[McGlockenshire]

Wow! When that one DHH blog went around the other day, I didn't actually pay attention to who the author was. All I saw was yet another bigoted rant and just skimmed it and rolled my eyes. (e: here it is to save people the effort: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 )

I should not have skimmed it. From your link:

> In the same post he praises Tommy Robinson (actual name Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon), a right-wing agitator with several convictions for violent offences and a long history of association with far-right groups such as the English Defence League and the British Nationalist Party. He then goes on to describe those that attended last weekend’s far-right rally in London as “perfectly normal, peaceful Brits” protesting against the “demographic nightmare” that has enveloped London, despite the violence and disorder they caused.

> To all of that he ads a dash of Islamophobia, citing “Pakistani rape gangs” as one of the reasons for the unrest, repeating a weaponised trope borne from a long since discredited report from the Quilliam Foundation, an organisation with ties to both the the US Tea Party, and Tommy Robinson himself.

This is ... disqualifying. That's the best word I can summon here to express my dismay. This is a crossed line. Absolutely nutso.

edit2: Uh wow I really should not have skimmed it. Here's one paragraph from DHH's blog itself:

> Which brings us back to Robinson's powerful march yesterday. The banner said "March for Freedom", and focused as much on that now distant-to-the-Brits concept of free speech, as it did on restoring national pride. And for good reason! The totalitarian descent into censorious darkness in Britain has been as swift as its demographic shift.

Well, if that doesn't speak volumes as to DHH's values, I don't know what does.

[kgwgk]

> To all of that he ads a dash of Islamophobia, citing “Pakistani rape gangs” as one of the reasons for the unrest, repeating a weaponised trope borne from a long since discredited report

Were independent inquiries also repeating weaponised tropes from long since discredited reports?

“By far the majority of perpetrators were described as 'Asian' by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”

https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-...

[pjc50]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07/29/officer-raped-ro...

The ultimate problems lie in the police: they are generally terrible at handling rape cases, and in this case there are claims that they were actively complicit in some of the rapes.

Using the actions of some members of an ethnic minority to justify .. well, any action against people who were not actually personally involved, is textbook discrimination.

[cratermoon]

He makes his position clear enough in the second paragraph, for those who know how to read between the lines. "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."

[vr46]

OMFG

This post is full of outright nonsense. I was in Central London last Saturday and watched a lot of it go down, before heading to Islington and then catching the last dregs of the crowd nearer Euston and chatting in the pub with some of them.

As a "native Brit" and "native Londoner" that DHH wouldn't recognise as such, he can absolutely do one.

[ethagnawl]

... and this is the guy whose Linux "distro" Cloudflare has just announced funding for.

[aquariusDue]

Yeah, it was funny the first time a YouTuber[0] did something like that but now I feel like the joke got out of hand a bit, I blame the uptrend of opinionated configs to turn code editors into bona fide IDEs[1][2][3] for this.

Welp, looking forward to the holy wars between people running different influencers' configs five years from now. Who knows, maybe we'll see premium versions of those too.

[0] DistroTube which maintains DTOS, https://distro.tube/dtos/

[1] LunarVim

[2] AstroVim

[3] Doom Emacs

[bigiain]

Not all _that_ surprising. From where I see things, pretty much every time you see "Cloudflare" and "free speech" in the same sentence, it always end up being about Cloudflare supporting free speech for nazis or white supremacists. DHH's racist and xenophobic views are totally on-brand for them.

[scuff3d]

2025 has been wild but DHH outing himself as a crazy racist was definitely not something I was expecting...

[simianparrot]

If he’s a crazy racist, what would you call an actual racist?

[scuff3d]

The venn diagram of actual racists and crazy racists is a circle.

[simianparrot]

So if I understand correctly, people want a state for the Palestinian people. But they do not accept that people want a state for the Danish people.

Is that it?

[scuff3d]

This comment is so off the rails I'm not going to bother responding to it, but it does make me think about why political discourse is so deeply broken today.

When someone lives this far into an alternate relatity it leaves basically no room for discussion. The amount of work that has to be done just to get everyone back to some relative place of sanity is damn near insurmountable. It leaves no time or energy left to have an actual discussion.

