A quick reminder · 1:46pm Jun 24th, 2020
So remember when a bunch of people on this site came out and posted blogs in support of Black Lives Matter?
I posted mine on the 4th. That was three weeks ago.
Black Lives Matter still. They always have and always will. We need to keep saying it till everyone is treated like they do, truly, matter. What we really don't need to do is rest on our laurels, say, "I spoke up, that's enough," and move on with our lives because the hashtag stopped trending.
We can still help, because help is still needed. Here's a list of places and ways to donate. Not all of them require money. Here's another. Thanks to Pride and Positivity for spreading these links around.
I've been waiting a while, maybe too long, to write this followup blog because, well, I don't like confrontation, and I'm not exactly the most educated person on the issues currently at large in our society because politics give me anxiety flareups uwu
But if I was waiting for a sign, here it fucking is.
No, the article's not good, as many have said. Sensationalist, either intentionally or ignorantly. The comments on the post are a shitshow, too. But it does put a lens over the issue. We spoke up against our fandom's issues, and... that's about it. And now others have noticed. This isn't going to go away without a lot of concerted effort.
And if you're sick of hearing about this constantly, well, I kind of can't blame you. My burnout threshold is very low. You gotta take care of yourself. But if it's a matter of, "ugh, I wish these people would just shut up already," you know you could make that happen, right? Contact your national, state, local representatives. Tell them you want to see the police reformed in a meaningful way so all these darned activists will leave you alone, already. Get things moving along quicker, and we'll shut up quicker. Your assistance will be appreciated.
All the protesting has actually accomplished things, after all. Not enough, but some large and altogether very positive steps. It's a start.
I've cared about issues like BLM for a long, long time. I continue to learn new ways to be more supportive. And this is the only platform I have where a large number of people who don't necessarily think like me are likely to listen. So I'm gonna use it, and that's why y'all have to listen to me talk about it.
Anyway, keep speaking up. It makes it easier for others to speak out. It certainly did for me.
My only question is why y'all weren't here for us 10 years ago.
Silence is easy, speaking up is hard. Thanks for this.
I should really try to write that blog post about how actually everything is always political and how "avoiding politics" isn't actually a coherent idea.
5292521
Asserting a position of being apolitical is a political endorsement of the status quo
Well, thanks for writing this. Reading that was good. Remind me stuff is getting done, which is really easy to forget when men of color are being hung from trees and ruled as suicide with zero investigation. Because that’s a thing that happened. Five times. In a single week.
5292528
I was gonna use a lot more words than that but sure.
Yeah, it's hard to ignore the situation when you have to assure your mother that no, you aren't secretly a fascist because you're on a pony fiction site. Thanks for the push to do something constructive with that frustration.
5292516
Because speaking up is hard, because 10 years ago I was ignorant, because personal experience, I didn't think it was an issue in my nation.
I can keep going with a thousand and one excuses.
Excuses are easy. Stepping up is hard.
For me, it was feeling that my voice, my stories wouldn't make a difference. Now I feel like my voice can make a difference so I've spoken up, I've made an effort to monitor my responses and re-evaluate the responses of co-workers and police I interact with to ensure they aren't part of the problem.
Not everyone fights the issue in the same way. Some of us are closer to it than others.
5292552
Wait, you mean to say that a small minority of a very large and diverse group of people are total assholes, and the media is using that to fearmonger and smear the entire group as "toxic" and "problematic?"
i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/023/180/notsurprisedkirk.jpg
5292516
Ten years ago I still thought homosexuality was an affront to God, unions were evil, had almost 0 clue what trans people were, and Republicans were the good guys. Fortunately, going to college and getting away from my rich white conservative Christian parents did wonders for my politics. I’m sorry Yt people have destroyed so many lives for so many centuries. I can’t make up for that, but I can try to fight it now.
5292574
Have you seen Wootmaster’s excellent Twitter thread about /mlpol/?
5292563 Meh, it's more like the rule of a---holes. Everybody has one, don't be one. As much as we like to call Bronies a large and diverse community, we're a fringe group down around a single digit percentage of the general population (but still wildly diverse).
