Canceling "Hey" | Hacker News Reader

Canceling "Hey"

chadnauseam.com

292 pointsChadNauseam271 comments

I live in Oakland. Something I've noticed in a lot of the "THE CITY IS GOING TO HELL" commentary is that often people are pointing at visual symptoms - a homeless encampment, graffiti - as a proxy for "things are bad," and it doesn't take a lot of pulling on that thread before you get to "well just look at them," and it's real hard to cast that one in a "race-neutral" way. I've heard people complaining about hot dog vendors on the street as some kind of public nuisance, I've heard people point to wall murals as a sign of moral decay. Fine, that's your jam, that's what the suburbs are for, but if you don't like seeing poor people, make a society that doesn't create so goddamn many of them.

Homelessness is pretty race neutral tho? Especially in Oakland, which is incredibly race-balanced.

absolutely not, especially in the bay – people of color are way more likely to be homeless

The way you've stated this implies a structurally-enforced causality with regards to vagrancy in such a way that, wittingly or otherwise, wholly denies the possibility of individual agency in the very people you're ostensibly trying to defend.

I'm curious where you see the levers of individual agency here, and to what degree you think the affected people have tried to pull them. What's _your_ underlying thesis?

That is beyond my proverbial pay grade. But it's not beyond my proverbial pay grade to state that believing that, systemically, “[x demographic in y location] are way more likely to be [in undesirable situation]” is completely denying agency to the individuals in question by pretending that [x demographic in y location] ending up [in undesirable situation] is something of a weighted dice roll made by unseen forces, completely outside of individual agentic influence.

So you don’t believe in, like, history? Or what’s the argument here?

Either you're willfully ignoring the American citizen's right to free movement between States, or you're actually saying that any given black person who moves to Oakland has—regardless of any life circumstances or decisions they've made, simply as a fact of their ethnicity—some arbitrary-percentage chance of ending up homeless, as some immutable localized nth-order structural outcome, regardless of any choices they make.

Oh, I see the confusion - in America, we use the word “free” to mean both “allowed to” and “doesn’t cost money,” which leads to the kinds of odd circumstances where one is “free” to do something, but that thing isn’t “free,” so if they lack the money or resources to do so, they’re not actually able to do it. It’s a confusing part of our language and our system.

Similarly, we’ve got a bunch of cases where the law says X, but actually conforming with the law, or proving what you’re doing is legal, also costs money, and is therefore not “free” either. That one catches a bunch of people.

Does anyone else here know what this guy is talking about? I think he completely misread my post. I was asking if a black American citizen moving to Oakland had some arbitrary percent chance of becoming homeless after living there for awhile, based on his ethnicity and whatever structural factors Oakland has going for it alone (as implied by the rhetoric elsewhere in the thread). He then turned it into some kind of tirade about the ambiguity of the English language, or something, rather than answering my question?

Pretty sure they’re just a verbose troll.

They're calling you out on asking why the homeless don't just move, ignoring that (a) even the homeless have roots and social networks in the areas they live in, (b) long-distance travel is not trivial for those without financial means, (c) they may not have a reason to move away (what good is it to still be homeless in another town that you don't know?) and possibly other points.

Clearly, there are systemic reasons for certain ethnicities to be at higher risk of becoming homeless (not just in the U.S.). There are also clear reasons why people who share an ethnicity like living near each other, regardless of financial means. I think you're looking for a causation between two phenomena that may be entirely independent from each other.

Edit: I think this may have started with a misinterpretation of the initial post here (which was by a user who hasn't replied any further). You may have interpreted it as "in the Bay area, PoC are more likely to be homeless" while the original wording also allows for the interpretation of "PoC are more likely to be homeless, which e.g. is noticeable in the Bay area" that doesn't imply causation and is how I read the comment.

> They're calling you out on asking why the homeless don't just move

Please try reading my posts again very carefully rather than assuming my intent. Thank you!

If multiple people are confused on what you're saying, you should probably clarify with better wording.

If someone reads “black American moving to Oakland” as “homeless person moving out of Oakland”, that is not my fault…!

No, I read your post, it was just asinine. There's nothing intrinsic about Oakland - the homeless racial makeup stats roughly persist across urban areas - but there is something intrinsic about the entire rest of the system we have, which is related to my post, and what seems to be your blind spot about the relative levers of action that various people have about how to effect change in their lives, how and when those might fail, and why they may wind up in worse situations despite the system ostensibly seeming to be "colorblind."

If people are systematically more likely to be in area X, that may be because they are systematically more likely to make the relevant choices - for example because they are under different constraints or have different preferences. Choice is part of social science.

To put actual numbers to "way more likely". Using https://www.bayareaequityatlas.org/indicators/experiencing-h... and the census.

The rate is 42/10k for non-Hispanic White and 56/10k for all others - a common definition for people of color. So about a third more likely.

To provide some intuition if the numbers aren't clear that increased risk is about the same as:

* driving while having slept 6-7 hours rather than 7+ hours[0] 1.3x

* being a teen driver with a teen friend in the car rather than alone[1] 1.49x

* the increased cardiovascular risk from being highly sedentary vs. being active[2] 1.3x

As a whole, though, 'person of color' seems to be a bad grouping unit here because Asian people are 'people of color' and have a 7/10k rate, while Black people are also 'people of color' and have a 214/10k rate. Therefore, if I were trying to understand if there are subpopulation differences this is not the aggregation unit I would use.

0: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/bulletin/2017/national-police-week...

1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10735394/

2: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38081421/

So let's say hypothetically we kept the number of homeless people stable in Oakland, but made them all white. You think all (most? many?) of the people currently complaining about homelessness would shut up?

No, Appalachia's sufficient to negate that hypothesis, but it doesn't mean the people currently complaining about homelessness aren't also making judgements on racial grounds. A large part of the illegibility of Oakland to outsiders is mistaking other people's cultures for urban decay.

Visual disorder is real harm, not a proxy or suburban preference.

Encampments produce fires, needles, waste, blocked sidewalks, and local crime spikes. Surveys show high mental illness and substance use rates among the homeless. Mild climate plus weak enforcement concentrates the problem beyond local poverty levels. Treating every complaint as coded racism blocks diagnosis.

Unpermitted vendors create safety and fairness issues for taxed businesses. Illegal graffiti is vandalism that costs owners. Oakland fines them. Murals are different.

Pure tolerance by the left produced tent cities. Enforcement and treatment shows recent drops in both homelessness and crime.

People who want orderly streets are not required to absorb the costs. Working neighborhoods take most of the hit.

> Encampments produce fires, needles, waste, blocked sidewalks, and local crime spikes

Are you saying that if it weren't for such an encampment, homeless people wouldn't be keeping warm, shooting up, and relieving themselves? I don't see how that can be the case. It seems to me that what you are pointing out is that encampments make these events more visible by containing them in one place, rather than them being diffused throughout the city.

I dunno have you been to Vesterbro (he is talking about Copenhagen afterall)? Especially around H17? It's pretty gross. It's also spitting distance from Tivoli Gardens where you might want to take your kids out for the day.

The most objectionable thing about his post is that he's calling out gypsies specifically, but also Denmark relatively recently passed sweeping anti-begging laws kind of specifically targeting Roma people...

So they passed anti-begging laws and you say they target Roma people. Now who's making here racial assumptions?

No assumptions being made here. Denmark, like most of Europe, has a long history of Roma discrimination. It's been well-written about, discussed by the media, by members of the Folketing, and even in the European Court of Human Rights.

I'm not a Dane but have spent significant time there and well understand the spectrum of views Danes hold on immigration and Danish politics in general.

I wasn't even passing any kind of judgment, but bringing this up because DHH was discussing a topic that comes up locally (even though he doesn't even live there anymore) but sounds crazy if you don't have the context.

The question would be how exactly the laws target Roma people.

