Forum Agreement at WendyMcElroy.com
Paul Wakfer
http://www.wendymcelroy.com/smf/ to which anyone wishing to post on the
forum is required to agree. I first want to make it very clear that I am
*not* singling out Wendy McElroy and her website for any special
criticism. I have not joined/registered at many other Internet posting
venues for the same reason - that I found the agreement that I was
required to sign to be philosophically untenable to me, often worse than
the one critiqued here. Therefore, it should be assumed that the points
that I make in this critique also apply to other registration agreements
that I have seen.
My second purpose for this critique is to explain why I will not execute
any such agreement and thus why I cannot respond to any blog post of
Wendy McElroy at her own website. (The blog posts have no commenting
available, but there is also no thread begun for each post, which then
becomes the place to comment/discuss, as is done for many other blogs or
article websites).
The registration page states:
> You agree, through your use of this forum, that you will not post any
> material which is false, defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar,
> hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening,
> invasive of a person's privacy, adult material, or otherwise in
> violation of any International or United States Federal law.
Since I do not recognize the validity of any "International or United
States Federal law", I will not agree to any such thing. And for a
website owned by two individualist free market anarchist libertarians
who maintain that the non-aggression principle is the fundamentally
necessary libertarian maxim, it indeed seems strange that anyone should
be prohibited from doing so many actions which are not at all the
initiation of force or fraud. In fact, since writing anything at all
cannot possibly be construed as the initiation of physical force, the
only item above that should reasonably be forbidden is the use of
threatening language, but even that only if it is the threat of the use
of physical force against someone. (Note in passing that my
philosophical basis does *not* consider any such threats of physical
force as violations.) Worst of all is the totally nebulous and surely
non-libertarian forbidding of "invasion of a person's privacy" - in
fact, it is not at all clear what that phrase actually means and even
less how "invasion of a person's privacy" could actually be done on a forum.
Now if the owners of the forum (Wendy McElroy and Brad Rodriguez) wish
to forbid all these actions by posters, they are certainly entitled to
do so. After all, its their creation and their property, particularly
being on their own website. However, they should then clearly define
what it is they are forbidding and most certainly should not relate it
to any laws, which laws would seem to be totally rejected by the
philosophy both of them appear to espouse.
> You also agree not to post any copyrighted material unless you own the
> copyright or you have written consent from the owner of the
> copyrighted material.
Since I totally reject the entire notion of copyright as being a fiction
created by the State and not consistent with the reality of information
and its use by people, I will not agree to this one either.
> Spam, flooding, advertisements, chain letters, pyramid schemes, and
> solicitations are also forbidden on this forum.
This is fine since I would never do any of these things and I certainly
do not want to be associated with anyone who does (except perhaps for
ads and solicitations which are not in the form of "Interruption Harm"
(for a definition and explanation see:
http://selfsip.org/solutions/NSC.html), but it is the prerogative of the
forum owners to forbid these and as a forum user I would want them to).
[Deleted parts for which I understand the need and to which I have no
problem agreeing.]
> you agree to never give your password out to another person except an
> administrator, for your protection and for validity reasons. You also
> agree to NEVER use another person's account for any reason.
I will not agree to either of these last two. I should have the liberty
to decide whether or not doing either will harm either myself (in
reputation) or the forum (by actions contrary to the agreement). In
addition, why should I never use the account of another, as long as such
person has permitted me to do so and I am not doing so to act contrary
to any forbidden forum behaviors to which I have agreed?
The rest is no problem.
--Paul Wakfer
MoreLife for the rational - http://morelife.org
Reality based tools for more life in quantity and quality
The Self-Sovereign Individual Project - http://selfsip.org
Self-sovereignty, rational pursuit of optimal lifetime happiness,
individual responsibility, social preferencing & social contracting