Kiwi Farms, the infamous stalking/doxing site with an especial animus towards trans victims, is facing an energetic campaign to get it booted off the internet. If you haven’t been following the story, there’s a quick explainer here.
So-called “gender critical” transphobes, who recently cheered on the swatting of the trans streamer now leading the campaign against Kiwi Farms, are praying it survives.
On Ovarit, a Reddit-like forum that has become a haven for transphobes who left the real Reddit when the mods took down the Gender Critical subreddit, assorted commenters have professed their love for the site, which a commenter known as fistcity described as “one of the last free places on the internet and i hope it lives forever tbh.”
“Honestly I love KF,” fistcity confessed.
I’ve learned so many interesting things there that I would never have known about otherwise just because so many different kinds of people are there. Also some of them are crazily good documentarians. Bonus: very funny shit.
Fistcity has a vision of Kiwi Farms that seems to have come from a not-so-parallel universe.
They drove no one to suicide. They don’t harass people. They do not contact them. They don’t swat. They observe, and they take what is publicly available information that people voluntarily put out there and archive it. If someone wants to look at their thread, fine, but that’s on them. It’s nobody else’s problem but their own, and it’s a problem that can be easily solved by stepping away from the fucking computer lol.
For the real story, see here.
Ave_Lucifuge replied:
Kiwifarms is a big reason I peaked [became a TERF]. NOT because they’re “transphobic”, but because they document all the hideous shit TIMs do/say. Idk why TIMs put so much focus on shutting the fruit farms down when they could just simply not be degenerates (lies, we all know why).
When a commenter called littleowl12 pointed out that Kiwi Farms is “pretty racist and anti-Semitic,” other commenters, while not denying this was true, were quick to dismiss Kiwi Farms’ bigotry as no big deal.
“I’m a jew and the antisemitism doesn’t bother me,” wrote our old friend fistcity.
that’s just how it is in certain parts of the internet. …
I don’t know … that i’ve ever seen someone who was scary. I guess maybe the people who are really good at doxing might be scary to people. Kind of impressive really. A lot of stuff is also said in jest or just for the sake of profanity. Yeah, sometimes you see some wild ass psycho but that’s actually not most of the users. Feel like I’ve seen lots more people with normal lives, jobs, and families than I have seen like, basement dwellers.
“It’s a gossip site,” added WholeGrain.
They aren’t a hivemind and have a lot of diverse users. Threads on Jewish people will see anti-semitic users, threads on black people will have racist users, threads on right-wingers will have left-leaning users, and the threads in the beauty parlor have female users of all kinds. This is just how it is when everyone is allowed to say what they want to.
LuckyStar was pretty much ready to excuse any behavior.
I really dislike all the hate speech that is used on that website, parts of it feel like a bunch of edgy 7th graders super excited to finally use “the n word”. But tbh if the price of maintaining free speech — and thus being one of like two places left on the internet where we can speak honestly and accurately about TIMs [trans women] and call them out on their bullshit — is a bunch of edgy tweens trying out whatever bad word they learned from South Park last week then honestly I’ll take it.
Like fistcity, Lucky Star appears to live in a different universe than the rest of us.
The ugly language is gross, but TIMs are out here pushing the wholesale destruction of all of women’s rights and spaces and mass sterilization of gay and autistic youth, the urgency with which we must document their behavior and make others aware, to me far outweighs that
None of that is true, of course, but it does provide convenient cover for supporting a hate site under siege.
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@LouCPurr: (still love your avatar!)
I am as neurotypical as can be; I can make small talk with anyone in English and sometimes a little Spanglish. Cocktail parties, airplanes, wherever.
I also had a pretty good Barbie collection, but preferred my hair short and liked playing in vacant lots and irrigation ditches. The neighbor girls and I used to run through drills with some of the local college (now Pac-12) football boys because one of our neighbors was a coach there. Which motivated the boys when he’d thunder “My GIRLS can do this BETTER!” They’d seen us in action. So we might run drills Thursday, have a sleepover with Barbies and makeup and giggling on Friday night, whatever.
I also read LOTR at age 8 and reread it and other stuff regularly. I co-founded the computer club in high school. I am a neerrrrrrrddddd who can also criticize (American) football tactics and loves to watch curling. I ran the football drills the same years I was an ice skater, which is as stereotypically girly as it gets. Being an ice skater at a young age also meant I grew up thinking fondly of gay men. They were nice! And fun! And our moms knew we were perfectly safe being baby-sat by them.
i have been called “sir” pretty often in my youth (skinny, no boobs, short hair, jeans) and occasionally mistaken for lesbian (see last parens). I say I am not and the other person says “Sorry” and we go on about our business.
If anything, I’d say some autistic girls can be LESS vulnerable to brainwashing because they’re resistant to a lot of neurotypical thinking.
@VickyP: I was a very sturdy and bald baby/toddler. I was swathed in pink and ruffles from head to toe, and people still complimented Mom on her “fine boy”.
@Cyborgette: It was that way for trans men too, and then a year on HRT before they could get top surgery.