What I see in the streets of another European city in a country with a long history of discrimination against Roma people is a lot of Roma beggars. But these are very clearly not local people. They seem to be Romanian and working for an organised ring. If the situation in Denmark is similar and if the laws are targeted against exploitation of disadvantaged people for begging then that would be acceptable (and if not ECHR will have the last word on that).

> and if not ECHR will have the last word on that

They actually already did. Dian v Denmark. Ruling that the ban wasn't illegal.

Thank you for that. tldr: the court ruled that Dian was not in a precarious position but was using begging in Denmark as an additional source of income to support his family in Romania (and, reading between the lines, probably to buy drugs) and so Denmark was ok putting him in prison for a few days (after he insulted a police officer too).

Danish police are super tolerant and professional btw.

I had my passport lifted by a pickpocket while at a restaurant in Vesterbro and had to report it to the police and then go to my embassy to get a replacement. Both the Danish police and the US state department employees were amazing.

I've lived in east coast cities (NYC, Boston, and Philadelphia) for the majority of my adult life and while homelessness is less of a problem in the northeast because of the climate there is still a good amount of it in the major cities. I think it becomes way too easy to tune out those commentaries and avoid the parts of the city that they apply to.

In Philadelphia, I lived a few blocks away from the Girard stop on the L train. I would just avoid walking by the station because it was a hang out for homeless people and drug users in the area. Pretty much everywhere within a 10 block radius of the station is built up, there's always people out, and it feels like all of the local businesses in the area are thriving (more recently there's been too many chains opening up which sucks but I digress), there's barely any homelessness or crime with the exception of package thieves (I just bought a $20 box off amazon to put in front of my house and never had a problem) and the occasional car window being smashed.

In NYC, especially Manhattan although the same applies to the outer boroughs, unless you live around a more touristy area then you don't even think about it. In Boston even less so besides downtown.

I don't think trying to contain people to specific areas is a good solution. There's obviously a greater social issue across the US and other developed nations and it's a very hard problem to start solving, but I would guess that most cities continue to ignore it as long as its easy for the majority of the population to ignore it.

> I don't think trying to contain people to specific areas is a good solution.

Hamsterdam

The author is complaining about people defecating in public spaces, not about graffiti.

I guess that could be a type of art.

and where should the homeless go when there's no access to public bathrooms and every business is hostile to anyone that can't pay

https://visitorservice.kk.dk/en/explore-copenhagen/public-to...

Did you miss the “no public restrooms” part?

The author is dehumanizing an entire ethnic group by calling them wolves that need to be controlled.

You need some kind of proof that a homeless encampment is bad for the city or that someone might not like to be near one for reasons that might not include racism?

comments like these really grind my gears. are those really the only things you can imagine people don't like about "homeless encampments"? graffiti??

What is presented is a very short list of separate issues. It could easily have said "widespread shoplifting, potholes"; it is not insinuating that one causes the others, just like shoplifting clearly does not cause potholes.

I do find the author position to be incoherent in the following regard:

1. believe a statement can be true or false, and false should be called out.

2. believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken.

I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed. That eliminates margin for corruption and lenience. A strong law also creates incentive for the population to care about the letter of the law and reforms, since it becomes a known fact that such law will be followed through.

The worst of both worlds is a situation like in US or EU where immigrants "more or less" can settle, but live under constant pressure knowing there is no legal framework to support them, and deportation may come at any moment.

I think some of the trouble here is that the application of the law cannot be guaranteed to be free of discrimination or bias, regardless of the letter of the law itself?

I think DHH's comments are pretty mild given the subject. However, I think it is how he frames his comments that cause offensive - lumping a (potentially) problematic (arguably) ethnic group of people in with animal control...

> believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken.

Except that that author didn't say that at all. They said "deport only the lawbreakers", while expressing dismay at a blogpost which (apparently*) said "deport everyone".

> I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed.

Quote from TFA: "Any kind of mass deportation plan would have to change [the law], which would be legally tricky to say the least. However, enforcing the existing laws requires no legal action, and could start tomorrow if the relevant executive wanted it to."

*Other comments have argued that the post didn't actually say that.

To establish oneself in a country (for the majority if not all the western world) without an appropriate visa is already breaking the law.

Not saying this is the only way, or what should be - but it's what it is, selectively breaking the law is ok - "as long as they behave". It implies that immigrants must live in the limbo and under undue psychological pressure, knowing one day their whole life may be uprooted for any transgression (or even none). This to me is some medieval mindset.

The people DHH is taking about are EU citizens with a legal privilege by default to live in Denmark

He also means Danish citizens who might be second or third generations Danish but came from background he doesn't like. Oh and of course you can see it - their skin.

> without an appropriate visa

In this particular case, they are legal residents.

> I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed.

I read an article some years back that really changed my mind about this. It made the point that society evolves through the imperfect enforcement of laws (those some kinds of imperfection, like selective enforcement, are distinctly harmful). That is empirically true, but for some reason I hadn't realized it until the article pointed it out to me.

This one, by Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike, perhaps? https://moxie.org/2013/06/12/we-should-all-have-something-to...

Something I was told when started building in fintech was that the laws are in such a way that its impossible to be 100% compliant in every interpretation.

The law is huge, complex and can often have conflicting aspects.

This is assumed by some to be "by design". When the law is such that everyone is breaking it, then the power shifts to whoever can bring people in "front of the law".

So, in every case with strong beliefs such as yours, IMMV and it's easy to voice an opinion when you feel "not in target".

> That eliminates margin for corruption and lenience.

Lenience and mercy are critical components of a system of a just criminal justice system. We have judges issue sentences in large part because we want a human being with good judgement to decide how serious the punishment for an offence should be based on the circumstances.

A person who shoots their partner who has been abusing them for years should probably receive a different punishment than a person who pulls out a gun in traffic and shoots someone for cutting them off. Mercy or "lenience" are not inherently flaws in the justice system, though of course there's always "too much of a good thing."

I don't believe that deportation is inherently morally wrong, but there are certainly ways to deport people that are less moral than others.

Do you believe that even morally wrong laws should be enforced and followed? A lot of the segregation and jim crow laws were pretty odious. Women weren't allowed to have bank accounts and credit cards in multiple countries (even the US until 1974). Women were not allowed to legally vote (one Swiss canton kept this until 1990!).

Do you believe that these laws should be enforced and followed despite most people believing that they are morally wrong?

There's a coherent argument for doing so: if the law is enforced, and no one wants it to be enforced, it creates pressure to fix the law. Laws that are on the books but not enforced lead to laws meaning nothing in the extreme case.

I think there's merit to both sides and the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle.

Who decides what is morally wrong? If everyone decided to not follow or enforce laws based on their own morals, society would be in absolute chaos. You can't have a functioning society around "I do what I believe, fuck y'all"

In the US we call it the Supreme Court

People ultimately decide on their own. There are institutions that make judgments but ultimate it's an individual that decides. But for a lot of things, there are nearly universal agreement going one way, e.g. everyone almost universally agrees that murder is wrong.

> I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed.

Laws are written by imperfect humans. Bad laws exist.

Well then fix the laws, and/or advocate to fix the laws. Laws must exist in order to have a society, and no defeatist attitude will ever fix them. Laws won't fix by themselves, a majority needs to need them fixed. And then APPLY them.

But in the meantime follow the bad law? If the law said that you aren't supposed to give water to the people that cross the desert would you follow that even if the person is dying of thirst?

Oh dear, the desert thirst seems to be a beloved metaphor on HN... Anyway: you can and should have both. Because it's wrong and backwards to just disrespect laws - it breaks said society structure - without actively trying to do something to replace its wrong pillars. It might be more poetic or movie-like to be the hidden hero sharing water, but without a law change, when you'll be eventually busted (because you will) the stupid desert crossers will dry out. Literally.

> believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken.

I (the author) do believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases. For example, there are laws governing which people can be deported and for what reasons. Deportations that violate those laws are morally wrong. What I spent the whole article arguing against was the idea that people should be deported even when the laws say their deportation is illeagl. (It would be illegal to deport the vast vast majority of Roma in Denmark.) The other thing I argued for in the article is enforcement of the law against people who break it.

