Right, because the drag on Sci's reputation here is not the blatant trolling and flame posts, but Fraggle's distaste for such.
Thanks for the support. I often feel like I am alone in my desire to restore SciForums to what it was ten years ago when I joined, even though the Admins have charged us with that task.
Most of our members are young, and in any case this is not an academy, so a certain amount of trash-talking and other foolishness must be welcomed if we expect to have enough members to survive. We even have an entire subforum dedicated to socializing. But I insist that intellectual dishonesty must NEVER be tolerated, and I often find myself at odds with some of the other moderators on that issue. In their defense it must be acknowledged that it's damnably difficult to spot if the perpetrator is really skillful at it.
Then there's saying that in your opinion all members of religion X are offensive personal insult Y, which is absolutely unacceptable.
I doubt very much that I've ever said that in my life, since I've always lived in large cosmopolitan cities where my neighbors, colleagues and even friends represent all the major religions, and they're no more offensive than anybody else.
Opinions about religions should also be backed up with appropriate evidence or argument, as is standard for any topic discussed here.
I've posted my evidence many times.
- The fundamental premise that underlies all science and defines the scientific method is that the natural universe is a closed system (using a colloquial definition of that phrase to avoid expanding this to twelve lines) whose behavior can be predicted by theories derived logically from empirical evidence of its present and past behavior.
- This premise has been tested exhaustively for five centuries.
- Many of those who have tested it would dearly love to disprove it, if only to see their picture on the cover of Newsweek.
- Yet no respectable evidence has ever been presented that comes close to challenging it.
- Therefore, any assertion of the existence of an invisible, illogical supernatural universe, from which creatures and other forces whimsically and often peevishly perturb the operation of the natural universe so that our theories are invalidated, is, indeed, antiscience.
By the way, wouldn't this discussion between the two of you (or the three of us, as it may be now) be better had in the Moderator's forum?
Yes. But Bells generally does not agree with that way of processing our dirty laundry. She's both intelligent and honorable so I'm sure her reasons have some validity, and therefore I'm not going to fight over it.
Yet if she called you an "asshole" for being an "asshole", she'd be banned.
Not by me. Yes, I did indeed once ban a member for gratuitous and excessive profanity,
but specifically because it was gratuitous and excessive. It wasn't even particularly clever so it could not be defended on the grounds of its literary merit. When a post becomes nothing more than a showcase for invective, whether profane or not, it crosses the line into trolling.
This isn't garbage though. Do you think censoring a girl's photo because she showed her bits in it, in a country known for its bad treatment of women and censorship, in protest against how her country and her religion views and treats women is "garbage"?
Sorry if I wasn't clear. The garbage, to me, was the photos of the results of violence. I have no objection to nudity, but as James points out, both pornography and scenes that are simply grisly are not permitted on SciForums. Obviously I'm not alone in my revulsion for gore. Sure you can blame my age, but plenty of younger people, especially women, find it nauseating as well.
Do you think the images that came out showing the illegal torture of prisoners is "garbage"? Do you think showing people being murdered or injured is "garbage"?
Sorry. I could not look at any of those photos
long enough to discern the context. As I noted in an earlier post, it is quite reasonable to show a shocking photo of the horrors of war to the general population
every now and then. We all need to be reminded occasionally that the world outside our comfortable middle-class neighborhoods (many of which sit on land that has never been a battlefield, although here in the Maryland suburbs of Washington there was considerable action during our own revolution--a war whose righteousness I'm still not sure about since you Aussies seem to be doing fine without one) isn't all double-frappucinos and designer-dogs. But the operative word is "occasionally." Hitting people in the face repeatedly with something that shocks them into closing their eyes and walking away is not a good way to make a point--much less enlist their support.
Maybe it is your old age Fraggle, but you seem to think that the horrors of real life in war is "garbage". Do you think those men being tortured, would appreciate someone like you deeming their treatment as "garbage" because the images that the soldiers from your country took offends your delicate sensibilities? What about Phan Thi Kim Phuc? Do you think she is "garbage" as well?
