This whole thread reminds me of Radia Perlman's plenary talk at IETF-53: Miss Manners comes to IETF
She could repeat that talk at IETF-115 and it would still be totally relevant.
On Wed, Aug 24, 2022 at 12:07 PM Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 8/24/22 12:58, Joel Halpern wrote:
>
> Keith, there seem to be two separate issues which your emails appear
> to be conflating.
>
> On the one hand there is your often-expressed concern that the rules
> are vague and have been used to suppress opinions with which the
> leadership disagrees. While I disagree with you about the degree of
> vagueness, I do understand that concern. It is not good for the IETF
> to suppress dissenting technical perspectives.
>
> On the other hand, in the particular case you have seized on, we have
> an individual participant who has chosen to insult other individuals
> and subgroups. He has the perfect right to disagree with the
> technical work or technical opinions. But insulting the participants
> is not acceptable. And is not good for the IETF community. But you
> seem (and maybe I am misunderstanding you) to be objecting to efforts
> to prevent such behavior.
>
Joel,
Please understand that I can disagree with the moderators' actions, and
believe that they're counterproductive, without supporting or agreeing
with the post that they reacted to. I can also think that such actions
set a poor precedent for the future and that the sooner those actions
are discouraged or reduced in effect, the better.
For a lot of people it's an axiom that wrongdoing must be punished. To
me it sometimes appears that the punishment exacerbates the original
problem, or creates a worse problem than it can hope to solve.
Often, the best reaction to an insult is not to try to suppress the
person making the insult. Sometimes constructive engagement is
better. And sometimes the best reaction is to ignore it entirely.
Especially when it's devoid of substance and therefore easily dismissed.
Insults will soon be forgotten, but the detrimental effect of
suppressing open discussion in IETF will last a very long time. Be
careful what you wish for.
Keith
