As someone who agrees ISPs shouldn't get to be judge, jury, and executioner on censorship, I find it really odd when people go out of their ways to defend absolute cesspits every time the censorship issue comes up.
Kiwi Farms is an irredeemable cesspit by every measure I can see, and accepting that makes your argument stronger. Trying to act like it's an innocent place, or this place is ok because you're familiar with 100 even worse places just makes you look unreasonable. All it serves to do is muddy the waters between being anti-censorship and being pro-cesspit, and I'm not the former.
It's far from innocent. But they also talk about some things that others aggressively try scrubbing from the internet, which shouldn't be scrubbed from the internet. Cesspits suck, but if a cesspit is the last place you can talk about, say, the criminal indictments of a powerful influencer or moderator, then we have bigger problem than that the place stinks.
But this is a very dangerous argument you're making: "who cares if people are making up complete nonsense about them, they're bad anyway?!" I'm not trying to be uncharitable, but that is more or less the core of your argument.
I don't want to "defend" anyone; I just want to have an accurate understanding of the truth, insofar that's possible. It bothers me so much misinformation is being spread about this and I think this is also harmful overall for many reasons.
This was, IMHO, also the problem with Stallman: yes, Stallman was/is not good and should have stepped down a million years ago (in my opinion, anyway), but no, he's not a transphobic sexist nonce and most of those claims are complete bollocks. But hey, who's going to defend an asshole like Stallman? Especially when a significant section of his more fanatical fanbase is so ... unpleasant (in my experience, anyway)?
It's infinitely more dangerous to reduce the world to the kind of logic that underlies implying "if you feel a way about one case of X you must feel the same way about all cases of X ever in every context".
If someone bad mouths a cesspit by mixing up which stalking cases they're involved with, when said place was literally founded and named around stalking someone... I reserve the right to say that's an acceptable mistake of absolutely no consequence to a conversation about censorship.
I also reserve the right to do say so without unilaterally declaring that it's ok to make up facts about anyone in existence the moment said they're deemed to have done something wrong. That's the kind of nuance in thinking we aim to instill in children from a very young age.
> reduce the world to the kind of logic that underlies implying "if you feel a way about one case of X you must feel the same way about all cases of X ever in every context".
I never said any such thing or made any such argument.
The disagreement is about which events have occurred at all, and it's not about "mixing up" minor details.
I don't care if they got things wrong on which exact people got stalked. You twisted that into:
> But this is a very dangerous argument you're making: "who cares if people are making up complete nonsense about them, they're bad anyway?!"
So either that's the argument that you're making... or you genuinely believe that it's dangerous to say a place is a cesspit "just" because they stalked a lot of people (and drove a brilliant person to suicide, then celebrated)
Also, for posterity:
- If you're not a stalker and someone says you stalked someone: that's making things up.
- If you're named after the first guy you stalked, and you've stalked so often there are academic papers written on it, if people mis-attribute a stalking to you: that's a mix-up.
In their speak, "Is this the hill you want to die on". In other words, if there's something redeemable going on on KF, do you really want to even know? Because then your options are to stick your head out for unsympathetic people, or feeling bad about what's going on.
KF is an irredeemable cesspit but so is Twitter and so is Tumblr, if you know where to look.
There's no difference between what progressives do freely on Twitter/Tumblr and what Farmers do. KF worst actions are only possible because they amplify their harassment of targets by using "woke" optics on twitter to draw corporate backing and media attention against their victims.
The conversation is anti-censorship, and your hill to die on is the place named after the person they were trying to bully is just like the place where if you dig across the 450 million monthly users you'll find bad actors.
At the end of the day you're just elevating a sideshow above the actual anti-censorship argument at the cost of the former, but honestly it's not much sweat of my back. At the end of the day censorship is just the next net neutrality: sideshows based on the most useless cases of its risks burn all the oxygen in the room, no action against it taken, and the world moves on.
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
— Commonly attributed to H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Also the person the quote is attributed had some abhorrent views most people who share them have the good sense to only vaguely alude to through veiled references to Ayn Rand and questionable race science articles. He was not exactly a defender of democracy and equal rights.
Kiwi Farms is an irredeemable cesspit by every measure I can see, and accepting that makes your argument stronger. Trying to act like it's an innocent place, or this place is ok because you're familiar with 100 even worse places just makes you look unreasonable. All it serves to do is muddy the waters between being anti-censorship and being pro-cesspit, and I'm not the former.