You see how this is a problem, though, right? Like, here I am, disagreeing with you. That makes me a “dissenter” relative to you. Does that mean some or all of the forum rules or the CoC stop applying to me? Which ones, and for how long?
Trying to treat “dissent” as a special case just does not work as a principle, because everyone who wants to break rules and get away with it will just find a way to frame what they’re doing as “dissent” and claim the protections offered to dissenters.
Similarly, discussions (multiple, on multiple sites) have focused on certain people’s long history of good work on or on behalf of Python or its community. That also does not work as a principle for granting exceptions – “what I’ve seen of this person has always been good/nice” does not mean they haven’t also done bad things, or that if they do bad things they should be excused from consequences. Lots of people in the Python and Django communities have probably only ever seen me being nice, but I know I haven’t always been, and I also shouldn’t be exempt from rules or from the CoC just because of good things I may have done in the past.
The publicly-available information includes the assertion that the individual in question was warned before the actions taken against them were escalated. I said earlier in the thread that I don’t know how else the situation can play out when warnings are going unheeded.
Anyway, I’m going to once again share/expand on something from my own past experience as a moderator on various sites and forums (not this one, and not any other official PSF community space): most of the stuff a moderator deals with is minor and boring. I’d estimate at least 95%, probably higher. It’s small problems that have quick solutions, and even when someone needs to be “punished” it almost always consists of minor actions. Maybe a warning and a reminder about what the rules say. Maybe a post or two removed. Maybe if they were getting aggressive, a short timeout (maybe a day, maybe a couple days) from posting to make them take a break and cool off.
And for the vast majority of cases that’s the end of it. Escalating beyond those minor actions is rare, but there are some recognizable patterns to the cases that do escalate. One of the most reliable indicators of escalation is someone whose reaction to an initial minor encounter with moderation is to become radicalized against the concept of moderation itself, someone who suddenly decides that it’s inherently unjust that someone else could remove their posts or stop them from being able to post whatever they want. Once someone starts on that path there is, in my experience, no external intervention to get them off it, and it only ever ends in much more serious action – typically long-term or permanent ban – taken once the person has exhausted all the warnings and second (third/fourth/etc.) chances offered to them.
And I don’t think anyone can deny that both in this forum and on the PSF-Vote list there were multiple people who quickly took up the cause not of “dissent” but of being against moderation. The idea that a post could be automatically hidden for moderator review if enough users flagged it, for example, or that a moderator could redact out rule-breaking bits while leaving the rest, was treated as inherently offensive to the people affected by it. One person even said it should become illegal, so that action could be taken in court against moderators who do it!
I think anyone with any experience as a forum mod, at any scale, reading that stuff probably knew then how it was going to end.
And I guess that’s where you and I really differ. I look at this and see a pattern that’s extremely familiar to me and that I know pretty much inevitably ends up with someone being banned/suspended for a long time. I don’t see “dissent” being “silenced” or “punished”. There’s a reason why a lot of sites and forums have rules that arguing about moderation actions is off-topic – it tends to take over and escalate until someone finally does eat a ban for it, at which point their supporters can say “See? The mods really were out to get him the whole time! This proves he was right!” (also, sadly, a very familiar pattern).
I also think that if, hypothetically, someone were determined to try to show that moderation and CoC enforcement are inherently heavy-handed and extreme (rather than, as noted above, usually pretty light and minor), continually breaking rules and ignoring warnings until enforcement finally escalates is a way that person could, hypothetically, try to “prove” their claim. If someone’s willing to take the hit, it’s basically always possible to generate a self-fulfilling “they’re out to get me” claim about moderators by forcing them to deal with you.
Finally, I want to point out that a recurring theme of this thread is a desire for more information to be public so that people can effectively litigate the conduct case for themselves or to their own personal satisfaction. I’ve pointed out that the Python community has a notorious example of how that can go very very very badly wrong, and nobody who’s arguing for more publicity/transparency has meaningfully engaged with that point, as far as I’ve seen.