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The War on Kiwi Farms: The Kiwis Fight Back
I'm sure everyone here knows of the controversial site Kiwi Farms, which has been endlessly accused of facilitating online harassment, and endlessly deplatformed. The site's defense has always been that it doesn't do that, the content is completely legal in the United States, and it's just a neutral observer, and with very limited exceptions (namely protecting Chris Chan until 2021, and interfering with zoosadists), I've found that to largely be the case. But I always wondered if this attitude left them vulnerable to just being attacked endlessly like this. Like, if bad actors know that this site won't actually fight back in any way, wouldn't you expect that they would just relentlessly attack it, since they're more-or-less free to do it?
Well, recently, they've actually started doing it. They're using the tactics that have been most effective in deplatforming them, and turning it on others. Namely, filing abuse complaints with upstreams and accusing sites of violating their AUP (which stands for Acceptable Use Policy). Their first target, thematically enough for an anti-trans site, is DIY HRT, as in HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) that isn't dispensed directly from a licensed pharmacy, often homemade and imported in to the country from shady international sources.
DIY HRT sites exist in a very legal gray area, because they more-or-less undeniably facilitate the sale of unlicensed pharmaceuticals. There have been credible reports of the drugs being manufactured in really unsafe and unclean conditions, leading to issues like clearly visible human hair in a vial that's meant to be injected into your bloodstream. Furthermore, the demographic they serve raises child welfare concerns - children are the demographic most likely to be unable to access legal HRT and/or want to keep their HRT on the down low from others - and some of the marketing/labeling on the items is quite blatant (in one case, text reads "Keep away from parents" and the image is of a childlike figure). Naturally, these are the reasons Kiwi Farms uses to file abuse complaints with upstreams. And they're doing it quite openly - there's a public thread on the site where they coordinate and give information on filing abuse complaints. So has it worked?
Looking at the DIY HRT wiki, they list several DIY HRT sites that have been taken down by complaints, so certainly looks like it has. It's gotten to the point that I had to look through an archive of the DIY HRT wiki, because I couldn't connect to the live site. The irony is that, just like Kiwi Farms themselves, the sites haven't actually been taken down for good - they just hop to another web host, domain registrar, email provider, and they're back in business. And the biggest irony of all is that the DIY HRT camp don't have any recourse for this. On their subreddit, one person asks "What is stopping doing the same to KF?" and the answer is "It has been done to KF already." What are they going to do exactly, attempt to take down a site that has spent years hardening itself against being taken down? One is reminded of the Chinese parable where the penalty for being late is death. They can't be more mean to Kiwi Farms, because trans activists have already spent years being as maximally mean as possible to Kiwi Farms, kicking them out of almost every single web host and domain registrar in the world, and all that has resulted in is a horde of people pissed off that their site is being taken down by trans activism, now radicalized against the trans movement. They've been put in a situation where they can either lose, or lose but also take down others with them, and in that respect I don't blame them for finally, finally, starting to fight back.
This is absolutely irrelevant to anything you are saying, but man, I had forgotten how biting some of the earlier SSC posts are.
Age really does make congenial, erudite but uninteresting milksops of us all.
Oh I think Scott can still push out bangers when he wants to, his fiction is still just as good, it's more he doesn't want to agitate the powers that be much more, which makes sense once your public name is out there.
I wager it's more because he prizes staying in the good graces of his immediate social circle, if memory serves, the dude who happened to date (marry?) his non-binary ex Ozzy leaked private emails from Scott where he acknowledges his surreptitious belief in HBD, which is an unpopular stance to hold in the EA community (and partially taboo in Rat circles like LW). This would be obvious to anyone who read his OG blog, before SSC, covering his trip to provide medical aid to Haiti.
This isn't to deny that he probably didn't like the controversy from the NYT exposé, but from a more detached perspective, it didn't really do him any harm and a lot of good. He garnered a great deal of sympathy, even from his opponents, and his Substack made >250k annually shortly after he opened it. That is already median wage for a US doctor, and at this point I expect it's long eclipsed his regular income.
And he wasn't really susceptible to cancelation in the sense of being sacked and left unemployed, it takes quite a bit to do that to a doctor, and short of being struck off the register for gross malpractice, they have the option of doing private consultation or heading to places with good salaries but more flexible standards in who they hire.
Another reason I hold that opinion is because he still criticizes what might well be called essential elements of the PTB, such as calling for the FDA to be, if not delenda est, significantly reformed.
The things he posted after the expose were a lot more milquetoast. I'd say it did a lot of harm.
Harm to the diversity of his writing? Sure. Material harm to him, be it financially or through social ostracism? Quite the opposite.
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