* move semantics

* guaranteed memory safety

* threads without data races

* trait-based generics

* pattern matching

* type inference

* minimal runtime

* efficient C bindings

Except... that's the literal meaning of propaganda (it's literally Italian for "propagation"). It's only in the Cold War era (only relatively recently in the time-span of history) that "propaganda" have added that negative connotation.

I think it is a grave injustice to children to, for example, not introduce them to a variety of religions so that they can better understand folks they might run into. Same for not having comprehensive sex education: It matters little to me that a parent thinks some sex - or birth control - is a sin: The child still needs to learn about it so that they can make good decisions even if it goes against the parents' beliefs. Some parents want girls to just learn to cook and clean, and demand an emphasis on such classes.

And so on.

I'm not convinced it is entirely your right to do as you please with your children: To me, it is only OK so long it is healthy for the child and doesn't infringe on their rights... which they should have, and the US refuses to give.

bummer.

That repeats what a blog post on HN's front page said, but that doesn't make it true. It was the blog poster who didn't understand finance, as many on HN commented, and their argument was weak in many other ways. Also, the conclusion about ProPublica's motives has no evidence - even if the article is inaccurate in that way, there are many possible reasons why. It's an appeal to emotion when we start saying "the slightest idea", "obviously", and "imagined enemy", not to fact and reason.

Even the allegations don't necessarily fit the definition of propaganda; bias or even deceit are not necessarily propaganda.

Why are people so ready to believe that a carefully researched story, rich in evidence, is wrong and take at face value a ranting blog post, with no evidence or research, by some anonymous person?

The answer is, that is how propaganda works: An appeal to emotion, and many other tactics described in the OP, were in that blog post. That is killing our society, IMHO.

It's pretty ambiguous: Where do you draw the line between them, and what evidence do you have about their relative reliability. The professional journalism I see, e.g. news sections in established newspapers, is far more accurate and honest than the non-mainstream stuff I see.

My point (in response to the parent comment stating that 90% of all "mainstream media" is propaganda) is that the assertion "90% of mainstream media is propaganda" seems to be stretching the definition of propaganda from the reasonable one which you have brought up to something more like "propaganda is rhetoric to promote beliefs".

To me, that original comment seems to be more similar to weaponized rhetoric (in this case, designed to promote the belief that "mainstream" media is untrustworthy) than to earnest communication or expression of opinion.

As to misrepresenting information, the same subset of information could be seen as fair by one group and misrepresentation by another group.

What matters is the purpose of the activity. If one consistently spreads selective information from which one stands to gain in terms of money or power, I’d say that’s a problem, whether you call it propaganda or not. On the other hand, other types of selective information we could call “propaganda” (e.g., anti-drug or pro-savings commercials) might actually be beneficial to the society.

And that's very useful for establishing which sources we should rely upon in a shared discussion.

My sister's husband was quoting Breitbart news to me. I let him know that I believed that was a propaganda channel. In many discussions, its very important to establish who is, or isn't, a trusted source of information.

-------------

There are others who quote Elon Musk's tweets to me. Many of those tweets have no basis in reality IMO, so I let them know that I don't trust them, and I ask them for another source of information.

IMHO, and pertinent to the OP: That is out of textbook of how mis- and disinformation impacts human thinking: Observe something emotionally provocative and follow the urge to dive in, regardless of the reality: 'What if it's true???" I've trained myself not to do it.

I'm always interested in valuable, credible information. (And to be clear, it's not your job to educate me - that's my job - but it is your job to backup what you say.)

> slides circulating on Twitter

Is there any place where amount of propaganda is greater, in the history of the world, than on social media such as Twitter? It must be orders of magnitude beyond anything ever. Serious question: Why are you reading it? It's like digging through a garbage dump for coins.

But that law:

(1) Nowhere prohibits propaganda, by name or in effect,

(2) mandates teaching propaganda, and specifically teaching various propaganda documents, opinion/analysis works, and campaign presentations (the Federalist Papers, Democracy in America, the first Lincoln-Douglas debate) ahistorically as “founding documents of the United States” rather than as propaganda, controversial opinion, etc.

