eyes, I presume.
Again, not defending his choice of words, just providing a somewhat plausible explanation as to how one might arrive to this specific terminology.
First and foremost, if DHH meant "junkies" or "homeless" by "gypsies", a term widely regarded as derogatory used to describe Romani people [0], then already there is plenty to take umbrage with.
Second of all, homelessness and drug addiction are not moral failings. As the author says ".. there will be some who are good and some who are bad. This makes people very unlike wolves."
I ask you to question whether the people who are "...walking around having fully shit their pants" should be deported, or treated for the conditions that ail them. The people aren't to be protected on some basis of "individualism", but on the basis that they are human people. Not animals.
"gypsie" cannot be substituted by "junky" or "homeless", for the simple reason that those words simply mask the ethnicity and immigration overtones, which are very much present in DHH's blog post. I haven't found your message racist, but this first sentence might give the impression that you are willing to turn a blind eye to the racism of others if their views align with yours concerning the presence of drug addicts and homeless people in public space.
And once you look at the problems you mention without taking the easy way out ("They're aliens and should just be excluded from our society"), the question is not so much whether they have the right to do this, but how we, as a society, can provide care to those people.
Also, I can't understand your presumption that "This is tolerated in the name of individualism". The situation your are describing is a public health issue, not a question of lawfulness.
I can't recall when the strongarmed union-busting happened at Basecamp, but it was a few years ago. Funnily enough, he kept patronizing Citations Needed well after.
Yup. I followed his terrible behavior since his 2021 crashout, when he caused a third of his employees to leave his company, and he's only gotten louder and worse since. Looking back further, I can't see him actually supporting anything pro-social.
DHH has had a long decline, in my personal regard. A lot of things I ignored or gave grace for because of his early influence were actually clear signals about his fundamental beliefs.
> They're still reeling from the Pakistani rape gangs that were left free to terrorize cities like Rotherham and Rochdale for years on end with horror-movie-like scenes of the most despicable, depraved abuse of British girls.
I can see if you feel this was fabricated by the author, you'd have the negative reaction you're having. But this is much-reported, much-discussed fact. Maybe HN needs to read news sources besides HN.
He does say to shoot the wolves. And the wolves are the “gypsies” in the analogy he is explicitly drawing. The commenter you’re responding to was highlighting the parallelism not literally saying “he said to shoot people”
He says to deport literally an entire ethnic group independent of whether they happen to sleep in parks, which is the entire point being made by the article linked to by this page where we're commenting. The comment you're responding to also restates this, without making any claims about whether he said to shoot people, so your objection doesn't really make any sense in that regard either.
> Comment says “shoot them” refers to Roma. Totally false and intentionally misleading.
The comment is deleted now, so I don't have any way to prove this, but it didn't say that when I read it. Maybe it did earlier and it had been edited by the time I had read it.
> Please quote where he says to deport all Roma/gypsies
You want me to quote the exact sentence you already quoted? There's only one antecedent of the pronoun "them" that makes sense in that sentence, and it's not "public spaces". If you want to pretend that the intentional repeated use of a slur and years of similar opinions are somehow immaterial to trying to understand what that sentence means, you're free to do that, but that's not what libel means.
This is slightly less awful than what I imagined but still enough that I would never want to do do business with any company run by DHH anymore.
Granted, I already have a dim view of Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and have never used any of DHH's software products, so my comment is a moral denouncement that carries no weight. Still, the dog whistling in this blog post is so loud I hear barking from the next door down. I don't exactly have on-the-ground knowledge of the exact situation in Copenhagen, but even just from what DHH describes, I'm pretty sure the solution can be solved through means less invasive than deporting homeless people.
And just to be clear, I'm using the phrase "homeless people" rather than Europe's N-word because the problem is not where the people came from. Unless you want to pretend like Danish-born homeless are somehow way better, which would be a level of propagandistic bullshittery I don't even think Trump would stoop to. I also shouldn't have to explain why the actions to fix homelessness should not be identical or even analogous to the actions taken to manage an invasive wolf population.
There is an actual problem DHH is vaguely grasping at: western countries have an exceptionally low state capacity despite their status on the world stage. The West is run by people who believe their job is to merely manage the decline of their terminally-ill trade empires until the pieces get inevitably packaged up and sold to ancap-esque autocrats of trade. And the social and economic structures undergirding the west, especially in Europe, have ossified to the point where there is not only no place for immigrants of any stripe, but even our own young can't fit in.
But the answer to this problem that always gets attention is the people who want to burn that remaining state capacity on incredibly vengeful, petty, and stupid acts of bullying. "I don't care how poor I am as long as I have someone else's neck below my boot" is just a recipe for mass impoverishment.
Depends on the environment - in that book for example, Arctic wolves were not the cause of large (in physical size - the caribou) prey animal population decline, even though the "feelings" of the average person was that they must be the reason.
Outside of fiction, wolves are not ravenous beasts that hunt everything and anything in sight.
Predators do tend to go for the weak/sick, older or younger/inexperienced targets - they aren't stupid.
By that logic - every living being on the planet is - or can be prey for something else - and I am not disagreeing with that.
But that 5,000 foot view of mine is more related to the original blog author using predator/prey as an analogy - it breaks down quickly when applied to humans.
Nice comment! (I used to hunt - but not as intimately as your experience - you have a very skilled and serious background)
Facts alone won't get you to answers about what you should do about something.
Whether your personal view is that the solution to low income migrants entering your country should be outright genocide, deportation, societal integration, welfare, or something else - it's not going to be based on a statement of fact.
A fact is that the elderly who have retired from the workfrorce are no longer contributing to the national wealth, they're also using the public health system more than any other demographic.
Clearly we should...
One seemingly deliberately conflation this post commits is betwee "gypsy" and "roma". The first as a set of actions, the second as an ethnicity divorced from any action of behaviour. Dhh refers to the first, and uses the first word. The fine article interprets it to mean the second, and correspondingly substitutes the second word. But dhh makes it clear what he means by "gypsy", so one can only interpret this conflation as deliberate.
This article is about someone cancelling their subscription to software that was written by someone who is not in favor of allowing a population of immigrants frequently associated with criminal behavior to remain in Denmark.
The author argues in favor of "individuated enforcement" wherein deportation is conditioned on the degree to which a migrant has contributed positively to the country.
This is trying far too hard to be charitable. Mistake theory is great, and it's good that the article mentions it, but it then also presents sufficient evidence to prove, or at least substantiate, malice. At this point not having "bad feelings toward DHH" is itself a "Missing Mood". At any rate, though, the author took the correct action.
Wolves are also pretty important, by the way. Hopefully we all know that by now?
> This is trying far too hard to be charitable. Mistake theory is great, and it's good that the article mentions it, but it then also presents sufficient evidence to prove, or at least substantiate, malice.
The benefit of the doubt only exists as long as there is doubt. Once there's an overwhelming body of evidence that removes any of it, continuing to give it is pretty suspicious, like you mention.
I'll rephrase: I don't have any reason to actively think they're malicious, but I don't really trust the judgment of someone who sees a person advocate for what they describe as a racist national policy after years of similar opinions and thinks that it's important enough to stop paying a subscription to that person's service, but is concerned about whether they're going to hurt the feelings of that person by actually concluding that maybe the reason they're always advocating for racist policies is just racist.
Chad seems to be arguing:
1. DHH thinks all gypsies are bad, therefor
2. DHH does not see Roma as individual people, therefor
3. DHH is a bad person.
I read DHH's blog as:
1. It should still be illegal to camp in parks, therefor
2. People who do camp in parks should be housed, therefor
3. Foreigners who refuse housing should be deported.
My problem with the part about housing is that DHH acts as if cities have enough shelters to accommodate everyone and these 'gypsies' are refusing to go there. I don't buy that for a second.
I don't know about Copenhagen, but in US a significant fraction of the homeless population openly rejects various shelter and housing opportunities because those usually come with extra requirements for sobriety and commitments to addiction treatments. So yeah, there's definitely people who just refuse to go.
Then there's also mentally ill people who operate in the grey zone of law — clearly too mentally ill to be prosecuted for their crimes (or haven't committed any crimes yet), can't be held in prison, but also too unstable and violent to be admitted to shelters with other, mostly normal disadvantaged people.
One of the many holes in DHH's claim about wolves, sheep, and gypsies is that wolves are not the sort of low-dimensional archetype he uses to support his narrative.
If you're very literal like me, you take that to mean wolves, the mammal; a predatory animal living within a food web, fulfilling a particular role at its trophic level which is ultimately beneficial to the system it's a part of.
Wolves don't independently get 'out of control' such that they need to be shot. This has been demonstrated across North America and Europe. The perception of wolves being out of control is largely subjective and misguided, and the result of 1. humans encroaching on wild land, 2. human activity limiting wolves' access to food, and 3. humans fearing wolves and wanting there to be fewer of them.
Through this lens, comparing immigrants to wolves is absurd. It becomes clear that DHH is discarding a lot of context in order to weave a fearful narrative which uses invalid, fictional mechanisms to make his point.
The use of the terms gypsies and sheep also comes with issues. It's a poor piece of writing, lacks any compelling substance (assuming you aren't swayed by him), and largely demonstrates that he's not particularly thoughtful about this while lacking the self-awareness and comprehension to notice how weak his position is.