@Crip Dyke: What you said, especially:
@David: Yeah we’ve had too much from Toxic TERFy Incel Boy. Time for him to go somewhere else online where he can be clueless about something else. I bet he’s just as annoying and thick-headed on every topic under the sun.
@Victorious, @FullMetalOx:
Terry Pratchett put it simply:
@Nequam, YES I love that quote. I’ve barely even read Pratchett but that one’s a winner.
@GSS ex-noob: Thanks, and ugh that is terrible.
@Full Metal Ox:
I was also the Smart One while she was the Cute One. Then two more sisters were added and things got even more complex.
@Nequam
I love that Granny Weatherwax quote. Also the bit in that same book about faith and what believing in a god would mean to her.
OMG. I completed my 12 hour Twitter jail and tried to use my account and now they’ve tacked on another 12 hours. I tried to fill out a form in the contact us section and it wouldn’t even let me do it. You can’t send an email in the “help with a locked account” section if your account is locked. How the fuck does that make sense? All for a tweet that was a bit salty but did not violate the tos. I’m so fricking irritated. Not so much at the not being able to tweet. I can live a night without it, but because blatant hate, literally trying to get people killed is fine with them but a tweet mocking centrists for seeing the right and left as equivalent is hateful conduct.
Confession: I almost joined Kiwi Farms. (Although I planned to do so to join the thread on Alex Mahan, a cis pedophile and creator of Yandere Simulator) After I read their RationalWiki page I resolved not to.
I am a denizen of the internet. It’s practically my home country. (More than the U.S. of A*holes, anyway.) I am a digital utopian at heart. And weirdly, when Kiwi Farms degenerated, I was a bit… sad. It could have been a beautiful place like this little miniforum. It’s like the Thunderhead from Arc of a Scythe, crying digital tears over the implosion of humanity.
Could Kiwi Farms actually degenerate? I listened to the Behind The Bastards “A Terrible Story About the Internet” episodes and it sounds like KF was an industrial-sized boiling vat of liquid pig manure from the beginning.
@Crip Dyke
I am indeed shocked and appreciate your correction.
You people are not very nice here. I try to express my views politely and give arguments, in return I am called “fuckwit”, “stupid” etc., also calls for banning me. @Elaine said that my opinion doesn’t matter because I can’t “get” woman (on dating apps, as I said in unrelated thread) and it’s not very comprehensible to me. If I had hundreds dates from apps, my opinion on transgenderism would gain tousends percents of validity?
@Feliks: Disguise bigotry in polite wording all you want, it’s still bigotry. If I were to assume good-faith arguing on your part, I’d say your arguments aren’t convincing at best, nor do you engage with the content of the responses, aside from whatever names you are called. And the calls for your banning are based on the misinformation you spread, this has also been mentioned in those calls.
Given your posting history, I don’t see a reason to assume good faith.
@Crip Dyke
I am a cis woman. I shaved my head once for very personal reasons, and this exact scenario (asshole version) was repeated to me multiple times when I had to travel through Mormon country, and I wasn’t even wearing a leather jacket, only a tshirt. I have big-ass boobs that can’t be missed.
This was not the genesis, but the final solidification, of my “Don’t be an asshole” policy on pronouns, long before I ever did any self-educating on the subject. I wonder if perhaps Feliks has just never been brought up with “politeness costs nothing”. I mean really, in what way does it hurt him to call people what they want to be called?
@ Big Titty Demon
Exactly.
In law there’s a thing called ‘the balance of convenience’ test. I won’t bore you with the details; but it can be illustrated thusly:
It costs me absolutely nothing to use one word over another; but it can mean the whole world to the person I’m addressing.
The hyphen placing is so important there.
I suspect that the cost of calling people what they want to be called is “acknowledging that other people matter.”
This also seems to be what conservatives mean by “woke,” and why they are so opposed to “wokeness.”
Re: Gender identity
I don’t think I have one, but it’s obvious some people do. I should care? Sir, madam, good gentle, tell me how you like being addressed, that’s what I’ll call you.
(If it had been a thing back in my youth, I’d probably have gone with they or xe since I don’t feel like a man or a woman, just like myself.)
@Feliks
it’s been pointed out that people aren’t nice to you because the arguments you’re putting forth are hate-based, not fact-based as you seem to believe.
also your “opinions” on “transgenderism” are laughably malformed. you can frame your arguments as politely as you like, but it doesn’t make you any more credible or worthy of engaging with seriously.
Thanks everyone for backing me up, but let’s not anyone miss – and most especially not Feliks – that although I found him annoying in his arrogant ignorance and the spreading of misinformation is certainly enough of a reason to ban someone, central to my call for banning was the fact that this commenter named himself after the head of the early Soviet secret police. Wikipedia generously calls him “one of the architects” of the Red Terror (systematic political assassinations and incarcerations), though it’s hard to see how he could be anything less than the **primary** architect.
