Great post, and the best point is highlighted in bold.
> Yes, the issues the blog mentioned were real human rights issues, but selective coverage of human rights is propaganda.
Russia’s primary internal justification for war is based around a human rights argument regarding the ethnic Russians in the East.
Similarly, many US interventions around the world.
I guess people here will say our concerns are totally valid and theirs are fake. Western governments don’t lie.
When your scope of concern maps 1:1 to that of the State Department, though, it’s a fair question to ask what’s your motivation for amplifying these messages.
Yes, what’s happening in Iran is bad - what do you want done about it exactly? Because certain people in the US government have ideas about that which may not exactly improve the situation.
Western governments lie all the time. You are absolutely correct to assume that the State Department’s interests in Iran do not necessarily align with Iranians who want to live under a non-autocratic government.
At the same time: you are wrong to insinuate that the Rust project’s motivations (or anyone’s really) are those of any government or state’s. The unrest in Iran has the world’s eye; there is nothing about the situation that suggests ulterior motives.
> I think the people involved have consumed so much American state-affiliated media that they simply don’t ask themselves these questions.
Influence is one of these “how’s the water” problems. We don’t have any evidence that Rust’s release team is getting their viewpoints from state-affiliated media any more than they’re getting them from Iranian dissidents on Twitter.
To put it another way: interests align all the time, and evidence of their alignment is not evidence of influence (much less collusion).
It appears that the interests of the Rust community have aligned with the interests of state-sponsored American media several times now, and on several disparate subjects, none of which are related to software.
At some point, that's not a coincidence, that's an echo chamber.
“Twice” is not several. You’re also omitting the part where the positions in question are overwhelmingly popular positions, both in the US and everywhere else (except the governments of Russia and Iran).
You can gripe about politics and software if you’d like. But there’s no evidence of an “echo chamber” (what does that even mean in this context?), much less collusion with the US government or media.
I don't know where you got "twice" when the article we are discussing has 3 instances, and those are only instances of political messaging in rust release logs, not any of the other myriad references to politics that appear around the Rust community.
One of the three - the police brutality statement from release 1.44 - is US-centric and very much controversial in the US. That statement was issued in June 2020, when about 40% of the US disagreed with the reference (which was a reference to a specific instance of police violence). The other two statements had about 75% support at the time they were issued (25% disagreed).
One of the problems of political messaging in evergreen things like programming languages is that you can make popular statements at the time and they can become unpopular. At this point, a majority of US residents would not support the fact that the 1.44 release had that message, and a majority may be upset with all the support for Ukraine (a recent poll said that 57% of US residents thought it was time for peace in Ukraine).
An echo chamber is a community in which people who agree with each other echo each others' views, thereby causing people in the echo chamber to believe that their views are more popular than they are. Many tech employees live in an echo chamber where US progressive politics (pushed by the US media) is the dominant view, despite being unpopular in the US and around the world.
I don't think there's any evidence of state collusion. There is a lot of evidence that the community of Rust maintainers and power-users is unfortunately insular (an echo chamber), and follows the views of US media a lot more than a healthy community probably should.
> Yes, the issues the blog mentioned were real human rights issues, but selective coverage of human rights is propaganda.
This is not a good argument, it's just an appeal to nihilism.
That's not even remotely what propaganda is, and if you accept that that's what propaganda is then literally all human rights discussion is propaganda because it is nearly impossible to enumerate all of it.
Mentioning a few specific issues doesn’t mean others aren’t important. This is the same cudgel used by people to silence support for specific causes by saying “well what about these other ones???”
This entire post is based on a logical fallacy.
So what if the posts align more with what is seen in the US? If the majority of the team are from there, then it is their every right to post those things. It is not anyone’s right here however to ask them to post about other topics. You may bring awareness to the team about those but that’s where it ends.
This whole post feels like the age old: “I don’t want to think about the human element in tech, so leave it out”
However tech exists to serve humanity. The compiler exists to serve people. The compiler is made by people. Therefore tech is inherently human and humans are allowed to, and should, care about what’s going on.
The “I wish life wasn’t political” crowd simply aren’t at risk from the ignorance of politics. This is privilege. This is entitlement. To care about those who are at risk from political events is not a flaw and it’s really disappointing to see how many people believe that politics can be neatly boxed away.
> Mentioning a few specific issues doesn’t mean others aren’t important.
I got that objection enough that I think I failed at communicating my main point.
I really don't want to encourage a mindset of "if you don't cover every bad thing you can't talk about any bad thing". But I think if you as an organization start to make it an habit to talk about bad things (and three times make a pattern), at some point you have to think seriously about which bad things you want to mention and why.
I think there should be a documented process. Honestly, any process at all would be fine, it doesn't have to be drawn-out or rigorous. But it should exist.
> at some point you have to think seriously about which bad things you want to mention and why.
I’m confused by how you think those statements ended up there. Do you think they’re from a single random poster? Or do they just show up without thought?
