I don't mean to get distracted from the topic at hand, but is that really true? If I create my own software stack for the TRMNL display I received as a gift because I think it's fun and interesting, is that a political statement? What politics does that involve? If someone makes a small Rust library that implements some days structure and a few hundred people find it useful, what political stance is intrinsically baked in by the author?
It's exhausting to go through life if you think every field is a battlefield.
> If someone makes a small Rust library that implements some days structure and a few hundred people find it useful, what political stance is intrinsically baked in by the author?
Giving away for free things of value, contributing your work without compensation is a political action.
As for your trmnl project - how can you make your own software? Are the specs open? Do you use a free and/or open toolchain?
Is there are risk patents might deny you any of this?
It's easy to think things are "apolitical" when resting on the laurels of the results of political struggles and revolutions that brought us to where we are.
The idea that you should be able to create and own your intellectual efforts, and to do so without coercion.
> political statement?
> If I create my own software stack for the TRMNL display I received as a gift
Should you own what you create? Should you BE able to create? freely?
Should you be able to give and gift freely?
> some days structure
How do you think days are defined? Think "July" is a name that came absent of politics? What about October?
Saturday and Sunday are weekends? Since when did weekends exist as we understand and enjoy them without the action of political actors (union workers striking and other people fighting for labor rights).
What holidays are holidays? Which are national holidays? Those are all political.
Did you consider that your ancestors who went through those struggles fought so that you wouldn't have to? If your Sundays and holidays consist of nothing but self flagellation, guilt and reflection for the privileged life you lead, maybe you ought to chill a little and focus on something more constructive. Believe it or not, but going outside and touching grass can be apolitical.
> It's exhausting to go through life if you think every field is a battlefield.
You don't have to think every field as a battlefield, but your choices are affected by and are about your beliefs and stance.
For example, some people believe that going all SaaS for everything in their life is not bad, and they can afford that, so they do that.
I personally don't trust companies much, and value my freedom a lot. So I self host the things I can and find valuable. I have my small infra which is not accessible from open internet, and I install services there if I want them to be unavailable to the public.
I mean, nobody will try to get my mundane code from my hands, but having it in a box in front of me makes me happier and feel better, so I do it.
Also, stances doesn't have to be loud/violent/up to the nose. You can be yourself with your own stance, and build it calmly and slowly. You can be just happy about achieving what you wanted to achieve.
On the other hand, software licenses are of course political and the issue can get heated and gets heated semi-regularly. We're humans and being opposed to each other in various forms is our base nature.
So, don't stay at DEFCON 1 all the time, but aware that range from 1 to 5 is always a possibility.
Since I don't really believe in a universal right or wrong sentiment, I'll just say I think it depends on each person's own interpretation/definition of the word politics.
I don't personally care what people define it as to them, but if I were to look in my dictionary, I personally interpret that definition to mean "any time someone tries to influence others."
Now... we could argue that software by definition is trying to force people to only use it in a certain way (the way it's written or how it executes), and that that is by definition, political. We could also argue that bug reports and feature requests are also political because you are trying to influence the developer or community of a project in how they run things.
Not everyone is going to agree with those conclusions, and that's ok, because IMO there isn't a simple "right" or "wrong" answer.
> It's exhausting to go through life if you think every field is a battlefield.
This is really the whole conversation. 'Everything is political' is literally true (they mean downstream of politics, in some sense) but it's really only brought up habitually like this to create a political conflict. Everything is also downstream of water, but it doesn't give me the right to flood your house.
Isn't there always a political angle in the act of creating software?
In essence the human right and ability to learn and change and wield computers at an unlocked and low level is a policy decision.
What if governments said programs must be from companies and users should not be allowed to write their own programs, operating systems must be locked down to keep users safe or some bs 'think of the children' excuse.
Especially Linux and OSS is a political manifesto design specifically to stop this kind of government overreach from taking root. It would certainly benefit shareholders of large computer companies to the detriment of the individual user's freedoms.
