> The point was you said it was intended to poke fun at traditional chivalry like it was a fact. But it was just your speculation.

In a situation where the only thing anyone has is speculation, and speculation on top of speculation. This gaslighting is disgusting and needs to stop.

But yes, in retrospect I should have added an IMHO. On every HN comment anyone's ever written, probably.

> What they said and what kind of person they are are 2 different discussions.[1]

That's an interesting and potentially useful youtube video, so thanks for that. However it presupposes a couple of things that I don't think hold true here.

One of the most important is that you cannot know intent. The person spouting racist crap could be misinformed or miseducated or just didn't realise that what they said is commonly used to cause hurt - but just as equally, they might be a fundamentally hateful person spouting hatred. In that case, it is sensible to treat the comments based on the likely harms achieved, and not the intent, up to a point. (Even then, it's helpful to have people who will choose respectful education rather than abrasive condemnation)

In this case, pretty sure everyone agreed that the intent wasn't malicious, but that it wasn't appropriate or helpful or necessary in that forum, and the confused delivery didn't help either. (I would also accept arguments that his "at least it wasn't a blond joke" comments indicated a level of culturally normalized misogyny, but that's a far cry from malice)

But there's another issue, which brings us back to the origin of this thread: What kind of discourse do we want in our communities? It seems we have a choice - to either assume benign intent, or to assume malice.

In the first quote of this comment, I assumed malice - that you're trying to be dismissive and gaslight me. I'm pretty sure you're not. Not that your statement wasn't dismissive, but I don't think that's your intention - you were simply explaining how you read my comment. And hopefully, when you read that, it seemed out of place - because I try to be respectful and balanced, and I highly value a well-reasoned discussion.

But discourse where we treat people with respect and assume best intentions leads to better outcomes. If, in the absence of any certainty, we assume good intent and push people - with kindness - towards behaviours that are helpful instead of problematic, then we make the world a better place and make each other better people.

The only other option* is to choose the worst possible interpretation of a person's words. More so, this form of discourse almost guarantees that you will be alienating people based on language and culture, and is more painful for people on the autism spectrum and other neurodivergences.

* (you could argue there's a middle ground, but in terms of how you legislate community values, humans usually spin off towards any available edges, especially when in pain)

And actually, in this case I don't find fault in the way most of the mailing list started by calling out the behaviour. The person making the problematic comment doubled down, tried to explain themselves, failed to do so and made the problem worse. Again, maybe if it had been off-list, a better approach could have been found, and the situation was not helped by people feigning injury on someone else's behalf.

The problem that I was addressing was the after-effects - trying to change the CoC to flip the discourse from being explicitly expecting good intentions to expecting everyone to assume malice.

And that's not to say there aren't some hard questions in this. In trying to be quick and brief (and in some cases angry), nobody managed to articulate to the poster in a way they understood what their statement could be misconstrued as saying. Whose job is that? In the case where people are genuinely hurt, there is an absolutely valid principle that it's not the hurting party's job to educate their abuser. There is a widely accepted principle that being an Ally is a good thing because it fortifies the hurting party's morale. There was a vaguely understandable principle mentioned that a person does not have to be the target of a hurt to feel the hurt of a target that may or may not exist.

But that should not encompass the whole community. We need people who recognise that the person who causes hurt unintentionally will themselves be hurt in the backlash and the mob justice. And this is where the concept of "Ally" becomes wholly problematic. Those people should not defend the problematic behaviour, or dismiss the reaction as baseless, or invoke cancel culture or witch burning or hypocrisy etc, but instead work towards reconciliation. It's hard to say "These ally behaviours are fine, those ally behaviours are evil" because in each case, both parties are just being who they are.

"assuming good intentions [means] ignoring anything unintentionally objectionable" is a false dichotomy, a lazy one at that, and needs to be called out as such. I agree we should propose a different standard, and I agree that trolling is a poor substitute for reasoned advocacy.

It seems society increasingly favours "trauma-response ping-pong", and it seems the tech sphere is one of the few places on the internet where you can advocate against that without getting your head bitten off. It makes me sad, but maybe I should just shut my emotionally-stunted mouth and get with the times.