Beauty

"One must not have a too pronounced notion of what constitutes beauty in the external, and, above all, must not worship it.  To worship beauty for its own sake is narrow and one surely cannot derive from it that aesthetic pleasure which comes from finding beauty in the commonest things."  - Imogen Cunningham

Note:  If you have your mature content filter on or are not logged in you will only be able to see half my gallery.

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epiphyte78 was right.  They do censor arbritrarily here.

The staff has deleted over 20 of my deviations of a nude statue.  While there are any deviations of the statue left please note that all the statues were labled "mature content" and not a single one of them contained the "policy violations" as listed in this note sent by the staff...


"ludicmare,

Your deviation, listed below, has been removed from deviantART due to a violation of our policies:

URL: [link]
Title: Beautiful Dirty Lush 1 (as well as 2 - 50)
Submitted: 2005-09-02 12:08:51 am

Your deviation was removed because it violated one of the following policies:

1. deviantART does not tolerate deviations which are based, in majority, off of racial slurs, are anti-semetic or derogatory in nature towards a particular religion or ethnic group, offensive in nature towards an individual or group of individuals, pornographic or are deemed invaluable to deviantART as decided by the deviantART staff on a case by case basis.

2. deviantART does not tolerate deviations which are submitted in the Tutorials category which do not follow the deviantART Tutorial Submission Guidelines. If you are unfamiliar with the proper procedures for tutorial submissions then please view the deviantART Tutorial Submission Guidelines.

deviantART enforces a zero tolerance policy in regards to violations of our submission policy and therefore will take the actions that we deem necessary on a case by case basis. There is a possibility that you will be banned from interactivity on deviantART therefore it is suggested that you visit your user page to see if this is in fact the case.

If you feel that you are receiving this in error, or have questions regarding it, then visit the deviantART Help Desk in order to submit an inquiry. It should be noted that replies to this note will go unanswered and your only course of action is the deviantART Help Desk!

--
deviantART Staff"


Most likely they will ban me like anybody else whose art is too "deviant" for deviantART.


A couple hours later...

Before, I said you would only be able to see half this gallery if you had your mature content filter on.  Now even if you don't have your mature content filter on you'll still only be able to see half of this gallery because dA deleted the other 50 deviations that used to be in this gallery.

You'll have to take my word for it that the photos of the nude statue did not in any way violate a single of dA's policies and all were appropriately labeled as "mature content".

I was hoping to prove my point using my deviations as examples but DA's actions speak louder than any of my deviations ever could.

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If you don't want to take my word for it you can view the 50 deleted deviations here...

public.fotki.com/ludicmare/her…

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10 Oct 05 Update

It's funny how pageviews increase when somebody is banned.  I figure people are curious as to why the individual was banned and they are looking for obvious clues.  Did you find any obvious clues as to why I was banned?  Did you bother reading through my recent activity?  If you had gone back to 2 Sept 05 you might have discovered this comment I made: "Thank you so much for the watch. Except, since dA has deleted half of my gallery I most likely won't be uploading anything else." comments.deviantart.com/4/1499… fact, while going through my message center I made that same statement around half a dozen times that day.  Which is why on 8 Oct 05 I received this message when I logged in...

"USER BANNED
Reason: 24 hours, spamming identical comments is neither appreciated nor allowed comments.deviantart.com/4/1499… "

The question is... who didn't appreciate my comment?  I only made the comment to the people who added me to their watch list.  And I only made the comment once per watcher.  Do you think they visited my other watcher's pages and took offense that I said the same thing?  And reported it more than a month later?

See, the biggest problem with stupid policies is that most people don't realize how stupid they are because they are incapable of imagining how those policies could be abused by the enforcers of the policy.

If you had kept reading through my comments you might have also noticed this comment:  "Thanks for the fav!" comments.deviantart.com/4/1044… And yes, I made that same exact comment quite a few times.  How many times have you made that comment or a similar comment?  If DA admins equitably enforced stupid policies then either the whole community would be walking on eggshells or stupid policies would no longer exist or they would be modified to prevent abuse on the part of the admins.  Or we could just remove power abusing admins.

The question is... who banned me?  Convenient isn't it that they don't have to be responsible for their actions.  No worries... there are only 7 individuals in charge of Policy Violations:

$realitysquared ©Subversive-imaginati ©schemata-69 ©mooboy ©suzi9mm ©anon-y-mouse ©mirrorkills

Another question is... are they allowed to ban community members without first clearing it past another Policy Violation Admin?  If individual admins have the power to ban community members without another admin reviewing it, then how could you argue that the system isn't corrupt?  If, on the other hand, admins do have to review their banishment decisions with other members of the team, then it implicates more than one of the 7 PVAs of blatant policy and power abuse.

I obviously wasn't banned for harming the community.  I was banned in order to establish a "history" of "warnings" which would be used to "justify" a "permanent" ban.  

Here is how progress can be made towards solving the problem

1.  Allow community members to decide for themselves when they have been spammed or insulted and allow them to block the offending member from sending them further offensive/repetitive comments forum.deviantart.com/devart/su… and forum.deviantart.com/community…

2.  Allow banned community members the option to display their banishment explanation to the community forum.deviantart.com/devart/su… and  forum.deviantart.com/devart/su…

3.  In the case of banishments of over 2 weeks, allow a jury of 12 randomly selected community members to decide how long the banned community member should be banished for forum.deviantart.com/devart/su… and forum.deviantart.com/devart/ge…

These solutions will go a long way in protecting the community, not only from each other but also from disgruntled admins with little qualms towards abusing their power.

A screenshot of the banishment explanation can be provided upon request.