It's okay to want reduced immigration. It's okay to want to preserve certain things in your society. It's not necessary or reasonable to do so through this lens, however. There are plenty of compelling arguments to make for regulating these systems in local, regional, and national government. It's okay to want that. When you start describing immigrants as dangerous animals, you've gone many steps too far off of a sensible path.
I also understand the use of fables to communicate moral and ethical stories, which seems to be a component in his narrative. However, he steps out of that bound when he talks about literal wolves (and the need to shoot them). Yet fables are a coarse tool, not an intricate one, and they're far too reductive to support an argument against immigration across a continent. It's an absurd position to argue from, and in terms of narrative, it makes DHH seem either obtuse or very hateful and disingenuous. I've never read anything of his since this piece.
Not trying to counter your main point but the biological wolf analogy is quite close to the author's point.
The wolf population development has been known to exceed every prediction in Western Europe, and while it's fairly inoffensive for humans the economic consequences are much higher than most anticipated, for economic/ecologic benefits that are hard to defend. And the wolf population are still fairly low.
In my opinion maybe the money spent protecting wolves (hundreds of millions per year in Europe) would be better spent on homeless shelters and similar policies.
Still this article should remind every European of the Nazis comparing the Jewish diaspora dispersal with the historical dissemination of black and brown rats.
I’ll have to look into that. My reading on wolf populations in the past has consistently indicated that imbalances regularly point back to human interference, but I’ve read a lot less about European wolves and more about those in western Canada and the USA.
I totally agree about your last point. This type of rhetoric is dangerous and it’s highly precedented. There’s often a reason people lean on it for leverage.
I was disappointed to read this and hear language and using allusions that parallel arguments made by hate groups.
I think DHH can take a stance that overly lax immigration policy has led to issues, if that is what he believes. That may be true, I don’t know, and I have no issues with policy debate around that, but directly comparing a specific race of emigrant people as wolves preying on native peoples, sheep is pretty gross.
I wish people would get down their thrones and go to live near a gipsy camp before bitching about tolerance, I see all these champions of acceptance always living 20 metro stops from the last homeless
The article literally is making an argument to deport the people you're complaining about, just not literally everyone else who happens to be from the same ethnic group. I don't really understand why you'd have a problem with them saying that if that's what you actually care about.
It is a long blog post, but the controversy seems to center on DHH’s language and reasoning about Roma people.
My reading is that he used those examples deliberately to raise a broader issue: some people are tired of being told to ignore problems they can see and experience, whether that means feeling unsafe while walking through a city or attending a Pride parade (assume that are the “wolfs”), or being frustrated that nearly every item at Target is locked up (“gypsies”).
To be clear, I am not expressing an opinion on whether his argument is right or wrong.
I think a lot of folks - myself included - canceled our Hey subscriptions years ago when DHH said some other unfortunate things.
I don't have to agree with everyone on everything, not even people I do business with. But I do try to limit supporting people who have actively advocated for things that harm my family. Say what you will about Apple (where I transitioned), but they're the "least evil" option from my perspective.
Others are of course welcome to their own perspectives and choices.
One thing this post never does is actually meaningfully argue with the core idea of the post that so outraged them.
Which is: If someone comes illegally to your country and ends up sleeping in parks, they should be deported.
I don’t know if I agree with that but the post seems to take it for granted that any reasonable person cannot.
To me this is more a fashion statement than an argument. Advocating deportations is automatically bad, using the word “gypsy” is automatically offensive. It’s silly. Pretty much everyone has some line of behavior at which they advocate deportation, and can anyone here who is upset actually explain why “Roma” is less offensive than “Gypsy”? There are PhDs in Eastern European history who can’t do that.
> Which is: If someone comes illegally to your country and ends up sleeping in parks, they should be deported.
That doesn't enrage me, in fact I agree with it. But no one in this story came illegally to Denmark. I'm not sure what gave you that impression. And I read DHH to be saying that more people than just the specific ones sleeping in parks should be deported.
You don't need to express the issues like DHH did, but there are problems in the EU that weren't there 20 years ago.
The former European Community core states are too small and cannot handle the influx of millions from the East and the South.
The core states should leave the EU and reestablish the former European Community, which would help the populations as opposed to multinational locust companies.
It isn't fair that the whole world (mind you, including rich foreigners) buys up apartments, takes jobs and displaces the original population.
> I'm a big believer in live-and-let-live. That's why I don't have bad feelings towards DHH. I definitely don't believe in trying to change people's minds by shouting at them or shaming them.
I don't think I shouted at DHH or shamed him. Where did I do that? Is there a way to write a blog post disagreeing with someone that isn't shouting and shaming in your eyes?
Based on the content of the post, it seems like it would be adequate to find an email platform run by people not vocally calling for the ethnic cleansing of minorities.
He is calling for the deportation of illegal immigrants who sleep in parks.
Cloudflare, in contrast, actively works with the CCP which is doing actual ethnic cleansing in Tibet and Xinjiang. But they are harder to cancel aren’t they.
I’m a pragmatist. I’m not going to drive myself crazy interrogating the opinions of every service provider I use. I don’t know about the Fastmail founder or CEO’s beliefs and don’t want to.
I think this is a false equivalence. Cloudflare doesn't espouse the position that ethnic cleaning is good, and afaik nothing it does in China enables that.
Further, DHH isn't calling for the deportation of illegal immigrants in parks. He's calling for the deportation of all people tagged with a specific label with no discrimination. The blog post talks about exactly that difference.
I agree that we live in an ecosystem where, in some industries, all options are terrible. That doesn't mean that, among those bad options, you can't exercise discernment and good judgment. I'm similarly a pragmatist from a different angle - I do believe the marginal dollar value I add to a company's bottom line doesn't change much of anything, and that voting with your wallet only works with collective action to be more than theater - but I also think that makes OP's conscientiousness admirable. Pragmatism isn't apathy or agnosticism, and shouldn't be conflated as such.
> He is calling for the deportation of illegal immigrants who sleep in parks.
No, that's what this article is calling for. The complain they have is that DHH called for deporting the entire ethnic group independent of whether they're sleeping in parks.
>> When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
Looks like some of the controversy is whether "them" refers to "the gypsies" or "the gypsies who take over public spaces".
It sounds genuinely ambiguous to me. Example A) "When wolves eat too many sheep, you shoot them." seems to advocate for shooting all wolves. Example B) "When adults abuse minors, you imprison them." presumably only refers to those that abuse minors.
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
I think based on his choice of parallelism we can fairly guess he means it the wolf way. There's not a single sentence in his post that supports the other interpretation.
I mean, the first example you gave is pretty much exactly what he was saying as an analogy earlier in the blog post. It seems somewhat preposterous to give the benefit of the doubt to this like it was an accident when it wouldn't be at all hard for someone who cared about the difference to express it more clearly. It's not like he's unaware that people already think that he holds views like this, so the ambiguity seems more like intentional dogwhistling/plausible deniability than an innocent mistake from someone who didn't think that anyone might read their words in that way.
Daniel Berntsson, a co-founder and co-owner of Mullvad, made a massive personal donation of 5 million Swedish Krona (roughly $500,000 USD) to the Örebro Party.
Your comment suggests that all disagreements are equal. I would get email service from someone who likes Ruby more than Python, even if I disagree. I, like the author of the post, wouldn't get email from someone I knew was virulently racist as DHH is.
Thats not an accurate framing. There are some disagreements that are red lines and others that are not. I think Chrono Trigger is one of the greatest games of all time, and someone disagreeing with me on that point is not a big deal. A hyperbolic example of the other side would be a Nazi's opinion on Jewish people. Given the nature of that opinion, not only would I disagree with them it would also be completely appropriate to fully disassociate with them and highly encourage others to do so.
People draw lines in different places, and what you are doing here is implying that it is unreasonable for people to take that level of issue with DHH's "gypsy" comment. I disagree. I think its completely reasonable to view that as unacceptable and to disassociate from that person.
Can you explain how that's analogous to what he thinks we should do to wolves? Does he think that we should only shoot the wolves that are causing problems and leave the innocent majority of wolves alone?
I was really wanting to read this, I had a morbid interest in Hey.com's cancellation policy. After 3+ paragraphs and an effin PG quote, there still is no point.
There once were angry submissions (or comments?) here about how hard it is to cancel NYT.
I was expecting the Hey-version of that, instead I got long-winded prose that sounds like a bunch of college boys trying to sound smart.
No thanks.
I guess the E-mail-service is still overpriced due to them believing in non-existent value of their web client.
If that's the point of the article, sorry, I didn't make it far enough.
DHH’s blog post was, to put it simply, spot on. You disagree with that, and that’s fine.
But to cancel a subscription for another service entirely, because someone used a blog platform of the same provider to publish something you were repulsed by – this seems like a really bizarre way of managing your emotion. By this logic I should feel compelled to delete my HN account, delete all my social media and cancel all press subscriptions…
> However, in any ethnicity of people, there will be some who are good and some who are bad.
This is a strawman interpretation of anti-immigration arguments. Non-strawman anti-immigration positions are that immigrants are a problem even if they are all "good".
If you care about getting rid of "bad" people, then you have to evenhandedly apply the rule, even to those who have ethnic roots in the country going back a hundred generation: take those "bad" people too and strip them of citizenship.
Where in the world is immigration driven by "good" or "bad"; I mean, where do documents like visitor visas and residency permits lapse due to badness rather than the mere passage of time, whereby the individual not able to extent has to go, whether they are "good" or "bad"?
