waive your rights here

I’m created a waiver. This waiver can be copied and filled out by any member of ILP. It essentially waives the member’s right to not be trolled, insulted, or psychoanalyzed by other members. For example, if someone starts using ad homs against you in an argument. Normally, the forum rules would warrant that the offending party gets a warning, or if they have been warned several times, a temporary or permanent ban.

So WTF, gib, you’re saying. Why the hell would anybody wanna waive their right to not be trolled, insulted, or psychoanalyzed? Well, sometime it goes both ways. Sometimes when a person is trolling you, you’re really trolling each other, and you don’t want to stop. Just the other day, for example, Biggy and I were going at it and Mags stepped in to tell us to stop psychoanalyzing each other (viewtopic.php?f=1&t=194274&start=100#p2712916). Godamit, I thought, I rather enjoyed psychoanalyzing Biggy as I’m sure he did me. Then I replied asking if it would be ok if both Biggy and I agreed to be ok with psychoanalyzing each other. I promised I’d keep it just between Biggy and I and I’d keep it in the context of the thread. ← So yeah, there you go. Sometimes you wanna troll a person, and it’s well worth the price of allowing them to troll you in turn.

So I give you this waiver. Just quote it in this thread, fill it out, and provide a link to it wherever you’d like to waive your right to not be trolled, insulted, or psychoanalyzed (or any other variant thereof… you can tweak it to suit your needs).

Now, of course, there is no guarantee any of the mods are going to respect or recognize the legitimacy of this waiver. I’m not working in cahoots with them. They may just say: What? gib said you could sign this waiver? I don’t give a fuck what gib says, the forum rules and the forum rules. And, well, you’d probably best respect that. On the other hand, if the mods see this as reasonable, it may come in handy on the occasions when you have a hankering for trolling and don’t mind being trolled as a small price to pay.

So as an example, I will be the first to fill out my own waiver. I’ll do it in the next post.

^ See how simple it is?

I grant that there are situations where something like this should affect how a moderator responds to an exchange. But only a small part of the purpose of moderating is protecting a particular user from being insulted, so there will be many more situations where the moderating has nothing to do with that and the rights being protected aren’t yours to waive.

Compare it to two people who decide to have a fistfight in a mall. A security guard steps in to stop it, and both participants respond, “no, it’s cool, I waive my right not to be punched in this mall.” That’s unlikely to persuade the security guard. There, as here, the security guard isn’t primarily concerned with making sure the participants don’t get punched, as with making sure the mall doesn’t become a place where people have fistfights. Fistfights invite fistfights, and scare away people who are interested in using the mall for its intended purpose.

So too here. Shitting on each other may be good fun for the participants, but it kind of sucks for everyone else. It’s boring, it’s derailing, it’s always, always beside the point of any philosophical point worth making.

So, waive all you want, and to the extent any moderator action would have been taken specifically to protect you, I think mods should respect it. But know that most often moderators aren’t protecting your rights when intervening to stop other people insulting you; waiving your rights still leave a lot of other rights in place.

That is perfectly reasonable, Carleas. Still, these waivers can be useful in letting the mods (and everyone else) know where you stand–and this might persuade the mods’ decisions.

(Of course, I don’t actually expect people to fill it out; if they don’t mind being bullied on this forum, they can just say so.)

Agreed, and to reiterate, I can easily picture cases where this should change mod behavior, namely anywhere that moderation is based on protecting the victim in the instant case (as opposed to protecting e.g. the overall tone of the site).

I also think the the rate of response should inform mod behavior; if lots of people think this is worth doing, it signals that people think moderation is too strict, or at least inaccurate. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the signal, but the sum of responses generalizes beyond any specific case.

Well, we know where I stand. I have just waived my right to be protect from forum bulling and trolling by everyone here. Should be fun from here on in. :smiley:

Fuck you Gib.

Mods!.. oh wait…