If there was ever any doubt that "trans rights" isn't (in large part) a male supremacist movement, behold the speed with which narcissistic injury has obliterated a website which laughed at men.
When GOMI imploded, lots of posters went to reddit and created Blogsnark and a smaller number went to KiwiFarms where a special lady section was created for them. It was the reddit posters who doxxed the Gomi admin - her phone number, very personal family/health history were all posted there - and the KiwiFarms posters who obsessively archived it.
I am pretty sure that I first heard of KiwiFarms when the BSC mods on Blogsnark created some rule that you could not say its name or refer to it. Me: "Well, NOW I'm interested!"
If you ever listen to his podcast the owner of Kiwi Farms, has gone a little bit feminist over the past few months. He often talks about having boards within the forum managed by women, and allowing them to moderate themselves in a way they used to on lolcow.farm. Likewise about accomodating terfs and feminists.
Related: I like to occasionally check in on the GOMI forum for Dooce (cause I’m a weirdo) and apparently she’s a transphobe now. Makes me wonder if she’s a primo (Hi Heather!!)
It says a lot about the state of the discourse now that I’m wondering if she’s actually said anything “transphobic,” or if that’s now the go-to excuse for continuing to dump on someone online. People have been being bitchy about Dooce on on GOMI for freaking decades now, but “transphobia” gives it a veneer of righteousness.
I don't love Dooce - I think it's particularly gross how much stuff she's posted about her kids. But if the post they were talking about on GOMI is the only evidence, a transphobe she is not.
Maybe? She was one of the OG mommybloggers pre-Insta. She sued the GOMI lady (who, incidentally, also has a thread on KF) and was truly a pioneer in internet-meets-IRL drama
Yep! The only post I ever commented on GOMI was a recent one about how Dooce is apparently a transphobe for asking the same "hateful" questions we talk about here. My comment, defending what Dooce said, was deleted immediately and I decided not to give them anymore clicks.
“My Coworkers Cake Shamed Me On My Birthday” has a special place in my heart for its obnoxiousness, and I didn’t even read it until years after xoJane stopped publishing. I like to think the author is pretty embarrassed by it now.
I feel like that's a stretch to be honest. In the video they mentioned a female individual that was harassed as a result of KF's activity. I also don't fully agree with the framing of the movement as 'male supremacist' tbh.
KF doesn't target men, primarily, they find LOLcows everywhere.
As to "being a stretch" to say transactivism is male supremacism in action, well, when men are erased by being renamed "ejaculators" or "prostate havers"; when transmen are dominating sporting competitions against men half their age; when hundreds of transmen, many of whom have been convicted of rape/sexual assault, petition to be moved to men's prisons, maybe I'll change my mind.
Trans-women are an extremely small percentage of the population, the main advocates of a lot of the policies in prisons, sports, and changing rooms in America (and most of the rest of the western world) are female women not men. Calling them a male-supremacist movement doesn't make any sense in this instance.
They're advocating for policies that harm women by allowing males with lady feelings to access previously single-sex spaces like prisons (which is a violation of the Third Geneva Conventions rules on how prisoners of war are supposed to be treated). It's a male supremacist movement bc the benefits of allowing males to join women's athletic teams, or use their bathrooms/changing rooms, benefits men & we've seen again and again that women's feelings on any of this really don't matter to anyone pushing these policies.
How are women benefiting from making it impossible for us to have boundaries? Women are not a threat to men in the same way that men are a threat to women. Predatory males are taking advantage of gender self-ID. Data from prisons shows a greater % of trans-identified males are convicted sex offenders than compared w/ the general male population. Either (1) trans-identified males are more likely to be sex offenders, or more likely (2) predatory males are using the system to access female spaces. Neither option is good but if we're seeing that play out in prisons, where ppl should have an incentive to be on good behavior, I'm guessing the predatory males are gaming the system. So whether or not the population of TIMs is an "extremely small percentage," the cohort of sexually violent men overall now being given access to female spaces by saying the Magic Pronouns will cause harm to a greater # of women, and that risk should not be taken lightly.
Fair enough I wasn't arguing based on the reality of the movement but based on the way we should talk about it, maybe in effect it is a male-supremacist movement.
I think part of the problem is that people are getting tripped up on the fact that the outcomes of the trans rights movement benefit male supremacism, but a lot of the social enforcers are women. One doesn’t cancel out the other though.
One of the most irritating aspects of popular transactivism over the past few years has been its adherents’ refusal to lay out their terms, talk about outcomes, and have a proper debate over whether the ends do actually justify the means. Any attempt to do that has been shut down with “no debate,” and anyone who attempts to follow logical outcomes is a “transphobe” - even if the questioner is trans. The fact that a pile of women are helping to enforce this and obediently refusing to think through outcomes does seem to indicate that women can fall prey to social pressure quite easily, but it doesn’t mean the outcomes themselves don’t benefit the type of men those women would normally oppose. It’s a maddening paradox.
I do think Kiwifarms is a pretty bad place, but I really don't think you can make a strong case that anything that is being done on their is really all that different/worse than stuff you see on major social media sites that no one is calling to be deplatformed.
This whole saga really just seems like a person co-opting social issues to take down a site that was airing her dirty laundry.
Before all this I had visited KiwiFarms occasionally but since Keffels started this campaign I've been on the site every day that it's been up so.... hello, Streisand effect.
On one hand, reading Kiwifarms was not good for my emotional, intellectual, or spiritual health, and it’s not a bad thing for me personally to not be able to access it.
On the other hand, where am I going to see sane updates on the utterly INsane Gretchen Martin/Nicole Cliffe romance?
obvs the censorship is a nightmare and so’s the media coverage.
I have to confess, that was the reason I visited too . . . Nicole's pretty outlandish medical claims on Instagram are what first inspired me to start investigating. I used to read the Toast back in the day and thought it was pretty good. The public personae of the two founders makes me question that assessment, though I haven't gone back to check.
I'm hard pressed to think of a recent situation where a supposed victim has been as unsympathetic as Keffals has been during this entire time. I don't know how anyone could look at her history and not see that she's a complete bully and narcissist who gets off on the stupidest shit. Even while admitting that the police showing up and arresting you for something you didn't do is a terrifying experience, the way she has handled this situation and chosen to actively provoke her enemies makes it difficult to entertain taking her side in this.
Anyway, great job Katie and Jesse on delving into this story that truly exemplifies the worst of our times.
It's embarrassing how many people (including J&K) are falling for Keffals' shit. If you were genuinely scared for your life, to the point that you apparently had to flee the country, wouldn't you avoid doing ANYTHING that might lead people to you? Instead, Keffals keeps posting just enough information for people to figure out where he is, then crying about stalkers, then posting his location again. Each time he gets more press and more money. Trolls and journalists alike should be able to see through such obvious manipulation. We are truly living in the dumbest timeline.
Why does it matter to you? Third person pronouns are most often used when the person spoken about isn't even there, like now. It's hard to take comments like yours seriously and not just as a power play. Humans cannot change sex. Pretending that ppl's existence depends on whatever pronoun a random person on the internet uses for another random person on the internet is odd. Pronouns are not magic words. He's a male, and is acting like an aggrieved male.
Made it harder to understand by referring to a man as a "he" instead of "she"? We're not extras in The Truman Show. I'm not going to lie to protect the illusion that any of this is real.
I had no trouble, because Keffals is a man. What I find difficult is to suspend my disbelief and hear people refer to a man as "she". For real- I'm not being snarky in any way.
