I'm still struggling to understand the "why."
(That's not an implicit criticism of the article, which is extremely appreciated because it's neutral and factual)
I've been away from Ruby for a few years but Shopify always seemed like a huge net positive, sponsoring lots of valuable work on both Ruby and Rails. I never followed Ruby community happenings very closely but I'm not aware of negative feelings towards their community role in the past.
Apparently, the reason is having an incorrect opinion.
Everyone, you included, has opinions that they find unpalatable. Pretty much all of human history has been "cancelling" people for "incorrect opinions". I mean, what were the crusades? Or world war II?
There's no, like, gun to your head saying you have to respect things you don't respect. Some things are just not respectable. You're allowed to be like "no" and then decide to get as far away from the person as possible.
And, relatedly - you don't have to run away. You can push them away.
Its not really fair that crazy people are allowed to say crazy things then we, normal people, have to take the high ground and walk away. What if I don't want to walk away? Why do I have to leave a project like it's the plague because you said something insane?
Anyway, just my two cents.
Also, just to be clear: I don't think DHH is crazy or evil. I'm addressed the broader concept, not this specific case.
This takes as axiomatic that people with incompatible beliefs in one area cannot work together in a different area.
However, if I found out that one of the physicians I work with doesn't think I should have a job, doesn't think I should have equal rights, and doesn't think I belong in public spaces, then politics would become unavoidable. I'm not going to work for a bigot who sees me as a second class citizen.
Likewise there are a number of long-term Ruby OS contributors who belong to minority groups DHH has been attacking. Would you attend Railsconf if DHH called your ethnicity gangs of rapists, like he recently has?
> 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.
and that last sentence links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London showing that, well, they're 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. 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.
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.