Antipodean fruit grower statement

[nothingcomestonothing]

The antipodean fruit growers site is down. A statement from the owner reads in part:

What I fear more than losing my site, being sued, or dealing with police is living in a world where [redacted by me as would be against MN talk guidelines] while normal people are not allowed to even discuss it.

The mob has already planned subsequent targets. Should we stay down, they will then attack 'gender critical' communities - especially those ran by and for women. No place can exist online which criticizes [redacted], and nothing would excite them more than this power and domination struggle being inflicted on a female space instead.

Posted for info.

Yes, that is one of the things about KF. You can't accuse any of the threads of being derailed by the forensic unpicking of two or three words or the 'tone', in case someone's offended by them. Particularly when the threads are about things that everyone on the planet would find grossly offensive in the first place.

We see it all the time with transactivism. The misrepresentation of language, in order to first find it offensive, and then shut it down as a result.

I was stuck by the Get the L out issue at the pride march. People getting stuck on whether or not they disrupted the march, in order to address their motives, and therefore undermine them, rather than the actual issue, which is that lesbians have been banned from their own advocacy groups, in favour of heterosexual men.

You realise many KFarmers are women right? Indeed in recent years there has been a massive influx directly from MN, due to the fact that free speech was so heavily curtailed here, not being able to say what the psychological condition that affects middle aged men that begin wearing tutus etc is and what have you.

I was stuck by the Get the L out issue at the pride march. People getting stuck on whether or not they disrupted the march, in order to address their motives, and therefore undermine them, rather than the actual issue, which is that lesbians have been banned from their own advocacy groups, in favour of heterosexual men.

Talk about anything but the fact the elephant is in the room.

And as for doxxing, as far as I have seen the information they share is all publicly available information online? I have never seen users physically stalking targets like you get on 4chan sometimes.

Almost everything on there is stuff people have published themselves.

They will occasionally do digging, like going down to find court or other legal records, for example - things that are technically publicly accessible, but not normally "broadcast".

I'm not sure exactly where they draw the line, but the most "doxxy" stuff is at least behind a members-only wall to prevent casual browsing.

Doxxing is tolerated, but it isn't really the point of the site, and they mainly do it in an effort to undermine a public Internet figure's carefully-crafted profile. It's dirt-digging. They're not picking on nobodies.

Physical stalking absolutely isn't their thing. "Don't touch the poop" is a policy - laughing at crazy people is funny, and gives you random entertainment. Poking them isn't - it's just cruel and boring.

Someone posted a link to the 4-hour stream above - there was a discussion about "what is doxxing" and what KF and Null's views on it are from about 0:59.

There was an exchange in the comment section of the good Substack article above, which also seemed reasonable:

(Commenter 1) Parents these days are not only going to have to keep their daughters "off of the pole", but are going to have to teach their children to not do anything that makes them the subject of a thread on that forum.

(Author) Harder than it looks, I'd imagine.

(Commenter 2, familiar with KF? emphasis mine) Teaching their children to "not do anything that makes them the subject of a thread" is often the same as keeping them out of strip clubs. It is not easy to have a thread made on you on the Kiwi Farms. Most people who do are either the subject of illegal activity (Beastiality, Pedophilia, and other sex related crimes to name the most prominant) or are terminally onlines who are unable to read and understand what "Don't feed the Trolls" means.

You realise many KFarmers are women right?

It's hard to say how many, but reading the main big "trans" thread on there, I do get the impression that there is a quite high proportion of women. Higher than a lot of spaces on the Internet. It really does not feel like a particularly male space.

(No doubt different sections of the site vary - that thread might be a bit more female-interest than many).

It's not Mumsnet, sure, but you will hear female experiences expressed more freely than a hell of a lot of Reddit spaces, say.

My impression, across multiple threads, is it's around 50/50. People often mention their sex. Who knows but yes it definitely does not deserve the 'blokey, 4 chan' type image that certain people have a vested interest in portraying.

To use another reference that’s come up lately reading Kiwi Farms is a bit like being at a Jerry Sadowitz gig. Yes, it’s offensive, yes, the language is selected because it’s offensive, but there is a bigger project in play too. Some people won’t get past the language to see the rest of it, which is a shame, because that’s where the value is, but I don’t think you’d be able to have a website that can both frankly document the wrongdoing of people like Yaniv, whilst also having rules against swear words.

Given that restrictions are not the order of the day, the only way to restore equity would be to sign up on KF and start popularising slurs for white able-bodied men. Sounds like a project :)

this made me lol.

KFers seem to have a unflattering name for people of every nationality (often incorporating male names) including nations that are almost entirely white. They also have various unflattering names for men (albeit subcategories of men) and some of their unflattering political terms are disproportionately applied to men.

The site is also vastly different from
one area to another - Null isn’t even particularly keen on the news stories bit and some areas/threads have majority female members posting.

the people who value the ability to speak freely and frankly on all sorts of topics are a big ol mixed bag of young and old, left and right leaning, female and male, from various nations and class backgrounds. Some needed to be educated into valuing speech of all kinds (I did! I’m a classic case of ‘not all speech is worth protecting’ until big tech came for the feminists) and others landed there much earlier.

