Yesterday I was talking to my wife about Freedom of Speech and at the beginning she totally agreed with me.
Then I told her she'd just change her mind when she'd see this or this. She did.
It is normal to be shocked by such pictures. It is normal not to want one's child to see these before he is mature enough to understand its focus, accept the idea there might be such things and accept the risk to live along with these.
It is actually normal to want these people in jail.
Because they just got what they wanted : shock you.
No, the real question is "Why" ?
Possibilities are :

• they just test the cyber-nannies hermetism
• they want to proof your taste
• they want you to proof your lack of imagination by showing you cooked babies.
• they send you a message . "it exists : react !"
• the photos are aesthetically OK, it is in fact an art gallery (but gore).
• They are NSA, FBI or CIA and are just expecting some criminal to send them real pictures.
• they are gore, mad, and need to spend some time in an hospital.

...sorry, I just vomitted... I'll put an alias to rotten.com in my local /etc/hosts file for whichever machine belonging to their domain so that I never even by mistake reconnect there.
Let's do a whois:
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Billing Contact:
Dell, Thomas E (TED10) dell@GOONSQUAD.SPIES.COM
Soylent Communications
Box 4436
Mountain View, CA 94040
(408) 245-7726 (916) 756-9470
Somebody paid for this domain and there is an actual file concerning this individual, which excludes the possibilty of a criminally insane guy (would a gentle Californian just try the phone number and inform us about its reachability ?).
And look : besides the name, there are no shocking pictures on the front page. Maybe a warning, I don't remember. As a conclusion, Rotten.com should rather been "seen"... sorry : "related to" as a topic by civilized people. But, Hell : never get there more than 1 second, once in a millenium.

---

Update (2004-05-17): If Scarblac is offended by my suggestion concerning its banning then he might not have understood I wanted to start a discussion here : I am definitely anti-censorship and I just wanted to test my wife's good will when it comes to speech protection.
I am a greate goatse defender : as I explained here...

Rotten.com is an old, infamous site, featuring many images of disgusting diseases, dismembered corpses, ugly women, et cetera. It's not something I was going to node about. But the current write-ups do it no justice - rotten.com is not an argument for Internet censorship. I am especially offended by mirko's allusion that content should be banned from the Internet if you wouldn't want your children to see it. Rotten.com explain themselves, I'll just quote their 'Words' section here, since I can't say it better:

Written by the Rotten.com Staff, used here with permission.

The definition of obscenity, according to the Supreme Court and known informally as the Miller test, is:

• must appeal to the prurient interest of the average person
• must describe sexual conduct in a way that is "patently offensive" to community standards, and
• when taken as a whole, it "must lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value"

Certain people (including parents and schoolteachers) have complained to us and stated that rotten.com should not be "allowed" on the net, since children can view images on our site.

One US schoolteacher wrote us a very angry email that complained some of her students had bookmarked images on this site, that our site shouldn't be on the net, and other claptrap.

This is our respone. The net is not a babysitter! Children should not be roaming the Internet unsupervised any more than they should be roaming the streets of New York City unsupervised.

We cannot dumb the Internet down to the level of playground. Rotten dot com serves as a beacon to demonstrate that censorship of the Internet is impractical, unethical, and wrong. To censor this site, it is necessary to censor medical texts, history texts, evidence rooms, courtrooms, art museums, libraries and other sources of information vital to functioning of free society.

Nearly all of the images we have online are not even prurient, and would thus not fall under any definition of obscenity. Any images which we have of a sexual nature are in a context which render them far from obscene, in any United States jurisdiction. Some of the images may be offensive, but that has never been a crime. Life is sometimes offensive. You have to expect that.

The images we find most obscene are those from book burnings.

Please remember that no child has access to the Internet without the active consent of an adult. And absolutely no child should be left on the Internet alone. Supervision of children remains the responsibility of parents and teachers, as it always has and always will.

The rotten staff, April 1997

What was the reason they should be censored again?

One of the hidden gems of Rotten.com is Rotten Library, an incredibly comprehensive tome of all the things you wondered about and were afraid to ask, and some that are just wrong.

Covered topics include:

• Sex
• Conspiracy
• Biographies
• Death
• Disease
• Medicine

A lot of Rotten Library is safe for work, and is presented in a satirical or irreverent tone: however, there is still a lot which is sick or NSFW, and it requires some common sense to work out which pages are likely to contain such images. A handy tool is Mozilla Adblock, which can be used to block images until you say so-adding a simple "http://www.rotten.com/*" filter, which is deactivated through menus, and can be used to ensure pleasant and informative viewing of the library.

It goes without saying, however: if you're touchy about your kid or yourself learning about "deviant" sexual practises and gruesome deaths, keep away from Rotten.com in general, as well as Rotten Library.

Sadly, this does not include Abe Vigoda's urine for some reason. It includes nigh on everything else though.