I believe we all have that ability, and like many things which we can recognize, there's no simple test for it. Like SCOTUS Justice Potter Stewart wrote on pornography:mk, how do you recognise thoughtful comments and thoughtful posts when you see them? How do you recognise their opposite?
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it...
You know what? NO. Potter Stewart is only famous for that one stupid line, which was effectively kicking the can down the road for some other schmuck to deal with. So for seven years, conservatives got to keep hassling liberals about what was or wasn't pornography because Potter Fucking Stewart decided to be pithy rather than useful. So seven fucking years later, some dude in LA gets to go to jail because a Goldwater republican in Newport got mad at a catalog and lo and behold we have definitions of pornography: whether the work depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions, as specifically defined by applicable state law (the syllabus of the case mentions only sexual conduct, but excretory functions are explicitly mentioned on page 25 of the majority opinion); and whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Stewart dissented on that one, of course, but it was too late. Obscenity got knocked back further over the years to where we are now, where showing a tit in a movie is an instant R but you really gotta work at it to get gratuitous violence up to the point where they won't show it to kids. You're doing the same damn thing with "thoughtful" that Stewart did with pornography: you're saying the conversation makes you uncomfortable, you're refusing to give anyone else any insight, and you're refusing to deal with the problem and instead just shining it on. This is your site. Through and through. But it is what it is because of the contributions made by other people and some of us? We get MAD sometimes. And that's not your fault and I'm sorry it hurts your fee fees but FFS the whole point of getting MAD is so that you don't bottle it up and fuck up something that matters. Potter Stewart kicked the can down the road, then retired at 66 so that we could have Sandra Day O'Connor so that the Republicans could give the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000. And now we're all "I don't have to say something is something because there's that supreme court justice whose name I can't remember who didn't define pornography either" and NONE of that is "thoughtful."whether the average person, applying contemporary "community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;