[neetdeth]

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.

[woodruffw]

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.

[neetdeth]

To be clear, I’m not imputing motive directly to the Rust project.

I think the people involved have consumed so much American state-affiliated media that they simply don’t ask themselves these questions.

[woodruffw]

> 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).

[pclmulqdq]

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.

[woodruffw]

“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.

[pclmulqdq]

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.

[stormbrew]

> 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.