The Anti-Nuremberg Defense and The Nuremberg Response

Once again, W-HAT, the prankster and griefer group periodically disrupting the lives of some or all Second Life citizens, has struck -- this time, bringing down the entire grid. Or...wait...Was it *a group* that acted, or just one rogue member, who made a "mistake" or "went too far"?

The forums rapidly fill up with calls for hanging parties not only of the guilty individual (already removed by SL by the Lindens) and calls for removing all of W-HAT, but, in rebuttal, indignant outcries (injured but not innocent!) by W-HAT and Something Awful members and supporters who claim that "it's not all of us...it's not the group...it was just that one person...every group has its few bad apples."

Some forum readers find this to be a load of crap, and looking at the pattern of behaviour and numerous event-griefings and offensive "art shows" and such, believe there's no such thing as a merely pranksterish W-HAT, just a bunch of happy-go-lucky fun-loving guys and gals who just like fooling around, and see that merely as the projected PR image of what is really a more gangsterish W-HAT, a secretive group with an agenda and Bolshevik-like tactics and techniques which include automatic denial of group responsibilty or group intent and planning, and automatic pin-pointing of blame and guilt on just one "rogue" member who was either new, or opportunistic, or "made a mistake".

Uh...mkay...why are we not buying this, though, on like round 100 with these asshats?

The infamous defense at the Nuremberg Tribunal was, "I was just following orders." Whatever legalistic obstacles it created, nobody morally bought that then or now where evidence of knowledge of criminal intent or actual criminal intent could be brought forward.  "Just following orders" became particularly morally bankrupt as an excuse when some people were brave and did the right thing and did *not* follow orders.

W-HAT turns that concept around and says the opposite, "They weren't following orders." That one rogue member is just like Bub, the little boy who broke Mr. Johnson's window, in the Norman Rockwellish analogy Aimee Weber has drawn in the forums, and rather than blame all of Bub's dysfunctional family or his crappy school, we should just make the individual take responsibility for his actions and if Bub will work at the deli after school and pay for Mr. Johnson's window, why, the offense is expunged and harmony returns to the land.

This is very unsatisfactory for a lot of people, especially those whacked by first W-HAT, then the Linden's over-ambitious response to it, deprecating the 020 script that makes it possible to spread stuff all over the grid, so that now innocent artificial-intelligence experiences with breeding fish, or innocent management of customized vending machines over a network of sims, and no doubt other innocent and useful things not yet discovered, are borked, too.

The Herald has taken a very fierce editorial line on this issue, with a very graphic headline summoning up visions of June Cleaver with her dress over her head, getting screwed by Eddy Haskell again, who will deny all wrong-doing and say, "Gee, Mrs. Cleaver, what a lovely dress!" with his insincere and evil leering half-smile. That's exactly how the SL public in general feels about W-HAT -- that their proclamations of group innocence are utterly insincere, and all they've done is once again screw everybody this time, losing them a day of service right before an already-scheduled day of downtime for the new patch -- and then some. There have even been calls of RL lawsuits for damages.

Walker Spaight is right -- once again the Lindens, good California social engineers that they are, reached for a coding rather than a policy solution for the chronic problem of W-HAT; "that's what you get when you rely on your code not only to be the law but enforce it."

What would such a policy solution look like? Most people (as I did in the post below about "Broken Windows") are pointing to the need to act earlier even just on the individual-responsibility route, acting more swiftly to close (and remove might be a good idea here, to drain away attention) threads that obvious W-Hatters and SA'ers start, and punish racist and other TOS-violating behaviour inworld.

But what if the Lindens banned the group per se, and any spin-off groups and sympathizers? That would mean taking the concepts of guilt-by-association and collective punishment to cyberspace and applying them more liberally than even a conservative U.S. is willing to apply them, or even a conservative Russia is able to apply them.

The consequences when  you use these principles, which are believed antithetical to international human rights, are that you sometimes hit innocent people who aren't guilty of the charges.

Yet, originally, the Nuremberg Tribunal's charter made use of the concept of group responsibility (Articles 9 and 10): the Tribunal could declare as a "criminal organization" any group or organization of which an individual on trial for criminal acts was a member. That would then make it possible for mass indictments just on the basis of membership alone in say, the SS or HitlerJugend.

In practice, as the trials ensued, this concept of group criminality weakened, in part under Soviet influence, as the Soviets were unwilling to have an international legal concept develop that would then be used against their Communist Party, guilty of many crimes, including mass murder.

The practice of the Tribunal as it developed actually created then a narrow interpretation of group liability. Still, as Joanne Marine has written in a FindLaw essay, these issues are still alive today as the U.S. deals with the issue of membership in Al Qaeda as a marker of criminality. In U.S. history, overly-repressive laws like the Smith Act would punish all members of the Communist Party, say, including innocent utopians as well as those actually knowingly helping to fund Joseph Stalin's murderous GULAG and cooperating with the KGB.

