On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Thomas Dalton wrote:
Yet if I put a
picture of a gerbil against a cloudy sky in the article on
gerbils, nobody would say "clouds are irrelevant to gerbils" and take the
picture out until someone removed the clouds from the picture. Relevance
isn't enough; offensiveness matters.
It's not just relevance, it's
prominence. The clouds wouldn't be
prominent in the photo, they're just in the background.
Then forget the gerbilling. Imagine it's a picture of a gerbil, but on the
wall behind it is a poster showing a big penis.
We'd remove that, even though we wouldn't remove it if the poster had had
clouds on it instead.
(Of course, the obvious response is that the penis poster is much more
noticeable than the cloud poster *because* it's offensive, but in that case,
you've basically defined prominence as including offensiveness.