Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

There's a point where defensive driving starts *rewarding* the bad drivers - that nothing ever happens just encourages them to become worse drivers.

That assumes that getting into accidents is the only form of feedback bad drivers get. But that isn't the case. We have traffic police whose job it is to hand out tickets to bad drivers; they can even lose their license for repeated and/or severe violations. That's the point of the "Punishing bad drivers is a related but separate topic" comment. By separating the jobs of accident avoidance and punishing bad driving, we get the benefits of defensive driving while minimizing the risk that bad drivers will be rewarded for their misdeeds.

Translating back into codes of conduct, this suggests the rules need to come in two parts. One part are guidelines like the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines that try to encourage best practices so people who want to avoid confrontation don't create it inadvertently. The other part are hard rules about what is absolutely unacceptable and will result in some kind of punishment for violators. There can and should be a big gray area between following best practices and getting in trouble for breaking the rules, just as there's a big gray area between being a careful defensive driver and getting a ticket.