I have zero interest in being performative or hearing other people be performative in using pronouns when the person in question isn't even around.
Exactly. Anytime there is discussion of a TIM or a TIF I get cognitive dissonance because I know the words being used are masking the truth. And what message are we sending others by stating their sense of self depends on the willingness of others to use certain words to describe them? The "It Gets Better" campaign was powerful because it was based on appeals to our humanity, with older members of the LGB community telling LGB youth to look at their lives as a journey in time. Whereas now youth are being told that their lives depend on the words other people use to describe them. They're teaching them to be fragile.
Someone who clearly drinks their refill of kool-aid every day, I'm shocked you listen to this podcast. How many "friends" would you lose if your entire social circle knew you listened to Jesse and Katie?
I think David E does have some issues with the wokie race stuff and seems a bit more Marxist than a proper wokie... But then we've gotten full blown MAGA cultists in here on occasion and at least he's a regular...
Should be used to the GC-adjacent "misgendering" by now though.
I had a laptop stolen out of my hands once. It contained the only copy of my draft dissertation. I will always be grateful to the teenage boys who chased the fucker down, tackled him, and got my computer back.
I always thought those kinds of stories were apocryphal because everyone I knew had multiple back ups and paper back ups because of the fear of something happening. Hell I had back ups in different locations because I thought if my house burn down, I can’t lose my data.
I was going to post the same thing. I was going through some old thumbdrives the other day and found multiple copies of ALL my papers on all five drives. I, too, have backup privilege, formerly known as paranoia.
I worked the university help desk and helped a few students who had the only copy of some important paper on a Zip disk. We didn’t grant doctorates so none of them were doctoral dissertations, but I think one was a master’s thesis.
Seriously. When I was in grad school I lost my usb drive and thus a whole paper. Luckily I had time to rewrite it but from then on I backed everything up on multiple sources. And I agree withbyou
Was interesting hearing two Americans trying to sum up The Troubles in less than a minute (I give your summation a 7/10).
It's interesting to note that giving the recent history of the province (in the past 10 years particularly) that an LGBT person hoping to escape harassment and ill treatment decides that the best place to be safe is NORTHERN IRELAND.
Is it me or have there been more connections between trans activism and the Troubles recently with trans ideology co-opting Republican politics a bit? I can't find the article now but I think that in the Taylor Lorenz profile of the trans people doing DIY surgeries - one of the trans people seemed to be involved in that. I may have pulled this out of thin air! but it does make sense then that the person posting a bomb thread would claim to be pro Ulster. NB all this larping as IRA/Loyalist forces is in pretty bad taste.
Many Americans (and Canadians which lets face it, diet Americans) are obsessed with Ireland to a ridiculous degree. Since the queen died I've been seeing all sorts of posts about how 'all of Ireland is celebrating' when it's just a section of some fans at one football (soccer) game and some anonymous Irish twitter users.
I count that as a big aspect of the obsession, I think it's more common in left-wing circles but I do think it's an aspect of American culture generally.
No BUT you do bring up a good point as back in high school I had 2 teachers, one from Ireland, the other of Irish descent, ask my mom if my dad was Irish, since my mom clearly is not.
There has been a close relationship between Irish republicanism and the global left for decades. From an unsavory perspective, the IRA/pIRA/etc. had a long history of sharing weapons and training with various anticolonial and leftist groups, including the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Red Army Fraktion. I'm not surprised that the trans-specific part of the progressive blob has glommed onto this too.
As an anglophile who grew up in heavily Irish-American suburban Boston, the reflexive lefty anti-English sentiment (allegedly motivated by sympathy for Ireland) is so predictable and lazy that it just makes me roll my eyes.
I'm Irish, and spent a long time in UK. I feel really beyond angry when I see the BS of "Irish Twitter" re the queen. Yes, monarchy is weird and irritational. As are many, many aspects of our national identity. I also really cringe at the way all the motley Irish leftwing causes are getting eaten by wokeness. One day soon, Gerry Adams is going to put his pronouns in his biog and that's the day I officially want to stop the world, I have to get off.
For some reason the Republic of Ireland dove really headfirst into gender ideology. Search “Barbie Kardashian” and recoil in horror when you realize they put this psychopathic man in a woman’s prison. Ireland shares some kind of post-colonial neurosis with Canada.
I figured it was a way for these countries to forge their own modern identity, like, “look, we are anti-oppressive and kind, not evil cisgender heteronormative patriarchal colonialists like YOU. All of that rubbish came from your CoLOniALiSm”
I know. Colonialism is rhe evilest evil that ever happened and was done by awful white men to the poor bereft people of color. Because the Ottoman Empire never happened. Japan never did a thing. And China doesn't exist as it does without some expansionist practices of its own. Add to the fact that some cultures that were colonized had done horrible things and were deeply misogynistic and homophobic. But mo. All evilscwere wrought by colonialism
I think that's a good point. We are extremely thirsty for recognition in Ireland, especially from Americans and supporting gender ideology is one way of getting it.
I wouldn't know enough about it to comment on it, but if it is the case it is in bad taste, especially given that some splinter groups from the ones that went on ceasefire are still active, a few years ago a journalist was killed in Derry after being shot by a dissident republican group whilst covering a riot there.
Although for what it's worth, if the Ellen mentioned in the podcast is the same one I'm familiar with, she is/was a member of the Green Party (which identifies as neither nationalist or unionist, and stood in the Belfast West constituency (the most nationalist constituency in NI) in the Assembly Elections in 2017 and got only 251 votes.
NI is pretty safe for LGBT people though. It's obviously worse than say, most of Scotland or England or Canada but by and large if you're a young LGBT person staying in like South or central Belfast - which I'm guessing this person is because there's only one poutine place in Belfast - you're really not going to be in any particular danger compared to elsewhere. Things have gotten a LOT better over a short space of time. Obviously the story may change in staunchly loyalist areas, but bad neighbourhoods are bad, what else is new? It's not like she went to Afghanistan.
I can remember, as an English 18 year old, reading a student guide that said gay people should avoid Northern Ireland and the north east of England (where I am from).
"She helps to supply hormones to trans kids w/o their parents permission." "Isn't that illegal, Jesse?" -- then Jesse says to "set that aside."
It's incredibly illegal, Jesse, even if ppl sympathetic to the issue of kids with gender dysphoria don't want to admit it. If nothing happens on the legal front to Keffals and Eli Erlick for coordinating the delivery of prescription medications, especially Schedule III drugs like testosterone -- lots of ppl are going to be hurt. Not a lawyer, but transferring meds across state lines using US mail is a federal felony. If these hormones are not administered properly there is a medical risk to people OTHER than the person using them. https://www.insider.com/testosterone-gel-toddler-puberty-early-2022-06
A f-ing doctor could lose their license for prescribing meds to a person they don't have as a patient, at any age. And here we have trans rights extremists playing pharmacist & illegally supplying minors with prescription medication & if you want to #supporTransKids I guess that's okay now?
Looking forward to the first lawsuit against one of these ppl for harming a child. They have no right to do this, no matter how right they think they are.
We have to win the cultural victory of getting people to stop feeling like a good guy in a movie for mutilating children before anyone is going to enforce laws on this. I can’t believe we’re in this state, but it seems to be where we are and getting people to flip that switch in their heads is the only way I can see to get us out of it.