What is "bad"? Does "bad" have to be armed robbery? Or is someone also "bad" if they settle in Japan, and then demand that schools remove pork from school lunch?
Unwanted immigration can simply be the raw numbers: 500 immigrants not being a problem, but 500,000 being a problem, all else being held equal, including "goodness".
You can be deemed undesirable not because who you are but entirely because you're part of a group with 499,999 others. From the individual's point of view, it is unfair; that is true, and it isn't meant to be.
If anyone wants a great mail client, I highly recommend Mailmate which among other things lets you write messages in markdown: https://freron.com/ it’s maintained by a solo dev for 15+ years and charges a fair price
> I definitely don't believe in trying to change people's minds by shouting at them or shaming them
seems to me like they want to make a (polite) argument instead of explicitly calling them “heretic” to quote the article.
They also quite obviously seem to refer to cancellling the subscription here and not trying to invoke "cancel culture".
The first few paragraphs make this quite clear.
The blogpost has the attitude problem of virtue signaling about decisions that has zero cost to themselves, about a communal kin based socialist society them know little about.
Normal working families with kids live next to these parks and rely on them as open space, it is part of the Danish socialist welfare system and care for the working man. Defacation and open cooking plus thrash by not your own weak but foreigners has real cost to those that can’t afford to move.
> Normal working families with kids live next to these parks and rely on them as open space, it is part of the Danish socialist welfare system and care for the working man. Defacation and open cooking plus thrash by not your own weak but foreigners has real cost to those that can’t afford to move.
The article made it pretty clear that they're not arguing against deporting people who are camping in parks though, and just arguing against generalizing the issue as being about the entire ethnic group. Are you claiming that somehow having a communal kin based socialist society makes it impossible to have, using the term in the article, "individuated enforcement"?
The question asked in Scandinavia is if a migrant group is a net benefit to our ability to have group solidarity, while high skill individuals are judged on individual merit. These are two very different categories, and Scandinavians do not feel an obligation towards a world collective within their borders.
The group talked about here came in through mass migration and are in group conflict with working peoples interest in having safe communal open spaces, while being a net negative contributor to public pools of resources used to help the average man and disproportionately contributing to theft.
From a Scandinavian perspective you choose group solidarity with your own working man over the stranger that did not come in through high skill merit.
This doesn't really make sense to me, You're claiming that it's fine to hand-wave the issue of deporting the entire ethnic group as a whole rather than individuals because it has no high-skill members, but that doesn't really explain why you're so convinced that there are no individuals who might be able to contribute other than from assumptions about them based on them being a member of the ethnic group in the first place (e.g. "mass migration", taking up resources, disproportionately contributing to theft). That seems bizarrely at odds with the allusion to judging people by merit rather than bucketing them by shared ethnicity at the end of your comment.
What makes Scandinavians responsible for judging merit of individuals in or even allowing a specific group in? All border control is group based.
It’s our country and we have no obligation to let anyone in, especially a group that culturally conflict with ours in ways that violate our social contract and ability to provide basic standards of living to our own kin.
I mean, okay, yes, if you completely disregard what the author is actually saying they mean by using the word in the article and choose a different meaning, then it doesn't make sense. I'm not sure why that's worth pointing out when you wouldn't be able to get to the second statement without him already detailing the monetary subscription and literally following it up with saying that they're only making a financial decision, not a personal one.
I live in Oakland. Something I've noticed in a lot of the "THE CITY IS GOING TO HELL" commentary is that often people are pointing at visual symptoms - a homeless encampment, graffiti - as a proxy for "things are bad," and it doesn't take a lot of pulling on that thread before you get to "well just look at them," and it's real hard to cast that one in a "race-neutral" way. I've heard people complaining about hot dog vendors on the street as some kind of public nuisance, I've heard people point to wall murals as a sign of moral decay. Fine, that's your jam, that's what the suburbs are for, but if you don't like seeing poor people, make a society that doesn't create so goddamn many of them.
You need some kind of proof that a homeless encampment is bad for the city or that someone might not like to be near one for reasons that might not include racism?
The author is complaining about people defecating in public spaces, not about graffiti.
I guess that could be a type of art.
I've lived in east coast cities (NYC, Boston, and Philadelphia) for the majority of my adult life and while homelessness is less of a problem in the northeast because of the climate there is still a good amount of it in the major cities. I think it becomes way too easy to tune out those commentaries and avoid the parts of the city that they apply to.
In Philadelphia, I lived a few blocks away from the Girard stop on the L train. I would just avoid walking by the station because it was a hang out for homeless people and drug users in the area. Pretty much everywhere within a 10 block radius of the station is built up, there's always people out, and it feels like all of the local businesses in the area are thriving (more recently there's been too many chains opening up which sucks but I digress), there's barely any homelessness or crime with the exception of package thieves (I just bought a $20 box off amazon to put in front of my house and never had a problem) and the occasional car window being smashed.
In NYC, especially Manhattan although the same applies to the outer boroughs, unless you live around a more touristy area then you don't even think about it. In Boston even less so besides downtown.
I don't think trying to contain people to specific areas is a good solution. There's obviously a greater social issue across the US and other developed nations and it's a very hard problem to start solving, but I would guess that most cities continue to ignore it as long as its easy for the majority of the population to ignore it.
> I don't think trying to contain people to specific areas is a good solution.
Hamsterdam
Homelessness is pretty race neutral tho? Especially in Oakland, which is incredibly race-balanced.
absolutely not, especially in the bay – people of color are way more likely to be homeless
To put actual numbers to "way more likely". Using https://www.bayareaequityatlas.org/indicators/experiencing-h... and the census.
The rate is 42/10k for non-Hispanic White and 56/10k for all others - a common definition for people of color. So about a third more likely.
To provide some intuition if the numbers aren't clear that increased risk is about the same as:
* driving while having slept 6-7 hours rather than 7+ hours[0] 1.3x
* being a teen driver with a teen friend in the car rather than alone[1] 1.49x
* the increased cardiovascular risk from being highly sedentary vs. being active[2] 1.3x
As a whole, though, 'person of color' seems to be a bad grouping unit here because Asian people are 'people of color' and have a 7/10k rate, while Black people are also 'people of color' and have a 214/10k rate. Therefore, if I were trying to understand if there are subpopulation differences this is not the aggregation unit I would use.
0: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/bulletin/2017/national-police-week...
1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10735394/
2: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38081421/
So let's say hypothetically we kept the number of homeless people stable in Oakland, but made them all white. You think all (most? many?) of the people currently complaining about homelessness would shut up?
No, Appalachia's sufficient to negate that hypothesis, but it doesn't mean the people currently complaining about homelessness aren't also making judgements on racial grounds. A large part of the illegibility of Oakland to outsiders is mistaking other people's cultures for urban decay.
If other peoples' cultures seem indistinguishable to outsiders from urban decay, then those cultures are probably pretty unpleasant, and it's a good reason to not want people who follow those culture to be around in your urban area.
I feel like “outsiders” is the key word here. Y’all can just go home, that’s cool. Tourists coming in and saying “the taco trucks are a menace” ain’t helping, especially when combined with an ongoing critique of African American fashion and music trends.
We can critique what we want. Your sacred cows are not ours. Blacks have a terrible culture and nobody wants to live around them but suicidal self-hating White liberals.
This is more or less what DHH is saying to the Gypsies, y'all can just go home, that's cool.
The way you've stated this implies a structurally-enforced causality with regards to vagrancy in such a way that, wittingly or otherwise, wholly denies the possibility of individual agency in the very people you're ostensibly trying to defend.
I'm curious where you see the levers of individual agency here, and to what degree you think the affected people have tried to pull them. What's _your_ underlying thesis?
That is beyond my proverbial pay grade. But it's not beyond my proverbial pay grade to state that believing that, systemically, “[x demographic in y location] are way more likely to be [in undesirable situation]” is completely denying agency to the individuals in question by pretending that [x demographic in y location] ending up [in undesirable situation] is something of a weighted dice roll made by unseen forces, completely outside of individual agentic influence.
So you don’t believe in, like, history? Or what’s the argument here?
Either you're willfully ignoring the American citizen's right to free movement between States, or you're actually saying that any given black person who moves to Oakland has—regardless of any life circumstances or decisions they've made, simply as a fact of their ethnicity—some arbitrary-percentage chance of ending up homeless, as some immutable localized nth-order structural outcome, regardless of any choices they make.
Oh, I see the confusion - in America, we use the word “free” to mean both “allowed to” and “doesn’t cost money,” which leads to the kinds of odd circumstances where one is “free” to do something, but that thing isn’t “free,” so if they lack the money or resources to do so, they’re not actually able to do it. It’s a confusing part of our language and our system.
Similarly, we’ve got a bunch of cases where the law says X, but actually conforming with the law, or proving what you’re doing is legal, also costs money, and is therefore not “free” either. That one catches a bunch of people.
Does anyone else here know what this guy is talking about? I think he completely misread my post. I was asking if a black American citizen moving to Oakland had some arbitrary percent chance of becoming homeless after living there for awhile, based on his ethnicity and whatever structural factors Oakland has going for it alone (as implied by the rhetoric elsewhere in the thread). He then turned it into some kind of tirade about the ambiguity of the English language, or something, rather than answering my question?
Pretty sure they’re just a verbose troll.
