>then surely it should be at worst unsightly?

What me and other people are trying to get across to you, is that you only feel this way because you support the cause.

The practice of filling every place and institution with your partisan beliefs is a sign of disrespect, essentially a power move. "You're here to read up on an OS, but joke on you, you actually can't escape the all-pervasive hand of my religion. Here's some propaganda diet before you read anything".

To know what that feels, imagine if every time a mainland Chinese scientist published an academic paper they were forced to write at the end "Long Live The CCP" with big bold letters. Or imagine if every time a Muslim scientist published a paper they must write "In The Name Of Allah, God Of All Creation" in the beginning. Etc... Can you see why this is ridiculous to a non-communist or a non-Muslim ?

Why is this ridiculous belief-signalling an expression of power ? 2 reasons :

1- Like I said above, it asserts existence in a space where its competitors don't. No Christian, Jew or Hindu declares their religion in the academic papers they author, it feels fair that Muslims also shouldn't, it's like an unspoken agreement on keeping Academia free of an irrelevant controversial subject that gets people riled up and generates more heat than light. When Muslims (in the hypothetical world) violate this, it's a unilateral violation of the agreement that signals power and superiority. "Rules Don't Apply To Us". It's a fighting stance.

In the concrete case we're discussing here, only progressive tech companies signal their beliefs in this vulgar way, no conservative tech firm have ever put "Blue Lives Matter" or "Make America Great Again" on their technical docs, although there are tens of millions of people who believe just as sincerly as you that those causes represent worthy and moral goals. The reason sane well-adjusted people refrain from expressing politics and religion in workplaces is because of common sense social protocols and unspoken consensus, when you break those, you're deliberately asserting power and inviting challenge.

2- It's probably forced. Just like the vast majority of Chinese scientists or Muslim scientists would probably do the above hypothetical signalling out of fear (of being labelled a traitor and a heretic, respectively), the vast majority of people in progressive-dominated social bubbles probably virtue-signal out of fear, rather than any geniune conviction. It's morally disgusting to force people to express beliefs they don't actually hold, or hold in lesser intensity than being forced to express. It's tyranny 101, straight from 1984.

I really can’t see the equivalency between a political stance (imo a movement for racial equality) and religion. The former mixes, often by necessity, with technical documents all the time. See GNU or the Apollo program.

> In the concrete case we're discussing here, only progressive tech companies signal their beliefs in this vulgar way, no conservative tech firm have ever put "Blue Lives Matter" or "Make America Great Again" on their technical docs, although there are tens of millions of people who believe just as sincerly as you that those causes represent worthy and moral goals. The reason sane well-adjusted people refrain from expressing politics and religion in workplaces is because of common sense social protocols and unspoken consensus, when you break those, you're deliberately asserting power and inviting challenge.

No, but many will willingly participate in the US military industrial complex, which causes significantly more actual harm. So I think we have different ideas regarding who can claim to be “sane”.

> 2- It's probably forced. Just like the vast majority of Chinese scientists or Muslim scientists would probably do the above hypothetical signalling out of fear (of being labelled a traitor and a heretic, respectively), the vast majority of people in progressive-dominated social bubbles probably virtue-signal out of fear, rather than any geniune conviction. It's morally disgusting to force people to express beliefs they don't actually hold, or hold in lesser intensity than being forced to express. It's tyranny 101, straight from 1984.

You say all this, but “probably” is doing a lot of work. This kind of banner is uncommon even among Silicon Valley companies. It’s not as if there would be outrage if it weren’t there, or if it disappeared.

Finally, these are all reasons why someone who doesn’t agree with BLM would feel excluded by the banner. My original question was why people outside of the US would feel excluded. Do you feel that most people outside of the US view BLM negatively or indeed have an opinion at all? Enough that the banner can be said to exclude international audiences in general?

I think the issue is simpler than the above discussion.

I have no idea what to think about BLM. I'm not American, so it's not part of my zeitgeist. I hear all kinds of differing opinions about it from Americans. One thing is clear to me: "BLM good" is more complicated than just "racism bad".

When I see something supporting BLM in tech documentation, it's confusing (I don't know why it's relevant to tech documentation, and I don't know what to think about BLM), and alienating (the banner presupposes knowledge about BLM that most of the world doesn't have).

My guess is the only reason why Europe has a more sophisticated discussion about race and racism now than it did in the 50's is because of American influence. I say this as a European. There simply are not the sizeable minorities in europe to push these issues into the public discourse, and as such, without exposure to US culture, most people's views on race tend to be only lightly modified from traditional views, which are extremely racist.

Yes, I think you're right. And in many parts of Europe, there still isn't much sophisticated discussion about race and racism. (That's my observation as an outsider though; I'm not European.)

But pro-BLM is not the same thing as anti-racism, as I noted.

If you want to write down your values and plaster them at the top of every page of your tech documentation, I'll think that's a bit weird but I guess I'll mostly be fine with it?

But if you distill your advertised values into a single message of support for a political group that is virtually unknown in most of the world, that's more complicated. It makes it harder to understand the message, and it gives it an air of exclusivity, as the real meaning of the message is only understood to a subset of the people who see it.

> But pro-BLM is not the same thing as anti-racism, as I noted.

I guess for me the BLM movement goes back to the roots of the struggle for civil rights in the west. The west has always had this tension between a strong history of formal equality (probably going back to the Roman citizenship tradition) and an equally strong tradition of slavery and segregation.

You can go back to the 1800's anti-slavery campaign slogan 'Am I not a man and a brother?', or to the MLK-era billboard 'I am a man', to 'Black Lives Matter', and you can see the basic line of attack is the same. Equally, every step of the way, their opponents have always said that contemporary forms of anti-racism are not really connected to the past forms, they're going too far, even though their slogans and basic politics are more or less the same.

