alt Hacker NewsDHH's blog post reads:
>> When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
Looks like some of the controversy is whether "them" refers to "the gypsies" or "the gypsies who take over public spaces".
It sounds genuinely ambiguous to me. Example A) "When wolves eat too many sheep, you shoot them." seems to advocate for shooting all wolves. Example B) "When adults abuse minors, you imprison them." presumably only refers to those that abuse minors.
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I mean, the first example you gave is pretty much exactly what he was saying as an analogy earlier in the blog post. It seems somewhat preposterous to give the benefit of the doubt to this like it was an accident when it wouldn't be at all hard for someone who cared about the difference to express it more clearly. It's not like he's unaware that people already think that he holds views like this, so the ambiguity seems more like intentional dogwhistling/plausible deniability than an innocent mistake from someone who didn't think that anyone might read their words in that way.
DHH writes:
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
I think based on his choice of parallelism we can fairly guess he means it the wolf way. There's not a single sentence in his post that supports the other interpretation.