Bottoms first:

I noticed.


I was partly showing some evidence that I had indeed downloaded the image, as you have now confirmed.  I see too many liars and two-faced twisters on this forum.  Just in case you may have been suspicious that I was only pretending to ask to see it, I wanted a succinct way to demonstrate that, at least, I have in my possession the data without which I could not have produced a hash which, to my knowledge, has not previously been published.

Cryptography solves many problems!


I don’t doubt that you usually enjoy being caught between a rock and hard place—and that you don’t, here.  I appreciate that your evident willingness to discuss this topic fairly, and to express consistently the same principles as you have elsewhere.

For reasons that you have succinctly described from your own viewpoint, I really do not understand the “NSFW” rule.  Rules are supposed to be understandable to the ordinary intelligent person.  I believe that I meet or exceed that description; and yet, I seem unable to use my usual mind-reading powers to guess what a moderator will declare “Not Safe For Work”, vague as the term is.

Before further attempts to define that term, I will step back and examine the potential cultural origins of this dispute.


You are unfair to “Western society”.  It is a Christian issue, and most of all an issue of the persistent influences of certain denominations of Christianity—not a Western cultural issue.

When Popes have bought nude statues of mythic Greek heroes (who worshipped non-Christian gods and goddesses), they were not getting that from the Bible!  They were Renaissance men—culturally European, and sometimes not very good at being Christian.

Of course, what you want is not to be a Renaissance man.  I am not really one, either; but modulo a few of my own freethinking adjustments, it is an ideal for which I strive, so as to rise beyond my own modern corruptions, weaknesses, and failings.  Properly considered, I am not an “Antihero”, but rather, a Byronic hero (and a Don Juan).  —A hero in the original sense, but with tragic flaws inasmuch as I am assuredly not an Achilles.  Anyway...  I despise “virtue”:  I seek virtù.

You probably disagree with me about many things; for example, I infer that you would hate this post of mine and its followup.  (← ⚠ WARNING:  Links contain artistic nudity—i.e., a nude statue of Napoleon’s sister as Venus Victrix—and are likely offensive to Foxpup!)  And some of the forum’s right-wingers, who oft concur with me politically, are probably upset by my Nietzschean attacks on Christianity;—
—and you see—yes, you see, I took the nym “nullius”, which means ‘nobody’, for I please nobody.

Of note in this connexion, you awarded high merit to one of my posts that included, inter alia, a nude statue of Phryne in the Achilleion.  The Achilleion is a palace that was originally constructed by Kaiserin Elisabeth of Austria, who was strictly Catholic royalty; the palace was later purchased by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, an extremely conservative traditional Prussian.  Both Imperial monarchs were Christians—but like Popes who have admired nude Perseus, they were also strongly influenced by Western culture far older than Christianity, as reborn in the Renaissance.

(I will admit that they both probably would have had a problem with Courbet—but politics are here inextricable from the question, insofar as Courbet was a damnable Socialist.  I doubt that they would have appreciated Foxpup’s oeuvre—but Foxpup, you did say you aimed for “distasteful”! ;-)

Phryne was, of course, a great woman who provided aristocrats with intimate companionship in exchange for (very large amounts of) money.  —So great that she has inspired painters, sculptors, and poets for millennia.  And her legendary image, as imagined by artists, has appeared in not a few of my forum posts.

Foxpup, remember this?  I think you didn’t know that it is from the former palace of ultraconservative German monarchs.  (—Later taken away and converted to a posh casino where at least one James Bond movie scene was filmed, after the Germans lost it due to war politics.  I am pretty sure that the fence was not there before, when it was not open to the public.)

^^^ This is Western culture.  Only a subset of Puritanical Americans, and a few mutant Englishmen, could ever have a problem with it.  Their problem is that they are mentally ill, and unfit for survival in this world.

On that note, I do understand that this is a very American forum; and its policies are thus subject to the cultural influences of a country that was partly founded by

Perhaps my expectations may be too high here.

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This post is getting too long even for me.  —To be continued, with further discussion of “NSFW” as I attempt to understand what it means here.  Because I really don’t.