This article is just so politically charged and opinionated that it is hard to believe that it is coming on a "tech blog". Not to mention, a while back the very same company wanted its employees to have no political discussions at workplace in a widely published article.
It's not a tech blog, it's his personal blog, and it's quite in line with that company post previously; advocate for whatever policies you want on your own time and platform but not on the company's, and since this is his personal blog, he is doing exactly that.
There's plenty to criticize DHH for but to be fair world.hey.com is a feature of the email platform that lets you easily post a blog. He's using his own software/platform and I realize the optics, but you could post your own thoughts at world.hey.com/muglug too.
Benefit of being one of the owners/cofounders of Sidekiq: if you don't like DHH's shitty opinions, you are free to pull your very generous donation from Ruby Central and send the money somewhere else.
world.hey.com/dhh is not just "a personal blog" as it is simultaneously where he posts everything he wants to publish about his professional work, and sometimes it's literally the official updates on the software he maintains such as Turbo.
If you're an employee at some company you can post about your own work too on your own blog. The fact that he maintains the hosting platform as well doesn't mean much, 37Signals employees can post on Medium or some other blog host too.
If I post something on my personal blog, and it's against the company's Code of Conduct, then I'm in trouble with HR. If I'm the company's CEO, then I'm in trouble with the board. You're not an island.
Then you'll just have to be a CEO with a platform. And if it's on your personal blog, I don't see why you'd be in trouble with HR at any good company, unless they're monitoring your communications.
I don't know why everyone pretends that having an incorrect opinion is some untouchable thing and we just have to respect it.
Everyone, you included, has opinions that they find unpalatable. Pretty much all of human history has been "cancelling" people for "incorrect opinions". I mean, what were the crusades? Or world war II?
There's no, like, gun to your head saying you have to respect things you don't respect. Some things are just not respectable. You're allowed to be like "no" and then decide to get as far away from the person as possible.
And, relatedly - you don't have to run away. You can push them away.
Its not really fair that crazy people are allowed to say crazy things then we, normal people, have to take the high ground and walk away. What if I don't want to walk away? Why do I have to leave a project like it's the plague because you said something insane?
Anyway, just my two cents.
Also, just to be clear: I don't think DHH is crazy or evil. I'm addressed the broader concept, not this specific case.
> Its not really fair that crazy people are allowed to say crazy things then we, normal people, have to take the high ground and walk away. What if I don't want to walk away? Why do I have to leave a project like it's the plague because you said something insane?
This takes as axiomatic that people with incompatible beliefs in one area cannot work together in a different area.
I really like that my job has me working with lots of different people from lots of walks of life, and we are too busy saving lives to think too much about politics.
However, if I found out that one of the physicians I work with doesn't think I should have a job, doesn't think I should have equal rights, and doesn't think I belong in public spaces, then politics would become unavoidable. I'm not going to work for a bigot who sees me as a second class citizen.
Likewise there are a number of long-term Ruby OS contributors who belong to minority groups DHH has been attacking. Would you attend Railsconf if DHH called your ethnicity gangs of rapists, like he recently has?
I am American, and haven't used Ruby since two jobs ago, so don't have a dog in this fight. Still, going off of https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 which is supposedly DHH's own words on his personal blog, you get, repeatedly in full so I can't be accused of taking it out of context:
> As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go. Compared to Copenhagen at the time, there was something so majestic about Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and even the Tube around the turn of the millenium. Not just because their capital is twice as old as ours, but because it endured twice as much, through the Blitz and the rest of it, yet never lost its nerve. I thought I might move there one day.
> That was then. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits.
Now, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it's pretty easy to interpret that as non-white people shouldn't be seen in London. That's not exactly "you, personally, don't belong in public spaces?", but it's seems fairly close to me, to anyone that isn't white. I am open to hearing alternate interpretations of what I quoted from DHH's personal blog though.
> > Not just because their capital is twice as old as ours
Yeah, that's kind of the point. Preserving a culture that is several times as old as the USA.
> > Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits.
> [there] aren't as many white people in London as there used to be. Now, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it's pretty easy to interpret that as non-white people shouldn't be seen in London.... I am open to hearing alternate interpretations
The "alternate interpretation" is that "native Brits" means "native Brits", not "white people". Per your source, in the time frame DHH is talking about, the population was still specifically about 3/5 British. As in, English (and possibly Welsh and Scottish, although I imagine they mostly keep further north). So presumably that's what he actually observed.
A Dane isn't going to see this as a matter of race. Denmark is still about 5/6 ethnic Danish, and a big chunk of immigrants and their descendants are European. The concept of race is just not something you think about when you aren't exposed to it all the time. The difference between an ethnic Dane and and ethnic Englishman is salient to someone like that, in a way that a typical American can't be expected to understand.
We're talking here about people who are in their ancestral homeland. They are the natives of the area; they don't have anywhere to go back to. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxons have been there since the 5th century — far longer than the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_people have been in New Zealand, for example. And London was founded by the Romans, even longer ago than that. And those groups were both fully admixed with the indigenous population long before the establishment of modern immigration policy. So now we have recognizable "native Brits" who look different from modern-day "native Italians" or "native Germans". Not to mention, those indigenous island folk would presumably have been quite pale themselves.
If someone were pointing out that the settlements of Turtle Island were no longer full of First Nations peoples, would you make that out to be about race? Rounding all of this off to "white people" is a projection of an Americentric view of race, and frankly offensive. It's strange to me how there are people who put effort into knowing about the cultural and ethnic and religious distinctions found across, say, South Asia, and seem to think themselves morally superior for caring; but couldn't be bothered to do the same for Europe.
DHH chose to link to Wikipedia's page about ethnic groups in London, which is literally about race and ethnicity. Not accent, cultural practices, or national identity. His use of "native Brits" is telling, especially when he follows it with "[a] statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now." The implication is clear when you contrast this language with demographic data about non-white populations.
Reading further into DHH's blog post reveals even more troubling context. He describes Tommy Robinson organized marches as being "normal everyday Brits." When white supremacist, xenophobic marches are your idea of "normal everyday Brits," the mask rather slips, doesn't it? He attempts to equate these marches with legitimate free speech cases like Graham Linehan, trying to make it all seem like reasonable pushback, as if this is just another historical moment of the isles being "invaded". The rhetoric is telling.
It takes DHH only 701 words before he's linking to articles about Pakistani rape gangs. At this point, we're not dealing with subtle implications anymore.
The argument about Danish cultural context doesn't hold water either. Denmark has its own charged political discourse around Middle Eastern and African immigrants. And DHH has lived in the US for roughly 20 years so he's well aware of how these discussions are perceived.
As for the Anglo-Saxon history lesson: they were themselves migrants who mixed with existing populations. London was founded by Romans (also migrants!) and has been a multicultural trading hub for over a thousand years. What "native British" golden age is DHH mourning exactly? The 1950s? The Victorian era built on colonial extraction? When precisely was London purely "native British"?
> So now we have recognizable 'native Brits' who look different from modern day 'native Italians' or 'native Germans'.
I'd be curious to hear more about these supposedly "recognizable" distinctions. This sounds remarkably similar to certain early 20th century anthropological theories that we've since... reconsidered.
They can, but it really depends on the belief. Even for you or the most principled person, there is a limit.
And, even if you can, it doesn't mean it's pleasant.
Its one thing if someone is horrible in silent. From experience, horrible people seem to be the most confident and outspoken. Maybe there's a common character flaw that underpins both behaviors.
> This takes as axiomatic that people with incompatible beliefs in one area cannot work together in a different area.
"Beliefs" are when you think The Strokes are superior to The White Stripes, or that Giordano's deep dish pizza is superior to Lou Malnati's, or that IPAs are better than lagers. I'll happily work with people who espouse those beliefs, despite my beliefs to the contrary.
