Half of these people are trying to actively make life worse for you, or someone you know. We care about that stuff because otherwise people like DHH will want to get you shot if you're black, or people like Stallman will want to sexually harass you if you're a woman.

If you have the privilege of being able to forget about it: congratulations. If you're part of those potentially at risk: closing your eyes just makes their jobs easier.

Where's the list for people who would compile and publish a list of people who believe things they don't believe and call them "weird little guys"?

Rossmann might be a useful tool in fighting against companies, that doesn't change the fact that he's a gigantic asshole who regularly harasses people he disagrees with. In the same way, if Stallman could stop eating his toenails in public and saying that Epstein's victims were totally willing, maybe he would avoid being on that list.

For the better part of two decades I frequented a particular forum, and one of the most common reasons people tended to eventually get banned wasn't because of any particularly egregious political opinion, but because whatever opinion they held they tended to turn every thread they participated in anywhere into either a thread about that or a thread about them.

What if the space becomes a bit of an echo chamber when it comes to some topic and a person shows up with wildly different views, asks sharp questions and it becomes clear the community not used to having its beliefs argued doesn't have good answers? Negative valence arises through no fault of anybody. I've seen this happen multiple times. Utilitarian solution would be banning them, but it feels unjust.

'unaware.' [...] I think that is a little bit of what it is to be nice.

Me, not being nice: Don't use language to be priggish and confuse. We got enough of that going already.

It is disturbing how all of these people in tech like DHH and Elon have been so vile and all dropped the facade at the same time.

Look, either you loosen your understanding of native to be the region you are born, or you tighten it to mean precisely indigenous.

None of the populations of North America, Australia or the British Isles are indigenous by any neutral definition of the term. Populations have migrated and settled these regions over thousands of years.

You are a native of a nation if you are born within its borders. It is that simple.

Can you clarify why? I believe native anything is a flawed concept since a human, let alone an entire ethnicity, does not grow from the soil. Populations have moved, migrated and settled throughout our entire history.

Americans have a problem understanding this because race and racism is so embedded in their culture. I just been reading and hearing about American *historians" who claim "Anglo-Saxon" is a racist term (in the context of discussing medieval history) because they anachronistically see it through the modern American lens of "whiteness" that is a result of American history and politics.

Sounds like Americans projecting their problematic racial relations to the rest of the world.

That is not all he said, and the context of the UK and the US is different - for a start there is no clear divide between native and not. Are the Germanic English native, or Normans, etc? Does anyone say that white Americans are not proper Americans. Does DHH hate American cities because native Americans are a minority?

More importantly he said a lot more. He objects to London (that has always been a cosmopolitan city, especially in its centre) having too many people who are not ethnically "white British" and quotes numbers that excludes everyone who is not pure English, Welsh or Scottish - he excludes even the Irish, and, of course, people of mixed race.

The claim that London has greatly changed in nonsense. I grew up there and it feels exactly the same as it did in the 1980s. He talks about "A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now." i.e. he seems more brown faces than he likes. The interesting thing is that none of my childhood friends from London have a problem with this.

He supports and quotes various bigots (such as Tommy Robinson and Rupert Lowe) and takes what they say as fact. These are people who believe in white replacement theory, and are anti-immigrant to the extent of wanting ethnic cleansing.

Time and a place. I only see these kind of online spats refracted through people’s reactions like this one. Invariably I find myself asking how someone’s unattractive idea even came up there in the first place…

Over my time in the world I have chafed against the boundaries of “professionalism” and “courtesy” and “a valid topic but not what we’re here to discuss right now”… but… sure seems like those might help here.

Maybe it’s the old-school small-l liberal in me, but I feel like we lost something socially constructive in dissolving the boundaries between public and private thoughts, school and work and home and pub and church thoughts, the office and the flawed human occupying the office…

It's always been political and always will be, whether people believed or not. And now matter what is being done on the ground to make it otherwise, it will always be in vain.

Oh no, it only works one way. When one starts signaling virtue, there's nothing wrong he can possibly do

I don’t have much nice to say about this article.

Comparing DHH to a Nazi, which you obviously intended by choosing your “unrelated wink wink start example, is just bullshit.

“Black people are not native Brits” so very obvious facts are now radical?

“Native American” is not used in the way that you are using it

There is a difference between saying that people are ethnically native, and that only properly belong if they are ethnically native. What DHH is doing is the equivalent of saying that white (or black or Asian, or whatever) people are not real Americans.

Because that’s personal preference. Everyone has their own personal preferences and that should be respected as well. Otherwise it would like I’m being forced to do something that I don’t like to do

They accused me of being 'political' – the very thing an open source project shouldn't be, I'm told. It only divides people. Let's just focus on the technology. Surely we can all get behind building amazing, fast, cool websites!

