Philosophy in the New Metaverse ~ Where do you stand?

The part where you're making it seem like I'm dismissing harm as mere anything.

I think this reflects pretty exactly my own experience with the Political Compass thingy, as well, with slight changes in inflection here or there, my own politics RL and SL.

Maybe the most interesting thing to explore is the difference between our RL and SL political attitudes, as differences there must be (there certainly are for me, which reflect my awareness that SL is a simulation and that, while the experiences here ARE "real," they are "real" in a different way). Or maybe this is too much a case of "apples and oranges"?

I'd be inclined to expect great overlap between RL and SL politics, to the extent that those politics are a reflection of our basic values.

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"

Well... I have an alt for that.

Good one, Qie

Thank heavens you explained it to me. I was having visions of free-range librarians.

I never made it to university so you gotta have mercy on me as I'm not that swift. I'm always the guest at the dinner table who's playing with the dinner rolls when the intellectual chitter-chatter gets rolling. Thank God for tiny ipods

But, more in my kinda terms - isn't progressive just a watered-down version of socialism? Or rather, socialist (in a more recent definition.)

I always think of "liberal" as being undecided and safe. Like, rock music - the Beatles in the Cavern and early days appealed to art students, by the time "Revolution" came around and "Sgt. Pepper" fans were in Post Grad studies and then when White Album surfaced older fans were starting tenureship. Employed not in Graphic Arts or Univesities or Municipal Affairs, two job families disapproved of their daughters listening to The Clash or Marilyn Manson. Then as the Conservative party started to appeal, as Grandparents, they see Rap or HipHop as flagrant abuse of their eardrums. On that "journey" the Beatles became "safe" and finally lacked any edginess or political willpower.

"Taxman" or "Nowhere Man" are brilliant. "Let it Be" is as sad and defeated as Christ's words on the cross or Hamlet's final lines (which the title s meant to echo).

The rebellious mustang becomes the old dray horse put out to seed in the paddock.

?
If you mean the character's last words, those are:

O, I die, Horatio;
The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit:
I cannot live to hear the news from England;
But I do prophesy the election lights
On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice;
So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited. The rest is silence.

My question is how did libertarian get to be a dirty word?

Well, I meant Act 5, Scene 2, lines 213-215:

... the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be."

which is then confirmed (or echoed in) "The rest is silence"

I can't claim I discovered that reference to Hamlet, but Harrison knew it and created a tragic note and an historical literary allusion by doing so.

Murray Rothbard.

With me it became a dirty word when it was hijacked by people whom I'd regard as Thatcherites on speed.

Ever since both Parties decided we aren't capable of thinking for ourselves and need them to get through our lives.

SL is not a complete world - most of the human needs that drive RL politics have been removed from it, happily. Within the spectrum of "wants" within SL, though, there are things that people feel passionately about, and these are the things politics are made of.

SL is a (fairly) benevolent dictatorship. We can only affect what LL does by acting en masse (en HUGE masse) to put economic pressure on LL. We could also act in the RL press to do so, should an issue emerge worthy of RL press attention.

Time will tell.

We've seen that when a large enough group of residents care deeply enough, an issue-based opposition to LL emerges. Cf. the Open Letter, and to some degree Zindra. But in order for that to become "political", that opposition would have to decide to persist across individual issues.

I've always been quite sure that the Open Letter had more effect than signers believe ... it's just that there was huge latency in LL's response due to having to manage RL projects and employees, and a great need on their part to appear NOT to be affected. It would be horrible, from LL's perspective, for residents to think they can shove LL's product plans all over the landscape.

(Aside: Ironically, should residents ever form a political opposition to LL, the ties to social networking tools that LL is pushing will facilitate untraceable inworld organizing. But SL political organizers will have remarkably few tools in SL to exert pressure - basically, they could abandon land en masse, organize events and get them into RL press, and ... hmmm, anything else?)

Over time, there will be two types of residents of SL - those here for play, and those here for work/education. The work/education crowd will never get involved in "politics" - to them it's a Unified Communications platform, and if they need things they'll talk to the product managers. If they don't get what they need they'll go elsewhere.

So, that leaves those of us who are here for play, and the inworld businesses that serve us. For us, the advent of SL politics will suck a large amount of fun right out of SL.

Let's not go there.
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Probably the same way Liberal did, or Conservative. By having someone on the other side who didn't like that view.

One might ask the same, in a US context anyway, of "liberal."

