[lolinder]

But "those circles" is not "the entire Linux community", and it's unreasonable to expect the entire community to keep up with a small circle's latest slurs.

For most of the US for most of history, "the thin blue line" has been an unequivocally positive phrase describing people who stand up for what's right and protect against chaos. Whether we should have seen it that way is irrelevant to the question of whether we can reasonably expect an average Linux kernel maintainer to both be aware that some people take offense at it and adjust their language accordingly.

This kind of language policing is inherently discriminatory against older people who spent their early lives immersed in mythology surrounding police and haven't been exposed to the cultural shift, not to mention against people who live outside the US, were exposed to US media, but can't be bothered to keep track of US politics.