Don't Be Nice

Fully agreed.

This "Let's avoid politics" is just "Let's avoid conflict resolution and let things fester until it all boils over and goes to shit"

If you break the social contract of granting everyone a common baseline of respect and civility, such as by identifying with those that explicitly wish to violently purge entire peoples from the planet, I no longer am obligated to grant them the decorum outlined in that same social contract, as they've violated the accord.

Time and a place. I only see these kind of online spats refracted through people’s reactions like this one. Invariably I find myself asking how someone’s unattractive idea even came up there in the first place…

Over my time in the world I have chafed against the boundaries of “professionalism” and “courtesy” and “a valid topic but not what we’re here to discuss right now”… but… sure seems like those might help here.

Maybe it’s the old-school small-l liberal in me, but I feel like we lost something socially constructive in dissolving the boundaries between public and private thoughts, school and work and home and pub and church thoughts, the office and the flawed human occupying the office…

I already held Daniel in high esteem, but I respect him so much for posting this. Couldn't agree more.

People openly signaling they don't care about your feelings and rules are rarely missed. But as a former antisocial outcast myself, I always try to be nice to everyone and show them the light, prefer warnings to kicks and kicks to bans. Politics is really not that serious, decent people can have wildly different views.

Sounds like the paradox of tolerance. Being tolerant of intolerant people just gives them a platform to spread their intolerance.

By this logic every person born in North America is a Native American.

Of course, this criticism is very popular amongst Scots who live in Scotland which is still overwhelmingly Scottish even in the major cities.

If a technology is not considered political that should be the very first thing we should change about it.

It is disturbing how all of these people in tech like DHH and Elon have been so vile and all dropped the facade at the same time.

I totally agree that one can decide for themselves to be nice or not nice to anyone, but I wonder as adults is it the right course of action to block/kick someone out as soon as they disagree with you or say, write something you don’t like or when just simply have a difference of opinion. I think that’s very childish and when did we stopped simply to agree to disagree and move forward.

The example in the post is quite obvious with Nazi symbolism. But what if someone express their opinion, which is very conservative, or nationalistic like as an example I love Switzerland and I want Swiss people to prosper and have everything. Would that be incentive because they are excluding rest of the world?

> 'unaware.' [...] I think that is a little bit of what it is to be nice.

Me, not being nice: Don't use language to be priggish and confuse. We got enough of that going already.

I find the article a bit virtue signaling.

I am one of these people that DHH says in not "native British". I agree he is an unpleasant racist.

I do think that the case of the person using a Nazi avatar on a forum is comparable. The former is something they are doing withing the community, DHH's behaviour is outside the community. Its not clear how much people should be sanctioned for holding unpleasant views.

The problem with the article is clear in this passage:

"Sometimes a political party or a person decides to oppose shared human values like the importance of care, kindness, inclusion, or the simple value of welcoming people who are different from you. Maybe they oppose the equality of all people. Maybe they think some people do not deserve human rights."

That very quickly becomes a subjective and partisan judgement. Its very easy to say everyone who votes for a different party is "opposed to equality", or that people who do not share you culture or language and vocabulary or vote for any other party are those you should not be nice to. Very often the inclusive becomes exclusive and even culturally imperialist. Foreigner who uses the wrong words because they do not have the same implications in their culture? Excluded. This is not made, but, but something I have seen people get angry about.

Isn't DHH just not being nice?

This is a post about someone marketing their personal values: asserting their importance, suggesting we should all share them, and suggesting that certain alternative values should be rudely suppressed.

It’s not an argument, though. I don’t come away with any reason not to NICELY oppose Nazi sympathizers.

I am not especially nice, and I don’t trust most people who behave nicely. But this post is banal. You can do better.

It can be perfectly reasonable to remove people who are being completely inappropriate and/or egregiously insensitive. I think reducing it to simple politics is a distraction though. At the end of the day, people who are making everyone around them uncomfortable and causing everyone else to feel excluded/hated/marginalized probably deserve to learn that behavior is not tolerated, because that's often one of the only things that can get it to change.

Their opinions don't have to be political and your opinions don't have to be political. If someone is making the space worse for everyone, then maybe they're not good for the space. Maybe the space is not good for them. You would be doing good for both sides by stopping them from harming the space, and stopping the space from further enabling the problematic behavior.

