turkeysandwich's comments

The city is expected to police all crime regardless. The car manufacturer might (or might not) have some duty to the customer in this area, but certainly not the city for contributing to a crime increase.

You might as well say that a company that produces an exceptionally desirable product, one that perhaps entices thieves, would be responsible for a crime increase.

I wasn't claiming that they're literally ponzi schemes. Clearly they're sanctioned by law, obviously I wasn't arguing otherwise.

I was simply using "ponzi scheme" in the more casual, euphemistic sense of "skeevy unsustainable scheme that will screw people over".

And like I said, I don't believe all pension schemes to be dishonest/poorly executed. Some are just fine. But many are sloppy and poorly managed. A few are even so poorly managed to an extent that I'd say it borders on fraud, if not legally, at least morally. (I don't think that's common, necessarily; I think most mismanaged pension plans are entered into with the best of intentions.)

> Taxpayers and pensioners are not investors. They are people who want to live a descent life.

I'm not blaming them. They're victims of this poor management.

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...

This article paints a rosy outlook. And indeed, it's good news overall. But 35 state pensions meeting their goals means that 15 aren't. That's worth criticism.

It's a Ponzi scheme when it's not sustainable.

Social Security in the US, for example is not financially viable in its current form. Either the retirement age will need to be raised or its obligations will need to be abandoned, probably a bit of both.

Some but not all European pension schemes are facing similar problems.

"The notorious doxxing site might have been the last stand for free expression online"

> dogpiling a single person based on their gender identity

Now that's the real dishonest euphemism. You don't seem to actually know what was discussed on the site.

The material form that discussion on KF took was always tied to actual things normal people find worthy of criticism. Not their gender identity. Not their physical appearance. Not their ethnicity.

Those things ranged from more mild issues, maybe merely matters of taste, to more serious issues.

With the mild issues, the criticism on the site was appropriately mild. No one got angry or vitriolic because some dumb youtuber has dumb takes on movies. They laugh about it and discuss it. (Or if a one-off user got angry, the KF community would respond something like "lol calm down you weirdo". It was not remotely accepted or encouraged.)

Now, beyond that, the more serious issues included lots of appalling behavior. People ripping people off. Child abuse. Animal abuse. Sexual assault.

Like, for example, the main person spearheading this campaign has engaged sexually with minors online. Yet in an effort to cover this up, this person managed to get the ear of a company that protects ~17% of the internet from illegal DDoS attacks. They managed to convince this company to stop protecting KF from illegal, censorious DDoS attacks. KF is the sole place where their predatory behavior was documented extensively, with receipts.

And to add another layer to this disturbing situation, not a single mainstream journalist has brought this issue up. The motivation of this person to take the site down has not been mentioned in a single article I've read.

Does this disturb you? I mean, maybe you've read an article in a mainstream news outlet that presented that conflict of interest honestly, but I sure haven't.

This should disturb any right thinking person.

Bullying is the realm of children, or maybe adults in a workplace scenario. Certainly not an argument to raise when being criticized for one's public behavior. That's wholly inappropriate and seeing people weaponize it to censor that criticism is disturbing. It's very Orwellian.

> inevitable casual consequence

What consequences are those? I cannot think of a single real life consequence for anyone being discussed on KF, unique to KF, short of the mere fact that people's dirty laundry was being preserved for public comment.

That's the real reason this movement is so noisy. No one cared about Encyclopedia Dramatica to this extent. The reason is, everyone knew ED's content was 50% nonsense. So even if ED does discuss some real embarrassing dirt on someone, it's right next to "lol and dis person does seedy things under the overpass"; it's easy to ignore.

KF, on the other hand, keeps receipts and is obsessive about documenting the truth. That's the real reason they're wanting to take the site down.

The person spearheading this campaign is not concerned about their safety. A casual perusal of their social media is very convincing of that.

Like, ok, let's say this is just about doxing, I guess. Do you think we could discuss the individuals involved without their address on twitter or reddit without getting banned? Where do you go to discuss serious violations of human dignity, except the perpetrators are the "wrong" demographic? Do you really think that is tolerated on the mainstream internet?

I mean, the crowd is already setting their sights on Ovarit and similar sites. Ovarit doesn't permit doxing people's addresses. Is that going to protect them from these people?

There's no reason to believe Near is dead.

Near's friend is the only source for the claim and the Japanese government's death listing for US citizens for the alleged time period shows no listing for Near.

> Free speech outlet != tool of harassment and cyberbullying.

Kiwi Farms very aggressively opposes site users directly interacting with the subjects of discussion. The ethos is "look, but don't touch".

Who, Elizabeth Waite? She never had a Kiwi Farms thread. She was briefly mentioned in a megathread about silly public trans behavior.

