Dogpatch Press

When this news site about cartoon animals started, I didn’t sign up for this kind of news.

I can’t publish it, it’s too sensitive so I’ll just say: It had several minors, a “member of the babyfur community”, “forcible rape”, animal abuse, fear of blackmail and backlash, fear of reporting to police, and help wanted anonymously. It was just an info request, and not direct from the victim so I got right to the points.

There were answers that asked about writing a callout to help alert others to be safe.

The poor kids. I’m not equipped to deal with this. That’s a tiny glimpse of my inbox on a daily basis. There’s powerful people with money in those stories about traumatizing things. Usually I can’t publish them for the listed reasons. Or there’s no way to do it without an expensive lawyer, or when a hobby doesn’t allow resources. It’s overwhelming and makes me lose sleep and feel bad.

Hypothetically, imagine another person writes for help who isn’t an angel. That’s one reason why some people don’t go to cops and they go to my inbox instead. Maybe they got in trouble because they were in a bad place, like a group for problematic activity and are afraid of it coming out.

So perhaps they’re in a bad group. Would you delete the mail and just condemn it? I don’t know about you, but I think lots of problems call for more thoughtfulness, like this.

My friend went to prison for hacking. Last month he was taken into custody suddenly. I was the link between his family and him so I helped pack up his stuff for storage, sat in his court hearings, put money in his commissary, made sure to do regular visits, sent good books, and helped get him crucial medicine. Otherwise he might just not get what he needed. People die of neglect in there.

It sucks for his family, and how bad it is for me is nothing in comparison, but if I told you… anyways, I didn’t ask for such grief. I don’t know all the facts of his case but I think it was a bad reason to be in prison and I wouldn’t ditch him for it.

The topic is about when and how to use condemnation. You can drop a nuclear bomb or use more thought. Maybe not just for them but also people around them.

I see a difference between group problems and personal problems. Some groups are based on antagonism and resemble organized crime to dodge consequences. That’s where you might want to leave no place to dodge by using a nuclear bomb approach. A blocklist fits an antagonistic group acting like a gang. But some personal problems are like for my friend (where condemning a guy in jail is besides the point) or you can think about it case-by-case.

It came up after I got that mail of a babyfur needing help.

What happened:

Youtuber PKrussl was on my block list for being a source of misinformation in September’s Kero story and going out of his way to antagonize people.

Youtuber MythicalRedFox was on my love list for being a source of good info in the Kero story when he challenged PK.

PK backlashed at MRF. There was a size difference in PK’s platform against MRF and he also wasn’t truthful. PK’s platform seemed popular with kids; and it came out that PK was into babyfur/cartoon cub porn art in a way that would embarrass him. Twitter user SpicyCavy shared that and got PK in trouble.

I put tons of effort into the Kero story and wanted to support MRF, so I shared SpicyCavy’s folder that was going around about PK (including screens of underage users who followed PK.) I called it vindication for MRF because I was directing it at the untruthfulness.

SpicyCavy then targeted the same criticism at Timburr, who looked like a random target. Timburr hadn’t antagonized anyone as far as I know. He was just one of thousands with babyfur/cub porn art on personal pages. (I’m not friends with him although we may have traded a couple of tweets.)

Here is where the problem happened. I left a gentle suggestion to consider priorities for how to come down on someone for cub art.

I don’t like cub art.

If we compare it to the IRL illegal kind of thing, they grade it by levels of offense.

The COPINE scale:

• 1 Indicative
• 2 Nudist
• 3 Ero
• 4 Posing
• 5 Erotic Posing
• 6 Explicit Erotic Posing
• 7 Explicit Sexual Activity
• 8 Assault
• 9 Gross Assault
• 10 Sadistic/Bestiality

That’s a scale of harm. That’s not suggesting that any is OK; just that one kind is lower and the other is higher, the way professionals sort it.

In furry cub art, a lower level could be commissioning art of your own character while a higher level could be using it for grooming someone. Perhaps dropping a nuclear bomb on every level isn’t the solution. I don’t believe it’s an unfair double standard to look at the context.

To put it another way, why condemn one person more than another? It can use context if they have a bigger platform and use it antagonistically. For an imperfect example, Dan Savage wrote about outing gay politicians. A random one saying nothing is different from one doing anti-gay bigotry.

I commented about Timburr to think about if this was the time for a nuclear bomb or something more thoughtful, and it was twisted way out of context. That turned people from PK to me and soon there were lots of rounding errors as callouts flew around.

I posted this article from May 2018, “The complexity of problematic kinks” by Maybelle Redmond. Nobody cared about this article in May. I haven’t said that I agreed with it, although it’s hosted here. There’s quite a few parts where I don’t know what to think because of lacking data – to say the least. But it was part of hearing about things from a main source who couldn’t otherwise speak without being backlashed. I called it “good” for looking at different levels, and for being descriptive.

Not my article, but it was mistaken as “Patch thinks cub porn is OK.” But saying there are different levels isn’t calling it OK.

It would also be false to say that I agreed that keeping it walled into some careful group would be OK. I didn’t agree to that in May or now.

Also, if a group is a problem, it might be possible to separate the people depending if they organize to antagonize, or just … exist in a problematic way.

That’s why I’m not going to blast Maybelle Redmond, who wrote about being an abuse victim, or a babyfur who writes for help and is afraid.

What if you blast them all? Fear of backlash is already why they don’t speak up, and who else do we know is in their shoes? We might not know because they’re afraid to talk. (Not for “free speech” to say nasty things for no reason, I mean hearing from people like in my mail who need help for a real reason.)

As a side note, I posted a private tip I got that the folder of PKrussl stuff made by others had screenshots that exposed his underage user names. My comment wasn’t a threat, it was to point out the problem that happened from blasting people, and it made me sorry.

Hey PKrussl, sorry to you for attacks you have gotten about your appearance. MRF and Timburr, sorry you got blasted by some of the bad attention, and Maybelle Redmond, thanks for choosing me to post your controversial article and take heat for it, sorry people didn’t like it.

People who don’t like the cub stuff and want it gone, sorry I have failed to live up to helping with enough level of response. Like I said in 2016 about kids being endangered,

“Personally, and I think this speaks for virtually the entire community, I revile such activities and won’t support them. I’ll get the cops on the phone instantly if there’s a hint of it crossing the line into real life.“ – Said it to people it might apply to and I tried to make it happen in the top mail among other times.

Obviously I’m aware that people are scratching their heads about a “double standard” between whatever I would say about PKrussl vs. others, and I want to restate that I don’t believe it’s a double standard, it’s different situations, and it would help to look for that when there is a problem like with a PK vs. a random person blasted for having problematic art. Fine by me if nazis are rejected wholesale for hate recruiting, just consider that isn’t like going after everyone on Inkbunny, which was apparently the method of choice here.

Dealing with my friend in jail* is only part of a whole bunch of reasons that I might not post more issues articles. Actually the Kero story has been causing grief since September. The toxic effects make me prefer to have nothing else to do with all that. I signed up for cartoon animals not that. Blocking anyone is getting personal space for this tiring stuff. It’s been nice to see everyone be charged up about many things that need work, so good luck.

– Patch

*yes for hacking, Silicon Valley people know.