This is an important part of understanding why this isn't just a slapfight about terminally online people. KiwiFarms has archived tweets and messages on discord and Twitch of this man bragging about supplying hormones to kids so their parents have no idea. And these can be from shady sources so god only knows what's in it. Not to mention the cute tweets Keffals has about raping women (just a normal thing us girls brag about to our buddies).
KF is doing the work journalists not only refuse to do but cover up for. That's why KiwiFarms is being memory-holed. The only reason this is a discussion is the owner is a stubborn bastard that won't get bullied.
The Keffals drug story and the trans lifeline story are just two of the many coverups orchestrated by TRA's and media. A big thing to note, in KF, you better bring receipts in the form of archived links if you want something added to the thread. Why? Because KF doesn't want fake and manipulated information on threads. I can't think of a single media outlet that has that standard.
"Not a lawyer, but transferring meds across state lines using US mail is a federal felony."
I don't know. Given the current situation re: abortion rights I'm really not in favor of improving the infrastructure to catch people who are mailing legally restricted medications around. Leopards + faces. If we make it normal thing to prosecute people for mailing around T it's going to happen to mailing of contraception and abortion pills even quicker.
These are NOT physicians or medical specialists. These are social media grifters, and primarily, grown ass MEN, getting kids in secret discord servers and "helping" them. Big difference. And as much as I'm disgusted about the post-Roe restrictions, this isn't a gray area.
Also if they were doctors would it really matter? Would you be surprised if activist docs would be sending T and E through the mail to basically anyone who asked? I would be surprised if they weren’t. It’s hardly solving the problem to go after Keffals - underlying problem is still that kids now think they need this and anyone keeping it from them is a bigot.
I think it matters. First, if a doctor is found to be negligent they can lose their license. They also have to carry insurance so if they lose a liability case, they can pay up.....and their insurance goes up so there's a penalty to their practice.
There also has to be a log of who they proscribed to and how much.
Whether you think what a doctor is right or wrong, the systems are in place to hold them accountable once the evidence is out.
This is dramatically different than some twitter nut sourcing blackmarket T from Mexico and mailing it to 12 year olds.
Thing is that I don’t mind if non doctors are sending abortion pills and plan B to Texas because in my opinion the laws banning them are killing women and this is a morally acceptable workaround in an untenable situation.
The same argument is made by trans activists about hormones. It’s “life saving medical care” to them as well - saving these kids from bigoted parents and a society that doesn’t care if they suffer.
It’s hard to think of the criteria here other than “well I personally think that A is OK and B is bad”
My criteria is that substances that carry medical risk should be proscribed by doctors or medical professionals (pharmacists) and not activists.
I think drugs should be fully decriminalized. But I'd feel uneasy about activists mailing oxy to just anyone that asks.
If there are a lack of doctors, pharmacists, and volunteers willing to connect you with doctor's and pharmacists to get the treatment you need, I might see the point. But since there is no dearth of access (virtual or otherwise) to professionals, I'm not on board with random activists mailing abortion pills.
For example, in the past when abortion was completely prohibited I sympathize and would support the underground effort to provide some kind of abortion access. But not today.
Take the worst case we saw in the news today. The 10 year old rape victim who was refused care. On the one hand, it shows just how fucked up these laws are. On the other, her doctor took her to a neighboring state where she received the procedure. Showing that, in very significant ways, we are not in the same situation we were decades ago before Roe.
"I don’t mind if non doctors are sending abortion pills and plan B to Texas" -- I missed that day in school where the rule of law in the US only matters if we agree. It doesn't matter whether you think it's okay "just in this circumstance because that thing over there is awful, even immoral" -- can you not see that people who fought against abortion may also be taking a moral view that the life of the fetus matters? Some crazy people have used their feelings about how abortion is immoral to justify murdering doctors ("hey, it's not murder if I think the victim was acting against my morals"). This is why we have to defend the rule of law, even when it's hard. A country can't survive if there is no understanding that there are laws & punishments for breaking those laws, applied equally even if you're sympathetic to the perpetrator.
But if you are the doctor prescribing the birth control or abortion pills, you're covered with regard to the law we are discussing here. Neither of these people are MDs.
No matter what anyone thinks about Roe, it is illegal to send meds to anyone without a prescription. You don’t know people’s medical history, they may be at greater risk of stroke (hormonal BCPs are not risk free).
Yeah I had really bad reactions to certain birth control before I had to stop. Would be scary to do that without a doc or planned parenthood (where I went). I feel bad for women in those states, but a professional should be involved.
More commonly it’s family / friends in other states that obtain them legally via prescription, then mail to their relative who needs the meds (but wasn’t prescribed them).
Yea there’s some lady in Louisiana who has sent out hundreds of packs of what Dan savage refers to as m and ms. Heard an Interview somewhere (can try to look it up if you care). She might be a retired midwife but doesn’t know the people she’s mailing to (probably does not know if they are minors). I’d rather keep that and work on kids getting too much E or T in other ways than policing the US mail.
Totally with you. Red states already want to pounce on stuff like birth control and plan b and abortion bills. And I honestly dgaf if some 16 year old girl in Texas gets sent some plan b that she can keep on hand. Like, I don’t care if she’s a minor or not. I’m not going to send pills of any type to people through the mail, but I 100% agree that I don’t want the feds using the whole DIY hormones freakout as a reason to start going through our mail looking for other types of pills.
How does one obtain hundreds of packs of birth control or abortion pills without a prescription? Are they available over the counter in some states now? I don't know about policing the mail - I certainly don't want that - but if someone's dumb enough to publicly admit they're sending kids hormones without parental consent, they should be investigated.
You not being in favor of something does not make it legal. We have a justice system based on laws. Laws may suck in some states but the people can vote against state legislators, and do the hard work of getting better state laws. The only reason this sounds hard is because both parties thought it would never really fall at SCOTUS, so they amped up vitriol on both sides, Dems at the federal level never *seriously* (meaning try to at least get European level protections, which is what polls show most Americans will support... so limits after 1st trimester & exceptions for extreme problems with the baby’s health or to save the mother).
I didn't catch on to how they were doing it. Don't some states not require parental notification? Maybe they're not trafficking, but connecting them to doctors or services in those states.
Similar to what the new abortion services network is doing to get people around their local laws.
Yeah, the term came from Something Awful and it didn’t start as a negative term- SA members call themselves “goons” and it was a play on that. I think they’ve since banned the term there.
I thought it was a reference to how many Something Awful posters ended up coming out as MTF, so basically a transwoman in the style of a Something Awful transwoman.
Jesse - stop twitter replying to all of the Trans activists. They are the only ones gunning for you and much less consequential than their twitter activism on would suggest.
The target donations were at least at $20k to begin with and she kept raising it by like 10k+ increments every time the goal was reach or was close to reaching until it was at the current 100k target. You can see it all in the archives of the gofundme.
I noticed that, too. We're expected to be kind and use preferred pronouns even when the person referred to allegedly raped his frail mother? The cognitive dissonance is reaching its peak here when we're pretending a daughter raped her mother (with her girldick, of course). Even in the bits with Keffals I got tired of the "she, she, she," when the person comes off as a typical aggrieved dude hell-bent on revenge to the point of getting a site nuked from the internet bc of their "safety" -- when they're sloppy enough to let it be known (or their friend) pretty specific details that any new Google user could plug in and get a location. Ppl who are really scared do not blast their openly broadcast their lives on the internet. I don't even get what this person does to make money, talk on Twitch all day? What ppl pay money for this? Is this person an expert in something?