I used to admire that guy. I don't understand why anyone still works at Basecamp with posts like this to be honest. How do people justify it to themselves? Maybe it's just harder to switch jobs now with AI, I don't know.

Perhaps they agree with his opinion or they don't care about it?

Maybe it's simply because his opinion is shared by many people and I would even say that he is pretty mild in expressing it?

Equalling the Roma (and insisting on using a slur to refer to them) to wolves that need to be shot is mild?

To empathize a bit with the Basecamp employees, DHH has sort of slowly worked his way into the gutter racism that he displays openly now.

Like a lot of his peers, the first Trump administration seemed to unlock a permission structure to be increasingly reactionary in public, facilitated by the overt political bias of Musk's X. We've now reached a point where this sort of "vice signaling" is a great way to gain clout in the overtly nativist tech bro niche in the US.

Which is to say, he wasn't always like this, and it feels like each new blog post is getting worse in a way that, if I were at Basecamp, I might have initially overlooked as the frog was slowly boiled.

Maybe a lot of people actually agree with him, and would rather we expect more of people, rather than simply defining criminal activity as an unconscious effect of one's being somehow oppressed, or one's great-great-grandparents being oppressed, or whatever.

The culture in question have been infamous for centuries for their value system which is incompatible with most others. Just as it's okay for devout Islamists to find the whole American value system disgusting and want nothing to do with it, it's okay for DHH and other Westerners to find the Roma value system disgusting. It's a belief system they choose, it's not something like skin that people cannot change.

In America there's a lot of ethical ambiguity given how recently most current residents' ancestors arrived. But in Denmark? Did the Roma build that society? (Possible) EU citizenship aside, I find it hard to judge Danes who feel that ethically, they don't have a right to degrade that society with crime and vagrancy. Same as I don't blame English people who don't like certain things going on there.

The article being referred to says "When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them" - it doesn't say "you deport everyone of that race," it's about the people causing problems. If you allow literally any behavior, no matter how antisocial, bad actors will ruin everything for everyone. Only the most obtuse person doesn't recognize the truth of that, deep down.

> okay for DHH and other Westerners to find the Roma value system disgusting.

The Nazis murdered about a million gypsies so “finding a whole value system disgusting” can lead to some quite dark places.

By that logic, how can we even justify finding Nazi ideology disgusting? "Sure, a lot of Nazis committed a ton of heinous crimes, and their value system told them it was good and proper to do so, but some of them are probably nice people who didn't commit murder!"

To be clear my point is that not all cultures are equally good - due to their different value systems. Pretending they are always leads to the most harmful, unfair, and cruel ones taking advantage of the most trusting ones.

Again, nobody here is arguing for harming anyone, nor for taking any action at all towards those of that ancestry that aren't doing the crimes. But I'd be all for deporting those that do.

If some individuals are committing crimes, why isn't the normal criminal justice system the answer, instead of deportation?

And deport them to where exactly, and on what justification? They've been in Europe for a thousand years and are effectively stateless.

I don't think most gypsies are stateless.

I meant in the sense that Roma are an ethnicity lacking their own sovereign state, "stateless" as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateless_nation

OK. But then the answer to your initial question would be "deported to their home countries".

Which is where, exactly, for the people in question? i.e. what is the legal home country for most Roma in Denmark? Given folks like DHH have such strong opinions about this, I would expect they should be able to detail the specifics of the mass deportation plan they're proposing!

Presumably, if they are immigrants, then they have a passport and a legal home country. I agree with you that mass deportation (i.e. deportation of a whole group not based on individual guilt or innocence) is bad. Just saying that this particular argument isn't relevant.

Pardon my skepticism, but cursory web searching and LLM prompting is giving me responses like "a significant portion of the European Roma population faces high rates of statelessness or lacks basic civil documents", while citing real website articles with titles such as "Many Roma in Europe are stateless and live outside social protection".

That aligns 100% with things I've read previously, but that said, I'm not terribly well-informed on the topic and maybe I'm entirely wrong here. Do you have any links/info that support what you're saying?

Being literally stateless is not the same as not having a passport. (My father-in-law doesn't have one, but he's a perfectly respectable citizen!) Being in a foreign country without a passport is also not being stateless - it may well correspond to being an illegal immigrant, however.

It is quite hard to be made stateless. You have to be born in a very unlucky place.

All of this means that immigrants can be deported to their country of origin.

The articles I read yesterday indicated that it would be quite difficult to determine country of origin in many cases, due to complete lack of official identity documentation.

The article I previously mentioned by name literally describes statelessness and why that occurred for Roma in several specific scenarios: https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/-/many-roma-in-europ...

So again I must ask, do you have any links that support what you're saying?

But somebody who comes into a country must know where they come from! So you can just ask them. If they refuse to say, then that seems like a them problem, no?

I don’t know what proportion of gypsies are literally stateless… though like you I can ask ChatGPT. So I did, and it gave lots of links and an answer of “well under 1%”: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a6d93888f208191a02d5e6edd0ceea9

Regardless of whether they are "truly" stateless, if they have no identity documentation -- which your AI answer repeatedly indicates is a situation applying to a larger number of Roma -- and they refuse to say where they're from (or they say they're from that country; or they name a country that isn't where they're from; or the named country refuses to take them) then once again, where are they being deported to exactly?

My point with all this is that it is VERY important to ask specific questions of the folks like DHH who are promoting mass deportation plans, because otherwise having public support for this kind of thing is exactly how you end up with people getting sent to concentration camps (or worse). They're demanding "just deport them!" while hand-waving away even the most basic details of what that might mean, and simultaneously making disturbing analogies to shooting wolves. It's not hard to connect the dots here.

As for "That seems like a them problem"... For a directly analogous situation currently happening in the world, consider all the people the US has blindly deported to the CECOT prison in El Salvador. Is that a "them problem" too, where a large number of undocumented Venezuelan migrants with tattoos are being sent to a concentration camp for gang members in an entirely different country?

The Nazis are defined by their ideology. Gypsies are an ethnicity; judging them all by the actions of some is unfair. That doesn't mean you can't ever criticize another culture. But it does seem obvious that crimes committed by gypsies, no matter how serious, pale compared to the past crimes committed against them.

> How do people justify it to themselves?

Just read the comments in this thread. There are plenty of examples right here.

HN is full, absolutely rampant, with bots. Lotta reasons, e.g. hyping the latest YC unicorn, etc.

influencing wealthy and influential tech folks is very much a serious concern, since they're often online and high extra hard with regards to the 1-9-90 rule

This should not have been flagged. There's not even any flagged comments.

I don't know the rules for what does and doesn't get flagged. I tried to write it in a respectful way without resorting to personal attacks.

I think people have flagged it simply because the topic attracts the kind of discussion hn usually tries to avoid.

Guidelines:

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.

(To be clear, I'm not saying I think you did anything wrong)

Fair enough. If it's against the rules, I won't post things like this on hacker news anymore.

I don't believe it's against the rules, but rather part of the community is often self moderating to keep politics adjacent topics off the front page.

Reply:

The original post is about ideology, and the discussion thread includes battle over every controversial ideological topic you can think of. There are certainly many flagged, guidelines-breaking comments now, just as we'd expect for an article written in this way.

It's just not the kind of topic that can inspire curious conversation on HN.

Tom (Moderator)

It certainly does inspire thoughtfulness, in fact, I think this is one of the most interesting philosophical posts in a long time. He doesn't attack DHH with insults, but discusses frameworks of thought and how legitimate differences in opinion can be looked at by recognizing differences in the recognition of facts between parties, and the context in which certain courses of action are advocated. Example: the "sorrow of war" piece in the article.

It may not be HN's core purpose, but the essay is well constructed.