It does explicitly prohibit policies mandating teaching current events, though. But not propaganda.

> https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB3979/id/2339637

If you are aware of that bill, you know that it's potentially a product of the conservative reactionary movement, which demonizes anything liberal and attacks with everything they've got.

That doesn't mean propaganda doesn't exist in education, but isn't it a bit disingenuous to present the bill only as a product of 'concern' and omit political movement with which it's widely associated? Isn't that disninformation?

I'm asking a genuine question, given the context.

Especially regarding implicit bias. Implicit bias is specifically distinct from "regular" bias because is not deliberate and lacks intent.

> radicals have already successfully overtaken Western universities

Ironically, this uses techniques from the OP. It's an emotional appeal - calling people radicals, catastrophizing, etc. - but there's no evidence and really no information. Hyperbole eliminates information; it's like screaming 'we're all going to die!'.

Another commenter asks you whether, hypothetically, a certain kind of training were given to teachers would change your opinion.

Who is making a claim here?

You've effectively responded to a hypothetical "if teachers were converted to propaganda machines, would that be propaganda" with evasion that makes you sound like you have something to hide.

And its hard to argue with the result. Whatever is going on, that particular strain of "crt" is virulently spreading.

The NPR interview doesn't really say anything interesting or new to me. All of it applies to The Culture of Critique too. Putting whether these theories are actually true aside for a moment, my point is that if you are opposed to teaching children something like CofC then you should be opposed to CRT as well.

To illustrate my point better, let's take the CNN article on what CRT is: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/01/us/critical-race-theory-e...

Here is how CRT is defined, which isn't exactly the most charitable definition of CRT I've ever read, and it frankly sounds completely terrible, but just to demonstrate a point:

> Critical race theorists believe that racism is an everyday experience for most people of color, and that a large part of society has no interest in doing away with it because it benefits White elites.

Now let's change some races around:

> Critical race theorists believe that racism is an everyday experience for most White people, and that a large part of society has no interest in doing away with it because it benefits Jewish elites.

And this is roughly the conclusion CofC reaches too. So honest question, assuming you can come up with something to substantiate this claim (to keep the discussion simple), would you also be fine with this? Just in principle.

What you should read is that there is so much obvious evidence, easily available, that asking for more of it can only be interpreted as bad faith. I am certain that there is no evidence that fits your standard, because short of "Study: Schools taken over by radicals" you would not accept it. A scientific study like this would never be funded, even if this were a question for science (it isn't), for many reasons.

A google search of the relevant terms would turn up dozens of egregious instances. Have you looked?

"As Media Matters has previously noted, Fox News’ current obsession with “critical race theory” has been a year in making. What once was a slow trickle of monthly mentions has developed into a full blown assault. Since February, month over month mentions of the theory have more than doubled on Fox News as the network has begun to spin an illusion of what it is and where it’s being taught (in reality, critical race theory is not generally taught in K-12). Coverage of the theory sharply increased in March, with 107 mentions on the network according to data from Kinetiq media monitoring service. The following month, network figures and guests mentioned it 226 times, and by May, the number had increased to 537 mentions. Not even halfway through June, there’s already been 408 mentions on the network.

Just last week, Fox mentioned “critical race theory” a record 244 times -- an increase from the previous record high of 170 mentions the week before."

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-has-mentioned-crit...

But - CRT in it's applied form ultimately turns into 'propaganda' and there should be some legislative parameters around it.

The basic CRT premise of 'Minorities who live in Majority Culture are suppressed in systematic ways, and that we should be more sensitive to that and it's historical impact' ... is definitely fair.

So there's a legit grounding in aspects of CRT.

If that were it, then then this would be a good thing.

But the rhetorical application of CRT gets pretty vicious, pretty quickly, and it turns to the language of 'race war' almost instantly.

In particular, using terminology such as 'White Supremacy' which is normally associated with 'Men in White Pointy Hats' as purposefully toxic language, the tactic of castigating anyone who doesn't support their cause as 'upholding White Supremacy' and therefore racism etc. are common.

