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There's some weird opinions coming from mostly DHH. My personal take is that they're blatantly racist, but everyone can have their own

Here's some fun facts:

- DHH enforced a "No Politics at Work" policy.

- DHH wrote a post expressing that he wouldn't want to live in London anymore because it's "no longer full of native Brits", and expressed support for a Tommy Robinson march he called "heartwarming". Tommy Robinson is described as "an anti-Islam campaigner and one of the UK's most prominent far-right activists.". The march DHH praised featured speakers calling for ethnic cleansing via "remigration" and banning all non-Christian religions.

- DHH also promoted "demographic replacement" conspiracy theories and used language connecting immigration to crime, particularly regarding "Pakistani rape gangs" and street theft.

- DHH has been publicly critical of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. This one isn't backed by facts, so take it with a grain of salt.



Probably worth noting in this particular context:

The Ruby community in general, and the Rails community in particular, likes to style itself as people who care about people. "Matz is nice so we are nice" (MINSWAN) is a cornerstone concept that the community passes around. As a result, they have a tendency to care about this sort of thing; community standards of behavior didn't get bolted-on later, they were there at the start.

I once watched a Rails community member pretty well pillory someone for entertaining the thought experiment that if ReiserFS were more technically competent, the software-engineering community wouldn't care the creator murdered his wife and would still invite him to speaking engagements telecast from jail. It is therefore interesting to watch how the Rails community is reacting to the Rails creator having concerns not nearly as bad as killed-his-wife, but extremely disquieting nonetheless.


Cannot speak for the US, but in Europe immigration is connected to crime increase in general. The Ukraine refugees are one of few statistical exceptions.


I think a lot of people are forgetting or at least choose to ignore that DHH is Danish (and specifically a Danish expat) and is probably more inclined to have controversial views on immigration from majority Islamic countries. That's not to give his statements a pass, but to give them some needed context.

And no, I'm not saying that Danes are racist.


And, indeed, if he'd been talking about Copenhagen I suspect at least some people may have looked the other way.

Saying what he said about London is, at the very least, a fascinating example of failure to stay in his lane. In fact, if one were of the mindset to be denigrating immigrants, one could, perhaps, raise questions around what business a Dane has telling Brits which members of their former colonies do and do not count as British or, indeed, what it means to be British.


I think a lot of people don't know why being Danish is relevant. Is there some reason why controversial views on immigration might be less suprising coming from a Dane?


Denmark is the rare case of a European nation where its center-left listened to feedback from the electorate early on and earnestly adopted policies restricting immigration and refugee admission. As a result they had no populist backlash, and that policy position is uncontroversial to hold publicly.


Denmark also has significantly lower rates of violence, crime, rapes and more. Sweden sees ~10 times more rapes than Denmark.

As a Norwegian I respect Denmark for putting its people first.


Have you got any references for this claim?


Well, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10611-024-10144-y seems to claim there is a link for sexual crimes. This paper suggests that there is some delayed effect https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092753712....


He doubled down on his opinion by sharing a sequence of posts from a X account that denounces "woke activism" in the software industry and open source projects. He criticised the political activism in open source projects, then, ironically, suggested Palmer Luckey should step in to steward NixOs.


Ironic that DHH is politically active enough that it affects his day to day activities and public perception of his company - kind of the exact opposite of his own policy he expects his employees to abide by.


He posts about it on his personal blog, not on his company Slack.


It's not a distinction someone active in the open source community gets to make. For open source developers, the larger Internet is the workplace.


Is world.hey.com/dhh a personal blog? It's literally on his company's domain... At least in the company slack your fash opinions would reach just your poor colleagues...


Everyone with a Hey.com email gets a world.hey.com account linked to your email. So yes it's a personal blog.

Hey.com is 37Signals' Gmail, not the company's private domain.




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