Edit:

This article resonates with me so much. It puts into better words how I feel about political conflict in the US. I talk a lot about "good faith" discussions. It's the reason I try to hold back the instinct of hating/resenting the people in my political opposition. I think (a) reasonable people can have differences in opinion, and (b) many people in the country are factually incorrect about the things happening in our country.

My relative straight-up rejected the notion that the president's family has benefited from hundreds of millions of dollars in corrupt crypto investments including those from foreign governments, or that their family is self-admittedly engaging in rampant insider trading. Not "well it's not that bad". Not merely "the other side does it too". He denied the fact.

My anger is directed most toward the politicians and the media that knowingly propagate the lies and the intentionally misleading trains of thought to lead people into far-right ideology. They operate in bad faith. Even if some things that the right wants to do in the country have an iota of legitimacy, they do not operate with the context of decency and good meaning.

I'm very thankful that you found the post interesting. I think false information is the main thing that causes two good people to end up on opposite sides. As a tangent, people are afraid of the potential for AI to generate false information (e.g. deepfakes), but I'm hopeful that it will also help people discover true information more easily. But anyway, I really appreciate the kind words.

I noticed your respectful and thoughtful writing which is why I don't think it should be flagged. It starts the discussion in a nice way, and as I said at the time there weren't even any rule breaking comments that were flagged.

I've asked the moderators.

In many places, on Reddit especially, anything remotely referencing Travellers (UK), Roma, Gypsies will get flagged, locked, and taken down very quickly. To a degree there is brigading and to a degree a large number of people are unable to discuss them calmly.

Personally, I didn't flag the article but I think it might be right to be flagged - just; I think you have discussed the issue calmly, but I find the article to be faux respectful and presenting itself as being neutral where it is not. To me the article reads as posturing and signalling, and using the headline (cancelling Hey) as a thin cover for discussing something else entirely (the blog post, the disagreements with it, and the political disagreement with DHH). Note that HN says anything off-topic should be flagged, and the definition for off-topic starts with: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime...". If it had been, I'm cancelling Hey.com due to revelations about the owners DHH <link>, its cost me $x and was good and now I'm going to $y then I think it would be on-topic.

That all said; the topic you are really discussing is one that is very hard to have a reasonable conversation with people about. It has been unreasonably politicised, and is aggressively pursued as such; to a degree that distorts the basic facts and denies the real harms and impacts. One of my early roles involved physical security systems, and during it I encountered a large number of people suffering from related issues while the police both didn't have the power to resolve it and were not willing to wield the power they did have. I am deeply concerned about the widespread censoring of these discussions.

I didn't intend to present myself as neutral. I was explaining why I disagreed with him. But I do agree with you - having seen the site guidelines, it makes sense why it was flagged.

> anything remotely referencing Travellers (UK), Roma, Gypsies

I imagine (living in a country that's unbelievably racist to Roma people) that "anything" is usually pretty racist though, so it's not really everything referencing these groups of people.

> I am deeply concerned about the widespread censoring of these discussions.

But if the alternative is quite often these discussions spiralling into calls for genocide then "censoring" surely is the lesser evil.

> the police both didn't have the power to resolve it and were not willing to wield the power they did have.

That's a very familiar experience I think in most countries, but as you say if we can't discuss it, and we can't because mass murderers in waiting immediately hijack any attempt to do that, then we can't work on a solution.

Genocide is certainly not an outcome I've seen be suggested in the conversations I have had or read. This feels like quite the false dichotomy.

It's quite common in our neck of woods unless the discussion is censored.

It probably should have been flagged under the usual guidelines. It's not that you shouldn't talk about race and immigration but HN isn't really the place.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

For a hot second I thought the OP was going to share a way to silently suppress chats that start with "Hi", or "Hey".

Yeah, the title is really misleading. I thought the same at first, and then I also thought that this will be a review of the actual “Hey” email client.

Strange logic and strange days we live in.

Typically I just spend money on software that works the best and suits my needs.

I don't generally research the individual creating it.

We should all know less about eachother!

It's not strange at all. For example if your money are used for political causes you don't like then you should absolutely send the money to alternatives instead.

Did run purity checks on alternatives? Because maybe you're just funneling money to larger and better PR-assisted "nazis"

That's always a possibility (like recently mullvad). But better try my luck with someone new than keep supporting someone i already don't like.

It was much easier when the CEOs didn't gleefully out themselves as white supremacists on their own corporate social media.

Destroying the public space this way results in only the rich being able to escape the constant stress, squalor, random violence. For some reason that's "progressive."

If you believe that even the non-rich, of all ethnicities, should have access to peace, beauty, and safety: you're a "white supremacist!"

I believe even the non-rich of all ethnicities should have access to peace/beauty/safety, ergo we should deport all Romani and Muslims? Sure, that makes sense -- if you're wearing white robes.

> all Romani and Muslims

Not at all. Only the ones that (1) cause constant stress, squalor or random violence, and also (2) aren't citizens of the country. The standards and expectations for immigrants should be higher than the standards for natives, not lower.

Immigration into a country should only happen as far as the native population consents to it, whether that existing population in question is muslim or romani or swedish.

Maybe you only want non-white peoples to a have a right to self-determination? I want every people to have that right. I wouldn't dream of forcing the people of Bhutan to accept against their will an unlimited number of Swedish problem immigrants. The natives of Bhutan have a right to decide for themselves how much immigration, and what kind of immigration they want.

Except DHH wants to deport citizens who don't fit his ideal, not just noncitizen lawbreakers. If you actually read his writing, it becomes pretty clear that he doesn't think nonwhites can ever become true Danes (or Brits). And Romani, at least, have been around as long as the "natives," so to label them "immigrants" is kind of funny.

One thing this post never does is actually meaningfully argue with the core idea of the post that so outraged them.

Which is: If someone comes illegally to your country and ends up sleeping in parks, they should be deported.

I don’t know if I agree with that but the post seems to take it for granted that any reasonable person cannot.

To me this is more a fashion statement than an argument. Advocating deportations is automatically bad, using the word “gypsy” is automatically offensive. It’s silly. Pretty much everyone has some line of behavior at which they advocate deportation, and can anyone here who is upset actually explain why “Roma” is less offensive than “Gypsy”? There are PhDs in Eastern European history who can’t do that.

> Which is: If someone comes illegally to your country and ends up sleeping in parks, they should be deported.

That doesn't enrage me, in fact I agree with it. But no one in this story came illegally to Denmark. I'm not sure what gave you that impression. And I read DHH to be saying that more people than just the specific ones sleeping in parks should be deported.

> if I give someone inaccurate medical advice, that is not only false, it is false and harmful

I don't understand what's so special about legal and medical advice that it's so singled out in certain parts of the world. All kinds of advice people give can be harmful, such as eg cooking and dietary advice. Yet it's ok to tell people how to cook, but for whatever reason it's not ok to tell people to make sure they stay well-hydrated when they have a cold.

[Edit:] But gee does the rest of the article hit hard. The "missing mood" in particular.

I think it's hard to do significant harm with bad cooking advice. Unless the advice was absolutely terrible like "eat only raw potatoes". But that's pretty rare. On the other hand many people can think of someone who was harmed seriously by bad medical advice. Steve Jobs is a famous example. (I'm the author of the article)

Generally speaking, bad medical or legal advice has much higher potential to have far-reaching consequences - much more so than giving bad cooking advice.

But also good medical advice has a high potential to have far-reaching positive consequences. Telling people not to forget to hydrate shouldn't be controversial. Shouldn't we be on the side of good advice rather than on the side of no legal or medical advice?

Sure - and a really good indicator for whether the advice is good is, "is this person educated and licensed to talk about this?"

To say nothing of whether that person has the necessary - often lengthy - context necessary to provide good advice.

Hey is the only way I can have a public, usable email account anymore.

I maintain a self-hosted whitelist-only email account for sensitive work but email for other purposes just isn't tenable anymore.

If someone else comes along with a better product maybe I'll consider it.

I like Fastmail

I use Fastmail. It’s excellent, and only $114 for two years. (Just processed my renewal today.)

