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).

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.