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."

Uhm...

Since when do MMO players need politics as an excuse for grief play?

French Front National? Splitters!

Wait, we're the French Front National? I thought we were the National French Front. Oh, that's him over there is it? Splitter!

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You should so read this xkcd comic:


http://www.xkcd.com/c16.html [xkcd.com]

Nothing personal, but between your quote and the sig...

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xkcd rules. It is the best comic strip.

Sadly...

You need a third life to get away from the politics.

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Yeah, I only have a Half Life.

Amazing

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)

I'll have to disagree with you.

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 f

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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.

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! UNWED MOTHERS! FILTHY, HORRIBLE IMMIGRANTS EVERY

Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd wrote a song about the British equivalent of the Front National. Here is an excerpt.

Would you like to see Britannia,
Rule again, my friend?
All you have to do is follow the worms.
Would you like to send our coloured cousins,
Home again, my friend?
Al

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"Just what is the FN's "final solution" for the Islamic question?"

Let's hope it's better than Islam's "solution" for infidels. Is there a world wide war of incompatible cultures? Islam vs. the Western World? If it is war how show a cultural war be fought

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Let's hope it's better than Islam's "solution" for infidels

What, allowing them freedom to practice their own religion [everything2.com] and protection by the Islamic government? Even Iran lets the Jewish MPs in office, and swear on the torah or bible.

Quit your FUD.

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"One of the greatest debates within the Muslim Ummah, one that causes division within the Islamic nation and that is often used by the enemies of Islam as a means of ascribing brutality to our religion is centered on the methods by which Islam was propagat

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jihadunspun, a right-wing site, is disregarded by most Muslims. They're incorrect. Forcible conversion is NOT allowed in Islam, since the Quran says "Let there be no compulsion in religion" (2:256). God does not accept insincere conversions, so forced ones

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Let's hope it's better than Islam's "solution" for infidels.

I didn't realize that the only two options were ultra-right-wing racist Westerners and ultra-right-wing racist Islamists. I could have sworn there were other choices of how we run our societies and governments.

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Same issue in the southern US only it's catholic hispanics.

Essentially, in 40 years they are going to be the majority.

Rest of us are not breeding. I only had one child myself.

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1) They play their music (heavy polka/bass beat) in their houses so loud at 2 am that you can hear it 3 blocks away.

As opposed to the white folk that play their music loud at 2am?

3) They are mostly catholic and are going to enforce catholic social values once they are in the majority.

Just like white folk enforce their values and religion when in the majority?

4) They mostly speak spanish- not english so I can't understand them.

Why is that a problem? If you want to understand them, you could learn Spanish. but why do you need to understa

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There is no reason why the muslims will not be like every other immigrant group.

Look more carefully. Evidence to the contrary is ample. Perhaps the best example is what is happening in the Netherlands.

What evidence do you have that they are anything like

Re:I'll have to disagree with you.

While I'm not nearly conversant enough in modern French sociology to debate the finer points, I feel the need to point out that individual incidents that make the news are not enough to make a blanket claim as to the every day state of affairs, or justification for characterizing an entire segment of a society. Your line of reasoning would seem to indicate that your stance is more closely defined as bigotry instead of carefully considered concern.

Re:I'll have to disagree with you.

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?

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Birth rate dropping below replacement rate causes havoc with most countries social security systems and pensions, which were mostly built under the assumption that populations will remain stable or increase slightly for it to actually work. So unless the d

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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 w

Another demonstration of the tolerance of the left

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 position

Re:Another demonstration of the tolerance of the l

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.

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!

Not left vs. right

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.

Re:Another demonstration of the tolerance of the l

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 Lef

Left vs Right?

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?

 

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As far as I've seen, it mostly comes down to people who want to be able to tell others what to do, and everyone else. Unfortunately, the government has gotten really full of that first type of people. This whole left and right thing is just a set of labe

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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?

There's always the much-maligned Political Compass [politicalcompass.org] - with not one but two axes to look at. I posted a link to it a long time

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Really, do politics boil down to left and right?