It's easy to see a perspective like that where software is political. Politics is not a battlefield, that's an American two party system trick.
Seeing the word politics doesn't immediately mean bad or divisive.
I mean, yeah, you can't have politics in a vacuum. But any software that does anything interesting interfaces with the outside world at some point (via human proxy or otherwise).
That your TRMNL even allows you to write software for it is a choice (a cool one at that), and contributing to their ecosystem supports that choice.
The same people who love to push this "everything is political" drivel will also tell you that there "is no ethical consumption in capitalism". But somehow, in this particular instance, they feel compelled to impose an absolute purity test of your capitalist consumption regardless.
I'm very far from it but I saw many exchanges in my twitter timeline (because now when you click on a tweet to read it or interact, the algorithm thinks it's your only interest in life).
Do basically, they got 8 millions dollars of funding, they bragged and criticized others in linux and said some political stuff, they were also criticized by others including political stuff from the other side (not sure of the order). Finally it became viral enough for people looking at the security of the distro and found many issues.
Personally I like my Linux distro like my coffee: competently managed, with a minimum of drama and with having to hear the less assholes possible.
i doubt you have tried every distribution. at least you haven't tried the one i was part of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foresight_Linux a small, but independent distribution (not a spin-off of anything). i can assure you, it was drama and asshole free. (maybe it didn't live long enough to develop drama, that would be a fair counterpoint, but other than that, i reject your statement)
Yeah but it was also made to showcase GNOME, which was kind of its own huge drama at that time.
I mean I can't even believe you're seriously posting this. It was created intended to be a marketing tool and for something folks had long already made their decision either way about.
So yeah, I never used your extremely niche distribution and that's some sort of gotcha on my argument. Weirdly, I've used a ton of niche Linux distros even. Even was an early GoboLinux contributor.
If you're a niche distro you don't have the manpower to do anything more than already be downstream of larger communities with their own huge drama. That's kind of the point I'm making. You will not meaningfully find no-drama. This isn't even just a Linux or a FOSS thing -- it's group project dynamics. It's inevitable in any project not run by a benevolent dictator (and even then...).
yeah, but with that you are making the whole argument meaningless, because you are arguing that since you can't have life without drama, asking to minimize drama is useless. that's like saying that reducing pollution is useless because you can't eliminate pollution. yes, we can reduce pollution, and we can minimize drama. we can't entirely avoid it, but that was not being asked for.
But Omarchy has no internal drama. It's entirely external drama around how noninvolved parties feel about DHH. That's way different than internal drama or upstream drama affecting your project.
That's a reputation it had in the 90s to early 00s and has long since lost. Even in recent years the drama within Debian has been incredibly high.
A lot happened in debian-private, despite "We will not hide problems" being part of the project's social contract, and then leaks started happening and all hell broke loose. I didn't even mention the decade-long community censorship campaign yet. Or the Volunteer Day suicide. Or the "Please write a list of 5 Debian Developers you would like to kick out of the project." DPL election question. Or banning Linus from DebConf...
What collective human endeavour is devoid of politics?
Politics is how groups decide things, from what a code of conduct should be to where we should stop for coffee after lunch. It’s easy to not notice it, but we do politics dozens of times every day.
That OSS has become too entangled with political activism and ideological gatekeeping, when it should be about making great software, giving people control over their computers, and rediscovering the joy of computing.
I don't think Omarchy is anti-political so much as an attempt to revive the enthusiast/hacker ethos of the OSS community.
"Freedom to compute" cannot be separated from "Freedom to exist" as it explicitly depends on it. The authors of Omarchy pay lip service to the former while taking a stance against the latter.
Fully agreed. I have yet to encounter someone who is claiming something elss and is not privileged enough to just not need to worry about this. Ignorance doesn't reduce the political tech entanglement, it just... ignores it. Which is fine, do whatever. But don't claim it's not related.
