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I'm an outsider who only knows Guido van Rossum by way of interviews his writing. Assuming your quote is what the original text said (I don't disbelieve you--

I'm an outsider who only knows Guido van Rossum by way of interviews his writing. Assuming your quote is what the original text said (I don't disbelieve you-- but nobody can see it to confirm) why would this have violated community standards? Is there some rule about not mentioning "un-persons" or something? It's very confusing. Edit: Answering my own question. There appears to be a kerfuffle afoot. Apparently the Steering Council has suspended a core developer for 3 months[0] but isn't naming the suspended developer or citing specific reasons why (per [1] and sparking a call for a vote of no confidence in the council which did not succeed). Apparently even mentioning the suspended person (without naming them) is enough for even Guido van Rossum to be censored. Wow. Edit 2: The suspended developer is Tim Peters[3]. Edit 3: Altered paragraph "Edit:" from "...or the reason why[1] (" to "...or citing specific reasons why (per [1]". Edit 4: Added "which did not succeed" after "...vote of no confidence in the council". [0] https://discuss.python.org/t/three-month-suspension-for-a-core-developer/60250 https://discuss.python.org/t/three-month-suspension-for-a-co... [1] https://discuss.python.org/t/calling-for-a-vote-of-no-confidence/61557 https://discuss.python.org/t/calling-for-a-vote-of-no-confid... [3] https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestration-of-tim https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...