5292574 It's not really that they're such a large group, it's just that some people *like* being a--holes. Rather than run around naked and wack beehives with sticks as they should, they lurk around on message boards (and Twitter) to post crap that makes other people froth in anger, and they count their angry responses as points. Admittedly, there is a subset who are low-lifes who believe that crap, but they are a microscopic blot on humanity who can't even get a dozen of their members to have a march. (as opposed to a mere few decades ago where it was a yearly occasion in several cities who did not appreciate it one bit)
In short, the geniuses at The Atlantic managed to ignore *everything* the Brony community has done in the pursuit of Good, from scholarships, cancer research, children's assistance, horse rescue, suicide prevention, and general unity between an astonishingly diverse group in friendship and tolerance, and instead decided to glorify a teeny subset of loathsome cockroaches who revel in their resulting publicity. It's like they thought MLP fans were Republicans or something...
It's a terrible article about a terrible situation. Just that each "terrible" in that sentence means a different thing.
The comments in that EQD article reveal the problem quite severely. We absolutely do have a problem in the community and need to stop tolerating these racists yesterday.
5292594
Georg, you're dangerously close to ignoring the real problem to whine about "Wah why don't they cover the GOOD STUFF we do?!"
The problem exists. Address it.
5292563
Jake, same to you.
Just because most of the fandom is decent doesn't mean we can't fight against the toxic scum hiding in our shadow.
5292626 For some reason, The Atlantic refuses to hire me as a column writer.
5292629
It starts at home, mate.
The solution is simple:
Ban racists, fascists, and maybe the pedophiles and such while we're cleaning house.
Me last week: "The fandom isn't as big as we used to be, but that good news is it means we're out of the public eye so there are no more cringey media stories making me feel like a goof for being a brony even when they're giving us a fair appraisal."
Me now: "Well, poop."
5292631
The internet has proven this many times over many years: that if we can't get rid of the awful people, good people leave of their own instead. And then we're left with a community that's grown used to awful people mucking it up and not doing much about it.
5292645
Yep 100%
Some beliefs are actually poison.
5292642
Yeah unfortunately we haven't yet had the good sense like furries to tell Nazis to go home
5292631 "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong."
-- H. L. Mencken
Your solution is wrong on two fronts: First, you would have to define each of the terms you use. Second, you would then remove freedom of speech from each of the defined groups. The first is an invitation to totalitarianism on a broad scale, the second is a complete violation of human rights.
5292655
Oh shut up.
You know what those words mean. You're being deliberately obtuse out of a slippery slope fallacy.
I don't have to put up with your hand-wringing bullshit.
Tolerance of intolerance only leads to more intolerance.
5292648
Y'know, maybe I'm looking at this wrong, but the fandom's tendency towards awkward fascist sympathies dovetails neatly with its common obsession for defending villains.
"Sure, Luna launched a coup to try to set herself up as despot, but it's Celestia's fault because she wasn't nice enough to Luna!"
"I'm so angry they turned Chrysalis to stone after the Nth time she tried to take them out! So much for tolerance, huh?"
Dunno if this holds water or is coincidence. Just something that hit me.
5292687
That's an interesting observation. I'm not sure what to think about it, myself.
I think it definitely applies with Steven Universe and White Diamond, but it's harder for me to put it into context with MLP.
5292655
There is absolutely no legal or ethical requirement for free speech on a privately-run website. This isn't being operated by the government, so a ban is not a removal of free speech, nor is it a totalitarianism in any fashion. We're not talking about forbidding facists, racists, and pedophiles from speaking freely in real life, we're saying there's no good reason to let people who advocate facism, racism, and pedophilia continue to do so on fandom websites.
5292716
Though it's at times like this when we non-US folk can feel very foreign indeed. I wonder how many Americans really get that their First Amendment's hardline protection of free speech is extremely unusual, and absolutely not the norm for other Western democracies. In many (most?) of them, out-and-out Nazi rallies (eg Charlottesville) are simply illegal and unlikely ever to be legalised.
5292655
By this logic, everytime some gave a private lecture on astronomy, they'd have to allow time for Flat Earthers and UFOlogists to give their "side" of the story, otherwise it would be taking away their freedom of speech.
Also, you don't seem to think a very tiny percentage of the fandom can have much effect and should be shrugged off? Next time you're at a party, try dropping a very tiny turd in the punchbowl and see how many people are willing to shrug it off.
5292656
His sudden concern for the "rights" of a racist political philosophy that advocates ethnic cleansing (i.e. mass murder), does seem a bit disingenuous, doesn't it?
5292757
Trick, don't play.
You're doing the "The left says that anyone to the right is a fascist!" thing. We can do this without shutting down every conservative.
5292769
Extremely.
5292761
Yeah, that's fair. But many (and I hope most) Americans, myself included, feel that the robust protections for free speech provided by First Amendment jurisprudence — even for speech we hate and believe to be harmful — are good and right.
