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?
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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
It's pixels on a fucking screen. It's not a life, second or otherwise.
If you're going to be outraged, at least be consistent and mourn the thousands of times I've died at the hands of twink campers in World of Warcraft.
This space available.
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.'"
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
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:
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?
If the French never won America would be a monarchy run by a King named George - hang on - you may be right.
What's happening in the Netherlands? I've been living here for the last 3 years and haven't noticed any massive changes ... perhaps I'm reading the wrong newspapers, eh?