No, it is definitely possible to make great software without inserting messaging on irrelevant issues into it. Whatever the quality of Omarchy, DHH is right about parts of the free software world becoming entangled worth various irrelevant causes.
This equivocation on the word "exist" doesn't work anymore. It's not 2018 anymore. Normal people with common sense understand that keeping politics separate from technology isn't the same thing as existential violence. Nobody, to "exist", needs to make software political.
I'm becoming really upset at people whom I otherwise align with for taking absolute statements that don't make sense.
DHH said some stuff you disagree with, incidentally while I have always identified with strong social systems, welfare, high taxes and things like free healthcare, I can't say I disagree with the core of what he tried to say, because there has been seizemic ethnic change within a single generation - and people not talking about it is actually fuelling the extreme position.
So when you say "has a right to exist", what do you mean exactly? Because if I was to stand in the lobby of a parliamentary building and was forcibly removed, would that mean I don't have the right to exist?
You have a right to exist, just not here, just like how White English people have no right to exist in India, and White Dutch people don't have a right to live in Zimbabwe.
Saying "Hey, this demographic and major cultural change in the last 20 years makes the environment different" is considered racism- which has the obvious consenquence of making the word "racist" have less power.. It's not racism to notice this, it's racist to think anyone else is lesser than natives or to group "them" and treat an ethnic group as a homogenous bloc.
I'm reminded of the phrase "if you don't respect me, I won't respect you" whereby respect can mean as an authority or as a person, and they mean "if you don't respect me as an authority, then I won't respect you as a person".
You're saying "if you don't let me do everything I want then you're denying that I have the right to exist at all" which is a type of hysteric language which permits any atrocity in response it can be framed as an act of self defence.
>Saying "Hey, this demographic and major cultural change in the last 20 years makes the environment different" is considered racism
perhaps if he said it like this, rather than comparing Roma to wolves that should be shot and comparing immigration as something to be survived like a bombing blitz, people wouldnt care as much
>it's racist to think anyone else is lesser than natives or to group "them" and treat an ethnic group as a homogenous bloc.
>there has been seizemic ethnic change within a single generation
There hasn't. Look at actual numbers, and what you see is the same hysteria that was directed against the Jews during the first half of the XXth century: foreign agents, traitors, parasites, nuisance... All for a tiny fraction of the population. All blown up by the same people who are the ones responsible for the misery of the majority of the population - yes, the "whites" are being screwed up by other "whites", not by the "brown" people.
>White English people have no right to exist in India, and White Dutch people don't have a right to live in Zimbabwe.
One: it was English people in Zimbabwe too, and two: they have the right to live there; the problem with them is that they took everything by force and decided the native people where subhuman. Pretending the situation is the same with brown-skinned low-wage immigrants coming in western countries is completely cuckoo crazy.
>it's racist to think anyone else is lesser than natives or to group "them" and treat an ethnic group as a homogenous bloc.
Which is exactly what DHH does. Thank you for agreeing that DHH is a racist.
This is why I don't like getting into online debates... most people seem wholly uninterested in the (seemingly to them) blasphemy that is "other perspectives that aren't mine." To me, continually stroking your confirmation bias just proves you're not really as smart as you think you are. And indeed I think the Dunning-Kruger effect still applies to "smart" people.
You don't stop when you are estimating your ability correctly; as you learn more, you gain more awareness of your ignorance and continue being conservative with your self-estimates.
What this behavior has led me to do is basically only challenge people who are actually asking a question, because then there's a chance they might be willing to entertain other perspectives than their own. But if I say something and get a matter-of-fact response by someone with an obvious god complex... it's like they're not interested in mutual understanding, they just want to "win" the argument by asserting things loud enough until they're believed.
But when I see people being straight up dogmatic and preaching walls of black-and-white opinions as if they're somehow infallible and that there can't be any other perspectives... I just see incompetence. But it is frustrating because you want to set the record straight, because you know others are going to believe the louder person... but there's really nothing you can do about it. One time someone tried to argue with me that "cloud storage does not exist." All I could do in that moment was just ignore them and move on.
