I am American, and haven't used Ruby since two jobs ago, so don't have a dog in this fight. Still, going off of https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 which is supposedly DHH's own words on his personal blog, you get, repeatedly in full so I can't be accused of taking it out of context:
> As soon as I was old enough to travel on my own, London was where I wanted to go. Compared to Copenhagen at the time, there was something so majestic about Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and even the Tube around the turn of the millenium. Not just because their capital is twice as old as ours, but because it endured twice as much, through the Blitz and the rest of it, yet never lost its nerve. I thought I might move there one day.
> 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.
Now, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it's pretty easy to interpret that as non-white people shouldn't be seen in London. That's not exactly "you, personally, don't belong in public spaces?", but it's seems fairly close to me, to anyone that isn't white. I am open to hearing alternate interpretations of what I quoted from DHH's personal blog though.
> > Not just because their capital is twice as old as ours
Yeah, that's kind of the point. Preserving a culture that is several times as old as the USA.
> > Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits.
> [there] aren't as many white people in London as there used to be. Now, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it's pretty easy to interpret that as non-white people shouldn't be seen in London.... I am open to hearing alternate interpretations
The "alternate interpretation" is that "native Brits" means "native Brits", not "white people". Per your source, in the time frame DHH is talking about, the population was still specifically about 3/5 British. As in, English (and possibly Welsh and Scottish, although I imagine they mostly keep further north). So presumably that's what he actually observed.
A Dane isn't going to see this as a matter of race. Denmark is still about 5/6 ethnic Danish, and a big chunk of immigrants and their descendants are European. The concept of race is just not something you think about when you aren't exposed to it all the time. The difference between an ethnic Dane and and ethnic Englishman is salient to someone like that, in a way that a typical American can't be expected to understand.
We're talking here about people who are in their ancestral homeland. They are the natives of the area; they don't have anywhere to go back to. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxons have been there since the 5th century — far longer than the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_people have been in New Zealand, for example. And London was founded by the Romans, even longer ago than that. And those groups were both fully admixed with the indigenous population long before the establishment of modern immigration policy. So now we have recognizable "native Brits" who look different from modern-day "native Italians" or "native Germans". Not to mention, those indigenous island folk would presumably have been quite pale themselves.
If someone were pointing out that the settlements of Turtle Island were no longer full of First Nations peoples, would you make that out to be about race? Rounding all of this off to "white people" is a projection of an Americentric view of race, and frankly offensive. It's strange to me how there are people who put effort into knowing about the cultural and ethnic and religious distinctions found across, say, South Asia, and seem to think themselves morally superior for caring; but couldn't be bothered to do the same for Europe.
DHH chose to link to Wikipedia's page about ethnic groups in London, which is literally about race and ethnicity. Not accent, cultural practices, or national identity. His use of "native Brits" is telling, especially when he follows it with "[a] statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now." The implication is clear when you contrast this language with demographic data about non-white populations.
Reading further into DHH's blog post reveals even more troubling context. He describes Tommy Robinson organized marches as being "normal everyday Brits." When white supremacist, xenophobic marches are your idea of "normal everyday Brits," the mask rather slips, doesn't it? He attempts to equate these marches with legitimate free speech cases like Graham Linehan, trying to make it all seem like reasonable pushback, as if this is just another historical moment of the isles being "invaded". The rhetoric is telling.
It takes DHH only 701 words before he's linking to articles about Pakistani rape gangs. At this point, we're not dealing with subtle implications anymore.
The argument about Danish cultural context doesn't hold water either. Denmark has its own charged political discourse around Middle Eastern and African immigrants. And DHH has lived in the US for roughly 20 years so he's well aware of how these discussions are perceived.
As for the Anglo-Saxon history lesson: they were themselves migrants who mixed with existing populations. London was founded by Romans (also migrants!) and has been a multicultural trading hub for over a thousand years. What "native British" golden age is DHH mourning exactly? The 1950s? The Victorian era built on colonial extraction? When precisely was London purely "native British"?
> So now we have recognizable 'native Brits' who look different from modern day 'native Italians' or 'native Germans'.
I'd be curious to hear more about these supposedly "recognizable" distinctions. This sounds remarkably similar to certain early 20th century anthropological theories that we've since... reconsidered.
Why should one trust her? What's her full name and the reason for deferring to her expertise?
And yes I'm aware her posts have made it to the top of HN many times in the past. That I've seen, they've all been unhelpful vague-posts like this one.
