Going back to your OP:
If anybody has doubts of whether the social justice warrior society is out of control, take a look at this.
"Social media platform Twitter is dropping the terms "master", "slave" and "blacklist" in favour of more inclusive language."
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53273923
So a private US enterprise decides to divert a minuscule fraction of their revenue to changing terminology that they feel might be inappropriate in the US context. How is this any of your business? Why do you even care? And what does ancient Roman history have to do with any of that?
This is in the code. It's not in communication material. It's in the code, which nobody other than programmers see.
And the reason it
is in the code is because it seemed like an apt and innocuous metaphor to a handful of predominantly white American lead engineers growing up in a largely segregated society who coined those terms back in the 1950s to 1970s when computer science came of age. The reason they even thought of those metaphors instead of any other equally apt pair of words is because the concepts felt familiar coming from their cultural knowledge of US history. What those terms might evoke for African-American programmers seeing them everyday wasn't even on their radar, and as far as I can tell, no-one's blaming them for it - not the engineers who instigated the change, not Twitter's management, not the people welcoming the change. The only proposition made by those "social justice warriors" you so fiercely oppose is that this isn't the 1960s anymore, and maybe in retrospect their choice of terms wasn't the most sensitive. If you think that's "out of control" or "deranged", you'll have some explaining to do.
These are also terms that are standardised and universal within programming. They are also useful because they are clear and descriptive. If you have two thingy's on a network and one is called "the master" and the other "the slave" there's no doubt about which does what.
There's no doubt about which does what when they're called "leader" and "follower", or "allowlist" and "denylist" either. If anything, the proposed new terminology is even clearer and requires less historical and cultural context to assign an interpretation to someone hearing it for the first time. (For what it's worth, I don't think the background for "blacklist" or "whitelist" is racial, but "allowlist" and "denylist" are still clearer.)
It's also going to be expensive. These kinds of code changes cost a lot of money to push through.
Why don't you let that be a concern for Twitter's shareholders and costumers? Also, can you quantify "a lot of money", as a percentage of Twitter's annual revenue? Can you compare the figure to the cost of moving from one docstring convention to another, or from one Java version to another? I'm willing to bet a substantial sum that the cost will be minuscule in comparison. Where's your drunken rant about about the lunacy of keeping up with the most recent Java releases?
I don't think they're thought this through. I think this is something the communication department came up with without fully involving the nerds, because this is just dumb.
You're wrong about that, and all it took to verify it is to follow up the links in the article you yourself provided. The policy change was spearheaded by a pair of engineers by the names of Regynald Augustin and Kevin Oliver. Maybe you should read more nerdy sources?
https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially-loaded-tech-terms-like-master-slave/
I'm a lefty... but right now my chips are being moved over on the conservative side because this sort of lunacy has to be stopped. It's Newspeak. Reality is being replaced by virtue signalling symbols. Progressivism is being forced upon us in Moaist people's courts. While China just turned Hong Kong into an actual totalitarian Big Brother state, Putin became president for life, and the West worries about whether or not code might offend the handful of black programmers that come into contact with it.
A textbook example of whataboutism. Yes, there's a lot of problems in this world that are more pressing than whether a subordinate device is called "slave" or "follower". I don't see where Regynald Augustin, Kevin Oliver, or anyone else for that matter has claimed otherwise. Most of those more substantial problems are, however, not for Twitter to solve.
I suspect that most of their programming is done in India anyway, by people who have no reason to be offended by the term "slave".
They have no reason to be offended by the the term "follower" either. So it's a win-win: Where previously some people were offended while others weren't, now no-one has reason to be offended. Other than whiny "I'm-a-lefty-butts" who get offended by change (any change pretty much) for the sake of getting defending the good old ways (a.k.a. conservatives in the narrowest sense of the word).