I have personal experience with not changing until it became clear enough that certain behavior was driving away everyone and everything I care about. It didn't matter to me how much people told me it was bad, or tried to convince me to stop. What worked was seeing people leave over it, over and over, until I couldn't take it anymore. I had to change. You would be helping these kinds of people, and the community at large, by seeing to the consequences of their actions.

> They accused me of being 'political' – the very thing an open source project shouldn't be, I'm told. It only divides people. Let's just focus on the technology. Surely we can all get behind building amazing, fast, cool websites!

I would argue that picking an obviously Nazi-coded avatar is in itself political. It is a deliberate decision to select such an avatar. Nobody picks that symbol by accident. They know exactly what it signals, they know how people will react, and they know that the laissez-faire culture of tech is a perfect ground to normalize this shit.

If there is a not being political rule, then it is perfectly reasonable to ban people like this because they obviously are political.

> DHH, you're not welcome in the Nuxt community, because you say that Black people aren't 'native Brits' and call for the mass deportation of 'gypsies'.

100% agree. Niceness is NOT for white supremacists, and no, I am not debating whether DHH's politics are fascist-adjacent or what % of them are pure fascism.

DHH's politics and the man himself will get only shunning and ridicule from me. He's, after all, one of the weird little guys of FOSS: https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/

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I've got a family of all colors (with half-black and half-asian nephews) and we speak many languages at home.

I do believe however we should be allowed to criticize religions and I do believe we should be allowed to criticize religions without being labelled "racist".

For example I'll point out the incredible hypocrisy of the left in the west who raised me, in an atheist school, with the notion that christianity was a scam and where christians were being made fun of all around me (by my parents, by my friends, by my friends' parents, by my teachers, etc.).

And that same left in the west, who celebrates that christianity lost its grip on the people, is now bending over backwards over islam.

Another gigantic hypocrisy in Europe (and in the UK) is that free speech is not a given. And hateful speech is definitely not allowed... Unless it's hate speech protected by the fact that it's in a religious book.

And another, totally off the chart, hypocrisy in the west is the feminist and the LGBTQ2S+ movements who are constantly after heterosexual male... Unless they're muslims, in which case it's suddenly all cool to put a veil on your wife(s) (polygamy being allowed, but only one man / several women and not the other way round: oh the hypocrisy here) and daugther(s) so that they're safe from the looks of other men.

It's a very long article saying that people who oppose islam are basically deranged.

Now I do profundly believe that unless you've read the quran, you shouldn't comment on islam.

I did read it and I suggest you do the same and then make up your own mind.

Now as I'm not nice I'll put it blundly: I think the quran is just as bad as Hitler's Mein Kampf. But because it's "religious", the hate speech it contains is protected and allowed.

And we're basically at a point in Europe where if you point out that the quran is full of hate speech, your criticism is considered hate speech. But the real hate speech is totally cemented and impossible to attack because it's "religious".

You should at the very least read the quran and see where I'm coming from.

The world CIA factbook (not published anymore) estimated that 30% of all muslims worldwide had extremist views. I understand that 30% is not 100%, but 30% of nearly 2 billion people is a very big number.

To be very clear: either the muslim beard or the veil are already extremist readings of the quran and its hadiths.

Go read the book for yourself.

It is not normal that after 1200 teenagers who were dancing at a music festival were slaughtered by islamist terrorists, a big part of the world celebrated.

We're talking about tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of people who were genuinely happy that "evil jews got what they deserve" because it was "justified resistance".

I'm not talking about what came next: I'm against killing people, no matter who does the killing.

Now I'm not saying that that UK dude who wants to "ban islam" is a good person.

But there's really a very big spread spectrum between "ban islam" and "there's zero problem with islam growing in the west".

And there's definitely an issue when speech is censored, but the absolute worst form of hate speech is protected because it's a religious holy book.

Go read the quran, now.

Of course I agree with OP that one can't be nice to Nazis. But he should have also mentioned that one should not be nice to anyone who kills innocent humans. Not just the Nazis.

EDIT: is there something wrong with my statement? Don't be a coward and downvote silently. Tell me how what I wrote is wrong?