That said - is it really important to defend "stupid" as a word choice? Does rewording it, maybe to "senseless" or "ignorant", create some huge negative impact for a user? It seems like kind of a minimal effort solution that can accommodate users, so why make it a big deal?
I know I'm wandering through a nest of bees here, but this cuts both ways, I think. No, this particular word isn't important, and changing it is fine. Any one word can be fine. But similarly why did this user show up asking it to be changed? Is it a huge negative impact to leave it for the majority of users either? It feels like someone pulled a dictionary of newly bad words off a blog and grepped through the source with the perceived mission of contributing to the healing of the world, as a most charitable assumption on their intentions.
I think no one is worried about any one word, or any one PR. The concern is that the goalposts seem to change from words that 95% of people agree are bad, to words 60% of people agree are bad, to words like this that maybe 1% of people feel are bad, and there's a grey area here on what level of badness is bad enough for all of us to change to accomodate one or two people's sensitivities, and to what level those people should be responsible for their own sensitivities.
This is a civilization and cultural level spectrum which has "change for your society" and "society bends to you without change" at its ends, and different people fall at different points on this spectrum, which will put that at different points on the "how bad does a word need to be for me to be a bad person for typing it in my own code" spectrum. And for me, I feel "stupid" is over my line and is a noisy change that might beget other more petty changes with no benefit to the vast majority, despite how simple it is. But you clearly feel more strongly, and I can tolerate that too.
All that having been said, I have no opinion or context about this particular user being banned from this particular chat, unrelated to the ethics of the PR.




As an unfortunately pedantic person, it really bothers me that blacklist and whitelist get caught up in all this. Like, yeah, I can see why people think it's related to skin colour, and I can see the argument that even if it wasn't originally about skin colour, it leaves an impression of "white good, black bad" regardless of its original intentions. But fuck do I wish we didn't call white people white and black people black. It's not accurate, and would solve a whole bunch of these "colour-related phrases becoming racial" problems. We should just stop using colours to refer to people! But that ship has long sailed, and its harder to advocate in that direction, so I guess I'm fine with it. But I can dream π
Also "master" has other uses, like a Master Sculpter making a masterpiece, and more relatedly things like the "master tape" being the tape other tapes are copied from, a la "remastered". But I concede it's pretty hard to make that argument when DBs and BIOSes have "masters" versus "slaves" π¬π