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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   24081 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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The FBI discovered Dread Pirate Roberts via a years-old public forum post under is pseudonym (or used alternate construction, but still, it was possible).

If you're going to run a multibillion dollar drug empire, then you should take the appropriate opsec measures. In this regard, the feds have the ability to subpoena/EDR, effectively making all "private" data on the site accessible to them, but I don't think we should suspect alternate construction when his opsec was that bad.

On the Kiwi Farms, we take appropriate opsec measures to not get doxed, including using an alternate email address and not revealing personal details. We do want the ability to speak freely, but we also recognize that it's not really possible to do that under your real name in a world where saying "that" in your native language can earn the ire of the cancel mob. As Scott Alexander said, society is fixed, biology opsec is mutable.

And even then, limit the range so justice is reasonable (e.g. if someone mildly betrayed their friend, probably tell their friend but don’t ruin their life).

This isn't a useful or achievable maxim in practice. Once you tell someone, you can't really control what they do with that information. If the friend wants to ruin their life, you can say you don't want that, but you can't stop them from doing it. People are terrible at keeping secrets.

It's probably better for you to only tell the friend, because if the friend ruins their life in response, that's their responsibility and not yours. But the consequences are likely to be the same. Whether that means you're less morally culpable for what happens afterward depends on your moral philosophy.

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