That people pay to watch this kind of garbage really puts my age and related cultural "outsider" status in stark relief. I can't wrap my mind around why anyone would want to listen/watch this person for more than 2 minutes.
1. Excellent episode, brilliant work Trace & Jesse for research, Jesse for reporting and Katie (so ironically) being an excellent straightman and giving sane reactions to this insanity.
(Jesse: “……..Catboi Ranch”
Katie: “nooo nononononononono”)
2. Can’t wait for Part II!!1!1!!!1
3. I was worried you weren’t going to circle back to the assault rifle claim! Glad to be mistaken.
4. I think we can agree that the lolcows aren’t the only ones getting milked in this saga. Whatever you think of Keffals, that’s some savvy entrepreneurship. And don’t forget, that was $100K US dollars. To us Canadians like the fortunes of all our maple syrup magnates combined.
There needs to be some serious inquiry into what is actually happening here. The insane amount of baseless reporting by every single “news” outlet, every service provider dropping essential services based on zero evidence, and the 24/7 ddos attacks do not make ANY sense. At all.
I’ve never seen any website be so thoroughly and rapidly suppressed without committing serious, credible crimes. Even then, it takes a long time. There were numerous spree shooters posting on 8chan & 4chan, and the Christchurch shooting (that’s being blamed on KF) was live-streamed on Facebook!
This response seems massively lopsided. KF is not a threat especially when compared to social media platforms and has never broken any laws.
Every person needs to be concerned about the gaslighting and manipulation that’s happening. I’ve never been a “MSM is filled with lies” person until now. And conveniently enough, no random person reading any of the reporting can fact check because they are even wiping out ARCHIVES!
It’s scary how we’re watching the very concept of free expression be demolished in real time. This just seems to go way beyond an online slap fight.
I absolutely agree and I’m alarmed that so many analyses are missing the mark by dwelling on who doxxed Keffals and if Null is a psycho and whether slurs are bad mmkay. What is clear is that the website was/is not a Silk Route redux -- its raison d’etre is not to foster illegal activities. That having been established, the real story clearly begins with the question of what kind of apparatus got mobilized to efface the website, why and how it was mobilized, and what the implications are for free speech in a world increasingly shaped by (and experienced through) online discourse.
Just wondering: If KF was removed from the Internet Archive, but is now on Tor, is the whole thing still intact? All of it going backwards in time?
I would read the KF SRS thread regularly (which never focused on one person, but was just about anyone who had a problem with SRS surgery) b/c I am fascinated by what goes wrong with the surgeries. (This thread was NOT for the squeamish and included graphic images of the surgical results.) I can report that in a thread like that it is a mix of people, from obvious bona fide transphobes to people genuinely concerned for the lives of young people being exploited by doctors. That it is such a diverse group is part of what makes it not only fascinating, but the kind of place that a bona fide transphobe might even begin to feel a "sympathy" or "empathy" nerve while reading the posts of fellow farmers. Posts would sometimes be deeply philosophical on this whole issue. Some posts were feminist, some were anti-feminist, some were clearly hateful, some were attempting to speak directly to trans people with great sympathy in an attempt for them to understand the dangers of surgery, to save their future health and sanity. It's the kind of place where people can absorb ideas previously alien to them. In other words, it's one of the few internet forums that was not really encased in a bubble. And to maintain that non-bubble status, and to have that kind of cross-pollination of opinion, yeah, you have to include absolutely everyone, including the assholes.
NB: No doubt there were threads that were far more "bubble" like and far meaner. I had no interest in those. Also, I was just a lurker, not a participant.
Katie makes a really good point that hadn't occurred to me before: we do a ton of hand-wringing over online doxxing.
Yet until about 15 years ago, millions of Americans were listed in a phone book that contained not only their personal phone number, but also their full home address. This phone book was available to anybody and everybody. If I recall correctly, there was a fee to have an unlisted number.
What has happened in the US that we obsess over the disclosure of information that used to be publicly available as a routine matter?
Didn't doxxing previously refer to connecting someone's online and offline personas against their will? LotT was anonymous until she wasn't (and fuck her) but that was definitely doxxing. Whereas if I know who Jesse and Katie are because they don't just use kittypurrzog as their Internet handles (I don't know Jesse's off hand)
Probably wouldn't be too hard to figure out who I am based on my Internet activity but I'm pretty sure my spouse is the only one aware of a direct connection.
I see now she is bragging on Twitter about getting the founder removed from Google voice. This seems like absolute madness. This person clearly has a Messiah complex and should not be taken seriously. What a stupid time to be alive.
If there was ever any doubt that "trans rights" isn't (in large part) a male supremacist movement, behold the speed with which narcissistic injury has obliterated a website which laughed at men.
I know, right? This shit never happened to Get Off My Internets, whose targets were 99% women.
When GOMI imploded, lots of posters went to reddit and created Blogsnark and a smaller number went to KiwiFarms where a special lady section was created for them. It was the reddit posters who doxxed the Gomi admin - her phone number, very personal family/health history were all posted there - and the KiwiFarms posters who obsessively archived it.
I am pretty sure that I first heard of KiwiFarms when the BSC mods on Blogsnark created some rule that you could not say its name or refer to it. Me: "Well, NOW I'm interested!"
I think a lot of GOMI posters ended up on lolcow.farm, which is basically KiwiFarms for menstruators and cervix-havers.
If you ever listen to his podcast the owner of Kiwi Farms, has gone a little bit feminist over the past few months. He often talks about having boards within the forum managed by women, and allowing them to moderate themselves in a way they used to on lolcow.farm. Likewise about accomodating terfs and feminists.
Related: I like to occasionally check in on the GOMI forum for Dooce (cause I’m a weirdo) and apparently she’s a transphobe now. Makes me wonder if she’s a primo (Hi Heather!!)
It says a lot about the state of the discourse now that I’m wondering if she’s actually said anything “transphobic,” or if that’s now the go-to excuse for continuing to dump on someone online. People have been being bitchy about Dooce on on GOMI for freaking decades now, but “transphobia” gives it a veneer of righteousness.
I don't love Dooce - I think it's particularly gross how much stuff she's posted about her kids. But if the post they were talking about on GOMI is the only evidence, a transphobe she is not.
Is she the one who melted down on Insta? Another site where some people are not nice to those they disagree with.
Maybe? She was one of the OG mommybloggers pre-Insta. She sued the GOMI lady (who, incidentally, also has a thread on KF) and was truly a pioneer in internet-meets-IRL drama
Ha! I commented about Dooce above before seeing this
True, and both GOMI and Blogsnark were splintered from the inside by tactics straight out of the Mean Girls playbook, which says something.
Yep! The only post I ever commented on GOMI was a recent one about how Dooce is apparently a transphobe for asking the same "hateful" questions we talk about here. My comment, defending what Dooce said, was deleted immediately and I decided not to give them anymore clicks.
XOJane!!! Fuck. Sometimes I genuinely loved it but by the time it shut down I was like...meh. Now I really miss Sassy
“My Coworkers Cake Shamed Me On My Birthday” has a special place in my heart for its obnoxiousness, and I didn’t even read it until years after xoJane stopped publishing. I like to think the author is pretty embarrassed by it now.
Ahhh. But then you missed the comment sections which could be good, but were deranged fairly often
I feel like that's a stretch to be honest. In the video they mentioned a female individual that was harassed as a result of KF's activity. I also don't fully agree with the framing of the movement as 'male supremacist' tbh.