You're in luck because there are so many alternatives. Fastmail, Tuta Mail, Migadu, Proton, and I'm sure there are more.

I think DHH's opinion is a very common sentiment in Europe. "Gypsies" are a very European thing. I wonder if there's anything similar in the US? For context for US readers; they generally exist outside of the usual social norms, and have a pretty bad reputation because of it.

This is not a defence of DHH, just providing context to his comments.

As if the social norms only flow one way (gypsies excluding themselves) and not the other way (white Europeans excluding them).

There are in a lot of EU countries sets of laws to integrate gypsies, but it's a hard problem, e.g. schooling kids who move town every three months.

I think the gypsies he's referring to might be a particular set of organised beggar gangs exploiting gypsies from Romania, Bulgaria and generally central Europe in European cities since the early 2000s, and not the usual seasonal workers from these and other gypsy communities. But I haven't been to Copenhagen in a while.

I don't understand your comment - the social norms I refer to are paying tax, sending your children to school, integrating with the local community, living in areas/accommodation that is legal/not transitory. It can be argued how many of those are valid criticisms, but that is what generally refer to.

His opinion that their behavior is undesirable and should be dealt with is common.

His comparison to them as wolf-like predators (and you shoot wolves), previous posts about mass deportation and forced remigration ... no, most Europeans aren't veering strongly into hard-right territory.

There isn't really a direct point of comparison in the US, because by and large the US is much more loosely attached to the concept of having a specific "Our culture" that others are expected to assimilate to. Rather, US culture is more of an admixture of whoever happens to be in an area. That isn't to say that it's all peaches and roses, but our racism tends towards "this group is intrinsically worse than mine" rather than "this group is trying to conquer our homeland".

This plays out with things like US culture being pretty well tolerant of ethnic enclaves (Chinatowns, Little Italies, Solvang, etc) compared to what I've seen in my travels abroad, while preferring to bulldoze those enclaves when a new freeway needs to be built, and foods emblematic of certain areas being Flanderized versions of various foreign cuisines (Take a look at California's burritos, or a Chicago style pizza, or a New York style pizza).

I cannot speak for all of Europe, since I have no idea what rules are elsewhere. But in Sweden in the municipality I live in, they have banned begging in public areas. And the ones who are begging in public areas in Sweden are predominantly gypsies. There are a few municipalities in Sweden that have banned begging in public areas, while most still allow it. E.g. in the capital Stockholm it's allowed, and you may see gypsies sitting at shopping streets, at the central station and outside stores.

Just wanted to share that there are areas where people have gotten tired of gypsies, and have gotten rid of most of them in this way, as some extra context.

You don't need to express the issues like DHH did, but there are problems in the EU that weren't there 20 years ago.

The former European Community core states are too small and cannot handle the influx of millions from the East and the South.

The core states should leave the EU and reestablish the former European Community, which would help the populations as opposed to multinational locust companies.

It isn't fair that the whole world (mind you, including rich foreigners) buys up apartments, takes jobs and displaces the original population.

"Well, my understanding of Denmark is that they also don't have the will to start doing mass deportations of EU citizens, and DHH is advocating to change that. "

https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/69582/denmark-moves-tow...

No opinion, just statement for your records.

that link talks about non-EU citizens. the people discussed in the topic are EU citizens.

It is sad that such a song and dance is required when anyone with half a brain can read the racism in DHH's post.

Imagine a scenario that a black family moved into your neighborhood and started causing a bunch of problems. There are no other black people in the neighborhood.

It should take you a picosecond to figure out which one of these is obviously racist and which isn't:

"We need to remove the black people from our neighborhood"

"We need to remove the new family from our neighborhood"

People like "well he has a good point they are causing problems" so technically the set of "black people" and "people who are currently causing problems in our neighborhood" are the same set. This is irrelevant.

I think a lot is about a group with a particular behaviour. I'm in central London and we have all races and nationalities - black, white, arab, muslim, chinese, everything really but it's only the Roma that camped in my local square and do organised begging.

And it isn't just how they are - they are shipped in by organisers by the coach load to beg awhile and give a cut to the organisers.

I will say something that I made peace with: these are part of the new normal. This one is even light in front of everything else. Look at the supposed most richest person on Earth comments. And it will get worse. I'm seeing political people public calling the ending of the suffrage for women. People sharing memes about Jewish people with the same underlying message as dark web board messages of 2010s. And I'm not talking about a specific group. This is going all over the political spectrum.

Part of me thinks that there will be a time where progressives will have to choose their radicals. I hope that it happens after my death.

The world’s values have absolutely gone to shit. There may be many contributing factors, but I will say it’s at least in part the fault of the far left pushing too far.

Instead of maintaining the fight with actual racism, thinking that’s gone away, they picked racist fights with everyone else, embracing a form of racism themselves.

They have also sided with misogynistic and racist groups in their extreme search for “tolerance”.

A fresh young mind that comes along can see racism and misogyny promoted on both sides of the spectrum, with the left one a bit more oppressive and hypocritical about it and the right side a bit more self-consistent and hedonistic about it.

the discussed blogpost https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a

Disgusting. I want to say that DHH has fallen so far, but I don't actually see any evidence that he wasn't this hateful inside his heart years ago.

DHH has had a long decline, in my personal regard. A lot of things I ignored or gave grace for because of his early influence were actually clear signals about his fundamental beliefs.

Here he was last year championing the Far Right in England https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

Yup. I followed his terrible behavior since his 2021 crashout, when he caused a third of his employees to leave his company, and he's only gotten louder and worse since. Looking back further, I can't see him actually supporting anything pro-social.

Oh, wow.

> large gathering of perfectly normal, peaceful Brits

Let's just say that when a Tommy Robinson crowd walk into a pub, the perfectly normal, peaceful Brits look for the exits.

And not even the faux-respectable far right, fucking Yaxley-Lennon.

From the blog:

> They're still reeling from the Pakistani rape gangs that were left free to terrorize cities like Rotherham and Rochdale for years on end with horror-movie-like scenes of the most despicable, depraved abuse of British girls.

I can see if you feel this was fabricated by the author, you'd have the negative reaction you're having. But this is much-reported, much-discussed fact. Maybe HN needs to read news sources besides HN.

I can't recall when the strongarmed union-busting happened at Basecamp, but it was a few years ago. Funnily enough, he kept patronizing Citations Needed well after.

E: 2021, apparently; thanks mplewis.

Given the state of the world it doesn’t seem that the wolves are the ones out of control

[deleted]

Libelous. He never says to shoot Roma. He says to deport foreigners who sleep in parks.

even if that WERE what he said, it would still be an incorrect and outsized response based in racial animus

he pairs the concepts

He says to deport literally an entire ethnic group independent of whether they happen to sleep in parks, which is the entire point being made by the article linked to by this page where we're commenting. The comment you're responding to also restates this, without making any claims about whether he said to shoot people, so your objection doesn't really make any sense in that regard either.

1. Comment says “shoot them” refers to Roma. Totally false and intentionally misleading.

2. Literally the only place the word deport is used in the post is here: “ When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them”

Please quote where he says to deport all Roma/gypsies.

> Comment says “shoot them” refers to Roma. Totally false and intentionally misleading.

The comment is deleted now, so I don't have any way to prove this, but it didn't say that when I read it. Maybe it did earlier and it had been edited by the time I had read it.

> Please quote where he says to deport all Roma/gypsies

You want me to quote the exact sentence you already quoted? There's only one antecedent of the pronoun "them" that makes sense in that sentence, and it's not "public spaces". If you want to pretend that the intentional repeated use of a slur and years of similar opinions are somehow immaterial to trying to understand what that sentence means, you're free to do that, but that's not what libel means.

Do you know the basics of how written language works?

Are you familiar at all with the concept of juxtaposition?

When Tutsis were called "cockroaches" in the lead-up to the Rwandan Genocide, do you think the speakers were literally saying that Tutsis were a type of bug...?

