[jandrewrogers]

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.