KF doesn't target men, primarily, they find LOLcows everywhere.
As to "being a stretch" to say transactivism is male supremacism in action, well, when men are erased by being renamed "ejaculators" or "prostate havers"; when transmen are dominating sporting competitions against men half their age; when hundreds of transmen, many of whom have been convicted of rape/sexual assault, petition to be moved to men's prisons, maybe I'll change my mind.
Transmen might have an edge when it comes to competitive shooting. For some reason, biological females tend to be better long-range shooters.
Most popular sports just don't align with biological females' advantages.
Trans-women are an extremely small percentage of the population, the main advocates of a lot of the policies in prisons, sports, and changing rooms in America (and most of the rest of the western world) are female women not men. Calling them a male-supremacist movement doesn't make any sense in this instance.
They're advocating for policies that harm women by allowing males with lady feelings to access previously single-sex spaces like prisons (which is a violation of the Third Geneva Conventions rules on how prisoners of war are supposed to be treated). It's a male supremacist movement bc the benefits of allowing males to join women's athletic teams, or use their bathrooms/changing rooms, benefits men & we've seen again and again that women's feelings on any of this really don't matter to anyone pushing these policies.
How are women benefiting from making it impossible for us to have boundaries? Women are not a threat to men in the same way that men are a threat to women. Predatory males are taking advantage of gender self-ID. Data from prisons shows a greater % of trans-identified males are convicted sex offenders than compared w/ the general male population. Either (1) trans-identified males are more likely to be sex offenders, or more likely (2) predatory males are using the system to access female spaces. Neither option is good but if we're seeing that play out in prisons, where ppl should have an incentive to be on good behavior, I'm guessing the predatory males are gaming the system. So whether or not the population of TIMs is an "extremely small percentage," the cohort of sexually violent men overall now being given access to female spaces by saying the Magic Pronouns will cause harm to a greater # of women, and that risk should not be taken lightly.
USA: Almost 50% of Trans Inmates in Federal Custody for Sex Offences: http://archive.today/D2tsf
UK: ~60% 👉https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/are-sex-offenders-exploiting-trans-rights-policies-behind-bars-
Fair enough I wasn't arguing based on the reality of the movement but based on the way we should talk about it, maybe in effect it is a male-supremacist movement.
I think part of the problem is that people are getting tripped up on the fact that the outcomes of the trans rights movement benefit male supremacism, but a lot of the social enforcers are women. One doesn’t cancel out the other though.
One of the most irritating aspects of popular transactivism over the past few years has been its adherents’ refusal to lay out their terms, talk about outcomes, and have a proper debate over whether the ends do actually justify the means. Any attempt to do that has been shut down with “no debate,” and anyone who attempts to follow logical outcomes is a “transphobe” - even if the questioner is trans. The fact that a pile of women are helping to enforce this and obediently refusing to think through outcomes does seem to indicate that women can fall prey to social pressure quite easily, but it doesn’t mean the outcomes themselves don’t benefit the type of men those women would normally oppose. It’s a maddening paradox.
This podcast drives me nuts because they keep introducing me to people I'd rather not know exist.
I do think Kiwifarms is a pretty bad place, but I really don't think you can make a strong case that anything that is being done on their is really all that different/worse than stuff you see on major social media sites that no one is calling to be deplatformed.
This whole saga really just seems like a person co-opting social issues to take down a site that was airing her dirty laundry.
Before all this I had visited KiwiFarms occasionally but since Keffels started this campaign I've been on the site every day that it's been up so.... hello, Streisand effect.
On one hand, reading Kiwifarms was not good for my emotional, intellectual, or spiritual health, and it’s not a bad thing for me personally to not be able to access it.
On the other hand, where am I going to see sane updates on the utterly INsane Gretchen Martin/Nicole Cliffe romance?
obvs the censorship is a nightmare and so’s the media coverage.
I have to confess, that was the reason I visited too . . . Nicole's pretty outlandish medical claims on Instagram are what first inspired me to start investigating. I used to read the Toast back in the day and thought it was pretty good. The public personae of the two founders makes me question that assessment, though I haven't gone back to check.
Any juicy updates on Nicole? I visited Kiwi Farms for the first time last week and found it very confusing. The site needs tour guides!
This is exactly where I'm at.
I...am intrigued. And hate myself for it.
LOL maybe I’m intrigued by the requirements for joining
I'm hard pressed to think of a recent situation where a supposed victim has been as unsympathetic as Keffals has been during this entire time. I don't know how anyone could look at her history and not see that she's a complete bully and narcissist who gets off on the stupidest shit. Even while admitting that the police showing up and arresting you for something you didn't do is a terrifying experience, the way she has handled this situation and chosen to actively provoke her enemies makes it difficult to entertain taking her side in this.
Anyway, great job Katie and Jesse on delving into this story that truly exemplifies the worst of our times.
It's embarrassing how many people (including J&K) are falling for Keffals' shit. If you were genuinely scared for your life, to the point that you apparently had to flee the country, wouldn't you avoid doing ANYTHING that might lead people to you? Instead, Keffals keeps posting just enough information for people to figure out where he is, then crying about stalkers, then posting his location again. Each time he gets more press and more money. Trolls and journalists alike should be able to see through such obvious manipulation. We are truly living in the dumbest timeline.
Why does it matter to you? Third person pronouns are most often used when the person spoken about isn't even there, like now. It's hard to take comments like yours seriously and not just as a power play. Humans cannot change sex. Pretending that ppl's existence depends on whatever pronoun a random person on the internet uses for another random person on the internet is odd. Pronouns are not magic words. He's a male, and is acting like an aggrieved male.
Made it harder to understand by referring to a man as a "he" instead of "she"? We're not extras in The Truman Show. I'm not going to lie to protect the illusion that any of this is real.
Aggrieved male population +1.
Pronoun Police here ma'am. Please turn over your logins and erase yourself from existence online. Then donate to the keffels vacation fund. TY
I had no trouble, because Keffals is a man. What I find difficult is to suspend my disbelief and hear people refer to a man as "she". For real- I'm not being snarky in any way.
I have zero interest in being performative or hearing other people be performative in using pronouns when the person in question isn't even around.
Exactly. Anytime there is discussion of a TIM or a TIF I get cognitive dissonance because I know the words being used are masking the truth. And what message are we sending others by stating their sense of self depends on the willingness of others to use certain words to describe them? The "It Gets Better" campaign was powerful because it was based on appeals to our humanity, with older members of the LGB community telling LGB youth to look at their lives as a journey in time. Whereas now youth are being told that their lives depend on the words other people use to describe them. They're teaching them to be fragile.
I'm just going to follow you around loving everything you say.
[Jack Nicholson Aww Shucks GIF]
Someone who clearly drinks their refill of kool-aid every day, I'm shocked you listen to this podcast. How many "friends" would you lose if your entire social circle knew you listened to Jesse and Katie?
I think David E does have some issues with the wokie race stuff and seems a bit more Marxist than a proper wokie... But then we've gotten full blown MAGA cultists in here on occasion and at least he's a regular...
Should be used to the GC-adjacent "misgendering" by now though.
Sounds to me like Keffals is a ginormous POS grifter. Period.
Keffals genuinely seems like a malicious, horrible person.
MTG was also a victim of doxxing! yet something tells me that she won't get the same kid-glove treatment that Keffals got.
It's almost as if the supposed concern about doxxing is overstated & not based on deeply held principles.
