I never read the book/story, nor do I know anything about it. Star of David and the stuff around Jews in Germany I do. You can't blame people for not knowing some "more" obscure reference that you know.
I find it funny that the same person who made an obvious comparison between an online shame list and the physical marking of Jews in Nazi Germany is now
(a) claiming I'm assaulting their character
(b) "defending" themselves by claiming it's a super obscure reference in which a woman is marked instead of Jews.
Seems you're assuming bad intentions, also after the other person, 0des, gave an explanation.
To me, it wasn't an obvious comparison. There're lots of icons and symbols on people's avatars, in online forums and GitHub etc already, not that special? Eg admin or moderator icons.
(I think a saboteur icon is a bad idea but for other reasons)
Even if I believed his explanation, which I don't, it's an explanation referencing a story in which women are physically marked for what the in-universe society believes is bad behavior. To claim that is what I was arguing for is still unacceptable.
I'm also allowed to assume bad intentions based on his replies in other comment threads here, which you're free to look at and come to your own conclusions.
The Star of David and Scarlet Letter (or letter "A" for adulterer) were both symbols people were made to wear, so they could be identified as "undesirable". The Star of David is probably far more well known world-wide because of how much more recently it was used (some people still alive today were forced to wear it) and the atrocities that followed. Either way, in history it's never been a good thing when people are shaming and identifying people publicly by "marking" them.
> I'm defending an assault of my character
I hope "Maybe we could pin a symbol on their avatars, to make them easy to identify" was missing a "/s". Unfortunately, from the other comments in the thread and your follow up: "Here we are identifying bad actors in the field of business, analogous to a marriage.", it seems like proposals like this are unfortunately real.
And it's unclear how comparing your proposal to a Scarlet Letter would be a good thing. The Scarlet Letter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Letter) is a cautionary tale of public shaming:
> The major theme of The Scarlet Letter is shaming and social stigmatizing
Plus, the analogy doesn't even make sense.
1) business is nothing like marriage
2) this isn't even a business situation since you have no fiduciary relationship with the author (you got something, but paid nothing), and you have no contractual relationship with the author, other than you unilaterally agreeing to be bound by the "AS IS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND" terms of the MIT license
3) adulterers (or "bad actors" in a marriage) are rarely punished in modern society, and are no longer "marked" in any country I know of
This idea of creating a symbol and process to "publicly identify bad actors" is more in alignment with 17th century Puritans and 20th century dictators, not any modern social structure I know of.
The better thing to do is: if they broke a law or a Terms of Service, or a Code of Conduct, then warn, suspend or ban them from the platform and/or repository where the offense took place. If they didn't break any rules, then let them be and use your GitHub stars, free speech, forks, etc. to promote alternatives.