I won't work with people who describe a Tommy Robinson march as "heartwarming", or who use terms like "demographic nightmare" [1] to describe immigration, or who amplify repeatedly-debunked [2] claims of "Pakistani rape gangs", all of which DHH did. That's bigotry, not beliefs.
British culture isn't being eroded by immigration. It's being shaped by it, just like it has been for thousands of years. Where do you think your culture came from- thin air?!?
- Romans gave Britain roads, baths, and Christianity.
- Anglo-Saxons gave Britain Old English.
- Vikings gave Britain laws and half its place names.
- Normans made French the language of power and fused it with English.
- The Crusades brought new foods, science, and art.
And so on and so on.
It's the height of ignorance to look at that incredibly diverse history, and then say "OK, but right now is the moment in time where we 'lock in' our culture for the rest of time." Culture has never stood still, and no one, not even DHH, gets to freeze it in place. Well, they can try, but they'll be pissing in the wind, just like the Tommy Robinson marchers were.
I'll just leave this here: the folks in this Instagram reel [3], wearing the St. George's Cross flag and clearly on their way to the march, decided to stop and get a curry first. With the caption "When you're on your way to the racist march but the immigrant food is popping."
> ‘Bloody Beaker folk. Coming over here, rowing up the Tagus Estuary from the Iberian Peninsula in improvised rafts. Coming here with their drinking vessels. What's wrong with just cupping up the water in your hands and licking it up like a cat?’
repeatedly-debunked claims of "Pakistani rape gangs"
What exactly has been "debunked" about these claims? I realise this is veering off-topic, but the very real facts at the heart of these claims need to be heard. Denying that these things happened only serves to further the abuse the victims have already suffered.
Even the BBC does not deny the existence of these rape gangs nor their heritage:
> It showed how the gang, comprising men of mostly Pakistani and Afghan heritage, plied girls as young as 13 with alcohol and drugs and passed them around for sex. [1]
There is more than 10 years of recorded evidence of these activities, over 250 probable victims, over 90 identified perpetrators, plus a litany of investigation reports detailing the failure of authorities to even properly investigate many of the cases.
> In 2007, Ms Rowbotham and her team had alerted GMP and Rochdale Council about a gang of men of Pakistani and Afghan heritage engaged in child sexual exploitation (CSE) while Ms Oliver resigned from GMP in 2012 to publicly reveal the extent of the police failings. [2]
A senior police officer had to go public to make her own superiours start caring about these crimes. From her wikpedia page:
> When Oliver got upset about the handling of the case, she claims one of her seniors told her, "Maggie, calm down. Listen: What would these kids ever contribute to society? They should have just been drowned at birth". Then, Oliver stormed off the job [3]
Recently, the Greater Manchester Police published multiple investigations into itself. I will quote only the part from the summary that specifically calls out the GMP for deflecting blame for its own failures [4]:
> 2.58. a police source was quoted in the media as saying that the Crisis Intervention Team [..] did not always communicate this to the police and social services.
> 2.59. the two serious case review overview reports published in 2013 explicitly criticised the Crisis Intervention Team for not following child protection procedures and for not communicating appropriately with other agencies [however] the multi-agency CSE strategy group chaired by Chief Superintendent C16 was aware of approximately 127 potential victims who had been referred by the Crisis Intervention Team to children’s social care and that these referrals had not been acted on. This figure later grew to 260 potential victims
> We find this level of misrepresentation quite disturbing. We would have liked to have put our concerns to both the author of the overview reports and the chair of the serious case review panel. These individuals provided a joint written statement that did not directly address these concerns and they declined to be interviewed by the review team.
> 2.60. our review has found compelling evidence to support the view that the Crisis Intervention Team was sharing explicit information with the authorities on the exploitation of multiple children. We also have evidence that, despite these explicit concerns, GMP and Rochdale Council failed to take appropriate action.
