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Comment by watt | Hacker News Reader

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?

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“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?

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

>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.

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