Don't Be Nice
roe.dev
roe.dev
This "Let's avoid politics" is just "Let's avoid conflict resolution and let things fester until it all boils over and goes to shit"
If you break the social contract of granting everyone a common baseline of respect and civility, such as by identifying with those that explicitly wish to violently purge entire peoples from the planet, I no longer am obligated to grant them the decorum outlined in that same social contract, as they've violated the accord.
Over my time in the world I have chafed against the boundaries of “professionalism” and “courtesy” and “a valid topic but not what we’re here to discuss right now”… but… sure seems like those might help here.
Maybe it’s the old-school small-l liberal in me, but I feel like we lost something socially constructive in dissolving the boundaries between public and private thoughts, school and work and home and pub and church thoughts, the office and the flawed human occupying the office…
Really?
What kind of views we're talking about are and how serious said politics are can vary greatly from situation to situation. From TFA:
> I kicked someone from the Nuxt Discord who had chosen an avatar (for the second time!) of a man in a Nazi uniform.
Of course, this criticism is very popular amongst Scots who live in Scotland which is still overwhelmingly Scottish even in the major cities.
The example in the post is quite obvious with Nazi symbolism. But what if someone express their opinion, which is very conservative, or nationalistic like as an example I love Switzerland and I want Swiss people to prosper and have everything. Would that be incentive because they are excluding rest of the world?
Their opinions don't have to be political and your opinions don't have to be political. If someone is making the space worse for everyone, then maybe they're not good for the space. Maybe the space is not good for them. You would be doing good for both sides by stopping them from harming the space, and stopping the space from further enabling the problematic behavior.
I have personal experience with not changing until it became clear enough that certain behavior was driving away everyone and everything I care about. It didn't matter to me how much people told me it was bad, or tried to convince me to stop. What worked was seeing people leave over it, over and over, until I couldn't take it anymore. I had to change. You would be helping these kinds of people, and the community at large, by seeing to the consequences of their actions.
> What if they see that group as a legitimate target for political reasons?
It doesn't matter. I wouldn't engage with whether or not they think they're acting in a justified manner. If the behavior won't stop, the behavior is harmful, and the community would be better off without it, then sometimes you just have to kick someone out.
The reason why I say politics are a distraction is because I don't think you need to bother to explain that someone is politically incorrect or how you are less so. You can, but none of that is actually relevant in a majority of cases. Removing someone from a community is not about being more correct or about them being incorrect, it's for the good of the community (and/or the good of whoever you're removing).
The right solution for that specific situation varies:
- if the questions are valid but they're just phrased in a very uncomfortable way, I'd like to see someone work with them on how to ask better. Note that by "better" I don't mean that there's an objectively better or worse way in general, but just that some communities are friendlier to different approaches, and for example, you can often get a lot more mileage out of trying to understand someone's current approach first, rather than immediately asking why they don't use yours, or immediately raising a bunch of issues you see with it. I may be misunderstanding what you mean by "sharp", but I've seen and helped with this before.
- if the discomfort just comes from generally questions existing or alternative views being expressed at all, then sometimes the community's just not a good fit for those views. Some communities are pretty closed to alternative approaches, and sometimes that's just the way it is. I mean, the way you describe an "echo chamber" can of course imply that it's pretty harmful to its participants (one example is polarization on social media), but you can't always just invade those spaces and expect to change the status quo. You can't help everyone, and a lot of people feel insulted when you even imply you might know better. Sometimes, outsiders just stop asking questions or expressing alternative views at all, just to avoid being ejected (one example is how cancel culture can be incredibly harmful to developing minds). I think that should be avoided if possible, of course... trying to fit into a group that doesn't accept you is usually a recipe for disaster, especially if you've already established things about yourself that they have problems with.
There are probably more variations on this, but those are the two biggest possibilities I see. Either the behavior of the individual is a problem, and should be addressed (there's usually no need to remove them immediately, if there's a way to address the behavior instead), or the behavior of the community is a problem, and the individual might be better off looking elsewhere.
Me, not being nice: Don't use language to be priggish and confuse. We got enough of that going already.
It’s not an argument, though. I don’t come away with any reason not to NICELY oppose Nazi sympathizers.
I am not especially nice, and I don’t trust most people who behave nicely. But this post is banal. You can do better.
I do think that the case of the person using a Nazi avatar on a forum is comparable. The former is something they are doing withing the community, DHH's behaviour is outside the community. Its not clear how much people should be sanctioned for holding unpleasant views.
The problem with the article is clear in this passage:
"Sometimes a political party or a person decides to oppose shared human values like the importance of care, kindness, inclusion, or the simple value of welcoming people who are different from you. Maybe they oppose the equality of all people. Maybe they think some people do not deserve human rights."
That very quickly becomes a subjective and partisan judgement. Its very easy to say everyone who votes for a different party is "opposed to equality", or that people who do not share you culture or language and vocabulary or vote for any other party are those you should not be nice to. Very often the inclusive becomes exclusive and even culturally imperialist. Foreigner who uses the wrong words because they do not have the same implications in their culture? Excluded. This is not made, but, but something I have seen people get angry about.
