Tony Sidaway wrote:
A purported "community ban" has been asserted by some editors, but community bans only operate insofar as no administrator is prepared to unblock, after contemplating the matter, the banned editor. Jimbo has been in discussion with Daniel Brandt and several other administrators have co-operated on the technical side of unblocking Brandt, which turned out to be quite difficult, so no community ban applies at this time.
The cooperation may come not from a desire to see him unblocked (which few people expressed during the discussion), but more to the typical "What Jimbo says, goes" mentality of way too many Wikipedians. I would not use their compliance in helping Jimbo unblock properly as any sort of actual approval of his actions outside of "Jimbo did it, thus it's good."
The community ban you speak of came *before* the massive discussion at the community noticeboard - no one dared unblock him, thus it was a de facto community ban. Once ArbCom declined the matter (still a mistake, IMO), the discussion to unblock him occurred and was soundly and decisively rejected.
I'm willing to give Jimbo the benefit of the doubt that he may not have been aware of the discussion, but if he was and did it anyway, that's really, really troublesome. There's certainly nothing to indicate that he intended to invalidate the consensually-approved ban, and he's shown some approval (perhaps not explicit, I can't be certain at this point) of community-based measures for problem users.
-Jeff