I do find the author position to be incoherent in the following regard:
1. believe a statement can be true or false, and false should be called out.
2. believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken.
I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed. That eliminates margin for corruption and lenience. A strong law also creates incentive for the population to care about the letter of the law and reforms, since it becomes a known fact that such law will be followed through.
The worst of both worlds is a situation like in US or EU where immigrants "more or less" can settle, but live under constant pressure knowing there is no legal framework to support them, and deportation may come at any moment.
> believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken.
Except that that author didn't say that at all. They said "deport only the lawbreakers", while expressing dismay at a blogpost which (apparently*) said "deport everyone".
> I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed.
Quote from TFA: "Any kind of mass deportation plan would have to change [the law], which would be legally tricky to say the least. However, enforcing the existing laws requires no legal action, and could start tomorrow if the relevant executive wanted it to."
*Other comments have argued that the post didn't actually say that.
> That eliminates margin for corruption and lenience.
Lenience and mercy are critical components of a system of a just criminal justice system. We have judges issue sentences in large part because we want a human being with good judgement to decide how serious the punishment for an offence should be based on the circumstances.
A person who shoots their partner who has been abusing them for years should probably receive a different punishment than a person who pulls out a gun in traffic and shoots someone for cutting them off. Mercy or "lenience" are not inherently flaws in the justice system, though of course there's always "too much of a good thing."
Something I was told when started building in fintech was that the laws are in such a way that its impossible to be 100% compliant in every interpretation.
The law is huge, complex and can often have conflicting aspects.
This is assumed by some to be "by design". When the law is such that everyone is breaking it, then the power shifts to whoever can bring people in "front of the law".
So, in every case with strong beliefs such as yours, IMMV and it's easy to voice an opinion when you feel "not in target".
> I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed.
I read an article some years back that really changed my mind about this. It made the point that society evolves through the imperfect enforcement of laws (those some kinds of imperfection, like selective enforcement, are distinctly harmful). That is empirically true, but for some reason I hadn't realized it until the article pointed it out to me.
I think some of the trouble here is that the application of the law cannot be guaranteed to be free of discrimination or bias, regardless of the letter of the law itself?
I think DHH's comments are pretty mild given the subject. However, I think it is how he frames his comments that cause offensive - lumping a (potentially) problematic (arguably) ethnic group of people in with animal control...
I live in Oakland. Something I've noticed in a lot of the "THE CITY IS GOING TO HELL" commentary is that often people are pointing at visual symptoms - a homeless encampment, graffiti - as a proxy for "things are bad," and it doesn't take a lot of pulling on that thread before you get to "well just look at them," and it's real hard to cast that one in a "race-neutral" way. I've heard people complaining about hot dog vendors on the street as some kind of public nuisance, I've heard people point to wall murals as a sign of moral decay. Fine, that's your jam, that's what the suburbs are for, but if you don't like seeing poor people, make a society that doesn't create so goddamn many of them.
I've lived in east coast cities (NYC, Boston, and Philadelphia) for the majority of my adult life and while homelessness is less of a problem in the northeast because of the climate there is still a good amount of it in the major cities. I think it becomes way too easy to tune out those commentaries and avoid the parts of the city that they apply to.
In Philadelphia, I lived a few blocks away from the Girard stop on the L train. I would just avoid walking by the station because it was a hang out for homeless people and drug users in the area. Pretty much everywhere within a 10 block radius of the station is built up, there's always people out, and it feels like all of the local businesses in the area are thriving (more recently there's been too many chains opening up which sucks but I digress), there's barely any homelessness or crime with the exception of package thieves (I just bought a $20 box off amazon to put in front of my house and never had a problem) and the occasional car window being smashed.
In NYC, especially Manhattan although the same applies to the outer boroughs, unless you live around a more touristy area then you don't even think about it. In Boston even less so besides downtown.
I don't think trying to contain people to specific areas is a good solution. There's obviously a greater social issue across the US and other developed nations and it's a very hard problem to start solving, but I would guess that most cities continue to ignore it as long as its easy for the majority of the population to ignore it.
> I've heard people complaining about hot dog vendors on the street as some kind of public nuisance
Screw them, we need more hot dog vendors. To me they are the symbol of a multimodal city (if I am bastardizing terminology, I don't care, legitimize it, I want fistfights over ketchup). Gone are the days here in Denver of Biker Jim himself serving up "the usual." Lack of hot dog vendors sure are a proxy - for 37% commercial real estate vacancy downtown. And then there is the Honduran heroin crisis evolving into a full-blown fentanyl epidemic. I suppose the golden age of WeWork was fun. So is the Coors Field - Ball Arena corridor with tons of sport tourists either high or about to be. Roma, if DHH doesn't like you we have a ripe market for pickpocketing - just watch out for the Axon cameras.
You need some kind of proof that a homeless encampment is bad for the city or that someone might not like to be near one for reasons that might not include racism?
Visual disorder is real harm, not a proxy or suburban preference.
Encampments produce fires, needles, waste, blocked sidewalks, and local crime spikes. Surveys show high mental illness and substance use rates among the homeless. Mild climate plus weak enforcement concentrates the problem beyond local poverty levels. Treating every complaint as coded racism blocks diagnosis.
Unpermitted vendors create safety and fairness issues for taxed businesses. Illegal graffiti is vandalism that costs owners. Oakland fines them. Murals are different.
Pure tolerance by the left produced tent cities. Enforcement and treatment shows recent drops in both homelessness and crime.
People who want orderly streets are not required to absorb the costs. Working neighborhoods take most of the hit.
I dunno have you been to Vesterbro (he is talking about Copenhagen afterall)? Especially around H17? It's pretty gross. It's also spitting distance from Tivoli Gardens where you might want to take your kids out for the day.
The most objectionable thing about his post is that he's calling out gypsies specifically, but also Denmark relatively recently passed sweeping anti-begging laws kind of specifically targeting Roma people...
There are a lot of people who thrive in high trust societies and suffer in chaotic alternative. Pretending that diversity doesn't have a cost is plain wrong.
Facts alone won't get you to answers about what you should do about something.
Whether your personal view is that the solution to low income migrants entering your country should be outright genocide, deportation, societal integration, welfare, or something else - it's not going to be based on a statement of fact.
