Impeach Bush on Warcry

Today on the Warcry network:

Advertising and Those Obnoxious Guys Who Can't Live Without Injecting Politics into Everything Arrive In Second Life


"The next frontier of griefing is apparently real estate griefing. Second Life users are discovering some unsightly signs are ruining property values, in addition to being politically inflammatory."

Yey SL's dirty laundry is everywhere. Only a matter of time before a major news outlet picks this one up.

Any press is good press? =/ This is egg on all our faces.

You mean people don't want to live virtual lives in a place that has become an innovator in Spam? Everyone loves Spam.

Can't wait to see the next high profile magazine article on SL, guaranteed this will show up.

Gasp!

Contraversy! Dialog! Conflict!

We're doomed!

SL is ruined!

... or "even bad press is press none-the-less."

Press == mindshare.

Well, let's just hope the administration doesn't decide we SL'ers are some sort of threat now. Free speach isn't exactly free anymore in W's America. Howard Stern, for example, ran his program the same so-called "offensive" way for decades but it wasn't until he started saying "impeach Bush" that the FCC decided to get mideival on his ass. Whether you like Howard or hate him, if you know the story there's no denying the adminsitration completely overstepped their constitutional authority in the way they went after him, and there was no one to stand in their way.

Also, and perhaps more relevant, when W was running for president in 1998, his campaign was working hard to shut down a website that was making fun of him. When asked by a reporter about his viewpoint on the site in relation to free speach, Bush replied simply "There ought to be limits to freedom." That site has since been shut down, and its name has been sold to a bumper sticker store.

Let's hope SL doesn't share the same fate.


Anyway, as ugly as these signs may be, whoever's posting them hasn't broken any rules, so there's not much point in complaining about them unless it's constructive complaining to those responsible. I've seen lots of threads pronouncing the singer as a griefer and all kinds of other names, but I have yet to read one in which anyone claimed to have politely asked the owner to work towards a solution. Maybe this really is griefing, and maybe it's not. I don't know. What I do know is that nobody's a jerk until they prove that they are. So how about it? Has anyone actually talked to the signer?

And please, resist the temptation to say "I don't need to talk to a guy who posts a million unwanted signs everywhere to know he's a jerk." The answer to that is yes you do, but even if you don't believe that, my question was has anyone talked to the signer. If you can't answer yes, please don't theorize.

For what it's worth, I have very mixed feelings about the signs themselves. I support the message for sure. Bush is a maniac in my opinion. However, I don't support over-zealously placing them in every open nook and cranny of SL. All that does is piss people off, which besides just being plain wrong to do, certainly doesn't help spread the message. All that's been accomplished is that legitimate political statements will now likely be ignored since people will think it's just more of the same crap. Maybe that was the intention all along.


EDIT: Well, looks like my question was answered by at least one person. I was contacted by someone inworld who said about the signer, "he is anti-social and any polite attempts to comminicate about his signs brought verbal abuse and the posting of more signs to anyone who tried." Obviously one person's story is hardly proof positive, but there's not much more that can be said without turning this into a flame fest I guess.

We are providing him with exactly what he wanted, most likely.

Brilliant.

The funny thing is that this is an old issue... as old as SL itself. This isn't the first time someone has done this sort of thing and it surely won't be the last. It only affects you if you let it. Personally, I'll never comprehend how anyone can be griefed or extroted by prims. "That blasted prim with a texture on it forced me to pay a ridiculous amount for land I didn't want!"

I didn't even get a chance to ask him nicely as he started to immediately harass me and load up more signs around my home/business after I put up a simple privacy wall.

He did the same thing to my new friend, Kane Kent, the day after we bought Kane's new parcel for his business and put up a privacy wall to block the 3 signs that were there. Those 3 signs turned into 8 spread accross the one border of Kane's parcel.

Another friend contacted him before putting up a privacy wall and now has more signs around her home for asking him nicely to remove them.

And from what I heard he even distrupted a meeting with a bunch of land holders and started going on about how Bush is evil wich was totally off topic. The told him to stop going off topic so he started his antics of verbally harassing them and turned around a bought a few plots around the one guy's home then started to surround his place with signs aimed directly at the guy's home.



As I described above this is his MO. Only thing I can tell ya is if he's not permabanned for grid wide griefing is to wait for a sign to appear near your or a friend's home and talk to him yourself.

I'm glad the news spreading around We may lose custmers but atlest maybe Linden will decide to do somthing.

Sorry to hear that, Ron. Thanks for the information. Unfortunately, it sounds like this guy is going out of his way to be a jerk while technically playing by the rules. Therefore, LL's hands are likely tied in this situation. Shame.

LL's hands are never tied, for any reason or for no reason, and in this case they have a good reason: To not let one player wreak havoc on the profitability of their business.

coco

It reminds me of a phrase I heard recently (on a news report about terrorism and the power grid):

"Weapons of Mass Annoyance".

I wonder if LL would care to release some numbers on their profitability over the last month and see if havoc has truly been wrought.

My guess is that it hasn't affected anything economically speaking.

To maintain that, you would have to be saying that this activity has caused nothing detrimental to LL.

The evidence I have read on the boards - including people tiering down, deciding not to tier up, and deciding not to play at all based at least in part on these activities - would indicate that this behavior this widespread does indeed have a negative effect on LL's profit.

And that's just in terms of immediate profit.

coco

In Bush's defence, people voted for him a second time after all of that.

I so agree. People are acting like this is the first time this happened. Wait till an election year folks. There were signs galore back then.

And this won't harm LL...in any way.

How many of you are buying the land with the signs on it? Cause seems to me lowering his prices would be far more effective if all he wants to do is make money.

Yes..at least 42% of them did. Of course with the electronic voting devices that were not open to inspection by any non-partisan third party, and the owner of the company that produced them saying he would get George W. elected, it's still kinda gray as to whether he was really "voted" in by the american people.

Of course those exit polls could be wrong and he could have gotten 51% of the vote.....

Er, no/ he was voted in for the first time after that. His first term was due to his being appointed leader fo the US, rather than being elected their President.

Err, what? Like it or not, alot of people voted for him, so its the masses fault he is where he is now. That doesn't mean every single person voted for him. I assure you, however, that complaining about him on these forums or in a game won't do a darn thing.

Anyways, a wee-bit back on topic. I can't imagine LL really doing anything, being that there is no real rule breaking going on {although it could be argued that it is a form of greifing}. Also is LL did do anything, there would be the whole group of people that think they are being critical thinkers by saying LL is violating customer rights, and bring up topics like "Where to draw the line?" and "Freedom of Speech? Not for SL ".

It's obvious that he wants to both make money *and* annoy the crap out of people, not necessarily in that order. He's succeeding at both, and probably getting a big kick out of the fact that he's getting to behave so badly and make a profit from it.

All signs point to jerk, I'm afraid.

If it really IS about the message, I call on him to do one of these things which will prove it:

1) Buy all the parcels he wants, but do NOT set them for sale.

2) Get out of SL and do something effective about impeaching Bush IN THE REAL WORLD. Make a REAL difference instead of crapping up the landscape of a virtual world and griefing its multi-national playerbase.

Thing is, he won't do either, *guaranteed*...because he *does* want to behave badly, *does* want to make a few bucks from other peoples' pain and *doesn't* care one whit about making a REAL difference where President Bush is concerned.

Feh.