ETA: Didn't see Darien's post . . . but "liberal" has become a pejorative in an almost nonpartisan sense in the US, with even Democrats sometimes scrambling to disown it. At least, that's my sense.

This. We all want nice, neat categories to put each other in. Give out labels denoting race, religion, political leaning, economic status, and so on. Easier to keep track of people, as well as easier to avoid "wasting" time getting to know each other. Just look at the labels and you can decide right away.

No more than "Conservative" is. Just ask any Liberal.

This is a very good post. Why must we drag the RL socio/political baggage of RL into SL. We don't need to be pushing thaose agendas here, they are irrelevant. We should be focusing our attention on the place where the only real power lies, at the Lab, and pushing them to at least seriously consider our concerns on what goes on in world, instead of bickering amongst ourselves. But, just like the RL governments, LL is more than happy to watch is fight with each other instead of putting the heat on them.

Well, in Canada, of course, our most successful political party for well over the last century has been the "Liberal Party." And even our Conservative Party went through a longish phase (recently ended) during which they officially became the "Progressive Conservative Party." (How's THAT for an oxymoron?)

The Conservative lost their "progressiveness" when they merged with our far right-wing (in Canadian terms, anyway) Reform Party. For a brief time, the newly merged party played with a new name: Conservative Reform Alliance Party.

Yes, that's right. CRAP.

The Liberal Party is Australia's "conservative" party, and "Progressive" used to be about industrial development, so ... I see no problem here.

Real life, recently, has provided far too many examples of the wrong-headedness of beliefs such as 'the free market will solve all problems' for libertarianism to be respectable any more.

Also, I suspect, the anti-environmental efforts of libertarian standard-bearers such as The Cato Institute are viewed by many as head-in-the-sand nuttiness.

I think this is an excellent point, to a degree. Clearly we DON'T need to be tackling issues like medicare and social assistance in SL.

However, there are two factors which will ensure that RL politics DOES creep into SL.

The first is that increasingly both political parties and NGOs are using SL as a means of getting their messages across. In terms of the latter we have, of course, E-Amnesty International, an SL group which is, however, almost entirely focussed on RL human rights issues. But there are also partisan parties appearing here. I mentioned once, I think, dancing on the information counter of the US Republican Party Headquarters in SL (great fun: everyone should try it!) Recently, the British National Party, an extreme right wing party, began operations in SL.

The second is that SL is NOT entirely divorced from RL. At the very least, all of the politicized issues that relate to the internet as a whole are relevant here. Issues like harassment and bullying, access, etc., are important here, just as they are in Facebook, MySpace, or in a kazillion blogs across the web.

My own SL feminist groups partake of both of these threads: they use SL as a means of education on RL issues (with, for example, sponsored presentations on the institutional rape practices in Iran), and as a venue that, in and of itself, generates issues of interest to feminists.

Speaking merely for Canada -- and maybe even really only my particular part of Canada -- the term "libertarian" certainly has developed negative connotations, through association with figures like Ayn Rand and general right-wing wackiness.

I suspect that the only places in Canada this may not be true might be Alberta and perhaps parts of British Columbia, where wackiness rules supreme anyway.

*awaits posts by outraged residents of said provinces*

(j/k^_^)

There's been some discussion in the US to the effect that the term "Republican" has become so discredited as to convince people to look for an alternative--and for many, that alternative has been 'libertarian'. But as you say, some associations with that term are scarcely more respectable than are associations with 'Republican'.

This is part of the problem. One person's wacky is another's pragmatic. To us New Yorkers, California is wacky. I'm sure there are even more colrful adjectives to describe us.

Here in the States, BOTH parties have morphed into something totally unrecogniizable from their origins and have abandoned their long standing tenents and have totally abandoned their followers in favor of growing their reach into our lives, whether we want it or not.

I apologize if my post came off as a put-down; I was responding to your earlier comment "Maybe we need some researchers in here!" which I took as a general statement to the effect that we who are posting weren't up to the task of debating these matters. Whether that was your intended message or not, I think it's fair to point out that this thread is evidence of the number of well-informed, capable minds this forum attracts. I do think we're up to the task of examining these questions.

In re people's propensity to change their political philosophy as they age: yes, indeed.

(Though personally, I'm still waiting to become less progressive in my views. I'm skeptical it will happen even if it is a common human pattern. If I ever become an admirer of people such as the Bush administration and their supporters, I will be very surprised.)