mc32 2y ago
What the hell, has everyone caught and gone gung-ho on censorship? What the actual f*** is this? How in the hell do you have the balls or ovaries to ban the creator --for something so inane. It's like a highscool supe who gets no respect and will at every chance show you the little power she has in such a classless way. So utterly petty defying belief. I hope those dweebs get voted out pronto. That's an absurd abuse of power. People who trip like that have no business having any power or control.
- khazhoux 2y ago
  > gung-ho on censorship? What the actual f** is this? Unintenti**l irony
  - mc32 2y ago
    I hope that's just a rib. Else, one should be able to tell self control over stamping authority over others. Very few people openly speak their inner monologue, uncensored just releasing their stream of consciousness like a delirious hobo down a stench filled alleyway.
    - beedeebeedee 2y ago
      I speak my "inner monologue" and it is nothing like delirium or stench. Not sure who you are or who you're hanging out with, but better to get the stench out than let it fester.
    - khazhoux 2y ago
      It was funny that you censored yourself, in a comment about censorship, that's all :-)
    - plg94 2y ago
      You did have any opportunity to rewrite your sentence to use any other word than f**, one that did not require self-censoring. Yet you did not. Why?
  - the_real_cher 2y ago
    there's a difference between being polite and having your post removed entirely
    - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
      Of course, but it still elicits a reasonable chuckle.
- zaptheimpaler 2y ago
  Most people haven't gone crazy, the kinds of people on this board are experts in silencing dissent and making it appear that way. I really hope the Python community can hold an open poll or discussion on a forum not controlled by the fascists and force the board to resign.
- yarg 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - userbinator 2y ago
    It's starting to swing back already, as people are beginning to realise where this ~decade of identity-over-competence is leading us.
    - yarg 2y ago
      I think people are starting to see the long term consequences now; but the problem has been building for decades. You don't get every university across every ostensible democracy banning free speech yet permitting physical violence against 'the far right' over night. You need to subvert and replace the establishment piece by piece. What we're seeing now is what happens when that sort of incompetence starts to impact manufacturing, engineering, production and the training the people in the field. So the whole damned thing is turned on its head; Here's an example: during Covid, the only people who were not purged from the medical establishment were those who adhered to the narrative. That's disturbing - the so called health care system intentionally purged of any person critical enough to question that narrative. And even now that health care system retains the same personal and repeats that same line. (If you really wanna know what the actual numbers look like the only people with numbers that can be trusted are funeral homes and insurance providers.) But right now (in the middle of a health care crisis) some of the most competent doctors, nurses, etc remain unable to work because of mandates for them to undergo an invasive experimental procedure (from some of the least trustworthy companies in the world). (That is to say, any bloody doctor I'd be even remotely inclined to trust with my wellbeing.) Competency purged; 100 flowers pruned. I could go on and on, but I shouldn't, so I won't. Adios.
  - yeahwhatever10 2y ago
    Down voting this comment is burying your head in the sand. Censorship has been and will continue to be one the primary political fights of the 20s. They just arrested the Telegram founder a few days ago...
  - canadianfella 2y ago
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  > It's like a highscool supe who gets no respect and will at every chance show you the little power Sayre's Law, effectively, the smaller the stakes the bigger the fights/politics. See also: HOAs, academia.
germanjoey 2y ago
Looks like some kind of power play... Originally discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234180
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  My experience is that discussions of bylaw changes tend to get heated and that trying to change your bylaws is like Russian Roulette, that is maybe 1/6 of the time there is some disaster which is either the end of he organization or that results in a major loss of members.
rjmorris 2y ago
I don't understand why you said they didn't explain the reason for the 3-month ban. Your link [0] lays out the reasons.
- EvanAnderson 2y ago
  I badly paraphrased what citation [1] said. I've dropped on an edit. (I have no dog in this race, other than thinking that Python is a pretty important software project. I didn't mean to editorialize.)
zaptheimpaler 2y ago
Re: the vote of no confidence [1]. Looks like most devs disagreed with the vote and have opted to let the council continue but transfer the "HR" Code of Conduct duties to the PSF. [1] https://discuss.python.org/t/calling-for-a-vote-of-no-confidence/61557/ https://discuss.python.org/t/calling-for-a-vote-of-no-confid...
lovecg 2y ago
Wow, just wow. Reading all these makes me really worried about supporting anything built on Python long term. This creates an impression of a self-destructing dying community.
- gtirloni 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    No, it is pure 1984. Censorious nonsense spearheaded by those who are held unaccountable for their actions. The fact that this came about on a topic of voting systems is even more ironic.
    - gtirloni 2y ago
      I was replying to the comment, not the whole thread.
- BadHumans 2y ago
  This is silly. The Python Foundation could die tonight and people will still build in Python for years to come because believe it or not, most people do not know or care about the happenings of these organizations.
  - kamaal 2y ago
    Yeah, but my experience with Perl shows, once something like this happens, its pretty much downhill from there. Not saying Python is going away tomorrow, in fact it might remain actively developed and used for decades to come. But with proactive thought, improvement and initiative gone. Competition will replace you in time. That's just how it works.
- bun_terminator 2y ago
  Also see for the last python release notes for some hardcore politics injected right into your tooling language. Python is unfortunately radioactive and can't be used responsibly anymore. They're halfway to selfdestruction
krick 2y ago
That's kinda nuts, but kinda absolutely in line with all trends of the last 5 years. I remember similar shit happening in Linux community (the shit won, naturally). But, anyway, who is the "Steering Council" and how come they have more influence than the 2 people who basically created python the language and python the community?
- zitterbewegung 2y ago
  When Guido stopped being the sole leader (BDFL) he was replaced by the steering council which is elected and has the purpose of doing the following (Defined in PEP 13 which is the current governance model of Python. Right now Guido is a core developer at this time. See https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/#the-steering-council https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/#the-steering-council
  - krick 2y ago
    That's pretty obvious. The question was, who are these people, specifically, and why they were chosen and given that much power. I mean, I can see the names, but while I don't have to be told who Tim Peters or Guido van Rossum are, I have no clue who these guys are and what their actual contributions are.
    - stogot 2y ago