> 2.61. it has been a gross misrepresentation to suggest that the Crisis Intervention Team in some way was complicit with this failure and to tarnish the reputation of this small group of professionals
You're right that the crimes in Rochdale, Rotherham, and elsewhere were very real and appalling, and authorities failed the victims. Nobody is denying that.
What has been debunked are the sweeping claims that:
- Sexual exploitation in the UK is disproportionately or uniquely committed by men of Pakistani or Muslim heritage.
- There exists a singular phenomenon of "Pakistani rape gangs" uniquely distinct from other forms of child sexual exploitation.
- The existence of these gangs proves something essential about Pakistani culture or immigration.
Tommy Robinson, and those on the far-right who share his agenda, have weaponized real cases to push their narratives. The big picture from the CSA Centre's own data is that:
"Of defendants proceeded against for child sexual abuse offences in 2022/23, 88% were White, 7% Asian, 3% Black and 2% Mixed or Other ethnicities." [1]
Compare that to the census: Asians (including South Asians) are 9% of the population but only 7% of offenders (i.e. under-represented). Meanwhile, white Britons are 82% of the population but 88% of CSE offenders (they're actually over-represented). According the Home Office’s own review, "The majority of child sexual abuse gangs are made up of white men under the age of 30." [2]
Racist grifters love to flog lurid myths about "Pakistani rape gangs" to frighten gullible Britons into voting against immigration. And racist griftees eat those stories up, because in their eyes, rape by a non-white person is somehow "worse" or "scarier" than rape by a white person. But if someone is genuinely worried about roving gangs of ethnically homogenous rapists, they should probably avoid Robinson’s marches. Statistically, that's where they're more likely to be.
Your source doesn't establish this. It claims without evidence that Robinson's claims (and those of such partisans) originate in some particular report that I've never heard of despite years of keeping tabs on people who make those claims.
From what I can tell, the claims those people are making about rape in the UK generally have a much broader statistical basis; see e.g. https://archive.ph/jmS6q (the original Statista link isn't working for me, for whatever reason). Claims specifically about the gangs are based in things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit... (and note all the "See also" links). (But also see tremon's comment.)
The claim about conviction rates is missing the point entirely, that the Robinson protesters allege a wide-scale cover-up and bias against prosecuting the immigrants, ostensibly out of police fear of appearing racist.
> Where do you think your culture came from- thin air?!?
It's not mine (I'm Canadian), but yes, it literally did. Just like everyone else's. Thin air, and time. Time spent on doing things in the same way and noticing the patterns, and socializing.
> And so on and so on.
First off, infrastructure is not culture.
But the important thing is that all those events were centuries ago, taking place over the course of centuries. And in many cases they involved bloody wars and a whole ton of resentment. (Pretty understandable considering that the existing population, in each case, was trapped on an island.)
British culture was created by adapting ideas that were left behind in those conflicts. Just like every other culture is created by people with a shared identity picking up ideas, however they might be sourced, and forming a memeplex around them. That adaptation is what makes it British culture, and not "some combination of Roman, Anglo-Saxon etc. culture that doesn't deserve a name". That's why, for example, there was a Middle English, and eventually just more-or-less-modern English. A big chunk of that involved scholars independently studying Latin for their own reasons.
It's especially galling that you would whitewash the Norman invasions like this, considering the meaning and history of the two-finger salute. The same supposed "white supremacists" leading the charge in the UK still have less than pleasant banter for the French. The British literally developed culture by resisting foreign influence. (The whole "Britannia rules the waves" thing is also "culture", BTW.)
Anyway, none of these things involved the existing government consciously bringing in outsiders and completely transforming the population of major centers in the space of a generation or two. (Meanwhile, there are other parts of Europe — like the part DHH is from — that have not been subject to this. Should the EU be compelling them to follow suit or something?) This isn't about "locking in" culture; it's about understanding how the development (as opposed to displacement, or appropriation) of culture actually works.
