Would anyone care if it's not?

Says the people who are unwilling to do anything more than sign the occasional petition and type out a few sentences of rhetoric.

Legally, what Tumblr and the trolls have been doing is the same as throwing rocks into the businesses in shopping malls. Mall administration is sending bad-faith and harassing notices to business owners, and the trolls have committed libel, both resulting in damages that those parties are liable for.

The fact that so few people have been calling for official action to be taken is a testament to the lack of seriousness in the fight against those who have been increasingly turning parts of the community into bastions of hate and intolerance. I guess it might be fear that these groups would be motivated to move from throwing rocks through digital windows, causing monetary harm to throwing rocks through non-digital windows, causing physical harm. It's understandable, but these groups are the kinds that would do that, anyway, regardless of what we do or don't do to stop them.

What kills me is that nobody here is actually serious about resisting anyone that attacks the the community like this.

In a way, I guess I feel sorry for you. You've contributed so much to the community, and here you are getting angry and ragequitting because someone disagreed with you, giving an extraordinarily terse reply without any real effort being put into it.

I wonder if, my Mr. Henshaw, when I eventually reach your age, I'll be just as tired and unwilling to put out the same effort as in my youth. I avoided telling you to your face that your comments were little more than stock replies that any burgeoning troll would use. I wonder if it was because I respected your forethought in actually engaging with someone in a sea of worthless, quarter-baked half-thoughts? I wonder if it was because of your ability to pick apart peoples' arguments, especially when you thought that they were wrong?
It wasn't unreasonable to believe that you had good ideas, a good background, and the dedication to see through with whatever subject you talked about. After all, you make witty comments that are sufficiently brief to get your point across while not adding any unnecessary wording. At the same time, you have the capacity to engage in a lengthy, detailed discussion, taking on religious conservatives at every attempt of theirs to put in the last word. Your wit isn't relegated to just making superficially snide remarks, either. Your experience with the ins and outs of political players and their publications enables you to have insight that the majority of the retard ocean and mindless pandering that is modern political debate could never hope to attain.

The easy answer is that I was simply expecting too much. I was wrong. I was just so lazy and was so easily wooed by the fact that you separated yourself from the crowd by using complete sentences and bothered to express an actual opinion that I didn't bother to consider the fact that much of your comments are largely composed of the straightforward and brief dismissals or the cheap, tweet-sized bits of snarky pseudo-wit that have increasingly inundated the Web over the years. So narrow-minded that I believed that that could be enough to think that there could be enough of a glint of intelligence in the common man that it could be forced out at will, like pulling up an iceberg and finding it to be so much more. And so when I pulled, you cut and ran, and I responded as if I should have expected something different. Of course, I've never been one for easy answers.

I pulled up the iceberg, and looking at what was taken, I found a handful of snow. And looking down at the waters where it had been, I found nothing in its place. I felt embarrassed for looking for icebergs in a pool of ice cubes, but why?

Wasn't my goal, since the beginning, to do just that? Wasn't my goal to seek the oasis in the desert, to find the island in the ocean, to find the mythical double 360 no-scope headshot?

I suppose you could ask me what I was planning to do once I got to that oasis, when I found that island. And maybe I could answer that I would argue over how you define what the hell is a double 360 no-scope headshot. Such a thing would just be a red herring, of course. Sure, I had a plan once I found it, but I never expected to find it, so my plan was always left to be half-baked: turn the desert into a flourishing paradise, create a utopia upon the island, do a triple 360 no-scope headshot. Such impossibilities were meant to be so, but fighting toward that goal made the impossible seem possible, and the possibility of failing to achieve the impossible would be just as devastating as failing to achieve the possible.

Well, my dear Mr. Henshaw, I could have said that it was all for the simple act of trying to achieve it: achieving the act of acting and having the presence of principle to fight for the idea, rather than the outcome. But fighting just to fight doesn't seem quite right, does it? Even setting out, knowing that you would never find what you're looking for won't prevent the eventual failure of having not found what you knew you couldn't have found.

