The only reason this individual should have been punished by FreeBSD folks for this alleged harassment is if it was against FreeBSD rules, it occurred in FreeBSD channels or forums, and there was a consensus among other people that it actually constituted harassment.

Otherwise, you just have a weapon you can wield to silence all civil discourse (because everyone has a job or a hobby somewhere they don't want to lose) you don't like by claiming you feel unsafe or harassed.

And after reading the sources mentioned in this thread, your and Randi's description of events is, to put it very mildly, one-sided. You may win some support from the people who don't dig down, but you're alienating allies with these tactics. I was a proud supporter and ally for about ten years, but over the past year or so I've grown more and more disillusioned. More and more it seems like there's nothing worth fighting for. I would certainly not want to appear to support the hatefulness and bullying Randi has engaged in publicly over this and other issues.

FreeBSD is, frankly, better off without the politics and drama.

FreeBSD is, frankly, better off making these people feel threatened and dehumanized.

You do realize that many of your critics will point to statements like this and use them against you. So why make them?

It is ironic that you would make this argument. Identity politics as they have now become represent a kind of second coming of Nietzschean nihilism, where our sacred civic religion of human rights has self-overcome and transformed into the supremacy of the unbridled ego: all things must be seen through the interpretative framework of the subjective ego, and all things must be fully supportive of the ego or regarded as an enemy that must be totally and utterly destroyed. No logical argument is acceptable because any argument per se represents not rhetoric but a personal attack on the ego itself that must be responded to with overwhelming force. The ego must always answer "why am I unhappy" with "because of someone else - not because of me! Never because of me!" Inevitably every ally, supporter, and friend over time becomes an enemy, because even the closest and best of friends cannot (and should not) be continuously supportive of every thought, word, and action. That is, the natural consequence of this type of thinking is that it is impermissible, verboten, for anyone to speak for, let alone stand against, the ego.

The fact of the matter is you do not care the slightest whit for my feelings. That is why it is acceptable in your mind for you and Randi to slur, bully, and insult people, and render them into sociopathic strawmen (or neo-nazis) but not for anyone to respond in kind. You will be fighting a war that never, never ends, because part of your fundamental identity is that of an oppressed victim. No matter how the people in your external environment change, you will never feel differently, you will never not feel oppressed.

> FreeBSD is, frankly, better off making these people feel threatened and dehumanized.

This is an example of you scurrying to turn my post into a personal attack against you, because you cannot see outside of that interpretive lens.

What I said was this: FreeBSD should be in the business of enforcing their rules on their developers, which should apply only to FreeBSD venues and not outside of them. The rules should not be a hammer for people to wield against each other, but something reasonable people agree on. Just because you feel threatened and dehumanized, which could be caused by literally anything, depending on the person, and both of which are weasel words to start with, is no reason for anyone to take action. None whatsoever. If a majority of reasonable people see that an abuser is using specific language that credibly, physically threatens you, then there would certainly be grounds for real action by FreeBSD such as immediate excommunication from everything to do with FreeBSD, and actively assisting with the law enforcement side of the case.

More concretely, Randi herself violated (and violates) the FreeBSD Code of Conduct regularly. If CoCs are to mean anything at all, they should apply to everyone equally. FreeBSD did treat her in a very weaselly way with the trademark deal, but the real story is most likely that FreeBSD did not want to be associated with Randi and they believed that draping the request in legal trademark terms was more likely to be successful than telling her either privately or publicly they did not want to be associated with her behavior.

> BTW, being picked on and trolling cis men poses the exact scenario as threatening women, minorities, with death, rape, etc.

Nobody said this. This is just another attempt to turn this discussion into an us vs them battle. It is strange to me that you appear to hold in such high consideration people's feelings, but you seem utterly unable to understand my thoughts and feelings.

You can be yourself and fight for your rights without making the world a worse and more hateful place. That's not what is happening here. If someone calling you a "tranny" is dehumanizing (which is absurd on any objective level, since there are people such a the woman who lives across the street who prefers to be referred to as a tranny when the subject of transgendered people comes up), that does not make it OK for Randi to tell people to "go set yourself on fire", it makes her just as awful.

What?

If a co-worker started disparaging me on Facebook and sharing private chat logs publicly... they'd be reprimanded at the very least, and if the behavior continued they'd be gone.

This is exactly why companies have HR policies.

I didn't see that in the article, could you point us to that information?

I don't know anything about what happened here more than what's public, but it's totally imaginable to me that if you make that an ultimatum, and the project leadership hasn't given itself a reasonable way to do that, it's difficult for them to respond usefully.

Maybe the lesson here is that good projects should give their leadership the explicit ability and the political authority to do that, including for forums like IRC. There are many examples of projects / communities that are wonderful places until things go wrong. (This is, essentially, the argument for having a written code of conduct even though nobody would be violating it.)

Banning is a common response to harassment. Hacker News uses it, we even have multiple types of banning, including the shadowban and hellban. We know that "crucifixion" is hyperbolical language, and we can ordinarily forgive someone for being hyperbolical, but in this case it's simply an unreasonable exaggeration.

The same applies to your use of the term "ultimatum". That's an unreasonable exaggeration. It depicts the contents of the original article inaccurately. She detailed no consequences nor threatened retaliation in her request that a user be banned. You can call it a "demand" instead of a "request", but "ultimatum" is simply incorrect.

Honestly, I can understand and relate to both her request and the core developers' response, but I'm not convinced that a code of conduct is a prerequisite for banning abusive community members. Explicit political authority is great, but we shouldn't be automatically afraid to use implicit political authority.

What I mean to convey is that, if someone makes a demand that they're unwilling to compromise on or discuss, and you're are unable to satisfy the demand as stated, regardless of whether you want to seek a resolution along those lines, you have no good options. Of course in a healthy project there wouldn't be much need to discuss banning people who are harassing other community members. But mechanically it still has the downside of an ultimatum, even if the connotation of the term is wrong.

That is why I chose that word, and I apologize for not having been clearer about what I meant with it.

I do agree that greater willingness to use implicit political authority is generally a good thing for healthy projects. (Though maybe there is something complicated like not actually having technical control of the relevant IRC channels or something annoying like that, I don't know. In some open-source projects I'm active in, the core teams' ability to respond to harassment is somewhat weakened or at least rate-limited by using IRC servers, code-review forums, etc. run by unrelated teams, and I've seen people be hurt by abusers taking advantage of this technical limitation.)

And I think it is—unfortunately—normal for a healthy community to discuss banning users who harass others, because users who harass others are everywhere, until they are kicked out.

However if I do provide sources (articles written by you and/or rooshv), tweets, whatever, then there is the implication I'm "stalking" you or him. I'd rather not get involved in any such drama.

To be clear, by history I meant that the two of you have both written/talked/tweeted about each other (in generally negative ways). My intent there was to agree with the person who commented about how this whole situation is a "shit sandwich".