> decided to stop and get a curry first
This is actually illustrative. Culture isn't just a curry recipe; it's the ritual of stopping for a curry with your mates. And eating it with English table manners, etc. Meanwhile, I can't fathom that the curry available in London actually reflects the cultural diversity of curry preparation within India; nor can I fathom that it hasn't been adapted in some ways to the local palate.
You can't just gift a cultural artifact to another people. Culture doesn't work that way.
(And if you think about what the word "colonialism" means to you, this should be obvious.)
Basically, it is ok for bigots like DHH to spread their opinions and to try to push away or harm people they dont like.
But, if you push back or criticise them, that is something wrong. The harm can go only one way - from bigots to the rest of us. But other way round, once you funded bigots you have to continue with it.
I can’t comment on the decisions people made in this case, I was taking up GP’s musings on who we should let have what opinions in general.
I guess I would say that withdrawing funding from an organization based on who they let speak at an event seems like an overreaction given that it had these ramifications, but I don’t think it’s my place to judge what anyone chooses to contribute their own money to. None of the rest of us is contributing $250k to Ruby Central either, and we’re not entitled to have Mike solve our problems.
>I guess I would say that withdrawing funding from an organization based on who they let speak at an event seems like an overreaction given that it had these ramifications
Wait wait wait, now it's Mike's fault that Shopify acted the way it did and coup'd this organization? Come on. You can't judge his choice to remove funding on what someone else did.
The victim mindset of these people is on another level. DHH presents the openly transphobic Graham Linehan as some kind of free speech victim.
Oh, I should read the actual tweet? Funny the actual tweet is so much worse than I imagined.
If a trans-women is in a space that she is legally entitled to be in, according to him one should:
> Make, a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him[he means the trans-women] in the balls
He is literally telling people to be violent against trans people. And then cries when actions have consequences.
These people are like the school yard bully who will start a fight with you then cry "timeout, timeout" when you punch back. And go to the teacher to convince you they are the real victim.
I was actually shocked he included those tweets as if they were incredibly benign. I now believe this is an intentional move on his part. He knows the tweets are crazy incendiary, he just wants to filter out the audience early. This trend of catering to far right fan boys while maintaining plausible deniability is happening everywhere.
even before, during and after the fascist protest he is celebrating (as an immigrant in america, telling about his daydreaming on being an immigrant in the UK), there have been arrests for people simply saying "killing children is wrong" all over london.
yet he could not pick any of those arests for his example. yeah, it's plain and simple white supremacists. get over it.
As far as I can tell, the direct chain of events preceding this coup-like event was:
Ruby Central hosts DHH at RailsConf in July --> Sidekiq withdraws funding from Ruby Central --> Ruby Central is essentially entirely dependent on Shopify.
The "what" seems to be purely a reaction to this article DHH posted:
Strictly speaking, DHH's September blog post could not have driven this unless there was a time machine involved. However, DHH has made some contentious political statements in the past so perhaps what you're saying is true in a larger sense.
It's certainly possible that Shopify's actions had nothing to do with either side's politics in particular, and they decided it was simply safer for them to control Ruby Cental and RubyGems rather than rely on an independent organization with unstable funding (that they were basically solely funding anyway according to the article)
I don't love that outcome. As a Ruby fan, I don't want Ruby or bits of its infrastructure controlled by a particular organization.
Ruby Central [announces that it will] hosts DHH at RailsConf [6 weeks before the event is due to happen, when it's too late for people to refund their conference tickets and plane tickets too] in July 2025.
Announcing guests late for a convention (when the arrangements might not have been finalized until that point) is "a dick move", because some attendees might not like the idea of the guest being there (despite no compulsion to interact with said guest) and find it too late to cancel (on things they voluntarily committed to based on the existing expected content, fully accepting the risk of future change)?
No, I think the dick move (in the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0la5DBtOVNI sense) is raising hue and cry because the opportunity to see another influential person at a convention somehow ruins the rest of the convention for you.
And are we seriously arguing that the creator of the thing should be barred from a convention about the thing?