Who proved keffals didn’t do it though? I didn’t see the police confirm anything or anyone take credit (possible I missed it)
Does someone whose only copy of their thesis lives on an external hard drive deserve a PhD?
Or am I just displaying backup privilege?
I invented the concept of the "cloud" 20 years ago by emailing important documents to myself. Your welcome.
I had a laptop stolen out of my hands once. It contained the only copy of my draft dissertation. I will always be grateful to the teenage boys who chased the fucker down, tackled him, and got my computer back.
I always thought those kinds of stories were apocryphal because everyone I knew had multiple back ups and paper back ups because of the fear of something happening. Hell I had back ups in different locations because I thought if my house burn down, I can’t lose my data.
Yes, that was obvious bullshit.
I'll apply a little benefit of the doubt and hanlon's razor.
Keffals doesn't appear to be the smartest person. Her partner may also fall into that category.
Doing a PhD and not having DropBox? ICloud? HMMMMM...
I was going to post the same thing. I was going through some old thumbdrives the other day and found multiple copies of ALL my papers on all five drives. I, too, have backup privilege, formerly known as paranoia.
I worked the university help desk and helped a few students who had the only copy of some important paper on a Zip disk. We didn’t grant doctorates so none of them were doctoral dissertations, but I think one was a master’s thesis.
Seriously. When I was in grad school I lost my usb drive and thus a whole paper. Luckily I had time to rewrite it but from then on I backed everything up on multiple sources. And I agree withbyou
This is as likely as the "assault rifle in my face" lie.
Was interesting hearing two Americans trying to sum up The Troubles in less than a minute (I give your summation a 7/10).
It's interesting to note that giving the recent history of the province (in the past 10 years particularly) that an LGBT person hoping to escape harassment and ill treatment decides that the best place to be safe is NORTHERN IRELAND.
Is it me or have there been more connections between trans activism and the Troubles recently with trans ideology co-opting Republican politics a bit? I can't find the article now but I think that in the Taylor Lorenz profile of the trans people doing DIY surgeries - one of the trans people seemed to be involved in that. I may have pulled this out of thin air! but it does make sense then that the person posting a bomb thread would claim to be pro Ulster. NB all this larping as IRA/Loyalist forces is in pretty bad taste.
Many Americans (and Canadians which lets face it, diet Americans) are obsessed with Ireland to a ridiculous degree. Since the queen died I've been seeing all sorts of posts about how 'all of Ireland is celebrating' when it's just a section of some fans at one football (soccer) game and some anonymous Irish twitter users.
I rarely see anyone caring about Ireland except St Patrick’s Day. Which, let’s face it, is 100% an excuse to day drink on a Tuesday.
Another great excuse for day drinking on Tuesday is....being Irish.
I count that as a big aspect of the obsession, I think it's more common in left-wing circles but I do think it's an aspect of American culture generally.
Haha. Ouch to all the Canadians. Are you American? I don't really see an American obsession with the Irish.
I mean you haven't heard you're white American friends say that they're like 2% Irish and use it as an excuse to call themselves Irish
No BUT you do bring up a good point as back in high school I had 2 teachers, one from Ireland, the other of Irish descent, ask my mom if my dad was Irish, since my mom clearly is not.
Are you American? St. Patty's Day is huge here (well, at least in the New England area). Shamrock Shakes at McDonalds, anyone? ☘️
Yes. I am in NYC, where the St. Patrick's Day parade is a drunken epic bacchanalia.
There has been a close relationship between Irish republicanism and the global left for decades. From an unsavory perspective, the IRA/pIRA/etc. had a long history of sharing weapons and training with various anticolonial and leftist groups, including the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Red Army Fraktion. I'm not surprised that the trans-specific part of the progressive blob has glommed onto this too.
As an anglophile who grew up in heavily Irish-American suburban Boston, the reflexive lefty anti-English sentiment (allegedly motivated by sympathy for Ireland) is so predictable and lazy that it just makes me roll my eyes.
I'm Irish, and spent a long time in UK. I feel really beyond angry when I see the BS of "Irish Twitter" re the queen. Yes, monarchy is weird and irritational. As are many, many aspects of our national identity. I also really cringe at the way all the motley Irish leftwing causes are getting eaten by wokeness. One day soon, Gerry Adams is going to put his pronouns in his biog and that's the day I officially want to stop the world, I have to get off.
For some reason the Republic of Ireland dove really headfirst into gender ideology. Search “Barbie Kardashian” and recoil in horror when you realize they put this psychopathic man in a woman’s prison. Ireland shares some kind of post-colonial neurosis with Canada.
I figured it was a way for these countries to forge their own modern identity, like, “look, we are anti-oppressive and kind, not evil cisgender heteronormative patriarchal colonialists like YOU. All of that rubbish came from your CoLOniALiSm”
It's the geopolitical version of the revenge-of-the-nerds movement that seems to have taken over American politics!
I know. Colonialism is rhe evilest evil that ever happened and was done by awful white men to the poor bereft people of color. Because the Ottoman Empire never happened. Japan never did a thing. And China doesn't exist as it does without some expansionist practices of its own. Add to the fact that some cultures that were colonized had done horrible things and were deeply misogynistic and homophobic. But mo. All evilscwere wrought by colonialism
I think that's a good point. We are extremely thirsty for recognition in Ireland, especially from Americans and supporting gender ideology is one way of getting it.
I wouldn't know enough about it to comment on it, but if it is the case it is in bad taste, especially given that some splinter groups from the ones that went on ceasefire are still active, a few years ago a journalist was killed in Derry after being shot by a dissident republican group whilst covering a riot there.
Although for what it's worth, if the Ellen mentioned in the podcast is the same one I'm familiar with, she is/was a member of the Green Party (which identifies as neither nationalist or unionist, and stood in the Belfast West constituency (the most nationalist constituency in NI) in the Assembly Elections in 2017 and got only 251 votes.
Was it the story about people doing illegal surgeries in a barn?
https://archive.ph/8UypE
NI is pretty safe for LGBT people though. It's obviously worse than say, most of Scotland or England or Canada but by and large if you're a young LGBT person staying in like South or central Belfast - which I'm guessing this person is because there's only one poutine place in Belfast - you're really not going to be in any particular danger compared to elsewhere. Things have gotten a LOT better over a short space of time. Obviously the story may change in staunchly loyalist areas, but bad neighbourhoods are bad, what else is new? It's not like she went to Afghanistan.
I live in S Belfast... where is the poutine place lol
I can remember, as an English 18 year old, reading a student guide that said gay people should avoid Northern Ireland and the north east of England (where I am from).
"She helps to supply hormones to trans kids w/o their parents permission." "Isn't that illegal, Jesse?" -- then Jesse says to "set that aside."
It's incredibly illegal, Jesse, even if ppl sympathetic to the issue of kids with gender dysphoria don't want to admit it. If nothing happens on the legal front to Keffals and Eli Erlick for coordinating the delivery of prescription medications, especially Schedule III drugs like testosterone -- lots of ppl are going to be hurt. Not a lawyer, but transferring meds across state lines using US mail is a federal felony. If these hormones are not administered properly there is a medical risk to people OTHER than the person using them. https://www.insider.com/testosterone-gel-toddler-puberty-early-2022-06
A f-ing doctor could lose their license for prescribing meds to a person they don't have as a patient, at any age. And here we have trans rights extremists playing pharmacist & illegally supplying minors with prescription medication & if you want to #supporTransKids I guess that's okay now?