"As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding." -Sloman and Fernbach
I'm not seeing anywhere that he actually claims someone doesn't have a right to exist. I see lots of people using colorful, subjective interpretations of other things he said to try and push a narrative, but that's all.
He did. He claimed that the demographic has changed and he advocates for reverting this change. And it turns out that forcibly altering the demographic of an era is the literal definition of ethnic cleansing (and by the way the phrass has historicallt been coined with the specific meaning of removing Muslim people from Serbia, by the people who intended to perform that “cleansing”, so it's particularly apt here).
>> He did not call for forcibly altering the demographic.
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
And while I'm quoting:
MerriamWebster: Xenophobe
> one unduly fearful of what is foreign and especially of people of foreign origin
DHH:
> You can rest assured that I'd be in the streets waving a Danish flag if these were my conditions in my native country. I think that's a pretty universal sentiment. There's absolutely nothing racist or xenophobic in saying that Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes, Britain primarily a united kingdom for the Brits, and Japan primarily a set of islands for the Japanese.
I would say saying that is pretty much the definition of xenophobic.
Worse, in the context of DHHs rants, it comes off as racist - I don't get the sense he wants to throw out Norwegians from Denmark, for example.
Although shurly there are Norwegian migrants and foreign workers in Denmark.
> Supporting indigenous people and their rights to their native homelands is not xenophobic.
Xenophobia leads to the belief that white Danes need support for their rights to their native homeland.
It's not like this is some great battle to rise restitution for Native Americans, Maori or Aborigines.
It's about not having to see so many non-white faces in Copenhagen or London.
> Enforcing immigration laws is not ethnic cleansing.
That certainly depends on the law, and the enforcement.
More to the point: trampling nomadic sub- cultures, forcefully denying them access where they have lived for centuries, denying them their way of life - can certainly result in genocide ("the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group").
> Worse, in the context of DHHs rants, it comes off as racist - I don't get the sense he wants to throw out Norwegians from Denmark, for example.
I think "primarily" is doing some lifting in "Denmark is primarily a country for the Danes", along with his vagueness about what it means to be of "the Japanese" (Yamato/Zainichi/Ainu/Ryukyuan/Bonin) or "the Brits" (English/Scots/Welsh/Cornish/Irish/Manx/Jamaican/...).
DHH has the capacity to assess that going full on white supremacist is still relatively frowned upon, so he does only as much as he thinks he can get away with.
Sponsoring his badly made OSS and giving him any type of a limelight will only embolden him and the likes of him. I personally want nothing to do with him and anything he touches.
Take one glance at history, and you'll see that having a sovereign ethnic homeland is crucial to that "freedom to exist". So you're wrong on both counts - they are also taking a stance for the latter, and the two freedoms can be separated. Distributing FOSS does not require one takes a stance on every ethnic and political conflict on Earth. The GNU manifesto never once talks about the occupation of Tibet. This "cannot be separated" is nothing but a cheap attempt to attach your own cause to some other, more widely accepted cause.
FOSS never was about the right of the distributor. It’s been always about protecting the user. The way to do it is to give the users a set of rights that cannot be revoked.
Maybe DHH should live by his own ethos and "shut up and program" rather than continually making divisive political statements that alienate people who might otherwise use and contribute to his distro.
I don’t think he’ll refrain from using the political power he amassed by building a very popular web framework. We gave him a megaphone and a soapbox, and he’ll use it.
> That OSS has become too entangled with political activism
Wait is that really the spin that DHH is pushing? That'd be insane given he's among the most politically active open sources developers put there by a wiiide margin.
The fact that this is up for debate already says all. For anyone passing through, read the blog posts and his social media feeds, make up your own mind.
Just to explain because not everyone is necessarily a native English speaker or gets the reference.
This is a reference to a dog whistle. Above 25kHz are sounds that dogs can hear but humans generally can't.