He's been posting controversial stuff for quite a while, you certainly can't distill this to one blog post.
DHH stopped trying to cultivate an inclusive community some time ago. The ruby community can ill afford to drive away more prominent maintainers, yet that is what is happening here, as the corporate interests are aligned with DHH even if the rest of the community is not.
It’s pretty galling to see someone who’s never lived in London talk mad shit about it. London is my home, not DHH’s. He knows fuck all, which is why he repeats tired, overcooked falsehoods.
What he’s saying is that he only considers white British to be legitimately British. He would look at former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and current Mayor Sadiq Khan and dismiss them as insufficiently British. Too much melanin I guess.
He’s even excluded white people from elsewhere who were born in Britain if they have a non-British ancestor. So according to DHH and his ilk Nigel Farage’s children wouldn’t be counted as white British despite having white mothers (Irish and German), being born to a British father in Britain and living all their lives in Britain.
What the fuck is the point of dividing people like this? “Just an opinion” my ass. DHH and people like him are dehumanising my fellow Londoners.
My girlfriend witnessed a robbery in London's city center ~2 weeks ago, in the second day of our visit. After that, we saw a homeless guy pooping on a wall; some of them screaming at others.
I didn't feel like I was personally in danger, but I'm also a guy who's lived next to American slums.
I almost had my MacBook stolen out of my backpack from me in London (Shoreditch) a few years in broad daylight - by a black person that didn't even speak English during the attempted robbery.
I'm from Africa so I'm born with the instincts that luckily prevented me from losing anything or getting hurt.
I was just visiting the UK for 3 weeks, but that gave me a perspective how bad immigration laws can turn it into something out of control.
Why does a place like Singapore, where 48% of its workforce are immigrants / expats - not have this problem.
To add to your anecdata, had you visited London during the time of Dickens you would have had your possessions thieved by a charming raffish urchin that spoke English in a dialect you also wouldn't have understood.
I gotta be honest, I find the point of view that says "It would have been better if I were accosted by a native-born national" fascinating.
It's like being a lot happier getting half your crops taken by the local king instead of a wandering warlord, or burned at the stake by God-fearing Christians instead of "heathens." It's a kind of belief in a specific just order of reality that I don't think I'm in a place in my life journey to feel.
There's a fascinating book called Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson that talks about the place nationalism took in the zeitgeist of much of humanity, displacing previous tribe-structuring concepts of shared faith, same-village origin, or vassaldom to the local lord. Reading between the lines, it makes an interesting case that nationhood, while a useful fiction (it gives a person in East London a reason to care about the fate of someone they will definitely never meet in the Falkland Islands and made experiments like "The British Empire" possible), is no less a fiction than the people-unifying stories that came before.
And if the fiction is making a person care more about the fate of someone they'll never meet on an island in the Patagonian Shelf in the South Atlantic Ocean than a person who is so physically near to them that they just stole their laptop... Maybe the story could use some tweaking, yeah?
I actually accidentally walked into that protest while doing touristy stuff in London that weekend (yeah, great weekend to choose) and first it looked weird having all those people waving British and English flags walking around.... and then I noticed many wore shirts with "Make Britain White Again" (sic) slogans and unironically wearing "Make Britain Great Again" hats. Whatever that thing was, it was about as peaceful as "Truth Rallies" Milošević organized before the whole 1990s war in Balkans went down.
It's just another example of someone straying outside of their sphere(s) of expertise ... there are some excellent examples to the contrary, but fuck you money tends to tempt those with weak characters into these situations.
Incredibly sad to watch. He literally has no idea what he's talking about.
I did respond to one of his falsehoods, you must have missed it in your hurry to post this pithy putdown.
DHH and his gang of “White Replacement” reptiles overstate the facts by saying 40% of London is white British. Nigel Farage is a leader of a British far right party who exclusively has children with foreign women. His children are as white as he is, British citizens who’ve lived all their lives in Britain.
