Slashdot Mirror
Political Strife Erupts in Second Life
covert.c writes "A real-life drama in the political world has spilled over into the virtual, as the Second Life headquarters of France's controversial Front National political party fell to violent protesters. The anti-FN activists, who had armed themselves with slogans, placards and weapons, leveled the digital buildings occupied by Front National. Second Life is often home to established political and social movements. It seems logical that opposing forces would also choose to make SL their stage."
Since when do MMO players need politics as an excuse for grief play?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Wait, we're the French Front National? I thought we were the National French Front. Oh, that's him over there is it? Splitter!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
So the protesters stoop to violence and destruction of (virtual) property in their aim to stop the FN from exercising their basic human right of free speech and political representation.
FN claims to be a bulwark against the encroaching tide of terrorism and violent radicals. Attacks like this just prove them right.
You need a third life to get away from the politics.
Wikipedia makes them look like a sort of "wind back the clock" party. I'm amazed that they were even willing to have a headquarters in second life. They seem to be very protectionist and provincial. Their general delegate was suspended from his professorial position for five years for historical revisionism. The founded had to pay 1.2M francs (~200k Euros) for the same sort of thing, claiming the Germans' occupation "hadn't been so inhumane". (I don't agree with this lack of freedom of speech in France, but they're kind of a nasty country anyway, with cops wearing masks so they can't be identfied in court and the like.) I mean, Le Pen would actually like to evict all non-european immigrants from France. I don't think doing your best to evict them from second life is actually wrong. FN has basically declared war, and at the same time diluted the name of my favorite Belgian arms manufacturer. I say string 'em up! (digitally)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
you gotta wonder when the first real-world conflict (aka war) would start from something that happened in Second Life. Those ppl take it way too seriously. I wouldn't even put it past the North Koreans to invade South Korea so they can steal all the silk from Silkroad Online (an MMORPG) That crazy leader guy has kidnapped movie stars from south korea to make a movie that he wrote ffs! Let's hope he doesn't start playing second life.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Yup, in the left's worldview you are allowed to be any race, color, gender identity, etc. If you keep it in the closet and swear that it doesn't actually influence your behaviour you can even have a religion. But deviate from the accepted policy positions of the left and watch how little tolerance they have for that. They will violently suppress the slightest deviation from orthodox socialism.
Compare this with the other story posted today where US leftists are aiming to revoke the 1st Amendment in their continuing efforts to suppress political dissent during campaigns, reign in unregulated bloggers, the earlier story where they want to force changes in FCC rules to eliminate dissent on the airwaves, etc.
To a "progressive" diversity is looking as different as you want while thinking alike. Tolerance is a codeword for oppression. And of course "progressive" itself is a codeword for a retreat into failed 20th Century *isms. If anything Orwell was too optimistic.
Democrat delenda est
Really, do politics boil down to left and right? A single axis of political belief? Don't you think that's a little bit simplistic?
Deleted
Good point. Next time you hear some damned hippie complaining about NSA wiretapping, abu ghraib, guantanimo bay, and the loss of habeus corpus, make sure to come back at them by pointing to this outrageous violent attack.
This space available.
Well, it was the French fighting the French, so I'm guessing the French surrendered. Which means the French won, which common sense tells us is impossible, so logically that means that rather than the French, it was actually the French who surrendered... Wait...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
How long will it be till he makes his judgement on this game? ;-)
----- Concentrate on promoting more than demoting.
Who in France would not wish to turn back the clock?
Every night, over 100 cars are burned by the immigrants who will be the new France. The birthrate is below replacement rate. 43% of all children in France are born to unwed mothers.
France is quietly fighting an intifada in les banlieux (sp?), and France is losing. You might say that France is a quagmire.
If you like France the way it was, I recommend that you visit soon, and take lots of pictures. The France to come will be a Muslim nation. Some people like it that way. The Paristinians certainly would. Those who prefer the former and vanishing culture of France would like to turn back the clock.
This is hardly anti-Islamic sentiment, although it is anti-Islamist. Mods and replies, please draw the distinction before you accuse me of something terrible. There are plenty of Islamic nations out there, but only Islamists feel that France should also become such a place.
