I had also planned to post about:

Karl Knechtel (@kknechtel), in post 1:

a more concrete objection to the discussion in the “inclusive communications expectations” thread generally, and how it played out

Given new information, part of my original notes for this have been invalidated.

But I can still say: the discussion started with a SC member speaking on behalf of the SC (and not the CoC working group), apparently to reprimand a core dev (since the SC apparently has some amount of authority to pursue CoC violations by the core dev team, but not by the overall user base) - while addressing the general public about it. Notably, this messaging came from someone who is clearly in some kind of position of authority within the community, but not apparently actually responsible for CoC enforcement - such as a WG member, or an anonymous account intended to represent them collectively.

That’s a rather confusing situation, and yet not at all an ambiguous one.

Let me be clear: there is no realistic way that the list of putative offenses - excuse me, “key examples” - in the OP, combined with the evidence actually publicly available, could have led interested observers like myself to any other conclusion about the intent. I see one person doing the things that could plausibly be interpreted as what’s described in the OP, and that interpretation strikes me as incredibly strained.

Meanwhile, it left me with no real guidance on how I’m actually expected to conduct myself, besides “with extreme caution”. Hence many of the complaints in Steve’s thread.

That strikes me as, at a minimum, unprofessional. At worst, it’s an attempt at public shaming trying to maintain (not very) plausible deniability. Not only that, it happened in the context of discussing a proposal (which has now passed) to make it easier to label formerly well respected community members as persona non grata.

It’s not hard to put two and two together - and telling people that this is conspiratorial thinking, is not helpful.