Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment - Violations, misuse, and other issues

Plus there's the "is she really Tara Gilesbie" question to worry about, although that's not directly ROCEJ-related.

A redirect for Canon Defilement is Canon Rape, which I am pretty sure is insensitive. It also only has one wick.

Edited by Delibirda on Oct 10th 2021 at 5:36:27 PM

Sentence the redirect to Death.

The jury is at it.

Take it out back, beat it up, shoot it, set it on fire, and put out the flames by pissing on it.

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Oct 10th 2021 at 12:05:44 PM

It is on the list.

*glances at VideoExamples.Political Correctness Gone Mad*

You uh

wonder if maybe these particular examples are going a bit too far for the wiki's taste?

They're apparently from the Babylon Bee, which I believe is a right-leaning satire site like The Onion... the site uses fictionalized scenarios but relies a lot on real world commentary, but the trope seems to lend itself to that sort of thing. Are the videos worse than the trope examples? I mean, I don't like the sentiment of the videos but I don't like the sentiment of most applications of this trope either...

Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 11th 2021 at 6:48:12 AM

Yeah, to be fair, they do accurately represent the trope.

I am still a little "... Ehhh..." on having a page for the Babylon Bee. I don't want to be like "No! No right-wing comedy! Only left-wing, all the time!" but the Babylon Bee is openly extremely transphobic, definitely more far-right than right-wing, and rather than The Onion, which certainly has a political stance but most of their articles are solely meant to be funny, the Babylon Bee is almost exclusively political.

They're not Stonetoss or anything, but they're definitely in Ben Shapiro/Steven Crowder territory.

They are still fiction and thus tropable. There's some shit on this site that's awfully transphobic (cough- that one South Park episode -cough) but is still ultimately tropable as a work of fiction where we don't endorse the views. If someone's writing entries laughing at blatant transphobia, then they're the asshole.

Edited by mightymewtron on Oct 12th 2021 at 3:06:43 PM

Well, that's all true, but... see, the reason we cut people like Crowder weren't for their views, but because their works had nothing creative about them. (Stonetoss is obviously a different story.)

The Bee we can trope as-is without having to tiptoe around the truth for fear of being called slanderists. It's creative, as everything on it is fictional and exaggerated. It promotes some garbage views, but at a certain point we do need to draw the line at what's keepable and what's deletable. If we can keep pages on things like The Turner Diaries, Racial Holy War and Ethnic Cleansing, I think we can keep this.

Wow, what a perfect timing, Stonetoss being discussed in the post just before me.

Because I was just checking by to ask if we could finally nuke Emily Youcis. I already inquired about this at Ask the Tropers about 2 years ago, but back then, the page was only provided with a note and remained locked. But time has passed (though to be honest, it was already due back then) and I just wanted to submit another request for it.

This woman is a Neo-Nazi. Not some edgy conservative like Steven Crowder, an outright Neo-Nazi. She has spread Anti-Semitism/Holocaust Denial, Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, Transphobia, mocked sexual assault, mocked MURDER, hell she outright ADVOCATES for violence and freaking GENOCIDE. Everything despicable you can think of, she has engaged in, I guarantee you. Here's just a short collection of quotes https://canarymission.org/individual/Emily_Youcis

And it's not a "Separate the Work from the Creator" thing either. This◊ is the garbage she is producing now.

So yeah, I think that little note on the page is way too coy. This is exactly the kind of content creator that needs deplatforming.

And all of her linked works probably as well.

Edited by Forenperser on Oct 16th 2021 at 3:21:30 PM

Yeah, that's bad but we still have a page on The Turner Diaries which is essentially a pro-Neo-Nazism work IIRC, so as I hate to say this, I don't think that page will get cut.

If she has tropable non-Nazi works, I guess we can keep them, otherwise not sure (although I want to say the page is nukeworthy because I am part of a minority she is known to bash; on the other hand, to her credit, she at least acknowledges that my people can't just be lumped in with white people as a whole, albeit she doesn't care about Jewish ethnic diversity.)

If all of her works are Nazi propaganda? I fail to see how any of that is tropeworthy.

Edited by SkyCat32 on Oct 16th 2021 at 9:39:31 AM

Nah, nuke the page. If Stonetoss wasn’t worth it, neither is she. Seems most of her works are of the same caliber.

Edited by PurpleEyedGuma on Oct 16th 2021 at 9:37:43 AM

I think people are missing the reason why Stonetoss was nuked. It was because it was white supremacist material, but wasn't even open about it, making it a ROCEJ nightmare due to that technicality preventing us from saying what the author isn't saying.

Youcis seems awful but it seems she does have works that can be troped as fiction, and the page does trope her work more than her as a person. It notes she's a white supremacist and we shouldn't sugarcoat it, though we can cut the ROCEJ pothole.

right. Youcis's page, while it shouldn't bash her, is free to call her what she is, as well as to condemn her position. Stonetoss's page risked the wrong kind of attention because he pretends he's not a Nazi and there was no way to be both neutral and legally in the clear.

(to be clear, i am interpreting anti-Naziism as the neutral position here, because... do i need to explain?)

Exactly. The main problem with Stonetoss was that the comic undoubtedly advocates for bigoted viewpoints, but it doesn't do so as blatantly as other works, with it being partially hidden under a veil of Black Comedy. This was a problem, as for it prevented us from stating "this comic was made by a white supremacist" because as far as I know, he's never actually called himself that. We couldn't just act as if the bigoted comics don't exist either, since that would come off as us trying to hide the comic's bigoted side in its favor. In contrast, we can have pages for works like The Turner Diaries because they're so blatantly extreme that nobody who doesn't already hold white supremacist viewpoints is going to read it.

