On Mon, 20 Jul 2009, Elliott Hird wrote: > 2009/7/20 C-walker <[email protected]>: >> C-walker >> Statements made in this message may or may not be false > > I think this is nullifying all your messages; don't we have precedent on that?
Someone (can't remember who) very specifically tried to get out of whatever version of "lying" we had a while back by publishing a big, general disclaimer with eir report. We decided or discussed that either: 1. The disclaimer didn't work at all, if the rest of the message contained a lie it contained a lie and the disclaimer didn't protect em (because the broad disclaimer didn't specify what might be wrong), or; 2. The disclaimer disclaimed everything, so since we couldn't tell what was truth and what was being disclaimed, we couldn't tell anything about the message. IIRC, In the previous case, the message itself was clearly an attempt to lie or dissemble about something so we put in in category 2; I think what c-walker did might fit in category 1; i.e. just a generic non-functional disclaimer on messages that were otherwise perfectly clear so it all worked fine (and if it didn't work, it wasn't because the disclaimer was there). Directly targeted disclaimers tend to work, e.g. "I'm not sure about this one fact because of this specific type of uncertainty" because it gives us sufficient information on what to check. Yes, it's a fuzzy gray area; except for voting, conditional actions in general are wholly precedential (and that's a good thing, it would be far, far messier than trying to regulate this "act on behalf of" stuff). -G.