You can start white and homeless; pretty soon you will be a person of color.
comments like these really grind my gears. are those really the only things you can imagine people don't like about "homeless encampments"? graffiti??
What is presented is a very short list of separate issues. It could easily have said "widespread shoplifting, potholes"; it is not insinuating that one causes the others, just like shoplifting clearly does not cause potholes.
I dunno have you been to Vesterbro (he is talking about Copenhagen afterall)? Especially around H17? It's pretty gross. It's also spitting distance from Tivoli Gardens where you might want to take your kids out for the day.
The most objectionable thing about his post is that he's calling out gypsies specifically, but also Denmark relatively recently passed sweeping anti-begging laws kind of specifically targeting Roma people...
So they passed anti-begging laws and you say they target Roma people. Now who's making here racial assumptions?
No assumptions being made here. Denmark, like most of Europe, has a long history of Roma discrimination. It's been well-written about, discussed by the media, by members of the Folketing, and even in the European Court of Human Rights.
I'm not a Dane but have spent significant time there and well understand the spectrum of views Danes hold on immigration and Danish politics in general.
I wasn't even passing any kind of judgment, but bringing this up because DHH was discussing a topic that comes up locally (even though he doesn't even live there anymore) but sounds crazy if you don't have the context.
Visual disorder is real harm, not a proxy or suburban preference.
Encampments produce fires, needles, waste, blocked sidewalks, and local crime spikes. Surveys show high mental illness and substance use rates among the homeless. Mild climate plus weak enforcement concentrates the problem beyond local poverty levels. Treating every complaint as coded racism blocks diagnosis.
Unpermitted vendors create safety and fairness issues for taxed businesses. Illegal graffiti is vandalism that costs owners. Oakland fines them. Murals are different.
Pure tolerance by the left produced tent cities. Enforcement and treatment shows recent drops in both homelessness and crime.
People who want orderly streets are not required to absorb the costs. Working neighborhoods take most of the hit.
"Fine, that's your jam, that's what the suburbs are for, but if you don't like seeing poor people, make a society that doesn't create so goddamn many of them."
Hear hear! I have $5 left over this month after rent and food. Where do I donate it to change the world.
/s
I do find the author position to be incoherent in the following regard:
1. believe a statement can be true or false, and false should be called out.
2. believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken.
I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed. That eliminates margin for corruption and lenience. A strong law also creates incentive for the population to care about the letter of the law and reforms, since it becomes a known fact that such law will be followed through.
The worst of both worlds is a situation like in US or EU where immigrants "more or less" can settle, but live under constant pressure knowing there is no legal framework to support them, and deportation may come at any moment.
> believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken.
Except that that author didn't say that at all. They said "deport only the lawbreakers", while expressing dismay at a blogpost which (apparently*) said "deport everyone".
> I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed.
Quote from TFA: "Any kind of mass deportation plan would have to change [the law], which would be legally tricky to say the least. However, enforcing the existing laws requires no legal action, and could start tomorrow if the relevant executive wanted it to."
*Other comments have argued that the post didn't actually say that.
To establish oneself in a country (for the majority if not all the western world) without an appropriate visa is already breaking the law.
Not saying this is the only way, or what should be - but it's what it is, selectively breaking the law is ok - "as long as they behave". It implies that immigrants must live in the limbo and under undue psychological pressure, knowing one day their whole life may be uprooted for any transgression (or even none). This to me is some medieval mindset.
> without an appropriate visa
In this particular case, they are legal residents.
The people DHH is taking about are EU citizens with a legal privilege by default to live in Denmark
He also means Danish citizens who might be second or third generations Danish but came from background he doesn't like. Oh and of course you can see it - their skin.
Do you believe that even morally wrong laws should be enforced and followed? A lot of the segregation and jim crow laws were pretty odious. Women weren't allowed to have bank accounts and credit cards in multiple countries (even the US until 1974). Women were not allowed to legally vote (one Swiss canton kept this until 1990!).
Do you believe that these laws should be enforced and followed despite most people believing that they are morally wrong?
> believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken.
I (the author) do believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases. For example, there are laws governing which people can be deported and for what reasons. Deportations that violate those laws are morally wrong. What I spent the whole article arguing against was the idea that people should be deported even when the laws say their deportation is illeagl. (It would be illegal to deport the vast vast majority of Roma in Denmark.) The other thing I argued for in the article is enforcement of the law against people who break it.
Something I was told when started building in fintech was that the laws are in such a way that its impossible to be 100% compliant in every interpretation.
The law is huge, complex and can often have conflicting aspects.
This is assumed by some to be "by design". When the law is such that everyone is breaking it, then the power shifts to whoever can bring people in "front of the law".
So, in every case with strong beliefs such as yours, IMMV and it's easy to voice an opinion when you feel "not in target".
I think some of the trouble here is that the application of the law cannot be guaranteed to be free of discrimination or bias, regardless of the letter of the law itself?
> I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed.
Laws are written by imperfect humans. Bad laws exist.
Well then fix the laws, and/or advocate to fix the laws. Laws must exist in order to have a society, and no defeatist attitude will ever fix them. Laws won't fix by themselves, a majority needs to need them fixed. And then APPLY them.
> That eliminates margin for corruption and lenience.
Lenience and mercy are critical components of a system of a just criminal justice system. We have judges issue sentences in large part because we want a human being with good judgement to decide how serious the punishment for an offence should be based on the circumstances.
A person who shoots their partner who has been abusing them for years should probably receive a different punishment than a person who pulls out a gun in traffic and shoots someone for cutting them off. Mercy or "lenience" are not inherently flaws in the justice system, though of course there's always "too much of a good thing."
> I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed.
I read an article some years back that really changed my mind about this. It made the point that society evolves through the imperfect enforcement of laws (those some kinds of imperfection, like selective enforcement, are distinctly harmful). That is empirically true, but for some reason I hadn't realized it until the article pointed it out to me.
I don't believe that deportation is inherently morally wrong, but there are certainly ways to deport people that are less moral than others.
I think DHH's comments are pretty mild given the subject. However, I think it is how he frames his comments that cause offensive - lumping a (potentially) problematic (arguably) ethnic group of people in with animal control...
This should not have been flagged. There's not even any flagged comments.
I don't know the rules for what does and doesn't get flagged. I tried to write it in a respectful way without resorting to personal attacks.
I noticed your respectful and thoughtful writing which is why I don't think it should be flagged. It starts the discussion in a nice way, and as I said at the time there weren't even any rule breaking comments that were flagged.
I've asked the moderators.
I think people have flagged it simply because the topic attracts the kind of discussion hn usually tries to avoid.
Guidelines:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
(To be clear, I'm not saying I think you did anything wrong)
Fair enough. If it's against the rules, I won't post things like this on hacker news anymore.
I don't believe it's against the rules, but rather part of the community is often self moderating to keep politics adjacent topics off the front page.
In many places, on Reddit especially, anything remotely referencing Travellers (UK), Roma, Gypsies will get flagged, locked, and taken down very quickly. To a degree there is brigading and to a degree a large number of people are unable to discuss them calmly.
Personally, I didn't flag the article but I think it might be right to be flagged - just; I think you have discussed the issue calmly, but I find the article to be faux respectful and presenting itself as being neutral where it is not. To me the article reads as posturing and signalling, and using the headline (cancelling Hey) as a thin cover for discussing something else entirely (the blog post, the disagreements with it, and the political disagreement with DHH). Note that HN says anything off-topic should be flagged, and the definition for off-topic starts with: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime...". If it had been, I'm cancelling Hey.com due to revelations about the owners DHH <link>, its cost me $x and was good and now I'm going to $y then I think it would be on-topic.
That all said; the topic you are really discussing is one that is very hard to have a reasonable conversation with people about. It has been unreasonably politicised, and is aggressively pursued as such; to a degree that distorts the basic facts and denies the real harms and impacts. One of my early roles involved physical security systems, and during it I encountered a large number of people suffering from related issues while the police both didn't have the power to resolve it and were not willing to wield the power they did have. I am deeply concerned about the widespread censoring of these discussions.
I didn't intend to present myself as neutral. I was explaining why I disagreed with him. But I do agree with you - having seen the site guidelines, it makes sense why it was flagged.
I used to admire that guy. I don't understand why anyone still works at Basecamp with posts like this to be honest. How do people justify it to themselves? Maybe it's just harder to switch jobs now with AI, I don't know.
Perhaps they agree with his opinion or they don't care about it?
Maybe it's simply because his opinion is shared by many people and I would even say that he is pretty mild in expressing it?
Maybe a lot of people actually agree with him, and would rather we expect more of people, rather than simply defining criminal activity as an unconscious effect of one's being somehow oppressed, or one's great-great-grandparents being oppressed, or whatever.
The culture in question have been infamous for centuries for their value system which is incompatible with most others. Just as it's okay for devout Islamists to find the whole American value system disgusting and want nothing to do with it, it's okay for DHH and other Westerners to find the Roma value system disgusting. It's a belief system they choose, it's not something like skin that people cannot change.
In America there's a lot of ethical ambiguity given how recently most current residents' ancestors arrived. But in Denmark? Did the Roma build that society? (Possible) EU citizenship aside, I find it hard to judge Danes who feel that ethically, they don't have a right to degrade that society with crime and vagrancy. Same as I don't blame English people who don't like certain things going on there.