Are MMO games even allowed under Shari'a?
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
The FN must have given up and left. You can't 'level the digital buildings'. There's very little, if anything, you can do to other peoples objects in SL, and certainly not on their own land. The landowner or the person in charge of the land group must not have been there, paying attention, or clued in to his own power to disable object rezzing, disable scripts, disable push, disable flight, ban, freeze, eject, etc etc. And that's just the built-in land tools, and not even getting into third-party security systems, which would be more difficult to overwhelm with numbers than a human op (The comparison of an SL parcel owner to an IRC op is apt in terms of power over their domain).
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
How do you figure its always the left that resorts to violence? quite a claim you're making there. I won't deny that there are leftist groups who resort to violence, but there are also right wing groups which do the same. They are called extremists. They are on both sides of the scale.
As for the right to free speech. You should look up where it came from. It's a liberal principle. If it's from either side of the scale it would be more right than left.
Furthermore stating someone isn't allowed to speak because it doesn't fit in with your own views is politics 1 on 1
You can destroy property in second life?
And I always thought that games sucked!
Maybe I was mistaken.
You take it, I don't want it...
> Wikipedia makes them look like a sort of "wind back the clock" party.
Maybe Europe is annoyed at the U.S. muscling in on their "starting wars" monopoly and attempting to reclaim it? Not a problem, because this is easily solved:
Create a bogus Secondlife filled with Eliza-bots. Hack the French DNS servers to divert there. Hopefully they'll never catch on!
Absolutely. And paranoids on the right are correct - there is a global leftist conspiracy. We receive our orders from the Party on a daily basis, and follow them to the letter. Good news, too - you'll be the first up against the firing squads come the glorious revolution.
To me, the news story was about a pseudo-fascist political group in France trying to leap on to the bandwagon of publicity about Second Life, before being chased off their server in a typically amusing manner by a bunch of online griefers. However, assorted Slashdotters appear to take this as evidence of some kind of hateful leftist conspiracy, intent on stifling free speech and dissent on the internet.
Oh noes!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Hmm. It's not really a left vs. right issue. I think that protests against the FN are really about drawing attention to the nature of the FN.
Neo-Nazi organisations like the FN and the BNP in Britain have come up with a "respectable" face. Now they are patriots. It's all about conserving traditional values, a return to the way things were at some magical point in history when things were Good. Traditional justice, small government, support for local business, more policing - who wouldn't want that?
But there's much more to it than that. Underneath, the same people are involved, and they want the same thing - power. Power like the kind of power Hitler had. And their bigoted views are lurking just out of sight: Send the darkies home, fight back against the Muslims (terrorists, dontchaknow). Holocaust? What holocaust?
Some people will support them because they are genuine bigots. But I believe that most people are basically good, not intrinsically racist. It is these people who should understand the true nature of the FN before they make the mistake of voting for them.
Everyone, whether liberal, conservative, or socialist, should speak out against fascist ideas. Your political viewpoint doesn't matter: no-one wants a dictator.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Second Life solved the problem by turning out the lights around the protestors, and they were eaten by grues. ...
:(
Yes, I am horribly old.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Mussolini and Hitler (the best known examples of the uber-right extremists) weren't liberals, so far as I remember; furthermore, "right" can have many meanings depending on the context or nation. As for Second Life, I'm waiting for some guys to stage a coup, steal everything, and install a military dicatorship. Then the virtual resistance would begin, and the virtual counter-coup and so on....
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. Vladimir Nabokov
Anyone else noticed quite a big jump in news stories just about the recent year or so about Second Life, despite still having a quite small highly active user base compared to World of Warcraft and the likes? Either it's somehow popular to report on this "unusual" game (personally I find it quite boring, although the stories are fun for laughs), journalists find the game "futuristic" in the sense of what it's doing ("Oooh, look, we found out news about this cool game where you can protest for/against the UN or whatever!"), or there's the tin foil theory with many Second Life gamers submitting story material to news sites, posting it in blogs, etc to generate coverage.
