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Kiwi should not have done that, and should have ramped up their actions against Keffals even further, while staking out a clear position that Cloudflare is no ally of theirs. Do not kowtow to your enemies in the hopes they take pity on you. Not only does it never work, it's spiritually emasculating and deeply shameful.
Ah yes, wouldn’t want the spiritually honorable trad masculinity of kiwifarms to be compromised
The spark of humanity can burn in even the meanest breast.
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I don't disagree that the farms are likely not very traditional or masculine, but I still judge them poorly by those metrics.
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Empires, nations, countries, and large entities "kowtow to their enemies" in specific ways all the time, strategically, for success. Whether as a trick or just to reduce likelihood of death. Every historical figure we see as masculine or honorable or powerful did things to appease others constantly. They also took action to slaughter their enemies, hear the lamentations of their women, etc - and often more latter than former (or often the reverse) - but refusing to make any concessions, even if they help you win overall, is very stupid and means you lose.
Kiwifarms' actions are already constrained in a million ways by conventional morality, the state, and what hosting platforms are allowed to do. So are yours, so are mine, so are everyone's, it will always be "how constrained, and in what way", not "unconstrained". For instance, Josh can't even enter a gentlemen's duel with Prince - extremely dishonorable! Nor can they - legally - break into keffals' internet accounts and get stuff (despite some members either doing so or reporting so on the forum). And they would do the latter a lot more if they could. They already censor dox, putting it behind a login-to-view box - already kowtowing! And they already submit to their enemies in practice by being subject to the "Cathedral" - as josh named in the post - 's legal system, economic system, and society. Staking a post in some minor, specific subconflict that happens to be particularly obvious at the moment is just a strategic error.
These are not warring states and militaries. Kiwifarms has no ability to threaten or harm Cloudflare, and so 'buying time' is pointless. Cloudflare will always stomp on them so long as they use Cloudflare's services. The only right move is to refuse to heel and find someone else.
kiwifarms.net says: Due to an imminent and emergency threat to human life, the content of this site is blocked from being accessed through Cloudflare’s infrastructure. For more details, please see: https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiwifarms-blocked/
Likely, the causes were both internal and external pressure and specific, recent posts on kiwifarms or elsewhere that cloudflare interpreted to be an "imminent and emergency threat to human life". Kiwifarms should have attempted to reduce outward signs of the latter to keep their site up. It might - or even probably wouldn't - have worked, but is worth doing anyway.
Some users might argue otherwise - "we're spreading the truth, how disgusting the libs are, they can't let people see it because the regime would collapse". Most kiwis aren't there, it really is just a site for laughing at freaks, but there were a few posts to that effect that got a bunch of positive reactions. Ofc this is ... not entirely wrong, but wrong in every important way there's probably some impact of kiwifarms existing, but not in any simple way like that.
Yeah, if they had somewhere else to go. Josh isn't optimistic, as the recent t.me post shows. "refusing to heel", and having CF take away your site, is still losing. It's much, much worse for both 'laughing at lolcows' and 'spreading how disgusting trans grooming is' than wordfiltering the word 'bomb'.
Kiwifarms has taken hundreds of actions exactly like 'censoring a bit more to survive' over the past decade. Claiming this one is dishonorable ... it's a website for laughing at lolcows. If a bull running at you, you should move out of the way, whether you can shoot it later or not.
"Finding a gun to shoot the bull with" and "not moving out of the way" aren't the same action, at all. The latter doesn't help you win. Just because some meekly let the bull rampage - the answer isn't "letting it hit you in the chest".
There is no gun that can shoot Cloudflare. There is no action that can be taken against Cloudflare now or in the future. Cloudflare wants them gone, and is committed to their existential termination. Bowing down to them is simply pathetic behavior that will not change the outcome. Groveling is always the wrong move, even if they can find no other refuge.
Cloudflare is not a charging bull. It's not a mindless animal. It's a collection of thinking, reasoned sadists, who want Kiwifarms gone but more than that want Kiwifarms humiliated and broken. Being removed is inevitable; giving Cloudflare more satisfaction is wholly unnecessary.
I think what the other poster is trying to say is that instrumentally it's much more effective to pretend deference for a while, then do exactly what you are suggesting - migrate to another venue and hopefully keep 'fighting the fight', whatever that means to them.
This type of aggressive and short-sighted thinking is a large reason why censorship has successfully killed off so many communities, in my mind. We are incredibly lucky that the mods had the forethought to migrate the community before we were killed off as well.
To put it another way, do you think Cloudflare would be 'more satisfied' with a successful migration of the community, or with the current situation?
This type of aggressive and short-sighted thinking is not, actually, why censorship has worked, because communities constantly appease and slowly wither rather than do what I say.
If there was a way to prevent the slow withering of these communities, and turn it around to force the state to change, would that be more appealing to you than violence?
