Every political group has bad faith actors who care more about winning the argument than the truth. And worse faith actors who are just there to trash talk people. Just look at the red button / blue button argument (where the vitriol in the debate would only make sense if the buttons were real, or if people like being jerks).

Better faith CoC people talk about freedom of association vs freedom of speech - if a platform doesn't like their oppponents, isn't it fine to ban them? Or say it should just be treated as a more utilitarian "be nice" convention for the mailing list (obviously it depends who is calling the shots, but that is true in any project).

>Better faith CoC people talk about freedom of association vs freedom of speech - if a platform doesn't like their oppponents, isn't it fine to ban them?

Sure, but the problem here is far more insidious. By latching into delicate and, at times, controversial issues, CoC may hold a project hostage and threaten character assassination.

Imagine that for some bizarre reason, CoC establishes that issues are only to be talked about on Mondays. People can comply, or they can leave, no biggie. Strange but clear cut.

Now, say it instead establishes whatever politically motivated consideration. The choice now becomes one of positioning oneself into the current political climate. This makes sense at times, but also leaves a door open for abuse akin to rules lawyering, gotchas and crybullying. Sometimes creates a phantom HR that has no interest beyond exerting its power and which does d with no accountability.

Problem is anyone raising this as an issue or rejecting such proposal is going to look bad while doing so. It's easier to keep your head low.

There's no such thing as "good faith CoC people". The entire movement exists in bad faith. The fact that it even makes sense to call it a political group says everything.

Do you think open source projects just had to put up with anything and everything before they came along? No, if someone was being an active detriment to the project, they'd get naturally pushed away by the project leader, who was usually also the top contributor, in a clear and transparent manner. If the rest of the contributors agreed, that was that. If not, they could always fork. No drama needed, everyone was free to judge for themselves.

CoCs were introduced not only to to take that power from the leader or top contributors and hand it over to cliques of political activists, who often do not contribute to the project at all in terms of actually writing code, but also to allow them to invoke it in vague and secretive ways, for reasons that most actual contributors likely wouldn't agree with. Obviously, this leads to drama. You'll notice that CoC drama almost always boils down not to "this person is generally agreed to be a detriment to the project" but to "this person said or did something that offended me and thus violated the CoC".