To any reasonable person, even someone who struggles to mingle with non-white people like DHH, Farage’s children would be white British. But the stats would count them as “white - Other”, which is another 20% of London.
Speaking of incorrect opinions, it's pretty hard not to read this and conclude his "no politics at work" initiative was just him seeing his company was full of liberals he found annoying and this was his scheme to kick them all out.
If DHH had genuinely progressive instincts, he would likely have been more even-handed. He could have credibly said: “look, I’m personally left-leaning, but I want work to stay apolitical for everyone’s sanity”
Instead, the intensity of his crackdown, coupled with later statements aligning him with reactionary causes, strongly suggests his “neutrality” was in practice a shield against progressive causes inside Basecamp.
Is it unfair that you can only impose a “no politics” rule without backlash if you’re progressive? Maybe a little. But the asymmetry is baked in: progressives are the ones challenging the status quo, so banning politics almost always protects the status quo and silences the challengers. And in this case, his later positions confirmed that he wasn’t neutral at all, he wasn’t on the side of the people he’d told to leave.
> Is it unfair that you can only impose a “no politics” rule without backlash if you’re progressive? Maybe a little. But the asymmetry is baked in: progressives are the ones challenging the status quo, so banning politics almost always protects the status quo and silences the challengers
"Progressives" (I don't think the label is accurate for the group it describes) are also the ones who believe that "protecting the status quo" entails doing "politics".
reading a love letter to hitler. What? It doesn't say anything about the skin color?
> Tommy Robinson, is a British anti-Islam campaigner and one of the UK's most prominent far-right activists with a history of criminal convictions. [0]
> That was then. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.
the "no longer full of native Brits" is a link to an article on the ethnic makeup of London. The cite only makes sense as support for his argument if he means white native Brits.
My goodness, people need to leave their ‘supremacist’ scarlet letters in their bags for when they’re actually earned. The Brits are just as much ‘native’ people to their lands as any aboriginal group. To want to keep their characteristic culture from being wiped out is no more supremacist than any other ethnic group doing the same.
He doesn't talk about culture though. He only talks about native. Like people coming from other countries can't drink tea or enjoy great British bakeoff or something. It's one of those "you know what I mean" posts with racist references.
They are very much earned, but don't take my word for it when DHH says it himself.
> In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.
What does he mean here with that last sentence? Did he do a survey? Ask people where they were born or to self report their nationality? No. He walked through London, saw people who weren't white, and then went on his blog to complain about "non native Brits". He is explicitly talking about skin colour and implying that unless you are white you are not British. That definitionally racist.
To then go on, and praise Tommy Robinson, a far-right extremist who's spent the past decade stoking hate. The message of this article leaves no room for misunderstanding.
In DHH's own view if you are not a white "native" Brit then you should be removed. That is, by definition, a white supremacist.
He also links a Wikipedia article stating that more than 60 percent of Londoners were born in Britain to prove his point that only a third of Londoners are "native Brits". That doesn't leave much room for interpretation.
It's really telling you jumped right to "guilt". Nobody said the Brits had to feel guilty for their ancestors doing that. Just that they don't get to complain lol
The user you replied to said "collective guilt", which implies the former, and you seem to be confirming they were correct and that this side track about "feelings" is just you trying to diminish their point.
There's no need to lash out, you certainly won't gain anything by doing so.
I think that term gets tossed around too much flippantly - if you've ever ran into real white supremacists they are a magnitude more scary and dangerous than DHH's dopey opinion.
Racism isn't boogeymen in white robes hanging people.
It's kindly old ladies whose smile disappears the instant they lock onto a brown kid in the grocery store.
It's bosses who somehow find a good reason to not give a non-white person a pay raise or time off.
It's ordinary people who feel uncomfortable when they encounter people who look different and then they act different towards them.
The grand majority of racism is invisible. It's a constant pressure on people who do not perfectly fit into the culture that reminds them that if they do not meet the mark of what that group of people expect from them then the consequences will be extreme.