Controversial foundational elements such as rejecting liberal and enlightenment values (literally objective truth) in favour of one's own 'realized or expressed truth' in addition to issues such as rejecting the foundation of the written word etc..

There's been a few debates here on HN, but there is documentation from school boards on 'how the teaching of Math upholds White Supremacy' because it ostensibly implies 'linear thinking', 'predicate knowledge' and other artifacts of supposed 'White Supremacy'. The response to this particularly bad form of CRT on HN usually comes in the form of discounting classical teaching pedagogy as being possibly too 'stifled' - but that has absolutely nothing to do with race and there is no evidence whatsoever to back it up. In reality - certain groups (Hispanics, Blacks) do poorly, and other groups - including minorities/people of colour (Whites, Asians) do just fine under the same pedagogy and what's more likely is that kids who show up for class, who have good parents, who want to learn etc. (i.e. the obvious things) do just fine. CRT 'in practice' in this situation is unsubstantiated, anti-scientific, anti-progressive ideological rubbish in making excuses for kids who don't do well in math. It's 'good intentions run ideologically wild'.

Last week a New Jersey school board opted to remove the names of all holidays from their calendar and replace them with just 'Holiday'. This one is actually a pretty good example of the intersection of CRT and the effete values of school administrators: July 4, Easter, Memorial Day are just 'too controversial' for our kids to be exposed to, therefore, we'll just mark them as 'Holiday'.

That to me represents a kind of ideological 'crossing of the line': if our educators are interested in making sure kids hear about slavery and segregation, that seems reasonable. Important, actually. But erasing civic holidays because of concerns of CRT is I think 'radical', and there are people in every school board in America who would like to follow suit and CRT gives them basically the impetus to 'Be on the right side of history' (in their view) despite the 'Ugly, angry, overtly traditional parents' (again view of the teachers).

There's a little bit of a postmodern aspect to CRT - it's a 'turning inside out' kind of ideology, allowing adherents to basically refute anything and everything part of he 'conventional narrative' and replace it with ... well whatever they want. This is what makes it scary.

CRT has some valid intellectual underpinnings, but it ends up being like ugly Red Hat Trumpism for the Left. I actually support some aspects of it but I have no trust in the education system to use it responsibly.

Unfortunately, I think the 'sides' are talking past each other I don't see any consensus developing just yet.

Fair.

I wasn't intending to attack.

> Your claim that it's a subject for post graduate study/research might have been true at one point, but many of it's principles have been leaking into multiple levels of society, and in my opinion, to the detriment of society.

It's not my claim, and the "principles" you're talking about aren't CRT principles.

> Firstly, the focus on storytelling over data that is a hallmark of CRT. This has clearly metastasized. Note the prevalence of personal narratives, and the use of personal narrative to explicitly supplant other sources of truth that's common in today's conveyances.

The idea of a narrative being an important aspect of history education goes back... essentially forever. It doesn't trace back to CRT. It's a core principle of CRT because it predates it... and of course there's the whole thing about certain stories being excluded from our narratives.

> How punctuality and other such professional merits are now just white people's oppression [2] and that any acceptance of such is considered internalized racism?

The narrative on punctuality that is currently making the rounds is deliberately misframing the context. There's a reality (that has been studied) about how racism colours the application and enforcement things like punctuality. It's not that punctuality is intrinsically a tool for oppression, but rather how systemic racism plays out through things as trivial as punctuality.

There may indeed be a lot of the thinking here that has percolated out "into the mainstream". That's kind of the point of these things. You would expect that most ideas would get around throughout society. But no one worries about String Theory being taught in grade school, and the idea of actively trying to ensure it doesn't somehow slip in to the curriculum in grade school is laughable. If you can get students to the mental headspace where you can even begin to examine CRT, you're doing an amazing job as an educator, and I kind of don't care what you proceed to expose them to at that point.