Surely it's irrelevant whether or not anyone personally finds any site offensive or unpleasant to be on?

We all have back buttons. We are all creatures of free will.

Not bloody everything has to be CBeebied until everyone's feeling sufficiently handed their blankie and sure that Mummy's properly nurturing them.

And this wailing about oooh it's all unsafe comes from a political lobby that shrieks death and rape threats so ugly that most people are sickened by them. They really cannot have it both ways.

Not bloody everything has to be CBeebied until everyone's feeling sufficiently handed their blankie and sure that Mummy's properly nurturing them.

You'll note that in this activism the adults have to be treated like children, but the children have to be treated like adults. Odd that.

(I think I got that from Andrew Doyle's recent interview with Benjamin Boyce.)

Well said @Artichokeleaves 👏👏👏

And oh what an insight @NecessaryScene

so true! And yes very odd indeed. 🤔

I think Spartacus is making a reasonable general point, but this language is not confined to Kiwi Farms.

Yes. Hence my post at 10.05 where I make it clear that I am referring to a broader context.

Re Twitter and FB, be aware that general platforms (very heterogenous) are being compared with one, singular site.

Josh has mentioned before that a women make up a sizeable portion of his user-base and it is the fastest growing demographic there and I can personally confirm that.

It is a consequence of censorship, if you remove platforms that let women speak, those women will have no choice but to seek out alternative platforms, which are usually far more radical and extreme.

Grateful to Null for opening up the forum to us and accommodating us. I believe he even changed the Beauty Salon colours and sorted the live chat there, long before all the other groups, just for the “wamminz”.

Let's look at 'cuck' (and I knew what the meaning of this would be before I looked it up because I guessed it was the first syllable of 'cuckold'. From Google Dictionary:

a weak or servile man (often used as a contemptuous term for a man with moderate or progressive political views).

a man whose wife is sexually unfaithful; a cuckold.

Here is a longer account

www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/cuck-definition

In other words, this derogatory term is deeply sexist and misogynist and refers to me who are not (in men's eyes) the white, able-bodied, heterosexual, masculine norm.

I don’t use it myself and I have less respect for those who do use than for those who don’t but eradicating such language and the thoughtless hostility towards others which is behind it, is a major project and surely beyond the scope of this thread?

So if one acknowledges that such language is widespread one is thinking of a project that is 'too big'. If one does not do this she is 'only blaming KF's'. OK.

This is true, we may not like how the Kiwifarmers view women but we do have to respect it.

I respect my misogynist lord and master. Er no. I challenge him. That's what feminism is (or was) all about. How can you be a feminist if you accept misogyny and sexism?

Eradicating thoughtless hostility to others and 'language' viewed as unacceptable sounds on the surface a very noble, if really quite fantastically vague mission. Rather like 'world peace'.

However at this point I've found so many shiny, glossy figleaves shoved over the top of very ugly agendas that are supposed to convince me to go along with something that I have many, many questions. Forgive my having been trained to be very, very cynical, pattern recognition is a curse to naiceness.

To start with, who is going to be the judge of what is ok?
By what standards?
And most of all, is it going to be equally applied to all regardless of characteristic?
You know, like including when it's aimed at non compliant females and on TQ+ owned sites such as Twitter and Reddit?

Because in my experience some people there tend to get really shocked and annoyed when it's suggested that they possibly should reel the death and violence threats in a bit. They see this as a fantastically unacceptable incursion on their liberty (while wishing to severely curtail the liberty of others.)

The whole thing tends to be a bit mad really.

And we're going to need a lot of discussion and working out what 'language' and 'hostility' counts. Because currently it's fine to threaten to rape and kill a female and talk about 'DIAGF' and 'kerb stomping' - my God, what sort of depraved mind can actually refer to that? But the total unacceptability is females naming physical and biological reality and using the wrong pronoun.

To start with, who is going to be the judge of what is ok?
By what standards?

Probably men and by men's standards, ditto other groups that have power. This is why it is an important part of a broader feminist project but not the whole project. What I think is important is to continually call out instances of unacceptable and misogynistic language and clearly explain why it is not acceptable and certainly not make excuses for it.

Fair point

Because in my experience some people there tend to get really shocked and annoyed when it's suggested that they possibly should reel the death and violence threats in a bit. They see this as a fantastically unacceptable incursion on their liberty (while wishing to severely curtail the liberty of others.)

On Reddit, a suggestion not to post about committing violence against opponents of gender identity ideology got a somewhat equivocal response:

old.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/wxj4p3/mod_update_august_2022_posts_about_violence/

That was a good read, Nauticant. There were several deletions so I may have missed the worst of it. There were some good rational rebuttals, though. I'm pleased there are some rational voices over there, as I tend to only see the frothing madness.

I've just listened to the 4 hour livestream while painting my daughters bedroom. Interesting and amusing. My takeaways are that most of what is said about the frmas on twitter and by this keffals person is utter bullshit and that Josh is a decent bloke and I agree with much of what he says.

The site is back up....

Great news.

Just a thought: are MNHQ aware of the potential threat to this site? I do worry that they don't have the same level of technical know-how as Null, and this could leave us vulnerable.

Excellent