"FIC": common sense or group think?

Nolan, the FIC members in question are doing the exact opposite. They are ignoring new players because they are busy bothering Lindens, calling them up on the phone, etc.

The only "picking on" I see in these forums is from old players direct towards pretty much anyone that catches their fancy. Like this thread for instance.

Thats cus I'm in the FIC lololol - sorry Willow By the way I suggested votes for Willow as SL president in the PolySci forums

I don't think there was an FIC before, but there sure is now. The finger-pointers have willed it into existence by sheer force of personality.

I think we are going to have to accept it as a ubiquitous part of Second Life culture. The FIC is SL's version of tabloid talk. It's our Elvis sitings, our bat boy, and our Bermuda triangle. Some enterprising folks may consider opening a business along the lines of palm reading studios where they can look deep into your soul and see how FIC you are (for a fee). They would make a killing.

Allow me the honor of giving you a brief lesson in Sox Rampal's many blasphemous attributes. Here's the story: Sox is trying to throw away our freedom, our honor, and our future. His mission? To lower this country's moral tone and depreciate its commercial integrity. Before I move on, I just want to state once more that if you can make any sense out his wild analects, then you must have gotten higher marks in school than I did. Sox is firmly convinced that merit is adequately measured by his methods and qualifications. His belief is controverted, however, by the weight of the evidence indicating that Sox either is or elects to be ignorant of scientific principles and methods. He even intentionally misuses scientific terminology to demand that loyalty to licentious imbeciles supersedes personal loyalty. You shouldn't let him intimidate you. You shouldn't let him push you around. We're the ones who are right, not Sox.

Where are the solid statistics that prove that anyone who resists him deserves to be crushed? I've never seen any. Yet, I'm willing to accept that statistical details released by a third-party agency indicate that Sox's diatribes are out of step with democratic practices of equity and fair play. I'm even willing to accept that he, irrational blockish-types, and a few decent but occasionally iconoclastic people are engaged in a desperate struggle for the soul of society. But failure to analyze the jaundiced -- and what one can term only doctrinaire -- underpinnings of his bruta fulmina will make my stomach turn. And let me tell you, if history follows its course, it should be evident that for the nonce, he is content to create profound emotional distress for people on both sides of the issue. But in the immediate years ahead, he will supplant one form of injustice with another. What, then, does "homeotransplantation" mean? It means considerably more than any dictionary is likely to say. Today, as yesterday, if Sox truly believes that he is a martyr for freedom and a victim of denominationalism, then maybe he should enroll in Introduction to Reality 101.

I realize that feudalism is a tremendous problem in our society, but does it constantly have to be thrown in our faces? To ask that question another way, in view of his oleaginous cop-outs, what does it make sense for us to do now? The answer is obvious if you understand that it has been brought to my attention that when some snivelling beggars first introduced me to his sniffish scare tactics, I felt that civilization had reached a nadir of bleakness. While this is true, there isn't a man, woman, or child alive today who thinks that the moon is made of green cheese, so let's toss out that ridiculous argument of Sox's from the get-go. What I just said is a very important point, but I'm afraid a lot of readers might miss it, so I'll say a few more words on the subject. Sox's lapdogs believe that public opinion is a reliable indicator of what's true and what isn't. Although it is perhaps impossible to change the perspective of those who have such beliefs, I wish nevertheless to expand people's understanding of Sox's tactless equivocations.

If Sox were to convert our children to cultural zombies in a mass of unthinking and easily herded proletarian cattle, social upheaval and violence would follow. It is therefore clear that many people respond to Sox's cocky, salacious smear tactics in the same way that they respond to television dramas. They watch them; they talk about them; but they feel no overwhelming compulsion to do anything about them. That's why I insist we question authority. He recently claimed that his objectives provide a liberating insight into life, the universe, and everything. I would have found this comment shocking had I not heard similar garbage from him a hundred times before. The most significant aspect of Sox's mentality and its lack of refinement is the closeness of Sox's way of thinking in general to the way that the worst sorts of spiteful cowards I've ever seen think in particular. Well, that's getting away from my main topic, which is that I correctly predicted that he would address what is, in the end, a nonexistent problem. Alas, I didn't think he'd do that so effectively -- or so soon.

