I didn’t mention the police, I’m talking about anything that offends minority groups within your community of users. By choosing to be insensitive you contribute to their plight.
I'm sorry, I just can't agree. You shouldn't be intentionally hostile, but the web is so full of young justice warriors who are over-sensitive to everything that you can't account for all the trigger words in existence.
Avoid the general pathologies - misogyny, racism, tribal prejudice - yes. Cater to regional special cases (like this instance the word cop) - no. The world is a big place. You should embrace everybody you can. This means creating a global consensus what is polite to all users. And cleaning up random trigger words because one or other local bru-ha-ha really isn't really helpful.
You don’t have to account for all the trigger words in existence. All you have to do is believe that the people who are raising issues about specific topics are doing so from a place of need. By characterizing them as “over-sensitive”, you are indicating that you cannot or do not believe in the cause, or cannot empathize with their lived experience.
If that’s the root for you, then just say it - “I'm not values aligned with this cause”. That’s totally valid.
Software is political. It’s written by people, it’s used by people, and it has an impact on society. It is impossible for it to be neutral.
"Software is political. It’s written by people, it’s used by people, and it has an impact on society. It is impossible for it to be neutral."
If you take your definition of "political" to mean anything of utility made by people then yes, so it is. And everything else man made as well.
You are not wrong in stating that everything has a political dimension, but as a general guideline it's non helpfull. Everything has some property in many analytical contexts.
I would rather not think about for example the politics of daily consumables like milk and nails unless there is some milk related crisis going on. Or ponder on the metaphysics of gasoline while filling the tank.
Software is just an utility like them.
When it makes sense to observe spefic dimensions is when this observation has specific utility. Otherwise you are either a total nerd or a fanatic. Both of these stances are admirable, but not practical in the general sense.
The link to the ruby library here is that the ruby library was totally unrelated to the political issue at hand in any possibly sane sense. If the ruby library was linked in some direct way to the political cause then taking it into account in relation to it would have made sense.
In this case the links to the political cause were non-existant and the remotely familiar name was used as an excuse by attention seeking people who are too obsessed to do any action of real value. They satisfied their itch of "doing something" by an action that will NOT help the cause in ANY way. Perhaps it made the activists happy for a while but NOBODY else benefitted!
See where this is going? Nerds/fanatics/impractical.
Trying to sell an anti-police message to an international audience is American cultural imperialism at it's worst.