[maleldil]

"People" have differing opinions, but the one I mostly see from the left is that they want Palestinians to live in the land they owned before Israeli colonisers invaded it and forced them to relocate to subhuman conditions. What I haven't seen is the desire to expel the Israelis currently living there, as long as they agree to let the Palestinians lead a decent life.

[kgwgk]

You have never seen the slogan “from the river to the sea”?

https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/HHP...

Do you think that the long-term answer to the Israel-Palestinian dispute is for Arab states to absorb the Palestinians, for there to be two states, Israel and Palestine, or for Israel to be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians?

51% in the 18-24 group chose the third option.

[pjc50]

Ethnostates are a terrible idea regardless of whose ethnicity we're talking about, because they can only be maintained by violence.

The state of Palestine is an answer to the question of "what nationality do the residents of Gaza and the West Bank have?"

[rezonant]

Oh this sort of thing is far from new for DHH, there's long been a desire to oust him from Rails or fork it, but it's never quite came to fruition, and unless Shopify were to back it, it is unlikely it would survive :-\

[scuff3d]

I guess I wasn't aware since I'm not really involved in the Ruby community. I always knew he was kind of an oddball from a few of his posts I've seen and podcasts I've heard him on. Never would have guessed it was this bad.

Until now I thought his craziest idea was that dynamic typing is better than static typing. (Just a joke, not trying to start a war over dynamic vs static lol)

[rezonant]

To be fair it is an objectively crazy idea that dynamic typing is better than static typing (I'll start the war, it's fine).

[scuff3d]

Lol. I assumed a Ruby person would prefer dynamic typing and I didn't want to insult you.

But yeah I agree. Given the opportunity I'm almost always going to go for a statically typed language.

[rezonant]

> Lol. I assumed a Ruby person would prefer dynamic typing and I didn't want to insult you.

Nah it's the worst part about Ruby.

Also, naturally I ended up at zero points on that post lol. That wrecked someone's day.

[simianparrot]

As a fellow Scandinavian, DHH is just writing what the vast majority of us think. And it isn’t racist. That word is being misused until it soon has no value left; you sure you want that?

[ellen364]

I've been thinking about whether "$some_country rape gangs" seems racist to me. I've come down on "yes".

The reason might seem odd. But it ocurred to me that if you want to use immigration to reduce crime, including rape, the obvious solution is to ban all male immigration.

That shocked me because it seems so wildly discriminatory. Yes, most violent crimes are committed by men. But very few men commit violent crimes. Banning male immigration would punish a large group for the appalling actions of a few. Making it about "$some_country's men" doesn't seem a whole lot better. It's still unjust to punish someone for someone else's crime.

If anyone is curious about the exercise, I recommend trying it. It was disconcerting to sit with the idea of banning male immigration, really seriously consider it and realise how viscerally shocked I was by the idea.

Edit: for context, in the UK right now, phrases like "rape gangs" are part of the debate/argument about immigration.

[Dr_Incelheimer]

Your solution of banning male immigration makes perfect sense to me. Maybe not ban it entirely but at least ensure a 1-1 ratio of men to women (male surplus has a tendency to turn countries into shitholes).

Disallowing someone from immigrating is not a punishment because there is no right to immigration anyway. In fact I believe we should go even further and see immigrants as investments. If the immigrant is unlikely to have a net positive tax contribution (or at least not being a rapist, for a more realistic target), I don't see any reason to allow him or her to be here. If you accept this idea, there is nothing wrong with training a neural network on characteristics of existing immigrants to predict the future value of a particular potential immigrant.

[simianparrot]

The Grooming Gangs feature a lot of nationalities, but some more than others.

There's nothing racist about the facts. How one responds to it can indeed be racist -- ie. "all people of one of said nationalities are like these ones" would be racist. But observing that a nationality of immigrants are vastly overrepresented is just using your eyes to observe reality.

[BoredPositron]

What's the right use for the word and the value of it in your mind? You are commenting in circles in this thread and you could clarify it easily.

[fredrikholm]

I'm happy to say that ~80% of Sweden and Norway don't vote for right wing populist parties like SD and Fremskrittspartiet, so "vast majority of us" might be a bit of a stretch.

[simianparrot]

That's a misrepresentation of statistics though. FRP is the second largest party this election, with 23,8% of votes, only second to AP who got 28%. But many people won't vote based on the immigration issues, because so far, other issues are more pressing.

