Also, this article comes from another TSC member, meaning one of his peers. If 4 of your 12 peers resign because you weren't removed, there is almost certainly some merit to these complaints.
If 6 of them vote against removing the "accused" party, and 2 of them abstain, there's certainly little merit to these complaints.
As far as I can tell there is no merit to the complaints. If 4 members stepped down, that suggests Node TSC has a serious problem with people who are wildly extreme.
Here's what appears to have happened based on the original complaint:
1. This guy tweets an article that discusses campus speech codes, university politics and so on. It doesn't attack anyone and is a fairly long-winded but reasonable contribution to the discussion about free speech. His tweet implies he does see CoCs as having downsides and that he finds this article to be persuasive.
2. In response, someone tweets that "I hope I meet you at a place without a CoC so I can take a dump on your laptop". Rod points out that this isn't a very nice response and is not a mature contribution to the conversation, "Hey here's an interesting discussion to be had vs ... <tweet screenshot>".
Now let's look at the complaints. They assert:
1. Rod tweeted an "inflammatory article"
2. When he highlighted the immature response, this "suggests pleasure at having upset members of the JavaScript community and others".
3. Some woman complained and said she wouldn't contribute anymore. That woman asserted that "some people said he was bad but what can you do". This was "a reason for some to avoid project participation"
4. And "it is evidence to others that Node.js may not be serious about its commitment to community and inclusivity", citing a tweet that says the Quillette essay is "hot garbage" written by a "known MRA" (what the heck does MRA stand for?).
I find this rationale extreme, absurd and scary. These people ARE in fact "warriors" by any definition of the term. I strongly disagree with the complaint because:
* The article is not inflammatory.
* After being subject to outright abuse and highlighting it, something that women do every day on Twitter, somehow this was turned into Rod being a bad person. This is pure doublethink. Rod was clearly annoyed and trying to point out that such responses are not acceptable.
* A woman proceeded to do some serious shit-stirring and trolling, claiming that lots of anonymous people disliked Rod behind his back, but of course, was unwilling to say who. This is not acceptable behaviour.
* Another woman dismissed the article with a straight ad-hominem on the author.
The bad and abusive behaviour here is very clear and it's all by people who were objecting to Rod's tweet. Yet somehow this turned into some sort of trial.
Fortunately, Node TSC rejected this transparent attempt to get rid of someone for having the temerity to tweet about politics. If there are other members who couldn't handle this and quit as a result, that can only be healthy for the project.
Two abstained, one member was the person in question, and then we have 6 against removing, and 4 in favor.
And after this vote failed to remove the person, four members resigned.
This is the future we chose. Sorry. :(
The article was definitely what brought it to a head because it prompted some people to say publicly they had bad interactions with Rod Vagg.
There were also a number of thoughtful responses to Rod's tweet where people spelled out why they thought his attitude towards CoCs was unhelpful. As far as I know he didn't engage any of these authors, which makes me suspect he was not actually looking for "interesting discussion".
Overall it was inflammatory in the same way another article complaining about missing generics in golang would be inflammatory here. The article doesn't seem to respect existing work and doesn't bring a new or evidence based perspective.
I agree it would be nice if all the complaints, responses, etc were laid out plainly. But I can also understand why this is not the case, given tweets like https://twitter.com/ag_dubs/status/887785046320480256 and the understanding that there's little benefit for the women involved to gain by re-litigate these interactions in public.
The tweets by ag_dubs seem like a good example. She starts by saying up front her problem with Rod is that he "criticises social policies in node" and she can't handle that so she lessened her participation. Presumably she means policies like the CoC.
Then she goes on to assert that he "engaged in targeted harassment against me personally". Because of his "unrestrained antagonism", she often has to have "other people speak on my behalf to sidestep his derailing responses".
Having read that set of tweets, put simply, I don't believe her. I do not believe she has been harassed. I think she can't separate someone disagreeing with her on social policy issues with "harassment". The logic leap from "he harassed me" to, "that's why I ... avoid his derailing responses" clearly isn't rooted in any conventional definition of harassment. And what does it even mean, getting others to speak for her?
Um, yes it is. A harassing response which does not address the substance of your points is clearly a derailing response. That you can't "clearly" see this says more about you than it does about her.
> And what does it even mean, getting others to speak for her?
Literally, it means asking a colleague to say the exact thing that she wishes to say, because she knows that if she says it he will try to ad hominem it. This is standard English.
I would also point out that some of her vocabulary, "Beyond ____, also ____", is also standard English and it forbids your egregiously malformed interpretation of her comments. That is, you seem to think that the "targeted harassment" is "his constant, unproductive criticism" when in fact the criticism is clearly, in context, the "what he has done to the health of the project" which she has just been talking about -- and she has saying that "beyond" that, he "also" has targeted her with harassing statements. That construction explicitly forbids your sophomoric armchair psychoanalysis which can't separate someone who happens to disagree with you on social policy issues as "she can't separate someone disagreeing with her on social policy issues with harassment." (I don't actually believe that you are this way -- I don't know you -- I just think that your comment reeks of it and I would observe in passing that paradoxically we all accuse ourselves of our own sins. I mean, I'm terribly guilty of the latter, at least.)