If you're not from the west, I guess you can say, 'not my dog, not my race', but I think just as nations around the world have adopted western models of economics, and western models of citizenship, they also have to wrestle with the implications those models have for minority groups within their polities.

> But if you distill your advertised values into a single message of support for a political group that is virtually unknown in most of the world, that's more complicated.

I guess in the 70's, villagers in China knew about Huey P. Newton, but probably had a very shaky understanding of McDonalds. If there's one cultural export from America I'm rather pleased about, its the great work of their anti-racism campaigners. I'd be quite happy if the BLM message was as ubiquitous as the Coca Cola message, for instance.

>I really can’t see the equivalency between a political stance (imo a movement for racial equality) and religion.

Politics and religion are notoriously related. They are both morally charged subjects that infamously degrade people's ability to see the world clearly and discuss pros and cons rationally. I can cite plenty of pro-BLM speech and actions that disturbingly mirror religious language and actions. The fact that most BLM supporters might not speak or act like this is irrelevant too, most Christians don't go to church either.

>The former mixes, often by necessity, with technical documents all the time. See GNU or the Apollo program.

I'm really puzzled as to how this supports BLM banners in OS design documents though. You said "by necessity", is BLM mottos and iconography necessary to understand micro kernels as much as Cold War terms and timeline is necessary to understand the Apollo program ? that would be an... interesting point to argue.

Even ignoring this, not all politics is created equal. "The Apollo program was created as a demonstration of technical supramecy by the US intended to intimidate the USSR" is politics. "The Apollo program was when we showed those dirty commies who's the boss" is also politics. I hope you agree the first statment is vastly more palatable and neutral than the second. The vast majority of progressive mottos and rallying cries strike my ears like the second statment.

>No, but many will willingly participate in the US military industrial complex, which causes significantly more actual harm.

This is a strange thing to say for more reasons than 1

1- Conservative tech companies aren't any more likely to cooperate with the US military than progressive tech companies. Amazon and Google, hardly bastions of conservatism, are both known contractors to the US military. So if you hate this, you should hate all influential US tech companies, conservatism is not a useful predictor of this any more than random chance.

2- I'm not assessing who is "doing more harm overall", I'm assessing who's asserting ideological power over people in vulgar ways. US military power projection is an entirely different topic for a different conversation, we're now talking about who brings their obnoxious politics into the workplace. There are different ways of disliking things, I dislike the US military power posturing and US progressives power posturing in 2 different ways.

>This kind of banner is uncommon even among Silicon Valley companies.

Which is all the more reason to think it's forced virtue signaling.

>It’s not as if there would be outrage if it weren’t there, or if it disappeared.

I see you're unfamiliar with Twitter.

>Finally, these are all reasons why someone who doesn’t agree with BLM would feel excluded by the banner.

When it comes to religions and religion-like things, "disagree" is anything that isn't "agree". Any Non-Muslim "disagrees" with Islam, not because they have read the history of the prophet (which is awful) or studied Islamic Theology's arguments for why Islam is true (which is weak), but simply because Non-Muslims don't say "No God but Allah" and don't pray 5 times a day. They are non-believers, not dis-believers.

>Do you feel that most people outside of the US view BLM negatively or indeed have an opinion at all?

I can't speak for all the world off course, but I do feel that BLM is entirely irrelevant and unknown in my country, even if the events that sparked and galvanized it was internationally known. Again, no need for intense, explicit disagreement here, although I personally do think it's a destructive obvious scam\religion mix that every person who knows what it does and what kind of people run it should oppose it intensely, but there's really no reason to go that far.

Do you think you need hate or disagree with Islam to despise and hate the hypothetical practice of Muslims writing religious verses in completely unrelated writings? Do you think you need to hate or disagree with Communism to despise the hypothetical practice of Chinese Scientists writing pro-CCP mottos in completely unrelated writings?

My answer to the above question is No, I hate ideological spamming as a pathetic authoritarian practice regardless of the ideology doing it. In fact, sometimes I will hate the ideology itself, for no other reasons but the spam that its fanatics continually pump, and I think my view is a fairly popular and widespread to view things.

Whatever merits BLM might have had, it's completely eclipsed by the fact that their true believers seem to believe that micro kernel developers must hear them when they are reading up on their work.

Let people say and express whatever they want. Why do you want to censor anything that you "hate" or anything that looks "ideological" to you? I don't see anything wrong with someone supporting BLM or mentioning a verse from the Quran or from the Bible on a technical website. For me, it would be an interesting short read/observation, I don't care if I don't agree, it doesn't matter. If I read a scientific paper from a Chinese researcher that mentions "Glory to the CCP", it would probably give me a short laugh, then I'll just move and focus on my goal (the science).

>Let people say and express whatever they want

Does this extend to letting people control other people and harass them with politics in their workplace to coerce them into expressing their politics ?

>Why do you want to censor

Quote 1 part of my comments where I advocated for censorship.

>anything that looks "ideological" to you

Is this meant to imply that "ideological" is subjective? Because I'm pretty sure all the examples I mentioned would all be recognized as partisan Ideology to the vast majority of people (except possibly the believers of said ideology, who would predictably disagree that it's anything but the plain obvious truth).

As for why I mock people who bring their ideology or religion to their workplace and why I think they are immature and unworthy of respect or cooperation, it's because I believe in not burning bridges.

Humans differ on uncountable millions of things, the exception is when we agree for once. A workplace is already full of potential and actual work-related conflicts enough, without somebody bringing in another certified-infinite source of conflicts that serves nothing except heat generation.

It's selfish and disgusting, like an army breaking a peace agreement to score a quick victory.