Talk:Cui bono

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[edit] NPOV?

Extremist groups (or just groups with a very different social background) may pursue some goal that we do not consider valuable. To them, a particular act that appears nonsensical to us can carry a benefit that only they understand. This may involve concepts of honor, religion and ideology incomprehensible to us. For examples of codes of honor that seem odd to our system of values, see the entries on seppuku and counting coup.

This paragraph appears to be a massive violation of NPOV. A neutral article should not talk about "us" and "them" like this.

Relax, I fixed it. --adaxl 19:51, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

I fixed the article again, even though I do not accept many of the points raised by MilitaryTarget.

@MilitaryTarget: Please try to improve articles yourself instead of asking other people to do this for you. None of the issues you raised requires any special knowledge that you could not supply yourself. --adaxl 14:09, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

• If you think any of those informal, imprecise, arbitrary, or culturally-specific terms/expressions are acceptable and appropriate for Wikipedia, that's your concern, but their rubbish all the same. And your instructions are absurd: you seem to refute the very purpose and role of templates. If you were some kind of power contributor to the project I could defer to your exhortation to muck in and contribute more frequently and substantively, but given your own conspicuous lack in this regard, what are you on? MilitaryTarget 14:07, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Tov Says, "Since no particular POV is stated, the us & them seem quite nuetral to me. I think it would read equally well to a chicom or a neocon."

[edit] Literal Translation of "cui bono"

I don't agree with the most recent rendering of "cui bono" published by Thecardiffgiant. I believe we're dealing here with an ablative absolute, rather than with that preposterous "double dative" which Thecardiffgiant suggests. I propose the following translation:

"[being] good to whom",

where "bono" and the elliptic present participle of "esse" ("ens") are both in the ablative case: "bono [ente]". Nivaca 17:03, 29 January 2007 (UTC).

I've modified Nivaca's translation a touch. Being good for someone is the idea we want to convey in English. Being good to someone means something else entirely, I think. And while this is surely "inside baseball" of interest to relatively few, it is Nivaca's grammatical analysis that is "preposterous." "Cui bono" is indeed a double dative construction: bono being a dative of purpose and cui a dative of reference. "Bono" cannot be shorthand for "ente bono" for the simple reason that the present participle "ens" suggested by Nivaca does not exist in Classical Latin. Maybe it does in some Medieval text wherein we find Latin devolving into Italian or French. In proper Latin, however, the verb of being only has the future participle futurus, -a, -um. Ifnkovhg 04:36, 3 September 2007 (UTC)