For most people, yes. Politics and ideology are mind cancers. Some day we may find a cure, but not for a very long time. They may be the diseases that lead to human extinction.

Jack Thompson

How long will it be till he makes his judgement on this game? ;-)

That's sort of interesting about the buildings

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).

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Technically untrue. There are ways to overload someone else's parcel and cause things to de-rez. There are also other ways that I wouldn't talk about because they violate the TOS.

And there's no way to stop someone from dropping on THEIR land and dragging i

Wait One Minute!

You can destroy property in second life?

And I always thought that games sucked!

Maybe I was mistaken.

Can you arm yourself with a slogan?

Second Life solved the problem by turning out the lights around the protestors, and they were eaten by grues. ...

Yes, I am horribly old. :(

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"Yes, I am horribly old. :("

Only if you've played adventure on the original punchcards... I doubt the kids on this BBS or whatever newfangled open systems trinket this service is even know what a grue is...

Do you remember hunt the whumpus?

Just Wait ...

... the Vi vrs. Emacs war will make this little show look small.

Curious about this "Second Life" and coverage

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.

Re:Some are more equal than others...

Violence? Destruction?

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.

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Of course life is just a collection of atoms in an untidy heap.

That said, I hate getting ganked.

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Hrm.. is it merely a game, or a pretext towards a more radical real world?

Comments like "it's unacceptable to debate" seem rather more like Hitler's goons. Truly scary if that's the future of France.. and perhaps Europe.

Re:Some are more equal than others...

As horrible and disgusting as this sounds, tis is something that I almost understand the why, but not much after.

There were a number of rogue nations, and groups, like the KKK, Hitlers youth, etc. etc. The recently held a conference in a mid-eastern state (Iran I believe). They were there to discuss the idea that the holocaust never happened.

They were in this country, to say that because of their Countries laws surrounding denying that this ever happened, or even to talk about in the streets, is trampling on their rights to free speech.

Like I said, I can understand why they are thinking like that. It stems that some ideas are better then others. I wonder if this is becoming like anything else that the more they try to tighten these people, the more these people will fight back.

I can understand why Germany is afraid of these white-supremacy ideas. The trouble is that you might force them underground even more, where you can't see them. Any time you arrest someone for something they thought, they become a martyr (in that sort of way).

I don't want hate speech either, but as long as it isn't acted on, there shouldn't be any reason to step on it.

In the game world is a reflection of what we do here. In some games, yah its nothing but fun. In others people are destroying what you created. But at ;least both parties feel that they can stand for what they believe in. Thats the good thing, and no-one got hurt in the process. hmmmm Maybe someone should build a White-House, so we Canadians can come and burn it down again.

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some of that seems that way, others seem to have done the "the best way to deal with speech you don't like is not censorship but more speech" thing by errecting their own signs - I don't think you should tar them all with the same brush

Of course if the L

Re:Some are more equal than others...

You raise an interesting question.

If Second Life is a role playing game, then the attackers are just playing a different side.

So: when a real political organization establishes a presence in a game as themselves, do they get the same protections for their virtual activities (including speech) that they do for their real activities? If people silence them and destroy their assets in the game is it the same as taking the same actions outside the game?

I'd say no. There is a difference between actions in a virtual world and the real one, even if the parties are the same and the motivations are the same and the actions are parallel. What matters in the virtual world is the terms of service. If the attackers did not violate the terms of service set by the provider, then they were within their rights, which are completely defined by the provider. If you don't like it, you go to a different provider.

You have no such choice of real worlds.

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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.

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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 a

Famous violent leftists

The troops at Kent State.
The Klan.
Timothy McVeigh.
Abu Ghraib.
Abortion clinic bombers.

Yup, all radical leftists!

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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... W

Re:I have just one question.

If the French never won America would be a monarchy run by a King named George - hang on - you may be right.

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Asians tend to set aside racial differences to pick on everyone else in MMORPGs if you haven't noticed.