Death of the Fandom · 3:56am Jul 4th, 2020
I just encountered how Titanium Dragon has been smeared by the hard-core socialists on this site, and just reading through it is making me physically ill. The people slandering him aren't just random people; they're popular authors and community members, some of whom have written stories that I very much like... yet they're acting nothing like the values that their stories promote. They've called him everything from a homophobe to a racist, literally using witch-hunting tactics like "I didn't read what you said, I just assumed it was bad", and "only a racist would defend himself against the accusation so vigorously". It's... It's appalling, is what it is. And frankly, the site mods need to do something about it at this point. Slandering other users on this site clearly breaks the rules, yet where are the bans? Are these people too popular to punish? Do they have friends in the moderators who approve of their straight up bullying behavior? Unless the mods step in and do their damn job, things are only going to get worse. A lot worse.
The death of the fandom won't be the end of the show, or the slow leaving of fans for greener pastures, or any of that nonsense: It'll be the leaders of the community allowing ideological extremists, including ones who have actually promoted violence, to tear this place apart. Mark my words, it won't be long before they start demanding the removal of stories written by "problematic" people. Extremists will keep pushing until they hit a wall; you can't give them some rope and then think that will satisfy them. And when the "rope" you give them is to allow them to trash the reputations of other upstanding members of this community, it's pretty clear you're not planning on putting up that wall any time soon.
I'm going to go read one of my favorite TwiDash stories now, before it's removed because the writer is supposedly "homophobic".
I don’t know who Titanium Dragon is, and I don’t know what he’s done, but keep Cancel Culture off this site. That’s a hard no from me, thank you very much. It’s destroying hobbies and fandoms all over the place and driving us further apart, and it needs to end.
5300673
If you don't know Titanium Dragon, I recommend this amazing TwiDash shortfic. And then after you read this lovely story about lesbian horses that he wrote, take a short period to consider that certain users are calling him a homophobe.
5300678
I’ll give it a look. To be honest though, I really don’t care if he is or isn’t a homophobe. So what? He’s just some random on the internet to me. If people are nasty on the internet, I block them and move on with my life, I don’t “spread the word” that so-and-so is a bad person, people can usually tell pretty quickly who they do and don’t want to associate with.
5300690
The big issue is that the people slandering him are very popular authors on this site, including one of the mods of the site's Discord chat, and one of the people listed on the staff page (though thankfully not a mod themselves). The poison already runs deep. I'm sorry you had to come in to a website that immediately started going up in flames...
Edit: I'm not naming names, because I honestly don't know if the mods are on their side at this point, so I don't want to give them an excuse.
5300691
That’s terrible. I’ve seen it before, and I didn’t like it then, and I’m not happy this community is beginning to burn around us. I just joined in a few months ago and politics has already started creeping in, I came here to get away from talking about politics all the time.
5300693
Politics is soaking everything so thoroughly right now... I'm having trouble coping. I really shouldn't be writing these blog posts because it's only fueling my anxiety more... But this site is, like, my rock. The constant I can turn to, to read some stories and calm down; reread some old favorites if things have been really stressful. And I'm afraid that I'm going to lose it. Maybe I won't; maybe this will pass, and tensions will ease, and things will get better. But... it doesn't feel like it. It feels like all of society is headed for a cliff, and there's no way off the ride. I guess all we can really do is hold on, and prepare to put things back together if they shatter.
I won't abandon this fandom. Even if I'm chased entirely off this site, or the site goes down, I'll still be writing ponies, and reading ponies when I can. If I have to, I'll be one of the people restarting the fandom from the rubble. But I don't want to have to.
Hey, so you have been on the site since 2012, a long term, well-vetted user, so you know what's up with the site. But I have to ask-because I take calls to action from Moderators seriously, because I want to do my best to serve this site and its community--why haven't you submitted any reports in five years? You say there is site-breaking content that needs to be dealt with, but I do not know where to look to find that community. We do volunteer work as moderators; we are not paid, so we are not scanning the site constantly.
If you think there is content that violates site rules please do report it, and we will investigate! But without those reports it is hard for us to find every rule violation in such an active community. Please do report any content you see violating the rules, much appreciated.
5300700
I’m right there with you. Things are bad, and I fear they’ll get worse before they’ll get better. But this site will be here for a long, long time, and no matter what comes, we can rebuild something wonderful, of that I have no doubt.