You are trying to a complex reality into as a simplistic (American?) world view.
Also, its normal to use quotation marks when quoting someone.
What do you mean by "built"? What would someone have to do to qualify? To when do you place the start of the "jet age"? What do you man by "someone"? No one born in the last 70 years built anything before the jet age. If you mean their ancestors, what proportion of their ancestors?
So up to the mid 20th century? Completely arbitrary. Why not by the start of the 20th century, or the start of the 19th century, or after the Norman conquest, or the people who were native to the country at the time of the the Roman invasion?
The fact that the native population of Britain changed repeatedly thousands of years ago doesn't seem very relevant either. Are you saying that if new evidence showed that the native populations of America or Australia were the result of multiple ancient waves of migration rather than just one, that would change anyone's mind on which ones are truly the native Americans or Australians? That's obviously absurd.
If you really want to turn this apparently simple discussion about the common meaning of words into a matter of first-principles definitions, I guess I could give it a try, and it would probably have to bring in things like whether the waves of migration retained a significant identification with their place of origin. But it seems totally unnecessary.
Not if they were truly ancient because they would still all have been there tens of thousands of years.
If you can find a still distinct pre-Columbian group who migrated to the Americas in the last millennium or two I would agree they are not an indigenous population.
> The fact that the native population of Britain changed repeatedly thousands of years ago
Not changed repeatedly thousands of years ago. kept changing repeatedly all the last few thousand years. Britsh history simply makes it impossible to come up with a sensible definition of indigenous, so any definition of native has to be very different from the American one, and will be a lot less clear cut and impossible to reach a consensus on. I would expect quite a few Welsh people to argue that the English are not indigenous.
One of the British politicians who DHH likes quoted stats about the number of people in the country who are not ethnically white British. The definition he used classifies people like the King and Winston Churchill as not British. He became very evasive when ashed about this in an interview https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/07/rupert-lowe-rest...
That's not really what the argument is about, it's about whether such a group would invalidate the concept of "native American" entirely such that it wouldn't be meaningful to distinguish between the native Americans or the non-native European Americans. That's effectively what you're arguing for Britain, and it's absurd.
>Britsh history simply makes it impossible to come up with a sensible definition of indigenous
Taking the example of the Normans that you mentioned somewhere else in the thread, what's the difference between them and your hypothetical pre-Columbian group? Why does the Normans make it impossible to come up with a sensible definition of indigenous when another migration wave arrives, while the hypothetical pre-Columbians don't?
Suppose groups that had reached the Americas before Columbus, such as the Norse, probably Polynesians, possibly others, had settled in large numbers instead of just a fleeting contact, and that had happened repeatedly since the first peopling of the Americas, and some of the groups had merged with earlier groups, and some had not, then how would you define a native American?
This is exactly what you have in the UK. I notice you have ignored my comment asking you to provide a clear definition of native British. Given that most saves of immigration to the UK have merged into existing populations do specify how much of people's ancestry needs to be whatever you call "native" for it to count.
In the context of the wave of post-1492 European migration to America, I would define it to mean as anyone who isn't coming from that specific migration wave. It would remain easy, so long as the specific migration wave is still easy to distinguish from the the others.
You're now saying explicitly that if some new archeological evidence showed multiple waves of Polynesians in large numbers, then you would suddenly have trouble defining the distinction between a native American and an European in the post-1492 context, but this still seems completely absurd to me. So I'm afraid I don't really know what you're talking about.
The point that I was making is that this is the "definition" I would use for Britain as well, when discussing a very specific phenomenon of modern migration into Britain. Anyone who was there before the modern wave counts as native. As with all attempted formal definitions of real world phenomena, you can keep digging at and asking whether e.g. the Polish or Irish waves of immigration are distinct from the "current" ones that people are talking about. But there shouldn't be any doubts about the Normans 1000 years ago any more than there would be about the hypothetical Polynesians.
If that starts cutting the wrong way: so be it. The wrongness (not good) itself should be visible even if the kicker is doing this practice. Their "good" will not be so believable, it will damage the kicker too.
You know that insufferable friend who won't stop talking about the starving kids in XYZ? And you know how they donated five dollars that one time and just won't let you forget it? Yeah, well, at least that a*hat gave five dollars.
I'd rather have the Bonos of the world making mountains out of the molehills of aid they provide than hang out with people so cool and disaffected that they only see the virtue signaling and discount the virtue.
Just like you, I see the virtue signaling as gauche, but I think calling it out without any substance is just as gauche.
>pretty bad taste in my mouth even to imagine using the product of someone who's suggested that Black and Asian Londoners make Britain worse
You should shun anyone how suggests they might prefer less immigration in London? If you are being honest that's like 50% of Brits he's saying are untouchables.
I would argue that picking an obviously Nazi-coded avatar is in itself political. It is a deliberate decision to select such an avatar. Nobody picks that symbol by accident. They know exactly what it signals, they know how people will react, and they know that the laissez-faire culture of tech is a perfect ground to normalize this shit.
