Over my time in the world I have chafed against the boundaries of “professionalism” and “courtesy” and “a valid topic but not what we’re here to discuss right now”… but… sure seems like those might help here.
Maybe it’s the old-school small-l liberal in me, but I feel like we lost something socially constructive in dissolving the boundaries between public and private thoughts, school and work and home and pub and church thoughts, the office and the flawed human occupying the office…
Of course, this criticism is very popular amongst Scots who live in Scotland which is still overwhelmingly Scottish even in the major cities.
I fully expect immigration to grow as an issue in the coming years. Global warming and climate change may make immigrants of those currently deriding immigrants today.
Me, not being nice: Don't use language to be priggish and confuse. We got enough of that going already.
The example in the post is quite obvious with Nazi symbolism. But what if someone express their opinion, which is very conservative, or nationalistic like as an example I love Switzerland and I want Swiss people to prosper and have everything. Would that be incentive because they are excluding rest of the world?
Why can't we be adults and agree to disagree on Nazism? If I think Hitler did nothing wrong and you think Hitler was the most evil man on this planet, why can't we just treat this as a difference in opinion and just build cool stuff together?
I've got a feeling that the author does not hold the same opinion when it comes to white europeans not being native americans.
More importantly he said a lot more. He objects to London (that has always been a cosmopolitan city, especially in its centre) having too many people who are not ethnically "white British" and quotes numbers that excludes everyone who is not pure English, Welsh or Scottish - he excludes even the Irish, and, of course, people of mixed race.
The claim that London has greatly changed in nonsense. I grew up there and it feels exactly the same as it did in the 1980s. He talks about "A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now." i.e. he seems more brown faces than he likes. The interesting thing is that none of my childhood friends from London have a problem with this.
He supports and quotes various bigots (such as Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe) and takes what they say as fact. These are people who believe in white replacement theory, and are anti-immigrant to the extent of wanting ethnic cleansing.
White Europeans are of course not native to US or Australia.
>When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.
(in addition, the concept of Native <any european country> is nonsensical. Europe is at the confluence of migrations and has been for millenia. Attributing "whiteness" as a distinctive attribute of europeans is at best ignorant, and at worst another racist rally point. Go tell the greeks they're white, see how they like it.)
Their opinions don't have to be political and your opinions don't have to be political. If someone is making the space worse for everyone, then maybe they're not good for the space. Maybe the space is not good for them. You would be doing good for both sides by stopping them from harming the space, and stopping the space from further enabling the problematic behavior.
I have personal experience with not changing until it became clear enough that certain behavior was driving away everyone and everything I care about. It didn't matter to me how much people told me it was bad, or tried to convince me to stop. What worked was seeing people leave over it, over and over, until I couldn't take it anymore. I had to change. You would be helping these kinds of people, and the community at large, by seeing to the consequences of their actions.
> What if they see that group as a legitimate target for political reasons?
It doesn't matter. I wouldn't engage with whether or not they think they're acting in a justified manner. If the behavior won't stop, the behavior is harmful, and the community would be better off without it, then sometimes you just have to kick someone out.
The reason why I say politics are a distraction is because I don't think you need to bother to explain that someone is politically incorrect or how you are less so. You can, but none of that is actually relevant in a majority of cases. Removing someone from a community is not about being more correct or about them being incorrect, it's for the good of the community (and/or the good of whoever you're removing).
I would argue that picking an obviously Nazi-coded avatar is in itself political. It is a deliberate decision to select such an avatar. Nobody picks that symbol by accident. They know exactly what it signals, they know how people will react, and they know that the laissez-faire culture of tech is a perfect ground to normalize this shit.
If there is a not being political rule, then it is perfectly reasonable to ban people like this because they obviously are political.
100% agree. Niceness is NOT for white supremacists, and no, I am not debating whether DHH's politics are fascist-adjacent or what % of them are pure fascism.
DHH's politics and the man himself will get only shunning and ridicule from me. He's, after all, one of the weird little guys of FOSS: https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/
If you have the privilege of being able to forget about it: congratulations. If you're part of those potentially at risk: closing your eyes just makes their jobs easier.
Comparing DHH to a Nazi, which you obviously intended by choosing your “unrelated wink wink start example, is just bullshit.
“Black people are not native Brits” so very obvious facts are now radical?