To be fair he is also the Ubuntu developer and upstart maintainer on the committee

What is there to be or to not "be fair" about? mjn's comment was a value neutral statement of fact. There was nothing prejudicial in his comment.

He's referring to Steve Langasek not min.

What was "unfair"?

I agree with that vote. Since Debian is still committed to BSD, they aren't going to drop sysvint once the next-gen init system is in place.