Canceling "Hey"

In Philadelphia, I lived a few blocks away from the Girard stop on the L train. I would just avoid walking by the station because it was a hang out for homeless people and drug users in the area. Pretty much everywhere within a 10 block radius of the station is built up, there's always people out, and it feels like all of the local businesses in the area are thriving (more recently there's been too many chains opening up which sucks but I digress), there's barely any homelessness or crime with the exception of package thieves (I just bought a $20 box off amazon to put in front of my house and never had a problem) and the occasional car window being smashed.

In NYC, especially Manhattan although the same applies to the outer boroughs, unless you live around a more touristy area then you don't even think about it. In Boston even less so besides downtown.

I don't think trying to contain people to specific areas is a good solution. There's obviously a greater social issue across the US and other developed nations and it's a very hard problem to start solving, but I would guess that most cities continue to ignore it as long as its easy for the majority of the population to ignore it.

The most objectionable thing about his post is that he's calling out gypsies specifically, but also Denmark relatively recently passed sweeping anti-begging laws kind of specifically targeting Roma people...

Encampments produce fires, needles, waste, blocked sidewalks, and local crime spikes. Surveys show high mental illness and substance use rates among the homeless. Mild climate plus weak enforcement concentrates the problem beyond local poverty levels. Treating every complaint as coded racism blocks diagnosis.

Unpermitted vendors create safety and fairness issues for taxed businesses. Illegal graffiti is vandalism that costs owners. Oakland fines them. Murals are different.

Pure tolerance by the left produced tent cities. Enforcement and treatment shows recent drops in both homelessness and crime.

People who want orderly streets are not required to absorb the costs. Working neighborhoods take most of the hit.

Hear hear! I have $5 left over this month after rent and food. Where do I donate it to change the world.

/s

Except that that author didn't say that at all. They said "deport only the lawbreakers", while expressing dismay at a blogpost which (apparently*) said "deport everyone".

> I personally believe laws should always be enforced and followed.

Quote from TFA: "Any kind of mass deportation plan would have to change [the law], which would be legally tricky to say the least. However, enforcing the existing laws requires no legal action, and could start tomorrow if the relevant executive wanted it to."

*Other comments have argued that the post didn't actually say that.

Do you believe that these laws should be enforced and followed despite most people believing that they are morally wrong?

I (the author) do believe deportation is morally wrong in certain cases. For example, there are laws governing which people can be deported and for what reasons. Deportations that violate those laws are morally wrong. What I spent the whole article arguing against was the idea that people should be deported even when the laws say their deportation is illeagl. (It would be illegal to deport the vast vast majority of Roma in Denmark.) The other thing I argued for in the article is enforcement of the law against people who break it.

The law is huge, complex and can often have conflicting aspects.

This is assumed by some to be "by design". When the law is such that everyone is breaking it, then the power shifts to whoever can bring people in "front of the law".

So, in every case with strong beliefs such as yours, IMMV and it's easy to voice an opinion when you feel "not in target".

Laws are written by imperfect humans. Bad laws exist.

Lenience and mercy are critical components of a system of a just criminal justice system. We have judges issue sentences in large part because we want a human being with good judgement to decide how serious the punishment for an offence should be based on the circumstances.

A person who shoots their partner who has been abusing them for years should probably receive a different punishment than a person who pulls out a gun in traffic and shoots someone for cutting them off. Mercy or "lenience" are not inherently flaws in the justice system, though of course there's always "too much of a good thing."

I read an article some years back that really changed my mind about this. It made the point that society evolves through the imperfect enforcement of laws (those some kinds of imperfection, like selective enforcement, are distinctly harmful). That is empirically true, but for some reason I hadn't realized it until the article pointed it out to me.

The culture in question have been infamous for centuries for their value system which is incompatible with most others. Just as it's okay for devout Islamists to find the whole American value system disgusting and want nothing to do with it, it's okay for DHH and other Westerners to find the Roma value system disgusting. It's a belief system they choose, it's not something like skin that people cannot change.

In America there's a lot of ethical ambiguity given how recently most current residents' ancestors arrived. But in Denmark? Did the Roma build that society? (Possible) EU citizenship aside, I find it hard to judge Danes who feel that ethically, they don't have a right to degrade that society with crime and vagrancy. Same as I don't blame English people who don't like certain things going on there.

The article being referred to says "When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them" - it doesn't say "you deport everyone of that race," it's about the people causing problems. If you allow literally any behavior, no matter how antisocial, bad actors will ruin everything for everyone. Only the most obtuse person doesn't recognize the truth of that, deep down.

This plays out with things like US culture being pretty well tolerant of ethnic enclaves (Chinatowns, Little Italies, Solvang, etc) compared to what I've seen in my travels abroad, while preferring to bulldoze those enclaves when a new freeway needs to be built, and foods emblematic of certain areas being Flanderized versions of various foreign cuisines (Take a look at California's burritos, or a Chicago style pizza, or a New York style pizza).

Just wanted to share that there are areas where people have gotten tired of gypsies, and have gotten rid of most of them in this way, as some extra context.

His comparison to them as wolf-like predators (and you shoot wolves), previous posts about mass deportation and forced remigration ... no, most Europeans aren't veering strongly into hard-right territory.

