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Comment by car_analogy | Hacker News Reader

> Rust believes that tech is and always will be political [..] Tech has enormous, sometimes shocking and unpredictable impact on human rights. Tech is and always will be political.

While I share in the condemnation of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, I hate this kind of weaselly language. It lumps explicit advocacy of political goals in the same category as generic activities that may have an entirely incidental, minor political effect.

If assuring your code is memory-safe is "engaging in politics", then literally everything is political, and the word has lost all meaning. If the way you're using a word adds zero information to your speech, you may as well erase it from your vocabulary, because you'll still be saying the same thing, in fewer words.

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> If assuring your code is memory-safe is "engaging in politics", then literally everything is political

That's precisely OP's argument -- everything is political. Taking this a step further, surely creating the world's first atomic weapons had political impact, and who is to say that any arbitrary technological advance couldn't be used in unforseen ways in the future with similar political import? Everything we work on is potentially political. I used to be a DoD scientist, and let me say you would be shocked by the list of seemingly mundane technologies that are then picked up and used in warfare or in support of the surveillance state.

The code you write today could affect the drone strikes of five years from now, without you ever knowing. DoD regularly reverse-engineers open source projects and internally re-releases them.

Everything is political

> Tech is and always will be political.

Some programming communities are political, like nodejs and rust. I've never seen this kind of shitfuckery in C++ or PHP for example.

Yes, but they are making an even stronger statement - that tech itself is political, not just the communities around it. Not free software, not surveillance technology, but all tech. Which is only true in the trivial sense that everything can have some effect on politics - if you sell a bookshelf, someone might put Atlas Shrugged on it.

Which brings us to the ridiculous point where, as sam0x17 noted, developing memory safety is treated as equally political as developing atomic weapons.

My take - Russians who feels attacked by people expressing support for Ukraine are the same ones that kinda like it.

When you say “we will / won’t be political”, you’re lumping together minor irrelevant dramas (like Depp vs Heard or Lia Thomas) and things which will directly, seriously affect you. You literally cannot stand on the sidelines when your political adversaries are pointing their guns at you.

Putin’s war is directly affecting any Rust members in Ukraine and Russia, and screwing everyone else by hurting the economy. I’m glad Rust has publicly explicitly supported Ukraine because I really support them and there’s not much of a cost to saying something.

That being said, OP sounds like an drama queen and allegedly has his own problems. At best, this isn’t something we should hate on random Rust community members for. This kind of exaggeration isolates the Russians who support Ukraine, who I consider to be allies, and those who are undecided, who I think are still worth trying to persuade.

> When you say “we will / won’t be political”

Which is something I didn't say. I as a person may be political, that does not mean Rust as an endeavor is political.

> You literally cannot stand on the sidelines

Again something I didn't endorse. Refusing to expand the definition of "political" to beyond meaninglessness does not imply a refusal to engage in politics.

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