Ruth Wedgwood, a conservative constitutional scholar, revisiting these issues in the US, has said "[j]oining Al Qaeda with knowledge of its purposes means that one has joined in a conspiracy to attack civilian targets and to make war illegally on the United States."

Now, at one level, we're all in a game -- and the Lindens can do what they like. In part because they're highly conscious that it is not a game at many levels, the Lindens don't do what they like on something with this many ramifications, and they don't just band all known W-HAT members and sympathizers and related groups automatically, before they've committed an offense. They could -- because they're a private club with dues to be paid to join (even the free members require submitting a credit card) and a TOS that must be signed, and if nothing else, all W-HAT behaviour fits into the concept of "interfering with the enjoyment of SL for other residents".

Using the conservative interpretation of the right to free association and related Supreme Court decisions, applying it to the SL simulated society, the Lindens could look at the pattern of W-HAT behaviour and say, "anyone who joins W-HAT or related groups is knowingly joining in a conspiracy to attack civilian targets and make war illegally on Linden Lab."

In fact, that would be true -- those rogue members that W-HAT is always claiming plausible deniability over joined W-HAT not because it has quilting bees and Tringo on Sundays, but because it has a rep as a bad-ass gang that puts up outrageous installations, whacks people at events, and gets up to all kinds of no-good. The history of bad deeds is what attracts the griefer personality in the first place. Maybe some of the old and new members of W-HAT think that bringing down the entire grid is "going too far" but they didn't think outrageously offensive depictions of murdered hookers, the Pope, the World Trade Center, etc. was going too far.

Furthermore, as I can personally attest, they routinely grief events, especially events trying to do something positive and visible. For example, when I had my first building contest announcement event, a posse of W-HAT showed up to grief my event, creating an obscene mall stall, mocking me, harassing me, and preventing the people who had come to legitimately find out about the contest from staying. At that time, not quite figuring out who they were, I humoured them, and even posrated one of them for their witty and ingenious avatar.

I'm going to think some more before I call on the Lindens to ban an entire group from SL. Try to think about what it would mean if they ban YOUR group because of the bad actions of a few -- let's take even the wild and wacky and idiotic Metaverse Justice Watch, which has been overpopulated with griefers now, but which I stubbornly remain in -- despite the efforts of people to keep officer-recalling me -- including one "valiant" effort to do this right on the eve of 1.7, to try to make it stick before 1.7 removed the ability of rank-and-file members to call anonymously for a vote to remove an officer. What if the effort to punishment rogues in a group like that is extended to our entire group? As soon as you think of your own group, you'll be all to ready to junk any notion of guilt-by-association, especially in an environment like SL where you have little or no recourse to control the actions of anonymous, alt-making strangers on the Internet.

I'm leaning toward thinking that at this point, however, W-HAT and Something Awful have enough of a pattern of criminal actions and enough evidence of criminal intent that they could safely make the assumption that anyone joining W-HAT or related groups is joining in celebration of that criminal history and criminal intent -- at the very least celebrating it, if indeed not intending to follow up on it.

The Lindens like to find coding solution to things and are always really reluctant just to make a desk policy. I'm always puzzled by that because, geez, they're the Lindens, they run the place, it's their servers. I think they need to think a lot harder about whether they need to be banning this group as a whole and all its members, and related groups when they show a pattern of TOS violations, and group actions (the W-HAT people always appear as a group when they grief events and are in tag-team tandem).

Meanwhile, I know what I'm going to do. Now it's been stated explicitly that Nauv deFarge is associated with Bazelkas Khan of the men's hair and clothing business BAZ, that Huns Valens and Stinqy Queso are also part of W-HAT.

I'm going to eject those members of W-HAT that I see in Metaverse Justice Watch or any other group where I'm an officer, and also those who danced at the victory dance over the crashing of the whole grid. While the jury might still be out on the question of the Lindens engaging in guilt by association or collective punishment, when I, as an individual, ban these people from my land, or eject them from my group, I'm merely exercising MY freedom of association in rejection of *their interference with my freedoms in SL*. That's what it is all about.

The constant call for innocence, rights, and freedoms for W-Hatters utterly overlooks the rights and freedoms that are abridged when they act against any or all of us.

I view rejecting W-HAT and all its works as a civic action that is absolutely justified. While I might be willing to tolerate W-HAT forming a group and having a sim where they can put any monstrosity they like, and let the Lindens deal with it, I don't think they can then take that around the grid and obstruct events, humiliate and harm, and then bring down the whole grid. That's not art. That's abuse coming at you and "significantly interfering with your enjoyment of SL."

