@Barhandar
That’s such an old hand gesture, too. Christians used it to identify each other in Pagan Rome. Many shows have used it to great effect, like The Prisoner (“Be seeing you”) and even Babylon 5 (also - “Be seeing you”). Seeing them do that, knowing the history of the sign, from “The Game”
(ps: the game) to it’s use in gay communities in the 90’s, to it’s current use by “straight white male underdogs looking for a way to identify each other in a world of hatred and genocide” it’s … chilling. And also very human.
So much of this has been going around for centuries. Hiding from it is no protection. At the same time, I’m a fan of not allowing assholes to use this place as a platform for promoting those kinds of agendas. Which, I’m sure some will be surprised to hear, we do not allow.
Because, first and foremost, this is a My Little Pony fansite. If people want to promote My Little Pony, they’re very welcome. Anything else? Well, maybe not. And in some circumstances, VERY not.
Are there images on this site that are disturbing and that most people would never want to host? Of course. From Aryanne to images depicting the rape of the bodies of mutilated and murdered foals. If you didn’t know those were on this site, for your sake don’t search for them.
But I collect Junko Mizuno pillow books.
And if I ran an art gallery (which I have) I would welcome the drawings of people from concentration camps and the drawings of Hitler and I would put them right along the paintings made by teenagers who were murdered by their parents for being gay.
And I fully expect to be one of the first up against the wall when the purge comes. Whether the purge is being waged by the extreme right OR the extreme left.
2LDR: This isn’t a juried gallery. But if it was I’d still be ok with some of the horrific shit that’s on this site, because
art is what humans do, and sometimes it says things we don’t have any other way to express.
@Background Pony #791E
And some of us are from /b/, back when /b/ros used to fight “the good fight”. Which of course makes us all an incredibly mixed batch of bastards, bitches, and overachieving yet somehow belligerent fuckups.
I’m glad we’re all here.
@daveedila - you’re welcome on the site, too. But this middle ground for how we’re handling fan art that we’ve got on the site is where we are for now. I hope you can find peace with it, and find a way to use your very valid and empowered feelings about this to make real change in the world. We’re an art site, and some of the art you think we shouldn’t host is art that we think we need to host. For now.
But, again - if you see any images that you think break Rule #0, please report them.
I can’t stress that enough. There’s 1,794,621 images on this site, sometimes a thousand or more new images a day, and about one to two dozen people on staff who are all already very busy with the things that we’re doing on a daily basis to keep the site running and happy. So we - I know some people think this is a lie, but it’s the truth - do not review or even SEE every image that gets uploaded.
And, if we’re doing our jobs, you will never see some of the images that we agree should not be on this site.
Which might be a part of the problem. People have trouble with the images that ARE here, and all I can think of is the images that AREN’T publicly viewable any more. I know “You should see the shit that we delete!” isn’t going to fix any of this for anyone, but … we can’t eliminate racism, or,
as has been well pointed out, even define it any better than our Rule #0 already does.
Also, I know no one asked, but we have people on the site who are literal, card-carrying new-world Nazis, and (perhaps ironically) some of them are some of our better behaved users. Some of them tried to post things that we won’t host, and we explained that those things aren’t welcome here, and now they’re just here for the ponies. It’s a little like when you think you’re going to meet some Satanists and they’re going to be all “Grr” and black eye shadow, and instead they’re handing out food at the shelters and chaperoning Muslims to their Mosques and Jews to their Synagogues.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that we all have to fit on this planet somehow. And that’s a lot easier when we all get along, and everyone can abide by some simple fundamental rules.
This concludes my latest wall of text that I’m sure is going to earn me another bunch of death threats in my in box by the morning. Yay!