US politics has been pretty fascist lately. The state is filling up concentration camps, engaging in mass state violence against people on the basis of racialized traits, deporting them to random countries without any respect for habeas corpus, exerting state pressure on the free press to censor speech critical of the current administration, and Trump is openly floating the idea of an unconstitutional third term.
Fascism is clearly on the rise, and they’re winning more and more power. None of this is far removed from us in the FOSS community – there are a number of fascists working in FOSS, same as the rest of society. I don’t call them fascists baselessly – someone who speaks out in support of and expresses solidarity with fascists, or who uses fascists dog-whistles or promotes fascist ideology and talking points, or boosts fascist conspiracy theories – well, they’re a fascist.
If one consistently speaks in support of a certain political position and against the opponents of that position then it is correct to identify them with this political position. Facts, as it were, don’t care about feelings, namely the feelings that get hurt when someone is called a fascist. Fascists naturally do not want to be identified as such and will reject the label, but we shouldn’t take their word for it. People should be much more afraid of being called out as fascist than they are afraid of calling someone a fascist. If someone doesn’t want to be called a fascist, they shouldn’t act like one.
It’s in this disturbing political context that I saw an odd post from the Cloudflare blog pop up in my circles this week: Supporting the future of the open web: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy. Based on Ladybird’s sponsorship terms we can assume that these projects received on the order of $100,000 USD from Cloudflare. I find this odd for a few reasons, in particular because one thing that I know these two projects have in common is that they are both run by fascists.
Even at face value this is an unusual pair of projects to fund. I’m all for FOSS projects getting funded, of course, and I won’t complain about a project’s funding on the solitary basis that it’s an odd choice. I will point out that these are odd choices, though, especially Omarchy…
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Instead of 3 full paragraphs of stuff everybody already knows, why not start by explaining why you think Ladybird and Omarchy are”run by fascists”?
That’s explained in the blog post just below where OP stopped quoting
Only thing I know about Ladybird is the lead dev didn’t want to include gender neutral wording in the documentation, because he “didn’t want it to be political”
That’s kinda old news now and not sure if anything came of it.
He now also celebrates Charlie Kirk hoping that others will pick up his great work, and whines about white men being discriminated against in tech.
Let’s just say he’s certainly not anti fascist.
Oh lovely…
Of course.
Shit. I read the DHH’s (
RubyRails founder) post. And oh, oof.To be clear, he’s not the founder of Ruby, he’s the founder of Rails.
Fixed. Thanks!
But 30 arrests/day is still wild to hear tho.
A new online crusade. Once again heavy accusations with very weak supportive evidence. It became a pattern already.
The post suggests that Cloudflare is donating $100k to Omarchy, but no figure is given by Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s press release reads more services in kind for an open source project— something many tech firms already offer without a check on the politics of the maintainers first.
If we want to use the Nazi bar analogy, Cloudflare is like a company that bought up so many bars in town that some end up not vetting for Nazism well enough, letting it slip through, not necessarily playing favours towards or against fascism but they would technically be a ‘Nazi bar’ under the analogy’s definition. Cloudflare is so big that they probably don’t have controlling interest about the pet projects they kick some pennies towards.
If you want to boycot Cloudflare itself, that’s fine and noble and all, but also staying away from anything they’ve ever donated to, you’ll put yourself in a bind. Like if Cloudflare donated to animal welfare, should one be against animal welfare simply due to second-order links to fascism?
Also there is a lot of reading into the comments used to link the two projects to the fascist regime. Very much a stretch.
Check this. Bit more than a comment. Wouldn’t call it nazi. But sus nontheless. We’ve seen plenty people write or say similar stuff over the years that graduated to fash later on.
But yeah agreed about CF. I take this kinda info more as a mental note on the individuals. CF is a corpo which is gonna corpo.
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At the very least, someone celebrating Charlie Kirk and whining about white men being discriminated against is not someone I’m interested in supporting, and if the future of the open web is in their hands I’ll just stick to lynx.
The good news is that ladybird is nowhere even close to implementing the full web. It’s maybe 0.5% there. There’s no danger of it becoming some centralized power at least in the next 5 years. Especially barring any license shenanigans.
As for Lynx, well it’s really hard to take that comment seriously.
More seriously from a technical side, I’m also not a huge fan of the browser and the engine being the same thing. To me they should be kept separate. So personally I’m cheering on Servo.
Some politicians or activists unfortunately use hyperbole too frequently and sometimes even maliciously. It gets them attention but at the cost of deepening the trenches in the political discourse. Drew thought he’s doing the right thing by calling a fascist out, but realistically this will be remembered as “The woke activists are calling us fascists for saying that nobody should be killed for their opinion.” in the right wing circles. Where the term “woke” is basically the right wing equivalent term to the left’s “fascist”.
I don’t know if you have been paying attention but nothing you do or say will leave the Republicans with a good memory of you no matter what if you are “woke,” so it almost doesn’t matter what you say.
I guess you can’t really convince the ones on the other side of the political spectrum. You only have a real chance to convince the “in the middle” people. But when doing so, it’s better not to give free munition to the opposing party to be more convincing than you.
Also I am kinda hoping that it (not using hyperbolic labels and overall being “nice”) helps create a place where people can be nice to each other even when they don’t agree on politics.
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