> There are some out there who would love fans of Ruby on Rails to suffer because of its association with DHH. It's not always entirely rational, so how could I ever predict what unhinged individuals in 2035 will take issue with on my blog? Everything online is preserved, so it's easier and safer to just not to participate at all.
What a weird justification for cowardice.
It is your life, but if you have the principles of your convictions you should probably be willing to stand by the things you say, or why say them?
DHH is presumably proud of his racism, hence why he publishes it, and therefor he's willing to enjoy any consequences that come from that.
The alternative is that you're only willing to have opinions unless someone disagrees with you, which just seems sad.
>you should probably be willing to stand by the things you say, or why say them?
Don't confuse the online world with the real one.
woosh
Read GP again.
> There are some out there who would love fans of Ruby on Rails to suffer because of its association with DHH.
This isn’t about DHH spouting whatever he is spouting.
It’s about people trying to convince others to not associate with Rails because of DHH.
It's worse than that. It's people generating a moral panic so they can retroactively declare something to be crimethink and then use that as a weapon against anyone who disagrees with them by trawling through their history. In which case it's not a matter of standing by it because mobs aren't interested in context or nuance.
Society's defense against this should be that we don't use mobs to punish people for saying things we disagree with and anybody who attempts to do that gets laughed off the stage. Because as soon as that's not what happens, the public discourse gets marred by self-censorship until enough time passes with it not happening that people stop expecting it to and thereby stop worrying that they can't know what's going to be declared an offense tomorrow.
But now that it has happened recently, the only way to get it back in the short term is to have people posting under pseudonyms.