Do you remember all the concern about CRT in 2018? All the brawls at boards of education? The 1100 times that it was mentioned on FOX News in just the first half of that year? Yeah, me neither. Yet somehow, I'm supposed to believe a narrative that there's been some massive nationwide covert shift in school boards, school administrations, and teachers that was executed without any turn over, public policy, etc.? I'm sorry. It's a lot easier to believe that the narrative about CRT is propaganda that plays a role in a larger, otherwise unrelated, political landscape.

> I certainly don't like it.

...and that's the crux of it. We're used to the propaganda we've been fed, and the idea of it changing in anyway is just really upsetting.

Here's one example from PaulG: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994

One tell is when they quote anonymous sources => propaganda. Another is using unconfirmed reports. Another is when the only source has a heavy incentive to misrepresent. Another is when the statistics make no sense, or do not support the thrust of the story.

It goes on and on.

Edit: Finally when we got an actually interesting topic to discuss among the ocean of controversies everyone forgets in a week and tech equivalents of cute animal pictures, mods suddenly decided to limit my account and I can no longer respond to anything. I don't want to deal with this BS, bye.

Last response, since I can't respond directly to shuntress:

Feel free to post examples of right-leaning media doing it. Like for example the mask idiocy, because your example doesn't make any sense. As I said, it wasn't my intention on picking on the left here. It's just that the 'mainstream' right don't have the 'activist spirit' like the left or the fringes have, so it happens behind the closed doors and saying the same about the right would be technically a mere speculation on my part. Activism on the other hand happens out in the open on the internet and you can see all the tactics for yourself. Also I'd love to refute the 'wokeness' meaning 'being polite', but that would probably be a somewhat longer discussion and given the situation I'm unable to do it. You can thank the mods.

I have a kid in a public high school. He has shared pictures, video, links, and schedules. Also I have visited local high schools and seen the messaging being delivered on the walls. These schools have one mission right now, above anything else: crank out social-justice warriors; get some reliable street troops on the ground for leftist causes.

Do NOT dare to tell me it is not like I describe.

1. Special presentations carved out from academic class time every day for black history month, with presentations about white privilege and other fodder to cultivate racial grievance.

2. A week devoted to BLM during that month, with similar time carved out each day from many classes for a presentation that included justifications for hate against white people and exhortations about how you should become an "Ally". Including a black poet that read that she was justified in calling white people "the devil" and lumped all white people who didn't jump to BLM action into the category of aggressors that deserve the violence of BLM protests.

3. "Open" class discussions after such presentations where everyone is called on to share their thoughts, but of course only certain thoughts are permissible and discipline is doled out to those who disagree.

4. A school-wide presentation by the "equity association" that re-enacted all the horrible things white people do to black people, such as saying they like fried chicken and watermelon, to demonstrate just how bad white people are all the time.

5. Gay pride month where they devoted more class time to special presentations and discussions, like Bill Nye saying that in addition to that little "sex" thing, there's also all these other more important dimensions like "gender" that need to be dwelled on.

6. Time off granted if you join a walk-out for preferred causes like global warming activism.

7. Posters around school lauding the actions of "world-changing" demonstrators. All leftist demonstrators of course.

8. Lots and lots of "No human is illegal" signs all over.

9. In my kid's school, at least one classroom decorated from top to bottom with Black Panther publicity and aggressive black-defiance messages.

10. In my spouse's teacher training, 100% of the time has been spent on "anti-bias" and "equity" training. Where no problem existed in the least.

11. School district hiring 6-figure "diversity consultants" by the dozen, all of whom will do nothing except arrange presentations such as I cited above. And then they claim to need a new tax levy to hire enough teachers or pay them decently.

So whatever you've seen in terms of CRT quizzes and stereotype pyramids, what you don't understand is that it's way worse than that. It's not just obnoxiously flooding kids with racial stereotypes. It's not just that that is a topic that is 100% unrelated to education. It's that they are cultivating racial grievance. And they are pitting student against student to get it done as completely as possible.

I'm a mild-mannered guy. And I've never been so pissed off in my life.