Today's Registration Protests

First off, I didn't say your concerns were invalid. In fact, I don't even care about your concerns. The thing is, you were protesting on a day that was to be celebrated. Protesting someone on their birthday, if you will. And second, I didn't say he treated you crummy. I was saying that you were all being dicks by protesting someone on their birthday, no more, no less.

Lastly, Summer mischaracterized you? I wouldn't guess that a person that would start a portest against someone on their birthday as "high of character".

As for that plug you put in the end of your post, I disagree. But that aside, you are trying to justify a wrong by bringing up a hypothetical outcome. You aren't someone that should be talking about civilized debates.

Uhm... Nolan?

It's "desired."

I love irony...

P2

I know it wasn't his birthday, but it was a birthday no less. If my shirt said "Fuck you, Allana Dion", that would be considered negative as well, so it's not like you have to act like a raving asshole for the negative message to be there. The fact that you plug in your own agenda by wearing these shirts and justifying it by using self righteousness really annoys me.

My shirt said "Restore Age Verification". Really very very different from "FU".

It annoys you, point made.
I'm afraid I really can't bring myself to be at all sorry. I had a point I felt I needed to make as well and I did my best to make it. But you have the right to your opinion that it was wrong, I respect your right to have that opinion whether I agree or not.

How can you attempt to justify what didn't happen?

I wasn't critiquing anyone's grammar or spelling though. I was pointing out the irony of someone who makes lots of grammatical and spelling errors critiquing another person's skills.

Which Summer did.

FYI - there is a difference between not knowing how to spell a word, and a typo.

You seem to think that we were protesting "someone". We weren't. We were demonstrating our concern for Second Life, which is not a person. It's a community and we are members of that community just like you. Not even Philip objected to our presence there, yet you resort to calling us "jerkwads". That's a personal attack in my book.


Yes she did. She's made the assertion in several threads several times that we were "griefing" the celebration -- an assertion that turned out to be egregiously wrong. And you follow that with yet another personal attack on me? Just how high is that horse you're on anyway?



Oh dear god. I have tried with everything I have to be calm and reasonable in these discussions, but some of you don't seem to want to allow us our opinion no matter what we say. I don't tend to treat people the same once they're insulting like Summer and now like you. This isn't the stuff a good discussion is made of. It's character assassination, except that neither of you are very good shots. You have not earned any kindness from me whatsoever with your idiotic insults, so please save yourself further embarrassment and just shut the hell up, huh?

You're bigger than I am, Allana. After calling us "jerkwads" I don't really give a rat's ass what his opinion is.

an obnoxious hit and run post. And not a good one. now if *I* had been making an obnoxious hit and run, I'd have done it better. But let's put that aside for the larger question of Phillip's "caring."

I'm sure Phillip "cares about" the problem. SL is his baby. Of course he cares. He may or may not agree with your solution to it, or your assessment of its seriousness.

Wow, it's like you are reading what I said, then changing all the words to something you want to hear so you can bitch about it. I'll try to keep the point I was trying to make short, then go on to another point.

What you did showed utter disrespect for SL by using it's birthday for your own self righteous agenda. The only example I could think of that you might understand is like if you wore an anti American shirt while at a veterans day parade. You are jerks for that action. That's it. There is nothing more that I'm trying to say there. You are one of the psychotic "do gooders" that can't grasp when they step over the line, and get extremely over offended on little issues if it disagrees with their agenda. You have proven yourself to be on the list of "loud people who think they are always right or higher then others cause they use the term debate, even though they can't debate without going nuts if someone dares point out a wrong and will instantly try to turn it into some kind of vicious and hateful personal attack, and then hypocritically in the very next sentence, attack that person" people.

What I first stated wasn't a personal attack. It was how a group of people did an asshole thing, and me stating why there was cause for suspicion that said group would become 'loud'. You took that as an assault on your character, which ironically ended up showing your true character. I really can't stand people like you, and I'm glad the only interaction I get from your types is in the SL forums.