Elizabeth was bemoaning the general concept of transphobia in society, not actually blaming Kiwi Farms directly for why she committed suicide. She also blamed Trump, for example. Nowadays, she would probably also blame feminists groups fighting for women's rights in a similar tone. Suicide is tragic but hot a realistic window to evaluate societal issues.

But really, the press bringing up Elizabeth Waite is absolutely disgusting. Her story highlights the massive need for a free speech outlet that polite society is not providing, and in fact, is actively suppressing.

Elizabeth Waite was a troubled trans woman living with her wife and child. She struggled with depression and her gender identity issues for a long time. At times she called Trans Lifeline, a suicide hotline for and by trans people.

The thing is, Trans Lifeline was a massive fraud operation. The founders rubbed elbows with Hollywood celebrities and managed to collect hundreds and thousands of dollars of charity to support the operation. The thing is, the money never actually went to the service.

Kiwi Farms users did a study and discovered that Trans Lifeline answered less than 7% of calls over a 90 day period. The founders became very agitated about the publication of this data and personally went to Joshua Moon's (owner of Kiwi Farms) house to confront him.

Elizabeth Waite took her life when she received a final "there are no operators to assist you" recording from Trans Lifeline. Her widow complained about the shitty service on Trans Lifeline's Facebook page and was blocked by the founders of the hotline. She came to Kiwi Farms to tell her and Elizabeth's story. She clarified that Kiwi Farms didn't have anything to do with Liz' death, but that Trans Lifeline itself was directly responsible.

Ultimately, the data about Trans Lifeline went ignored by the trans community and normal society for a long time. The reality of transgenderism in the US is that the trans community as a group is immensely powerful. They're pandered to by massive corporations. But that power rarely, if ever, actually serves individual trans people. Especially very troubled trans people. The community is absolutely incompetent at policing itself and wider society will be hounded as transphobic if they try. So they take a hands off approach. "welp, not getting involved with that" And that enables predators and grifters to exploit them. The trans community has a serious problem with sexual predators, for example.

You see this ingroup/outgroup dynamic in basically any minority group and it's extremely damaging to the most vulnerable members of the group.

The data about the service went ignored until Buck Angel, a trans man porn star, read the thread (ignoring the mean words about "trannies") and used his connections in the San Francisco gay scene to have the board of directors of the charity look into it. Because of their fiduciary duty, they investigated and discovered that Greta Martela and Nina Chaubal misappropriated $350,000 from the charity and removed them. Due to their anti-authority stance, they refuse to prosecute and instead have a "repayment" plan. Year to date, not one red cent has been repaid.

Buck Angel, by the way, is a pariah in the trans community because he's uncomfortable with the current political push to medically transition minors.

In the world at large (not just a schoolroom or workplace situation), everyone is subject to being criticized for their public behavior. That's not bullying. That's holding them to task.

Think people like Onision. The documentary about him by Chris Hansen, Onision: In Real Life, wasn't bullying, cyber or otherwise.

Even if you don't personally think Onision is a predator, it's certainly fair for other individuals to raise the question and wish to discuss the issue themselves on a public website.

Conflating it with harassment (or the lesser "cyberbullying") is dismissive of the very real issues people deserve to be able to discuss.

> the fact that the people under discussion were almost universally subject to seemingly coordinated harassment campaigns

Almost universally? I don't think I can think of a single person discussed on Kiwi Farms experiencing that.

Or, well, I take that back I can think of one person: Patrick Tomlinson. Patrick Tomlinson, all his personal faults aside, is legitimately constantly being pestered by a crowd of fans of the Opie and Anthony radio show. Originally they were on Reddit, and then migrated to their own forum. Kiwi Farms later discovered this brouhaha and started discussing it.

That's about it.

Now plenty of people have an incentive to claim they're experiencing coordinated harassment. Every social media personality since the dawn of time, whether they're being discussed on Reddit or Twitter or whatever, is massively incentivized to make up claims of harassment. Usually the kernel of truth is that they might have received maybe one rude DM from someone, which they then parlay into "harassing messages". There's never any receipts and the connection between the main group discussion and the person messaging is dubious at best. They wield this like a cudgel to shut down all criticism of their behavior.

I mean, hell, take Onision. He pulled that shtick constantly. That and DMCA abuse. And the discussions he was shutting down were (true) claims that he was grooming teenaged girls sexually. The mainstream public finally heard about Onision because of Chris Hansen's investigation. But there are dozens of Onision types out there pulling the same trick.

Kiwi Farms has always been very careful to cultivate a culture against interacting with the subjects.

Again, I think you really are imagining some kind of 4chan type scenario. That simply isn't the case.