Personally, I don't really see the big deal. Some huge geeks started using a game as a platform for politics debates? What's new, really. People stand out in towns in WoW, Guild Wars, and other games and sometimes get into hot "religion and politics" debates. It's just more of the same, only that due to how Second Life works, they can take a more "practical" stance on it with crappy designed graphics looking like something out of the early nineties to help their cause.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
-- Pink Floyd, The Wall, side 4 of 4, Waiting for the Worms
Could an attempt to "turn back the clock" actually lead to something far worse? It's not unreasonable to think so. Just what is the FN's "final solution" for the Islamic question? Just what will they do about single mothers and ethnic minorities? Given that their strategy so far is straight out of the Dr Goebbels songbook, it's not too hard to guess.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
While your flaming flamebait sits unremarked. Please step to the window on the left to pick up youor Slashdot +3 Liberal mod.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
...whom you wish to cite as policy guidance?
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
no.
+++ATH0
If the French never won America would be a monarchy run by a King named George - hang on - you may be right.
Sorry, The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes." We will have to be content with second.
Since they're resulting to virtual violence for political purposes, doesn't that make them virtual terrorists/cyberterrorists? We cannot let people do this. We might even have to virtually torture they're avatars for virtual information, before they virtually blow up the virtual bomb in the virtual building and virtually kill innocent virtual people. Think of the virtual children!
:)
Seriously though if we're going to have so many stories on it, let's make Second Slashdot you know , for people that don't have a second life either
"Wikipedia makes them look like a sort of "wind back the clock" party. "
With anything remotely political, taboo or maybe just not in sync with world socialism
when you look up stuff I recommend you read the discussion page too and look through
the article's history to see what they have deleted. Reading just the article by itself
is just as pointless as trying to lather up with soap but without water.
US leftists are aiming to revoke the 1st Amendment
Please back this up with a link, troll. How exactly do you revoke the 1st Amendment?
I thought it was the Supreme Court's job along with Bush's to erode the Bill of Rights? Why would Bush let the Leftists do his job?
Well, they have dark skin. Duh.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
This is probably one of the few times that someone screaming "Pig! Pig! Pig!" at at a rowdy demonstration would get more than my peripheral attention.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
The troops at Kent State.
The Klan.
Timothy McVeigh.
Abu Ghraib.
Abortion clinic bombers.
Yup, all radical leftists!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The two-axis world view of the political compass is Libetarian. If the Libertarians are considered left-wing these days, the situations in the US is worse than I imagined.
The two-axes of the political compass is way better than the single axis, but you can of course choose many different axes. The axes of the political were better suited to the cold war era. These day I'd say a tribal/local vs. humanist/global axis would better match many of todays political conflicts.
Someone should probably tell them that they're late to the party and that KG has already slaughtered it, along with the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th.
They can still try to revoke the third though, looks like it's still there.
They should probably hurry.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
> If the French never won America would be a monarchy run by a King named George - hang on - you may be right.
Actually, the French didn't win the American Revolution, they just made it so that the Americans could. The French contribution was that their presence made fighting in the New World so costly that the British simply could not continue the conflict, lest they start losing stuff to the French for real. But, in realistic terms, since the American colonies were not lost to the French it can't be said that the French won the American Revolution.
Still, if you want to go that far back, wasn't there some guy back in the day from France who did some decent fighting? I think his name was Napoleon, but I could be wrong.
Virg
It's just the "you ungrateful sods we saved your country" silliness cuts both ways - freedom fries or not.
Yeah, I only have a Half Life.
Napoleon was from Corsica. Not trying to knock the French fighting abilities or anything, my above joke being more of an attempt at absurdism than a poke at the French. However, Napoleon was French only by technicality, the island of Corsica having been transfered from Genoa to France the year before he was born.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
So, as long as someone agrees with you, you are allowed free speech. This seems strangely familiar to me....
(Flame shield on!)
Just remember - if the world didn't suck, we would all fall off.
Since Porcupine is not a damage-enabled area, weapons there have about as much stopping power as pointing one's finger at the computer screen and saying Bang Bang. But get enough projectiles flying, and server lag is bound to ground anyone's use of the area to a halt. (Or in my case, cause the Second Life viewer to crash.)
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.