The article being referred to says "When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them" - it doesn't say "you deport everyone of that race," it's about the people causing problems. If you allow literally any behavior, no matter how antisocial, bad actors will ruin everything for everyone. Only the most obtuse person doesn't recognize the truth of that, deep down.
> if I give someone inaccurate medical advice, that is not only false, it is false and harmful
I don't understand what's so special about legal and medical advice that it's so singled out in certain parts of the world. All kinds of advice people give can be harmful, such as eg cooking and dietary advice. Yet it's ok to tell people how to cook, but for whatever reason it's not ok to tell people to make sure they stay well-hydrated when they have a cold.
[Edit:] But gee does the rest of the article hit hard. The "missing mood" in particular.
I think it's hard to do significant harm with bad cooking advice. Unless the advice was absolutely terrible like "eat only raw potatoes". But that's pretty rare. On the other hand many people can think of someone who was harmed seriously by bad medical advice. Steve Jobs is a famous example. (I'm the author of the article)
Generally speaking, bad medical or legal advice has much higher potential to have far-reaching consequences - much more so than giving bad cooking advice.
But also good medical advice has a high potential to have far-reaching positive consequences. Telling people not to forget to hydrate shouldn't be controversial. Shouldn't we be on the side of good advice rather than on the side of no legal or medical advice?
Sure - and a really good indicator for whether the advice is good is, "is this person educated and licensed to talk about this?"
To say nothing of whether that person has the necessary - often lengthy - context necessary to provide good advice.
There are a lot of people who thrive in high trust societies and suffer in chaotic alternative. Pretending that diversity doesn't have a cost is plain wrong.
The way you've written your comment implies "high trust societies" and (presumably ethnic) "diversity" are opposites. The terms high- and low- trust society come from Fukuyama, who considered ethnically homogenous countries like Korea low-trust, and ethnically diverse countries like the US and Germany high- trust. Please, go more into what you mean about social trust and how it relates to diversity.
> ethnically diverse countries like the US and Germany
Less true in 1995, when both were Whiter countries.
> In his 1995 book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, political scientist Francis Fukuyama
> In 1995, the white population made up approximately 73.0% to 73.6% of the total United States resident population
> In 1995, Germany had a total population of approximately 81.8 million people. Official German demographic and statistical agencies do not track or categorize the population by "white" race; instead, official statistics record population data by citizenship and migration background. Historical demographic estimates place the approximate share of the indigenous white/European ethnic population at roughly 93% to 94% of the total population at that time.
And both countries were definitely higher-trust in 1995. Which makes sense since there are proportionaly less White people now, and White people are objectively the least in-group biased race:
https://www.ljzigerell.com/?p=9002
https://archive.org/details/5366a-475f-4b-0824675fa-928fe-45...
"diversity" is a weasel word (often commits the motte-and-bailey fallacy) because it can easily mean different things at different times, making it prone to use as a political catch-all slogan.
"Diversity is our strength" -- what kind of diversity? Within a company, diversity of purpose is not a strength, because you can't have people working at cross-purposes with one another. It's the same for countries, local communities, and families. "Diversity" can easily be used to describe what ultimately is "division", making it contradict the old saying in the USA "United we stand, divided we fall".
Diversity of strengths/weaknesses, personalities, backgrounds (including ethnic), etc. all do make us stronger provided we maintain and prioritize a practical unity in a shared purpose.
'high-trust society' is quite often the same, as a sibling demonstrates. These two terms pretty much never appear simultaneously in an argument except as a dogwhistle.
Strange logic and strange days we live in.
Typically I just spend money on software that works the best and suits my needs.
I don't generally research the individual creating it.
We should all know less about eachother!
It's not strange at all. For example if your money are used for political causes you don't like then you should absolutely send the money to alternatives instead.
Did run purity checks on alternatives? Because maybe you're just funneling money to larger and better PR-assisted "nazis"
I think DHH's opinion is a very common sentiment in Europe. "Gypsies" are a very European thing. I wonder if there's anything similar in the US? For context for US readers; they generally exist outside of the usual social norms, and have a pretty bad reputation because of it.
This is not a defence of DHH, just providing context to his comments.
There isn't really a direct point of comparison in the US, because by and large the US is much more loosely attached to the concept of having a specific "Our culture" that others are expected to assimilate to. Rather, US culture is more of an admixture of whoever happens to be in an area. That isn't to say that it's all peaches and roses, but our racism tends towards "this group is intrinsically worse than mine" rather than "this group is trying to conquer our homeland".
This plays out with things like US culture being pretty well tolerant of ethnic enclaves (Chinatowns, Little Italies, Solvang, etc) compared to what I've seen in my travels abroad, while preferring to bulldoze those enclaves when a new freeway needs to be built, and foods emblematic of certain areas being Flanderized versions of various foreign cuisines (Take a look at California's burritos, or a Chicago style pizza, or a New York style pizza).
As if the social norms only flow one way (gypsies excluding themselves) and not the other way (white Europeans excluding them).
There are in a lot of EU countries sets of laws to integrate gypsies, but it's a hard problem, e.g. schooling kids who move town every three months.
I think the gypsies he's referring to might be a particular set of organised beggar gangs exploiting gypsies from Romania, Bulgaria and generally central Europe in European cities since the early 2000s, and not the usual seasonal workers from these and other gypsy communities. But I haven't been to Copenhagen in a while.
I don't understand your comment - the social norms I refer to are paying tax, sending your children to school, integrating with the local community, living in areas/accommodation that is legal/not transitory. It can be argued how many of those are valid criticisms, but that is what generally refer to.
His opinion that their behavior is undesirable and should be dealt with is common.
His comparison to them as wolf-like predators (and you shoot wolves), previous posts about mass deportation and forced remigration ... no, most Europeans aren't veering strongly into hard-right territory.
For a hot second I thought the OP was going to share a way to silently suppress chats that start with "Hi", or "Hey".
Yeah, the title is really misleading. I thought the same at first, and then I also thought that this will be a review of the actual “Hey” email client.
It is sad that such a song and dance is required when anyone with half a brain can read the racism in DHH's post.
Imagine a scenario that a black family moved into your neighborhood and started causing a bunch of problems. There are no other black people in the neighborhood.
It should take you a picosecond to figure out which one of these is obviously racist and which isn't:
"We need to remove the black people from our neighborhood"
"We need to remove the new family from our neighborhood"
People like "well he has a good point they are causing problems" so technically the set of "black people" and "people who are currently causing problems in our neighborhood" are the same set. This is irrelevant.
Back when I lived in a homogeneous country, I used to believe in those progressive ideas "don't be racist", "discrimination is the source of issues", "we have to resolve poverty through investments in public infrastructure", yada yada all of that. Then I moved into a black neighborhood of a multicultural country, had my things stolen twice, witnessed three shootings. Honestly, at this point I don't understand what's wrong with being racist and admitting that some groups of people are just less civilized and they're not going to change unless we eradicate their culture.
I have a friend who tries to get me back on being progressive. Obviously, he lives in a 100% white neighborhood.
Islamic terrorism is pretty much a recurring theme in Germany yet mainstream parties are still utterly baffled how is it possible that AfD is surging. I wonder when things boil over and a developed democracy elects a government that openly implements racist policies in order to improve public safety. Because we can clearly see the public discourse changing - things we are able to say now were unimaginable even 10 years ago.
This is a wholly uncharitable strawman of DHH's post.
"Well, my understanding of Denmark is that they also don't have the will to start doing mass deportations of EU citizens, and DHH is advocating to change that. "
https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/69582/denmark-moves-tow...
No opinion, just statement for your records.
that link talks about non-EU citizens. the people discussed in the topic are EU citizens.
I think the author is taking umbrage with DHH using the word "gypsies" where it might have been "junkies" or just "homeless".
I see it in Berlin, rise of agressive, smelly begging in U-Bahn (I witnessed a beggar actually attacking passengers, hitting a woman). People walking around having fully shit their pants. This, I presume, is tolerated in the name of individualism, that the individual is free to choose how they present themselves in the public, and walking around with pants fully shat must be some inalienable right.
Area around Kottbusser Tor reeks of urine, and there's junkies fully out of it constantly screaming and fighting. Is somehow pointing this out is shameful and racist?
“Gypsies” are a race of people. “Junkies” and homeless people are, at an individual level, not.
Homeless people and drug addicts may well be victims of circumstance or victims of society depending on your point view - or even victims of their own choices or actions - but there’s a difference between saying “this race of people is problematic” and “this class of people is problematic”.
Hypothetical: A group of people from a specific race and culture recently came into a country and make their living primarily by stealing the wallets of tourists. If you had to guess, what are the chances that they are Japanese people?
Not that I disagree, but to play Devil's advocate for a second...
I think DHH was trying to refer to junkies and homeless people most of whom happen to be immigrants. The immigration status is the particular attribute that invites usage of the term "gypsies" to signal that the problem with those particular junkies and homeless could be solved via immigration enforcement. At least in his eyes, I presume.
Again, not defending his choice of words, just providing a somewhat plausible explanation as to how one might arrive to this specific terminology.
First and foremost, if DHH meant "junkies" or "homeless" by "gypsies", a term widely regarded as derogatory used to describe Romani people [0], then already there is plenty to take umbrage with.
Second of all, homelessness and drug addiction are not moral failings. As the author says ".. there will be some who are good and some who are bad. This makes people very unlike wolves."