Since I don't know Sox that well, I'll have to be a bit presumptuous when I say that I feel that writing this letter is like celestial navigation. Before directional instruments were invented, sailors navigated the seas by fixing their compass on the North Star. But those who divert us from proclaiming what in our innermost conviction is absolutely necessary do us all a great injustice. Now, I could go off on that point alone, but I frequently talk about how all of his expostulations contain judgmental elements. I would drop the subject, except that if he continues to reduce us to acute penury, I will unmistakably be obliged to do something about him. And you know me: I never neglect my obligations. Sox doesn't have any principles, or if he does, he puts them aside whenever they're inconvenient. I do not propose a supernatural solution to the problems we're having with him. Instead, I propose a practical, realistic, down-to-earth approach that requires only that I draw a picture of what we conceive of under the word "contradistinctive". He wants to cause peremptory subversion to gather momentum on college campuses. Who does he think he is? I mean, he has never gotten ahead because of his hard work or innovative ideas. Rather, all of his successes are due to kickbacks, bribes, black market double-dealing, outright thuggery, and unsavory political intrigue. My eventual goal for this letter is to maximize our individual potential for effectiveness and success in combatting Sox Rampal. I'm counting on you for your support.


http://www.pakin.org/complaint/

Ok

*wonders where she can join the FIC*

I give up.... Swear me in, i'm obviously missing out on something SPECTACULAR!

Maybe If I join the FIC, my sim won't keep repeatedly going down all the time, for hours at a time, seen as they apparently get special treatment.

Actually you've played longer than I have - at least try to use a little logic with your fallen attempts at wit.

Why MAN WHY!!!?!?!!?

My time is taken up attending secret meetings, wearing my underpants on my head and drinking mead from a cows horn.

It's the tweaking of nipples I like best



This is true - I have 10 kids and I'm a cop so I guess I'll be on the front lines combating the very social upheaval I've caused

Sigh. People have a very hard time with abstract notions around here, don't they?

10 kids? ...Well at least you are armed

1) It wasnt wit
2) It wasnt a statement of logic, rather one of clarity.
3) I wasnt talking to you Sox
4) Stop calling LL on the phone they are busy.
5) Age has nothing to do with FIC status, if you call Lindens on the phone, IM them daily, fly over to chat with them, your in.

I think the more Feted someone is, the less likley they are to post on these forums. They don't need to, because they already have the Lindens' ear.

On the other hand, I think the ultimate FIC are the people who loaned Linden Lab millions of dollars, not the ones paying big tier fees.

Damn, that makes me unable to EVER be FIC...seen as

a) I never call the Lindens, I am in the UK
b) I only ever IM one if my sim goes haywire
c) I think I have chatted to about 2 Lindens in world, that haven't come to fix a problem for me.

*sigh*

Now what will I do

Sorry Willow I cant reply anymore I'm too busy subverting humanity



Oh...and two grandchildren.What can I say? - I prefered 'staying home' to going out drinking with my m8s when I was on leave

I heard that if you have cyber sex with FIC members then you can become one by osmosis... or maybe it was mitosis...

OR wed one.

OR bribe a newbie to call you one

OR become an Infamous Middle Person (IMP)

Thank you Sox for saying that. Things that start out as jokes and then start getting taken WAAAY too seriously need to just go pooferz.

I do know a great deal about this, having spent hours in-world discussing it with some residents. You still don't get it. The Lindens "opened up" land for "anyone to use" is in fact the subsidizing of a sim for a social democracy toy government. Sending in a project proposal was part of it. The Lindens did nothing to stimulate this opportunity, preferring to just let one group take it, and calling that a "competition," which is misleading. Scathing remarks about other players being too lame to take advantage of this offer doesn't take away from the essence of the subsidy here: one group, and a socialist democracy take-over at that, got freed of a purchase price.

FIC and the criticisms related to are old than 2 months, and this process may well have been accelerated by the public discussion of the really unreasonable policy of giving one group of players a sim free of up-front purchase cost, merely for the cost of tier.