On the topic of good stories, do you have any recommendations?
5300701
I'm hesitant to report anything that I'm not directly involved in; not only do I not know all of the details, but I'm often getting the information somewhat secondhand. In this case, I'm mainly talking about this blog, and the comments under this blog*. Did anything overtly rule-breaking happen? I don't know; maybe I have a different standard of what should count. But the users involved have shown a pattern of this behavior, singling out and attacking people who they think have said something wrong and then continuing to attack them for long periods.
As for the threat of violence, my understanding is that the mods addressed that one. Although it came from one of the users involved in the blogs above, and given the pattern of behavior they've displayed, simply telling them to take a blog down when it literally called for political violence seems rather a slap on the wrist from the perspective of the sort of person whom these sort of attacks can be directed at.
*Note: The comments in question have literally nothing to do with the topic of the blog.
5300703
That would depend on the sort of story you're looking for.
5300707
Lol I suppose it would, wouldn’t it?
I like long adventure and drama stories mostly.
5300708
Well, if you want a really long one:
- MLP: FiM
- Adventure
[Now EQD Featured!] A young girl must travel to Equestria to rescue her kid sister from the clutches of a terrible magician.This is a multifaceted adventure of high magic and ancient secrets that clocks in somewhere between the lengths of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and The Lord of the Rings. The primary characters are OCs, but don't let that discourage you.
- MLP: FiM
- Adventure
As the Earth is under threat, humanity reaches out for one last hope of salvation.A delicious mix of doomsday scenario, alien contact, and wholesome friendship, this is also pretty dang long... and sadly, the sequel remains incomplete because the author had real-life-issues.
- MLP: FiM
- Dark
- Adventure
Twilight gives her life to stop a changeling invasion. Repeatedly.A very much shorter, but still decent length, tale that is best described as the movies Die Hard and Groundhog Day mixed together. It has multiple longer sequels to check out if you find it to your liking.
I can't guarantee that you'll like any of these, but I certainly do.
5300721
I put them all on the to-read list!
Hey, hi, hello. I got told to look at this because I believe I'm one of the authors being referred to here. So I just wanted to share these Discord chatlogs to contextualize why I say things like "I didn't read what you said, I just assumed it was bad" at this point.
I only got transcripts rather than screenshots, since that's how I saved them at the time, but I can provide proof he believes this and says shit like this all the time. Antsan posted another gorgeous example just now.
Problem is when you see the results of a recent conversation, you don't see the context of everything that happened before it. But after someone's had a public tussle with you about IQ heritability and black crime rates, you kind of zone out after that.
5300805
5300804
As I said before, all I see is some guy who has different opinions then you. I don’t give a shit, if you don’t like him, block him and be done with it, I’m not canceling him because he has some shitty opinion or says stuff that may or may not be true.
5300701
Just an update: Four* of the people involved have now found this blog, simultaneously.
5300805
Fun fact: Neither of your pieces of evidence are what you claim them to be. Does it even let me reply to someone who's blocked me?
*Based on the vote count on comments at the time.
5300866
And?
5300804
5300805
Let's just get to the point: Do you believe violence against those who oppose communism is justified?
5300872
Ok Boomer
5300866
He didn't "fantasize". Execution is in the law of this country, and he was warning you about performing a potentially executable offense. Regardless of whether or not he is correct in his assessment of the situation, you are horribly mis-characterizing his intent.
5300873
Because you're friends with people who have openly expressed this sentiment, and your hostility to anybody you perceive as remotely different in political persuasion is correlated with violent thoughts.
Let's try a particular example. A few days ago, a woman posted a Tiktok where she said that she would stab anybody who used the phrase "all lives matter". She was fired from her job, and posted another Tiktok crying about how it was the "alt-right's" fault. How do you feel about this story?
5300877
From the very quote you presented:
I always try to assume idiocy before malice, so we'll go with the idea that you're blind as a bat first, and not that you deliberately lied about what was said.
And maybe Titanium Dragon does, too. I don't know his position on the morality of execution, because the quoted paragraph does not give one. Again, you're misinterpreting intent.
5300881
And yet the anarchists continue to support the communists, weird how that works
5300885
Oh, no, I indeed know WHY they do it, it’s just that
1. They’re plainly wrong
2. I don’t give a shit what some Random on the internet thinks about me.
5300881
Super Trampoline posted a blog telling people to kill police, just a few days ago.