He does say to shoot the wolves. And the wolves are the “gypsies” in the analogy he is explicitly drawing. The commenter you’re responding to was highlighting the parallelism not literally saying “he said to shoot people”

This is slightly less awful than what I imagined but still enough that I would never want to do do business with any company run by DHH anymore.

Granted, I already have a dim view of Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and have never used any of DHH's software products, so my comment is a moral denouncement that carries no weight. Still, the dog whistling in this blog post is so loud I hear barking from the next door down. I don't exactly have on-the-ground knowledge of the exact situation in Copenhagen, but even just from what DHH describes, I'm pretty sure the solution can be solved through means less invasive than deporting homeless people.

And just to be clear, I'm using the phrase "homeless people" rather than Europe's N-word because the problem is not where the people came from. Unless you want to pretend like Danish-born homeless are somehow way better, which would be a level of propagandistic bullshittery I don't even think Trump would stoop to. I also shouldn't have to explain why the actions to fix homelessness should not be identical or even analogous to the actions taken to manage an invasive wolf population.

There is an actual problem DHH is vaguely grasping at: western countries have an exceptionally low state capacity despite their status on the world stage. The West is run by people who believe their job is to merely manage the decline of their terminally-ill trade empires until the pieces get inevitably packaged up and sold to ancap-esque autocrats of trade. And the social and economic structures undergirding the west, especially in Europe, have ossified to the point where there is not only no place for immigrants of any stripe, but even our own young can't fit in.

But the answer to this problem that always gets attention is the people who want to burn that remaining state capacity on incredibly vengeful, petty, and stupid acts of bullying. "I don't care how poor I am as long as I have someone else's neck below my boot" is just a recipe for mass impoverishment.

Sigh.

While every wolf may be a predator - that does not necessarily mean they are they are dangerous to all potential types of prey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Cry_Wolf

Isn't prey by definition in danger.

If you honestly believe what you're saying you're going to have a REALLY BAD TIME in the wild.

Depends on the environment - in that book for example, Arctic wolves were not the cause of large (in physical size - the caribou) prey animal population decline, even though the "feelings" of the average person was that they must be the reason.

Outside of fiction, wolves are not ravenous beasts that hunt everything and anything in sight.

Predators do tend to go for the weak/sick, older or younger/inexperienced targets - they aren't stupid.

You're looking at the problem from the 5,000 foot view.

Prey is whatever is at risk of being consumed. I have made no attempt at classifying wolves behavior in my comment.

Edit: I do take the prey/predator relationship very seriously, I wrote about what I do here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46462101

By that logic - every living being on the planet is - or can be prey for something else - and I am not disagreeing with that.

But that 5,000 foot view of mine is more related to the original blog author using predator/prey as an analogy - it breaks down quickly when applied to humans.

Nice comment! (I used to hunt - but not as intimately as your experience - you have a very skilled and serious background)

> You're looking at the problem from the 5,000 foot view.

As they should be. Because the analogy between wolves and Gypsies on the level of predator-prey is clearly completely broken (Gypsies are not predators and the majority population is not prey). And the only level where it works is the irrational fear far beyond their real threat that both wolves and Gypsies instill in some members of the society. Which has lead to near extinction of wolves - damaging ecosystems that depend on them - and (among other things) a genocide of Gypsies.

I haven't experienced gypsies first hand, but from the youtube perception that I see, they definitely DO prey on tourists at land marks.

Unless there is a youtube/social media conspiracy, i think the analogy stands.

I have "experienced" Roma people including having lived close to a large Roma group (same street), going to school with them etc and it's a complete nonsense to blame and persecute the whole ethnic group. In general, in the year 2026 we should know better than to assign collective guilt. It always creates more issues than it purports to solve.

If you really want to understand an issue in depth, don't use propaganda videos as education.

I never said they were collectively guilty. that was on you. You assigned them all as guilty.

> and it's a complete nonsense to blame and persecute the whole ethnic group

Cultures exist in ethnic groups, I don't know what to say. If you don't believe this, you're being intentionally obstuse.

> In general, in the year 2026 we should know better than to assign collective guilt.

Again, that was you.

> If you really want to understand an issue in depth.

I only get to see what I'm presented. I don't even know how to identify what they look like. They do appear to look like every day people in the youtube videos. They usually speak the language, but people point them out as being a problem.

That is not a "me" problem, that is a PR problem. Now that I think about it, i don't think I've ever seen a positive video about gypsies on the net.

Man...do I need to switch from Omarchy now

This is trying far too hard to be charitable. Mistake theory is great, and it's good that the article mentions it, but it then also presents sufficient evidence to prove, or at least substantiate, malice. At this point not having "bad feelings toward DHH" is itself a "Missing Mood". At any rate, though, the author took the correct action.

Wolves are also pretty important, by the way. Hopefully we all know that by now?

Yeah, personally, it's hard to say "live and let live" about someone who doesn't want a people to live.

> someone who doesn't want a people to live.

Who doesn't want a people to live? Where do they say that?

Sure but I don't want wolves eating my children.

> This is trying far too hard to be charitable. Mistake theory is great, and it's good that the article mentions it, but it then also presents sufficient evidence to prove, or at least substantiate, malice.

The benefit of the doubt only exists as long as there is doubt. Once there's an overwhelming body of evidence that removes any of it, continuing to give it is pretty suspicious, like you mention.

For what it's worth, I do think the author is only guilty of being too kind. I wouldn't call it suspicious in this case.

I'll rephrase: I don't have any reason to actively think they're malicious, but I don't really trust the judgment of someone who sees a person advocate for what they describe as a racist national policy after years of similar opinions and thinks that it's important enough to stop paying a subscription to that person's service, but is concerned about whether they're going to hurt the feelings of that person by actually concluding that maybe the reason they're always advocating for racist policies is just racist.

I'd rather be overly charitable 10 times than not charitable enough once. It probably doesn't make me any friends to say it, but let me say why. A slight exaggeration of your view might be that some people are irredeemable mutants who need to be ostracized and can't be reasoned with. I won't stay quiet when I strongly disagree with someone, but I don't need to go that far. I think it's a manifestation of the same tendencies that lead to DHH's post.

> some people are irredeemable mutants who need to be ostracized and can't be reasoned with

Well, not mutants, but in order to be redeemable or able to be reasoned with, they need to choose to be open to those things. Many choose not to. Some might later change their mind, but likely not because of anything you say.

I do think your mistake is a respectable one, though. Figuring out which people actually deserve ostracization is a rather fine balance and we should certainly err against it.

If anyone wants a great mail client, I highly recommend Mailmate which among other things lets you write messages in markdown: https://freron.com/ it’s maintained by a solo dev for 15+ years and charges a fair price

One of the many holes in DHH's claim about wolves, sheep, and gypsies is that wolves are not the sort of low-dimensional archetype he uses to support his narrative.

If you're very literal like me, you take that to mean wolves, the mammal; a predatory animal living within a food web, fulfilling a particular role at its trophic level which is ultimately beneficial to the system it's a part of.

Wolves don't independently get 'out of control' such that they need to be shot. This has been demonstrated across North America and Europe. The perception of wolves being out of control is largely subjective and misguided, and the result of 1. humans encroaching on wild land, 2. human activity limiting wolves' access to food, and 3. humans fearing wolves and wanting there to be fewer of them.

Through this lens, comparing immigrants to wolves is absurd. It becomes clear that DHH is discarding a lot of context in order to weave a fearful narrative which uses invalid, fictional mechanisms to make his point.

The use of the terms gypsies and sheep also comes with issues. It's a poor piece of writing, lacks any compelling substance (assuming you aren't swayed by him), and largely demonstrates that he's not particularly thoughtful about this while lacking the self-awareness and comprehension to notice how weak his position is.

It's okay to want reduced immigration. It's okay to want to preserve certain things in your society. It's not necessary or reasonable to do so through this lens, however. There are plenty of compelling arguments to make for regulating these systems in local, regional, and national government. It's okay to want that. When you start describing immigrants as dangerous animals, you've gone many steps too far off of a sensible path.