If there is a not being political rule, then it is perfectly reasonable to ban people like this because they obviously are political.
100% agree. Niceness is NOT for white supremacists, and no, I am not debating whether DHH's politics are fascist-adjacent or what % of them are pure fascism.
DHH's politics and the man himself will get only shunning and ridicule from me. He's, after all, one of the weird little guys of FOSS: https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/
If you have the privilege of being able to forget about it: congratulations. If you're part of those potentially at risk: closing your eyes just makes their jobs easier.
Stallman comes across as discerning here because he's drawing a distinction between two things (sexually assaulting someone who is resisting vs sexually assaulting someone who is presenting as willing), but there is no real difference. The problem is not in his verbiage. The problem is that his underlying message is wrong.
He is trying to create a rationalization for why minsky's reputation should not be harmed. If Minsky flew to Epstein's private island and had sex with a very young girl of unknown age, his reputation should be harmed whether or not she "presented as willing."
I do believe however we should be allowed to criticize religions and I do believe we should be allowed to criticize religions without being labelled "racist".
For example I'll point out the incredible hypocrisy of the left in the west who raised me, in an atheist school, with the notion that christianity was a scam and where christians were being made fun of all around me (by my parents, by my friends, by my friends' parents, by my teachers, etc.).
And that same left in the west, who celebrates that christianity lost its grip on the people, is now bending over backwards over islam.
Another gigantic hypocrisy in Europe (and in the UK) is that free speech is not a given. And hateful speech is definitely not allowed... Unless it's hate speech protected by the fact that it's in a religious book.
And another, totally off the chart, hypocrisy in the west is the feminist and the LGBTQ2S+ movements who are constantly after heterosexual male... Unless they're muslims, in which case it's suddenly all cool to put a veil on your wife(s) (polygamy being allowed, but only one man / several women and not the other way round: oh the hypocrisy here) and daugther(s) so that they're safe from the looks of other men.
It's a very long article saying that people who oppose islam are basically deranged.
Now I do profundly believe that unless you've read the quran, you shouldn't comment on islam.
I did read it and I suggest you do the same and then make up your own mind.
Now as I'm not nice I'll put it blundly: I think the quran is just as bad as Hitler's Mein Kampf. But because it's "religious", the hate speech it contains is protected and allowed.
And we're basically at a point in Europe where if you point out that the quran is full of hate speech, your criticism is considered hate speech. But the real hate speech is totally cemented and impossible to attack because it's "religious".
You should at the very least read the quran and see where I'm coming from.
The world CIA factbook (not published anymore) estimated that 30% of all muslims worldwide had extremist views. I understand that 30% is not 100%, but 30% of nearly 2 billion people is a very big number.
To be very clear: either the muslim beard or the veil are already extremist readings of the quran and its hadiths.
Go read the book for yourself.
It is not normal that after 1200 teenagers who were dancing at a music festival were slaughtered by islamist terrorists, a big part of the world celebrated.
We're talking about tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of people who were genuinely happy that "evil jews got what they deserve" because it was "justified resistance".
I'm not talking about what came next: I'm against killing people, no matter who does the killing.
Now I'm not saying that that UK dude who wants to "ban islam" is a good person.
But there's really a very big spread spectrum between "ban islam" and "there's zero problem with islam growing in the west".
And there's definitely an issue when speech is censored, but the absolute worst form of hate speech is protected because it's a religious holy book.
Go read the quran, now.
No liberal I know agrees with the tenants of Islam. But they might have Muslim friends who catch a lot of flak for no reason other than belonging to an outgroup.
At least, that’s what seems to me to be the logical conclusion of what the article espouses.
I’d guess that there are instances where the author would and would not agree the line is, but I also think that the subjectives of that line is where people might take issue with this article.
First, Islam is as diverse as any global religion. Some branches of it are far more liberal than others. There is no central authority.
Second, even if someone is a member of a conservative religion, it's not necessarily the case that they're an asshole or a bigot. Most people just want to live quietly in peace. Catholicism is another socially conservative religion, but most Catholics are pretty chill and normal. It's not particularly weird for a liberal to be friends with a Catholic.
If they're running around with a megaphone extolling the virtues of white supremacy and ethnic cleansing, that's a different matter entirely.
EDIT: is there something wrong with my statement? Don't be a coward and downvote silently. Tell me how what I wrote is wrong?
The Nazi example was clear and useful in the original post. It's a thing that almost everyone will be on the same side of. The point is that it is an extreme example, not the most generic possible example, in order to demonstrate the point that "there exists at least one scenario where being nice is not mandatory."
Because the original example was already sufficient for the purpose, it comes across as suspect that you are suggesting that he should not have used it as an example. The natural suspicion would be that you are in some way trying to blur the separation between Nazis and run of the mill murderers of innocents, I.e. implying perhaps that they are not much worse than others.
I don't know what your intent is, but many believe Nazis to be much worse than ordinary innocent killers, so your statement implying they are the same is probably rubbing those people the wrong way