An end-of-the-world snow parcel in SL has the delightfully alliterative name of "Our Narnia." I've flown out there some nights just to look at the awesome ice-crystal towers against the dark, starry, snowy night sky.
I also take the opportunity to ponder why in RL, as often in SL, the greatest architectural marvels of the world are often built by evil-doers or in celebration of evil or take the side of evil. Sure enough, this awesome build features the Witch's castle, the witch who freezes people to death into statues in her courtyard, not some other kinder aspect of "Our Narnia. And, inside, there are implements of torture...
It's an old story that evil is always more interesting and compelling -- everybody reads or remembers Dante's Inferno, but they don't bother with Paradiso. Everyone remembers tag lines from Eddie Haskell, but not Wally Cleaver. And so on.
In SL, too, it's a rule of thumb that some of the most arrogant, nasty, authoritarian assholes have also made some of the greatest builds. Again, it's an old story, often remarked about Wagner and his musical genius, contrasting with Hitler's inspiration from this music.
There is something about evil and order that often go together; good often must become anarchic and disorderly to undo that deathly order that is the order of the grave.
By the same token, evil's order is often brittle, unable to sustain itself, a fragile order that you push on, and it falls over. Evil is often petty in its order of little minutiae -- forgetting the larger order of the bigger, more important things.
In our miniature world of SL, it's "always winter and never Christmas" in some ways, too. Well, there's the literal version of this truism, that snow sims always stay snowy, and that for every person who puts out a Christmas tree or puts carol music on their parcel, there are scores of others who sneer and jeer at them for allegedly being intolerant of other religions or imposing one religion, --in the annual anti-religious seizure of political correctness that really should be made a winter holiday all its own, Correctivus.
But in the larger sense, the "always winter/never Christmas" problem of SL has to do with the eternal argument about code is law or code is not equal to law or code is not just law -- code must always make winter if it is set to make winter, but code cannot make Christmas.
In dealing with the many disperate nasty beasts of the forums -- people who you'd like to imagine aren't this nasty in RL -- I'm often reminded of the battle sceen in the "Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." Reminded, not because they're ugly or behave viciously -- though, that too.
Reminded, because of the jeering and taunting of the noble creature, Aslan and of the children who are fighting for good, on the side of good. So often, the jeering, taunting and harassment of the forums appears so petty and banal, as evil often does.
Anyone glancing through weeks of comments on this blog, often by the same person under different pseudonyms, often saying the same thing, can see the same spirit of banality and jeering so colourfully exemplified in the panoply of ugly beasts in the Narnian scene.
As I can see many of these nasty jesters and jeerers reaching through their reply button, let me hasten to assure you that I do not imagine myself to be a Messiah, or Aslan, or the Greater Good. It's not about whether I'm good or bad. It is about chosing to fight on the side of good, however, and I think anyone who dispassionately looks at the forums can see where the divide lies -- those who consistently jeer at others, belittle them, call them names, disparage them, personally attack them, impugn the realness of their life, reveal their RL details, and a host of other typical crimes -- not the least of which is ganging up on someone like Cocoanut, who exposes these evil practices, and impudently sneering that she doesn't criticize Prok for his "vitriol" -- proof positive that they are able to dish it out, but cannot take it reflected back at them.
The techniques uses by these people are appalling -- ugly pictures, even things like a photoshopped raven's head blown up and bloodied, or telling them to "cut off their fingers" or "sew a corpse's cock on" or whatever lurid and vivid manifestation of ugliness they can think up.
This is because they don't like the original characterization of group-think in which they participate, and they will do anything to preserve their group-think.
Another chief characteristic of this group-think, besides the nasty invective -- of the kind people like Enabran have a constitutional blindness toward -- is bloody-minded literalness -- this is the taking of everything so literally, and extending it out so "logically," that it becomes absurd.
Thus a spoof on Aimee's 'government' -- as evidenced only by her silly diagram of a civic city area (well we can only hope it's silly and not real!) becomes fuel for more paranoid and hysterical ramblings about skybox security -- as if Aimee doesn't know perfectly well that Inever come near her skybox, and have no idea where it is, and in fact one of her friends that she admitted to her precious skybox took this snapshot and gave it to me -- because even her friends aren't just THAT impressed with Aimee ALL the time lol.
More than all this petty six-grade stuff, however, is the essense of the tekkie problem -- the belief that code is law -- although after all, is merely just lines of stuff they wrote in lock-step fashion to solve by rote routines this or that issue as they identified it -- and subjectively identified it often without any appreciation of the larger context. Whatever its capacity to drive machines in lock-step, mechanical fashion, code is merely one more imperfect and flawed human creation like a thousand others. It isn't the Perfection of Creation itself. Belief in this code-law is merely one more manifestion over the millenia of man's pride and failure to experience humility in the face of the real awesomeness of the Creator.
Law, of course, can be taken literally, and when taken literally, it can be death. We see manifestions of this in our own micro-world, when the Lindens can police a garden-variety TOS violation like a "note-card spamming," or a situation where a sign-griefer is blocked on all 4 sides as indeed a violation of the TOS, but overlook the larger picture of someone spamming thousands of parcels all over SL with IMPEACH BUSH signs, and simply find no way in their book of codes and laws to address this larger rent in the fabric of civility and civilization.