ETA: Not that I know of a mystical solution, but I think it is worth finding. Right now I'd tentatively agree that violence is at least a surefire way of getting what you want, if you have the skills to use it well.
Ultimately, though I do sincerely advocate in favor of political violence, it would perhaps be more accurate to say I advocate most for direct and immediate action; I think intelligent people, in this community and others, far too often fall into a mental trap where instead of decisively resolving a situation for better or worse they drag it out because they're afraid. They put too much thought into consequences, too much thought into risk, and inevitably conclude that this fight isn't worth fighting.
And they conclude the next one isn't, either.
And the one after that.
Every time, there are many good, valid, sensible arguments for submission, and a scarcity of sensible arguments for defiance. Yet if you cede all ground because you're afraid of risk, eventually there is no more ground to cede. 'Death before surrender' is not merely a pithy phrase; a group that internalizes that message and acts in accordance with it will make hostile powers think twice and be more cautious, because even if they can win it will happen at a cost.
If you fight, you might lose. This is true. I can't deny it: if the American Right embraced my violent outlook, it is possible I, and people who share my values, would be crushed to paste and die miserably, or be imprisoned, or tortured, or paraded as a vanquished foe as a status symbol for the progressive elite. It's also possible we'd win. It's also possible we'd lose, but exact enough of a blood price from the left that they back off and treat the survivors with more respect and permit more autonomy.
The only guaranteed outcome is that if we always surrender, we definitely lose. You have to be a fighter.
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"If you behave like a rabid dog, don't be surprised if you get taken behind the shed and shot"
It is easy to mistake the leeriness of members of a society you find yourself opposing some key elements of for irredeemable, minus-infinity-level hostility that the only dignified response for you is to fight with all your might, but the natural consequence is then that every time you fight back against someone, more members get leery of you, until you are left standing alone against everyone. Sometimes dissidents who contain their righteous anger and try to work with those organs of society that are predisposed against them fail miserably anyway, but it seems quite clear that 100% of those that do not contain it do. Of course, it may be that you value a great chance of coming out looking more dignified to yourself in your loss higher than a small chance of not losing, but then forgive me if I don't want to participate in your particular rebellion and prefer one that is in it for victory rather than aesthetics.
Strange - I see large segments of society behave like rabid dogs, and instead of being shot they secure victory after victory and bathe in endless rewards for mashing defect in the prisoner's game we call coexistence. How curious that society bends over backwards to appease left-approved violence, but right-approved violence is surely doomed to failure. Why, it must just be a simple rule of nature that bad things only work for leftists.
Alternatively, perhaps bad things just work, period, and there's an influential chunk of society keenly interested in making sure their enemy tribe doesn't realize this.
this is exactly what moldbug's terrorism as folk activism or breivik was about. The left can kill and smash as much as they want because they're left wing, and because SOME in power supported them. If you shoot keffals, nobody's gonna support you. No NLG will break you out. No politicians will pardon you. You'll just be all over the internet as christchurch 2, shooting a bunch of fweaking innocent people for no reason, evil right wingers are a threat to society.
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The problem is that in this metaphor, capturing (and, of course, exaggerating) the vast difference in institutional power, only you are the dog. A dog can see its fellow dogs getting kicked, dragged around by the leash and euthanised by "rabid" humans, but lashing out at its human owner when the human owner already thinks of it as a problem dog will lead to worse outcomes than, say, becoming the maximally instagrammable pomeranian that has trained its dog mommy so much that it's really not clear anymore who exactly owns whom.
"How curious that society bends over backwards to appease human-approved violence, but dog-approved violence is surely doomed to failure"
A sufficiently brutish dog can kill a full-grown man. If you must lose, take someone down with you.
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Alternatively, maybe things only work for leftists, good or bad.
Yeah, that's certainly something the leftist leviathan would want to convince people of. Color me skeptical.
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This is about where I am, too. It seems that the moral high ground is more of a cliff edge off which you will inevitably be pushed.
You remember the post about how a system that optimises for only one metric will eventually end up sacrificing all others in pursuit of it? It's that, and the criteria is victory. You're either willing to sacrifice everything to win, or you're destined to lose.
You have to be willing to burn and salt the earth.
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Agreed. Personally the fact that modern society has by and large rejected using outright, violent force to solve disputes is something that makes me quite happy.
If we start to push violence against others as a way to settle disputes, we risk falling back into the pre-modern hellhole of constant warfare and massive, cyclical societal devastation.
It's easy to reject using force when you already control all the other means of solving disputes.
Hmmm good point. I don't reject using force per-se, but I'm more inline with curiously_straight_CA that if you're going to use force, especially against the progressive leviathan, you had better be damn sure it works. 'If you come at the king, you'd best not miss' and all that. That's my more fundamental disagreement with this line of thinking.