A fact is that the elderly who have retired from the workfrorce are no longer contributing to the national wealth, they're also using the public health system more than any other demographic.
Clearly we should...
I think the author is taking umbrage with DHH using the word "gypsies" where it might have been "junkies" or just "homeless".
I see it in Berlin, rise of agressive, smelly begging in U-Bahn (I witnessed a beggar actually attacking passengers, hitting a woman). People walking around having fully shit their pants. This, I presume, is tolerated in the name of individualism, that the individual is free to choose how they present themselves in the public, and walking around with pants fully shat must be some inalienable right.
Area around Kottbusser Tor reeks of urine, and there's junkies fully out of it constantly screaming and fighting. Is somehow pointing this out is shameful and racist?
“Gypsies” are a race of people. “Junkies” and homeless people are, at an individual level, not.
Homeless people and drug addicts may well be victims of circumstance or victims of society depending on your point view - or even victims of their own choices or actions - but there’s a difference between saying “this race of people is problematic” and “this class of people is problematic”.
First and foremost, if DHH meant "junkies" or "homeless" by "gypsies", a term widely regarded as derogatory used to describe Romani people [0], then already there is plenty to take umbrage with.
Second of all, homelessness and drug addiction are not moral failings. As the author says ".. there will be some who are good and some who are bad. This makes people very unlike wolves."
I ask you to question whether the people who are "...walking around having fully shit their pants" should be deported, or treated for the conditions that ail them. The people aren't to be protected on some basis of "individualism", but on the basis that they are human people. Not animals.
> However, in any ethnicity of people, there will be some who are good and some who are bad.
This is a strawman interpretation of anti-immigration arguments. Non-strawman anti-immigration positions are that immigrants are a problem even if they are all "good".
If you care about getting rid of "bad" people, then you have to evenhandedly apply the rule, even to those who have ethnic roots in the country going back a hundred generation: take those "bad" people too and strip them of citizenship.
Where in the world is immigration driven by "good" or "bad"; I mean, where do documents like visitor visas and residency permits lapse due to badness rather than the mere passage of time, whereby the individual not able to extent has to go, whether they are "good" or "bad"?
What is "bad"? Does "bad" have to be armed robbery? Or is someone also "bad" if they settle in Japan, and then demand that schools remove pork from school lunch?
Unwanted immigration can simply be the raw numbers: 500 immigrants not being a problem, but 500,000 being a problem, all else being held equal, including "goodness".
You can be deemed undesirable not because who you are but entirely because you're part of a group with 499,999 others. From the individual's point of view, it is unfair; that is true, and it isn't meant to be.
I think DHH's opinion is a very common sentiment in Europe. "Gypsies" are a very European thing. I wonder if there's anything similar in the US? For context for US readers; they generally exist outside of the usual social norms, and have a pretty bad reputation because of it.
This is not a defence of DHH, just providing context to his comments.
His opinion that their behavior is undesirable and should be dealt with is common.
His comparison to them as wolf-like predators (and you shoot wolves), previous posts about mass deportation and forced remigration ... no, most Europeans aren't veering strongly into hard-right territory.
DHH’s blog post was, to put it simply, spot on. You disagree with that, and that’s fine.
But to cancel a subscription for another service entirely, because someone used a blog platform of the same provider to publish something you were repulsed by – this seems like a really bizarre way of managing your emotion. By this logic I should feel compelled to delete my HN account, delete all my social media and cancel all press subscriptions…
One of the many holes in DHH's claim about wolves, sheep, and gypsies is that wolves are not the sort of low-dimensional archetype he uses to support his narrative.
If you're very literal like me, you take that to mean wolves, the mammal; a predatory animal living within a food web, fulfilling a particular role at its trophic level which is ultimately beneficial to the system it's a part of.
Wolves don't independently get 'out of control' such that they need to be shot. This has been demonstrated across North America and Europe. The perception of wolves being out of control is largely subjective and misguided, and the result of 1. humans encroaching on wild land, 2. human activity limiting wolves' access to food, and 3. humans fearing wolves and wanting there to be fewer of them.
Through this lens, comparing immigrants to wolves is absurd. It becomes clear that DHH is discarding a lot of context in order to weave a fearful narrative which uses invalid, fictional mechanisms to make his point.
The use of the terms gypsies and sheep also comes with issues. It's a poor piece of writing, lacks any compelling substance (assuming you aren't swayed by him), and largely demonstrates that he's not particularly thoughtful about this while lacking the self-awareness and comprehension to notice how weak his position is.
It's okay to want reduced immigration. It's okay to want to preserve certain things in your society. It's not necessary or reasonable to do so through this lens, however. There are plenty of compelling arguments to make for regulating these systems in local, regional, and national government. It's okay to want that. When you start describing immigrants as dangerous animals, you've gone many steps too far off of a sensible path.
I also understand the use of fables to communicate moral and ethical stories, which seems to be a component in his narrative. However, he steps out of that bound when he talks about literal wolves (and the need to shoot them). Yet fables are a coarse tool, not an intricate one, and they're far too reductive to support an argument against immigration across a continent. It's an absurd position to argue from, and in terms of narrative, it makes DHH seem either obtuse or very hateful and disingenuous. I've never read anything of his since this piece.
Depends on the environment - in that book for example, Arctic wolves were not the cause of large (in physical size - the caribou) prey animal population decline, even though the "feelings" of the average person was that they must be the reason.
Outside of fiction, wolves are not ravenous beasts that hunt everything and anything in sight.
Predators do tend to go for the weak/sick, older or younger/inexperienced targets - they aren't stupid.
I was disappointed to read this and hear language and using allusions that parallel arguments made by hate groups.
I think DHH can take a stance that overly lax immigration policy has led to issues, if that is what he believes. That may be true, I don’t know, and I have no issues with policy debate around that, but directly comparing a specific race of emigrant people as wolves preying on native peoples, sheep is pretty gross.
It is a long blog post, but the controversy seems to center on DHH’s language and reasoning about Roma people.
My reading is that he used those examples deliberately to raise a broader issue: some people are tired of being told to ignore problems they can see and experience, whether that means feeling unsafe while walking through a city or attending a Pride parade (assume that are the “wolfs”), or being frustrated that nearly every item at Target is locked up (“gypsies”).
