Hachiro said:
By only filtering out English profanities a double standard is being upheld.
I agree on this one. In many countries it is against the law to insult civil servants (police for example), so calling names at them would end up in a fine or worse. I often wondered what would happen if I used vulgar language that they do not understand, like Japanese. I am sure as they do not understand what it means you can get away with it. (Unless of course, they ask you the meaning and you're so naive to tell them what it means..)
So if a word is offensive or not seems to be dependent on the receiving end; if the listener understand what it is being said, and interprets it as an offense, the word may be labeled as offensive.
Now, this is a forum where there are also many Japanese speakers/readers, so one might think that also Japanese profanities should be censored. Moreover, there are also many people from many other countries, each with their own language. One might advocate censoring vulgar words in those languages too.
Apart from the technical difficulties, I oppose this way of thinking more fundamentally; censorship is useless and contradictory to the freedom of speech, and inhibits motivation to consider the reader's feelings.
I said earlier that the impact of a word is dependent on the receiving end. But it is also dependent on the communicator; what does the sender of the message mean with "f@ck", "baka" or "kanker"? ("Cancer" in Dutch, my earlier post in this thread might explain why people might use this word in an offensive way.) By just censoring these words posters are not encouraged think about the other's feeling or position in a sense that although the writer is forced to search for other words, the motivation is not intrinsic and censorship might cause reactant behaviour.
Wouldn't it be better if posters are free to write whatever they want, and if a post or certain words in it are offensive they are notified so by the responsible admins and other forum members?
I understand that very well that this is an English language-based forum, and for that reason only the English vulgarities are censored. Personally though, I think censorships do not solve the core of the problem, which is a rotten attitude and incompetence to take other people's feelings into account when communicating, be it in English, Japanese, Dutch or Swahili.