Maybe she's actually a real expert I should be listening to! But layer upon layer of vague "if you know, you know" do not make that case.
Hamas is not an "Islamist" organisation (I hate that word BTW, as it's an Israeli invention to demonise Muslims).
The article you linked to is pure propaganda - Hamas' charter changed a long, long time ago. OTOH, Israeli politicians literally say genocidal things on a near daily basis - it's a deeply sick society.
> The article you linked to is pure propaganda - Hamas' charter changed a long, long time ago
No, it's not "propaganda". It's factual reporting that happens to be inconvenient to Hamas apologists.
It's also corroborated by the atrocities against innocent civilians that these monsters gleefully filmed themselves committing on October 7th, such as attacking children with grenades.
Islamist is used widely to mean Islamic supremacist. And Hamas absolutely is that. There are non-violent Islamists. Hamas is also jihadist, so they are violent Islamists.
Hamas' charter was changed recently when it was rewritten by a UColumbia grad. They still openly talk about destroying Israel and killing Jews. Learn Arabic, they don't use cover words there.
It wasn't changed "recently", it was 2017! Hamas, unlike many Israelis, are not supremacists; they lived peacefully alongside Christians in Gaza for example, and explicitly state they have no beef with Judaism.
> They still openly talk about destroying Israel and killing Jews
No, they really don't? Meanwhile, Israeli politicians talk daily of committing war crimes and genocide, but somehow that's fine because it's against Arabs?
Sir, 2017 is recent. And it is clear from their actions and speech that their intent has not changed, even if they have whitewashed their written calls for the extermination of Israel.
> they lived peacefully alongside Christians in Gaza
Christians are .13% of Gaza. Come on. If the Christians had any real power, they'd crush them just like they want to crush the Jews. They'd make it totally unworkable just like in Lebanon.
> No, they really don't? Meanwhile, Israeli politicians talk daily of committing war crimes and genocide, but somehow that's fine because it's against Arabs?
The far-right who does so, no that's not ok. But the IDF does not act in such a way.
> The blood of the Palestinian civilians that Hamas waged war from behind is absolutely on Hamas's hands.
Everyone is responsible for their own actions. Thousands of Palestinians children are dead, and for every single one, Israel could have chosen not to kill them, and the decision to do so is on them.
They had no choice. If you're Natanyahu on October 8, 2023, and the reports of the Hamas massacres on civilians come in, there is almost no leeway for reacting in a way differently than how the Israeli government and the IDF reacted. What I've heard from "pro-Palestine" (= pro Hamas) supporters as alternatives so far was utterly unconvincing, basically variations of the following:
- The "Israel should disband itself" reply: Give in to terrorists' demands, give them their country, and humbly negotiated for a freeing of the hostages without any military response. Hamas remains in charge as military dictatorship of Gaza.
- The military genius reply: I would have sent only special forces to Gaza to go after the Hamas leadership and free all hostages. No civilians would have been harmed and all collateral damage is avoided.
Neither of these are even remotely realistic. What was ordered and how events unfolded was more or less like any other country would have reacted. Two goals: #1 Destroy Hamas, #2 Free the hostages.
The problem right now with the hostage deal is that it leaves Hamas in charge. That's a huge problem.
They had a choice every single time they dropped a bomb! In fact, "the IDF is the most moral army in the world" supporters would like us to believe that very often, they chose not to.
If they want credit for the ones not dropped, they need to take responsibility for the ones they did. Not really that hard!
This is important because "it's all on Hamas's hands" is really just a refusal to engage with the ethical questions at all. Folks could (and clearly would!) say that, whether one child is killed, or a million. It's just a question of when it becomes untenable to brush the question away.
The idea that "this is more or less like any other country would have reacted" is the same trap; this makes Israel no worse or better than any other country, and conveniently means we don't have to ask ourselves about the morality of it all.
> If you're Natanyahu on October 8, 2023, and the reports of the Hamas massacres on civilians come in, there is almost no leeway for reacting in a way differently than how the Israeli government and the IDF reacted.
Any lack of political leeway to react differently is squarely within Israel's ethical score card. I.e. "Israel as an entity is not responsible for its choices because the entities constituent parts forced those choices" is reductive.
> The problem right now with the hostage deal is that it leaves Hamas in charge. That's a huge problem.
That this is the current outcome is maybe an indication that your framework of the three possible options (what Israel did + two strawmen) is lacking.
