Let's see. Rodvik made an interesting response on his profile:
Thank you very kind! No worries I always enjoy hearing from customers good and bad. Sometimes its stuff we can action, others not.
He said that in response to one of those self-serving fangirlz who is also one of those scripting freebie opensource cultists inworld:
marita.mumfuzz
Rodvik , as a citizen of SL let me apologize for your page getting trashed by a few of the stranger SL citizens. 99% of us just enjoy going inworld and having fun and that odd 1% seems to enjoy trying to control others or cluttering up websites with babble.
...Oh and a few of us here would really like one of your bears , so when you get those infrequent spare minutes keep working on it .... and keep up the good work.
Evidently she is fussing about not only the griefers bombarding Rodvik with self-justifying crap, but me, who has decided to counter them. I always chuckle at these "high-minded" types who say "a plague on both your houses" with reprehensible moral equivalency. If she can't sort out the difference between a bunch of Robble or Korpov alts junking up the profile with sock puppets with names like "actonjlu" and "permabanned resident" and so on, as distinguish between relentless fellow travellers like Senban from the discredited Herald, well, whatever, you don't engage in counterpropaganda to win that one over, but the larger public.
As I said, that circle of immediate supporters who justify griefing and apologize for it while not indulging in it themselves (think: Hun Valens as the classic form of this) are what makes griefers most able to continue in SL, and the sooner the Lindens make it known that they won't stand for that kind of griefer-enablement anymore and will stand tall in the face of specious "no guilt by association" whining, the better. Indeed, some of their actions in past griefer-purges reflect a philosophy that the "no guilt" alibi doesn't wash with them. Either they see how much they really do enable griefers or actually grief even on a low level, or they decide that they can't be arsed, and "let God sort them out". They do have that discretion. If you are unfairly caught up in a Linden anti-griefing action, well, maybe spend less time on Tizzer's latest reincarnation's sim?
What's funny about Rodvik's general and offhand comment is that the gang at Sharia-Slun have decided this means that LL won't act on the JLU. Well, no, not necessarily. They may act. Perhaps we will see Kalel symbolically suspended for 3 days -- the recent symbolic suspension of AnnMarie Otoole lets us know that the Lindens may be up for symbolic suspensions now to let us know they care, even if they can't act, for their own hobbling arcane hippie reasons.
Or...They may come up with a nice, cheerful Halloween post, for example, that doesn't exactly change the TOS or anything but says, "We love role-play and costumes and stuff but not when it strays into RL harassment. Don't put razors in those apples, kids!". If I were them, that's EXACTLY what I'd do now, put up a cheerful Halloween post.
They might mean this homily equally to vigilantes as they do griefers, but since it mainly applies to griefers it will do the trick (it *may* apply to vigilantes, but that has yet to be proved, even so, the Lindens can take the British lefty liberal position on the terrorists and look good). Certainly coming to Kalel Venkman's house on Halloweed and "trick-r-treating" him -- as Tizzers did -- is hardly innocent and hardly a prank but definitely up there in the annals of big-time griefing and real crime.
Now, what else? In this post, I made a few mistakes I'll correct in a bit -- Astolat isn't British, nor is Tracer. Gosh when I wave my hands around and start swatting some of these griefer pests and their enablers, I take a few wild swings, eh? So sue me. Astolat merely plays British on TV (she has a Victorian thing going in SL so is quite convincing as a high-minded old British Labour type). Tracer isn't British either, not to be confused with the inworld communist Plot Tracer, a former tenant who got all angry because his low-cost capitalist rental included a weekly charge for group fees of what amounted to a penny a month, about which he was notified three different ways.*Possibly* that unconscious association may explain how I thought Tracer was British -- I don't recall and it doesn't matter. He's not British, he tells us, and I take that on face value. He's just another kind of griefer-enabler from somewhere else! Sawwies.
Anything else? Oh, I left out some fellow travellers -- so little time, so many! I should have included Gaara Sandwalwood, who also uses the name NotoriousD -- and that's why he is blocked here, until he can decide which one it will be. Every single comment of NotoriousD's sounds like he's a card-carrying Woodburyite, but gosh, if I got that one wrong, sue me.
His may be a simple case of geeky nastiness: "Student currently enrolled in networking and technical support, soon to be possibly enrolled in computer repair services.
What more can be said? I'm a geek."
Mkay, roger wilco on that one!
So some more replies and considerations:
I don't have moderation here, comments posted go up immediately, unless they seem to appear to be spam to the system, or sometimes because they contain a word like "Woodbury" which is blocked.
I don't censor or moderate people for their speech, but I have two rules: 1) a) you must use a legitimate first and last SL name (not an obvious alt) a valid RL name (i.e. not like Ralph Kramden) or an established blogger's name and 2) you cannot incite or cause damages to me in RL or SL. The threshold for that is pretty high, i.e. "you can't crash my sim or call my kids at home", and isn't "you can't call me certifiable" -- you can.