5292769
I think Georg is arguing in good faith. I think he's also very much in the wrong here, but I don't believe he's being disingenuous.
5292788
That's certainly possible, But if such logical fallacies and deflection techniques are so ingrained in his thinking that they seem deliberate, then it's no more worth debating him than debating re-runs of the Rush Limbaugh show.
5292788
From talking to American friends, I think this is a real Transatlantic divide. There are others (and actually your Second Amendment is perhaps the starkest of all) but this one is definitely there. We generally think the harm allowed from (almost) unrestricted free speech is too big a price to pay, whereas you generally think restricting it is too big a price to pay. Just one of those things, I guess.
Scrolls down to comment, reads all comments, nopes out.
That said, PP if I may call you by that, keep up the words.
5292691
Yeah, that whole “be kind to fascist space rocks” message was a real doozy. #Bismuthdidnothingwrong
5292827
I can kinda forgive Blue and Yellow as being deep in the sunken place after their abuse from White, but White is an actual monster.
5292757
Yes, slippery slope, but there are thousands of aspects of life where we have to and do draw an arbitrary line in the sand somewhere. Legal driving blood alcohol content, age of consent, number of stories in order to get Fimfiction Self publication privledges, Maximum story title length on fimfiction which I constantly am running up against, how many days of school in the school year, how tall you need to be to ride a roller coaster, how many hours of residential work med students need, etc.
No one is going to be completely happy with all the arbitrary cut off points you choose, but it’s also not true that you can’t set any at all.
5292761
For your edification, Charlottesville wasn’t a Nazi rally as much as, in a distribution not unlike the bell curve, a rally with everyone from quite conservative Republicans to wanna be genocidal ethnic state fascist. So it was more an extremely conservative rally that happened to have some Nazis at it thotagain, the fact that they tolerated that is obviously unacceptable.
5292788
you’ve just described every single one of George’s bad political takes. He’s legitimately one of the sweetest people I know, but his politics are extremely boomer and rural which isn’t surprising given that he is a rural semi-boomer.
He did give me some good story advice last night though.
5292806
I can break this down quite simply. Conservative Americans are very big on positive freedoms. Freedom of this, freedom to that, etc. I can’t speak for everyone, but contrast that with leftists who are big on negative freedoms. Freedom from this, freedom from that, etc.
Or another way of looking at it, individual rights versus societal rights.
5292788
This. Having met Georg in person several times, I'm well-convinced that his arguments are in good faith and that he's a good person.
5292839
Yeah, I get that. It's just that the whole political divide thing is different over here. For example, "leftist" just isn't a word we use, either positively or negatively, while you can find Conservative MPs who will use "liberal" as a positive term. (Also, cheers for the clarification re Charlottesville. When I saw the main photo on the page literally shows a guy holding a swastika flag, I kinda jumped to conclusions...)
5292944
Trick Question, what the fuck are you talking about?
I know what you're saying, but the words are nonsense.
This is simple -
Racism
Sexism
Nazi shit
Authoritarianism
Anti-semitism
Pedophilia
People who consistently post this shit need to go for the safety of the community.
I do not know what the fuck your problem is such that this is a hard question.
Your hand-wringing "but muh freeze peach" slippery slope cowardice can stay home. This isn't that hard.
It's a growing concern we've ignored for too long. I've done a post about it too last week.
5292967
Sure? That's fine? It's consenting adult shit.
Why would I want to kick him out of the fandom for that? That's absurd.
Dom/Sub is a far cry from "WOMEN ACTUALLY DO BELONG IN THE KITCHEN."
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
"If only it weren't for you darn people not wanting monsters in our community, we might actually get rid of them!"
Do you even hear how incoherent an opinion that is, Trick?
What the fuck are you even on about?
I want to get rid of Nazis, pedophiles, and chauvanists, not everything objectionable.
I'm afraid the evidence is actually that many bronies don't abhor those thinsg.
Well, I had a bunch of nice comments ready to go, then I tried to multi-reply to 5292947 and 5292967 and they're all gone, so now I'm pissed, thanks Fimfic.
Also you two can knock off the personal attacks before they get any worse. This helps no one but those you hate.
5293012
I don't hate you or Georg, for what it's worth.
You know, I've got money and will but it's such a tangle trying to figure where the money actually goes...
ACLU isn't glamorous (and they pick dumb fights here and there), but it's a solid name.