Israel was and still is fully justified to go to war against Hamas. You're the one who's dodging moral questions. You also fail to present any reasonable argument, only the usual sentiments and hand-waving. That's because you're unable to state any realistic path that the Prime Minister of Israel could have taken other than the one he took. That's exactly my point.
Do you think Palestine has a future under a Hamas government? If you do, you're supporting Hamas. If you don't, you need to come up with a plan to oust Hamas. Sadly, any realistic option would involve high collateral damage because Gaza is a densely populated area and the Al Aqsa brigades were comprised of about 40k prepared fighters with extensive tunnel systems.
I'm tired of hearing terrorist apologists coming up with vague "in between" replies that ultimately fall into one of the categories I've mentioned. If you can't even state how you would have dealt with the October 7 attacks, you should shut up.
At least I don't agree IDF is the most moral army. Armies and morality at wartime is an oxymoron. IDF retaliated with brutal force, and thats the fact. There is no defending IDF, just like there is no defending Hamas. There is no defending any war. In wartime, it is foolish to ask one party to be restrained. War is about military might. It is good for nothing, so everyone must be ultra careful not to trigger one.
Yep. Everyone is responsible for their own actions. Hamas could've just surrendered and returned hostages. Before every single Palestinian child lost life, Hamas could've chosen to do that. So its on them
Media Bias Fact Check ranks Reason as a "Right-Center" biased website with a "High" rating for factual reporting: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/reason/
They certainly approach stories with an editorial perspective, but they're generally factually reliable and hardly "incredibly slanted".
Except in this article, where they assert that the funds were correctly reported to the government with no explanation of what that claim even means. And they’re not saying that the defendant claimed to have reported; Reason themselves are making the claim.
Like most publications, they have editorial constraints, and usually choose to discuss the breaking news rather than rehash older facts. Reason has been covering this highly complex and lengthy case for nearly a decade, they have published dozens of articles about it, unfortunately for you they did not address your specific question in detail in this particular article. I think if you dig a bit deeper you'll find answers.
edit - 2 minutes of searching past Reason articles:
That Lacey was convicted of "international concealment money laundering" is bizarre, since the money transfer was not concealed: His lawyer informed the IRS about it, as required by law. And it was not made for nefarious purposes, according to Scottsdale lawyer John Becker's trial testimony. Lacey had needed some place to park his savings after U.S. banks, scared by a years-long propaganda crusade against Backpage, had decided doing business with the company or its associates was a reputational risk. So Becker and another lawyer advised Lacey to deposit the money—$17 million, on which taxes had been paid—with a foreign bank.
It's hard to see how Lacey conducted a financial transaction "to conceal or disguise the nature, the location, the source, the ownership, or the control of the proceeds of specified unlawful activity," even if you accept the government's premise that this money was derived from unlawful activity. And, to be clear, I don't accept that premise, since Backpage's business should have been protected by the First Amendment (not to mention Section 230 of federal communications law).
Party stances are always going to reflect the country they operate in.
On an absolute scale Republican’s support for expanding Medicare drug coverage was left leaning compared to at the time current law even though it’s to the right of many countries and Democrat’s stance on the issue.
yeah, the left/right dichotomy is gradually becoming outright meaningless - usually just sloppily slapped labels that fit an agenda. Important nuances go completely unnoticed in the left/right universe, like libertarians siding with communists, and neocons siding with democrats - or whoever thinks regime changing from above is a good idea. Anarchism, militarism, libertarianism, conservativism, fascism, welfarestateism, social democracy, etc, these are all useful terms. Left and right; not so much.
The Left-Right bias is more clear when you look at the general population vs specific interest groups.
Voters in low population states have outsized political power and therefore get handouts. Same deal with elderly voters because they vote more often and everyone expects to get old Meanwhile groups who vote less often like 18-24 year olds get fucked over.
There's a few distinct axes commonly labelled "left". The Democrats are quite left on some axes (e.g. concern about racism) and less so on others (e.g. siezing the means of production).
The Left no longer means pushing for worker unionization or trying to expand welfare programs, at least not in the rich countries. This traditional left has become fringe almost everywhere in the top 20 economies.
The Left is now a mostly academic movement dealing in obscure words.
>The Left no longer means pushing for worker unionization or trying to expand welfare programs, at least not in the rich countries. [...] The Left is now a mostly academic movement dealing in obscure words.