I ask you to question whether the people who are "...walking around having fully shit their pants" should be deported, or treated for the conditions that ail them. The people aren't to be protected on some basis of "individualism", but on the basis that they are human people. Not animals.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people
>I think the author is taking umbrage with DHH using the word "gypsies"
comparing them to animals and repeatedly declaring how we shoot those animals is probably also not great.
"gypsie" cannot be substituted by "junky" or "homeless", for the simple reason that those words simply mask the ethnicity and immigration overtones, which are very much present in DHH's blog post. I haven't found your message racist, but this first sentence might give the impression that you are willing to turn a blind eye to the racism of others if their views align with yours concerning the presence of drug addicts and homeless people in public space.
And once you look at the problems you mention without taking the easy way out ("They're aliens and should just be excluded from our society"), the question is not so much whether they have the right to do this, but how we, as a society, can provide care to those people.
Also, I can't understand your presumption that "This is tolerated in the name of individualism". The situation your are describing is a public health issue, not a question of lawfulness.
the discussed blogpost https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
Disgusting. I want to say that DHH has fallen so far, but I don't actually see any evidence that he wasn't this hateful inside his heart years ago.
I can't recall when the strongarmed union-busting happened at Basecamp, but it was a few years ago. Funnily enough, he kept patronizing Citations Needed well after.
E: 2021, apparently; thanks mplewis.
Here he was last year championing the Far Right in England https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
Oh, wow.
> large gathering of perfectly normal, peaceful Brits
Let's just say that when a Tommy Robinson crowd walk into a pub, the perfectly normal, peaceful Brits look for the exits.
Yup. I followed his terrible behavior since his 2021 crashout, when he caused a third of his employees to leave his company, and he's only gotten louder and worse since. Looking back further, I can't see him actually supporting anything pro-social.
DHH has had a long decline, in my personal regard. A lot of things I ignored or gave grace for because of his early influence were actually clear signals about his fundamental beliefs.
From the blog:
> They're still reeling from the Pakistani rape gangs that were left free to terrorize cities like Rotherham and Rochdale for years on end with horror-movie-like scenes of the most despicable, depraved abuse of British girls.
I can see if you feel this was fabricated by the author, you'd have the negative reaction you're having. But this is much-reported, much-discussed fact. Maybe HN needs to read news sources besides HN.
[deleted]
Libelous. He never says to shoot Roma. He says to deport foreigners who sleep in parks.
He does say to shoot the wolves. And the wolves are the “gypsies” in the analogy he is explicitly drawing. The commenter you’re responding to was highlighting the parallelism not literally saying “he said to shoot people”
He says to deport literally an entire ethnic group independent of whether they happen to sleep in parks, which is the entire point being made by the article linked to by this page where we're commenting. The comment you're responding to also restates this, without making any claims about whether he said to shoot people, so your objection doesn't really make any sense in that regard either.
1. Comment says “shoot them” refers to Roma. Totally false and intentionally misleading.
2. Literally the only place the word deport is used in the post is here: “ When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them”
Please quote where he says to deport all Roma/gypsies.
> Comment says “shoot them” refers to Roma. Totally false and intentionally misleading.
The comment is deleted now, so I don't have any way to prove this, but it didn't say that when I read it. Maybe it did earlier and it had been edited by the time I had read it.
> Please quote where he says to deport all Roma/gypsies
You want me to quote the exact sentence you already quoted? There's only one antecedent of the pronoun "them" that makes sense in that sentence, and it's not "public spaces". If you want to pretend that the intentional repeated use of a slur and years of similar opinions are somehow immaterial to trying to understand what that sentence means, you're free to do that, but that's not what libel means.
he pairs the concepts
even if that WERE what he said, it would still be an incorrect and outsized response based in racial animus
This is slightly less awful than what I imagined but still enough that I would never want to do do business with any company run by DHH anymore.
Granted, I already have a dim view of Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and have never used any of DHH's software products, so my comment is a moral denouncement that carries no weight. Still, the dog whistling in this blog post is so loud I hear barking from the next door down. I don't exactly have on-the-ground knowledge of the exact situation in Copenhagen, but even just from what DHH describes, I'm pretty sure the solution can be solved through means less invasive than deporting homeless people.
And just to be clear, I'm using the phrase "homeless people" rather than Europe's N-word because the problem is not where the people came from. Unless you want to pretend like Danish-born homeless are somehow way better, which would be a level of propagandistic bullshittery I don't even think Trump would stoop to. I also shouldn't have to explain why the actions to fix homelessness should not be identical or even analogous to the actions taken to manage an invasive wolf population.
There is an actual problem DHH is vaguely grasping at: western countries have an exceptionally low state capacity despite their status on the world stage. The West is run by people who believe their job is to merely manage the decline of their terminally-ill trade empires until the pieces get inevitably packaged up and sold to ancap-esque autocrats of trade. And the social and economic structures undergirding the west, especially in Europe, have ossified to the point where there is not only no place for immigrants of any stripe, but even our own young can't fit in.
But the answer to this problem that always gets attention is the people who want to burn that remaining state capacity on incredibly vengeful, petty, and stupid acts of bullying. "I don't care how poor I am as long as I have someone else's neck below my boot" is just a recipe for mass impoverishment.
Given the state of the world it doesn’t seem that the wolves are the ones out of control
Sigh.
While every wolf may be a predator - that does not necessarily mean they are they are dangerous to all potential types of prey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Cry_Wolf
Isn't prey by definition in danger.
If you honestly believe what you're saying you're going to have a REALLY BAD TIME in the wild.
Depends on the environment - in that book for example, Arctic wolves were not the cause of large (in physical size - the caribou) prey animal population decline, even though the "feelings" of the average person was that they must be the reason.
Outside of fiction, wolves are not ravenous beasts that hunt everything and anything in sight.
Predators do tend to go for the weak/sick, older or younger/inexperienced targets - they aren't stupid.
You're looking at the problem from the 5,000 foot view.
Prey is whatever is at risk of being consumed. I have made no attempt at classifying wolves behavior in my comment.
Edit: I do take the prey/predator relationship very seriously, I wrote about what I do here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46462101
By that logic - every living being on the planet is - or can be prey for something else - and I am not disagreeing with that.
But that 5,000 foot view of mine is more related to the original blog author using predator/prey as an analogy - it breaks down quickly when applied to humans.
Nice comment! (I used to hunt - but not as intimately as your experience - you have a very skilled and serious background)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
Facts alone won't get you to answers about what you should do about something.
Whether your personal view is that the solution to low income migrants entering your country should be outright genocide, deportation, societal integration, welfare, or something else - it's not going to be based on a statement of fact.
A fact is that the elderly who have retired from the workfrorce are no longer contributing to the national wealth, they're also using the public health system more than any other demographic. Clearly we should...
One seemingly deliberately conflation this post commits is betwee "gypsy" and "roma". The first as a set of actions, the second as an ethnicity divorced from any action of behaviour. Dhh refers to the first, and uses the first word. The fine article interprets it to mean the second, and correspondingly substitutes the second word. But dhh makes it clear what he means by "gypsy", so one can only interpret this conflation as deliberate.
This article is about someone cancelling their subscription to software that was written by someone who is not in favor of allowing a population of immigrants frequently associated with criminal behavior to remain in Denmark.
The author argues in favor of "individuated enforcement" wherein deportation is conditioned on the degree to which a migrant has contributed positively to the country.
"your neighborhood is taken over by migrants" is a wild way of saying "associated with criminal behavior". This is yikes and so is your analysis.
Google Search: Pakistani Rape Gangs London
TIL Pakistani and Rroms are the same people.
The blog post literally equates “gypsies” with animals.
It’s not difficult. It’s beyond yikes territory: it’s his now typical xenophobia and bigotry.
Now we know how the 1930s felt, I guess. Wealthy fair-haired motorsport brat edgelords were the leading edge of fascism then too.
Hey is the only way I can have a public, usable email account anymore.
I maintain a self-hosted whitelist-only email account for sensitive work but email for other purposes just isn't tenable anymore.
If someone else comes along with a better product maybe I'll consider it.
I like Fastmail
I use Fastmail. It’s excellent, and only $114 for two years. (Just processed my renewal today.)
This is trying far too hard to be charitable. Mistake theory is great, and it's good that the article mentions it, but it then also presents sufficient evidence to prove, or at least substantiate, malice. At this point not having "bad feelings toward DHH" is itself a "Missing Mood". At any rate, though, the author took the correct action.
Wolves are also pretty important, by the way. Hopefully we all know that by now?
> This is trying far too hard to be charitable. Mistake theory is great, and it's good that the article mentions it, but it then also presents sufficient evidence to prove, or at least substantiate, malice.
The benefit of the doubt only exists as long as there is doubt. Once there's an overwhelming body of evidence that removes any of it, continuing to give it is pretty suspicious, like you mention.
For what it's worth, I do think the author is only guilty of being too kind. I wouldn't call it suspicious in this case.
I'll rephrase: I don't have any reason to actively think they're malicious, but I don't really trust the judgment of someone who sees a person advocate for what they describe as a racist national policy after years of similar opinions and thinks that it's important enough to stop paying a subscription to that person's service, but is concerned about whether they're going to hurt the feelings of that person by actually concluding that maybe the reason they're always advocating for racist policies is just racist.