When you are not white and live in a town of generically racist white people, there are countless small things that happen that continuously remind you that your presence is under surveillance and that your permission to exist peacefully in "their" space is an act of grace that you must forever be grateful for.
This is something that can be explained to anyone ad nauseum, but until they experience it for themselves it sounds like bs. It's so easy to ignore that most people forget this as soon as their eyes are not looking at these words.
Race and culture are not the same thing and it’s a big pet peeve of mine that Americans always link the two.
A Slav that was born and grew up in China would be Caucasian but culturally Japanese.
Accusations of racism should stay limited to disparate treatment based on skin color or race exclusively and not extend into the cultural domain. Cultural preferences are not racist, full stop.
When I say culture, I mean the local culture, which is often defined by the demographics of the area.
I can see how that is confusing, but there is more than one interpretation of the word.
Also, wouldn't the Slav who grew up in China be culturally Chinese?
They would probably also experience racism as defined by being treated differently because of their race. Their experience of what would most likely be a small pocket of people who have integrated them surrounded by a larger pocket that would automatically treat them as a westerner would mean that their cultural experience would be inversely analogous to a Chinese person who grew up in Poland.
I don't disagree with anything you've said. Just that calling DHH a white supremacist is an exaggeration. It waters down the meaning, and not sure what's left to describe violent street thugs in discourse, I guess "LiTerAL nAZis"?
I mean, his words are the words of a white supremacist. His ideals are the ideals of a white supremacist.
Just because he isn't calling for war, murder, famine, pestilence, plague, death, and the fourth Reich all to fall on people of other colors does not mean that he isn't a white supremacist.
Like I said. It's easy to overlook. No one should long for a "pure" society.
There are no pure humans on this planet outside of a select group of african people who never interbred with neanderthal or denisovians, and as the last bastion of "pure" humans they seem fairly well content to not enforce their superiority on other people.
I just think these word shifts are silly. Yeah times change but using the most extreme terms waters them down, and personally think it makes society numb to them, like crying wolf too many times.
What are the chances that successful white supremacists have learned how to espouse their ideals while avoiding triggering language that could affect their income or popularity?
There are many people who won't get it unless it is explicit, and this has been an understood issue for a long time.
Look at these lyrics:
"He's the one who likes all our pretty songs, and he
Likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun, but he
Knows not what it means" -Nirvana "In Bloom"
People who follow right wing white supremacist influencers and fail to understand that they are being influenced to support right wing white supremacist causes are the people Kurt Cobain was singing about.
They think they are just there for fun, to own the libs, to protect their future or their country or occasionally to protect the "purity of their bloodlines", whatever catch phrase is going around, and then the people they support do bad things their supporters say, "It's not my fault X did Y" but keep supporting the general causes and content of those influencers.
Sure, maybe they drop Andrew Tate for being a rapist, but then they just find someone else to take his place.
Regardless of whether or not that's the correct term for DHH....
real white supremacists they are a magnitude more
scary and dangerous than DHH's dopey opinion
I would like to caution you against the use of the term "real" white supremacists.
Are you imagining a "real" white supremacist as guy who burns crosses, is covered with racist tattoos, and openly spouts slurs? Because the effective and dangerous ones are a hell of a lot more stealthy than that.
Racism in general, including white supremacy, is more accurately viewed as a spectrum and not a binary racist/non-racist divide.
> viewed as a spectrum and not a binary racist/non-racist divide
That's exactly my point why I suggest not watering down the term white supremacy with "I hate this annoying opinion when I interpret it maximally". Calling DHH a white supremacist is silly.
No, the dopey ones are just as bad. They legitimize having bigoted opinions, and having bigoted opinions towards immigrants in an industry founded on immigrants is both short-sighted and not something anyone should support.
Nobody ever gets cancelled for actual conservative values like lower taxes and limited government. They get kicked out for being hateful.
Apparently, the reason is having an incorrect opinion.