But then how do you determine merit? And how do you keep this determination of merit free of politics? (if that would be a goal)
By an implicit or explicit process that you implicitly or explicitly politically agree with all participants (or in case of disagreements, the community diminishes or splits).
What counts as merit for you is a political decision. Everything is, as
@λ the β-Redex Reducer and you say, as long as it affects more than one person.
What happens is that I'm becoming more suspicious of people that mark any political discussion as avoidable, unnecessary or troublesome. I always suspect they simply
want to take the advantage that their political opinion is mainstream enough and prevent it to be challenged by political debate. I can't know. because I can't read minds,
but it is like the path of least resistance, so I suspect people to follow that consciously or not. As I grew older I may be turning into a Occam sword fighter...
I'm not a fan of CoC, but I'm also not against them. CoCs shouldn't be necessary, but they try to address real and important issues. Then they fail to address other real and important issues.
For example every CoC finds it terrible to discriminate on race, sexuallity, nationality or gender, but most free software communities discriminate on language. I know it's not the same because
one can learn languages, but most people on the world don't speak English. Most projects will do their best so that their end product UIs are translated into as many languages as possible, but many
will not let you participate in languages different than English or at most will create specific "ghetos" for other languages. And I don't see SJWs against that. Possibly because translation,
multiplication of communication channels, and multicultural awareness do take more work than just writing a CoC and feeling good about it.
My problem with CoCs is that they probably don't address all problems and they understimate the problems they want to solve. An unenforced CoC has little value. And an enforced CoC may run contrary to
other human rights like due process and so on because it is essentially setting up an adhoc judiciary without real force, oversight or checks and balances (and without properly written law, to start with, for which you don't even have a
census to vote it). And there're enough problems with more "professional" judiciaries out there to try it amateurishly. Amateur courts bring me some kind of vigilante smell that I dislike. Did people really never
kick off nasty members before CoCs, just because they got fed up of their abuses ?
But I also think that in the most part they honestly try to fix a problem bigger than they can. It's the anarchist dream to build a world better than you have, not really stopping to think if you really can.
If people are stalking others there should be a real court you can bring them to. That does not work internationally, so people hack together what they can. But does it really work ?
But I kind of dislike both SJWs and anti-SJWs. So I tend to never push for CoCs, never avoid communities with CoCs (although I tend to read them because exceptionally they are indeed
unreasonable for me, and even if they're normally not, you still learn something about the community).