To be clear, I am not expressing an opinion on whether his argument is right or wrong.
He does say to shoot the wolves. And the wolves are the “gypsies” in the analogy he is explicitly drawing. The commenter you’re responding to was highlighting the parallelism not literally saying “he said to shoot people”
He says to deport literally an entire ethnic group independent of whether they happen to sleep in parks, which is the entire point being made by the article linked to by this page where we're commenting. The comment you're responding to also restates this, without making any claims about whether he said to shoot people, so your objection doesn't really make any sense in that regard either.
Yup. I followed his terrible behavior since his 2021 crashout, when he caused a third of his employees to leave his company, and he's only gotten louder and worse since. Looking back further, I can't see him actually supporting anything pro-social.
> They're still reeling from the Pakistani rape gangs that were left free to terrorize cities like Rotherham and Rochdale for years on end with horror-movie-like scenes of the most despicable, depraved abuse of British girls.
I can see if you feel this was fabricated by the author, you'd have the negative reaction you're having. But this is much-reported, much-discussed fact. Maybe HN needs to read news sources besides HN.
DHH has had a long decline, in my personal regard. A lot of things I ignored or gave grace for because of his early influence were actually clear signals about his fundamental beliefs.
Chad seems to be arguing:
1. DHH thinks all gypsies are bad, therefor
2. DHH does not see Roma as individual people, therefor
3. DHH is a bad person.
I read DHH's blog as:
1. It should still be illegal to camp in parks, therefor
2. People who do camp in parks should be housed, therefor
3. Foreigners who refuse housing should be deported.
My problem with the part about housing is that DHH acts as if cities have enough shelters to accommodate everyone and these 'gypsies' are refusing to go there. I don't buy that for a second.
I was really wanting to read this, I had a morbid interest in Hey.com's cancellation policy. After 3+ paragraphs and an effin PG quote, there still is no point.
There once were angry submissions (or comments?) here about how hard it is to cancel NYT.
I was expecting the Hey-version of that, instead I got long-winded prose that sounds like a bunch of college boys trying to sound smart.
No thanks.
I guess the E-mail-service is still overpriced due to them believing in non-existent value of their web client.
If that's the point of the article, sorry, I didn't make it far enough.
This article is about someone cancelling their subscription to software that was written by someone who is not in favor of allowing a population of immigrants frequently associated with criminal behavior to remain in Denmark.
The author argues in favor of "individuated enforcement" wherein deportation is conditioned on the degree to which a migrant has contributed positively to the country.
You don't need to express the issues like DHH did, but there are problems in the EU that weren't there 20 years ago.
The former European Community core states are too small and cannot handle the influx of millions from the East and the South.
The core states should leave the EU and reestablish the former European Community, which would help the populations as opposed to multinational locust companies.
It isn't fair that the whole world (mind you, including rich foreigners) buys up apartments, takes jobs and displaces the original population.
One thing this post never does is actually meaningfully argue with the core idea of the post that so outraged them.
Which is: If someone comes illegally to your country and ends up sleeping in parks, they should be deported.
I don’t know if I agree with that but the post seems to take it for granted that any reasonable person cannot.
To me this is more a fashion statement than an argument. Advocating deportations is automatically bad, using the word “gypsy” is automatically offensive. It’s silly. Pretty much everyone has some line of behavior at which they advocate deportation, and can anyone here who is upset actually explain why “Roma” is less offensive than “Gypsy”? There are PhDs in Eastern European history who can’t do that.
I wish people would get down their thrones and go to live near a gipsy camp before bitching about tolerance, I see all these champions of acceptance always living 20 metro stops from the last homeless
The article literally is making an argument to deport the people you're complaining about, just not literally everyone else who happens to be from the same ethnic group. I don't really understand why you'd have a problem with them saying that if that's what you actually care about.
I think a lot of folks - myself included - canceled our Hey subscriptions years ago when DHH said some other unfortunate things.
I don't have to agree with everyone on everything, not even people I do business with. But I do try to limit supporting people who have actively advocated for things that harm my family. Say what you will about Apple (where I transitioned), but they're the "least evil" option from my perspective.
Others are of course welcome to their own perspectives and choices.
> I'm a big believer in live-and-let-live. That's why I don't have bad feelings towards DHH. I definitely don't believe in trying to change people's minds by shouting at them or shaming them.
This is trying far too hard to be charitable. Mistake theory is great, and it's good that the article mentions it, but it then also presents sufficient evidence to prove, or at least substantiate, malice. At this point not having "bad feelings toward DHH" is itself a "Missing Mood". At any rate, though, the author took the correct action.
Wolves are also pretty important, by the way. Hopefully we all know that by now?
> This is trying far too hard to be charitable. Mistake theory is great, and it's good that the article mentions it, but it then also presents sufficient evidence to prove, or at least substantiate, malice.
The benefit of the doubt only exists as long as there is doubt. Once there's an overwhelming body of evidence that removes any of it, continuing to give it is pretty suspicious, like you mention.
Based on the content of the post, it seems like it would be adequate to find an email platform run by people not vocally calling for the ethnic cleansing of minorities.
He is calling for the deportation of illegal immigrants who sleep in parks.
Cloudflare, in contrast, actively works with the CCP which is doing actual ethnic cleansing in Tibet and Xinjiang. But they are harder to cancel aren’t they.
I’m a pragmatist. I’m not going to drive myself crazy interrogating the opinions of every service provider I use. I don’t know about the Fastmail founder or CEO’s beliefs and don’t want to.
> He is calling for the deportation of illegal immigrants who sleep in parks.
No, that's what this article is calling for. The complain they have is that DHH called for deporting the entire ethnic group independent of whether they're sleeping in parks.
Thats not an accurate framing. There are some disagreements that are red lines and others that are not. I think Chrono Trigger is one of the greatest games of all time, and someone disagreeing with me on that point is not a big deal. A hyperbolic example of the other side would be a Nazi's opinion on Jewish people. Given the nature of that opinion, not only would I disagree with them it would also be completely appropriate to fully disassociate with them and highly encourage others to do so.
People draw lines in different places, and what you are doing here is implying that it is unreasonable for people to take that level of issue with DHH's "gypsy" comment. I disagree. I think its completely reasonable to view that as unacceptable and to disassociate from that person.
