The endless battle to banish the world’s most notorious stalker
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Ledditors griefing over internet "censorship" and muh freeze peach principles that were apparently violated when effective, direct measures were used to combat fascism.
I don’t think we should ever celebrate people being deplatformed...If the content is illegal pursue legal means to punish the posters...But let’s say they win, and they get the domain blocked everywhere. They’ll just launch a new domain, just like all the pirate streaming sites do.
Are you implying you shouldn't try to do anything because the fascists will (deterministically) win? Hence why the people trying to shut them down went straight to the ISPs because they know they can win the ISPs over on moral grounds?
[...] you have to decide if the internet is a human right or not. If it is, it must be for everyone, or it is for no one. As soon as we make exceptions to basic rights, those rights get eroded for everyone. Because people in power will bend the exceptions to political expediency.
More and more people are saying this! But seriously, in the gulag you'll get human rights but certainly not a loaded machine gun like unrestricted internet access to stalk, bully, and harass people to self-harm.
Not getting harassed by internet fascists should be a human right too, but the only 'rights' they care about are the ones that expand their bourgeois consumerism.
Legality is a very stupid and bad metric for what sites and communities should be combated. Piracy is illegal, fascism is legal. Laws are threats from the dominant socioeconomic group and so on.
Also, who's version of legality? I very much doubt Mr "Let the law handle the Nazis" is going to be happy if Iran or Saudi Arabia tried to take down porn sites due to their local laws.
Of course, that's a rhetorical question. Whenever someone talks like this they always mean American/Western laws, which they assume should apply universally.
Capitalist ideology in general, Žižek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief – in the sense of inner subjective attitude – at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.
I see that a lot with China Man Bad takes, they decry the evil of the CPC, pick one random Chinese corporation they swear off (Tencent is a popular one), and then act like they’ve taken a principled stand while continuing to buy mountains of plastic shit that’s made in China.
They are part of the non-profit industrial complex. They make money by appealing to hardship and selling gains, not by directly assaulting systems of oppression. If they did, they would be quickly outlawed, perhaps branded a terrorist organization. They also ensure their own power and relevance through integration with that oppressive system and its centers of power. The EFF makes most of its money from "charitable organizations", i.e. rich people's kids' orgs that function as cheap PR due to tax write-offs, i.e. mouthpieces of the bourgeoisie. The ACLU is a libertarian org in bed with all kinds of corporate goons, again via "charitable organizations". It's actually a pretty great example of the limits of reformism and the way that radical movements are coopted into snd subsumed by capital, as it began as something much cooler.
The thing about Kiwifarms is that it acts a lot more like Reddit (as a whole) than your typical forum.
People don't come to Kiwifarms because they want to be a part of the Kiwifarms community -- they come to Kiwifarms because they obsess about some individual or some other community that they want to dunk on or harass.
Each thread therefore has to be viewed more akin to a subreddit with its own separate userbase than your typical forum thread.
The best example for this are their two competing Ukraine war threads, one pro-Russia, the other pro-Ukraine, each with roughly the same number of posts yet representing two completely different, irreconcilable worldviews.
This property is what I think makes Kiwifarms so extremely resilient. Even if they have to move to the darknet, where other sites would normally not survive, they still have the necessary draw to gain new users from mere name recognition alone.
Because when you're obsessed about something or someone, is the small hurdle of installing torbrowser and looking up an onion link really going to stop you?
Freedom of speech (and comparable rights) applies under the assumption that no concerns should go unheard to ensure that everyone's needs are considered when making decisions so the best outcome can be achieved for everyone.
Kiwifarms exists to hurt people. People use it to hurt others. It does not need defending.
Turns out the "natural rights" framework is liberal bullshit and legal rights, while extremely useful, must be embraced as a fallible human construction that, on some level of application, must be delineated arbitrarily.
You have to give people basic rights no matter what.
