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It's mostly extreme hyperbole and twisting of his views if anything.

One of his criticisms was the virulent attacks on anyone that questioned policy during covid. He for example prefered the Danish approach and they still ended up doing better than the UK or US.

I also can't help but see the folks clamoring for mass migration for the past 2 decades in europe against popular will as anything other than blind oikophobes. If you'd look at my capital and other places you'd question who is actually calling for ethnic cleansing.

I think caution re cultural integration, vs talking about shooting wolves and calling for deportations using a word regarded as a slur, are two different things. (Both these are within the same paragraph, adjacent sentences.)

It does not read as twisting of his views: he has it right in writing on his blog. https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a

Remember one of the tactics is to sound reasonable, while stretching what is acceptable speech. This lets those who approach with bad faith defend the statements while approving of what they imply or lead to.

>I think caution re cultural integration.... are two different things.

I was called similar for much milder views and past caution. I stood by in discussion further in the past when people got attacked in that way lest id be perceived badly and out of line with my ohter progressive views. No caution was had. Now it's too late. You can't reasonably wish to undo most of it. (Denaturalising people who are abusing or comiting crime is not that) I honestly see my culture as a dead one down the line. All so we could supress wages and pretend to hold up a pyramid scheme whilst doing some social signaling.

That doesn't mean i should forget, forgive myself and others and go along. I've developed a strong dislike for the social cooling that got us there in conflict with the opinions of the majority of the public. I no longer want to be overly nuanced and I am more than able to remember and throw back every past claim and defense regarding all this i read countless times a decade or 2 ago.

> vs talking about shooting wolves and calling for deportations using a word regarded as a slur

It's a stupid analogy. That said deportations within the law of foreign nationals that have no permission to be there is a historic normality the world over. The slur i can see tho i also don't give it much weight because I think it's one squarely on the euphemism threadmil. I used to argue your very point roughly a decade ago alongside an american against a polish friend who was very much opposed to them. Putting his grandma in the hospital over a bike, killing a mates dog along the whole cultural chasm with forced marriages and attitudes towards education and authority really didn't sit well which i could see. But i thought words have power and will worsen the situation and generalisation. But in the end the word gypsies will be forced out of the vocab, zigeuner/cigany will go as well and then roma will be used with those conotations all whilst useful change is sidestepped. I think Slavoj Žižek had a good bit on this.

>Remember one of the tactics is to sound reasonable, while stretching what is acceptable speech. This lets those who approach with bad faith defend the statements while approving of what they imply or lead to.

And the opposite has happened as well and has had far far more impact. Curtailing what is acceptable speech to defend in bad faith and hide what it's all leading to.

> Perhaps they could support a different Linux distribution.

They won't. SV/YC loves the guy, that's the only reason they're donating to Linux/OSS (but really just omarchy).

> If we trust 1Password with our data, we are trusting a company with those views inside it with our data.

Is this really true? Your data is presumably encrypted at rest on their servers; you're not "trusting" them with it any more than you're trusting S3 when you send encrypted blobs to it. The political alignment of Jeff Bezos doesn't really come into it.

You're certainly supporting them with your money - that seems like the real objection here.

COVID lab leak is not a conspiracy theory.

it doesn't mean it's true (we may never know), but framing as "conspiracy" was a product of conflict of interest where certain scientists were protecting grant money. Since then even some of the scientists who participated in it walked it back and openly said that both natural and lab leak theories were credible: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj0016

> DHH has called for the ethnic cleansing of Europe; he is also an antivaxer, a Covid "truther," a proponent of the "lab leak" conspiracy theory, an 'anti woke' weirdo, and is virulently anti-DEI

Leaving aside all the rest of this, I thought "lab leak" was considered a reasonable hypothesis, although not especially likely, these days, rather than some kind of fringe theory.

I believe it was disproved, but regardless, there is a lot between accepting an hypothesis and possibly valid and building a conspiracy around it. I don't about this case, but this conspiracy typically degenerate in anti-science behaviours, perosonal attacks (on researchers or just chiense people) and similar nice things.

The lab leak isn’t considered reasonable outside of pundits as far as I’m aware. Unfortunately the pundits are the ones with the microphone

> “I thank each of the 27 members of SAGO for dedicating their time and expertise to this very important scientific undertaking over more than three years,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “As things stand, all hypotheses must remain on the table, including zoonotic spillover and lab leak.” [but] “the weight of available evidence…suggests zoonotic spillover”

... so I think your framing there is too strong.

https://www.who.int/news/item/27-06-2025-who-scientific-advi...

Thanks that was an interesting read

It's a result of political division in US. If you are on the left then you have to see lab leak as a racist rightie conspiracy theory or you will have issues fitting in. Also lab leak is rejected as a side effect from being confused with intentional leak/bioweapon theory, which is entirely radioactive.

Political right is the other way around.

It is not conclusively proven one way or the other, but most people just made their conclusion: left that it's the market, right that it's the lab (or bioweapon for especially out there).

It is both a racist rightie conspiracy theory and a plausible possibility worthy of serious consideration. Any reasonable person needs to recognize it as both simultaneously and will have no trouble fitting in among anyone outside the fringe at either end of the political spectrum.

It can't be two mutually exclusive things simultaneously.

I don't think it's just the fringes, at least it wasn't the case in 2022, now it's just not something many people talk about anymore

What is mutually exclusive about those two things?

"conspiracy theory" specifically means choosing the crazy explanation while more reasonable explanations exist. If you say the explanation is NOT crazy because it deserves investigation then it's automatically not a conspiracy theory.

"choosing" is the keyword here. You have to reason probabilistically. There was a point at which lot of people would have put 100% or 99% confidence that covid came from a lab leak. That's the conspiracy theory side.

A lot of more reasonable people would have put 1% or 5% confidence on covid coming from a lab leak, saying roughly "It's unlikely, but hard to rule out because China isn't being transparent". And then ask for more investigation, which is exactly what happened.

So at no point was it rationally worth a 99% probability estimate, but it was worth investigation.

What validity do you put on earth being flat? So that's the validity some people put on covid lab leak theory. You may be surprised.

Calling something a conspiracy theory means rejecting its validity for investigation out of hand. Maybe you don't use it like that but that's how most people apparently use it.

> There was a point at which lot of people would have put 100% or 99% confidence that covid came from a lab leak

Why was? Now it is a point at which a lot of people put 100% confidence that covid came from a lab leak. And a lot of other people put 100% confidence that it was Wuhan market bat. And that's the problem I tried to express.