I also understand the use of fables to communicate moral and ethical stories, which seems to be a component in his narrative. However, he steps out of that bound when he talks about literal wolves (and the need to shoot them). Yet fables are a coarse tool, not an intricate one, and they're far too reductive to support an argument against immigration across a continent. It's an absurd position to argue from, and in terms of narrative, it makes DHH seem either obtuse or very hateful and disingenuous. I've never read anything of his since this piece.

Not trying to counter your main point but the biological wolf analogy is quite close to the author's point.

The wolf population development has been known to exceed every prediction in Western Europe, and while it's fairly inoffensive for humans the economic consequences are much higher than most anticipated, for economic/ecologic benefits that are hard to defend. And the wolf population are still fairly low.

In my opinion maybe the money spent protecting wolves (hundreds of millions per year in Europe) would be better spent on homeless shelters and similar policies.

Still this article should remind every European of the Nazis comparing the Jewish diaspora dispersal with the historical dissemination of black and brown rats.

I’ll have to look into that. My reading on wolf populations in the past has consistently indicated that imbalances regularly point back to human interference, but I’ve read a lot less about European wolves and more about those in western Canada and the USA.

I totally agree about your last point. This type of rhetoric is dangerous and it’s highly precedented. There’s often a reason people lean on it for leverage.

> However, in any ethnicity of people, there will be some who are good and some who are bad.

This is a strawman interpretation of anti-immigration arguments. Non-strawman anti-immigration positions are that immigrants are a problem even if they are all "good".

If you care about getting rid of "bad" people, then you have to evenhandedly apply the rule, even to those who have ethnic roots in the country going back a hundred generation: take those "bad" people too and strip them of citizenship.

Where in the world is immigration driven by "good" or "bad"; I mean, where do documents like visitor visas and residency permits lapse due to badness rather than the mere passage of time, whereby the individual not able to extent has to go, whether they are "good" or "bad"?

What is "bad"? Does "bad" have to be armed robbery? Or is someone also "bad" if they settle in Japan, and then demand that schools remove pork from school lunch?

Unwanted immigration can simply be the raw numbers: 500 immigrants not being a problem, but 500,000 being a problem, all else being held equal, including "goodness".

You can be deemed undesirable not because who you are but entirely because you're part of a group with 499,999 others. From the individual's point of view, it is unfair; that is true, and it isn't meant to be.

It is a long blog post, but the controversy seems to center on DHH’s language and reasoning about Roma people.

My reading is that he used those examples deliberately to raise a broader issue: some people are tired of being told to ignore problems they can see and experience, whether that means feeling unsafe while walking through a city or attending a Pride parade (assume that are the “wolfs”), or being frustrated that nearly every item at Target is locked up (“gypsies”).

To be clear, I am not expressing an opinion on whether his argument is right or wrong.

Welcome to America, where we blame victims.

Once again, it's projection.

Strong people raise others up.

Weak people seek to cut others down.

Look in the mirror. What do you see? Jpeg at imgbb.com

https://i.ibb.co/yBmnPGbf/epstein-mirror.jpg

I see a fake image with a fake narrative.

I think the author is taking umbrage with DHH using the word "gypsies" where it might have been "junkies" or just "homeless".

I see it in Berlin, rise of agressive, smelly begging in U-Bahn (I witnessed a beggar actually attacking passengers, hitting a woman). People walking around having fully shit their pants. This, I presume, is tolerated in the name of individualism, that the individual is free to choose how they present themselves in the public, and walking around with pants fully shat must be some inalienable right.

Area around Kottbusser Tor reeks of urine, and there's junkies fully out of it constantly screaming and fighting. Is somehow pointing this out is shameful and racist?

First and foremost, if DHH meant "junkies" or "homeless" by "gypsies", a term widely regarded as derogatory used to describe Romani people [0], then already there is plenty to take umbrage with.

Second of all, homelessness and drug addiction are not moral failings. As the author says ".. there will be some who are good and some who are bad. This makes people very unlike wolves."

I ask you to question whether the people who are "...walking around having fully shit their pants" should be deported, or treated for the conditions that ail them. The people aren't to be protected on some basis of "individualism", but on the basis that they are human people. Not animals.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people

“Gypsies” are a race of people. “Junkies” and homeless people are, at an individual level, not.

Homeless people and drug addicts may well be victims of circumstance or victims of society depending on your point view - or even victims of their own choices or actions - but there’s a difference between saying “this race of people is problematic” and “this class of people is problematic”.

Not that I disagree, but to play Devil's advocate for a second...

I think DHH was trying to refer to junkies and homeless people most of whom happen to be immigrants. The immigration status is the particular attribute that invites usage of the term "gypsies" to signal that the problem with those particular junkies and homeless could be solved via immigration enforcement. At least in his eyes, I presume.

Again, not defending his choice of words, just providing a somewhat plausible explanation as to how one might arrive to this specific terminology.

Hypothetical: A group of people from a specific race and culture recently came into a country and make their living primarily by stealing the wallets of tourists. If you had to guess, what are the chances that they are Japanese people?

>I think the author is taking umbrage with DHH using the word "gypsies"

comparing them to animals and repeatedly declaring how we shoot those animals is probably also not great.

"gypsie" cannot be substituted by "junky" or "homeless", for the simple reason that those words simply mask the ethnicity and immigration overtones, which are very much present in DHH's blog post. I haven't found your message racist, but this first sentence might give the impression that you are willing to turn a blind eye to the racism of others if their views align with yours concerning the presence of drug addicts and homeless people in public space.

And once you look at the problems you mention without taking the easy way out ("They're aliens and should just be excluded from our society"), the question is not so much whether they have the right to do this, but how we, as a society, can provide care to those people.

Also, I can't understand your presumption that "This is tolerated in the name of individualism". The situation your are describing is a public health issue, not a question of lawfulness.

I was disappointed to read this and hear language and using allusions that parallel arguments made by hate groups.

I think DHH can take a stance that overly lax immigration policy has led to issues, if that is what he believes. That may be true, I don’t know, and I have no issues with policy debate around that, but directly comparing a specific race of emigrant people as wolves preying on native peoples, sheep is pretty gross.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

Facts alone won't get you to answers about what you should do about something.

Whether your personal view is that the solution to low income migrants entering your country should be outright genocide, deportation, societal integration, welfare, or something else - it's not going to be based on a statement of fact.

A fact is that the elderly who have retired from the workfrorce are no longer contributing to the national wealth, they're also using the public health system more than any other demographic. Clearly we should...

>created by industry legend DHH

DHH = david heinemeier hansson (ruby on rails creator)

I think a lot of folks - myself included - canceled our Hey subscriptions years ago when DHH said some other unfortunate things.

I don't have to agree with everyone on everything, not even people I do business with. But I do try to limit supporting people who have actively advocated for things that harm my family. Say what you will about Apple (where I transitioned), but they're the "least evil" option from my perspective.

Others are of course welcome to their own perspectives and choices.

One seemingly deliberately conflation this post commits is betwee "gypsy" and "roma". The first as a set of actions, the second as an ethnicity divorced from any action of behaviour. Dhh refers to the first, and uses the first word. The fine article interprets it to mean the second, and correspondingly substitutes the second word. But dhh makes it clear what he means by "gypsy", so one can only interpret this conflation as deliberate.

This DHH guy doesn't seem to care about woke scolding. His opinions are so controversial, something like 40% of Europeans agree. Based, I'm moving everything to Hey.com.

This whole article seems like a straw man.

Chad seems to be arguing: 1. DHH thinks all gypsies are bad, therefor 2. DHH does not see Roma as individual people, therefor 3. DHH is a bad person.

I read DHH's blog as: 1. It should still be illegal to camp in parks, therefor 2. People who do camp in parks should be housed, therefor 3. Foreigners who refuse housing should be deported.