I'm not sure Youcis has ever directly called herself a white supremacist and/or Neo-Nazi, but nevertheless, she's very open about her bigotry. In contrast, I don't think Stonetoss (the person) is nearly as open about his views, preventing us from directly stating that he is a white supremacist. Besides, it doesn't even seem like Youcis' bigoted works are being troped anywhere on this wiki.

Edited by jandn2014 on Oct 16th 2021 at 11:37:59 AM

I had a very big draft message saved on this topic but there was never a good time to post it. The gist was that one of the issues I had with Stonetoss is that even if it was possible to trope neutrally, and even if we could cover his Nazi-lite philosophy in a balanced way that accurately described the topic... would we really want to?

The Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf have historical significance, at least. Nazi webcomic man and white supremacist YouTube lady do not. There is nothing to be gained by drawing attention to them or chronicling their works. 'There is no such thing as notability' means that a work doesn't need to be Citizen Kane for us to trope it, but that doesn't mean that we're obligated to accept pages for anything. Stonetoss dealt in Holocaust denial and 'Jews control the media!' jokes. The idea that the primary reason not to promote his work wasn't because he was a white supremacist, but simply because he wouldn't admit to being one (and therefore it was difficult to accurately describe the webcomic) is an idea I very strongly disagree with.

Had he admitted it, I would still be in favour of deleting the page because even with disclaimers, we would still be providing him with a platform and free advertising, to a limited extent. I don't think there's any significant risk of this happening really, but I worry that this leaves us open to more media-savvy types. If anyone wanted to create a Nazi webcomic and give it a trope page, then as long as they're comfortable admitting that it's a Nazi webcomic, that shouldn't make it okay.

Admittedly very little of this applies to Emily Youcis, it's just something that's been weighing on my mind lately. Emily's trope pages seem mostly safe and barely touch on her politics, but after reading that collection of quotes, I would still be heavily in favour of deleting it because, uh, holy shit, her beliefs are on par with the KKK.

Except "he doesn't admit to it" is the exact reason why. It boiled down to us being caught between slander and sugar-coating. You can read the thread here. People pretty much agreed that it wasn't worth cutting it for the content alone, but for our inability to discuss it without causing ourselves more trouble.

Had he admitted it, we could've gone right ahead and called his work what it was. It wouldn't have had to be promotion- we have pages for works like F.A.T.A.L. and Ethnic Cleansing, and both of those are disgusting works that we call out for being disgusting. We can call a spade a spade, but not if that spade insists it's actually just an innocent spoon. And pointing out that a spade is in fact a spade is no way an endorsement of that spade.

...Well, that and the fact that Stonetoss made at least one sock account to edit the page and attract unwanted attention toward our site.

Edited by WarJay77 on Oct 16th 2021 at 1:39:16 PM

I don't want to get to the point where we cut works where we disagree with the politics of the creators, as that can greatly harm historical discussions of prejudice in the media, and that's something that shows up in a lot of media tropes. The Birth of a Nation (1915) is an extremely racist film that is often relevant in discussing the context of tropes like Scary Black Man. I can also predict edit warring if someone thinks the work and/or its creator are too bad to keep on the site, but others disagree.

Yes, I know this risks being the same Slippery Slope Fallacy that people complained about in the Stonetoss thread, but it's important not to reduce the Stonetoss controversy to "the artist is a Nazi so we cut the page."

Would Stonetoss even deserve a page if he admitted he was a nazi? His comic has no storyline or substance other than attacking minorities.

That's pretty much my perspective. If we could have troped Stonetoss neutrally/honestly because he had admitted what kind of webcomic it was, I would have still been in favour of deleting it because a lot of content creators see a TVTropes page as some kind of milestone, and like it or not, by providing them a platform, we are advertising them to an extent. TV Tropes as a Gateway Drug and all that. I've discovered so many series on here that I never would have known about otherwise. The pages for Fatal and Ethnic Cleansing are at least completely making fun of how terrible the works are.

Not trying to pretend that I speak for a majority here but when Stonetoss' page got the boot, I do believe that a significant number of the people in favour of cutting it didn't hold that opinion because of the technicalities of it being difficult to accurately trope a white supremacist work that the author refused to admit is white supremacist. They held the opinion that his page should be deleted because... like, 'Jews control the media, the Holocaust never happened!' he clearly wasn't just dipping his toe into these beliefs.

Never knew that he was using an alt account to edit his own page though. Although (apologies for slippery slope) if it hadn't been caught, and the page had remained, you can bet he would have kept trying to tweak it and shoehorn it into other pages for attention.

What makes you think Stonetoss's page would've been any less mocking if we were able to be honest with it? You're acting like us being able to trope the work accurately wouldn't have been a groundbreaking change for the page. Thing is, it would've been. We would've been able to outright call him a Nazi, admit the comics were political comics with Nazi views, and that said views suck (as if that even needs to be said when it comes to Nazi views, but hey). Because we weren't allowed to say that, we weren't able to properly trope the work, and thus it was safer to cut it.

Point is, no work is "deserving" of a page. Troping a work isn't a badge of honor for it. It's just us pointing out facts, because all works have tropes, and all we're doing is analyzing them. There's no such thing as a work deserving or not deserving a page. By calling Turner Diaries and Birth of a Nation "historic" and the other pages fine because they're making fun of the thing, you're sort of moving the goalposts just to keep Emily from having a page. But the only goalposts for a page to exist are "does it have tropes?", "is it a work of fiction in some way?" and "is it porn?". You're seeing the evidence that pages like these aren't allowed and still spinning it to somehow act as evidence that her page shouldn't be... But it doesn't really work. We can make her page mocking if we wanted to, although we're not supposed to, and a work being "historic" or not doesn't warrant it any special treatment.