Sure, but I kinda have other priorities in life which is more important to keep up, than FOSS influencers.

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.

I think the manner in which you ask the questions is important, but I also think that community response is important too. Some questions just could be phrased a lot better, and some communities just could be a lot friendlier to curiosity.

The right solution for that specific situation varies:

- if the questions are valid but they're just phrased in a very uncomfortable way, I'd like to see someone work with them on how to ask better. Note that by "better" I don't mean that there's an objectively better or worse way in general, but just that some communities are friendlier to different approaches, and for example, you can often get a lot more mileage out of trying to understand someone's current approach first, rather than immediately asking why they don't use yours, or immediately raising a bunch of issues you see with it. I may be misunderstanding what you mean by "sharp", but I've seen and helped with this before.

- if the discomfort just comes from generally questions existing or alternative views being expressed at all, then sometimes the community's just not a good fit for those views. Some communities are pretty closed to alternative approaches, and sometimes that's just the way it is. I mean, the way you describe an "echo chamber" can of course imply that it's pretty harmful to its participants (one example is polarization on social media), but you can't always just invade those spaces and expect to change the status quo. You can't help everyone, and a lot of people feel insulted when you even imply you might know better. Sometimes, outsiders just stop asking questions or expressing alternative views at all, just to avoid being ejected (one example is how cancel culture can be incredibly harmful to developing minds). I think that should be avoided if possible, of course... trying to fit into a group that doesn't accept you is usually a recipe for disaster, especially if you've already established things about yourself that they have problems with.

There are probably more variations on this, but those are the two biggest possibilities I see. Either the behavior of the individual is a problem, and should be addressed (there's usually no need to remove them immediately, if there's a way to address the behavior instead), or the behavior of the community is a problem, and the individual might be better off looking elsewhere.

'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 they only properly belong if they are ethnically native. What DHH is doing is the equivalent of saying that white (or black or Asian, or whatever) people are not real Americans (and should be deported to Europe, Africa or Asia).

"Hitler did nothing wrong" specifically that puts it on the other side of a line that one doesn't cross

Basically supporting mass murder of innocent people or seeing nothing wrong with killing innocent people

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.

Of course it is. Give me a definition of "native British" that is as clear as the meaning of "native American".

You are trying to a complex reality into as a simplistic (American?) world view.

Also, its normal to use quotation marks when quoting someone.

Fully agreed.

This "Let's avoid politics" is just "Let's avoid conflict resolution and let things fester until it all boils over and goes to shit"

If you break the social contract of granting everyone a common baseline of respect and civility, such as by identifying with those that explicitly wish to violently purge entire peoples from the planet, I no longer am obligated to grant them the decorum outlined in that same social contract, as they've violated the accord.