This is as factual as rain is dry.
>This traditional left has become fringe almost everywhere in the top 20 economies.
What is traditional left? Marxism-Leninism? Socialism is and has been a wide spectrum since before the Russian revolution. Right now we're seeing an uptick in extreme right tendencies in Europe but top 20 economy countries such as the UK, France, Brazil and Germany do have solid leftist parties.
The traditional left advocates for the rights of those who work for a living via collective action and organizing of working people, and attempts to break up concentrations of corporate power.
That’s hardly the only things traditional left advocated for, they also wanted things unions could help provide like safer working conditions, vacation days, etc.
Initially it was an offshoot of the abolitionist movement which took a hard look at property rights in a broader context but very much still wanted to abolish slavery and even serfdom. They also wanted social security style safety nets with pensions and compensation for injured workers and their families etc. Western democracies essentially adopted most of those standards to the point where they became invisible in modern politics.
FDR for example really gutted the socialist movement in the US with the “New Deal” to the point where it largely stopped being a talking point. More recently having gutted unions, with the gig economy sidestepping many worker protections, and 401k replacing pensions, etc has started to reawaken some of the west’s latent socialist tendencies.
The leftists I know are socialists, anarchists, and communists. They are very much doing the work both politically (I live in the Pacific Northwest, where socialists are on the ballot regularly) and locally (e.g. via Food Not Bombs or restoring land to natural states).
There definitely are academics, in organizations like the DSA. But there's practical folks too.
Virtually no one who calls themselves socialists in America are actually socialists. They’re social libertarians and neoliberals cosplaying as socialists.
You can’t have a workable left-wing movement that prioritizes social libertarianism because workers invariably will be more traditional than elites. You can’t tell factory workers they can’t say this or that and that they need to learn to like foreigners. You can think it, but you can't say it, and you certainly can't call them "racist, sexist, and homophobic." If your platform morally reforming workers and their manners becomes core to your platform, then it's not a workable left-wing platform. All you'll do is split the workers and push them away: https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/postcard-from-the-hispanic-....
What you'll end up with is a coalition where economic left-wingers are the rump of a neoliberal party. The neoliberals will never give the left-wingers anything, because they don't have to. Neoliberals have no reason to do anything other than pay lip service to leftists who can't actually unify and rally the mass of workers.
“They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appealing to emotion or stereotypes) to favor conservative causes“
So, when they present facts, they surround them with emotional words to try to sway opinion.
Is this a principle you apply universally? For example, do you oppose U.S. companies providing technical support for Ukraine's justified war aims, such as Starlink?
I've seen no indication that simply protesting is seen as "not ok". But trespassing on private property, or worse blocking bridges, goes quite beyond "protest" and freedom of speech.
It's called civil disobedience, and you opt into the inconvenience when your government acts truly in a truly odious manner to the sensibilities of the governed.
Google isn't really a government... so, civil disobedience doesn't really work here.
Google, as well as any other employer is required by many different regulations to both comply with government rulings and to give certain means for its employees to appeal / protest whatever the company is doing. Staging a protest inside CEO office isn't a legal way to protest.
It makes sense to protest in such way against an overstepping government because there's no other means to call upon the government to change its course (similar to how there's no way to deal with ethics violations of the supreme court, since there's no court that can judge them). When it comes to a company, things are different because there's a higher power that regulates what companies can do.
The protesters come across as annoying and arrogant for wanting to cut corners in the process of appealing their company decisions and for putting themselves on display rather than trying to use the proper channels and working towards the benefit of those affected / involved.
It's kind of like as if I had a dispute with my landlord over who has to fix the plumbing, and instead of reporting them to the proper authority, I'd block traffic on a busy highway demanding "justice" for the broken plumbing.
>Google isn't really a government... so, civil disobedience doesn't really work here.
Google is a multi-national corporation, which based on jurisdiction, essentially makes it an arm of the local government.
>Google, as well as any other employer is required by many different regulations to both comply with government rulings and to give certain means for its employees to appeal / protest whatever the company is doing. Staging a protest inside CEO office isn't a legal way to protest.
You feel compelled to constrain things to the bounds of legality in a game that has already breached the boundaries of illegality (Genocide and territory annexation, boundary redrawing is illegal by all contemporary standards). Finite thinking in an infinite context.
>The protesters come across as annoying and arrogant for wanting to cut corners in the process of appealing their company decisions and for putting themselves on display rather than trying to use the proper channels and working towards the benefit of those affected / involved.