Here’s a taste:
If someone entered the chat here named Pol Pot or Pinochet or Hitler, I don’t think there would be any question that the person is acting in bad faith and counter to our values. They would be lionizing someone not just famous for mass murder, but famous for mass murder without being famous for anything else: no one gives themselves the internet handle “Hitler” because they’re fond of Germany’s inter-provincial road system.
This is arguably worse. Pol Pot, Pinochet and Hitler have the fame that they do because of their mass murders/genocides, but as heads of state they did **technically** do other things. While we wouldn’t take seriously the idea that someone was only praising Hitler for the road system, it also wouldn’t be literally false.
With Feliks Dzerzhinsky he didn’t have any position of note EXCEPT head of the new Soviet secret police. And he clearly advocated for and oversaw mass murder on a stupidly large scale. From Wikipedia again:
While lots of people are ignorant and a good number of those are arrogant enough to believe they are informed when they are not, most of those people do not deliberately name themselves after someone who conceived, planned, organized, implemented, justified, and celebrated mass murder on a scale of dozens of thousands.
I don’t merely advocate for Feliks ban because he’s stupid or ill informed. I argue for it because there is no possible reason someone here for discussion in good faith would name them after a person who famously murdered people because he didn’t want to have to persuade them.
Feliks is for murder and against reasonable discussion because he is for the actual Feliks Dzerzhinsky. One cannot be for FD and also be for freedom. One cannot even be for FD and against the murder of one’s political opponents.
For someone to name themselves FD and then complain that someone might not publish their letters b/c that’s censorship or unfair or harsh treatment is the height of bad faith.
Feliks here is a fuckwit because he embraces terrorism and mass slaughter while pretending his position is reasonable. He knows who the real FD was. He knows there is no such thing as a reasonable person who embraces FD. He is a troll and a bad one and I don’t want him here any more than I would want someone who names themselves Josef Mengele.
@Crip Dyke: Thanks for that clarification. I admit I skimmed past that, when I first came across it.
@C.A. Collins: Based on your description, I think you might recognize yourself in the term ‘agender’.
@Crip Dyke
You have some serious issues. I am not native English speaker, but “dyke” is probably offensive homophobic slur, right?
BTW Dzierzhinsky was not only known from heading Cheka, but I don’t see anything relevant to…. anything in your comment anyway. Is this thread history class for Yankees?
@ Felicks the twit,
If someone is disabled and a lesbian they can called themselves a crip and/or a dyke; however, if someone is not disabled and calls a disabled person a crip, they’re being offensive, as ‘crip’ is used as an ableist slur. If someone is not a lesbian and calls someone a dyke, they are also being offensive, as ‘dyke’ is being used as a homophobic slur. In English, sometimes context is important. Crip Dyke is telling us something with their/her name (sorry @Crip Dyke, not sure about your pronouns). It isn’t relevant to the conversation and you’re reaching by implying that Crip Dyke is homophobic, because you’re on the back foot in the conversation.
Dyke also means a drainage ditch where I’m from. It is very confusing for people who move here and hear people say ‘the dog got in the dyke’ for example.
Thanks, RJ. I tend to use “her” but gender-neutral forms of address like “they” are welcome as well.
I love Feliks’ response, BTW. If I may paraphrase:
GFY, Feliks. You celebrate mass murder and terrorism, and the **best case** is that you are doing it merely to troll.
Calling someone a dyke can be a homophobic slur. Calling one self a dyke is not. Queer can be that. Me calling myself queer or wearing a shirt that says queer, is not. It’s not that hard to understand fleikis. Use the pudding you call a brain for two seconds
@crip dyke
And for the record I love your bloody name. It’s perfect
@Crip Dyke
Oh gods, I didn’t know that about the source of the handle. I kind of assumed he was just being stupid and using his real name on the a public Internet forum. I concur, he should be banned, and I’m sorry for trying to reason with him at first – in that context his whole thing is clearly bad faith.
So widdle Feliks is a big supporter of mass murder! Wonder if he’s on Vlad’s payroll of disinformation, or if he’s merely a freelance fuckwit.
@David: Time to make the Lenin fan go bye-bye. Soviet worshipper, go fuck yourself!
@Crip Dyke: I have always loved your posts wherever I saw them on the web. When I first saw your name, I thought “Awesome name, that’s a woman I could hang with.”
I have had friends in Dykes on Bikes, with their motorcycles. I have a friend who spent years as an activist for accessibility and she calls herself a crip all the time. I myself have a hidden disability (pain and mobility issues). My husband is currently dealing with some medium-term mobility and balance stuff, and I call what I’m teaching him “The Way Of The Crip”*, so he doesn’t hurt himself doing things the TAB way. He’s still taller than me, so the high shelves are still his purview.
*yes, sometimes I say it in a Yoda voice
@Allendrel
Well ok, fair enough. I did assume that to be a baseline fact and a non-cost. My mistake.
@Crip Dyke
I admit that I didn’t specifically know that’s what you meant when you first referred to asshole McGee standing for those things, but that’s because of my gap in historical knowledge. It’s worse than I realised and you’re totally right. I mean, everyone could see he was bad faith anyway from his specious arguing, but I agree he should go.