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That's the thing though, it's hard to ignore them since they pose themselves as coming from a morally righteous place, and they have the followers to back them up with their demands. Just look at the Opal thread I posted, it's started as a demand, and then a bunch of people who've had 0 to do with Opal start spamming the thread to back up the OP and hurling insults around at all the contributors for "daring" to associate themselves with one of the most prolific contributors to the project.

All of their arguments are also posed in a way to make anyone who disagrees seem like they're disagreeing with something very reasonable. It's phrased in such a way as to imply that they're in the 100% right, and if you dare disagree you're a bigot/homophone/transphobe/whatever other bad thing that can stick.

Every time I've seen a project get targeted by these CoCs, all the maintainers approach it from a good place assuming no malice, whereas the ones pushing for it will NOT take no for an answer.

I mean just look at one of the final comments in that locked Opal issue: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941#issuecomment-1132902...

They're blatantly trying to paint anyone disagreeing with them, no matter how mild the disagreement, as someone attacking them directly, and there's a scary amount of people who would side with them as well.

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Every time I've seen a project get targeted by these CoCs, all the maintainers approach it from a good place assuming no malice

That unfortunately just shows how naive the average person has become.

Anyone else notice that all of this identity politics stuff seems to mainly infect projects in more "accessible" languages? I've heard about it in Javascript, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. but not much in C/C++ and basically none in Asm. The sibling comment here about SQLite's response (a pure C project) to this trolling provides a great contrast. People and projects solidly focused on technical stuff know better.

Exactly.

I think the best way to avoid falling into that kind of trap is to learn to dissociate between a value one believe in, and a discourse/action done in the name of that value.

It's perfectly possible to agree to one without agreeing to the other.

People who haven't yet learned this[1] tend to think that disagreeing with the latter also means disagreeing with the former. Worse, they might believe that not personally sharing/believing a value constitutes an attack on this value. And since one's identity tends to be tied with one's deeply held values, it constitue an attack on them or on their peers as well.

The important point is that good people might do it in good faith, out of naivety. In the Opal thread, however, I believe most of the 'Twitter army' that came to +1 the CoC uses it as a rethorical trick, out of self-righteousness.

[1] And I honestly believe that most early twenty-something tends to fall into that category, especially the most politicaly or religiously active ones.