      In line with the trends, as the grandparent said. People who claim tolerance are intolerant
    - plg94 2y ago
      I don't have a factual answer for you (be interested in one, too), only a cheek-in-tongue one: It's like politics, the only thing you have to do to get elected is to get people to vote for you. And often the vote is only among people who _want_ to be elected (and in a position of power), massively reducing the pool of good candidates.
    - zahlman 2y ago
      > The question was, who are these people, specifically, and why they were chosen and given that much power. They are core developers elected by an internal process among the developers. See PEP 13 for details: https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/#the-steering-council https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/#the-steering-council > I have no clue who these guys are and what their actual contributions are. Barry Warsaw (https://barry.warsaw.us https://barry.warsaw.us) is another of the "old guard" who can be pictured standing next to Peters and GvR fairly easily. He gained the title of "Friendly Language Uncle For Life" (FLUFL), and has previously been the project lead for Mailman and lead maintainer for Jython. He was the release manager for Python 2.2 (as far as I can tell, the first time this position existed), 2.6 and 3.0, and shared the role for 2.3. His name is all over 2.x-era process documentation. Prior to GvR's actual retirement in 2018, there was an April Fools' Day announcement of his resignation in 2009, authored by Barry Warsaw and Brett Cannon. This was accompanied by a hidden option (still available!) which changes the `!=` syntax to `<>`. Refs: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4007289/ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4007289/ ; https://peps.python.org/pep-0401/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0401/ . Emily Morehouse (https://emilyemorehouse.com/ https://emilyemorehouse.com/) was the PyCon co-chair for 2019 and chair for 2020 and 2021. She has done project management for Axios and mentoring for PyLadies (https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-nomination-emily-morehouse/686 https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-nomination-emi...). Gregory P. Smith has been a core dev since about 2003 and has notably worked on `hashlib` and `subprocess` (https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-nomination-gregory-p-smith/737 https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-nomination-gre...). Pablo Galindo Salgado (https://github.com/pablogsal https://github.com/pablogsal) was the release manager for 3.10 and 3.11, and Thomas Wouters was/is the release manager for 3.12 and 3.13. Wouters has also previously served as a PSF Board member and was a PSF founder (https://www.python.org/nominations/elections/2020-python-software-foundation-board/nominees/thomas-wouters/ https://www.python.org/nominations/elections/2020-python-sof...).
dilap 2y ago
They suspended Tim Peters? That is insane.
- threatofrain 2y ago
  The Python steering committee also threw the kitchen sink of accusations at him. IMO it speaks to character when you throw arguments like an adversarial lawyer. Not the kind of person you want to be around for work or life.
  - zahlman 2y ago
    To be clear, the accusations in question came from the Code of Conduct Work Group; the Steering Council simply "acted on their recommendations". I don't expect any positive changes if said Work Group becomes directly responsible for such disciplinary actions.
    - em-bee 2y ago
      is the steering council able to remove messages without a recommendation? i think that if two "independent" groups have to cooperate then that's better than one group being able to act alone. now the question is how independent are these groups really. i saw another comment drawing that into question.
holsta 2y ago
[flagged]
- bitcharmer 2y ago
  What does reverse racism mean?
  - zahlman 2y ago
    There exists an argument that people who are not white are, in fact, capable of saying or doing things which tend to discriminate against white people; and furthermore that such speech and action is harmful and morally offensive. "reverse racism" is a term used by people who find that position disagreeable or inconvenient, to mislabel, misrepresent and mock it. The argument is not at all "far right"; it's centrist, and obvious. But certain extremist identity-based ideologues have manage to sell that nonsense with their propaganda based on the label. Occasionally you will see people who don't know any better use the term unironically, because of the dominance its derogatory use has achieved; but serious opposition to so-called "progressive" identity politics does not actually use the term.
zahlman 2y ago
> why would this have violated community standards? Is there some rule about not mentioning "un-persons" or something? Flags may be cast by anyone, and this will eventually result in automatic hiding - flags on Discourse are weighted according to the "trust level" of those raising them. My guess is that people perceived this as a passive-aggressive objection to Tim Peters' suspension. It has definitely been permitted up until now to refer to this (although everyone seemed to be avoiding the name on principle), but there seems to be an expectation that people should "read the air" now and stop talking about it - hence posts like https://discuss.python.org/t/moderated-posts-are-no-longer-publicly-visible/61648 https://discuss.python.org/t/moderated-posts-are-no-longer-p... and https://discuss.python.org/t/pr-disaster-surrounding-recent-bylaws-changes-and-core-developer-suspension/61364/21 https://discuss.python.org/t/pr-disaster-surrounding-recent-... . > and sparking a call for a vote of no confidence in the council which did not succeed The call was retracted, which is not surprising. The Steering Council isn't the root of the problem, anyway. That would be the Code of Conduct Work Group (https://www.python.org/psf/workgroups/#code-of-conduct-work-group https://www.python.org/psf/workgroups/#code-of-conduct-work-...), which is not elected (https://wiki.python.org/psf/ConductWG/Charter#Membership https://wiki.python.org/psf/ConductWG/Charter#Membership), has membership overlapping other important groups (4 of them are on the PSF Board of Directors - https://www.python.org/psf/board/#id3 https://www.python.org/psf/board/#id3 - and Brett Cannon and Łukasz Langa are Discourse forum moderators) and enforces the Code of Conduct according to hidden rules that betray the neutrality of that document (https://policies.python.org/python.org/code-of-conduct/Enforcement-Procedures/ https://policies.python.org/python.org/code-of-conduct/Enfor...) counter to the wishes of one of the original drafters of said document (https://discuss.python.org/t/why-i-am-withdrawing-fellowship-status-in-psf/58301 https://discuss.python.org/t/why-i-am-withdrawing-fellowship... ; https://discuss.python.org/t/why-im-leaving-discuss-python-org/58093/4 https://discuss.python.org/t/why-im-leaving-discuss-python-o... etc.). It's also noteworthy that the Steering Council - consisting of 5 core devs - apparently also now requires a "communications liaison" (https://www.notion.so/46aec24028fd4e8dbdba003097c18b5b?pvs=21 https://www.notion.so/46aec24028fd4e8dbdba003097c18b5b?pvs=2...) who gets a glowing write-up in official updates on the forum (such as https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-updates-for-july-2024/60995 https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-updates-for-ju...) - which are not posted by said liaison. I have no idea why this should be necessary, nor is there anything in PEP 13 (https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/) about this position existing. It seems that this person was selected entirely out-of-process.

