Stirring pots and calling kettles black, in a totally non-racial way.
During a routine shopping trip, Starlight Glimmer has a chance encounter with a pony espousing some incensing rhetoric to anypony near enough to hear. Eager to prevent a potential problem, and maybe prove she can do some good, she inserts herself into the situation.
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Not a bad first story, but it could use some editing. You also shift perspective in it from paragraph to paragraph. Again just something an editor can help you with. Hunt around, and if someone offers, take them up on it. Trust me a good editor can make a story.
I do like the story idea, and the subject matter, it works well with the characters in question for sure, not at all outside their core personality.
I loved this but the one thing that came to my mind was; everyone knows racism almost froze their race to extinction.
8631084
I have to agree. It is a decent and well written story. And I feel you got starlight's personality spot on, so props there. But shagohad does have a point.
8631084
Doesn't mean there are no ponies that don't believe those stories.
The Mane 6 did believe that the stories of the legendary ponies were only just that. Only stories. Remember Applejack unbelievably asking Celestia that 'Wait, they actually existed?'
And how nobody believed in Nightmare Moon or knew that she was Celestia's sister.
And remember that Snowfall Frost didn't believe in those stories. And she was highly intelligent.
And the Tribe thing existed even further back than that.
...why?
There's some good dialogue in here, particularly from Spike, but I'm not really a fan of the structure. The story essentially starts over halfway through, and the first half is largely irrelevant to the rest of it.
Still, it gets an upvote from me.
Granny Smith is a registered landmark?
The only other problem I have is one Twilight didn't seem to think about, that because Starlight punched Iron Blitz without him hitting back, he can now claim that she assaulted him. And then he can say that she's the tribalist one, and make speeches about being oppressed. Which in turn gives him a spin which he can recruit more ponies. Even though he's spewing nothing but hate, as Starlight herself pointed out, he still might find someone to listen to his nonsense.
8631518 She's a living landmark!
8632147
She's a "landmark"?
8632311 I meant a legend, seeing as she's been around since the founding of Ponyville.
8632311
I was torn between "landmark" and "monument," because I couldn't think of a word for a historically relevant individual, to be honest. But, I figured monuments are intentionally raised to memorialize things, whereas landmarks just happen to be where they are and that's that. So I suppose she's a mobile living landmark, at least whilst in the town limits of Ponyville.
8631904
Except she attacked him the Earth Pony way. No Horns, No Wings, no weather. Just physical strength. He let a Unicorn, the least physical inclined tribe scare him away with a single punch. He's going to look like a joke when that gets around.
8631904
A good point. Violence, no matter how tempting, has a tendency to come back and bite us in the ass. Even if some people dearly deserve a good old Applejack buck to the cranium.
8632438
That doesn't really matter, by a purely legal standpoint. Assault is assault, and even if she doesn't get prosecuted, she's still given him ammunition to use against her and the rest of Equestria in public forums. He may only be an organization of one, but her inability to keep a level head has given his argument a leg to stand on.
8632438
It doesn't matter that he as a Earth Pony has higher base physical strength or that she didn't use magic to hurt him, only that she did. This, especially if she isn't prosecuted, could be argued as an elite beating on a commoner. He can even say as Twilight, a former unicorn and royalty herself, that the government is backing Earth Pony oppression. And there are ponies who are stupid, spiteful and/or gullible enough to believe him. That's the dangerous nature of hate speech.
8632670
Agreed, he did need to the get the taste smacked out of his mouth; however really doing it without him violently attacking someone or Starlight herself would be ironically morally wrong. Words should be fought with words, and swords with swords.
8632333
To be honest I think Granny Smith was speaking untruth, since according to Twilight Ponyville is hundreds of years old.
I don't think she was lying, but she does have Alzheimer's so.
It always starts like this....
Also you know what else starlight could have done...ask him to talk about his job, because I'll bet cash that his little tantrum was based on the fact that he no longer has one. That a unicorn or pegasus managed to nab it supposedly because of their natural abilities.
8633392 Granny Smith having Alzheimer's contradicts her steel-trap memory.
8633787
She licked a chalk board.
8633820 Gah! I'm also banking on the fact that she has a lesbian porn stash under her bed.
I enjoy the downbeat note that that ended on. It's a sobering reminder about the danger of a hateful ideology. People dismissed the National Socialist Party as crackpots initially. If one were to not know about the horrors they inflicted, a quick read of their views might make them seem almost farcical. Right up until you realized what happened when it was practiced. But then, I've talked to actual Neo-Nazis and, I've got to say, it's more than a little unsettling to see how deeply rooted such hatreds can become. Violence should never be our first solution. However, it has its place. The Nazis weren't stopped with words. They were stopped with the blood of a few million brave men and women. Having a spotlight shine on this initial, farcical image of bigotry reminds us that monstrous ideologies all start somewhere. Well done.
Wow that dragons hona gey cavitys
How about I put it this way, Iron Blitz.
I am going to take a pair of pliers.
Iam going to extract your teeth, one by one.
Then I'm going to stick one in each eye
and the rest up your ass.