Clearly someone has taken a measured stance in posting about those. If that is the case, then why don’t you also believe they put serious thought into what they posted? Why is the assumption that there isn’t a process within the team?
If a project with half a dozen developers put political messages from those developers in their release notes, I'd think that was fine.
But I disapprove of the people writing the release notes for a Rust release putting messages of their choice in there, because they don't have a mandate to speak on behalf of the people whose work they're showcasing.
IMO the same goes for packages printing political messages on startup. You don't have a right to hijack the voices of your users to spread your agenda, no matter how righteous that agenda is.
In what sense does a startup message “hijack the voice of the user”? I don’t think anybody who uses a computer genuinely believes that the startup splash for a program expresses an opinion held by the end user; it’s not like Linux’s penguin splash communicates a private mental state about chubby penguins on my part.
Your users are people who compile software with your package. That software could be run on their server (in which case your political message appears harmlessly in their logs), or it could be distributed to other parties.
Those other parties would then read in their logs, "I distribute software that has an insecure supply chain and relies on people who are not mature enough to avoid grandstanding at every opportunity."
I wish they would leave the politics out. It just bleeds unnecessary energy. Leave it up to the rest of us to argue on HN and Reddit and twitter (mastodon now?). Just keep coding. Have political positions on your own blog, not in the office or your open source project (at least if that's not its main purpose). Rust is a tool, I don't need my hammer telling me that I should stop being libertarian and join the proletariat.
FWIW: I know this is a chaotic argument. I initially wrote it as a reply to another post on the internals rust forum, then I grew long enough I thought I could make it into a blog post.
This isn't a manifesto, and I didn't proof-read it against every possible objection, or try to make it perfectly neutral. I do hope it's interesting.
There are two conflicting positions espoused by this post: (1) that the Rust blog shouldn’t take any political stances at all, and (2) that the Rust blog correctly identified subjects of public interest and would be right to continue doing so if they broadened their scope to topics the author thinks are more important (like Assange).
As I understand it, the position under the heading "My own take" is the one that the post's author is espousing, and the other positions they bring up are being talked _about_.
I go back and forth on this. If you're there for the Rust, you're probably not there for the politics. If the blog is about Rust, it's counterproductive to make it about Rust+politics, because the set of people interested in that is strictly smaller than the set of people interested in Rust.
On the other hand, I'm a human being. I don't quit being a human being when I think about programming languages. I care about the events in Ukraine and Iran. I care about tyranny - I'm strongly against it. (And, for the record, I'm very much not "woke" or "progressive". Conservatives care about Ukraine too. Conservatives care about what the people of Iran suffer too.)
So I would say that there's a close-to-universal care, just because we're human beings, and they're human beings. But if you're going to bring politics into something unrelated like programming, the issue needs to be about that universal and clear-cut.
But, as others have said, then you get into the problem of selectivity. If I don't say something about everything that rises to that level, then... what? Say nothing about anything? That leaves it as a programming blog, but ignores my humanity. Start saying something about everything? That turns it into a political blog. Be selective? That raises questions about bias. There is no good answer...
The guiding principle of the free western world is that the government is not allowed to just murder a child because they refuse to wear a funny hat. Everyone from the most radical left to the furthest radical right should be able to agree with that principle, and if they don't, then I highly suggest everyone else tell them to fuck right off along with whatever despotic countries might take offence at this.
It's not politics, it's not propaganda, it's simply what is right in our common western world view.
Americans really need to get their heads out of their asses if they can get at each-others throats over this. None of you want your government to decide what sort of hats you wear, you all agree on this issue...
The death of "god" has lead people to adopt politics as their new religion.
Christian Evangelism and the Moral Majority has been replaced with Progressive US Liberalism and the Woke.
Even if that is correct - which I don't think it is - it's not relevant to this discussion. IMO if Rust pushed christian evangelism in their release notes, the problem would be exactly the same.
Since when anti-violence and anti-genocide is being "woke progressive "? This blog sounds like political message saying that we should ignore those events
And as far as I know, Ukraine and russia is hear nearby, in Eastern Europe, so it’s definitely not US-centric. Nor is murdery of women in Iraq.
Because rust is a tool and not a soapbox. I mean I can't stop them from supporting whatever cause, but I don't care to hear it and I'm 100% for the Iranian people "removing" the current regime and starting an egalitarian democracy.
The author didn't explicitly state anti-violence and anti-genocide is being "woke progressive. But a lot of other messages from Rust or any other Tech circles within US are "woke progressive".
If I was to guess the author deliberately left those example out for obvious reasons. Especially when many of them are well known SJWs.
> Also, let’s stop mincing words for a second: a big part of the issue is that these messages are progressive, and reflect a progressive agenda.
The author is speaking specifically about the messages that come from the Rust core team (in their capacity as the Rust core team), and identifies three examples. While all of them are things that most US-based people who describe themselves as progressive probably agree with, none of them are particularly progressive and only the police brutality one is particularly US-centric.
> Many people are opposed to the use of a tech forum to broadcast political messages.
