Humans as numbered entities: This is particularly true in database-related books (including my own!). Technology is presented through a medium of scenarios that represent--and manipulate--humans as numbers.

Everything and anything as numbered entities: Hey, it's not just people!

That's how computers work. It's numbers all the way down. The point at which it stops being a number is the moment when a human reads the light emitting from their monitor and thinks about a particular person/object again.

The author's perspective is interesting, but the reason one shouldn't use any emotionally-charged example in an educational text, political or otherwise, is because people learn best when they are thinking analytically, rather than emotionally.

To introduce an example that might shake your reader out of an analytical, academic mindset, is also to introduce content that might make your educational book a less suitable vehicle for learning.

And that's not really wrong I guess, but it begs the question: why do it?