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>Additionally, other movements who are (or feel) oppressed are not relegated to starting from a point of appealing to fellow-citizens: not the Pro-life, or the Pro-choice, or the Pro-2A contingents do this.

You'd actually be surprised. Most Pro-2A folks have given up on any hope for actually having the Supreme Court pick up a case, never mind coming to a positive judgement that makes the regulatory framework less fickle and perilous. Screw up with a gun, have a bad lawyer, and poof, everything becomes a felony. You lose voting rights, and your firearm. (Actually I think felonies are woefully overused as criminal punishments nowadays, period)

You can be turned into a felon in waiting overnight if the ATF deems it so. Few hopes at legislation are realistically attainable (silencers becoming non-NFA because of the hysteria around them, to the benefit of many enthusiast's ears) and other perfectly reasonable legislation everyone wants gets poisoned the minute another rider taking another chunk out of the 2nd Amendment gets attached. Most pro-2A groups have tried to build grass root support through friends and family to dispel the fear and mania around firearm ownership.

There are a lot of subgroups and interests all competing for limited legislative and public awareness resources; everything comes with a poignant attrition cost. Completely pointless changes for change sake like the branch name change are the worst type of wasteful expenditure of human organization. It doesn't get an actual physical result. It doesn't cut prison populations. It doesn't get kids in disadvantaged or resource poor districts a shot at better education or exposure to something new. It just lets someone uncomfortable with the world as they perceive it cathart through (in a tragedy of the common sense) being able to point at something and say, "Look, I did something!" Damned be the consequences or naysayers.

> I didn't see the same levels of indignation when the kilobyte and megabyte were redefined from 1024 to 1000, but technically the changes are similar

The changes are similar but they reasoning behind them isn't.

Personally I'm annoyed about the change to the point of refusing to use Github, as a protest. To me it strikes as being overly politically correct. The whole master/slave and white/blacklist thing is an insane stretch of wokeism. If anything I'll start using more of these "controversial" terms if it actually ticks these kinds of people off.

> My POV is that bad actors should never be a consideration - they are never going to be helpful whether you "empower" them or not. They should be removed from the equation entirely.

We disagree on strategy here. Bad faith actors have the power to damage the movement, and we should not give them opportunities to do so if it can be avoided. I want to be clear that I'm not saying we should diminish the fervor of the fight for social justice to accommodate racists, what I'm saying is that we shouldn't waste political capital on efforts that give us nothing in return; fanfare over git branch names gives us nothing, but gives them a talking point. To clarify even further, I'm not saying changing the name is wrong, I'm saying that elevating such trivialities into the wider conversation of social justice is harmful to the cause.

> I never claimed naming a default branch "master" is racist - changing it is petty, and doesn't change anything overall

So what were you referring to when you asked why we should supplicate racists before earning a chance at human dignity?

> People who get outraged over this claiming "PC gone mad" or "'Wokism' is destroying the world" raise a red flag for me and I immediately suspect them of being a culture warrior.

We are in total agreement here. My point is that an 800lb gorilla like github declaring such trivialities as progress towards social justice offers the culture warriors a brightly painted catalyst for delivery of their propaganda that they wouldn't otherwise have. If github were doing something meaningful then this would be a completely different situation because the positive changes they were enacting would outweigh any bleating of the bad faith actors, but since this isn't something useful, the sum total of the act is to harm the movement.

> Oh, I think reasoning with our fellow citizens is a wonderful thing

Your statement of "fuck hearts and minds" doesn't seem to reflect that belief, but I'm happy to take your word for it.

> it should not be a prerequisite for a subset of the citizenry to get what ought to be inalienable rights

I never made that argument. I was discussing the trivialities which were the topic of this article, not inalienable rights.

> I think MLK's "Letter from Birmingham"[1] addresses this more eloquently than I can.

An excellent read of which I am very familiar, but I hope I've made it clear that on the topic of discussion (git branch names), the inalienable rights of oppressed peoples is not the subjective of my criticism.

> We disagree on strategy here

Oh, absolutely - and that is fine.

Additionally, we're probably having slightly different conversations - you appear specifically focused on only Github's renaming of the default branch, and I on the more general "hearts and mind" argument - I used Github's action and the criticism thereof as a launchpad to a more general problem - perhaps I failed to communicate that clearly.

>> Oh, I think reasoning with our fellow citizens is a wonderful thing

> Your statement of "fuck hearts and minds" doesn't seem to reflect that belief, but I'm happy to take your word for it.

The phrase you quoted better captures my thinking when it's not truncated halfway; the second half of the sentence you elided is the more important half.

> They should be removed from the equation entirely.

Yeah, this always ends well...