Quote "proper channels" result in memory holing or ignoring doing anything. Hierarchical power structures ensure this. Arrogance is a subjective eval on your part. Annoying is accurate, but rather the point. I'd call it "pointedly and unambiguously escalating".
>It's kind of like as if I had a dispute with my landlord over who has to fix the plumbing, and instead of reporting them to the proper authority, I'd block traffic on a busy highway demanding "justice" for the broken plumbing.
Landlord disputes have a pre-defined process. War crimes, and ongoing facilitation thereof does not until long after the critical period wherein continued or amplified loss of life can be prevented has already passed.
People called a spade a spade and more importantly, did something about it. The fact we're trying to convince one another of the illegitimacy of their means just demonstrates that to a degree, their act is having the desired effect. People are questioning the status quo.
You need to remember, "the Government" is just a nominative signpost for the set of entities through which a collective projects power. In that sense, a corporation is even more "the Government" than any one of us could ever be.
I do think there is a big difference between an invasion and the war that is happening here. Yes I realize both are a war, but there is a big distinction.
That being said, if we need to apply it universally and avoid situations like this that may be the better situation. Once we start making special cases we open it up to this exact situation.
By the same logic, a far-right person could complain about a "veneer of neutrality" in the mainstream press's coverage of, say, the Proud Boys. But that would be ridiculous.
Some things really are objectively stupid as hell.
I have no opinion on the Proud Boys because I have no access to untainted information on them. But in general you should strongly distrust news orgs talking about anything with political or culture war implications. Every single case I've had personal experience with has had massively misleading coverage.
It's a device for smuggling in a new concept (enforcement of equal outcomes) using a word that sounds similar enough to "equality", representing an older and unobjectionable concept (equal opportunity), that it should provoke minimal opposition.
To whom? To the 'donor' (as it were) it's probably (jurisdiction varies, IANA tax advisor, etc.) a decent inheritance tax avoidance (obligatory 'as opposed to evasion') - helps out a cause he believes in, while leaving the capital (hopefully/in theory) for his inheritants.
To the recipient.. I don't know why you'd prefer it to a (stipulation-free) donation, but in general it's probably easier to get big loans than big donations.
Since it's 0% interest you could probably make enough profit by investing it in the stock market instead that you could pay inheritance tax and still get more than the initial amount out of it after 50 years. So I would not call this a tax avoidance scheme, it seems more like "help this cause I care about and if it becomes successful enough to be able to pay my children back then that's great".
I think it actually is more helpful to the business to get a loan instead of a donation. With a huge donation you can do whatever you want with it and may overinvest or spend wastefully, until the cash reserves run out. A loan means that the business has X-many years to be self-sufficient. So I think it helps the business's culture as it's developing.
This is like the awful paternalistic version of my thought. Ha. My guess is that there's a implied agreement, "keep to your promises about how Signal will be run and developed and eventually the loan will be forgiven altogether; try to burn me on those promises, like Zuck did, and that'll be a $100 million gamble." And sure, with inflation, the longer they're around, the less daunting the figure will be, but that may be the point, or the loan could be refreshed with more money that just keeps the prospect of repayment a perpetually serious prospect (it was doubled once already).
Oh, I like that explanation better actually. They very well may have an agreement like that where he'll forgive the loan as long as he's still happy with how they're running it
This is an extremely good point. So many small idealistic companies are bought out, with the "baggage" of a big loan anyone who did want to buy out Signal for profit would have to now pay 100 million dollars.
If I had oodles of money I'd probably do this, "I'm just giving you this money now, but if you got bought up by someone without those same ideals they need to pay up.”
Given it’s the former WhatsApp CEO even more reason to be skeptical.
I'm reading it as, "Given it’s the former WhatsApp CEO [who's already been burned once, they have] even more reason to be skeptical [of acquirers holding to the values of the acquired]".
Loans get paid back... donations don't. An organization that takes donations (like wikipedia) will have to keep asking for donations... while an organization that has a debt can take the time to figure out a revenue model not driven by ads to allow them to repay the debt.
Wikipedia's average donation is tiny. That's why they keep asking. The way you've written this it suggests that if instead of giving wikipedia a $2 donation, we have them $2 no-interest loans, weed be helping them prepare for the future and they wouldn't have to ask for more donations (or loans) from us. That's not how it works.