The term dog whistle is used to refer to phrases that racists use to indicate their racism, while sounding plausibly deniable. The idea is that it's a phrase that will make other racists realize that you are one of them, while not sounding openly racist to others.
DHH himself has gone beyond dog whistles. He's directly compared what he considers undesirable ehtnic populations to wolves who need to be shot. He's just openly calling for ethnic cleansing by now.
But support for Omarchy itself can be seen as a dog whistle. It's widely known that DHH is a fascist, but you have some plausible deniability by donating to Omarchy because you're just politically neutral and think it's cool tech, or something like that.
> DHH himself has gone beyond dog whistles. He's directly compared what he considers undesirable ehtnic populations to wolves who need to be shot. He's just openly calling for ethnic cleansing by now.
Let me prefix this with that DHH's opinions suck, not sure what he's going through but clearly something, and that blog post you're referencing is terrible in lots of ways. But he's not openly calling for ethnic cleansing, you're doing speaking against him a disservice by not providing an accurate view of what shit thing he said. It's still terrible, the verbatim quotes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448148), but deporting isn't the same as "ethnic cleansing". Even people we disagree with vehemently should be disagreed with honestly.
Then that blog post is just one of many where he've essentially gone of the rails in terms of hardline authoritarianism and fascist ideas, which makes it kind of weird he's getting the financial support he's getting. But then some just don't care about what viewpoints others have, I suppose that's a valid stance too even if I disagree with it.
> but deporting isn't the same as "ethnic cleansing".
I’m sorry, but forcibly deporting people because of their ethnic background is the very definition of ethnic cleansing.
In general, if people use violence on the population as a way to either kill or forcibly expel them, there would be a strong case to call it a genocide.
> forcibly deporting people because of their ethnic background is the very definition of ethnic cleansing
I agree, but I think if this is what you think he's arguing for, you either need to re-read the blog post, or you're not discussing that post honestly, which again does us all a disservice, regardless of how much we disagree with him or not.
He uses a word that is a slur for the Romani, an ethnic minority in many European countries. He never discusses nationality.
He also compares deporting them (to where, you might ask) to shooting wolves.
It's also not his only post on the topic. He has previous ones where he complains of how horrible London is because white British people no longer constitute a majority. He calls for not just ends to immigration and closing borders, but "remigration".
It is very clear from these posts that he strongly believes that non white ethnic groups should be removed from European countries.
If that's not ethnic cleansing, I don't know what is.
I'm not just trying to score points about whether he sucks, but specifically point out the types of policies that he advocates for, and there are a number of people in this thread trying to claim somehow that he doesn't advocate for policies that he clearly has been.
So I'm curious, what makes you think that what he calls for isn't ethnic cleansing?
From Wikipedia (and please, fill me in if you have a better definition):
"Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous."
From DHH:
Calling for the deportation (forced removal) of a specific ethnic group (also note the violent analogy to wolves): "When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them."
Calling for the forced removal of millions of people of various ethnic groups he considers undesirable from Europe: "Because the sacred cow here is not just that mass migration must stop going forward. It's also that millions who are already in Europe must go. Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in record time on account of that realization. The Overton window is swinging wide open, but the cow is still there."
Talking about how much he wanted to move to London but that he no longer has that desire due to its ethnic diversity: "As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go.... That was then. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.... Recently, a projection that Danes would be a minority in their own country by 2096 caused an enormous stir in Denmark. Politicians across the spectrum decried what a catastrophe that would be for this world's oldest continuous monarchy. But a demographic nightmare worse than that has already enveloped London!"
As you can see, DHH is explicitly calling for the force removal (deportation and "remigration") of ethnic groups, because he is afraid of the results of the population becoming less ethnically homogeneous. I don't know how you could argue that what he's calling for is anything other than ethnic cleansing.
Also, note that none of this is due to any actualy on the ground experience; he lives in LA, he's lived in the US for over 20 years. This is purely an exercise in ideology. In fact, LA has a smaller percentage of the population that is white Anglo-American than London does of white British people.