This is a fucking ridiculous comparison. The two things are so wide apart. There are far more serious sensibilities involved in a veteran's day parade.

I wasn't involved in the protest at all, but I was flying around having a look. From what I saw before I crashed, the protestors were sitting peacefully and chatting. They respected SL by behaving well and not disrupting proceedings. They seemed to stay away from the parade itself.

My opinion on this whole issue is somewhere in the middle, maybe even leaning towards the new registration has it positives (and reading along I've often been agreeing with Moopf's pov), but I feel what they chose to do is fair enough, and they went about it in a respectful manner.

And as for someone else calling it 'passive griefing'... bullshit, bluntly.

The definition of griefing seems to get looser every day, and it muddies the whole discussion.

And it sucks.

Again Tren you have a right to your opinion. However the way you express that opinion I find personally offensive so I'm going to decide to just not listen to you anymore and go do my own thing instead while you go on expressing your opinions any way you choose to others who do want to listen.

See how it works? Try it.

I like how you suggested that I should ignore what I don't want to listen to by you yourself replying to a post that wasn't directed to you and then at the end implied that you yourself ignored the very post you replied to, saying that I should do the same. I will by replying to your post, then saying I'm done with this thread. Oh and a little to make up for the emotional boo-boos I made. I sorry.

Indeed it was before the griefers - no doubt a direct result of the very thing we are objecting to (unlimited unverified signups), a great time.

The biggest problem we had was one individual who called us a bunch of jerks and various other insulting comments - who was part of the organising committee of the event, wearing his group tag and therefore could be construed to making official comments. Such intolerance was neither appreciated nor appropriate.

Three (or was it four) Lindens turned up during the couple of hours before the event, when were were there chatting and debating, and not ONE commented in any form that perhaps it was not the best place to hold a protest; in fact they all asked for a copy of our signs and t-shirts! Of course, they made no comment pro or anti regarding our points of concern - which is to be expected - but all in all we had a great time until the griefers came along and ruined it for everyone.

I gave up after the second crash, which was a few minues into Philip's talk, when he was actually saying that he respected our right to protest, and was going to address our concerns.

That's when my audio stream stuttered to a halt, my client stopped responding, and the crash logger came up. I couldn't log back in, read the forums and figured that neither could anyone else, so I gave up and went to bed.

I can see this being a busy weekend for the gridmonkeys......

Lewis

The birthday party was absolutely not the place for this.

People don't seem to realize that the birthday was organized and run by residents just like you. They put in a huge amount of effort to entertain you and to celebrate all the reasons that you are even on Second Life. They worked incredibly hard and dealt with enormous stress organizing a huge event that some people decided they would crash with signs and t-shirts to make a point.

There's talk about trying to be 'visible' but this isn't an issue which required visibility. There was already a huge amount of talk over this before the birthday party. This was excessive. This was bullying. You didn't just interrupt Linden Labs, you pretty much wrecked the party for all the people who were involved in organizing it, the same people who are largely still pretty upset about the whole thing.

So yes, I absolutely think it was a jerkish thing to do. If you don't like being called jerks, don't do things that are likely to get you called jerks. In the end though, I don't think the people involved were fully cogniscent of who exactly they were impacting with this needless protest; other residents. And not in a positive way. If you want to protest, find a time and a place. You have the right to express your concerns. You even have the right to do it at a birthday party. But that doesn't mean everyone else isn't going to think it was a jerkish thing to do.

Here's the real clincher; instead of making your concerns 'visible' you have just made a lot of people think that you lot are jerks. Congratulations, that was very well played.

Technically, I agree with your sentiment, but in a way I actually kind of hope that LL swings the other way just so this kind of behavious isn't encouraged. No, I do not want celebrations in SL to turn into some kind of Protest of the Month free for all, and this is the precedent you are setting.

Have some decency and don't wreck other people's fun just because you want to be 'visible.' There are other ways, use your brain and figure them out. Until you do, people are going to resent your actions for the way it affects them, and you're going to have to learn to live with it.