It doesn't matter if only one group showed up for the contest, because LL didn't go on providing that opportunity equally over enough time to enable others to take advantage of such an opportunity.

When you only get one applicant for a "contest," it isn't a contest you have promoted or explained very well, and just letting one "winner" walk away with it is a poor policy that lays the groundwork for questions about impartiality.

It is now ending, and thanks the Lord for it. Just don't misrepresent what it is: people who didn't pay an up-front purchase price for a sim like the rest of us LOL.

A chief feature of the FIC is that they deny there is any privilege in the first place.





Um, that's why it says the ended the OLD system, the OLD way it was done, and substituted a new way.




No, that's why the previous point was made, they ended one system, created a new system, everyone hollered, and they revised it. Go read the Linden forums. They made it so not just mentors and live helpers, already privileged on a reinforced cycle track, but anyone with a plausible educational program, could get the grant. It has a few hoops to jump through but in principle now, anyone, live helper or mentor or not, can get an education grant. That was not the case when they first redid the program, just go back and look at the official announcements before shouting "bullshit" because you can't stand a point being made.



Geez, this is the best example, and you are obdurate about accepting it. Go and read the thread about the Linden cards, and you'll get it.




They've changed that to 60 days now, I believe. That's what I mean by revising.




I guess you are one of those people privy to the Lindens' to-do list and game plans way ahead of schedule, like some other posters here?




You wouldn't have to be a conspiracy nutter to point out that only one group got a sim without an up-front purchase price, that only a few players got to have the card dispensor on their lot, etc. That's just being an ordinary person walking up to a very privileged and insular system and saying, hey, wait a minute here...



Well, now you've introduced a new concept, a Linden move prompted by their possible concern about newb masses always asking worriedly "what is the FIC". I never thought of that. Well let's add it to the list then : )




Their awareness about this was sharpened by the hell breaking loose on the forums which occurred due to very sharp debates and the response of some groups to the sharpness of those debates by engaging in personal attacks and venomous hectoring.




Well, that's pretty silly, because some very old players are in fact the club owners and in fact hop too. The content-creators who got rated due to their content and kept those ratings forever, whether they ever created another thing, would be the winners, as would those who once had popular lots and got the ratings, etc. To pin it all on "newbie club hoppers" is short-sighted indeed. Unfortunately, we can't pull up a fair sampling of profiles now to see if your very skewed and prejudicial take on ratings is correct. But I think the rapidity with which many old players restored their ratings and kept their high stipends testifies to their large, established player networks that function outside of clubs.



I concede they did nothing for your world. I said they were beneficial for the world which is our world.

again your ignorance shows....it was not a a sim and the Lindens did much to stimulate this effort but they asked for complete project outlines and onle ONE group submitted this. It was LL way of trying to do something productive with the snow sims that began to wane. Perhaps if you were here when all of this actually took place you might know better ...as it stands you are disseminating false information



Fraid not my friend but nice try.



again project outlines were asked for and more thna this area was available...only one group submitted a project outline. The timeline was more than equitable to anyone who wished to participate just because you think it was not doesn't make it so ...and again where were you when this took place?




Only in the minds of people who are ignorant of lil things others call facts....




Ignorance must be bliss... no one got a sim...and you are the only person misrepresenting anything. And the fact thay a fee wasnt paid up front for the land was part of the deal. there are also similar deals that can still be had for renting whole sims from LL



A chief feature of ignorance is lack of sustainable facts...





um...ok





you made no point and continue to make no point....I don't have to go back I was here and you are again wrong. Not just mentors or live helpers were granted special rights to grants.



no thanks I can do without more drivel





I gues you are a conspiracy theorist who has no clue but wants to make a name for himself ...



You really should learn facts because you look like a fool. No one got a full sim but since you dont go by faxcts who cares right? and again this situation was offered to every resident....oh...except you...but then again you didn't exist then did you?




No you implied that move thats why I stated what I did...whats the matter now you cant even keep your melodramtic theories straight?



You haven't been in the forums long have ya? Venomous Hectoring lol





No one has kept ratings forever...your newbness is really showing. The fact is ( and I know because I was here and you weren't ) is that the majority of people with high ratings weren't oldbies they were newbies going to rating parties and making the social rounds...your complete ignorance of this is understood because again you weren't even here to know what the facts were.