Again, I apologize for not choosing my words more carefully. But all I can do is point you to my previous sentence. I could not look at those photos long enough to analyze them and figure out what they were about or what point they strove to make. When these things come at us less often, then when one does actually show up, we're more likely to grit our teeth and look at it more carefully, because
somebody must have thought it was worth the outrage. There were a few of those photos during the Vietnam War, and we all looked at them dutifully while trying hard to suppress our gag reflex. But now they're everywhere. I have given up trying to decide if any individual photo is a worthy comment on war or some other flaw in humanity, or just a gratuitously shocking picture from a book jacket or a movie trailer.
Note please that I have not stepped over the line and begun campaigning to make these images illegal, as Sam's people have done regarding certain cartoons. Freedom of speech must be absolute with only a very few, very reasonable exceptions such as fraud. It is the rules of this forum that tell us these photos must not be posted here. I confess to being a little too zealous in categorizing them all as "garbage" without even looking at them carefully, since I was incapable of doing so and understood that some (or perhaps all) were meant to shock me into taking a position I already hold: that wars are horrible and we should do a better job of choosing leaders who don't start them, or at least not supporting leaders who do start them. But my stomach was crying "garbage" as it struggled to hang onto its contents, and the word managed to make it all the way to my keyboard.
I'm sure there are things you find so utterly offensive that they motivate you to behave a bit irrationally, so maybe you can forgive me for this.
Your country and mine perpetrated half the violence shown in those images. If you think they are "garbage", maybe you should contact your local politician and tell them to cease and desist in murdering and torturing innocent civilians lest their images offend your delicate and fragile sensibilities.
I have written plenty of letters to my politicians. Since I escaped from my parents in 1960 I have almost always lived in regions with a large majority of "liberal" voters, so the politicians who represent my district, or even the entire state, are almost always in complete agreement with me.
It's all those other fools who are difficult to influence.
Fraggle will forget his "in a place of science and scholarship" when it comes to his insulting Sam and her religion and Muslims and other religions in general. Good luck asking him for evidence.
I did not single out Muslims for an insult, and never have. Reread the sentence in which I spoke specifically about Muslims and you'll realize that it was an insult to Sam, not anyone else.
As for evidence, I have presented it so many times that all I have to do now is cut and paste it, as I did earlier in this post. So far no one on SciForums has falsified it.
I think we do have an issue with nudity and we are hypocritical in what is printed and what is not. I don't think we are that free after all. And that is somewhat disturbing.
I don't disagree with that at all. Of course it doesn't apply to the entire West in general. The best statement of that I've ever seen was advice columnist Carolyn Hax's response to a bewildered American tourist returning from Scandinavia: "In Sweden, it's not rude to be naked. It's just rude to notice."
Now back on ignore you [Signal] go.
Unfortunately Moderators and general members do not have the ability to put each other on Ignore.
I'm sure that Fraggle honestly believes what he writes when he says "Religion is anti-science".
It is my reasoned assertion as an amateur scientist, not merely a "belief," and I posted the evidence supporting this assertion above. Everyone is free to peer-review it, yet in all these years no one has come forth with a decent rebuttal, either on this website or out in the carbon world. The best any of them can do is mutter, "Well we can hardly base our lives on reason and logic now, can we? What kind of a world would that be?"
First, I would say that the US is not a place-holder for "the west". "The western media" includes the media in Italy, the UK, Australia, the US, France, Germany, etc. I don't think that all these nations have the same attitudes to things like nudity or violent imagery or images of death.
I'm not sure about death, but some general-circulation U.K. newspapers frequently feature nudity for no other reason than to attract more readers.
Having said that, I agree with you in general terms about the US. Its mainstream media tends to be prudish about nudity, which reflects the views of its citizens.
Not the majority of citizens, just the loudest ones.
