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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Update on Kiwi Farms:

It's not looking good. DDoS-Guard dropped them without warning. There has been no communication from them to anyone explaining their decision. (EDIT: See below.) Some speculate it was because of yet another false flag fedposter who lurked for 3 years before posting a blatant bomb threat that was promptly deleted by moderators in less than 20 minutes, but not before being screenshotted and posted to Keffals's Twitter.

Regardless, the site is off the clearnet and is now only accessible through Tor. Site owner Null has released a statement that says, among other things, the current host will likely give up too, along with the other two potential hosts he's looking at towards for moving.

EDIT: DDoS-Guard have released a statement. They were getting tons of complaints from users that it violated their acceptable use policy and thus found it fit to take matters into their own hands instead of waiting for law enforcement to tell them. Not surprising, tbh.

the update from kiwifarms - "In my life, there is a family emergency. It has absolutely nothing to do with the forum drama. I cannot and will not elaborate further. There will be a week or more where I am completely unavailable and it is likely the site will go down during this time where I will not be able to bring it up."

"We have one host and I am looking at two more. It is likely that the host will give up too. The two hosts confident they can handle the Kiwi Farms are probably wrong. DDoS-Guard was confident they could handle the Kiwi Farms and said "bring it on" for less than 24 hours."

There isn't any good evidence cloudflare's dropping them was just caused by the claimed false flag post - just bc it was going around on twitter doesn't mean it's the sole cause. There were likely many other comments in the thread that bordered on illegal activity, or seemed so to cloudflare. Kiwi should've aggressively moderated them, for the moment, just strategically. Temporarily killing the keffals thread, while a potentially more effective mitigation, would strike at the heart of kiwifarms' laughing at lolcows/drama purpose - but more aggressive moderation to save the entire thing would have probably been a good move. Not that it would've saved them, maybe just given it a few more days - but for the small chance it did, they should've wordfiltered 'bomb' or something. (this isn't about whether the speech is harmful, rdrama/kiwi policy is fine, please don't accuse me of being a lib for the 50th time, not interesting discussion)

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.

I don't disagree that the farms are likely not very traditional or masculine, but I still judge them poorly by those metrics.