I know that all kinds of leftist, liberals, and lunatics will scream at my expulsion of these people from MJW or my land -- but I'd just like to see Jauani Wu and all the rest justify keeping known sympathizers with grid-crashers and griefers in their "justice" group.

I also expelled Nauv DeFarge from a sub-sub-let of mine. I don't want loafers and griefers who don't even pay rent, and who grief events, to be on my property. If the sub-lessee BAZ wants to let his little pal Nauv loaf on his rental, he can find another agent. If my original tenant, Anshe Chung, wants to let her sub-letter Baz let the griefer and loafer Nauv on her rental, she can contact me about it.

Some people are going to let their liberal creeds cripple them from responding effectively to the problem of people constantly trying to destroy society. Some are going to "yes" this position because they fear retaliation if they frequently hold events. When you do that, the very project of liberal society itself is then endangered because of these destroyers of the type who always want elections to bring in their radical agenda, but then you can kiss democratic elections good-bye on the day after they come to power.

I'd also urge everyone to keep a weather eye on all these newbie accounts that have suddenly shown up to make flippant and stupid comments on the forums. These are merely the re-surfaced W-Hatters with new accounts. Watch especially for the name "Sholokhov".

I'm going to continue to think hard about the problem of collective punishment and guilt by association in the Metaverse, but one thing is for certain -- de-coding the ability to perform the crime, and having god-like powers to read all transcripts and have more information to understand intent than any government in history, are not going to be sufficient.

So much for Philip Linden's rosy theory expounded in the Herald interview more than a year ago that when people had the wondrous creative potential of SL in their hands, they'd stop griefing and being mean. It was utterly fallacious, not only because this society introduced terrible inequities like any human society, with possibly more profound consequences, with the content-fascist and creator- Darwinism movements it has facilitated.

Comments

[Delphi]

I have to agree with 100% of what you've written above.

I need not add much more as you've effectively stated most of my feelings on the matter as well.

As far as Huns and the other apologists go, they will sometimes claim to not be in the group, yet its VERY obvious, especially when you see the smug, self-promoted boy genius Huns standing around at a celebration the likes of that which we see in the posted pictures, that he is involved, always has been involved, and operates as a damage control pointman on the forums. Although this time he seems to have stayed a bit more reserved. I am wondering what that is all about. Mayhap he realizes that he better steer clear of this one, lest he fall from grace with his Linden buddies.

Now the Californian anarchist nigh on illiterate Mulch Ennui (what a fitting last name indeed) has taken on a role as Minister of Propaganda, using all kinds of OBVIOUS smoke and mirrors stunts to try and divert attention away from the fact that these children have a LONG history of many, many, homophobic, racist, anti-furry, griefing incidents. LONG before his ass ever set foot in SL - or maybe not... hmmm...

I have some advice for you Mulch, go join W-hat. You can hang out with some other societal malcontents, ones who think that the post-modernist French philosphers are to be revered as visionaries. You'll fit right in. A bunch of twats who think they're smarter than everyone else, when in reality, they just now how to work the system, and avoid personal responsibilty. THAT is their forte'. The problem is, the more times the try to get away with it, the more people will become aware of their schemes, and more pressure will be placed upon them and LL.

Mulch, your blog sucks, by the way. Bristling with Bolshevik bullshit and tough-guy "don't be suprised when you find out I can handle myself" bravado.

Hint: People who "can handle themselves" don't need to broadcast that "fact", nor do they need to tell the world how cool they are for being banned from game boards.

Now then, the Lindens need to get their shit together on this issue.
Breaking object to object scripts is ridiculous AND it doesn't really prevent global attacks, as is being detailed over on the SL general forums in the thread about the subject.

Thanks LL, not only do you bend over and spread YOUR cheeks for W-Hatters, you force US to as well. Absolutely mind-boggling.

TAKE CARE OF THIS ISSUE WITHOUT FUCKING THE POPULATION OVER MORE THAN THEY ALREADY HAVE BEEN BY THESE GRIEFING ASSHOLES!

[Cubey]

"The constant call for innocence, rights, and freedoms for W-Hatters utterly overlooks the rights and freedoms that are abridged when they act against any or all of us."

Yes. Well put.

[Mulch Ennui]

Originally Posted on Broken Windows Comments:
"I am not gonna debate you in your comments section all day. "

And I'm certainly not gonna get into the weird game of debating or dignifying your weird little alts on the comments section of your blog either Prok, I mean Random, I mean "Delphi."

Bizarre! You are like a runaway train loaded full of warped.

[Prokofy Neva]

? I'm not Delphi, I don't have any idea who Delphi is. My alts are known because they have the same land groups and the same blog on the profile, duh.

While good liberals want to do the right thing and not use guilt-by-association so as to punish the innocent, you do have to face down these Bolshevik types who use this classic deniability technique where they constantly perpetrate misdeeds and then look around and say "who, me?" or "oh, that was just one of our young 'uns." We're all SO past that now, and even you get it.