mc32 2y ago

What the hell, has everyone caught and gone gung-ho on censorship? What the actual f*** is this? How in the hell do you have the balls or ovaries to ban the creator --for something so inane. It's like a highscool supe who gets no respect and will at every chance show you the little power she has in such a classless way. So utterly petty defying belief. I hope those dweebs get voted out pronto. That's an absurd abuse of power. People who trip like that have no business having any power or control.

khazhoux 2y ago
> gung-ho on censorship? What the actual f** is this? Unintenti**l irony
- mc32 2y ago
  I hope that's just a rib. Else, one should be able to tell self control over stamping authority over others. Very few people openly speak their inner monologue, uncensored just releasing their stream of consciousness like a delirious hobo down a stench filled alleyway.
  - beedeebeedee 2y ago
    I speak my "inner monologue" and it is nothing like delirium or stench. Not sure who you are or who you're hanging out with, but better to get the stench out than let it fester.
  - khazhoux 2y ago
    It was funny that you censored yourself, in a comment about censorship, that's all :-)
  - plg94 2y ago
    You did have any opportunity to rewrite your sentence to use any other word than f**, one that did not require self-censoring. Yet you did not. Why?
- the_real_cher 2y ago
  there's a difference between being polite and having your post removed entirely
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    Of course, but it still elicits a reasonable chuckle.
zaptheimpaler 2y ago
Most people haven't gone crazy, the kinds of people on this board are experts in silencing dissent and making it appear that way. I really hope the Python community can hold an open poll or discussion on a forum not controlled by the fascists and force the board to resign.
yarg 2y ago
[flagged]
- userbinator 2y ago
  It's starting to swing back already, as people are beginning to realise where this ~decade of identity-over-competence is leading us.
  - yarg 2y ago
    I think people are starting to see the long term consequences now; but the problem has been building for decades. You don't get every university across every ostensible democracy banning free speech yet permitting physical violence against 'the far right' over night. You need to subvert and replace the establishment piece by piece. What we're seeing now is what happens when that sort of incompetence starts to impact manufacturing, engineering, production and the training the people in the field. So the whole damned thing is turned on its head; Here's an example: during Covid, the only people who were not purged from the medical establishment were those who adhered to the narrative. That's disturbing - the so called health care system intentionally purged of any person critical enough to question that narrative. And even now that health care system retains the same personal and repeats that same line. (If you really wanna know what the actual numbers look like the only people with numbers that can be trusted are funeral homes and insurance providers.) But right now (in the middle of a health care crisis) some of the most competent doctors, nurses, etc remain unable to work because of mandates for them to undergo an invasive experimental procedure (from some of the least trustworthy companies in the world). (That is to say, any bloody doctor I'd be even remotely inclined to trust with my wellbeing.) Competency purged; 100 flowers pruned. I could go on and on, but I shouldn't, so I won't. Adios.
- yeahwhatever10 2y ago
  Down voting this comment is burying your head in the sand. Censorship has been and will continue to be one the primary political fights of the 20s. They just arrested the Telegram founder a few days ago...
- canadianfella 2y ago
FireBeyond 2y ago
> It's like a highscool supe who gets no respect and will at every chance show you the little power Sayre's Law, effectively, the smaller the stakes the bigger the fights/politics. See also: HOAs, academia.

germanjoey 2y ago

Looks like some kind of power play... Originally discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234180

PaulHoule 2y ago
My experience is that discussions of bylaw changes tend to get heated and that trying to change your bylaws is like Russian Roulette, that is maybe 1/6 of the time there is some disaster which is either the end of he organization or that results in a major loss of members.

rjmorris 2y ago

I don't understand why you said they didn't explain the reason for the 3-month ban. Your link [0] lays out the reasons.

