Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Tag: Corruption

Furgeddaboutit is New Jersey’s new furry con after the disgrace of Garden State Fur The Weekend

by Patch O'Furr

Furgeddaboutit is coming to New Jersey on May 2-4, 2025. Info: Furgeddaboutit.org. There’s also The Big One furmeet. More about this shortly…

Many New Jersey furries have been demanding more honest events while protesting Garden State Fur the Weekend, the corrupt convention with a history of favoring nazi-furries. This has new developments.

  • How often does a community create not one, but two alternative events to make up for a toxic one?
  • Ever seen a con struggle to deny a toxic reputation — while officially operating on a pro-nazi site?

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How to love the freedom of leaderless fandom, and fight the flipside of organized abuse

by Patch O'Furr

 

Do you know the story where several blind people try to describe an elephant by only touching small parts of it? Nobody can say what the whole animal is.

That happens when furry subculture talks about itself. It has a peer-to-peer horizontal structure where the whole elephant is a series of bubbles that don’t see each other. The limited views go with a longstanding habit of members reacting against outside stereotypes by falling into their own… The Geek Social Fallacies.

Ignorance is bliss, but knowledge is power. If you don’t like the media, Be The Media. That’s the mission at Dogpatch Press, to tell the full story warts and all and own it from inside before outsiders tell it for you; but the subculture keeps stubborn blind spots. Many stories are too inside for professionals to investigate, but hobbyists lack the resources, especially when they need action that people don’t want to take. Difficult, costly, critical stories are the ones that stay overlooked, underreported, and suppressed. Nobody is immune to the psychology of denying uncomfortable knowledge. This is how you get too much shallow drama between individuals on peer-to-peer level, but too little intensive research at wide-scope.

You may say the solution is showing more of the positive; but that’s not seeing the whole elephant.

It’s important to do the difficult work of telling the full range of human experience within, and maturely accept a place in society, not apart from it. The more we know, the more it empowers people to do better. This is a challenge always lagging behind the growth shown below.

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Garden State Fur The Weekend refuses to clean up their corruption, disgraced Chair made owner

by Patch O'Furr

After a mismanagement crisis was excused with PR statements, New Jersey furries are sick of more deception from the same broken leadership. 

UPDATE 12/4/24: CON ISSUES STATEMENT, STAFF RESIGN, PUBLIC CALLS FOR BOYCOTT.

Garden State Fur The Weekend was set to have their first convention in May 2024, but in January, their organization was rocked by one of several staff revolts. It leaked out with a Dogpatch Press report — Grassroots action: Leadership changes and weeding out hate at Garden State Fur The Weekend. The inside story can now be told in more depth, because cautious community members who stayed quiet before have come forward to ask for new reporting. GSFTW’s own PR person, Pawsouls, quit and reports being lied to. Numerous sources with deep involvement spoke to Dogpatch Press about how a chronic problem was “fixed” by moving it higher:

Many sources spoke on condition of whistleblower privacy.

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Texas civil rights activist murdered by right-wing extremist with furry fan background

by Patch O'Furr

Months of protest and two killings

Michael Ramos was a Black and Latino man killed by Austin police in April 2020. Since April, hundreds of concerned citizens have been organizing demonstrations as the Mike Ramos Brigade to protest police brutality and call for justice.

This week, their member Garrett Foster was killed while supporting the cause. A video from the scene had a witness report of how they were attacked by a reckless driver who drove into the crowd and shot at them from inside the car. Foster’s killer drove away, but they got his license number.

Garrett Foster died on Saturday, July 25. He was a military veteran and had been pushing his disabled fiance in a wheelchair on another one of nearly 50 days of protesting together. “Garrett’s death painfully reminds us of Heather Heyer’s death in Charlottesville when a pro-Nazi white supremacist deliberately drove his car into a crowd of protesters.”Mike Ramos Brigade

From the car plates, the killer was identified as Daniel Perry. His lawyer admitted he was the shooter.

BREAKING: Investigation Exposes US Army Sergeant as Murderer of Garrett Foster. (Archive)

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