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The issue is that people have apparently on many occasions said "Hey Rod, don't do that, it's against the CoC (code of conduct)" and his attitude has been "I don't care about the CoC, I don't believe in CoCs, and I'm important enough that you can't touch me." This creates a really difficult environment for completely non-SJW-related reasons (I am very sad that people keep treating this as a social justice issue).

Codes of conduct are only meaningful if they apply to core contributors with all the more force than occasional contributors. The chief accusation lobbied against a CoC is "oh you just use those to go after people you don't like," much like, say, the police sometimes use US law. The only security against this accusation is that the CoC is applied with more forgiveness at the lowest levels and more stringently to the people-at-the-top. It's not social justice; it's consistency.

Admittedly I think a bunch of HN would like the anti-SJW approach of "let's just burn the CoC and forget that it ever existed," and in that sense I suppose that it is "social-justice-ish", but these are orthogonal concerns. The one concern is that members of the Node.js CTC are beyond reproach for shitty things they do; the other concern is defining clearly what things are shitty.