I would argue that picking an obviously Nazi-coded avatar is in itself political. It is a deliberate decision to select such an avatar. Nobody picks that symbol by accident. They know exactly what it signals, they know how people will react, and they know that the laissez-faire culture of tech is a perfect ground to normalize this shit.

If there is a not being political rule, then it is perfectly reasonable to ban people like this because they obviously are political.

Sounds like the paradox of tolerance. Being tolerant of intolerant people just gives them a platform to spread their intolerance.

Of course I agree with OP that one can't be nice to Nazis. But he should have also mentioned that one should not be nice to anyone who kills innocent humans. Not just the Nazis.

EDIT: is there something wrong with my statement? Don't be a coward and downvote silently. Tell me how what I wrote is wrong?

People openly signaling they don't care about your feelings and rules are rarely missed. But as a former antisocial outcast myself, I always try to be nice to everyone and show them the light, prefer warnings to kicks and kicks to bans. Politics is really not that serious, decent people can have wildly different views.

I've got a family of all colors (with half-black and half-asian nephews) and we speak many languages at home.

I do believe however we should be allowed to criticize religions and I do believe we should be allowed to criticize religions without being labelled "racist".

For example I'll point out the incredible hypocrisy of the left in the west who raised me, in an atheist school, with the notion that christianity was a scam and where christians were being made fun of all around me (by my parents, by my friends, by my friends' parents, by my teachers, etc.).

And that same left in the west, who celebrates that christianity lost its grip on the people, is now bending over backwards over islam.

Another gigantic hypocrisy in Europe (and in the UK) is that free speech is not a given. And hateful speech is definitely not allowed... Unless it's hate speech protected by the fact that it's in a religious book.

And another, totally off the chart, hypocrisy in the west is the feminist and the LGBTQ2S+ movements who are constantly after heterosexual male... Unless they're muslims, in which case it's suddenly all cool to put a veil on your wife(s) (polygamy being allowed, but only one man / several women and not the other way round: oh the hypocrisy here) and daugther(s) so that they're safe from the looks of other men.

It's a very long article saying that people who oppose islam are basically deranged.

Now I do profundly believe that unless you've read the quran, you shouldn't comment on islam.

I did read it and I suggest you do the same and then make up your own mind.

Now as I'm not nice I'll put it blundly: I think the quran is just as bad as Hitler's Mein Kampf. But because it's "religious", the hate speech it contains is protected and allowed.

And we're basically at a point in Europe where if you point out that the quran is full of hate speech, your criticism is considered hate speech. But the real hate speech is totally cemented and impossible to attack because it's "religious".

You should at the very least read the quran and see where I'm coming from.

The world CIA factbook (not published anymore) estimated that 30% of all muslims worldwide had extremist views. I understand that 30% is not 100%, but 30% of nearly 2 billion people is a very big number.

To be very clear: either the muslim beard or the veil are already extremist readings of the quran and its hadiths.

Go read the book for yourself.

It is not normal that after 1200 teenagers who were dancing at a music festival were slaughtered by islamist terrorists, a big part of the world celebrated.

We're talking about tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of people who were genuinely happy that "evil jews got what they deserve" because it was "justified resistance".

I'm not talking about what came next: I'm against killing people, no matter who does the killing.

Now I'm not saying that that UK dude who wants to "ban islam" is a good person.

But there's really a very big spread spectrum between "ban islam" and "there's zero problem with islam growing in the west".

And there's definitely an issue when speech is censored, but the absolute worst form of hate speech is protected because it's a religious holy book.

Go read the quran, now.

I am one of these people that DHH says in not "native British". I agree he is an unpleasant racist.

I do think that the case of the person using a Nazi avatar on a forum is comparable. The former is something they are doing withing the community, DHH's behaviour is outside the community. Its not clear how much people should be sanctioned for holding unpleasant views.

The problem with the article is clear in this passage:

"Sometimes a political party or a person decides to oppose shared human values like the importance of care, kindness, inclusion, or the simple value of welcoming people who are different from you. Maybe they oppose the equality of all people. Maybe they think some people do not deserve human rights."

That very quickly becomes a subjective and partisan judgement. Its very easy to say everyone who votes for a different party is "opposed to equality", or that people who do not share you culture or language and vocabulary or vote for any other party are those you should not be nice to. Very often the inclusive becomes exclusive and even culturally imperialist. Foreigner who uses the wrong words because they do not have the same implications in their culture? Excluded. This is not made, but, but something I have seen people get angry about.