Your comment suggests that all disagreements are equal. I would get email service from someone who likes Ruby more than Python, even if I disagree. I, like the author of the post, wouldn't get email from someone I knew was virulently racist as DHH is.
It is sad that such a song and dance is required when anyone with half a brain can read the racism in DHH's post.
Imagine a scenario that a black family moved into your neighborhood and started causing a bunch of problems. There are no other black people in the neighborhood.
It should take you a picosecond to figure out which one of these is obviously racist and which isn't:
"We need to remove the black people from our neighborhood"
"We need to remove the new family from our neighborhood"
People like "well he has a good point they are causing problems" so technically the set of "black people" and "people who are currently causing problems in our neighborhood" are the same set. This is irrelevant.
I used to admire that guy. I don't understand why anyone still works at Basecamp with posts like this to be honest. How do people justify it to themselves? Maybe it's just harder to switch jobs now with AI, I don't know.
Maybe a lot of people actually agree with him, and would rather we expect more of people, rather than simply defining criminal activity as an unconscious effect of one's being somehow oppressed, or one's great-great-grandparents being oppressed, or whatever.
The culture in question have been infamous for centuries for their value system which is incompatible with most others. Just as it's okay for devout Islamists to find the whole American value system disgusting and want nothing to do with it, it's okay for DHH and other Westerners to find the Roma value system disgusting. It's a belief system they choose, it's not something like skin that people cannot change.
In America there's a lot of ethical ambiguity given how recently most current residents' ancestors arrived. But in Denmark? Did the Roma build that society? (Possible) EU citizenship aside, I find it hard to judge Danes who feel that ethically, they don't have a right to degrade that society with crime and vagrancy. Same as I don't blame English people who don't like certain things going on there.
The article being referred to says "When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them" - it doesn't say "you deport everyone of that race," it's about the people causing problems. If you allow literally any behavior, no matter how antisocial, bad actors will ruin everything for everyone. Only the most obtuse person doesn't recognize the truth of that, deep down.
If anyone wants a great mail client, I highly recommend Mailmate which among other things lets you write messages in markdown: https://freron.com/ it’s maintained by a solo dev for 15+ years and charges a fair price
> I definitely don't believe in trying to change people's minds by shouting at them or shaming them
seems to me like they want to make a (polite) argument instead of explicitly calling them “heretic” to quote the article.
They also quite obviously seem to refer to cancellling the subscription here and not trying to invoke "cancel culture".
The first few paragraphs make this quite clear.
I mean, okay, yes, if you completely disregard what the author is actually saying they mean by using the word in the article and choose a different meaning, then it doesn't make sense. I'm not sure why that's worth pointing out when you wouldn't be able to get to the second statement without him already detailing the monetary subscription and literally following it up with saying that they're only making a financial decision, not a personal one.
The blogpost has the attitude problem of virtue signaling about decisions that has zero cost to themselves, about a communal kin based socialist society them know little about.
Normal working families with kids live next to these parks and rely on them as open space, it is part of the Danish socialist welfare system and care for the working man. Defacation and open cooking plus thrash by not your own weak but foreigners has real cost to those that can’t afford to move.
> Normal working families with kids live next to these parks and rely on them as open space, it is part of the Danish socialist welfare system and care for the working man. Defacation and open cooking plus thrash by not your own weak but foreigners has real cost to those that can’t afford to move.
The article made it pretty clear that they're not arguing against deporting people who are camping in parks though, and just arguing against generalizing the issue as being about the entire ethnic group. Are you claiming that somehow having a communal kin based socialist society makes it impossible to have, using the term in the article, "individuated enforcement"?
I do find the author position to be incoherent in the following regard:
1. believe a statement can be true or false, and false should be called out.
2. believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken.
I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed. That eliminates margin for corruption and lenience. A strong law also creates incentive for the population to care about the letter of the law and reforms, since it becomes a known fact that such law will be followed through.
The worst of both worlds is a situation like in US or EU where immigrants "more or less" can settle, but live under constant pressure knowing there is no legal framework to support them, and deportation may come at any moment.
> believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases, that is, the law can be selectively broken.
Except that that author didn't say that at all. They said "deport only the lawbreakers", while expressing dismay at a blogpost which (apparently*) said "deport everyone".
> I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed.
Quote from TFA: "Any kind of mass deportation plan would have to change [the law], which would be legally tricky to say the least. However, enforcing the existing laws requires no legal action, and could start tomorrow if the relevant executive wanted it to."
*Other comments have argued that the post didn't actually say that.
> That eliminates margin for corruption and lenience.
Lenience and mercy are critical components of a system of a just criminal justice system. We have judges issue sentences in large part because we want a human being with good judgement to decide how serious the punishment for an offence should be based on the circumstances.
A person who shoots their partner who has been abusing them for years should probably receive a different punishment than a person who pulls out a gun in traffic and shoots someone for cutting them off. Mercy or "lenience" are not inherently flaws in the justice system, though of course there's always "too much of a good thing."
Something I was told when started building in fintech was that the laws are in such a way that its impossible to be 100% compliant in every interpretation.
The law is huge, complex and can often have conflicting aspects.
This is assumed by some to be "by design". When the law is such that everyone is breaking it, then the power shifts to whoever can bring people in "front of the law".
So, in every case with strong beliefs such as yours, IMMV and it's easy to voice an opinion when you feel "not in target".
> I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed.
I read an article some years back that really changed my mind about this. It made the point that society evolves through the imperfect enforcement of laws (those some kinds of imperfection, like selective enforcement, are distinctly harmful). That is empirically true, but for some reason I hadn't realized it until the article pointed it out to me.
I think some of the trouble here is that the application of the law cannot be guaranteed to be free of discrimination or bias, regardless of the letter of the law itself?
I don't believe that deportation is inherently morally wrong, but there are certainly ways to deport people that are less moral than others.
I think DHH's comments are pretty mild given the subject. However, I think it is how he frames his comments that cause offensive - lumping a (potentially) problematic (arguably) ethnic group of people in with animal control...
