Er, how is saying that someone is "_dramatically_ privileged" an attack? It's a judgment-neutral observation. When I say that sshd runs a privileged process, I don't mean to say that sshd is morally bad (or whatever), just that it needs to be more careful than less-privileged code and that it can do things more easily than less-privileged code can. It's the same meaning of "privileged" here.
(And yes, you could bring up to the moderators that this is an attack, but you could do that in the absence of any written rules, too, and if the moderators are the sort of people who would agree with that argument, then neither having nor not having written rules would save this forum.)
You can observe whether sshd is running a privileged process because you have all of the information available to make that judgement. You can't observe whether a random person is privileged because it's relative and related to your opinion and biases.
True, but then it's at most a false claim. It's still not an attack. If I say ping is privileged and you say you're on a distro with unprivileged ping, I haven't in any way denounced ping.
That's a false analogy. Saying something incorrect about a computer is different from using an incorrect/biased statement to try to shut a person down.
In your opinion. As the recipient of said 'claim' I took it as an attack. Maybe I'm an overly sensitive person, maybe it's the end of a long week and I'm just feeling cranky, either way it offended me. So in this fictional world I feel that I have been attacked, and the HN CoC frowns upon members hurting other members' feelings. What should be done?
Fair enough - I think that in this fictional world where the CoC frowns on hurting others' feelings, you'd have a valid complaint, and I think that such a CoC would quickly break apart a community (especially an open community, where anyone can show up and then proclaim their feelings have been hurt).
I think the NumFOCUS CoC doesn't say that though (although it's ambiguous because it includes "Be kind" in the normative text, and I'd agree that's a problem), and other CoCs are more interested in the objective (or, at least, more objective) question of whether a personal attack actually happened than the question of whether a participant felt attacked. The Contributor Covenant, for instance, prohibits "Trolling, insulting or derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks," to which 'I'm sorry you felt insulted, but this was not an insult' would be an adequate defense.
It does appear that the relevant sections of the NumFOCUS CoC aren't unique to them, though I can't tell exactly where they came from, and you have convinced me that this is a problem. (Geez, this is license proliferation all over again.) Thank you!
Attached is an implicit "and thus your opinion only perpetuates the issue", due to the inherent problem with phrasing basic rights in terms of "privilege" - the paradigm directs attention towards the people whose rights aren't being infringed as the exceptional cases, and away from the specific people responsible for the infringements.
(And yes, you could bring up to the moderators that this is an attack, but you could do that in the absence of any written rules, too, and if the moderators are the sort of people who would agree with that argument, then neither having nor not having written rules would save this forum.)