Donny Darko
Aug 25, 2017 · 2 min read

I came to this in passing, but what caught my eye was the bit about the policy of arbitration within the CoC not allowing for basic rights and justice.

The inability to face ones accuser or learn of the accusations leveraged against them has historically been associated with the concept of assumed guilt. This is an understanding that goes all the way back to Roman times in legal proceedings, was a major component of common law, and is currently a mandatory staple of Due Process in almost every civilized western liberal society. Why modern Tech CoC’s have not implemented very basic and century old concepts of fairness and justice is beyond me. It is however ironic that communities on the bleeding edge of technological advancement in 2017 are being moderated with CoC’s that are for all intents reflective of literal Draconian era Athens type arbitration than anything remotely resembling a basic understanding of modern due process.

Understanding the accusations against you and facing your accuser are ideas that are conceptually synonymous with fair arbitration.

“Dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because the defendant is obviously guilty.”

— The Supreme Court 2004 Crawford v. Washington

Any CoC which attempts to adjudicate disputes by dispensing with the basic concepts of due process is on it’s face, entirely worthless, and must be considered incapable of maintaining any form of decent conduct in the most basic sense. In this primitive state such a CoC actually promotes general misconduct via the abuse of the adjudication processes in order to unfairly leverage authority in a manner that is neither fair nor just, and in doing so it becomes nothing more than a protected means of misconduct as opposed to a viable means of establishing an acceptable code behavior within the group. With this in mind it may be in the interest of your community to rectify that issue by changing the procedures to reflect a more fair and modern concept of arbitration.

Godspeed in your endeavors.

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    Donny Darko

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