I live in Oakland. Something I've noticed in a lot of the "THE CITY IS GOING TO HELL" commentary is that often people are pointing at visual symptoms - a homeless encampment, graffiti - as a proxy for "things are bad," and it doesn't take a lot of pulling on that thread before you get to "well just look at them," and it's real hard to cast that one in a "race-neutral" way. I've heard people complaining about hot dog vendors on the street as some kind of public nuisance, I've heard people point to wall murals as a sign of moral decay. Fine, that's your jam, that's what the suburbs are for, but if you don't like seeing poor people, make a society that doesn't create so goddamn many of them.
I've lived in east coast cities (NYC, Boston, and Philadelphia) for the majority of my adult life and while homelessness is less of a problem in the northeast because of the climate there is still a good amount of it in the major cities. I think it becomes way too easy to tune out those commentaries and avoid the parts of the city that they apply to.
In Philadelphia, I lived a few blocks away from the Girard stop on the L train. I would just avoid walking by the station because it was a hang out for homeless people and drug users in the area. Pretty much everywhere within a 10 block radius of the station is built up, there's always people out, and it feels like all of the local businesses in the area are thriving (more recently there's been too many chains opening up which sucks but I digress), there's barely any homelessness or crime with the exception of package thieves (I just bought a $20 box off amazon to put in front of my house and never had a problem) and the occasional car window being smashed.
In NYC, especially Manhattan although the same applies to the outer boroughs, unless you live around a more touristy area then you don't even think about it. In Boston even less so besides downtown.
I don't think trying to contain people to specific areas is a good solution. There's obviously a greater social issue across the US and other developed nations and it's a very hard problem to start solving, but I would guess that most cities continue to ignore it as long as its easy for the majority of the population to ignore it.
> I don't think trying to contain people to specific areas is a good solution.
Hamsterdam
> I've heard people complaining about hot dog vendors on the street as some kind of public nuisance
Screw them, we need more hot dog vendors. To me they are the symbol of a multimodal city (if I am bastardizing terminology, I don't care, legitimize it, I want fistfights over ketchup). Gone are the days here in Denver of Biker Jim himself serving up "the usual." Lack of hot dog vendors sure are a proxy - for 37% commercial real estate vacancy downtown. And then there is the Honduran heroin crisis evolving into a full-blown fentanyl epidemic. I suppose the golden age of WeWork was fun. So is the Coors Field - Ball Arena corridor with tons of sport tourists either high or about to be. Roma, if DHH doesn't like you we have a ripe market for pickpocketing - just watch out for the Axon cameras.
Homelessness is pretty race neutral tho? Especially in Oakland, which is incredibly race-balanced.
absolutely not, especially in the bay – people of color are way more likely to be homeless
You can start white and homeless; pretty soon you will be a person of color.
The author is complaining about people defecating in public spaces, not about graffiti.
You need some kind of proof that a homeless encampment is bad for the city or that someone might not like to be near one for reasons that might not include racism?
Visual disorder is real harm, not a proxy or suburban preference.
Encampments produce fires, needles, waste, blocked sidewalks, and local crime spikes. Surveys show high mental illness and substance use rates among the homeless. Mild climate plus weak enforcement concentrates the problem beyond local poverty levels. Treating every complaint as coded racism blocks diagnosis.
Unpermitted vendors create safety and fairness issues for taxed businesses. Illegal graffiti is vandalism that costs owners. Oakland fines them. Murals are different.
Pure tolerance by the left produced tent cities. Enforcement and treatment shows recent drops in both homelessness and crime.
People who want orderly streets are not required to absorb the costs. Working neighborhoods take most of the hit.
I dunno have you been to Vesterbro (he is talking about Copenhagen afterall)? Especially around H17? It's pretty gross. It's also spitting distance from Tivoli Gardens where you might want to take your kids out for the day.
The most objectionable thing about his post is that he's calling out gypsies specifically, but also Denmark relatively recently passed sweeping anti-begging laws kind of specifically targeting Roma people...
There are a lot of people who thrive in high trust societies and suffer in chaotic alternative. Pretending that diversity doesn't have a cost is plain wrong.
This should not have been flagged. There's not even any flagged comments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
Facts alone won't get you to answers about what you should do about something.
Whether your personal view is that the solution to low income migrants entering your country should be outright genocide, deportation, societal integration, welfare, or something else - it's not going to be based on a statement of fact.
A fact is that the elderly who have retired from the workfrorce are no longer contributing to the national wealth, they're also using the public health system more than any other demographic. Clearly we should...
I think the author is taking umbrage with DHH using the word "gypsies" where it might have been "junkies" or just "homeless".
I see it in Berlin, rise of agressive, smelly begging in U-Bahn (I witnessed a beggar actually attacking passengers, hitting a woman). People walking around having fully shit their pants. This, I presume, is tolerated in the name of individualism, that the individual is free to choose how they present themselves in the public, and walking around with pants fully shat must be some inalienable right.
Area around Kottbusser Tor reeks of urine, and there's junkies fully out of it constantly screaming and fighting. Is somehow pointing this out is shameful and racist?
“Gypsies” are a race of people. “Junkies” and homeless people are, at an individual level, not.
Homeless people and drug addicts may well be victims of circumstance or victims of society depending on your point view - or even victims of their own choices or actions - but there’s a difference between saying “this race of people is problematic” and “this class of people is problematic”.
First and foremost, if DHH meant "junkies" or "homeless" by "gypsies", a term widely regarded as derogatory used to describe Romani people [0], then already there is plenty to take umbrage with.
Second of all, homelessness and drug addiction are not moral failings. As the author says ".. there will be some who are good and some who are bad. This makes people very unlike wolves."
I ask you to question whether the people who are "...walking around having fully shit their pants" should be deported, or treated for the conditions that ail them. The people aren't to be protected on some basis of "individualism", but on the basis that they are human people. Not animals.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people
[delayed]
>I think the author is taking umbrage with DHH using the word "gypsies"
comparing them to animals and repeatedly declaring how we shoot those animals is probably also not great.
> However, in any ethnicity of people, there will be some who are good and some who are bad.
This is a strawman interpretation of anti-immigration arguments. Non-strawman anti-immigration positions are that immigrants are a problem even if they are all "good".
If you care about getting rid of "bad" people, then you have to evenhandedly apply the rule, even to those who have ethnic roots in the country going back a hundred generation: take those "bad" people too and strip them of citizenship.
