Hacker News Reader

Comment by colinbartlett | Hacker News Reader

Did you read this methodically written and sourced post?

It is most certainly NOT calling "anyone having doubts" a "racist".

It is calling one particular person's astonishingly racist post as exactly what it is.

I read the DHH "As I remember London" post and don't find it astonishingly racist. I guess you are referring to that? Which line is astonishing?

I think jakelazaroff twists things rather - I'm after something DHH actually wrote.

What, the post where DHH implies that brown immigrants are rapists and criminals and that Britain is being invaded and needs to be cleansed? The one that paints five-time convicted criminal and fascist Tommy Fucking Robinson as some sort of folk hero? That man is a post away from shrieking about remigration for non-whites, just like many of his new-found allies already do.

Indeed that on which does not contain the words "brown", "rapists", "criminals", "invaded" or "cleansed" and does not say Robinson is a folk hero.

As I said - I'm after something DHH actually wrote.

You are doing exactly what happens repeatedly in these sorts of conversations. You completely ignore all subtext, all historical context, all conclusion, all metatextual reading in favor of exact out-of-context literal wordings which you claim will convince you of the case. That is not what will happen, but of course you know that already.

No xenophobic racist with an ounce of sense is going to write something like "brown people are rapist criminals who have invaded our lands and must be cleansed". It's absurd to maintain we must provide that as proof or it didn't happen.

I hate that people will read this comment and file it away as “woke” or whatever. No, it’s basic reading comprehension FFS. English 101.

I just feel if you are going to call someone otherwise respected like DHH astonishingly racist it's basic decency to be able to quote one sentence where he is. I'm quite good at reading subtext and to me it reads like DHH: "They're still reeling from the Pakistani rape gangs"... critics: "he's saying he hates brown people". No he didn't. That's what let the rapes go on for years - that if you prosecuted rape you'd be called a racist who went after brown people.

The whole thing reminds me of Hillary's calling Americans deplorable so as to stop Donald Trump. Didn't that work out well?

A direct thing he wrote is "Britain should be a kingdom primarily for the Brits", where previously he has unambigiously defined "Brits" and "native Brits" as "white British people". That's racist.

The quote in the London post is

>There's absolutely nothing racist or xenophobic in saying that Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits, and Japan primarily a set of islands for the Japanese.

with no mention of Brits being defined as "white British people". I'm not sure the source for the Brits=white thing?

The source is DHH himself. There is no other possible good faith interpretation of "about a third" "native Brits" based on the Wikipedia article he himself cited. I show this in the post: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...

When he's discussing "native Brits" he is clearly, if indirectly, referring to white British people. He links to a Wikipedia page as citation for his statistic, and that statistic on Wikipedia is _explicitly_ about white people.

He says 1/3 of London is now native brits. Given this article he links to, how else might you interpret that? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London

From OP:

> 59% of Londoners were born in the UK! How could it possibly be that only a third of them are native Brits? The article’s first section breaks down the demographic data in a table. The first ethnicity listed? “White British” at 36.8% as of the 2021 census. Ah.

Where is the logical flaw here? How could you read the original DHH quote as anything other than “non-white Brits are not native Brits”?

From DHH’s blog post:

> Don't give up. You survived the Blitz. Britain will be back.

What do you think this means?

I'll give you it sounds a bit iffy but it's the ending of an post that includes things like "British police are now making 30 arrests a day for wrongthink" which many have criticised.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com