[awesomerobot]

If someone mourns for a death do you just say "well everyone dies, suck it up?" — no, because that's ridiculous. So when someone is being harassed why say "it happens to everyone so get over it"? Why go out of your way to invalidate how someone feels about something?

where free speech is an actuality and not a slogan.

Harassment isn't protected speech, and that's beyond the point because this isn't an issue of free speech at all.

the price you'll pay in trying is way too high for my taste

Someone in an organized community was being harassed, and they're upset that leadership of that community didn't seem to think it was a problem. The price being paid is that someone harassing a community member isn't part of the community anymore. That's a high price?

[fche]

"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.

[dogma1138]

>Protected speech

That's an american definition, all forms of speech should be protected even hate speech, when hate is being pushed to the sidelines it only festers and becomes worse, let it be in the open and let it be ridiculed.

>Someone in an organized community was being harassed

Some one claimed to be harassed (there's a very thick and really not one sided story behind all this), considering the authors day to day activities allot of the things she does are also harassment or is calling out some one all the time for their beliefs is only harassment if those beliefs are currently socially progressive?

>The price being paid is that someone harassing a community member isn't part of the community anymore. That's a high price?

Well the price in this case was that she wasn't in the community any more, mostly because of her doing I would guess but I really don't want to get into that.

Communities tend to cast out the ones that cause the most disturbance and disturbance is often not a person who aggravates some one but a person who gets aggravated allot, usually by many people and about many issues.

Most communities are self managing (and do it quite well) if you find your self out of place all the time and being constantly cast out and "harassed" even if you are in the right it might be worth the time to take a deep look at one self and understand how you can adapt better and what different actions you might be able to take to avoid that because clearly; dichotomy and my way or the high way doesn't work and even in cases when it does it won't work for long and at the end will might be your own undoing because there always will be a more progressive agenda that will just as easily hijack the current one as yours did before it.

I really miss the days when progressiveness was about open dialog, accepting others and most importantly being open to your own ideas being challenged as much as you challenge the ideas of others, today progressiveness especially in online communities boils down to some unholy checklist which gets updated every so often with the latest social fab being mandatory for maintaining membership privileges.