Then, I'm going to twist each of your hooves off
and throw them at you.
Then, I will scalp you and cut your muzzle off.
Then, and only then, will I give you the luxury of death.
I will burn you alive.
Am I a psychopath? Probably. Do I care? No.
9175421
To be honest, that sounds like something I'd do. Good to know there are fellow like-minded people out there.
Wonderful!
I would have dropped a piano on him.
8633266
You're right, she should be prosecuted, show that it wasn't who did the act (violence, in this case) that matters but the act itself.
As for Iron Blitz, there's a two-pronged approach I would apply here; first, make it clear how he's not just anti-Unicorn, Pegasus, and Equestria, but also how he stands athwart the proud Earth pony traditions, against practicality (real world experience has taught us that if you're a farmer, you want to do everything in your power to keep the weather stable), hospitality, and teamwork. Show him to be wrong on his own terms. Second, after showing him to be wrong on his own terms, respond proportionally to how he's wrong on your terms, namely how his Earth pony supremacy movement could be considered either antisocial or downright treasonous. Suppress him the way St. Dominic suppressed the Albigenses in southern France, by showing his supporters how he's wrong (on his own terms) and making the same clear to all those to whom he speaks. A stallion speaking truth to power for his oppressed kinsfolk may find support, but a traitor sacrificing his kinsfolk's proudest traditions for political power will find little.
The main problem with this approach is that many people will call anyone who disagrees with them fascist. There's a good post i once read somewhere (I don't know where it is) saying something like "Since communists are calling capitalists Nazis, and capitalists are calling communists Nazis, and democrats call republicans Nazis, and republicans call democrats Nazis, I've started worrying about Nazis getting assaulted in public. And I'm Jewish!".
11287929
Mmm, any time someone calls out fascism there always has to be someone in the comments saying "but I'm a reasonable person, surely you're not talking about me?"
Buddy if you think the message that fascism is bad is referring to you then YES it is referring to you and you should probably think about why.
Man, Glim Glam has rage issues. (Just kidding)
Jokes aside, there are people like this that exist in real life that won't listen to reason. And that depresses me.
11286500
This is an excellent approach and I appreciate the history lesson saddled with the post. Thank you.
11287929
This was exactly my concern once upon a time about this exact sort of scenario, and its hopefully obvious real-life inspiration. However, there's a pretty easy zone of people who call themselves nazis that makes at least that piece of the moral quandary straightforward.
11287508
As terrified as I am of spiders, I must admit that is indeed a very swanky hat. Also shout out to continued use of the word swanky. Makes me feel young again. Excellent work all around.
Some relevant quotes, one of which I know to be tried and true, and one almost certainly newer:
"I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." -Evelyn Beatrice Hall describing Voltaire's attitude.
"The solution to bad speech is more speech."
I feel it is unwise for even major public forums* to in any way deny haters the rope necessary to hang themselves in the court of carefully considered, detailed, and logically analyzed public opinion... even our current sensationist, emotional, surface-appearances-driven sort of public opinion will do until the happy day that the former makes a return.
*The smaller or more specialized a forum is, the more it is reasonable to deny hate-speech within it.
11287929
You didn't quote anything, so I have to ask, for maximum clarity: what approach do you feel has the problem you described?
11320918
Approximate quote from a movie "People forget that the first country the Nazi's invaded was there own."
With that explicitly established, let me say that if good Germans had been more willing to fight with words, many orders of magnitude fewer bullets would have been needed, and those would have been fired by German POLICE in the appropriate and lawful exercise of their duties.
I have heard*, and it seems plausible to me, that the word 'meek' in "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth." meant ones who bear swords, know how to use them, but do everything they can to never need to draw them.
To say it yet another way another quote that needs no source I should think: "Four boxes for the defense of liberty (from the government) : soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Apply in that order."
*Admittedly from an atheist or agnostic or some such who only much admires Judeo-Chrstianity.
11554867
I think you may be underestimating how popular the Nazis were in Germany; i.e., they were the "good speech" of the moment, promising a return to law & order (thanks Dick Wolf), economic stability, and traditional German values. They didn't take over by force. They were voted in, legitimately. And then used every other means in the book to secure that power forever.
As for the German police, it may come as little surprise that they rather liked being shielded from criticism (by censoring the press) and being given expanded power to keep the citizenry in line. Rather than being the one holding the Nazis accountable, the German police of the time—like modern US police—would have been the ones keeping them safe from public anti-fascist ire.
Now, all that said, a modern person might be entirely too charitable and say, "well they didn't know it was going to go the way it did." And that may be true. But we know now. We have no excuse to stop these kinds of people, except our own cowardice.
I also recommend this series for information on the rhetoric the far right uses and why it's so hard to argue against. First hint: the fascists and the people arguing against them aren't playing the same game in the first place.
Real talk, without hitting Google I actually have no idea who said this, but relating it back to my previous brick of text: the Nazis used the first three boxes to get into power to begin with then torched the boxes behind them. There wasn't a lot of choice left by then.
Anyway remember to punch your local Nazis folks. Unless they're cops. Then just livestream them in public as allowed by your local ordinances.