I understand that people sometimes look at situations like this and say, "this is the reality of the world." And truthfully, you're correct that people have fewer safety nets to take advantage of their rights sometimes, and that is reality.

But I think the pushback comes from the response/followup to that statement. We're on a forum of relatively privileged tech people, and I think it's good for us to talk about the fact that others don't always get to take advantage of the rights they have on paper, and it's good for us to advocate that they should be able to.

There's pushback to these kinds of comments in the same exact way that there's pushback to comments that, for example, say that Google is tracking everything, and people just need to understand that. Okay, you've identified something about the current world that people don't like, but that is still happening. Now what?

The average privileged person in tech doesn't need to learn how to keep their head down, they need to learn how to get very angry when underprivileged people's rights are taken away, and they need to learn how to make a bigger, more public fuss about vindictive social policies towards people with criminal records. It's one thing to acknowledge that society is cruel towards people with a criminal record, but the followup should always be, "and that is unjust and we should change it".

There is some value in recognizing reality, but there is also value in being outraged over outrageous things even in situations where they are common.