Where in the world is immigration driven by "good" or "bad"; I mean, where do documents like visitor visas and residency permits lapse due to badness rather than the mere passage of time, whereby the individual not able to extent has to go, whether they are "good" or "bad"?
What is "bad"? Does "bad" have to be armed robbery? Or is someone also "bad" if they settle in Japan, and then demand that schools remove pork from school lunch?
Unwanted immigration can simply be the raw numbers: 500 immigrants not being a problem, but 500,000 being a problem, all else being held equal, including "goodness".
You can be deemed undesirable not because who you are but entirely because you're part of a group with 499,999 others. From the individual's point of view, it is unfair; that is true, and it isn't meant to be.
I think DHH's opinion is a very common sentiment in Europe. "Gypsies" are a very European thing. I wonder if there's anything similar in the US? For context for US readers; they generally exist outside of the usual social norms, and have a pretty bad reputation because of it.
This is not a defence of DHH, just providing context to his comments.
As if the social norms only flow one way (gypsies excluding themselves) and not the other way (white Europeans excluding them).
His opinion that their behavior is undesirable and should be dealt with is common.
His comparison to them as wolf-like predators (and you shoot wolves), previous posts about mass deportation and forced remigration ... no, most Europeans aren't veering strongly into hard-right territory.
DHH’s blog post was, to put it simply, spot on. You disagree with that, and that’s fine.
But to cancel a subscription for another service entirely, because someone used a blog platform of the same provider to publish something you were repulsed by – this seems like a really bizarre way of managing your emotion. By this logic I should feel compelled to delete my HN account, delete all my social media and cancel all press subscriptions…
DHH is the owner of the so called 'provider'
DHH co-owns 37signals, the company that created hey.com.
DHH is the creator of Hey.
One of the many holes in DHH's claim about wolves, sheep, and gypsies is that wolves are not the sort of low-dimensional archetype he uses to support his narrative.
If you're very literal like me, you take that to mean wolves, the mammal; a predatory animal living within a food web, fulfilling a particular role at its trophic level which is ultimately beneficial to the system it's a part of.
Wolves don't independently get 'out of control' such that they need to be shot. This has been demonstrated across North America and Europe. The perception of wolves being out of control is largely subjective and misguided, and the result of 1. humans encroaching on wild land, 2. human activity limiting wolves' access to food, and 3. humans fearing wolves and wanting there to be fewer of them.
Through this lens, comparing immigrants to wolves is absurd. It becomes clear that DHH is discarding a lot of context in order to weave a fearful narrative which uses invalid, fictional mechanisms to make his point.
The use of the terms gypsies and sheep also comes with issues. It's a poor piece of writing, lacks any compelling substance (assuming you aren't swayed by him), and largely demonstrates that he's not particularly thoughtful about this while lacking the self-awareness and comprehension to notice how weak his position is.
It's okay to want reduced immigration. It's okay to want to preserve certain things in your society. It's not necessary or reasonable to do so through this lens, however. There are plenty of compelling arguments to make for regulating these systems in local, regional, and national government. It's okay to want that. When you start describing immigrants as dangerous animals, you've gone many steps too far off of a sensible path.
I also understand the use of fables to communicate moral and ethical stories, which seems to be a component in his narrative. However, he steps out of that bound when he talks about literal wolves (and the need to shoot them). Yet fables are a coarse tool, not an intricate one, and they're far too reductive to support an argument against immigration across a continent. It's an absurd position to argue from, and in terms of narrative, it makes DHH seem either obtuse or very hateful and disingenuous. I've never read anything of his since this piece.
Hey is the only way I can have a public, usable email account anymore.
I maintain a self-hosted whitelist-only email account for sensitive work but email for other purposes just isn't tenable anymore.
If someone else comes along with a better product maybe I'll consider it.
I like Fastmail
Sigh.
While every wolf may be a predator - that does not necessarily mean they are they are dangerous to all potential types of prey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Cry_Wolf
Isn't prey by definition in danger.
If you honestly believe what you're saying you're going to have a REALLY BAD TIME in the wild.
Depends on the environment - in that book for example, Arctic wolves were not the cause of large (in physical size - the caribou) prey animal population decline, even though the "feelings" of the average person was that they must be the reason.
Outside of fiction, wolves are not ravenous beasts that hunt everything and anything in sight.
Predators do tend to go for the weak/sick, older or younger/inexperienced targets - they aren't stupid.
You're looking at the problem from the 5,000 foot view.
Prey is whatever is at risk of being consumed. I have made no attempt at classifying wolves behavior in my comment.
I was disappointed to read this and hear language and using allusions that parallel arguments made by hate groups.
I think DHH can take a stance that overly lax immigration policy has led to issues, if that is what he believes. That may be true, I don’t know, and I have no issues with policy debate around that, but directly comparing a specific race of emigrant people as wolves preying on native peoples, sheep is pretty gross.
It is a long blog post, but the controversy seems to center on DHH’s language and reasoning about Roma people.
My reading is that he used those examples deliberately to raise a broader issue: some people are tired of being told to ignore problems they can see and experience, whether that means feeling unsafe while walking through a city or attending a Pride parade (assume that are the “wolfs”), or being frustrated that nearly every item at Target is locked up (“gypsies”).
To be clear, I am not expressing an opinion on whether his argument is right or wrong.
The article says:
> You do not need to deport all of them to deport the ones who "take over public spaces".
And continues to assume that DHH is talking about mass deportation. He's not. He says:
> When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
He's not saying we should deport _all_ gypsies just because one group is taking over public space.
the discussed blogpost https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
[deleted]
Libelous. He never says to shoot Roma. He says to deport foreigners who sleep in parks.
He does say to shoot the wolves. And the wolves are the “gypsies” in the analogy he is explicitly drawing. The commenter you’re responding to was highlighting the parallelism not literally saying “he said to shoot people”
He says to deport literally an entire ethnic group independent of whether they happen to sleep in parks, which is the entire point being made by the article linked to by this page where we're commenting. The comment you're responding to also restates this, without making any claims about whether he said to shoot people, so your objection doesn't really make any sense in that regard either.
1. Comment says “shoot them” refers to Roma. Totally false and intentionally misleading.
2. Literally the only place the word deport is used in the post is here: “ When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them”
Please quote where he says to deport all Roma/gypsies.
he pairs the concepts
even if that WERE what he said, it would still be an incorrect and outsized response based in racial animus
Disgusting. I want to say that DHH has fallen so far, but I don't actually see any evidence that he wasn't this hateful inside his heart years ago.
