Rod Vagg's statement on the request to be removed from the Node.js CTC

This reads akin to the logic behind a witch hunt - a bunch of people are very upset at a person, therefore the person must be a witch. I disagree with the premise.

The people are indisputibly angry. They may have reason to be angry. I don't see it, but they may have it. But the entire line that "he's accused, therefore he must be guilty" is flawed.

> James Snell's reasoning behind hiding the accusations inside the committee deliberations is theoretically sound: to keep Rod from getting harassed.

No. It is not. Saying that the specific accusations were removed to keep Rod from getting harassed suggests that it must have been something serious. Fortunately there's the Web Archive and you see what was the 3 most serious crimes that rod was accused of, and I quote:

1. "Rod’s first action was to apologize to a contributor who had been repeatedly moderated" 2. "Rod did not moderate himself when asked by another foundation director" 3. "Most recently Rod tweeted in support of an inflammatory anti-Code-of-Conduct article"

Some of this is NOT EVEN TRUE - see Rod's response: https://medium.com/@rvagg/the-truth-about-rod-vagg-f063f6a53... - as no evidence was ever provided that he was indeed asked to "moderate himself" (read: remove what he posted in a comment on GitHub which was not even ever accused of being incorrect).

The third point is deliberately misleading and you can see for yourself - just see the tweet in question: https://twitter.com/rvagg/status/887652116524707841

Rod twitted no more no less but: "If you've never considered the potential downsides of codes of conduct, here's a good place to start" and posted a link to The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech by Geoffrey Miller - who is described by Wikipedia as: "Geoffrey F. Miller (born 1965 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is an American evolutionary psychologist, serving as an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico and known for his expertise in sexual selection in human evolution, and for his views on the evolution through sexual selection of the human brain as sexual ornamentation." - see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_(psychologist)

As you can see, when someone is quoting a very interesting article of a known professor of psychology with the only comment of "If you've never considered the potential downsides of codes of conduct, here's a good place to start" and THEN someone else describes it as: "Rod tweeted in support of an inflammatory anti-Code-of-Conduct article" then it is a deliberate misinformation - but who will take the time to search for the real tweet, follow the article, read it and read about its author? No one. But the rest of the world is already describing Rod as "a person who has generally been standing in the way of making Node.js an inclusive project" because of the mysterious accusations that were later removed - see: https://github.com/ayojs/ayo/issues/4

Now, even if all of the accusations were indeed true and even if they were not blown out of proportion - it all boils down to 3 points:

1. he apologized someone for being censored 2. he didn't respond to self-censorship request fast enough and instead got censored by someone else 3. he twitted a link to an article on Twitter - a medium where no one can censor him unlike on GitHub, an article that (God forbid!) explains the exact same problems that we see here.

See the original accusation and think for yourself - were the actual accusations removed to defend Rod from harassment or to make us think that it must have been serious misbehavior if there was a risk of harassment if anyone knew the facts involved? THAT is the real reason of never talking about the real "crimes". Think about it.

See: https://web.archive.org/web/20170821212745/https://github.co...

> I mean, under the current circumstances, a public, enumerated list of all your supposed crimes is pretty much guaranteed to bring a mob down on your head, and it would probably rocket to the top of Google searches for your name -- regardless of how the process turned out.

See? Even you assumed that those must be something that rod should be ashamed of. Meanwhile it was ONLY those 3 things that I described above. Now, when those were removed, people who google for his name will see articles like "Node.js forks again – this time it's a war of words over anti-sex-pest codes of conduct" and think that he must be a "sex-pest" because all of the actual accusations were (deliberately) removed.

He makes it sound as if he was unable to even know what he was being accused of in order to defend himself. He should be apart of that process even if it is in private.

Not being allowed to criticize something is the first red flag, for me personally, that the idea is likely to be worthless. There shouldn't be any debate about whether or not an idea can be criticized and the people in this thread who seem to be ok with firing/excluding a person because of their opinion... man that is just bizarro-land to me.