But my point was that I am absolutely sure the majority of Norwegians _want Norway to remain a country that retains its cultural history_ while not being exclusive to one ethnic group. It's about retaining a majority.

I don't understand why that sentiment is so problematic here on HN, because simultaneously people are clamoring for a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people.

Why can't Norway have a Norwegian state for the Norwegian people? Or Denmark? Or the UK?

[fredrikholm]

> That's a misrepresentation of statistics though.

I can't speak for Norway, but in Sweden the only party worth keeping an eye on that adheres to the usual combination of pro-Russia, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, anti-EU rhetoric etc is Sverigedemokraterna (formerly Bevara Sverige Svenskt, a party based solely on the idea of an ethnostate). They're hovering around 20%.

> But my point was that I am absolutely sure the majority of Norwegians _want Norway to remain a country that retains its cultural history_ while not being exclusive to one ethnic group. It's about retaining a majority.

Is the existence of history dependent on the ethnicity of the person reading it? I'm sure you've met non-native people who are in all other respects very much Norwegian.

Unless you mean to imply that culture is constrained to genetics. I deeply hope that that is not what you meant.

> I don't understand why that sentiment is so problematic here on HN, because simultaneously people are clamoring for a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people.

How many Norwegian cities were leveled by bombs this year? How many were murdered by foreign military?

> Why can't Norway have a Norwegian state for the Norwegian people? Or Denmark? Or the UK?

They do. Here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK

All fully functioning sovereign states, all internationally recognized by their peers and enemies alike.

[thevillagechief]

Frankly, I might be sympathetic to this view, except for a few countries: The US, the UK, France, Belgium and maybe a few others. The US is a country of immigrant, so none of that cultural history nonsense holds, except maybe for the Native Americans. As for France and the UK, yeah no one told them to go colonize a bunch of countries around the world and impose their culture on them. They don't get to complain about retaining their cultural history. Belgium doesn't get to complain either after the atrocities they committed in Central Africa.

[watwut]

The word racism is not diluted. It is that just some full on racists feel like it says something negative and thus don't want the label put on racists stuff they like.

[simianparrot]

So do you consider what the Danish PM said racist?

> There are really a lot of us Danes who believed that when people came to this ‘world’s best country’ and were given such good opportunities, they would integrate. They would become Danish, and they would never, ever harm our society. All of us who thought that way have been wrong.

That's objectively observed reality in Denmark. And in Scandinavia in general. It's not about race, it's not about skin color, it's about cultural heritage and values.

All we're saying is that to retain a country's cultural heritage and carry it -- and obviously shape it -- into the future, you have to retain a majority of that heritage, and integrate newcomers. Otherwise it's no longer Denmark.

[em-bee]

They would become Danish

you have to retain a majority of that heritage, and integrate newcomers. Otherwise it's no longer Denmark.

what you are asking is not possible without rejecting immigration.

that is the delusion. it is the same all over europe. people expect 100% integration. yet at the same time, prejudices will reject them if they are not completely invisible. that is not possible, and it is not the integration i would want. i have written about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746099

[maleldil]

Danish PM's comment is about integration. You're mischaracterising it. I'd say it's pro immigration, not what you're trying to spin it as.

"We want immigrants to integrate" is not the same as "we don't want immigrants", which is the point you're trying to make.

[simianparrot]

DHH didn’t say he is against immigration. Neither did I. Why are you straw manning?

[em-bee]

how is this not against immigration?

https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

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.

Copenhagen, by comparison, was about eighty-five percent native Danes in 2000, and is still three-quarters today. Enough of a foreign presence to feel cosmopolitan, but still distinctly Danish in all of its ways. Equally statistically evident on streets and bike lanes.

But I think, what would Copenhagen feel like, if only a third of it was Danish, like London? It would feel completely foreign, of course. Alien, even. So I get the frustration that many Brits have with the way mass immigration has changed the culture and makeup of not just London, but their whole country.

[em-bee]

it is xenophobia. rather widespread in europe unfortunately. xenopobia is not necessarily racism, but it is closely linked.

[simianparrot]

No it's not. Stop diluting terms. You're making this problem worse for everyone, even the people you think you're on the side of, whoever they might be.