Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

I am one of these people that DHH says in not "native British". I agree he is an unpleasant racist.

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 seem to be betting on this strategy that words can keep being changed to mean anything you want depending on the political context, forever, but at some point it will just make you look insane. "Native British" is not something ambiguous that's a matter of opinion or that goes into quotes, any more than Native American ever was.

Of course it is. Give me a definition of "native British" that is as clear as the meaning of "native American".

You are trying to a complex reality into as a simplistic (American?) world view.

Also, its normal to use quotation marks when quoting someone.

Someone who built Britain before the jet age.

Your definition includes a lot of people excluded by DHH's definition which proves my point about the impossibility of coming up with a definition people can agree on.

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?

There is no definition of "native British", just as is the case for most of Europe. The "native" population has changed repeatedly for thousands of years. This isn't like America where there was a native population that was largely displaced in the past 400 years

Being displaced has nothing to do with native or not native. If nobody ever got displaced and there was just a small minority of European-descended Americans concentrated in one place, the common understanding of which ones are the native Americans wouldn't change.

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.

> 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?

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...

>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.

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.

Its not what I am arguing at all

What are you arguing then?

>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?

I am arguing there is no clear break at which you can reach a consensus.

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.

>then how would you define a native American?

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.

I agree it's subjective. For now, I think that amplifies the need. If people have conflicting views, fine, state yours as you are kicking out the Nazis and other genocidal turds. Be clear.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com