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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Moon himself addresses this in his update:

This is an organized attack. There is a coalition of criminals trying to frame the forum for their behavior. These criminals provide opportunities for professional victims to amplify their message. Journalists canonize the crimes as the behavior of the forum itself, which becomes the effective truth for the general public.

This is a machine that was built up formerly against 8chan and activates any time the cathedral wants to test the new fronts of its censorship. It is a massive amalgamation of various interests. I am one person. The financial limitations aren't even the real problem - the problem is, I am powerless alone. There is no amount of money I can throw to convince people to be brave and be free. This is just the reality of our country.

And what this machine will not accept is compromise. If I censored specific kinds of behavior, it would not matter. They don't want a specific thing censored. They want the average person to be able to speak in channels where only specific thoughts are acceptable.

More importantly, they want to make it so that no small organization can host a service which threatens the cathedral. It used to be that one guy with a good idea could open a platform and be a Tom Anderson, Mark Zuckerberg, Tom Fulp, Christopher Poole, or Richard Kyanka. Take note these names are all from 10+ years ago. There are no new groundbreakers online anymore because breaking ground in the new Internet's corporate parking lot is not allowed.

Emphasis mine. There is no acceptable compromise in the minds of the attackers, they love the boot and they just want to keep stomping.

This is an excellent quote thanks for sharing. I have been anti-censorship for most of my life but recently have fallen off in emphasizing its importance. This quote convinced me to be more vigilant in the future.

They haven't even stopped attacking Cloudflare, because Prince took too long to block the site, and they are demanding he resign. Simultaneously, they've taken attention off of the site to now focus on their own - Liz-Fong Jones is accusing Keffals of facilitating "microaggressions" with her chat either willingly or unwillingly (but that's the definition of "microaggression" in the first place).

I think we've repeatedly seen this sort of thing play out, though perhaps not in such a blatant fashion. There are two options when the mob comes for you, immediate and unquestioning obedience to their demands (no guarantee of safety) or total repudiation. That's it. Any attempt at walking a middle path, any wavering in your chosen stance, is the twitter equivalent of going swimming off Playa del Carmem at twilight with bloody steaks taped to yourself. Had Cloudflare stuck to their guns, stayed the course, and other idioms that mean the same thing, the entire keffles/kiwifarms kerfuffle would have blown over in maybe a week at most. By caving to the mob after taking an initial stance against them, they have signaled weakness and will be set upon without mercy.

This reminds me of an old story about an indie game on Steam, it's called Heartbeat. The lead developer is a lesbian, and her girlfriend had very public negative opinions about transwomen on twitter. As expected, a cancel mob ensued to go after the developer because of what her girlfriend had been saying on twitter, but her response to the cancel mob turned out to be a middle finger so huge and outrageous nobody expected it. Instead of saying anything, she put the game on sale at a 41% discount in an apparent reference to trans suicide rates. The review bombing attempts were quickly countered and the developer pretty much got off without any major consequences, all that happened was that her girlfriend privated her twitter for some time.

A thing of note in this case is that Steam never removed the game and they didn't even acknowledge the controversy, even the response from the developer herself, despite being so hostile, was also subtle enough so that it would fly over the head of any casual observer.

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