I fear you have constructed a tectonic collision from a small mammal's soil-based home.
If you are arguing against the phenomenon of CoCs in general, then I agree - they are a blight, rife with overreach and often easily misused to justify prejudice or condemn innocent misunderstandings. While I won't deny the emergent behaviour of self-policing based on fear, I suspect the origins of the CoC are actually less subtle and more an attempt to assign power to marginalised and persecuted groups, without recognition that actually causes a net increase in inequity, that power corrupts and in turn causes more persecution thanks to the bad taste left in people's mouths when being victimised unfairly due to prejudices mislabelling themselves as anti-prejudices.
But that's an aside. Power will always be, inequality will always be, prejudice will always be - and the point of the CoC was never to improve that, merely invert it. It has, in some ways (along with other cultural and corporate shifts) worked beautifully and now has dominance over the Open Source community landscape at least. I don't see us putting that particular genie back in the bottle any time soon.
But we can try to keep the potential harms in check. And raise the alarm when we see potentially dangerous overreaches.
In the current climate of escalating prejudice on both sides of the fence, I'm not sure there's much more we can do.
I mean, hypothetically, what if self-appointed and loud "advocates", maybe even members of persecuted groups, narcissisticly pushed a project like that, bullied socially inept project leaders struggling against rising prejudice within their communities, into adopting a useless and counterproductive legalism - while playing the victim against any who refused?
Sounds totally implausible, now that I think about it. It's a conspiracy theory, and I'm sure we're better than that. Let's move on.
If you are arguing against the phenomenon of CoCs in general, then I agree - they are a blight, rife with overreach and often easily misused to justify prejudice or condemn innocent misunderstandings. While I won't deny the emergent behaviour of self-policing based on fear, I suspect the origins of the CoC are actually less subtle and more an attempt to assign power to marginalised and persecuted groups, without recognition that actually causes a net increase in inequity, that power corrupts and in turn causes more persecution thanks to the bad taste left in people's mouths when being victimised unfairly due to prejudices mislabelling themselves as anti-prejudices.
But that's an aside. Power will always be, inequality will always be, prejudice will always be - and the point of the CoC was never to improve that, merely invert it. It has, in some ways (along with other cultural and corporate shifts) worked beautifully and now has dominance over the Open Source community landscape at least. I don't see us putting that particular genie back in the bottle any time soon.
But we can try to keep the potential harms in check. And raise the alarm when we see potentially dangerous overreaches.
In the current climate of escalating prejudice on both sides of the fence, I'm not sure there's much more we can do.