Looking forward to the first lawsuit against one of these ppl for harming a child. They have no right to do this, no matter how right they think they are.
We have to win the cultural victory of getting people to stop feeling like a good guy in a movie for mutilating children before anyone is going to enforce laws on this. I can’t believe we’re in this state, but it seems to be where we are and getting people to flip that switch in their heads is the only way I can see to get us out of it.
This is an important part of understanding why this isn't just a slapfight about terminally online people. KiwiFarms has archived tweets and messages on discord and Twitch of this man bragging about supplying hormones to kids so their parents have no idea. And these can be from shady sources so god only knows what's in it. Not to mention the cute tweets Keffals has about raping women (just a normal thing us girls brag about to our buddies).
KF is doing the work journalists not only refuse to do but cover up for. That's why KiwiFarms is being memory-holed. The only reason this is a discussion is the owner is a stubborn bastard that won't get bullied.
The Keffals drug story and the trans lifeline story are just two of the many coverups orchestrated by TRA's and media. A big thing to note, in KF, you better bring receipts in the form of archived links if you want something added to the thread. Why? Because KF doesn't want fake and manipulated information on threads. I can't think of a single media outlet that has that standard.
I think “bringing receipts” and due process should be a systemic part of government over the whole internet. Too many people saying too many things.
"Not a lawyer, but transferring meds across state lines using US mail is a federal felony."
I don't know. Given the current situation re: abortion rights I'm really not in favor of improving the infrastructure to catch people who are mailing legally restricted medications around. Leopards + faces. If we make it normal thing to prosecute people for mailing around T it's going to happen to mailing of contraception and abortion pills even quicker.
These are NOT physicians or medical specialists. These are social media grifters, and primarily, grown ass MEN, getting kids in secret discord servers and "helping" them. Big difference. And as much as I'm disgusted about the post-Roe restrictions, this isn't a gray area.
The womens groups sending meds to women in states with draconian laws are also not MDs. The situations are not that different legally speaking.
Also if they were doctors would it really matter? Would you be surprised if activist docs would be sending T and E through the mail to basically anyone who asked? I would be surprised if they weren’t. It’s hardly solving the problem to go after Keffals - underlying problem is still that kids now think they need this and anyone keeping it from them is a bigot.
I think it matters. First, if a doctor is found to be negligent they can lose their license. They also have to carry insurance so if they lose a liability case, they can pay up.....and their insurance goes up so there's a penalty to their practice.
There also has to be a log of who they proscribed to and how much.
Whether you think what a doctor is right or wrong, the systems are in place to hold them accountable once the evidence is out.
This is dramatically different than some twitter nut sourcing blackmarket T from Mexico and mailing it to 12 year olds.
Thing is that I don’t mind if non doctors are sending abortion pills and plan B to Texas because in my opinion the laws banning them are killing women and this is a morally acceptable workaround in an untenable situation.
The same argument is made by trans activists about hormones. It’s “life saving medical care” to them as well - saving these kids from bigoted parents and a society that doesn’t care if they suffer.
It’s hard to think of the criteria here other than “well I personally think that A is OK and B is bad”
My criteria is that substances that carry medical risk should be proscribed by doctors or medical professionals (pharmacists) and not activists.
I think drugs should be fully decriminalized. But I'd feel uneasy about activists mailing oxy to just anyone that asks.
If there are a lack of doctors, pharmacists, and volunteers willing to connect you with doctor's and pharmacists to get the treatment you need, I might see the point. But since there is no dearth of access (virtual or otherwise) to professionals, I'm not on board with random activists mailing abortion pills.
For example, in the past when abortion was completely prohibited I sympathize and would support the underground effort to provide some kind of abortion access. But not today.
Take the worst case we saw in the news today. The 10 year old rape victim who was refused care. On the one hand, it shows just how fucked up these laws are. On the other, her doctor took her to a neighboring state where she received the procedure. Showing that, in very significant ways, we are not in the same situation we were decades ago before Roe.
"I don’t mind if non doctors are sending abortion pills and plan B to Texas" -- I missed that day in school where the rule of law in the US only matters if we agree. It doesn't matter whether you think it's okay "just in this circumstance because that thing over there is awful, even immoral" -- can you not see that people who fought against abortion may also be taking a moral view that the life of the fetus matters? Some crazy people have used their feelings about how abortion is immoral to justify murdering doctors ("hey, it's not murder if I think the victim was acting against my morals"). This is why we have to defend the rule of law, even when it's hard. A country can't survive if there is no understanding that there are laws & punishments for breaking those laws, applied equally even if you're sympathetic to the perpetrator.
But if you are the doctor prescribing the birth control or abortion pills, you're covered with regard to the law we are discussing here. Neither of these people are MDs.
Most of the people sending abortion pills to people in red states that need them are not doctors either. But they are saving lives by doing so.
No matter what anyone thinks about Roe, it is illegal to send meds to anyone without a prescription. You don’t know people’s medical history, they may be at greater risk of stroke (hormonal BCPs are not risk free).
If it's not prescription medication, then fine. If it is prescription, that's illegal and I'm ok with prosecuting.
There are plenty of doctors that will telemedicine the prescription meds.
That's not leopards eating faces. It's good medical sense. . . .
*edit*
Pretty sure even the over the counter needs to come from a pharmacist.
Yeah I had really bad reactions to certain birth control before I had to stop. Would be scary to do that without a doc or planned parenthood (where I went). I feel bad for women in those states, but a professional should be involved.
Is that true? And are any of them minors? This certainly creates an ethical wrinkle.
More commonly it’s family / friends in other states that obtain them legally via prescription, then mail to their relative who needs the meds (but wasn’t prescribed them).
Yea there’s some lady in Louisiana who has sent out hundreds of packs of what Dan savage refers to as m and ms. Heard an Interview somewhere (can try to look it up if you care). She might be a retired midwife but doesn’t know the people she’s mailing to (probably does not know if they are minors). I’d rather keep that and work on kids getting too much E or T in other ways than policing the US mail.
Totally with you. Red states already want to pounce on stuff like birth control and plan b and abortion bills. And I honestly dgaf if some 16 year old girl in Texas gets sent some plan b that she can keep on hand. Like, I don’t care if she’s a minor or not. I’m not going to send pills of any type to people through the mail, but I 100% agree that I don’t want the feds using the whole DIY hormones freakout as a reason to start going through our mail looking for other types of pills.
How does one obtain hundreds of packs of birth control or abortion pills without a prescription? Are they available over the counter in some states now? I don't know about policing the mail - I certainly don't want that - but if someone's dumb enough to publicly admit they're sending kids hormones without parental consent, they should be investigated.
You not being in favor of something does not make it legal. We have a justice system based on laws. Laws may suck in some states but the people can vote against state legislators, and do the hard work of getting better state laws. The only reason this sounds hard is because both parties thought it would never really fall at SCOTUS, so they amped up vitriol on both sides, Dems at the federal level never *seriously* (meaning try to at least get European level protections, which is what polls show most Americans will support... so limits after 1st trimester & exceptions for extreme problems with the baby’s health or to save the mother).
I didn't catch on to how they were doing it. Don't some states not require parental notification? Maybe they're not trafficking, but connecting them to doctors or services in those states.
Similar to what the new abortion services network is doing to get people around their local laws.
Re: Twitch. They'll permit it until they inevitably get sued someday.
