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"They have been solicited to pay to attend LF organized conferences."

That appears to be a big part of the business model of LF.

"you just blamed the victim"

That phrase has lost meaning. Listing things the victim could have done differently or better is nothing but exploration of the causal chain. Blame in any logical or legal sense accrues only to a proximate-cause rule-violator kind of party.

Sorry: I should not have implied that the CBC is the only one with a royal charter for political capital minting/disposal.

"We need to invest in growth sectors."

Who exactly is this "we"? You personally can invest in whatever sectors you like, and so can your neighbours. How is that not enough?

"expending massive political capital"

Luckily, political capital is a fiat currency and can be created or destroyed by the CBC in moments.

The PuffHo article is vapic & narcissistic the same way.

The original commenter claimed "He means it. Literally." I rather think my mind-reading is more plausible than his/hers.

"Someone in an organized community was being harassed"

Note that one of the twists & turns in this sorry saga was that the same freebsd developer submitted a documented harassment complaint against Randi. The freebsd CoC was in effect by this time, but it doesn't seem like it was helpful.

There is a thread on KiA where references to the original materials (transcripts of Randi's dispute with the freebsd developer) are available. The raw materials paint a rather less flattering portrait of who was attacking / harassing / abusing whom. This may be one of those cases where discretion (withholding names / evidence) does a disservice to the truth.

I'm not saying it's tasteful or appropriate. But it's not "literal".

Can you give some references to problems that existed in your organization before the CoC, and to what extent the CoC procedures have demonstrably helped?

Randi talked about several different guys. Her main beef seems to be with the unnamed FreeBSD committer.

She refers to other people ("neo-nazi friends") with whom that person communicates on twitter / etc., one of whom is rooshv, who wrote that absurd "campaign to legalize rape" article.

Randi's accusation about actual gamergate participation in her recent freebsd ordeal consists entirely of:

"GamerGate hopped onto all of this."

No claims of gamergate people actually doing anything, just hopping.

"He means it. Literally."

No, rooshv was dripping with sarcasm.

There should exist an option that is between those spectrum endpoints. One that runs a lot more free (inspectable, trustworthy) software than present cloud services. One that leaves some control with the owner of the data.

"GCC has been designed specifically NOT to be extended."

Several extension mechanisms have been built out in the last few years, including plugins for intermediate passes of compilation, and a library to operate as a JIT.

In other news, AOL still exists.

OK, there were three bullets in the middle of the "protocol" that dealt with procedure. ("The organizers shall provide as secure ..." through "... privacy of all parties"). But it belabours trivia ("collect time, place, name ...") and skips over substantial questions like burdens of proof, appeals, range of penalties, false complaints, violations of procedure. That's the meat & potatoes of law, amateur or professional.

"So the solution is to remove the incentives and opportunities for misbehavior, and raise the risks of exposure. Then, bad actors will adapt and self-select. Either they will behave, or they will go elsewhere."

That sounds good, but nothing in the rest of the write-up actually "removes incentives and opportunities" etc. It's the usual sort of "don't harass, don't touch, don't X Y Z ..." litany, without any procedural prescriptions as to what to do in case someone does X.

"Density requires a level of competence in governance ..."

And density requires a populace willing to suffer the indignities of such density too ... unless you were proposing that government should impose it regardless ... or that government can wave away those indignities.

Might want to include overt taxpayer subsidies in the former, plus any allowance for access to a car in those cases where mass transit doesn't cut it. It's kind of like including the capital/expense cost of the necessary standby fossil plants in the costs of "green energy" system.

"... when preventing scientists from sharing their research with the greater scientific community ..."

There was no such prevention.

"how to push back against the perpetrators who are clearly acting in bad faith but stay on the legal side"

But by definition of being on the legal side, such people are not even perpetrators.

Perhaps "bad-faith-crimes" are something the legal system shouldn't get involved in (never mind that it cannot competently, as we agree). Among other reasons, the bad-faithness definition itself becomes easy to game (see "*ism!" accusations).

That may be so, but it sounded like you were making a much stronger claim two messages up - as though intent made activity more harmful to the victim (than if no intent were present). That worries me because that way lies thought policing.

"[intent-land are] the ones that are becoming the most harmful"

Why do you think so? Or in other words, in what cases does the intent of a person make any action more harmful?

That sounds like true-scottish-canadian norms.

I liked that it was written by a scientist. But the text was bogged down by so much science exposition that the story - characters & drama - could barely breathe. There was a paragraph of [tech] on every page.

Funding cuts are off topic to "muzzling".

... and even that "muzzling" was limited to the capacity in which those scientists were to talk to mass media. They could and did publish any academic papers / attend conferences / etc. They just couldn't speak seemingly on behalf of the government.