You can't torture anyone, you can't force anyone to let you search them or take any of their shit, you can't force someone to incriminate themselves, you can't punish anyone for expressing an opinion
I respected her fight but in the end it just shows how pathetic the state of human rights is in the West. I would assume that in a normal society, those who run a website like kiwifarms would be arrested on the grounds of causing mental and physical harm to innocent human beings.
What Keffals could only do was pressure various corporations that lie in the junctions between kiwifarms servers and the user. Her movement would pressure the private DNS provider, the private VPS host and Cloudflare inc. to stop having kiwifarms as customers. I think Cloudflare dropped them but I am not sure what things are like now.
This is not an indictment of Keffals and her efforts but rather of the justice systems of the developed world. FBI will hunt you down to the innermost circles of hell if you are sharing pirated books (b-ok.cc) or are downloading academic papers like Swartz was but if you are running a fascist cesspool you are given a pass probably because they recruit or entrap from there.
as long as the US government wouldn't literally put someone in a cage for it, you are morally obligated to provide anyone who asks with the means to do whatever they want, with zero discretion allowed on your part. because it's speech.
At best the isp actions merit critical support, since they got the right answer but not within a framework of understanding or decision making that ensures their power will be used appropriately in other situations.
e: to go a bit farther, the eff is also right for the wrong reasons. their concerns about censorship are merited, not because that censorship will impinge upon free speech, but because we have no assurance that censorship will be meted out consistent with Juche.
It really is hard to be enthusiastic about this when we know damn well that the right wants to censor queer people on the internet and that it very realistically could be used as part of legal justification to do so. They're already working on it through a few avenues: https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/senator-admits-kids-online-safety
Of course, they'd most likely find a way to do this with or without KF being taken down by ISP or court order, but how the hell am I supposed to find that reassuring?
I agree that it stops at critical support. ISPs are no saints. Nevertheless, the material reality called for actions to be taken by the activists. While I agree the framework is not ideal, it won't change unless we change the system; we live in a world where the line between government and business is blurry, and there will also be constant power struggle between humans (minus fascists) and these monoliths. But I think we should struggle case-by-case, both speculatively and as they arise, instead of basing it on nebulous and generalized ideas of "rights" or "principles".
We have to give everyone basic rights. Otherwise we're no better than fascists. You can judge a society most accurately based on how they treat their prisoners. Look at how they treat prisoners in the Scandinavian countries and then look at all the black-sites the US is running.
Being in favor of free speech means allowing people you hate to talk too. If someone says something that's factually incorrect, prove them wrong.
And if you're dealing with some kind of bigot, the best way to make them see the error of their ways is for those people they're bigoted against have civil conversations with them.
The solution to bad speech is good speech. Not de-platforming and not censorship.
And yes, if someone is doing something illegal, go through legal means to have them taken down.
If they just have a shitty opinion. Let them say what they have to say.
And if you're dealing with some kind of bigot, the best way to make them see the error of their ways is for those people they're bigoted against have civil conversations with them.
Do you have any evidence to support this claim?
Frankly, I don't care about convincing them. I care about suppressing them. Whenever possible their voice should be taken away and they should always be afraid of expressing their bigotry out loud. They are worthless scum and generally beyond saving, what matters is protecting the people who they endager.
They say "oh just have civil conversation with them" like that's the easiest thing in the world, but who on earth wants to actually talk to these people? Why would you assume they want to be talked to? What would you even say to them?
No, you let the racists and bigots face the consequences of their actions, including legal ones. If someone wants to say racial slurs, they get arrested. That's how it works in South Africa. If you say the k word, you can expect legal action to be taken against you. And that's how it should be. Hate speech has no value and is not "free speech".
Being in favor of free speech means allowing people you hate to talk too. If someone says something that's factually incorrect, prove them wrong.
Well we don't believe that "free speech" is a "basic right". Now material rights to shelter, food, and productive participation in society are things we consider to be "basic rights". Being a Fascist is not productive participation in society however, therefore in order to fulfill that basic right, they must be corrected.