Anyhow: I have laid out in detail the arugment for calling what he calls for "ethnic cleansing". Do you have any argument that it isn't ethnic cleansing that he's calling for? It seems pretty clear to me, so I'm confused why you have kept on insisting "if this is what you think he's arguing for, you either need to re-read the blog post", because I've read all three of these posts of his and more, and it all points towards him advocating for ethnic cleansing.
Something like "mass expulsion and killing of one ethnic or religious group in an area by another ethnic or religious group in that area" I suppose, but also, I really don't have any energy left to discuss something I don't care about. I don't like that guy, I don't like his views, and I don't want to argue against others who also don't like him.
Hope your text helped someone, enjoy the rest of your day!
Of course it differs by the individual. I think there are three camps: Those who have read DHH's blog posts, and agree with them. Those who have read DHH's blog posts, but think "he couldn't possibly mean that". Those who haven't read DHH's blog posts, but know that he's on "their side" (right-leaning).
What about the people who have no idea who DHH is, what he stands for, and have heard about Omarchy for the first time just now and are trying to figure out what it even is and suddenly people are talking in circles about him being eccentric or problematic.
I switched to Omarchy 4.0 from CachyOS and is having an amazing experience so far, barely know anything about DHH other than that he made Rails, and now everybody is calling me a racist sympathizer.
What about "ignoring him, not knowing him, just using his product" is defending? Are you using Nestle products? Ah you do? You must be all for stealing people's water well and selling them bottled water from it.
Omarchy is just a pile of settings and a branding, you could have configured Cachy similarly and wouldn't have to associate yourself with the racists. Be careful of the company you keep.
Yes, if you're jumping on some hypetrain OSS distro built around a cult of personality and it has very few merits otherwise and that project's creator has racist views, absolutely yes. People's distro alignments are a little bit different than some small utilities or OSS libraries, nobody writes jokes like "how do you know someone uses libxml? They'll tell you" like they do for Gentoo, Arch, etc.
But keep defending it, we can see what you're ok associating with.
Come on, this is so dishonest, his personality has basically nothing to do with Omarchys popularity, and it has loads of merit. It's way more pleasant to use than all other distros I've tried.
To claim that it is super simple for everyone to transform Arch into Omarchy clones without reading the Omarchy repos and that everyone should just do that instead because of politics is beyond absurd.
His personality actually has everything to do with Omarchy’s popularity, because he gets funding based off of it.
Omarchy is a set of dotfiles. That’s it. We all know the only reason you, and everyone else, even knows about it is because DHH is behind it.
There’s, like, a million dot file repos on GitHub. Most probably higher quality than Omarchy. But somehow, Omarchy is popular. The actually dishonest view is to somehow think that DHH being DHH has nothing to do with Omarchy’s popularity.
Barely. Setting up a repo is next to nothing, and I would hardly call what they have "applications".
Omarchy is not an impressive, innovative, or exciting distro. Manjaro did what Omarchy did a decade ago, and better. Providing an out-of-the-box tolerable Arch Linux experience is very par for the course.
This is, at best, a weekend project. Not to mention I can find much more impressive, cohesive, and easier-to-use dotfile repos on GitHub.
I think the only people who think Omarchy is, well, anything, are either new to Linux or just like DHH. Which is fine. But if you're new to Linux, please, browse around. Arch Linux is really not the most cohesive and easy-to-use distro you can find.
You seem to be talking about users. They're talking about creators.
I don't think users know who DHH is, or care who DHH is. Probably like 0.01% of users have read a blog post, let alone a political one. (Maybe they all are, I haven't read any)
Disagree there; anyone who installs Omarchy does it because a social media creator they like suggested it, and there’s only a few degrees of separation between those creators. This isn’t like Slackware’s popularity in the 90s, peer to peer, this all top-down. I’d call it hype-driven, if they didnt have a neat product (which I’m not a customer of).
