On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 4:45 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I didn't say it did, my comment was mostly directed at the fact that Steve compared female masturbation with decapitation, something I found patently offensive.
Why? Both are natural and both have been aproved and opposed by various societies throughout history.
I'm sorry, but you don't find the comparison offensive? You do think murder and masturbation are comparable offenses?
We point is, we shouldn't censor either Commons or Wikipedia based on arbitrarily chosen moral guidelines. The goal of Wikipedia, especially, should be to give people the truth,
Ah the truth<sup>tm</sup>. But Quid est veritas? (and no Est vir qui adest is not a useful answer in this context).
Let just say your claim is disputed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Verifiability/truth
You're lawyering, and doing it badly. Of course our goal should be to tell the truth, but we can't do that without verifiability, but that doesn't mean that knowledge and truth shouldn't be our goal.
Also, I believe my claim was that masturbation was both healthy and pleasurable, both of are ridiculously verifiable (indeed, we have an article about it with loads of sources), so this is the wrong place to start debating the whole philosophical debate over verifiability versus truth. In this case, both of them are on my side.
to cut through all the moral crap that we inherit from culture and just give people the information.
Morality is crap? Well that is certainly a POV although one I doubt you hold going by some of your early comments. By rejecting the comparison between masturbation with decapitation you in turn reject the endpoint of moral relativism and thus your position becomes internally inconsistent.
You're so missing my point with these irrelevant little philosophical asides. First of all, I didn't say "morality is crap", I said that some moral lessons that people are being taught are crap, and they are, anyone can agree with that. Things like "Don't eat shellfish, or you will be stoned", "Don't make pictures of people", or indeed "Women are by nature sinful creatures, and if they find pleasures with their own bodies they will go to hell!"
You're trying to make it sound like I want Wikipedia to get rid of old-school Judeo-Christian morality and substitute it with my own sexually deviant one, but that's not what I said. I said that wikipedia shouldn't ascribe to any moral system what so ever, it should just try and present the truth (or verifiable facts, if you're going to continue to complain about that point)
It's absurd for such a project to say "We should delete all the pictures of women touching their cooches, because masturbation is dirty and sinful!".
No more absurd than saying that we should keep them because it allows commons to tech some message that you want to transmit.
I'm not saying we should keep them to teach my message of sexual revolution! I'm saying that the reasons people want to delete them are entirely based on arbitrarily chosen moral standards. Like I posted long, long ago, why should this category be treated any different than Category:Dogs in clothing? Can you tell me a single good reason?
Neither actually show decapitation. Problem is that decapitation isn't something normally done during dissection so it won't show up there and Category:Butchers isn't that complete yet.
They show people being executed, which was the point. If you want pictures of actual decapitations, look no further than the articles on the Guillotine and the French Revolution.
Strangely no. Most artists show just before hand and the photos don't even show the person on the guillotine.
The bible inspired Image:Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio.jpg Would appear to be the first actual decapitation pic that comes to hand and Image:Beheadingchina2.jpg the closest we have to a photo.
Eh, whatever, not really the central focus of this discussion, is it :)
--Oskar