I was trying to actually look for the sexist joke, couldn't find it anywhere.
"Maybe this has been written for women, having calculated their age ;)"
If I were in charge of a community or mailing list, I would kick the person who wrote that off. But I simply don't see how (a) the existing rules didn't do enough to cover this, or (b) the changes will resolve those issues without causing other problems.
Maybe they should point to Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
edit: evidently someone thinks this comment is worthy of a downvote. I didn't say whether I approved of this action or not. I looked through the threads to find out why the decision was made. I don't think a sincere effort to provide more information should be punished because of disagreement.
If someone is willing to go through the CoC with a fine tooth comb, they're likely going to find something they could potentially use to defend themselves. Just say no!
The changes open up so much interpretation that anyone could use it to kick out people for all sorts of silly reasons.
It is somewhat of a modern cultural failing that we cannot moderate without having a CoC to point to and say "see? You're bad, it says so here". A good moderator can make the value judgements necessary to keep a community relatively healthy. For some reason a lot of folks have forgotten a CoC does not change that at all.
Obviously, CoCs generally aren't written as foolproof legal documents, and there's no caselaw or court system, so this is kind of absurd. But one approach to rules-lawyering is always to tighten the rules to remove the loopholes that are being exploited, so... Personally I think it'd be better to add language emphasising that the CoC is merely a _guideline_, and that the moderators are judge, jury and executioner.
Popper lived in a world where democracy was threatened by very powerful totalitarian movements and its demise in Europe at least was a very credible scenario. His paradox of tolerance addresses those violent, brutal movements that left a trail of blood and destruction on the continent.
There is zero evidence that Popper intended to micropolice or censor uncouth / rude verbal or written interactions among people. He was mostly concerned about outright tyranny and genocide. And there is a long way from bad jokes to tyranny and genocide, even though the Anglo-Saxon world has evolved a rather thin skin in the last decades and seems to think otherwise.
Making sexist jokes on a mailing list should probably be rebuked or punished by moderators for being in bad taste, but not because of Popper's ideas. A person joking about some girls age almost certainly does not want to enslave/kill women and does not have to be forcibly prevented from doing so.
Popper was talking about groups like the Nazis coming to power. When overwhelming violence is near, you have to make a choice or else you’ll lose the capacity to make that choice. And even then, determining when overwhelming violence is near is extremely difficult and should be the absolute last resort.
It’s astounding how often this is linked with respect to online discussion.
From Popper's own words at the link:
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
Can sexist humour be kept in check with rational argument and public opinion?
It was foolish to make the joke, it was even more foolish to make it on a digital format that cannot be rescinded. It's also foolish for people to immediately call for this person's removal from the community in perpetuity, rather than have a chat and explain that those jokes aren't funny.