'There are literally dozens of us!' Alas there probably are more maldeveloped, who insist on neutral spaces, that cannot handle basic decency & morality & solidarity for suffering people.
> And these asides have each been posted as-is, with no justification behind them and no hint that a justification is even necessary or wanted.
Solidarity for the suffering & basic humam rights are pretty obvious causes to most. ot having your nation invaded is a pretty obvious cause. Not being persecuted by religious morality police is pretty obvious cause.
> There’s a clear disconnect in the community: for some people, these messages are so self-evident that they shouldn’t even be considered political. For some people, they reflect a worldview that they don’t necessarily agree with, and when they don’t, still don’t want to be pushed without their input in the name of a community they’re participating in.
These absolutely are political messages, and thats not denied or suppressed. Its politics against dictatorial control, against authoritarian regimes, against use of excess force by governments against the people.
Open source communities are founded around a personal empowerment & right to explore, right to create, are created under conditions of peace not fear, personal growth & developmemt not suppression & regime. To find affinity between open source & these moral political causes against abominations is unsurprising.
> Also, let’s stop mincing words for a second: a big part of the issue is that these messages are progressive, and reflect a progressive agenda.
So is open source. It believes in progress, possibility, developmemt, furthering humanity. It shares liberally, believes strongly in the common good. Open source is political, and it's left. It's practically communist.
> A lot of people in the Rust community aren’t progressive, or not progressive of the specific US flavor that dominates western social media, and so feel extremely threatened when the Rust blog makes these political statements.
Write a shorter screed daying you disagree & collect some countersigners. That you are uncomfortable with a basic display of morality is, I generally feel, not a problem & ylI dont feel bad for you. But you have options (if you arent in Iran, if you arent in Russia, if you are not being persecuted by a local police force) & you can day so & if you really really cant stand morality happening in your presence you can fork & leave & vote eith your feet, because you are free to do so.
> Do you agree with the point about them being very selective what cases they choose to show basic decency, morality and solidarity for suffering people?
The whole argument around selectivity, so far, rests on these examples:
> The blog has had an aside on the death of Mahsa Amini in Iran, but not on the brutal murder of Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi by US ally Saudi Arabia. More recently, the blog had nothing to say about the political persecution and extradition of Julian Assange to the US. The blog hasn’t mentioned the criminal murder of Shireen Abu Akleh by the Israeli military.
These individual incidents are all worrying & indicative of a greater larger bad pattern. They're not good. But they are still far cries from the systematic, broadscale injustices that the three current callouts have said.
Im fine with there being some kind of process, but rather than it bring a process of rules & requirements & checks & balances, a 60% majority on any proposed declarations would probably serve better. I fear that making a set of heuristics that any proposal can flow through will lead to systems abuse, with low quality biased proposals of support that arent representative of the larger community, and at great cost of debate over how authenticatable the claims really are. And reciprocally it would give the stick in the mud anti-* crowd a chance to rules lawyer & stomp their feet & throw mud over whether something that everyone else agrees qualifies really does qualify.
Process is exploitable. Jamming the system or draining everyones energy is incredibly easy, owing to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. The author seems to be asking for a very exploitable, easy to jam, very slow process, one that could let fringe views have outsized voices. Im not opposed to some process... I think a holding of votes eould make sense. But the author's ask sounds like a bad faoth ask to make the system exploitable, to armor it, but in such a way that there will be more obvious chinks in the armor that those with enormous energy & time to drive counter-politics, to generate discord, to resist basic goodness would exploit.
Right now I think Rust has done a fine job. They dont need guidelines now. They have commented about broadscale, large issues with mass impact on populations, that are involved in active & sizable conflict that hurts people. I think there's room to consider other cases here, but none of the authors listed examples frel anywhere near this level of tension, and that seems self-evident & obvious. So I'd prefer we let it ride as is with no change, given the good job the Rust blog has been doing.
Heaven forbid uppity open source developers have opinions outside of their projects! It's bad enough we have to tolerate their fussy "licenses" and "proper attribution" while suffering maintainers rudely closing bugs as "wontfix" and not prioritizing patches that are crucial for the *important* commercial usages.
> selective coverage of human rights is propaganda
What absolute disingenuous horsehit to compare the murder of non-political 22-year-old woman with the murders of grown-ass journalists who have chosen a career that they are well aware comes with risks. Similarly, all three examples of political posts are unambiguously anti-violence, which makes the hypothetical comparison of cheerleading a war equally valueless.
> Yes, the issues the blog mentioned were real human rights issues, but selective coverage of human rights is propaganda.
Russia’s primary internal justification for war is based around a human rights argument regarding the ethnic Russians in the East.
Similarly, many US interventions around the world.
I guess people here will say our concerns are totally valid and theirs are fake. Western governments don’t lie.
When your scope of concern maps 1:1 to that of the State Department, though, it’s a fair question to ask what’s your motivation for amplifying these messages.
Yes, what’s happening in Iran is bad - what do you want done about it exactly? Because certain people in the US government have ideas about that which may not exactly improve the situation.