Bingo. A little fair warning is all that I ask. It’s like goatse: If you’re not expecting it, it’s gross as hell, but when you’re the one planning to goatse someone, the image isn’t all that horrible to deal with.

I’m sure that made sense at some point before I tried to put it into words, but yeah. Fair warning was what I was going for, I think.

We can’t dedicate the front page to long-faced mourning every time we decide to post something sad. We post stuff that interests us as we find it.

The problem with this photo is that it is extremely powerful and profound. And it is a mouse flick away from “Decomposed Hot Dog” and “Japanese Schoolgirl Panties.”

The severed bloody flesh tethering her clothing to the pole does bring your mind back to the grotesqueness of it all.

This photograph is art. It’s not meant to be disrespectful in any way and is not overtly graphic.

And anyway, only Jonathan (and maybe Andrew?) objected. That’s not that many people.

I was a little surprised about it too, but at first we didn’t know the circumstances. behind it. It was a commenter who pointed out that it was real, and that someone actually died an instant after it was taken.

This is a little closer to home. A little more contemporary. I don’t object. But I also understand the reaction to it. I’ve seen worse, whether I wanted to or not. Snopes has a video of a guy blowing his head off in police custody.

I’m not going to worry to much about it. It’ll drift off the bottom of the page sooner or later. I’ll let the others weigh in, and leave it to you to figure out.

I suppose I must have been wrong on this one: I do not find the image intensely unpleasant or uncomfortable, and posted things on ToM (like the fire escape falling down with the children in the air) that I was a lot more uncomfortable with… although, in that case, I didn’t know the full story.

Seriously, if I upset anyone, I’m sorry. But I find the tragic beauty of this picture far more remarkable than uncomfortable. It was not an attempt to shock.

Post the twisted corpse of an accident victim, and you tear down certain barriers of comfort that people have between them and their own mortality. Maybe that was your intent. I don’t know.

But you’re going to get a reaction. Maybe it was more or less the reaction you were looking for, maybe not. But there it is.

I just want to brace myself before I see it.

Look, I’m not posting this to be morbid. I’m posting it because — like photographs from World War I of the trenches or some of the heartbreaking photos from Iraq — there is sometimes extraordinary beauty in the photographic composition of horror.

As for the censoring angle: we censor stuff to keep the site work safe. We’re trying to conform the hypocrisy of NSFW reasoning in corporate america, which says, across the board, that nudity is more questionable than death. Like it or not (and we don’t, because we find nothing to be ashamed of in looking at a naked body), our traffic is all during 9-5 work hours, and that means we need to be considerate.

But back to the photo: this isn’t an eviscerated, pulsing, bleeding corpse, photographed with callous insensitivity. It’s a beautifully composed photograph that tragically moves us. And that’s the kind of thing we want to post on Ectomo when we come across it.

You cover up monochrome nipples with censorious cephalopods — but fresh corpse is acceptable viewing?