Yeah, personally, it's hard to say "live and let live" about someone who doesn't want a people to live.
> someone who doesn't want a people to live.
Who doesn't want a people to live? Where do they say that?
Sure but I don't want wolves eating my children.
This whole article seems like a straw man.
Chad seems to be arguing: 1. DHH thinks all gypsies are bad, therefor 2. DHH does not see Roma as individual people, therefor 3. DHH is a bad person.
I read DHH's blog as: 1. It should still be illegal to camp in parks, therefor 2. People who do camp in parks should be housed, therefor 3. Foreigners who refuse housing should be deported.
If he said "Foreigners who refuse housing should be deported." I would agree. Can you show me where he said that? I read "gypsies should be deported"
Note: I meant "I read a sentiment along the lines of 'gypsies should be deported'", I didn't mean to imply he said those words literally
My problem with the part about housing is that DHH acts as if cities have enough shelters to accommodate everyone and these 'gypsies' are refusing to go there. I don't buy that for a second.
I don't know about Copenhagen, but in US a significant fraction of the homeless population openly rejects various shelter and housing opportunities because those usually come with extra requirements for sobriety and commitments to addiction treatments. So yeah, there's definitely people who just refuse to go.
Then there's also mentally ill people who operate in the grey zone of law — clearly too mentally ill to be prosecuted for their crimes (or haven't committed any crimes yet), can't be held in prison, but also too unstable and violent to be admitted to shelters with other, mostly normal disadvantaged people.
One example of such case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Eina_Kwon
I don't even know where to begin with this comment...
One of the many holes in DHH's claim about wolves, sheep, and gypsies is that wolves are not the sort of low-dimensional archetype he uses to support his narrative.
If you're very literal like me, you take that to mean wolves, the mammal; a predatory animal living within a food web, fulfilling a particular role at its trophic level which is ultimately beneficial to the system it's a part of.
Wolves don't independently get 'out of control' such that they need to be shot. This has been demonstrated across North America and Europe. The perception of wolves being out of control is largely subjective and misguided, and the result of 1. humans encroaching on wild land, 2. human activity limiting wolves' access to food, and 3. humans fearing wolves and wanting there to be fewer of them.
Through this lens, comparing immigrants to wolves is absurd. It becomes clear that DHH is discarding a lot of context in order to weave a fearful narrative which uses invalid, fictional mechanisms to make his point.
The use of the terms gypsies and sheep also comes with issues. It's a poor piece of writing, lacks any compelling substance (assuming you aren't swayed by him), and largely demonstrates that he's not particularly thoughtful about this while lacking the self-awareness and comprehension to notice how weak his position is.
It's okay to want reduced immigration. It's okay to want to preserve certain things in your society. It's not necessary or reasonable to do so through this lens, however. There are plenty of compelling arguments to make for regulating these systems in local, regional, and national government. It's okay to want that. When you start describing immigrants as dangerous animals, you've gone many steps too far off of a sensible path.
I also understand the use of fables to communicate moral and ethical stories, which seems to be a component in his narrative. However, he steps out of that bound when he talks about literal wolves (and the need to shoot them). Yet fables are a coarse tool, not an intricate one, and they're far too reductive to support an argument against immigration across a continent. It's an absurd position to argue from, and in terms of narrative, it makes DHH seem either obtuse or very hateful and disingenuous. I've never read anything of his since this piece.
Not trying to counter your main point but the biological wolf analogy is quite close to the author's point.
The wolf population development has been known to exceed every prediction in Western Europe, and while it's fairly inoffensive for humans the economic consequences are much higher than most anticipated, for economic/ecologic benefits that are hard to defend. And the wolf population are still fairly low.
In my opinion maybe the money spent protecting wolves (hundreds of millions per year in Europe) would be better spent on homeless shelters and similar policies.
Still this article should remind every European of the Nazis comparing the Jewish diaspora dispersal with the historical dissemination of black and brown rats.
I’ll have to look into that. My reading on wolf populations in the past has consistently indicated that imbalances regularly point back to human interference, but I’ve read a lot less about European wolves and more about those in western Canada and the USA.
I totally agree about your last point. This type of rhetoric is dangerous and it’s highly precedented. There’s often a reason people lean on it for leverage.
>created by industry legend DHH
DHH = david heinemeier hansson (ruby on rails creator)
I was disappointed to read this and hear language and using allusions that parallel arguments made by hate groups.
I think DHH can take a stance that overly lax immigration policy has led to issues, if that is what he believes. That may be true, I don’t know, and I have no issues with policy debate around that, but directly comparing a specific race of emigrant people as wolves preying on native peoples, sheep is pretty gross.
Welcome to America, where we blame victims.
Once again, it's projection.
Strong people raise others up.
Weak people seek to cut others down.
Look in the mirror. What do you see? Jpeg at imgbb.com
https://i.ibb.co/yBmnPGbf/epstein-mirror.jpg
DHH is absolutely correct. Someone thinking differently just didn't have an experience. Buy hey, it's so nice to hop on that high horse.
I wish people would get down their thrones and go to live near a gipsy camp before bitching about tolerance, I see all these champions of acceptance always living 20 metro stops from the last homeless
The article literally is making an argument to deport the people you're complaining about, just not literally everyone else who happens to be from the same ethnic group. I don't really understand why you'd have a problem with them saying that if that's what you actually care about.
Yeah. I watched Seattle slide downhill, and I decided to leave.
Find needles on the beach multiple times, and you simple stop caring about reasons and want action.
Far right is a label being used for normal things like secure borders and safe cities.
Funny how Obama said the very same things and I'm pretty sure he wasn't far right.
He deported and secured borders to such an extent he would definitely be called far right now.
It is a long blog post, but the controversy seems to center on DHH’s language and reasoning about Roma people.
My reading is that he used those examples deliberately to raise a broader issue: some people are tired of being told to ignore problems they can see and experience, whether that means feeling unsafe while walking through a city or attending a Pride parade (assume that are the “wolfs”), or being frustrated that nearly every item at Target is locked up (“gypsies”).
To be clear, I am not expressing an opinion on whether his argument is right or wrong.
I think a lot of folks - myself included - canceled our Hey subscriptions years ago when DHH said some other unfortunate things.
I don't have to agree with everyone on everything, not even people I do business with. But I do try to limit supporting people who have actively advocated for things that harm my family. Say what you will about Apple (where I transitioned), but they're the "least evil" option from my perspective.
Others are of course welcome to their own perspectives and choices.
One thing this post never does is actually meaningfully argue with the core idea of the post that so outraged them.
Which is: If someone comes illegally to your country and ends up sleeping in parks, they should be deported.
I don’t know if I agree with that but the post seems to take it for granted that any reasonable person cannot.
To me this is more a fashion statement than an argument. Advocating deportations is automatically bad, using the word “gypsy” is automatically offensive. It’s silly. Pretty much everyone has some line of behavior at which they advocate deportation, and can anyone here who is upset actually explain why “Roma” is less offensive than “Gypsy”? There are PhDs in Eastern European history who can’t do that.
> Which is: If someone comes illegally to your country and ends up sleeping in parks, they should be deported.
That doesn't enrage me, in fact I agree with it. But no one in this story came illegally to Denmark. I'm not sure what gave you that impression. And I read DHH to be saying that more people than just the specific ones sleeping in parks should be deported.
You don't need to express the issues like DHH did, but there are problems in the EU that weren't there 20 years ago.
The former European Community core states are too small and cannot handle the influx of millions from the East and the South.
The core states should leave the EU and reestablish the former European Community, which would help the populations as opposed to multinational locust companies.
It isn't fair that the whole world (mind you, including rich foreigners) buys up apartments, takes jobs and displaces the original population.
> I'm a big believer in live-and-let-live. That's why I don't have bad feelings towards DHH. I definitely don't believe in trying to change people's minds by shouting at them or shaming them.
Hence the blog post.
Where is the shouting and shaming in the blog post?
This blog post is an exercise in publicly shaming Hey/DHH for their blog post.
Which is fine. But there is significant hypocrisy in presenting as though you aren't doing exactly that.
...thats his point. He doesn't want to shout and shame. So he wrote a blog post.
"Hence" means, "therefore", as in "I didn't want to shout and shame, therefore I wrote this blog post"
No, I'm pointing out the author's hypocrisy.
I don't think I shouted at DHH or shamed him. Where did I do that? Is there a way to write a blog post disagreeing with someone that isn't shouting and shaming in your eyes?
Cool, way to prioritize your opinions. Now you just have to find an email platform run by people you always agree with about everything.
Based on the content of the post, it seems like it would be adequate to find an email platform run by people not vocally calling for the ethnic cleansing of minorities.
He is calling for the deportation of illegal immigrants who sleep in parks.
Cloudflare, in contrast, actively works with the CCP which is doing actual ethnic cleansing in Tibet and Xinjiang. But they are harder to cancel aren’t they.
I’m a pragmatist. I’m not going to drive myself crazy interrogating the opinions of every service provider I use. I don’t know about the Fastmail founder or CEO’s beliefs and don’t want to.
I think this is a false equivalence. Cloudflare doesn't espouse the position that ethnic cleaning is good, and afaik nothing it does in China enables that.
Further, DHH isn't calling for the deportation of illegal immigrants in parks. He's calling for the deportation of all people tagged with a specific label with no discrimination. The blog post talks about exactly that difference.