If you honestly believe what you're saying you're going to have a REALLY BAD TIME in the wild.

Granted, I already have a dim view of Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and have never used any of DHH's software products, so my comment is a moral denouncement that carries no weight. Still, the dog whistling in this blog post is so loud I hear barking from the next door down. I don't exactly have on-the-ground knowledge of the exact situation in Copenhagen, but even just from what DHH describes, I'm pretty sure the solution can be solved through means less invasive than deporting homeless people.

And just to be clear, I'm using the phrase "homeless people" rather than Europe's N-word because the problem is not where the people came from. Unless you want to pretend like Danish-born homeless are somehow way better, which would be a level of propagandistic bullshittery I don't even think Trump would stoop to. I also shouldn't have to explain why the actions to fix homelessness should not be identical or even analogous to the actions taken to manage an invasive wolf population.

There is an actual problem DHH is vaguely grasping at: western countries have an exceptionally low state capacity despite their status on the world stage. The West is run by people who believe their job is to merely manage the decline of their terminally-ill trade empires until the pieces get inevitably packaged up and sold to ancap-esque autocrats of trade. And the social and economic structures undergirding the west, especially in Europe, have ossified to the point where there is not only no place for immigrants of any stripe, but even our own young can't fit in.

But the answer to this problem that always gets attention is the people who want to burn that remaining state capacity on incredibly vengeful, petty, and stupid acts of bullying. "I don't care how poor I am as long as I have someone else's neck below my boot" is just a recipe for mass impoverishment.

The wolf population development has been known to exceed every prediction in Western Europe, and while it's fairly inoffensive for humans the economic consequences are much higher than most anticipated, for economic/ecologic benefits that are hard to defend. And the wolf population are still fairly low.

In my opinion maybe the money spent protecting wolves (hundreds of millions per year in Europe) would be better spent on homeless shelters and similar policies.

Still this article should remind every European of the Nazis comparing the Jewish diaspora dispersal with the historical dissemination of black and brown rats.

The benefit of the doubt only exists as long as there is doubt. Once there's an overwhelming body of evidence that removes any of it, continuing to give it is pretty suspicious, like you mention.

That doesn't enrage me, in fact I agree with it. But no one in this story came illegally to Denmark. I'm not sure what gave you that impression. And I read DHH to be saying that more people than just the specific ones sleeping in parks should be deported.

People draw lines in different places, and what you are doing here is implying that it is unreasonable for people to take that level of issue with DHH's "gypsy" comment. I disagree. I think its completely reasonable to view that as unacceptable and to disassociate from that person.

/s I left Migadu for Hey.

It’s not difficult. It’s beyond yikes territory: it’s his now typical xenophobia and bigotry.

Now we know how the 1930s felt, I guess. Wealthy fair-haired motorsport brat edgelords were the leading edge of fascism then too.

Find needles on the beach multiple times, and you simple stop caring about reasons and want action.

Far right is a label being used for normal things like secure borders and safe cities.

"Diversity is our strength" -- what kind of diversity? Within a company, diversity of purpose is not a strength, because you can't have people working at cross-purposes with one another. It's the same for countries, local communities, and families. "Diversity" can easily be used to describe what ultimately is "division", making it contradict the old saying in the USA "United we stand, divided we fall".

Diversity of strengths/weaknesses, personalities, backgrounds (including ethnic), etc. all do make us stronger provided we maintain and prioritize a practical unity in a shared purpose.

Fukuyama's argument was that any form of factional identity breaks down social trust, including say, identifying a subset of the population as "white/European people". He's not advocating for ethnostates. I'd suggest reading it, except it's as bad as all the rest of Fukuyama's works. The only reason I even brought it up is to highlight that these terms didn't originate the way they're being used. We can all see the intended meaning in these discussions.

Homeless people and drug addicts may well be victims of circumstance or victims of society depending on your point view - or even victims of their own choices or actions - but there’s a difference between saying “this race of people is problematic” and “this class of people is problematic”.

Second of all, homelessness and drug addiction are not moral failings. As the author says ".. there will be some who are good and some who are bad. This makes people very unlike wolves."

I ask you to question whether the people who are "...walking around having fully shit their pants" should be deported, or treated for the conditions that ail them. The people aren't to be protected on some basis of "individualism", but on the basis that they are human people. Not animals.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people

comparing them to animals and repeatedly declaring how we shoot those animals is probably also not great.

And once you look at the problems you mention without taking the easy way out ("They're aliens and should just be excluded from our society"), the question is not so much whether they have the right to do this, but how we, as a society, can provide care to those people.

Also, I can't understand your presumption that "This is tolerated in the name of individualism". The situation your are describing is a public health issue, not a question of lawfulness.

> I definitely don't believe in trying to change people's minds by shouting at them or shaming them

seems to me like they want to make a (polite) argument instead of explicitly calling them “heretic” to quote the article.

They also quite obviously seem to refer to cancellling the subscription here and not trying to invoke "cancel culture". The first few paragraphs make this quite clear.

Normal working families with kids live next to these parks and rely on them as open space, it is part of the Danish socialist welfare system and care for the working man. Defacation and open cooking plus thrash by not your own weak but foreigners has real cost to those that can’t afford to move.