The next step then becomes: how do you deal with sympathizers, supporters, and victory-dancers? And my answer to that is boot and ban if you are a resident. With Lindens, I think it would be more appropriate to judge each individual case and look at criminal action. But like the FBI, they should have a profile going now that shows the kinds of groups, names, etc. that these people always take, it's become a pattern now.

[iwy birdy]

"The constant call for innocence, rights, and freedoms for W-Hatters utterly overlooks the rights and freedoms that are abridged when they act against any or all of us."

Dead right.

[juro kothari]

In this case, with W-Hat's history, I would disband the group and perma-ban all of them - but that's probably why I'm not running things.

[Simone]

Let me get a few things straight here, and forgive my ignorance; I'm not college educated. What little education I do have is from reading.

That being said, I want to know what LL's premise is here. ARE they a game? In which case, let's see a little more immediate reaction to issues when they arise, and a LOT more forethought to prevent this kind of thing. Or is LL's growing little experiment nothing more than a glorified Skinner box? I'd assume if it were, it's a very capitalistic Skinner box, and anything interfering with free trade would be removed post-haste...(RL advertisers don't want to deal with gangs and grafitti and people who destroy property in the real world, why the hell would they put up with it here?)

EverQuest, the massively popular online world with an active subscriber base of 500,000 plus people, encountered a very similar problem. A guild by the name of "Brotherhood of the Spider" attempted to monopolize and control the economy on a particular grid. Resistance against this thousand member-organization's tactics resulted in harassment intended to encourage opponent players, anyone not affiliated with their group, to stop playing. This guild of extortionists and griefers managed to achieve such a high level of control that they had locked down nearly every form of profitability. The developers' response was this: All members in a position of leadership were banned for a year. The ban was credit card, avatar, and IP. The entire organization was forcefully disbanded, and all remaining members /not found immediately guilty of policy violation/ were prevented from forming subsequent groups, or even associations with any other member, permanently. This went even so far as disallowing former members to join any guild that a single other member of the now defunct Brotherhood of the Spider had also joined. The good folks at EverQuest simply squashed the griefers, and their tentacles. There has been no repeat incident to my knowledge.

Not every member of the group was guilty. And I don't think that's the issue.

EQ went on to flourish despite this, I am sure in no small part due to their enthusiasm to demonstrate their desire to see the community as a whole flourish.

Interesting point brought to my attention by another player: time does not stop in the real world if you run out of money. But if LL pisses off the majority of players by refusing to deal with a handful of asshats in a sufficiently effective way to make the majority of it's customers happy with the sevice, money will indeed run out and SL will go 'dark'. (that means no electricity for those trying to read more into it than what's there.)

I'll attempt to quote Lord Byron here. Forgive if it is not thoroughly accurate. "All that is necessary for evil to flourish is for good men [and women, implied, you PC folks] to do nothing."

[Prokofy Neva]

Simone, your invocation of the Skinner Box as an analogy for SL is brilliant and scary, and gah, I have to think about that -- you could be right.

If it were a very much closed-box game, however, like a TSO or a WoW, they'd be able to eject a group like this more thoroughly. Even TSO was a lot slower in dealing with the SSG precisely because it's a social game relying a lot on the customer base to create the society and its entertainments and "custom content," as much as snotty SLers like to portray TSO as moronic skill-leveling grinds.

The more free you make a world, the more open it is to that kind of tentacled griefing that invokes its own freedom of assembly as its first weapon. I think the EQ response is very instructive.

We don't know what LL is doing, really, they haven't told us. We see that Something Awful, which used to be a group with these griefers in it, is no more. There's nothing called W-HAT per se. Other groups exist including one called Anti-Griefers claiming to be fighting griefing (just like the SSG used to) but themselves engaging in it -- this contains some of the victory dancers.

So it seems that LL might have disbanded groups -- or at least they fell apart after the avatars in them were banned.

EQ used the early Nuremberg notion of criminality of groups to kill off even members of groups who didn't have individual criminal liability -- but you can't go very far with that as Nuremberg itself didn't without using what Urizenus Sklar of the Herald has reminded is the most effective tool: government infilatration and manipulation of groups.

At the end of the day, however, as I indicated, the solution lies more in the direction of the quote about "all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing" problem. It's really more up to people in the society, not the government only, to cope with this destruction by themselves not accepting in, or expelling from their groups, those who engage in these activities. People shouldn't become so crippled by their need to allow freedom of expression and assembly in others to forget that those freedoms also include robust condemnation -- and civic action -- against those who would abridge those freedoms for others.

[Simone]

"People shouldn't become so crippled by their need to allow freedom of expression and assembly in others to forget that those freedoms also include robust condemnation -- and civic action -- against those who would abridge those freedoms for others."

*high fives*