I agree that we live in an ecosystem where, in some industries, all options are terrible. That doesn't mean that, among those bad options, you can't exercise discernment and good judgment. I'm similarly a pragmatist from a different angle - I do believe the marginal dollar value I add to a company's bottom line doesn't change much of anything, and that voting with your wallet only works with collective action to be more than theater - but I also think that makes OP's conscientiousness admirable. Pragmatism isn't apathy or agnosticism, and shouldn't be conflated as such.
He is calling for deportation of homeless migrants.
He nowhere says they are illegal immigrants.
> He is calling for the deportation of illegal immigrants who sleep in parks.
No, that's what this article is calling for. The complain they have is that DHH called for deporting the entire ethnic group independent of whether they're sleeping in parks.
DHH's blog post reads:
>> When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
Looks like some of the controversy is whether "them" refers to "the gypsies" or "the gypsies who take over public spaces".
It sounds genuinely ambiguous to me. Example A) "When wolves eat too many sheep, you shoot them." seems to advocate for shooting all wolves. Example B) "When adults abuse minors, you imprison them." presumably only refers to those that abuse minors.
DHH writes:
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
I think based on his choice of parallelism we can fairly guess he means it the wolf way. There's not a single sentence in his post that supports the other interpretation.
I mean, the first example you gave is pretty much exactly what he was saying as an analogy earlier in the blog post. It seems somewhat preposterous to give the benefit of the doubt to this like it was an accident when it wouldn't be at all hard for someone who cared about the difference to express it more clearly. It's not like he's unaware that people already think that he holds views like this, so the ambiguity seems more like intentional dogwhistling/plausible deniability than an innocent mistake from someone who didn't think that anyone might read their words in that way.
You only need to find an email platform run by people you agree with more, no? I'd vouch for proton mail here.
Isn't Proton funneling money into a far-right Swedish party?
You're thinking of Mullvad.
Daniel Berntsson, a co-founder and co-owner of Mullvad, made a massive personal donation of 5 million Swedish Krona (roughly $500,000 USD) to the Örebro Party.
Proton is Swiss, not Swedish.
People like you always say to vote with your wallets until people start doing that.
Your comment suggests that all disagreements are equal. I would get email service from someone who likes Ruby more than Python, even if I disagree. I, like the author of the post, wouldn't get email from someone I knew was virulently racist as DHH is.
Thats not an accurate framing. There are some disagreements that are red lines and others that are not. I think Chrono Trigger is one of the greatest games of all time, and someone disagreeing with me on that point is not a big deal. A hyperbolic example of the other side would be a Nazi's opinion on Jewish people. Given the nature of that opinion, not only would I disagree with them it would also be completely appropriate to fully disassociate with them and highly encourage others to do so.
People draw lines in different places, and what you are doing here is implying that it is unreasonable for people to take that level of issue with DHH's "gypsy" comment. I disagree. I think its completely reasonable to view that as unacceptable and to disassociate from that person.
That would be Migadu, btw. But also plenty of people left them over their vague anti-violence pledge which many deem anti-Free Speech.
/s I left Migadu for Hey.
You don’t have to agree on everything but there are redlines
The article says:
> You do not need to deport all of them to deport the ones who "take over public spaces".
And continues to assume that DHH is talking about mass deportation. He's not. He says:
> When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
He's not saying we should deport _all_ gypsies just because one group is taking over public space.
Can you explain how that's analogous to what he thinks we should do to wolves? Does he think that we should only shoot the wolves that are causing problems and leave the innocent majority of wolves alone?
I was really wanting to read this, I had a morbid interest in Hey.com's cancellation policy. After 3+ paragraphs and an effin PG quote, there still is no point.
There once were angry submissions (or comments?) here about how hard it is to cancel NYT.
I was expecting the Hey-version of that, instead I got long-winded prose that sounds like a bunch of college boys trying to sound smart.
No thanks.
I guess the E-mail-service is still overpriced due to them believing in non-existent value of their web client.
If that's the point of the article, sorry, I didn't make it far enough.
The article doesn't mention Hey or the cancellation anywhere after the PG paragraph.
Ah, I see, the post is about why, not how.
Guess my language limits got me there.
Still very hard to understand and I find hard to say it would be worth reading. Apart from the Gemini-like looking template.
The site is hosted with Obsidian Publish which looked exactly like this far before Gemini existed
DHH’s blog post was, to put it simply, spot on. You disagree with that, and that’s fine.
But to cancel a subscription for another service entirely, because someone used a blog platform of the same provider to publish something you were repulsed by – this seems like a really bizarre way of managing your emotion. By this logic I should feel compelled to delete my HN account, delete all my social media and cancel all press subscriptions…
DHH co-owns 37signals, the company that created hey.com.
DHH is the owner of the so called 'provider'
DHH is the creator of Hey.
Your left nav doesn't have a scrollbar and doesn't fit on a 16:9 laptop screen.
I guess it's a flaw with Obsidian Publish, what the author is using to post their thoughts.
Should be using world.hey.com.
> However, in any ethnicity of people, there will be some who are good and some who are bad.
This is a strawman interpretation of anti-immigration arguments. Non-strawman anti-immigration positions are that immigrants are a problem even if they are all "good".
If you care about getting rid of "bad" people, then you have to evenhandedly apply the rule, even to those who have ethnic roots in the country going back a hundred generation: take those "bad" people too and strip them of citizenship.
Where in the world is immigration driven by "good" or "bad"; I mean, where do documents like visitor visas and residency permits lapse due to badness rather than the mere passage of time, whereby the individual not able to extent has to go, whether they are "good" or "bad"?
What is "bad"? Does "bad" have to be armed robbery? Or is someone also "bad" if they settle in Japan, and then demand that schools remove pork from school lunch?
Unwanted immigration can simply be the raw numbers: 500 immigrants not being a problem, but 500,000 being a problem, all else being held equal, including "goodness".
You can be deemed undesirable not because who you are but entirely because you're part of a group with 499,999 others. From the individual's point of view, it is unfair; that is true, and it isn't meant to be.
If anyone wants a great mail client, I highly recommend Mailmate which among other things lets you write messages in markdown: https://freron.com/ it’s maintained by a solo dev for 15+ years and charges a fair price
If you read canceling as part of the "cancel culture" and not canceling the subscription, then this two statements seam contradictory
> Cancelling "Hey"
> I definitely don't believe in trying to change people's minds by shouting at them or shaming them
I'm not a native speaker but
> I definitely don't believe in trying to change people's minds by shouting at them or shaming them
seems to me like they want to make a (polite) argument instead of explicitly calling them “heretic” to quote the article.
They also quite obviously seem to refer to cancellling the subscription here and not trying to invoke "cancel culture". The first few paragraphs make this quite clear.
I am a native speaker, I agree with this assessment.
The blogpost has the attitude problem of virtue signaling about decisions that has zero cost to themselves, about a communal kin based socialist society them know little about.
Normal working families with kids live next to these parks and rely on them as open space, it is part of the Danish socialist welfare system and care for the working man. Defacation and open cooking plus thrash by not your own weak but foreigners has real cost to those that can’t afford to move.
> Normal working families with kids live next to these parks and rely on them as open space, it is part of the Danish socialist welfare system and care for the working man. Defacation and open cooking plus thrash by not your own weak but foreigners has real cost to those that can’t afford to move.
The article made it pretty clear that they're not arguing against deporting people who are camping in parks though, and just arguing against generalizing the issue as being about the entire ethnic group. Are you claiming that somehow having a communal kin based socialist society makes it impossible to have, using the term in the article, "individuated enforcement"?
The question asked in Scandinavia is if a migrant group is a net benefit to our ability to have group solidarity, while high skill individuals are judged on individual merit. These are two very different categories, and Scandinavians do not feel an obligation towards a world collective within their borders.
The group talked about here came in through mass migration and are in group conflict with working peoples interest in having safe communal open spaces, while being a net negative contributor to public pools of resources used to help the average man and disproportionately contributing to theft.
From a Scandinavian perspective you choose group solidarity with your own working man over the stranger that did not come in through high skill merit.
This doesn't really make sense to me, You're claiming that it's fine to hand-wave the issue of deporting the entire ethnic group as a whole rather than individuals because it has no high-skill members, but that doesn't really explain why you're so convinced that there are no individuals who might be able to contribute other than from assumptions about them based on them being a member of the ethnic group in the first place (e.g. "mass migration", taking up resources, disproportionately contributing to theft). That seems bizarrely at odds with the allusion to judging people by merit rather than bucketing them by shared ethnicity at the end of your comment.
What makes Scandinavians responsible for judging merit of individuals in or even allowing a specific group in? All border control is group based.
It’s our country and we have no obligation to let anyone in, especially a group that culturally conflict with ours in ways that violate our social contract and ability to provide basic standards of living to our own kin.
Downvoted for 'socialist society'.
May want to read the Wikipedia entries on both Denmark and socialism.
Socialism has very different definitions depending on who you ask.
I am from Scandinavia. We call ourselves socialist.
I mean, okay, yes, if you completely disregard what the author is actually saying they mean by using the word in the article and choose a different meaning, then it doesn't make sense. I'm not sure why that's worth pointing out when you wouldn't be able to get to the second statement without him already detailing the monetary subscription and literally following it up with saying that they're only making a financial decision, not a personal one.
It's about the author cancelling their subscription to "Hey."