Instinctively I feel like 'troon' doesn't mean 'trans activist' as much as 'trans person with AGP who doesn't pass well and is kind of cringey online'
Yeah, the term came from Something Awful and it didn’t start as a negative term- SA members call themselves “goons” and it was a play on that. I think they’ve since banned the term there.
I thought it was a reference to how many Something Awful posters ended up coming out as MTF, so basically a transwoman in the style of a Something Awful transwoman.
I thought Troon currently meant TRA's with anime/cartoon avatars. Key example would be Ana Mardell (sp?).
Jesse - stop twitter replying to all of the Trans activists. They are the only ones gunning for you and much less consequential than their twitter activism on would suggest.
Jesse's twitter addiction is genuinely concerning. Constantly arguing with the dumbest people on the internet is bad for your mental health.
There's a reason these twitter people spend their whole lives on the internet.
I need that as a tattoo.
Seriously Jesse, I'm grateful for your research but just ignoring the people who want to gain asspats on Twitter will greatly improve your life.
Say it with me people: Don't. Feed. The. Trolls.
Correction on the Keffals gofundme:
The target donations were at least at $20k to begin with and she kept raising it by like 10k+ increments every time the goal was reach or was close to reaching until it was at the current 100k target. You can see it all in the archives of the gofundme.
You really said "she raped her mother" with a straight face? If ever there was an argument against using preferred pronouns, this is it.
I noticed that, too. We're expected to be kind and use preferred pronouns even when the person referred to allegedly raped his frail mother? The cognitive dissonance is reaching its peak here when we're pretending a daughter raped her mother (with her girldick, of course). Even in the bits with Keffals I got tired of the "she, she, she," when the person comes off as a typical aggrieved dude hell-bent on revenge to the point of getting a site nuked from the internet bc of their "safety" -- when they're sloppy enough to let it be known (or their friend) pretty specific details that any new Google user could plug in and get a location. Ppl who are really scared do not blast their openly broadcast their lives on the internet. I don't even get what this person does to make money, talk on Twitch all day? What ppl pay money for this? Is this person an expert in something?
That people pay to watch this kind of garbage really puts my age and related cultural "outsider" status in stark relief. I can't wrap my mind around why anyone would want to listen/watch this person for more than 2 minutes.
10 min from the end, have to say:
1. Excellent episode, brilliant work Trace & Jesse for research, Jesse for reporting and Katie (so ironically) being an excellent straightman and giving sane reactions to this insanity.
(Jesse: “……..Catboi Ranch”
Katie: “nooo nononononononono”)
2. Can’t wait for Part II!!1!1!!!1
3. I was worried you weren’t going to circle back to the assault rifle claim! Glad to be mistaken.
4. I think we can agree that the lolcows aren’t the only ones getting milked in this saga. Whatever you think of Keffals, that’s some savvy entrepreneurship. And don’t forget, that was $100K US dollars. To us Canadians like the fortunes of all our maple syrup magnates combined.
There needs to be some serious inquiry into what is actually happening here. The insane amount of baseless reporting by every single “news” outlet, every service provider dropping essential services based on zero evidence, and the 24/7 ddos attacks do not make ANY sense. At all.
I’ve never seen any website be so thoroughly and rapidly suppressed without committing serious, credible crimes. Even then, it takes a long time. There were numerous spree shooters posting on 8chan & 4chan, and the Christchurch shooting (that’s being blamed on KF) was live-streamed on Facebook!
This response seems massively lopsided. KF is not a threat especially when compared to social media platforms and has never broken any laws.
Every person needs to be concerned about the gaslighting and manipulation that’s happening. I’ve never been a “MSM is filled with lies” person until now. And conveniently enough, no random person reading any of the reporting can fact check because they are even wiping out ARCHIVES!
It’s scary how we’re watching the very concept of free expression be demolished in real time. This just seems to go way beyond an online slap fight.
I absolutely agree and I’m alarmed that so many analyses are missing the mark by dwelling on who doxxed Keffals and if Null is a psycho and whether slurs are bad mmkay. What is clear is that the website was/is not a Silk Route redux -- its raison d’etre is not to foster illegal activities. That having been established, the real story clearly begins with the question of what kind of apparatus got mobilized to efface the website, why and how it was mobilized, and what the implications are for free speech in a world increasingly shaped by (and experienced through) online discourse.
Just wondering: If KF was removed from the Internet Archive, but is now on Tor, is the whole thing still intact? All of it going backwards in time?
I would read the KF SRS thread regularly (which never focused on one person, but was just about anyone who had a problem with SRS surgery) b/c I am fascinated by what goes wrong with the surgeries. (This thread was NOT for the squeamish and included graphic images of the surgical results.) I can report that in a thread like that it is a mix of people, from obvious bona fide transphobes to people genuinely concerned for the lives of young people being exploited by doctors. That it is such a diverse group is part of what makes it not only fascinating, but the kind of place that a bona fide transphobe might even begin to feel a "sympathy" or "empathy" nerve while reading the posts of fellow farmers. Posts would sometimes be deeply philosophical on this whole issue. Some posts were feminist, some were anti-feminist, some were clearly hateful, some were attempting to speak directly to trans people with great sympathy in an attempt for them to understand the dangers of surgery, to save their future health and sanity. It's the kind of place where people can absorb ideas previously alien to them. In other words, it's one of the few internet forums that was not really encased in a bubble. And to maintain that non-bubble status, and to have that kind of cross-pollination of opinion, yeah, you have to include absolutely everyone, including the assholes.
NB: No doubt there were threads that were far more "bubble" like and far meaner. I had no interest in those. Also, I was just a lurker, not a participant.
Yes, and Null had previously said on telegram that if worst came to worst, he would anonymize all forum content and put it in a torrent.
Katie makes a really good point that hadn't occurred to me before: we do a ton of hand-wringing over online doxxing.
Yet until about 15 years ago, millions of Americans were listed in a phone book that contained not only their personal phone number, but also their full home address. This phone book was available to anybody and everybody. If I recall correctly, there was a fee to have an unlisted number.
What has happened in the US that we obsess over the disclosure of information that used to be publicly available as a routine matter?
a) before the internet you weren't getting into rage fueled arguments with strangers. The
'letters to the editor' page was your best option.
b) people learned they could weaponize dox info for swat attacks
c) The Terminator
First thing I thought of when Katie made this point. The point is still valid! But also...Sarah Connor.
Which Terminator (my teen self had a dumb crush on what’s his name in the 2nd one).
The evil Ahnold one from the original film was the Terminator who was fond of murdering with only a phonebook and a laser sight to guide him.
In the second film, the evil Terminator was a shapeshifter who mostly stayed in cop form and ran EXTREMELY AERODYNAMICALLY.
A-ha. Thank you.
I would give this 1000 stars if I could.
Even more extreme: pre-WW2 it wasn't uncommon for telephone books to also list your place of employment/type of job next to your residential listing!
Didn't doxxing previously refer to connecting someone's online and offline personas against their will? LotT was anonymous until she wasn't (and fuck her) but that was definitely doxxing. Whereas if I know who Jesse and Katie are because they don't just use kittypurrzog as their Internet handles (I don't know Jesse's off hand)
Probably wouldn't be too hard to figure out who I am based on my Internet activity but I'm pretty sure my spouse is the only one aware of a direct connection.
I see now she is bragging on Twitter about getting the founder removed from Google voice. This seems like absolute madness. This person clearly has a Messiah complex and should not be taken seriously. What a stupid time to be alive.