Also have to disagree with you there... there are other ways to find out about distros besides social media or people suggesting it. Back in the day, one of the only ways people even found out about new distros was through sites like Distrowatch who just reported on the facts of the distros and never tried to market them to people.
Ugh, gosh really? I looked at one of the videos of the... eh excentric developer of the distro where he was presenting 4.0 and I was wondering about that retro neon design of background images he seemed to adore so much. I was wondering why someone would still think this Fashwave design to be cool. It's been what? 10 years when this trope peaked?
Right; it's not political in the sense of "vote for candidate/party/policy XYZ", it's political in the sense that Omarchy is distinguished by being a vehicle for DHH's opinions, and by promoting Omarchy one can promote the general idea that DHH is a respectable guy with good opinions while still remaining firmly situated in "technical" subject matter.
It wasn’t that long ago that omarchy got started. As far as I could tell it was a direct response to DHH giving up on Apple. He was in a dispute with them in regards to App Store publishing and sales. He seems to have since made it his personal mission to move off of the Apple ecosystem.
Finally got me to unsubscribe. I'm surprised that the whole crew of them were cool with reposting the snippet of DHH calling linux maintainers "clowns and goblins" amongst other things.
“when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population” which I don’t think this really clears, as objectionable as his comments may be
DHH hasn’t committed a crime against humanity. He just said he would not consider one entirely bad if it made him feel safer when walking around his house.
I don’t recall him being specific about which Roma are wolves and which aren’t. Were he talking only about “criminal” migrants, he’d make a point about that distinction.
I don't think he's been literal about ethnic cleansing, even though I strongly disagree with his political views on the matter.
Anyway, he also supports open weights models, which IMO is a good thing.
So maybe separate the artist from the art? He's not running for elections, that's for sure, so as a citizen he can have the political views he likes, doesn't mean the software is bad because of them.
As I've said before, I strongly disagree, but what I read is that he calls for the removal of those behaving in a way that (in his opinion) make the city of Copenhagen less safe, or at least that change the perceived security of the people living there.
Gypsies create issues almost everywhere in Europe, but it's not based on ethnicity, most of the ethnic Roma are fully integrated, some of them are not, in Italy many Sinte families are linked to mob and criminality in general.
Do they deserve special treatment because of their ethnicity?
And what if they are not regular citizens?
It's an open problem, DHH's solutions it's absolutely not my solution, but there's a still a difference between what he said and calling for ethnic cleansing.
No one will reply to you because it requires thinking through this problem with the same nuance they accuse DHH of not appreciating. I'm right there with you.
Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing via
mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants
and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry.
I'm not interested in having "nuanced discussions" about whether the Roma people have some kind of Nuisance Gene that makes discussion of extermination valid
If you'd like to make an argument that isn't just "ethnic cleansing is okay sometimes if the ethnicity is REALLY annoying" go ahead
I'm guessing taking a stance like the one below kind of does put you in the direction of more hardline perspectives:
> You have to act. You have to protect the sheep. Standing idly by while your livestock is devoured by predators or your neighborhood is taken over by migrants is a pathetic abdication of any functioning society's most basic duty to its citizens.
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.
"When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces you deport them" is how his last post ends. It's not even a dogwhistle anymore.
Mostly because HN is full of two kinds of things: tech bros that think that "everything shouldn't be political durr" and actual literal fascists that think that palantir is a good thing.
I'm not fully surprised by it. Pissing in their cornflakes and reminding everyone what they are is what matters, not points.
It's disappointing more than anything, I never agreed with him on everything but he was at least somewhat interesting/relevant to listen to at the peak of the RoR days and mostly harmless.
I mean, we can also expand with him being a xenophobic, great replacement conspiracy theorist, actively supporting racial hatred and violence dickwad if you want.
The "smear" you're mentioning is actually him smearing his shit all over the walls on his personal blog, and indeed, it reeks of fascism.
Thank you, this is exactly my experience with reporting on Omarchy. There is a small vocal group that is very determined to pull politics into it somehow, but to most (a more silent, big majority) this is not even known.