EvanAnderson 2y ago
I badly paraphrased what citation [1] said. I've dropped on an edit. (I have no dog in this race, other than thinking that Python is a pretty important software project. I didn't mean to editorialize.)

zaptheimpaler 2y ago

Re: the vote of no confidence [1]. Looks like most devs disagreed with the vote and have opted to let the council continue but transfer the "HR" Code of Conduct duties to the PSF. [1] https://discuss.python.org/t/calling-for-a-vote-of-no-confidence/61557/ https://discuss.python.org/t/calling-for-a-vote-of-no-confid...

lovecg 2y ago

Wow, just wow. Reading all these makes me really worried about supporting anything built on Python long term. This creates an impression of a self-destructing dying community.

gtirloni 2y ago
[flagged]
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  No, it is pure 1984. Censorious nonsense spearheaded by those who are held unaccountable for their actions. The fact that this came about on a topic of voting systems is even more ironic.
  - gtirloni 2y ago
    I was replying to the comment, not the whole thread.
BadHumans 2y ago
This is silly. The Python Foundation could die tonight and people will still build in Python for years to come because believe it or not, most people do not know or care about the happenings of these organizations.
- kamaal 2y ago
  Yeah, but my experience with Perl shows, once something like this happens, its pretty much downhill from there. Not saying Python is going away tomorrow, in fact it might remain actively developed and used for decades to come. But with proactive thought, improvement and initiative gone. Competition will replace you in time. That's just how it works.
bun_terminator 2y ago
Also see for the last python release notes for some hardcore politics injected right into your tooling language. Python is unfortunately radioactive and can't be used responsibly anymore. They're halfway to selfdestruction

krick 2y ago

That's kinda nuts, but kinda absolutely in line with all trends of the last 5 years. I remember similar shit happening in Linux community (the shit won, naturally). But, anyway, who is the "Steering Council" and how come they have more influence than the 2 people who basically created python the language and python the community?

zitterbewegung 2y ago
When Guido stopped being the sole leader (BDFL) he was replaced by the steering council which is elected and has the purpose of doing the following (Defined in PEP 13 which is the current governance model of Python. Right now Guido is a core developer at this time. See https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/#the-steering-council https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/#the-steering-council
- krick 2y ago
  That's pretty obvious. The question was, who are these people, specifically, and why they were chosen and given that much power. I mean, I can see the names, but while I don't have to be told who Tim Peters or Guido van Rossum are, I have no clue who these guys are and what their actual contributions are.
  - stogot 2y ago
    In line with the trends, as the grandparent said. People who claim tolerance are intolerant
  - plg94 2y ago
    I don't have a factual answer for you (be interested in one, too), only a cheek-in-tongue one: It's like politics, the only thing you have to do to get elected is to get people to vote for you. And often the vote is only among people who _want_ to be elected (and in a position of power), massively reducing the pool of good candidates.
  - zahlman 2y ago
    > The question was, who are these people, specifically, and why they were chosen and given that much power. They are core developers elected by an internal process among the developers. See PEP 13 for details: https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/#the-steering-council https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/#the-steering-council > I have no clue who these guys are and what their actual contributions are. Barry Warsaw (https://barry.warsaw.us https://barry.warsaw.us) is another of the "old guard" who can be pictured standing next to Peters and GvR fairly easily. He gained the title of "Friendly Language Uncle For Life" (FLUFL), and has previously been the project lead for Mailman and lead maintainer for Jython. He was the release manager for Python 2.2 (as far as I can tell, the first time this position existed), 2.6 and 3.0, and shared the role for 2.3. His name is all over 2.x-era process documentation. Prior to GvR's actual retirement in 2018, there was an April Fools' Day announcement of his resignation in 2009, authored by Barry Warsaw and Brett Cannon. This was accompanied by a hidden option (still available!) which changes the `!=` syntax to `<>`. Refs: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4007289/ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4007289/ ; https://peps.python.org/pep-0401/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0401/ . Emily Morehouse (https://emilyemorehouse.com/ https://emilyemorehouse.com/) was the PyCon co-chair for 2019 and chair for 2020 and 2021. She has done project management for Axios and mentoring for PyLadies (https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-nomination-emily-morehouse/686 https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-nomination-emi...). Gregory P. Smith has been a core dev since about 2003 and has notably worked on `hashlib` and `subprocess` (https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-nomination-gregory-p-smith/737 https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-nomination-gre...). Pablo Galindo Salgado (https://github.com/pablogsal https://github.com/pablogsal) was the release manager for 3.10 and 3.11, and Thomas Wouters was/is the release manager for 3.12 and 3.13. Wouters has also previously served as a PSF Board member and was a PSF founder (https://www.python.org/nominations/elections/2020-python-software-foundation-board/nominees/thomas-wouters/ https://www.python.org/nominations/elections/2020-python-sof...).