Here he was last year championing the Far Right in England https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
Oh, wow.
> large gathering of perfectly normal, peaceful Brits
Let's just say that when a Tommy Robinson crowd walk into a pub, the perfectly normal, peaceful Brits look for the exits.
Yup. I followed his terrible behavior since his 2021 crashout, when he caused a third of his employees to leave his company, and he's only gotten louder and worse since. Looking back further, I can't see him actually supporting anything pro-social.
From the blog:
> They're still reeling from the Pakistani rape gangs that were left free to terrorize cities like Rotherham and Rochdale for years on end with horror-movie-like scenes of the most despicable, depraved abuse of British girls.
I can see if you feel this was fabricated by the author, you'd have the negative reaction you're having. But this is much-reported, much-discussed fact. Maybe HN needs to read news sources besides HN.
DHH has had a long decline, in my personal regard. A lot of things I ignored or gave grace for because of his early influence were actually clear signals about his fundamental beliefs.
Given the state of the world it doesn’t seem that the wolves are the ones out of control
This whole article seems like a straw man.
Chad seems to be arguing: 1. DHH thinks all gypsies are bad, therefor 2. DHH does not see Roma as individual people, therefor 3. DHH is a bad person.
I read DHH's blog as: 1. It should still be illegal to camp in parks, therefor 2. People who do camp in parks should be housed, therefor 3. Foreigners who refuse housing should be deported.
I don't even know where to begin with this comment...
My problem with the part about housing is that DHH acts as if cities have enough shelters to accommodate everyone and these 'gypsies' are refusing to go there. I don't buy that for a second.
I was really wanting to read this, I had a morbid interest in Hey.com's cancellation policy. After 3+ paragraphs and an effin PG quote, there still is no point.
There once were angry submissions (or comments?) here about how hard it is to cancel NYT.
I was expecting the Hey-version of that, instead I got long-winded prose that sounds like a bunch of college boys trying to sound smart.
No thanks.
I guess the E-mail-service is still overpriced due to them believing in non-existent value of their web client.
If that's the point of the article, sorry, I didn't make it far enough.
The article doesn't mention Hey or the cancellation anywhere after the PG paragraph.
This article is about someone cancelling their subscription to software that was written by someone who is not in favor of allowing a population of immigrants frequently associated with criminal behavior to remain in Denmark.
The author argues in favor of "individuated enforcement" wherein deportation is conditioned on the degree to which a migrant has contributed positively to the country.
"your neighborhood is taken over by migrants" is a wild way of saying "associated with criminal behavior". This is yikes and so is your analysis.
Google Search: Pakistani Rape Gangs London
The blog post literally equates “gypsies” with animals.
It’s not difficult. It’s beyond yikes territory: it’s his now typical xenophobia and racism.
Now we know how the 1930s felt, I guess. Wealthy fair-haired motorsport brat edgelords were the leading edge of fascism then too.
You don't need to express the issues like DHH did, but there are problems in the EU that weren't there 20 years ago.
The former European Community core states are too small and cannot handle the influx of millions from the East and the South.
The core states should leave the EU and reestablish the former European Community, which would help the populations as opposed to multinational locust companies.
It isn't fair that the whole world (mind you, including rich foreigners) buys up apartments, takes jobs and displaces the original population.
One thing this post never does is actually meaningfully argue with the core idea of the post that so outraged them.
Which is: If someone comes illegally to your country and ends up sleeping in parks, they should be deported.
I don’t know if I agree with that but the post seems to take it for granted that any reasonable person cannot.
To me this is more a fashion statement than an argument. Advocating deportations is automatically bad, using the word “gypsy” is automatically offensive. It’s silly. Pretty much everyone has some line of behavior at which they advocate deportation, and can anyone here who is upset actually explain why “Roma” is less offensive than “Gypsy”? There are PhDs in Eastern European history who can’t do that.
>created by industry legend DHH
DHH = david heinemeier hansson (ruby on rails creator)
I wish people would get down their thrones and go to live near a gipsy camp before bitching about tolerance, I see all these champions of acceptance always living 20 metro stops from the last homeless
Yeah. I watched Seattle slide downhill, and I decided to leave.
Find needles on the beach multiple times, and you simple stop caring about reasons and want action.
Far right is a label being used for normal things like secure borders and safe cities.
Funny how Obama said the very same things and I'm pretty sure he wasn't far right.
The article literally is making an argument to deport the people you're complaining about, just not literally everyone else who happens to be from the same ethnic group. I don't really understand why you'd have a problem with them saying that if that's what you actually care about.
I think a lot of folks - myself included - canceled our Hey subscriptions years ago when DHH said some other unfortunate things.
I don't have to agree with everyone on everything, not even people I do business with. But I do try to limit supporting people who have actively advocated for things that harm my family. Say what you will about Apple (where I transitioned), but they're the "least evil" option from my perspective.
Others are of course welcome to their own perspectives and choices.
> I'm a big believer in live-and-let-live. That's why I don't have bad feelings towards DHH. I definitely don't believe in trying to change people's minds by shouting at them or shaming them.
Hence the blog post.
Where is the shouting and shaming in the blog post?
...thats his point. He doesn't want to shout and shame. So he wrote a blog post.
"Hence" means, "therefore", as in "I didn't want to shout and shame, therefore I wrote this blog post"
This is trying far too hard to be charitable. Mistake theory is great, and it's good that the article mentions it, but it then also presents sufficient evidence to prove, or at least substantiate, malice. At this point not having "bad feelings toward DHH" is itself a "Missing Mood". At any rate, though, the author took the correct action.
Wolves are also pretty important, by the way. Hopefully we all know that by now?
> This is trying far too hard to be charitable. Mistake theory is great, and it's good that the article mentions it, but it then also presents sufficient evidence to prove, or at least substantiate, malice.
The benefit of the doubt only exists as long as there is doubt. Once there's an overwhelming body of evidence that removes any of it, continuing to give it is pretty suspicious, like you mention.
Yeah, personally, it's hard to say "live and let live" about someone who doesn't want a people to live.