In Narnia, before the battle, the Witch sneers at Aslan that a law must be fulfilled. It's the old "deep magic" of the stone table that says that a traitor must be killed. Of course, the original intent of the law might have been that a traitor to the good project of the originally-created seasonal Narnia be killed, not the traitor to an evil project like the always-winter freezing Witch's Narnia. No matter. Law is law. Aslan does not dispute it at that level. He admits that the traitor must be punished by a death -- only substitutes himself as the sacrificial lamb on the traitor's behalf. This is the essence of the Christian faith, and Aslan describes it as the "Deeper Magic".
He doesn't bend the law, he does *not* say, oh, make an exception to the law, that's the children's brother, and can probably be persuaded to repent, or an exception should be made to the Witch's taunting demand for his head, merely because she is evil, and herself betraying a traitor who in fact served her whom she's willing to sell down the river when convenient.
Instead, Aslan says, ok, the law is correct, it must be implemented, but if a sacrifice is demanded, I will make it. Then by that Deeper Magic contained in the stone table, placed there by the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea, Aslan's Father, Aslan rises again -- though not before, interestingly, he is unbound by the many ropes placed on him, which are gnawed away by mice -- symbolic of both the petty regulations that attempt to bind a greater fulfillment of the law and by the importance of tiny gnawings on getting rid of lawless and brutal petty literal-minded "law-enforcement".
BTW, with all the media hype of Narnia and the movie now, there's a great deal of jeering about the use of the Christian myth and allegories in this story originally written back in the 1950s by the British college don C.S. Lewis. I'm fairly certain from having read amply of Lewis' work and the numerous biographies about him that his intent was not to have the reader become dismayed that his story was in fact "smuggling in Christian allegory" to spring on an unsuspecting -- and then later annoyed -- reader.
Rather, when the reader is delighted by the story and intrigued by the figure of Aslan, Lewis' intent as a converted Christian himself was then to help the reader to an awareness that Jesus Himself is that kind of attractive figure of Aslan, or delight and intrigue, and not the tacky cliche of a thousand banal and boring religious devotional exercises that have rendered Him as a smarmy and sickly-sweet -- and often Wonder-Bread-White -- character.
The Witch tried to play what we all know and love as the forums "game of gotcha" -- saying, see, here's the law. We know the law! The law says this, so Edmund must die. Whereas Aslan, while fulfilling the law, goes beyond it and lends the entire world the meaning of redemption in the process.
You never get that kind of volume and depth of fulfillment of the law, much less any Higher Law of redemption from the law's punitive and killing aspects, by any notion of "code is law".
I find that people who have trouble understanding this are often the ones willing to celebrate the uniformity and law-conformity of evil and quickly dispel what they view as the messy and problematic manifestations of good, even when the good is manifestly the greater good and the evil is manifestly evil.
I pointed out to one FIC representative who urged me "never to contact him again" (another paragon of tolerance!) that his grumping about finn Jensen's one notecard "spam" and his willingness to do nothing and remain silent about Lazarus world-spamming all over SL with his IMPEACH BUSH signs was not only hypocritical, but part of why the battle isn't getting won. He replied that fighting IMPEACH BUSH isn't a battle that can be won, whereas haranguing poor finn over the card is a battle that can be won.
Yes, to be sure, in SL you have to pick your battles. Somehow I don't think beating up on poor finn and indulging in the easy and common forums sport of Anshe-bashing is really a noble battle.
But...the IMPEACH BUSH battle would be won much easier if all those who get eyebleeds over the events list and get huffy over a single notecard spam would put their indignation and their forums ranting to work against the IMPEACH signs, and would also abuse-report Lazarus Divine, hold meetings about the problem, write petitions, contact the RL media -- do a thousand things that can be done to fight any battle. Any one of these methods don't work by itself; together, with lots of people doing them, they do.
If Adam Zaius would stop smugly watching the mainland go to hell with the IMPEACH signs so he can have more customers on his Azure islands and would vocally and forcefully condemn the signs and speak frequently to Philip in his frequent contacts with him and other Lindens; if Aimee Weber would stop having fake angst about the supposed artistic dilemmas caused by the need to balance creativity and curbs on freedom of expression and use her power and prestige in SL to save the look of the mainland, she, too, has evidently left for the islands; if all the land barons and people selling land would stop cutting out squares for him on his request (we continue to see this everywhere) just to make a buck themselves; we would start seeing the Lindens get to work on this problem using their existing TOS against spam and disturbance of the peace.
Oh, is it petty to make a battle between "evil" and "good" about a *game*? Not at all. Like I said, it's not that people are good or evil; it's that they chose the sides of good or evil, and those sides manifest themselves even in a game, even on our miniature level of SL. The banal and petty spirit of a witch sneering that it's time to kill a traitor -- a traitor that in fact served her! a traitor that SHE is P.S. now betraying herself! a traitor she now betrays to the Law in order to harm the children fighting her! -- this sneering, evil spirit is no different than the spirit manifest on the forums -- and everyone knows it.
It's common for people to say that remain in the game "because of the people". In all my life, even in the most evil of settings, I've never seen such a concerted, energized, resilient, and feted group of nasty people as I have in SL, especially on the forums. I often marvel at it. It's the reason I feel I must fight it -- it really is so truly awful and cannot be allowed to stand.
The Lindens' refusal to really take this in hand through not only enforcement of the TOS, but more solid and balanced editorial voices appearing there, and less favouritism. impeaches their credibility and their claim to be building a Better World.
