Was it a refusal to be triggered, or a decision to steel yourself for possibly being triggered and commitment summoning the wherewithal to handle that gracefully?
A little bit of both. It is a commitment to efficiently and dispassionately evaluating the facts at hand on their own merits, but it also is the practiced discipline of disregarding your emotional reaction and recognizing that your emotional reaction to offensive ideas are not grounded in reason.
It follows from the idea that how something makes you feel has little relation to its veracity or rationality. If the goal of discussion is primarily about the veracity and rationality of an argument then taking offense contributes nothing toward that goal and tends to suppress otherwise reasonable perspectives via social convention.
Crocker's Rules can be looked at as an intentional refusal to have any sacred cows, consciously or subconsciously, and making an effort to respond to every discussion as if one actually does have no sacred cows.
That's not a side effect but rather the point, isn't it? To allow others to communicate to you more directly by committing to not responding emotionally.
Edit: to be perfectly clear, by "not responding emotionally" I mean not sending a nasty email while angry. I don't mean suppressing any emotional response.
Well, one criticism of Postel's principle is that it's contributed to the security hazards of the modern-day Internet. We have a lot of ill-behaved software, written by programmers who felt free to take the easy way out because everyone else bent over backwards to accommodate them. The critics argue that a more formal, RFC-respectful approach -- the equivalent of what we'd call "political correctness" in a conversational context -- would bring about a safer Internet (or safer world) for everyone.
I don't subscribe to that point of view because I disagree with the idea that safety and security should be prioritized above virtually everything else including freedom. But I think it's worth acknowledging in a devil's-advocate sense. The question, "What's the minimum level of standards enforcement / political correctness that's required to enable technological development / human progress?" is an interesting one. Clearly the answer isn't "Zero" in either case.
Political correctness is about being conservative in what you say. Crocker's rules is about being liberal in what you accept. You could do both, then you'd be following a conversational equivalent of Postel's principle.
Was it a refusal to be triggered, or a decision to steel yourself for possibly being triggered and commitment summoning the wherewithal to handle that gracefully?