Sure but I don't want wolves eating my children.
Cool, way to prioritize your opinions. Now you just have to find an email platform run by people you always agree with about everything.
Based on the content of the post, it seems like it would be adequate to find an email platform run by people not vocally calling for the ethnic cleansing of minorities.
He is calling for the deportation of illegal immigrants who sleep in parks.
Cloudflare, in contrast, actively works with the CCP which is doing actual ethnic cleansing in Tibet and Xinjiang. But they are harder to cancel aren’t they.
I’m a pragmatist. I’m not going to drive myself crazy interrogating the opinions of every service provider I use. I don’t know about the Fastmail founder or CEO’s beliefs and don’t want to.
> He is calling for the deportation of illegal immigrants who sleep in parks.
No, that's what this article is calling for. The complain they have is that DHH called for deporting the entire ethnic group independent of whether they're sleeping in parks.
He is calling for deportation of homeless migrants.
He nowhere says they are illegal immigrants.
Thats not an accurate framing. There are some disagreements that are red lines and others that are not. I think Chrono Trigger is one of the greatest games of all time, and someone disagreeing with me on that point is not a big deal. A hyperbolic example of the other side would be a Nazi's opinion on Jewish people. Given the nature of that opinion, not only would I disagree with them it would also be completely appropriate to fully disassociate with them and highly encourage others to do so.
People draw lines in different places, and what you are doing here is implying that it is unreasonable for people to take that level of issue with DHH's "gypsy" comment. I disagree. I think its completely reasonable to view that as unacceptable and to disassociate from that person.
You only need to find an email platform run by people you agree with more, no? I'd vouch for proton mail here.
People like you always say to vote with your wallets until people start doing that.
That would be Migadu, btw. But also plenty of people left them over their vague anti-violence pledge which many deem anti-Free Speech.
/s I left Migadu for Hey.
You don’t have to agree on everything but there are redlines
Your comment suggests that all disagreements are equal. I would get email service from someone who likes Ruby more than Python, even if I disagree. I, like the author of the post, wouldn't get email from someone I knew was virulently racist as DHH is.
Your left nav doesn't have a scrollbar and doesn't fit on a 16:9 laptop screen.
I guess it's a flaw with Obsidian Publish, what the author is using to post their thoughts.
Should be using world.hey.com.
It is sad that such a song and dance is required when anyone with half a brain can read the racism in DHH's post.
Imagine a scenario that a black family moved into your neighborhood and started causing a bunch of problems. There are no other black people in the neighborhood.
It should take you a picosecond to figure out which one of these is obviously racist and which isn't:
"We need to remove the black people from our neighborhood"
"We need to remove the new family from our neighborhood"
People like "well he has a good point they are causing problems" so technically the set of "black people" and "people who are currently causing problems in our neighborhood" are the same set. This is irrelevant.
This is a wholly uncharitable strawman of DHH's post.
I used to admire that guy. I don't understand why anyone still works at Basecamp with posts like this to be honest. How do people justify it to themselves? Maybe it's just harder to switch jobs now with AI, I don't know.
Perhaps they agree with his opinion or they don't care about it?
Maybe it's simply because his opinion is shared by many people and I would even say that he is pretty mild in expressing it?
Maybe a lot of people actually agree with him, and would rather we expect more of people, rather than simply defining criminal activity as an unconscious effect of one's being somehow oppressed, or one's great-great-grandparents being oppressed, or whatever.
The culture in question have been infamous for centuries for their value system which is incompatible with most others. Just as it's okay for devout Islamists to find the whole American value system disgusting and want nothing to do with it, it's okay for DHH and other Westerners to find the Roma value system disgusting. It's a belief system they choose, it's not something like skin that people cannot change.
In America there's a lot of ethical ambiguity given how recently most current residents' ancestors arrived. But in Denmark? Did the Roma build that society? (Possible) EU citizenship aside, I find it hard to judge Danes who feel that ethically, they don't have a right to degrade that society with crime and vagrancy. Same as I don't blame English people who don't like certain things going on there.
The article being referred to says "When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them" - it doesn't say "you deport everyone of that race," it's about the people causing problems. If you allow literally any behavior, no matter how antisocial, bad actors will ruin everything for everyone. Only the most obtuse person doesn't recognize the truth of that, deep down.
If anyone wants a great mail client, I highly recommend Mailmate which among other things lets you write messages in markdown: https://freron.com/ it’s maintained by a solo dev for 15+ years and charges a fair price
If you read canceling as part of the "cancel culture" and not canceling the subscription, then this two statements seam contradictory
> Cancelling "Hey"
> I definitely don't believe in trying to change people's minds by shouting at them or shaming them
I'm not a native speaker but
> I definitely don't believe in trying to change people's minds by shouting at them or shaming them
seems to me like they want to make a (polite) argument instead of explicitly calling them “heretic” to quote the article.
They also quite obviously seem to refer to cancellling the subscription here and not trying to invoke "cancel culture". The first few paragraphs make this quite clear.
I am a native speaker, I agree with this assessment.
I mean, okay, yes, if you completely disregard what the author is actually saying they mean by using the word in the article and choose a different meaning, then it doesn't make sense. I'm not sure why that's worth pointing out when you wouldn't be able to get to the second statement without him already detailing the monetary subscription and literally following it up with saying that they're only making a financial decision, not a personal one.
The blogpost has the attitude problem of virtue signaling about decisions that has zero cost to themselves, about a communal kin based socialist society them know little about.
Normal working families with kids live next to these parks and rely on them as open space, it is part of the Danish socialist welfare system and care for the working man. Defacation and open cooking plus thrash by not your own weak but foreigners has real cost to those that can’t afford to move.
> Normal working families with kids live next to these parks and rely on them as open space, it is part of the Danish socialist welfare system and care for the working man. Defacation and open cooking plus thrash by not your own weak but foreigners has real cost to those that can’t afford to move.
The article made it pretty clear that they're not arguing against deporting people who are camping in parks though, and just arguing against generalizing the issue as being about the entire ethnic group. Are you claiming that somehow having a communal kin based socialist society makes it impossible to have, using the term in the article, "individuated enforcement"?
Downvoted for 'socialist society'.
May want to read the Wikipedia entries on both Denmark and socialism.
It's about the author cancelling their subscription to "Hey."