My problem with the part about housing is that DHH acts as if cities have enough shelters to accommodate everyone and these 'gypsies' are refusing to go there. I don't buy that for a second.

I don't know about Copenhagen, but in US a significant fraction of the homeless population openly rejects various shelter and housing opportunities because those usually come with extra requirements for sobriety and commitments to addiction treatments. So yeah, there's definitely people who just refuse to go.

Then there's also mentally ill people who operate in the grey zone of law — clearly too mentally ill to be prosecuted for their crimes (or haven't committed any crimes yet), can't be held in prison, but also too unstable and violent to be admitted to shelters with other, mostly normal disadvantaged people.

One example of such case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Eina_Kwon

I don't even know where to begin with this comment...

If he said "Foreigners who refuse housing should be deported." I would agree. Can you show me where he said that? I read "gypsies should be deported"

Note: I meant "I read a sentiment along the lines of 'gypsies should be deported'", I didn't mean to imply he said those words literally

The article says:

> You do not need to deport all of them to deport the ones who "take over public spaces".

And continues to assume that DHH is talking about mass deportation. He's not. He says:

> When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.

He's not saying we should deport _all_ gypsies just because one group is taking over public space.

Can you explain how that's analogous to what he thinks we should do to wolves? Does he think that we should only shoot the wolves that are causing problems and leave the innocent majority of wolves alone?

DHH’s blog post was, to put it simply, spot on. You disagree with that, and that’s fine.

But to cancel a subscription for another service entirely, because someone used a blog platform of the same provider to publish something you were repulsed by – this seems like a really bizarre way of managing your emotion. By this logic I should feel compelled to delete my HN account, delete all my social media and cancel all press subscriptions…

DHH is the owner of the so called 'provider'

DHH is the creator of Hey.

DHH co-owns 37signals, the company that created hey.com.

I was really wanting to read this, I had a morbid interest in Hey.com's cancellation policy. After 3+ paragraphs and an effin PG quote, there still is no point.

There once were angry submissions (or comments?) here about how hard it is to cancel NYT.

I was expecting the Hey-version of that, instead I got long-winded prose that sounds like a bunch of college boys trying to sound smart.

No thanks.

I guess the E-mail-service is still overpriced due to them believing in non-existent value of their web client.

If that's the point of the article, sorry, I didn't make it far enough.

The article doesn't mention Hey or the cancellation anywhere after the PG paragraph.

Ah, I see, the post is about why, not how.

Guess my language limits got me there.

Still very hard to understand and I find hard to say it would be worth reading. Apart from the Gemini-like looking template.

The site is hosted with Obsidian Publish which looked exactly like this far before Gemini existed

Thanks for the info! I always wondered about Gemini's love for Tailwind, and found the aesthetics to feel very Vercel-like.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't originate somewhere else. Looking at Obsidian, it seems to be an ideal training source for pairs of Markdown and HTML/CSS.

But I don't wanna insinuate further, it's a summer evening and I made it outside. Have a good day/evening/night'

Your left nav doesn't have a scrollbar and doesn't fit on a 16:9 laptop screen.

I guess it's a flaw with Obsidian Publish, what the author is using to post their thoughts.

If you read canceling as part of the "cancel culture" and not canceling the subscription, then this two statements seam contradictory

> Cancelling "Hey"

> I definitely don't believe in trying to change people's minds by shouting at them or shaming them

It's about the author cancelling their subscription to "Hey."

I'm not a native speaker but

> I definitely don't believe in trying to change people's minds by shouting at them or shaming them

seems to me like they want to make a (polite) argument instead of explicitly calling them “heretic” to quote the article.

They also quite obviously seem to refer to cancellling the subscription here and not trying to invoke "cancel culture". The first few paragraphs make this quite clear.

I am a native speaker, I agree with this assessment.

The blogpost has the attitude problem of virtue signaling about decisions that has zero cost to themselves, about a communal kin based socialist society them know little about.

Normal working families with kids live next to these parks and rely on them as open space, it is part of the Danish socialist welfare system and care for the working man. Defacation and open cooking plus thrash by not your own weak but foreigners has real cost to those that can’t afford to move.

Downvoted for 'socialist society'.

May want to read the Wikipedia entries on both Denmark and socialism.

I am from Scandinavia. We call ourselves socialist.

Socialism has very different definitions depending on who you ask.

> Normal working families with kids live next to these parks and rely on them as open space, it is part of the Danish socialist welfare system and care for the working man. Defacation and open cooking plus thrash by not your own weak but foreigners has real cost to those that can’t afford to move.

The article made it pretty clear that they're not arguing against deporting people who are camping in parks though, and just arguing against generalizing the issue as being about the entire ethnic group. Are you claiming that somehow having a communal kin based socialist society makes it impossible to have, using the term in the article, "individuated enforcement"?

The question asked in Scandinavia is if a migrant group is a net benefit to our ability to have group solidarity, while high skill individuals are judged on individual merit. These are two very different categories, and Scandinavians do not feel an obligation towards a world collective within their borders.

The group talked about here came in through mass migration and are in group conflict with working peoples interest in having safe communal open spaces, while being a net negative contributor to public pools of resources used to help the average man and disproportionately contributing to theft.

From a Scandinavian perspective you choose group solidarity with your own working man over the stranger that did not come in through high skill merit.

This doesn't really make sense to me, You're claiming that it's fine to hand-wave the issue of deporting the entire ethnic group as a whole rather than individuals because it has no high-skill members, but that doesn't really explain why you're so convinced that there are no individuals who might be able to contribute other than from assumptions about them based on them being a member of the ethnic group in the first place (e.g. "mass migration", taking up resources, disproportionately contributing to theft). That seems bizarrely at odds with the allusion to judging people by merit rather than bucketing them by shared ethnicity at the end of your comment.

What makes Scandinavians responsible for judging merit of individuals in or even allowing a specific group in? All border control is group based.

It’s our country and we have no obligation to let anyone in, especially a group that culturally conflict with ours in ways that violate our social contract and ability to provide basic standards of living to our own kin.

> It’s our country and we have no obligation to let anyone in

But they're already in, legally, according to the laws you defined? It's hard to believe that you have such a well-defined social contract that literally everyone agrees that means you can't let in people of another ethnic group if the laws made by the people you suggest literally don't support mass deporting everyone who fits into the group you mention.

A lot of it comes through EU laws, which was agreed to with the assumption of a different population mix in the Schengen free flow of people. Same with migrants brought in through exploited asylum laws which again assumed small numbers from neighboring countries with similar cultures.

Scandinavia is in a much better spot than the UK, which voted in favor of brexit to stop flow and instead received replacement migration.

At this point, it seems like you're just arguing "nobody in Scandanavia wanted them to come and we got tricked" as a universally agreed upon societal opinion. I guess it's possible, but it's impossible to distinguish from you projecting your own personal views across the entire society because you already strongly believe in the idea of everyone being on the same page about everything. Maybe it's my bias as someone from a society without that level of social cohesion, but I have trouble imagining literally everyone being in agreement on what's acceptable but somehow not managing to notice that something different was happening until too late rather than some people having exaggerating views of how much everyone else agreed with them, since the latter is something I've seen incredibly often, and the former is not something I've ever seen actually happen in practice.

There is no collective opinion needed to interpret the historical use and context of the laws.

When Scandinavia entered Schengen it was all Western European countries that explicitly kept Eastern European countries out.

Asylums were rare, low in number and strictly enforced to known political refugees with very few arriving until the UN started funding migrant transports & EU started requiring quotas from the third world through EU at the risk of severe fines if you say no.

There was no vote on these changes to what was previously very strong borders.

I mean, okay, yes, if you completely disregard what the author is actually saying they mean by using the word in the article and choose a different meaning, then it doesn't make sense. I'm not sure why that's worth pointing out when you wouldn't be able to get to the second statement without him already detailing the monetary subscription and literally following it up with saying that they're only making a financial decision, not a personal one.

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