Having read stuff from DHH for a long time, this does not surprise me in the least. It just feels like he picked the right time, zeitgeist-wise, to fully come out of the closet.
I distinctly remember a specific Twitter comment, maybe 7ish years ago, that solidified my view on DHH as a person. It was a thread about remote work. Someone from South America commented trying to be nice to David, saying something like "you should work remotely from Chile, it has a great Ruby community" etc, to which his response was "I've no interest in living in a 3rd world country".
Notch-esque politics aside, that was mean-spirited, inconsiderate behavior which should not be applauded. From that day I strongly sensed that was who he truly was.
Umberto Eco gave a pretty well-reasoned definition of Facism, and I think it's pretty straightforward to apply this definition to the situation in London (and DHH's commentary thereon): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
The question was "Why was "platforming" DHH bad?". Some people disagree with the views represented in that linked blog post, and do not wish to sponsor events that showcase him.
Personally, I think DHH is a troll and would never be interested in sponsoring, or attending, an event that involved him.
Pushing everyone who doesn't have a 100% positive opinion on mass immigration under the label of "racist far-right" actively contributes to the strengthening of said "racist far-right". I hope you're aware of that.
> Because the link he posted shows that the third of London he calls Native British is just White British.
The table doesn't distinguish "British" from "non-British" for non-white people, so it would be rather hard to account for that.
But if he's referring to an ethnicity (really a narrow group of ethnicities) rather than a nationality then of course that would entail a range of skin tones what people would normally call "white". And yes, that thinking would necessarily exclude Idris Elba.
But then if this is really about worrying about "white people", then why is he also excluding the non-British white people from his figure? Can it really not just be that there exists an English ethnicity (and Scottish and Welsh) that has been there for centuries and has nowhere else to go?
> This isn’t about mass immigration, it’s just about immigration as such.
There is no such distinction.
You ask "after how many generations are you native British"; I can equally well ask "after how many immigrants is it mass immigration".
The point is that the rate of immigration has been sufficient to completely overwhelm the native birthrate, causing a rapid demographic shift.
When the UK colonized India in the first place, the population did not become minority-Indian at all, let alone within the space of a couple of generations.
I'll note I'm white, but not native British, and none of the people in question tend to object to me being here. Often they make that explicit, by e.g. telling me that I'm "one of the good ones" or similar.
What instead often happen when they hear I'm Norwegian is a complete mask-off moment where they start explaining their favorite racist thinking to me, assuming that since I'm from a group they like, apparently I'm expected to agree with them (I do not).
My main exposure to anti-immigrant thinking face to face in London over the last 25 years have been repeated incidences of people who "just have concerns about immigration" revealing their racist motivations to me without me even asking them.
In other words: I don't buy it for a second when people try to insist it's immigration they care about, rather than seeing non-white faces.
> In other words: I don't buy it for a second when people try to insist it's immigration they care about, rather than seeing non-white faces.
Have any of them ever proposed to you to expel the established black families? If they're just being racist, you should naturally expect it to extend that far, right?
No, the entire claim is that DHH actually means "British" when he says "British", rather than meaning "white" because people say he does, because he's supporting Tommy Robinson, who also means it that way, because reasons.
David Heinemeier Hansson, also known by his initials DHH, is a Danish programmer, writer, entrepreneur, and racing driver. He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a web framework written in Ruby.[1]
