What does “fash problem” mean?
Here's some fun facts:
- DHH enforced a "No Politics at Work" policy.
- DHH wrote a post expressing that he wouldn't want to live in London anymore because it's "no longer full of native Brits", and expressed support for a Tommy Robinson march he called "heartwarming". Tommy Robinson is described as "an anti-Islam campaigner and one of the UK's most prominent far-right activists.". The march DHH praised featured speakers calling for ethnic cleansing via "remigration" and banning all non-Christian religions.
- DHH also promoted "demographic replacement" conspiracy theories and used language connecting immigration to crime, particularly regarding "Pakistani rape gangs" and street theft.
- DHH has been publicly critical of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. This one isn't backed by facts, so take it with a grain of salt.
And no, I'm not saying that Danes are racist.
As a Norwegian I respect Denmark for putting its people first.
Saying what he said about London is, at the very least, a fascinating example of failure to stay in his lane. In fact, if one were of the mindset to be denigrating immigrants, one could, perhaps, raise questions around what business a Dane has telling Brits which members of their former colonies do and do not count as British or, indeed, what it means to be British.
Hey.com is 37Signals' Gmail, not the company's private domain.
The Ruby community in general, and the Rails community in particular, likes to style itself as people who care about people. "Matz is nice so we are nice" (MINSWAN) is a cornerstone concept that the community passes around. As a result, they have a tendency to care about this sort of thing; community standards of behavior didn't get bolted-on later, they were there at the start.
I once watched a Rails community member pretty well pillory someone for entertaining the thought experiment that if ReiserFS were more technically competent, the software-engineering community wouldn't care the creator murdered his wife and would still invite him to speaking engagements telecast from jail. It is therefore interesting to watch how the Rails community is reacting to the Rails creator having concerns not nearly as bad as killed-his-wife, but extremely disquieting nonetheless.
People really like to misuse terms like fascism these days, huh…
How the hell is any of that facism
Racism could be a much better fit. The blog post in question: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
The interpretation that raises some pretty interesting points about the inherent racism in the expressed worldview: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...
There is, however, an interpretation that explains how this specific kind of racism can be seen as at least fascism-adjacent: https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance
The question of whether he wants politics in the workplace is moot when he's making public blog posts like this. For the open-source community, the open Internet is the workplace. People aren't just going to pretend DHH didn't say what he said (in public, of his own free will, using his own megaphone) because he didn't post it to ruby-core@ml.ruby-lang.org.
I'm done letting these labels deter my rational thinking.
The racist part was him asserting he could walk down the streets of London and guess who was British. Given the disparity between his estimated number and the actual percentage of Brits by census (and the remarkable similarity to his number and the probable skin color of Brits by census), it is real hard to find the generosity to assume that he doesn't just mean "When did the Brits stop being white?" And that kind of thinking has nothing to do with immigration control and everything to do with believing that there's a right skin color to have.
I'm Norwegian by the way and I belong to quite a small ethnic minority, but because of the color of my skin, people assume a whole lot of things about my background which isn't true. And I don't get to be proud about my heritage for some reason. Weird that.
It doesn't take much 4D-chess reading of his actual words to infer, I think correctly, that he's saying it's not ethnic British... And that's wrong. At least wrong for him (and wrong for the Brits, since he goes on to assert that "it's tough to blame the Brits for being pissed").
"I thought I might move there [London] 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."
... I mean, I'm having a real hard time finding a reading for those sentences that isn't "I was more comfortable when Britain was full of native Brits and I am not comfortable now." If I assume your assertion that he means ethnicity, not culture or citizenship-birth... What the hell, DHH? What is it about "non-ethnic Brits" that is giving you the heebie-jeebies?
> can be a Japanese citizen but I cannot be Japanese.
That's going to be a difference of definition. If I may, "I can be a Japanese citizen but I cannot be ethnically Japanese."
And whether that's true or not: this is perhaps a thing that Japanese people can have traditionally, or Danes. It would be the height of hypocrisy, given the Empire's history, for the Brits to do this, and DHH is swimming way outside his lane opining on how Britain should be or what makes him, a non-Brit, most comfortable in London.
Do you want to know when the Brits stopped "looking British?" Around the time Victoria crowned herself Empress of India, creating a country of about 28.9 million "ethnic Brits" (I'm going to speak loosely here, and my Irish and Welsh cousins will give me a proper thrashing for it later) and 250 million "ethnic Indians." And the fact India later gained its independence again has no bearing on the people who are Brits who look "non-ethnic" because of 90 years of British rule of a subcontinent. If DHH, or the British, or anyone want someone to blame for Britain suffering a "demographic nightmare" (whatever the hell that means)... They can probably blame the Widow of Windsor.
> Why is that?
Because some nations were expansionist and some were isolationist. Ethnic and national identity lack 1-to-1 overlap, and that matters more in some nations than others. I'm not in the business of telling the Japanese how they should see themselves (if I were, I would be making meaningful harumphing noises about the easiest possible way to curb their apparent birthrate crisis...). But DHH has put himself in the business of telling Brits how they should be seen, and in so doing he decided to wade into a conversation that makes him, yeah, the racist in the story.
He's free to walk it back any time he wants to stop causing controversy in the Ruby community so people can focus on the tech again.
> I'm Norwegian by the way and I belong to quite a small ethnic minority
Oh, you've opened quite a door. I want to guess but guessing feels rude so I will refrain. For what it's worth, every person I ever met while visiting Norway had a lot to be proud of (hell, waking up every day in that climate and giving death herself a middle finger is damn impressive to me!), so whoever is making you feel like you don't have a right to be proud of your heritage can probably pound sand.
Yes, but… https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/arthur