dilap 2y ago

They suspended Tim Peters? That is insane.

threatofrain 2y ago
The Python steering committee also threw the kitchen sink of accusations at him. IMO it speaks to character when you throw arguments like an adversarial lawyer. Not the kind of person you want to be around for work or life.
- zahlman 2y ago
  To be clear, the accusations in question came from the Code of Conduct Work Group; the Steering Council simply "acted on their recommendations". I don't expect any positive changes if said Work Group becomes directly responsible for such disciplinary actions.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    is the steering council able to remove messages without a recommendation? i think that if two "independent" groups have to cooperate then that's better than one group being able to act alone. now the question is how independent are these groups really. i saw another comment drawing that into question.

holsta 2y ago

[flagged]

bitcharmer 2y ago
What does reverse racism mean?
- zahlman 2y ago
  There exists an argument that people who are not white are, in fact, capable of saying or doing things which tend to discriminate against white people; and furthermore that such speech and action is harmful and morally offensive. "reverse racism" is a term used by people who find that position disagreeable or inconvenient, to mislabel, misrepresent and mock it. The argument is not at all "far right"; it's centrist, and obvious. But certain extremist identity-based ideologues have manage to sell that nonsense with their propaganda based on the label. Occasionally you will see people who don't know any better use the term unironically, because of the dominance its derogatory use has achieved; but serious opposition to so-called "progressive" identity politics does not actually use the term.

zahlman 2y ago

> why would this have violated community standards? Is there some rule about not mentioning "un-persons" or something? Flags may be cast by anyone, and this will eventually result in automatic hiding - flags on Discourse are weighted according to the "trust level" of those raising them. My guess is that people perceived this as a passive-aggressive objection to Tim Peters' suspension. It has definitely been permitted up until now to refer to this (although everyone seemed to be avoiding the name on principle), but there seems to be an expectation that people should "read the air" now and stop talking about it - hence posts like https://discuss.python.org/t/moderated-posts-are-no-longer-publicly-visible/61648 https://discuss.python.org/t/moderated-posts-are-no-longer-p... and https://discuss.python.org/t/pr-disaster-surrounding-recent-bylaws-changes-and-core-developer-suspension/61364/21 https://discuss.python.org/t/pr-disaster-surrounding-recent-... . > and sparking a call for a vote of no confidence in the council which did not succeed The call was retracted, which is not surprising. The Steering Council isn't the root of the problem, anyway. That would be the Code of Conduct Work Group (https://www.python.org/psf/workgroups/#code-of-conduct-work-group https://www.python.org/psf/workgroups/#code-of-conduct-work-...), which is not elected (https://wiki.python.org/psf/ConductWG/Charter#Membership https://wiki.python.org/psf/ConductWG/Charter#Membership), has membership overlapping other important groups (4 of them are on the PSF Board of Directors - https://www.python.org/psf/board/#id3 https://www.python.org/psf/board/#id3 - and Brett Cannon and Łukasz Langa are Discourse forum moderators) and enforces the Code of Conduct according to hidden rules that betray the neutrality of that document (https://policies.python.org/python.org/code-of-conduct/Enforcement-Procedures/ https://policies.python.org/python.org/code-of-conduct/Enfor...) counter to the wishes of one of the original drafters of said document (https://discuss.python.org/t/why-i-am-withdrawing-fellowship-status-in-psf/58301 https://discuss.python.org/t/why-i-am-withdrawing-fellowship... ; https://discuss.python.org/t/why-im-leaving-discuss-python-org/58093/4 https://discuss.python.org/t/why-im-leaving-discuss-python-o... etc.). It's also noteworthy that the Steering Council - consisting of 5 core devs - apparently also now requires a "communications liaison" (https://www.notion.so/46aec24028fd4e8dbdba003097c18b5b?pvs=21 https://www.notion.so/46aec24028fd4e8dbdba003097c18b5b?pvs=2...) who gets a glowing write-up in official updates on the forum (such as https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-updates-for-july-2024/60995 https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-updates-for-ju...) - which are not posted by said liaison. I have no idea why this should be necessary, nor is there anything in PEP 13 (https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/ https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/) about this position existing. It seems that this person was selected entirely out-of-process.