Well, my dear euphgeek, maybe I shouldn't use you as a mere notepad to place disjointed thoughts, but it doesn't seem right to not address you as the human being you once were before you turned to the representative symbol that you are now, especially since I am wont to addressing inanimate text such as yourself as if you were capable of meaningful response. I know that I should tell you such facts that we both already know, like how I am always leaving out most of my thoughts in the text, or that discussing things with a once-human block of text gives a humanistic catharsis that the normal demagoguery to a private blog could never achieve. But somehow this seems different. As if the fact that I am talking to a dead piece of forum text is somehow different than the thousands of other times I've talked to dead pieces of forum text. I know the feeling. It's dread. Fear of finding an all too familiar face. The fear of having searched so far for that metaphorical iceberg where none should be, and finding that it's just another drifting soul from the same mainland, seeking not truth and fact, but amusement from pushing around the commoners.

Television programming revenues dropped 18% during Q2. I don't know how much of that was Friendship is Magic, but considering the fact that there were half as many episodes as last season, I doubt that the show raked in as much money as Q2 2012. It may be more reason to cut the budget and transfer more staff over to other projects.

TL;DR version: "Now listen to MY opinion! It's the only one that matters!"

I may find it amusing that you aim to gain popularity by making the most superficial comments imaginable, but I kind of expected more wit out of you.

My response is rife with material for assholes looking to get as many thumbs up their ass as possible. Whether or not you want to throw your hat into that crowd is your decision, of course, but you could have stopped reading after the second paragraph and proclaimed "I find it amusing that you're so full of shit."

Or you could have gone classier and stated "You're comparing MMC to tires? Now I know you're full of hot air."

Hell, you could have even read nothing, scrolled all the way down, and said "Not everything is black and white, but I can absolutely say that you're 100% full of shit."

If you're going to end a conversation with a cheap, pseudo-charismatic punchline, at least put some effort into it. Trolling is an art form. If you want to properly derail a conversation to the point of no return and ensure that nobody ever gets anything useful out of the discussion, don't be half-assed about it.

You grew up during the age of Internet BBS and IRC. You should know this. Don't get lazy on me now.

You mean the standard that I summarily shot down in the third and fourth sentences of my second paragraph (The paragraph under the opening one-liner)? I guess I should have formatted that better so that it was easier to see.

In any case, I believe that subjectivity is a somewhat necessary part of judging whether or not something meets a particular standard of quality, especially when you're forced to rate something as simply "good," "bad," or "mediocre". Still, there is almost always a good deal of objective assessment in those ratings. An example would be determining that a game is "mediocre" based on the fact that its graphical complexity included unusual attention to facial expression detailing, had a soundtrack full of easily forgettable generic rock, and had a storyline that could have been written by one of Michael Bay's interns with characters as flat and one-sided as a 14th century European World Map. Another reviewer could say something different, and come up with a somewhat different assessment, but a careful eye would probably not be radically different, other than shifting around the metaphors a little and noticing various minor details that one reviewer or the other missed.

The subjectivity aspect starts to come into question when experienced experts in the field all start saying the same thing about something. With things like electronics and hardware tools, you usually don't have to read too many reviews to determine a general consensus on the quality of something. With movies, television, and other entertainment media, it's oftentimes necessary to get a general picture from no fewer than a dozen reviewers or so. And even then, you have to realize that even if the storyline was bad, scenes were poorly composed, or the audio was cheap, whether or not you find yourself actually liking the media either in spite of or because of its flaws, just like any other product, is simply up to you.

On another note, if you want to see a more detailed discussion of this, scroll down. I have a rousing conversation with euphgeek on the matter. I'm kind of a bastard for poking fun at him until he turned into a hateful mess that is as much of an asswipe douchebag as I was being, but he did make a few decent points with MisterArb about opinions about opinions before the eventual devolution.

*Puts sunglasses on DSludge*
...

I'm going to do like what many Star Trek fans did with Enterprise and lump alicorn Twilight and Equestria Girls in with all the other bad, non-canon fanfic ideas.

I should start selling some stock.