Its easy to tell you'll never have anything worthwhile to say...you'll be another person whispering about the FIC for all your days

Not "another person" Talen, just a VERY obvious alt of someone we all know far to well after reading reams of his baseless, meandering, pakin.org sounding rhetoric. I think everytime he responds in the future, we should all just reply with pakin.org complaints. thanks for the inspiration.

I am SO glad someone else sees the Alt thing going on here too

Awww Willow!

You've fallen into the "no-win situation trap" that *CRAP* is putting out there.

If you reply back saying "I don't call the Lindens, I am not FIC...", etc., then you will be accused of being "self-important, we weren't talking about you...".

You simply can't argue with them, because they have an inexhaustible supply of these all too obvious conversational tricks. If you don't challenge them, you run the risk of being sorted and branded along with countless others, if you do, you are being assumptive... Lose-Lose situation.

As Amy said, they are willing it into existence, by whatever means necessary.


Edit: P.S. Now the alts are voting as well. WOOT!

Edit: P.S. Now the alts are voting as well. WOOT!

They are all alts of the real FIC...be afraid....be very afraid

Wow, gosh, golly, woot, Willow, could that be an alt? How PERCEPTIVE of you!!!

It's important to keep answering even the longest most ridiculous post because there are just some obvious truths that anyone with intelligence and reason can see if they are willing to shed their FIC blinders.



It doesn't matter if it was technically a "sim" or "part of a sim" or "just some dog-meat snow sim the Lindens couldn't sell".

The point is they got land without paying an upfront purchase price.

Please do not deny that.

They got land without paying an upfront purchase price.

Your persistence, and the persistence of the people in this project in skirting, denying, evating, prevaricating about this is truly astounding. So let me say it again for good measure:


They got land without paying for the upfront purchase price, merely the tier henceforth.


Um, go back and look at the dates LOL. You think because you holler "nice try, fraid not" that makes it any less true? LOL. It got accelerated, for sure.

Quote:
It doesn't matter if only one group showed up for the contest, because LL didn't go on providing that opportunity equally over enough time to enable others to take advantage of such an opportunity.



It doesn't matter if I was here in this game or not. Obviously I wasn't. These are matters of principle. The Lindens held a crappy contest which wasn't explained very well, had too many hurdles, and it only got one applicant. They gave some snow sim away to somebody's socialist dream. I'm saying even if only one applicant showed up and it is lousy snow sim, well, it's a giveaway and a subsidy that is unfair and unnecessary, and the obvious confirmation of my point is that the Lindens stopped this program then. Whereas if they had continued it, revised it, stimulated it, we might see 10 things now, instead of this one idiotic socialist democracy toy. Or if they admitted that it wasn't such a fantastic idea, encouraging socialism by depriving socialism of awareness of its costs (like upfront purchase prices).

My God, these are such obvious facts, I don't even know where to start, if they cannot be established.



Well..um...where are the facts? I don't see them. It was a poorly designed competition that drew one application who was particularly zealous with their utopian alpine socialist dream/nightmare. That should tell you it was flawed, and they needed to discount it, start over, make more contests, or admit that you don't subsidize socialism like that, it's too much of a loud back-pat to something like that in a game of this nature.

The original objection to this entire enterprise is that these people used their subsidized perch to call into question the group land discount system and the discounted tier system, so they were not only prepared to grab a free subsidy from their Linden friends, they were willing to use that feted position to grab away whatever anyone else had managed to pay for from the Lindens. THAT is what was so terrible about what they did.
Quote:



Um...part of the deal...and I'm calling it a) an unfair deal b) a bad deal c) a bad idea d) not replicable.

Similar deals? Huh? I'm not aware of any such deals where you can have the upfront purchase price of a sim waived, i.e. not buy it on the auction, and have LL turn over to you, as your personal playground, and entire sim or part of a sim, where you can then merely pay tier henceforth. Um...where are those deals? I think you'll find they don't exist.
Perhaps there's a student research project somewhere where the Lindens gave some land to something? I think you'll find that it just isn't the case that the Lindens waive up-front purchase prices. And it's a good thing, given how poorly this was organized in the past.



