On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 8:33 AM, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 03:34, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
While I don't find that line of argument to be a fully fledged straw-horse argument, it does appear to me to be a cherry-picked argument to *attempt* to refute. There are much stronger arguments, both practical and philosophical, at any attempt to elide controversial content. Even as such, I am not convinced by the argumentation, but would not prefer to rebut an argument that does not address the strongest reasons for opposing elision of controversial content, by choice or otherwise.
My point was not to provide an argument for or against any particular implementation. It was a response to one particularly god-awful argument.
"English Wikipedia already has the “bad image list”: a list of shocking images that can only be included in the article it is listed for on the list. If you want to use it elsewhere, an admin has to update the list. It’s basically to prevent that delightful image “Autofellatio6.jpg” from being inserted into My Little Pony articles and other amusing bits of vandalism. Does the bad image list enable censorware? Yes. But it has kind of an important and useful function: preventing vandalism. Similarly, the doctrine of double effect can be called into play here: yes, we may be building up a list of categories that could be reused by censorware sellers, but that’s not our primary intention."
If you had started with the last sentence, rather than concluded with it, I doubt even the most moronic reader would have been stringed along by the rhetoric. Let me emphasize the last phrase of that paragraph for rhetoric effect:
"[...] yes, we may be building up a list of categories that could be reused by censorware sellers, but that’s not our primary intention."