> Doesn't that same logic apply to KiwiFarms itself though? They too have historically lacked any kind of regular moderation.

Actually, I think there seems to be a misunderstanding of the nature of Kiwi Farms. I think people are tending to confuse it with a 4chan type forum, one that that is generally unmoderated.

Kiwi Farms has always had consistently good moderation.

Threats of violence and harassment have been instabans for a long time. Really, any attempts to interact with the subject of discussion are worthy of at least being reprimanded by moderation, if not a ban.

The site culture held by normal users (not just mods) is of a "look don't touch" approach. The people being discussed are interesting for their natural behavior on social media; it's less interesting when they're being prodded (at least not by the forum itself).

Occasionally 4chan types approach KF as if it's another imageboard, but there's some big culture clashes and they generally don't last long.

> The harassment, which is the critical context behind the decision, is literally thousands of pages. By definition, you cannot harass someone by talking about them.

> But it seems you're fine with Kiwi Farms literally posting SSNs, bank balances, passwords to accounts, and much more.

Small correction, this doesn't happen on Kiwi Farms. Kiwi Farms is focused on discussing much more mundane, public drama. Just interactions between people, mostly on public social media like Twitter, Youtube and others. Things like hacking, private financial information, DDoSing, swatting, are all heavily policed on Kiwi Farms. Additionally, directly interacting with the subject of a thread on Kiwi Farms is also bannable.

Their ethos is watching monkeys in the zoo, not going out and poking them themselves.

There's actual shady forums out there that do those illegal things, generally hosted in foreign countries or behind Tor.

I think the enforcement is way more imbalanced than you realize.

Here's an example, how about instead of "X should die", it's "lol, can all X just die?". They give it a little jocular spin with the "Lol", but it's effectively the same comment.

Here's the deal: if X in that comment is "black people", you get banned on Twitter. If it's "white people" you don't get banned.

Now personally, I don't mind the comment in either form. I don't believe it's an actual threat to anyone. It's kind of edgelordy, but whichever. And beyond that, I'd be very unhappy if someone got banned for something like that, because it just stomps over whatever other, more legitimate commentary they might've had.

I'm interested in having conversations, even imperfect ones. All conversations are imperfect.

But OK, let's move past "X should die".

But it's not just that. Any discussion where one side can be spun as a vulnerable minority (merit be damned), that minority status can be used to silence the other side.

So for example, consider transwomen in women's sports. There's a not-insignificant push among trans activists to claim that transwomen are "biologically female". I think the logic with that is: 1. sex is fuzzier than most people realize (debatable) and 2. hormone treatments are sufficient to tip someone over the line into the other biological sex (also debatable).

Referring to a trans woman as male for the sake of argument runs you a serious risk of getting permabanned from Twitter if the person you're arguing with is particularly ornery.

I've started businesses. When I start a business, it's mine (and my partner's). Like a car or a house or a website. I'm trying to do something specific with it, with plans that I've drawn up. It's not just to make money. If all I wanted to do was make money, I'd just get a normal job.

When I hire people, I'm not giving away my business, in the same way that if I give a friend a ride, I'm not giving away my car. If they don't like where I'm driving, their only option is to find another ride.

That's the key difference between starting a business vs getting a job: all the decision making is yours.

And this applies at any scale, even Amazon scale. If you have plans and you start a business to execute them, you can execute them even better at a large scale. Getting Amazon big and maintaining control is the reason you start a business.

It'd be insulting if my hires started wanting to take away control. When you hire someone, it's with the implicit understanding that they respect that the business is not theirs. They don't own any of it. (Unless they want to buy in.)

Violating that understanding is disrespectful. Like your neighbor letting their dog shit on your lawn and not picking it up, because they think "well, he's just going to walk his dog in twenty minutes, he can do them both at the same time."

I don't like working (whether for my business or for someone else's business) with disrespectful people. There's a lack of trust.

The only thing the democracy index gets right are the broad strokes. But then again, so could a high schooler with wikipedia and a free afternoon.

It's not implemented well enough to detect the fine differences between western countries.

Hate speech laws reduce the range of discourse. They suppress dissent. That's inherently undemocratic.

Western democracies with hate speech laws are less democratic because the range of legally permissible opinions is smaller.

If mere functioning is your goal for the country, then certainly countries without strong free speech protections can function. They can even function without democracy at all.

But most people want more for their country.

Western democracies with weaker free speech protections do function, but they also have a substantial pressure outlet in the form of websites hosted in other countries that don't kowtow to oppressive governments.

Sweat.

They took samples after/during seizures.

Possibly, but I feel behavior is probably the biggest tell for dogs.

Their owner starts acting funny right before a seizure comes on.