I'm making my case successfully again, since you've been unable to prove that this group didn't get a purchase-price waived except by ranting and huffing and puffing about how "it was a contest" and "it was part of the deal". But you can't disclaim that in fact, this group got the purchase price waived.

Now, say I want to do a government project. Can I do that now, if I don't want to pay the upfront purchase price? No. Could I do it before, if I was the one application in a poorly-run contest? Um, yeah. And that's what we're talking about here.



The original version of the revised educational grant system was open only to those pre-approved mentors and live helpers. People howled. They revised it. It's in the Linden forums. Go look.




Oh, OK, I get it, so when I'm right about something it just becomes more drivel?



No, I'm just a person asking how you happen to know so much about the Lindens' to-do list? I find that fascinating.

Quote:

You wouldn't have to be a conspiracy nutter to point out that only one group got a sim without an up-front purchase price, that only a few players got to have the card dispensor on their lot, etc. That's just being an ordinary person walking up to a very privileged and insular system and saying, hey, wait a minute here...

You really should learn facts because you look like a fool. No one got a full sim but since you dont go by faxcts who cares right? and again this situation was offered to every resident....oh...except you...but then again you didn't exist then did you?

It doesn't matter if it is a full sim or 1024. It's still free land. And if I didn't exist then, who cares? And if it was "open to every player" so what? Only one group applied, which means it was a poorly advertised and poorly run contest, not even a fair competition. A crappy snow sim was given away for somebody's alpinian socialism. Maybe not such a big deal. But it constitutes a subsidy and a back-pat that opened up problems of fairness across the board. Any reasonable person coming into this situation who isn't in that symbiotic FIC love-bond can see it.



I guess it's important for you to hector a newer person with your oldbie status?

But I'm looking at people like Lordfly who aren't clubbers. They get a fair amount in their stipend box and they have lots of pluses, for their products. You just have one impression, but it isn't even rigorously tested. I just don't buy what you say because I can pull up the profile of any content-baron in the game and see loads of pluses, even if they don't go to parties. Geez, that ought to be self-evident.



You provide fresh confirmation of its existence daily.

Oh how convenient that "Henry" has forgotten to mention that when Nberg moves, they don't get any money from that land they are leaving. Sure they didn't have to pay anything but tier, that is because the land was NEVER THEIRS! Gee golly by george whiz bang!



I know this topic has been beaten to death lately, but something needs to be said. Trying to commit acts of immorality, dishonesty, and treason is just as disgraceful as trying to deface a social fabric that was already deteriorating. To organize my discussion, I suggest that we take one step back in the causal chain and lead Officer Henry "Prokofy" Hutchence II out of a dream world and back to hard reality. His anti-democratic "compromises" run counter to human nature and, as such, are doomed to failure. More than that, his intent is to prevent us from asking questions. Officer Hutchence doesn't want the details checked. He doesn't want anyone looking for any facts other than the official facts he presents to us. I wonder if this is because most of his "facts" are false. Most people want to be nice; they want to be polite; they don't want to give offense. And because of this inherent politeness, they step aside and let Officer Hutchence destroy all tradition, all morality, and the entire democratic system.

He is absolutely determined to believe that a totalitarian dictatorship is the best form of government we could possibly have, and he's not about to let facts or reason get in his way. As I see it, Officer Hutchence seeks scapegoats for his own shortcomings by blaming the easiest target he can find, that is, what I call aberrant turncoats.

Following this line of logic, it would appear that he floats with the tide of dysfunctional Fabianism, especially when driven by the gravitational pull of egotism. No joke. I am convinced that there will be a strong effort on Officer Hutchence's part to redefine humanity as alienated machines/beasts and then convince everyone that they were never human to begin with before you know it. This effort will be disguised, of course. It will be cloaked in deceit, as such efforts always are. That's why I'm informing you that you shouldn't let Officer Hutchence intimidate you. You shouldn't let him push you around. We're the ones who are right, not Officer Hutchence. To summarize my views: Officer Henry "Prokofy" Hutchence II will adopt or abandon any principle to obtain power.

www.pakin.org