Every civil liberties story ever posted to HN has been accompanied by that justification, and, were it to be taken seriously, there would be nothing but social justice stories on HN, there being no dearth of important social justice stories to find on any given day.
If we included every Rails internals article, that'd push everything else off the front page too. HN catches the highlights, and I like that that includes a lot of different stuff.
"were it to be taken seriously, there would be nothing but social justice stories"
Total non-sequitur. I'm not saying I think this is a good HN article to upvote but the idea that this is somehow going to exclude everything else is bizarre.
I think you misread (or, equally likely, I wrote unclearly). I'm not saying "if you take the article seriously, we'll have nothing but social justice stories". I'm saying that if you take the premise that social justice is inherently interesting to hackers, then we'll end up with nothing but those stories.
Many people here, myself very much included, get their social justice stories in a different section of their RSS readers. It's not that those stories aren't interesting; it's that they simply aren't Hacker News, any more than updates about Girl Talk albums are Hacker News because hackers are so likely to listen to them.
I completely understand you don't want this type of article on HN. But, you don't need to worry the site will only be articles on social justice if hackers find the topic "inherently interesting." Most people here are inherently interested in a variety of topics and that's why the community makes room for a few these "off-topic" stories.
Broken window theory. The rate of civil rights outrages worldwide is more than high enough to overwhelm the forum, so the number of completely off topic stories only remains low thanks to people visibly objecting to them.
Acknowledging that social justice is inherently interesting does not imply that only social justice is interesting or that it is the most interesting. As such, the claim does not lead to 'nothing but those stories'. For that, additional premises are needed, none of which were posited.
Or to take a purely commercial angle: Where there is change, there is opportunity. Startups don't make money by joining the herd, but by exploiting changing situations.
Change can come in many forms, including social. Such stories are a record of social change, and the pressures that drive it.