The real irony here is that people are deciding 'not to listen' to the people who are protesting your method of protesting because you don't like the way they're seeing you. Funny, really, because a lot of people found the way you protested at the party to be offensive. If you want people to listen to you, don't piss them off. And if you absolutely must piss them off, don't pretend like it's justifiable for you to totally ignore the disagreements you get just because you don't like how they're presented.

You're setting a real fine example for protests should be performed, guys. Yes, that was sarcasm.

If I remember correctly, the fun was ruined by database errors and grid outages far more than by us holding up signs.
Does that mean that LL database admins are jerks, too?

*meow*
Sheila.

Alas, I think some people here just do not have the capacity to comprehend that a civilised discussion and wearing shirts does not necessarily spoil a party and does not prevent the players from engaging in meaningful debate with the Lindens.

This is SL's birthday. SL is the sum of its parts (residents) and I don't think there is anything in the TOS requiring the players to not have an opinion or to refrain from expressing any opinion they might have, as long as it's done respectfully.. Too bad for those posters if they can't see that. I'm done discussing this issue.

Keep ignoring the parts where it's mentioned that Philip Linden welcomed the debate. Partial blindness for trolls. It works.

Wendel

If you guys showed up accidentally, not realizing that you had a bunch of signs and t-shirts, not realizing it was a celebration, then you wouldn't be jerks either.

You see, the subtle difference here is intent. If the database admins were like, 'Now would be a great time to show the grid how our database has some quirks! Everyone would really notice our problems if we crashed the game right now with a code glitch!' Yeah, they would be jerks too.

Thanks for trying though.

Edit: Aagh, you disagree with me, you are a troll. Anyone who doesn't share my views are trolls!

LOL! Cute.

Wendel

Scuse me? What exactly did we do wrong? Last time I heard, any resident could attend the birthday party. There were all sorts of group tags and clothing being worn there, ours were no more or less obtrusive than any others, and when Philip arrived, through conversations held in group chat we all agreed to take down our signs so as to not obstruct anyone's view or enjoyment, and everyone in the group complied.

So if "wrecking the party" was simply because we attended, then I'm sorry, but we had as much right to be there as you did.



Really? I've heard nothing except a few individuals complain that we were there. As already stated, we did nothing to disrupt anything of the evening - you can blame that on the grid crashers who were nothing to do with us at all. If being organised enough to get there early enough to find a few front row seats is 'griefing'... then you really are stretching it.



Again, we disrupted nothing, disturbed no-one. All our conversations about what was being said was done in our group chat, not disrupting the flow of open chat. As for 'protest of the month', evidently you've never been to a town hall.



Really? I'm not seeing "a lot of people" complaining about a group of people sitting quietly at a public event.



Perhaps if you could actually disassociate our protests with the actions of the grid crashing griefers who were nothing at all to do with us, you may be able to see things a little more clearly.

Lewis

It is currently legal in the States and in Canada to protest with signs and shirts at a funeral of a dead soldier. Legal. Totally within your rights. Doesn't make a person any less of a jerk just because you're allowed to do it.

And no, I'm not saying it's the same thing. Protesting at a birthday party is a whole lot lower on the slime scale than protesting at a funeral.

Like I said, you were totally within your rights to be there. Absolutely and totally. Never once did I say you weren't.

I just think it was a poor time and a poor place to do it. There's lots of things you have the right to do that you shouldn't just out of respect for people.

Statement corrected for veracity.

They protested peacefully and their clothes and attachments (sign included) were no worse than anything else I saw there.

We chose to take down our signs when the talk began so as to not disrupt the view for anyone else (we were aware several were trying to film the event).

I'd say that, as a group, we were quite possibly more well behaved than some of the others who attended.

Especially those who came just to crash the grid.

Lewis

I'd agree though I got there after the speech began. I saw the signs on PierceP's video, and my favorites were Psyra's and Phillip jumping the shark.


To be fair, people need to look at it objectively. How is one attachment worse than another, or one shirt worse than another. I'd say the event coordinator who berated the protestors and a certian person I corrected were about as bad as the greifers.