I have never watched one of these Islamist beheadings, and never will. I don't want those images in my head.
I can't even bear to go to the front of the line in an open-casket funeral. I do
not want that to be my last memory of that person, seared into my brain forever. If the police called and said that it seems that one of my loved ones was killed in a road accident or something like that, and they needed me to come down and make a positive identification, I would beg them to use dental records instead, even if it will take longer to find out who it is.
"An attempt to launch an attack on the US"? Do you think her images contain launch codes for ballistic missiles?
You're getting a little silly here. I think everyone who read this who is over the age of eight understands the kind of "attack" that was meant: a verbal, philosophical one. Duh?
You know, this thread had a lot of potential. It is a shame that people such as yourself, Fraggle and others are too blinkered shouting at the messenger than looking at what is actually being discussed.
Guilty. But this is exactly the issue we're arguing: images such as this are so offensive to some of us that we can no longer participate meaningfully in the discussion. So offensive that our only goal becomes to prevent them from being foisted on us in the future. So offensive that we were not even able to look at them long enough to understand their context or purpose.
More importantly,
so offensive that they are prohibited on SciForums. Like many members, I'm reading this through a corporate server. The people who administer it have company standards to maintain. One more set of photos like these and they might decide to block this website. I would have no way to challenge that since it has nothing to do with my job.
I don't think it's unreasonable of me to expect the content on SciForums to be self-censored sufficiently to ensure that we do not get locked outside the firewalls of schools, libraries and corporations. I.e., I don't expect to encounter photos like these, and this expectation is
reasonable.
I'm sorry, but I don't see how one can state images of people being tortured to death as "garbage". I find it quite repulsive that anyone could view human suffering inflicted because some individuals wanted souvenir photos as being 'garbage'. Especially when one considers the risks and dangers involved in getting those images to the public in the first place. One is currently in jail for leaking it and the other has been charged on some trumped up rape charge. To view it all as "garbage" demeans the very notion of crimes against humanity and torture.
I have already apologized for introducing that word into the discourse, and explained why it happened. I will strive not to do something like this again, if only because I'm the professional writer here and I should be able to do better.
I hope you can let it rest now.
And I think you need to ask yourself how and why the media deems torture and the murder of civilians as being less offensive than a girl's nudity on her blog. That is the whole point. That the Western media and all media in general are happy to post overly violent images but will blank out a girl's nipples in her protest against a violent regime because it might offend. I think you need to ask yourself how and why violence is somewhat less offensive in the media than a girl's nude protest.
I think you'll have to ask that question to the religious folks, since this is their moral standard, not mine.
The point is that I would never moderate someone I detested or thought was a douche because it could be viewed as being biased. Ergo I have never moderated you or threatened you with moderation or with a ban nor will I ever.
One can defend oneself against accusations of bias. It's done all the time.
But why is it a taboo? If I read the above it is like our taboos are random, so if there is fear around a taboo, it is fear of breaking the taboo.
They're not random, they're just inherited from earlier cultures so they don't make a lot of s ense today.
Before the Industrial Revolution, physical strength was one of the most important measures of one's ability to contribute to society and to defend oneself. Most women were not as strong as most men, and on top of that they were often pregnant or nursing, which further reduced their ability to do hard labor or to defend themselves. So the morality evolved that men must protect women--from the minority of other men who would take advantage of the strength differential. In many cultures that extended to requiring them not to look sexually appealing, to avoid pushing those one-percenters over the edge, to where they'd lurk in the shadows and grab them when no one was around to defend them. As recently as the late 19th century, women in American cities showed very little shape or skin, wearing gloves, full-length sleeves and stockings, corsets and bustles. (Women on the farms had to wear clothing that didn't interfere with their work.)
This is where we started from. American culture is famous for its huge pendulum swings; just look at its attitude about alcohol, for example. The sex pendulum swung to the libertine side in the 1920s and stayed there through the 1960s, and now it is swinging back toward the Victorian side, at least in public.