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This doesn't make sense given the way cloudflare acted. Probably Prince genuinely wanted to keep them, and chose to ban them for a variety of complicated (this does not imply good) reasons. I'm suggesting there were ways to influence the contingencies such that kiwi might've survived longer. The long article about "why we wouldn't refuse services" and then immediately after banning for supposed extreme risk isn't compatible with cloudflare "wanting them gone, certainly, entirely", because ... of how long prince kept them when most other companies wouldn't have. they could've just kicked kiwifarms years ago, there've been several such campaigns in the past. Again, this doesn't mean they wouldn't have anyway in practice, no matter what they did, i'm not sure tbh.
can you clarify the context in which you argue this? Groveling is a very useful move for people, organizations, even nations, and has saved many from death - which is why it exists. And "temporarily banning certain words in the thread" (and - not even telling anyone you're doing that) is not groveling in any obvious sense.
this doesn't make sense at all. cloudflare kept kiwifarms up until a large social media campaign to drop them. and ... "sadists"? what? how are they sadists? "humiliated and broken"?
Even if the libs/cathedral/etc are your mortal enemy in every possible way, that doesn't mean they are "sadists" and "want to humiliate cloudflare in every way because they are sadists".
Hard disagree. It makes perfect sense as I've argued elsewhere, which is how I was able to accurately predict Cloudflare's actions and was not caught off guard, unlike many who thought differently. Cloudflare is a tentacle of Left, Inc., and its facade of libertarian attitude is a relic of Old Internet mores which no longer exist and are no longer believed in. The progressive leviathan will continue to crush, oppress, and destroy, and there is nothing anyone can do to change it from the inside. No matter how much you beg your masters to take pity on you, they will not. They do not have it in their hearts.
The only path to success, long-term, is a total rejection of the progressive beast. Gather state power and martial power; accumulate resources; take both legal and extra-legal means to inflict harm on the corporations and the people that comprise them.
You know what won't stop Keffals? Fedposting bomb threats. You know what would stop Keffals? Actually doing it. You know what won't sway Prince? Apologizing, groveling, sniveling, accommodating. You know what would? Imposing costs on him as a person.
This is something the progressives have learned much, much better than non-progressives, for whatever reason. Progressives have a total war mentality. It works.
It's absolutely groveling in an obvious sense. It's the same thing Zorba did with AEO on Reddit for ages, with the end result being we're all here, anyway. Sucking off your betters so that they can enjoy the sadistic thrill of watching you squirm unhappily might buy you some time, but it will never actually lead to a good outcome for you. Just bite it.
That's just unfalsifiable booing better suited for the other place. "Everything someone does that's aligned with people I hate is evidence of them being a tentacle of The Devil, and everything they do that isn't is just a relic".
"This is unfalsifiable booing", sun declares, seemingly wholly unaware that Cloudflare did in fact just betray all their nominal principles in service to the agenda of Left, Inc.
Yeah, no. It's been falsified. Deal with it.
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Do you not think the fact that these 'betters' enjoy flexing their power is a weakness that can be exploited, even if you subscribe to a total war mindset?
In theory, sure, you could kowtow to a sadist so they lower their guard. In practice, there's no real way for Kiwifarms to do that to Cloudflare. What would them dropping their guard even look like?
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But it "proves too much" - if cloudflare was entirely anti-kiwifarms, they would've folded in 2017, surely?
there are literally multiple different people in cloudflare. Prince is the CEO and as such probably makes decisions, but he does so for reasons, needs to make his people happy, investors, customers, etc.
Actually killing keffals would ... uh ... not help stop progressives? It'd give them way more reason to fight back, while not materially impacting them at all (he's a random trans streamer popular on twitter). You'd argue that the way to stop christians was showing jesus's body really obviously on the cross, making it crystal clear his hands were bleeding, just in case any peasants missed it. Tell the world about john brown, so they learn from his example!
Okay, so you're kicked, then you bite. And what happens to dogs that bite? They get put down. This is the strategy - "this dog is dangerous. he bites when we kick him". Provoke the right, use their fighting back as an excuse to totally destroy them. Biting doesn't stop the progressives. Actually taking power would - killing keffals takes as much power away from progressives as calling them 'racist' does
It's fun to make your enemies squirm. It's fun to make them obey you. It's fun to gather them in one place as a harmless boogeyman you can point to to help conjure up public support and sympathy. Up until they stop being so harmless, and someone actually wants to send a message, at which point there is nothing that can be done.
Agreed. Prince is the most public-facing of the tentacles, not the only one.
I am still unsure to what extent I can advocate political violence here. Suffice to say "if you kill your enemies they win" was silly when Trudeau said it, and it's silly when you say it. You would in fact stop progressivism in its tracks if being a degenerate strongly elevated your risk of death. See: why even the woke don't tend to touch Islam.
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