I am sorry but I am confusing. As a non-native English speaker (and non-USA citizen), I have a hard time grasping the issue.
Of course, I am against any kind of harassment but I am not sure how those changes improve the situation. Probably we don't share common sense, background, and culture.
So I propose the following:
* Revert everything back before the issue for now
* Protect related PRs (including #2690, #2693, #2695, #2696) for a while (say 1 month) to cool down
* Then open a new issue to discuss the CoC for the Ruby community
Note that the Ruby community has no membership, no initiation, no admission. It's just a group of Ruby users who like the language. So the community guideline shall be abstract and vague (with encouragement but without enforcement) like the current one. CoC for individual teams (e.g. the core team) or aggregations (like conferences) might have more concrete CoC.
No one supported hmdne's claim everyone knows what protected classes are.
Jacob Herrington encouraged hmdne to make another PR mostly. Consider he recognized hmdne was trying to derail his PR. And he said he'd be in support of finding a better way to communicate the spirit of tolerance and mutual respect. Not removing that part.
Matz approved both PRs. But it isn't clear he read the discussion.
In this sense, that they would help protect the community from trolls - yes they are defensible. But otherwise, I would unfortunately disagree. It's like an argument that we should lock everyone in cages, so they wouldn't hurt themselves.
I tried really hard to follow the threading in that but I came away being completely unable to parse it, at least on mobile. What was the attempted "joke"?
Guy reports a behavior where date math doesn't return the result he expected and jokes that it might have to do with how women don't like to admit when they're aging.
I wouldn't have made the joke, myself, but it's also not really insulting to anyone. It's not saying that women are bad at math, or that women broke date arithmetic to seem younger, it's just referencing that phenomenon.
What about a joke where adding weights resulted in quantities too large, and it's suggested that it was written for dudes who want to say they can bench press more than they really can?
I'd rather that joke were not made. There is a difference though between a discreet 'not a great moment' and public 'absolutely inacceptable [and we should hound the poor sap out of all gainful employment opportunities for life]'. A classic management principle is 'praise in public, criticize in private'. While the joke was was indeed inappropriate, the public reaction was 10x worse.
I can agree that there should be no public flogging, provided it is first couple times. If it has been explained to the individual that certain behaviour is considered unprofessional and yet they insist on engaging in it then... well, there should be consequences.
Yeah, looks like that's the diff OP intended to link.
At face value, it seems even worse than presented.
Removed:
>"Participants will be tolerant of opposing views."
Modified:
>Before - "Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated."
>After - "Behaviour which can be considered harassment against protected classes will not be tolerated."
The "reasonably" removal aside - for an attempt to be much more precise and inclusive with language, why would they narrow the previous "harassment" to "harassment against protected classes"? I'm sure this wasn't the intention, but rather than adding or intensifying any protections, the change, if read literally in the context of the diff, makes it seem like harassment is now tolerated if you aren't a protected classes whereas it previously wasn't tolerated at all.
I think a better route would've been to keep that line as-is and add a new line saying something like "any remarks that could be considered disparaging, mocking, or exclusive towards any protected classes will not be tolerated". This makes it clear that any kind of singling-out of protected classes is disallowed, regardless of the fact that some people may consider the definition of "harassment" to require something more severe than that.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28712821