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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26209 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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KF has had an influx of TERF refugees some years ago. The tone of many trans threads has shifted from "Haha, look at this weirdo!" to wall-of-text rants about how this man in a bad wig is an insult to womanhood and a threat to bathrooms everywhere.

The trend has abated slightly after the site has been harder to reach for a while and Twitter has become more permissive, but calling KF "anti-trans" is somewhat justified.

I agree, a lot of the cattier TERFs (for whom the main pleasure was bitching about certain transwomen lolcows rather than gender-critical advocacy) migrated to KF after Reddit (and, for a time pre-Musk, Twitter) cracked down on TERF content.

In general, they were always going to lean a certain way just because of the relatively lax moderation around slurs, throwaway insults etc (this is probably the only hard-right-leaning community I've ever found online where fully polite discourse is enforced). In addition to famous transwomen, a lot of other big targets are 'breadtube' (ie socialist youtuber) content creators, some of whom are trans like contrapoints and philosophytube, but others they hate for other reasons (hbomberguy). So naturally there's a general loathing for that kind of socialist ideology.

In general, making fun of reactionary youtubers (which still happens on the farms, but is mostly less popular) is more a pastime of rationalwiki users and a few other leftist online communities.

In general, making fun of reactionary youtubers (which still happens on the farms, but is mostly less popular) is more a pastime of rationalwiki users and a few other leftist online communities.

This isn't actually true. A huge portion of the site is devoted to going after Ethan Ralph and his ostensibly right wing crowd, and there's another devoted to Nicholas Fuentes and his bizarre cult. They make fun of a lot of the online/internet right, it's just that nobody cares about the internet right getting bullied.

Just in general, you’d expect right wingers to be a little bit less frequently the kind of in-your-face weird and crazy than lefties because of greater conformism. But the trans thing is probably a bigger part of leaning right/mostly targeting left wingers, you’re right.

I'm not a fan of the TERFs on the farms, they seem to have an actual political axe to grind rather than just laugh at the absurdity of the trans people who are posted there. Almost all of these people would still be scorn worthy even if they weren't trans, that's just icing on the cake, but TERFs treat the transness as the main issue with such people when in reality it's little more than an afterthought.

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