Codeberg responds to hate attacks

https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/edmund-burke-d...

TL;DR from the Reuters Fact Check team:

> The quote on the triumph of evil is misattributed to the eighteenth-century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke. The quote is possibly a paraphrase, although a definitive source has yet to be found

One possible paraphrase source is from John Stuart Mill:

> Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.

The challenge to relate this paraphrase to Burke is that Mill said this in an inaugural address in 1867. Burke died in 1797.

Another more in-depth quote check can be found here: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/04/good-men-do/

This is one of the quotes which really has stuck with the wrong attribution since early 1900, so I doubt it won't change much. But I'm fascinated by quotes and how many of them gets misattributed, so I can't resist digging into them.

Do you have any sort of basis for this claim?

I received a few of those codeberg emails and I too think that the language of the "fighting hate" announcement reads overly hyperbolic considering the likely nature of the attack. (Griefer discovers that codeberg allows prefix searches on usernames, spams some slurs or expletives, gets blocklisted.) Then again, I have no idea what other attacks they may be dealing with.

Again, crime is serious and it should _obviously not be "ignored"_. No one said that, can we please stop with the straw man arguments? It's also useful to describe the motives; no one questioned that either. It's about focus and nuance.

Crime is a _political_ issue only when above some thresholds - which are so far missing from that political and hyperbolic response, why? No one is asking for court-admissible evidence: a vague description of whatever far-right organization(s) were vaguely suspected to be involved would have been enough. But not even a mob was mentioned in this particular case. Yet?

Yes, the political issues of the moment (which are very real and very bad) are going to inspire every deranged individual. But if they're deranged, they would have been inspired by anything else. Describing every bully as part of some organized political plan is not credible and backfiring. It gives them the very exposure they want while making you look incapable of thinking outside politics. It's also distracting from the actual plans happening right now: once everything is political, "normal" people tune out and nothing is.

For a long time straw man arguments, conspiracy theories, exaggerating random and isolated crimes into political issues and ignoring numbers and statistics were unique to the far right. It's pretty sad to observe the left slowly "catching up". This has unsurprisingly be very "successful" on social media but recent elections across the world have looked different.