I.e., when Omarchy is reported on in my country (on local blogs) nobody ever replies with anything political, it's just about the tech. But in some circles this is very different, somehow.
Do you have examples? With Nitter and Xcancel down I can't even access twitter anymore, and it's not my habit to looking into the political views of developers. I don't really care. I liked FOSS because it was apolitical. Imagine Linus taking a political stance against all parties he doesn't agree with that use Linux. Imho this obsession with people's politics just has to stop. Omarchy. NixOS, LLMs. All interesting tech, and then a lot of shouting parties around it, sometimes both sides call each other nazis. I try to ignore them.
What do personal blogs and tweets have to do with Omarchy? I guess DHH is just bad and tainted from a far left point of view. I regard that kind of thinking as totalitarian.
Yea, what a great point! It's totalitarian for a bunch of individuals to call out someone for their bad ideas. And it's definitely not totalitarian for someone to encourage governments to carry out textbook ethnic cleansing. You're a true thought-leader!
No. I believe, for example, that singling out legal immigrants from Haiti, revoking their legal status, and deporting them back to Haiti, where the current state department's website says of Haiti: "Do not travel to Haiti due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care" [1], is an example of ethnic cleansing. To suggest this is just good ol' fashioned law enforcement is absurd.
Ethnic cleansing is when immigrants have to return to their home countries after the lawful suspension of a temporary program? That, frankly, is preposterous.
Also worth pointing out, apparently, “lawful” does not mean ethical. Owning slaves was lawful during much of U.S. history. Gassing Jews was lawful in Nazi Germany. The President, after spending years demonizing and lying about Haitians going on to unilaterally terminate Haitians’ legal standing in the country in order to “legally” deport them to their home country—a country we fully acknowledge is completely unsafe—is unjustifiable on any level. Do better.
DHH has repeatedly advocated for remigration. Wikipedia defines remigration as: a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry.
Also: "Omarchy is not just a distribution, but it's also a counterweight to all the nonsense that has plagued Linux for far too long. It's a refuge from the clowns and the circus that has been Linux politics since the old institutions got infiltrated." (https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3mtrdmfttak2s)
Appeal to the "Golden Age" is just built into the way they do propaganda, it's particularly popular if that Golden Age is long enough ago that everyone around during it is dead and can't ask awkward questions like "Golden for who though?".
The appeal to "Halycon Days" is strong but then I'm aware that based on the city I was born and the socio-economic group I was born into I'd statistically already be dead (average life expectancy was lower than my current age) and historically aware enough to know that when my country was "Great" exactly who it was "Great" for.
I'll take 2026 Britain over 1926 Britain and especially 1826 Britain.
Sadly true. I just felt the person I was quoting was waving it away as if it was a harmless irrelevance. But you’re right, appalling views have become mainstream.
There's an implicit political statement in being able to write a simple one line hello world program and run it, using free software and information. Consider the counterfactual world where to even begin programming you have to pay for certification and training or specialized equipment/software. I know paid compilers, proprietary languages and closed specifications exist, but we can still just save print('hello world') to a file and run it using python which is freely available, or even better we can open devtools in our browser and jump into the console and run console.log('hello world') without even installing anything.
Also, the book that popularized "hello world" was very consciously advancing a programming-first pedagogical agenda, as opposed to building up a theoretical foundation first:
> The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
"Proofs" in this sense of the word are things that apply to mathematics and formal systems. Language is squishy. A minimal counterexample is potentially squishy enough to be meaningless.
The definition of political is irrelevant. The result is supertrue. "If even one example of software is not political, then 'all software is political' is false" is true under all admissible values of "political." This is simple logic.
All assertoric claims about the world are either true or false. If they are false they should be rejected. If they are true they should be spoken. Treating factual claims about the world as a partisan psychological litmus test is, in my judgment, morally repugnant. There are four lights.
The funders are not funding the development of a Linux distro, they are co-signing the political statement.