Your own coordination in this matter would indicate that either that relationship has changed, or you don't care about it all that much.
Edit: It occurs to me that you identifying as an "anarchist", when I primarily know you from that time you argued with a mod because they refused to sensor content you didn't like, is rather odd. Almost like "anarchy" here is just code for "authoritarian, except rules don't apply to the people I like".
I'm not asking for people of different political persuasions to be removed from this site. I'm asking for people who advocate that to be restricted, regardless of political persuasion.
I didn't ask about her intelligence. What do you think about her, morally speaking?
5300883
That you were so thoroughly wrong about your last example that you actually gave up defending it tells me that your rewording of a scenario is unreliable. I need to see the actual statements made to honestly judge them.
5300865 5300871
Just to be clear, I'm not replying further. I just wanted to provide some context for the accusations you're leveling at me here. We got different personal values, I'm not going to justify mine here or ask you to justify yours.
Totally forgot I blocked you though; I'm surprised I'm allowed to comment here because of it, and I did get notifications for your replies. That genuinely does seem like something that should be fixed.
5300893
Well, just to clarify, my personal values are peace over violence, reason over hate, and freedom for all to the extent that it does not infringe on the freedom of others. If you want to claim your values are different... that doesn't exactly look good.
Edit, to clarify further: I do not believe that the average Internet Communist has underlying values so different from mine. I believe them to be so bamboozled by emotion and propaganda that they misinterpret evidence and end up making statements and taking actions contrary to their own values as a result.
5300965
Moving forward... after reaching backward towards the small of his back, where guns are often kept and where he had improperly reached for multiple times previous, with increasingly dire warnings to not do so. The officer in fact gave multiple "last warnings"; yet you're depicting him as bloodthirsty. The decision to pull the trigger happened when the hand moved back; when the hand moved forward again without a gun, the finger was already pulling the trigger, he can't undo an action he's already taken.
Because nobody has ever pulled a gun in a similar situation. Ever. Your assertion that it's absurd is, itself, absurd.
He calls the person (You? Who knows.) out for demanding justice for a case that has already gone through the justice system. That's not an appeal to authority, that's pointing out a flaw in the opposing position.
Whether they were in actuality in danger is immaterial. Both morality and the law is about what people think; evidence of reality is used as a proxy to intent and belief. To sincerely believe that the man was reaching for a gun is central both in the eyes of the law and in moral calculation.
They had all of the opportunity to... approach someone that they sincerely thought was armed? No. That's not how anything works.
Further, TD did not at any point say that the death of the victim was good. Only that the officer did not commit murder. He did not base his argument on "because the guy had been seen with a gun earlier", he based it on the mistaken movements that the victim made in the video provided and what the officer is likely to have believed about those movements under those circumstances.
For the record: I think the death in the video was tragic, but I do not think it constitutes murder, based on that video. The result was horrible, and there are various problems I have with the police procedures displayed in the video, but the officer did not set out to kill an unarmed man as you attempt to imply. And apparently a jury agreed... but if a jury disagrees with you, justice must be broken and... your solution is what, then? Mandating that juries agree with a predetermined decision that you come up with?
He at no point "supports fascist ideals" in the conversation you present. His opponent does, though. Russia's invasion of Crimea, for instance, was overtly fascist.
Woo! Some progress! Now, why do you support an extremist movement full of people who think the way she does?
5300965
But let's get back on the original topic, which was slandering TD. The most obvious of these is the accusation of homophobia: Fun fact, you could hypothetically prove that he's a raging racist and overt fascist... but the accusation of homophobia would still be slander. So please try justifying that... or admit that you're wrong, which you're probably not used to doing, ever.
5300997
The movement in question is Communism. Look around you, at the people you're hanging out with who identify as Communists, and whom you appear to agree with on all major political points, despite your claim to be separate from them.
You're literally on my blog. Which, although it pertains to you, I specifically avoid naming names, and only provide a link when a site mod, in my perception at least, requests one.
Edit: To clarify, I'm well aware, even if you are not, that the people calling for the censorship and even death of anybody who says the phrase "all lives matter" are not representative of everyone who uses the phrase "black lives matter". Whether people have a problem with the former phrase is actually a pretty good indicator of whether they're sensible reformers or unhinged extremists.