As I said, it's unlikely that Senban was Pixeleen, because Pixeleen, wouldn't have the time or inclination to play "mean girl" on two accounts, it's overkill. Furthermore, I said that if the JLU included her, it must be due to her fellow traveller status. You dont get to fellow-travel on the Woodburies, and then suddenly wheel around and bitch that you aren't a griefer who has actually rezzed a particle spewer and therefore shouldn't be tracked.
Indeed, you are part and parcel of the substrate of grieferdom; they flourish first and foremost because they have an immediate circle of pals who approve what they do, or at least, refuse to condemn it and disassociate themselves from it. That's why in addition to appealing to the morals of the general public and common decency, which takes you very far, or appealing to some of them from within who might be wavering to defect sincerely, you also have to tackle that immediate substrate -- which in my experience, RL or SL, is the hardest nut to crack.
Senban claims she is "just me" -- she is not part of any trolling faction or deliberate bad-faith campaign but just "expressing her opinion". I don't buy that for a minute. I don't believe there are innocent bystanders and random principled civilians in this story. The Herald is a deliberate act of bad faith (many people would use the word "deliberate troll") designed to heckle and harass first of all Linden Lab, and then its supporters or fans. It's an exercise mounted with a thin layer of plausibility as a muck-raking press outfit, but its purpose as we've seen over the years is really to serve as a propagandistic device to both make and cover news about "emergent behaviour" (i.e. griefing) to fuel Peter Ludlow's books and the theses and papers of various other griefer-professors of the Chomskian or neo-Marxian sort.
Pixeleen (Mark McCahill) also has a larger axe to grind, which he is a developer of another (failed) virtual world called Croquet which had only limited application and was revised and morphed into other business or military applications and whose principles (open source cultic notions and various other geeky concepts) never caught on even among those who like that sort of stuff. So at one level, it's a profound tantrum by an insulted, infantile geek having a hissy fit about his failed software project and venting his spleen on his immediate and obvious competitor, and at another level it's a determination to achieve by terrorism (inciting and supporting griefing) what could not be achieved by peaceful means (philosophical argumentation of the sort you see on Terra Nova). The Herald is not a study in witty intellectual dissent and the salon life, as Urizenus fondly persuades himself, it's a study in infantile regression and petulance, and possibly the banality of evil.
Anyone who joins Robble Bobble's group in SL can see that Senban is in it, so hiding it is silly -- and it's no surprise. Senban is part of the Herald conspiracy, if you will, a concerted faction of software cultists who hate mass commercial software competition to their wonky crap and most of all, hate dissenters to their very off-brand outdated sort of stilted, rigid canonical rebel posturing. They're like a subset of Stallmanites who never left the sandbox, literally and figuratively.
If Senban is also in the Bimbo Cheerleaders, that's an interesting link, and we see that the Herald may have helped CheerGirl to stage her provocation -- not merely reported on it. No surprise there.
And again -- Oh, dear, Astolat isn't British! Oops, my bad. I'll correct. It must be this Victorian RP shtick, eh? Very well done! And as far as me "getting it wrong," if one's RL details are on one's profile, you don't have to fear Prokofy getting it wrong, eh? I'll figure out some wording here, but I have to say I won't join the politically-correct ranks on the issue of cancer.
When my friends and relatives have had cancer, they could be called "survivors" when they've had their first rounds of chemotherapy or radiation therapy, they could be referred to as "no longer having cancer" if no cancer happens to be found on this particular checkup, but in some cases, they are living on borrowed time and are in remission and will suffer again. So it seems journalistically misleading to me. Of course, since we will all likely die of the top reasons for death -- heart attack, stroke, or cancer -- I may come to personally appreciate these life-affirming descriptives myself.
Also, when people overshare their medical conditions online, I don't manufacture sympathy for them like Pavlov's dog. I think that should come from friends and family in RL in sincerity. That is, one can abstractly care as a proposition of decency, and I do. But Astolat's role in this story has been entirely odious, and I'll be calling that out over and over again, despite her craven bids for sympathy, and the silencing of dissent, through this sort of emotional blackmail, all too common online.
I haven't asked the JLU to file any tickets on my behalf. Indeed, in looking at all these wikis and records, I don't see them ever doing that on my land. They aren't wanted, and they don't have to. My tenants and officers and I do this all on our own without any recourse to any vigilantes -- frankly, as most landlords do. What I remark about is the striking correlation -- the very same list of people who have come to grief me deliberately and systematically are also going around to sandboxes, science fiction fairs or what have you, and griefing there in exactly the same ways and being AR'd there.
I'm all for Internet privacy, but Internet privacy begins at home. If you overshare and link your names online, you have to expect a certain amount of exposure. I've had my own privacy shattered by assholes at the Herald some 8 years ago, but I decided that rather than go around on alts behind seven walls of proxies, I should just link my RL and SL names myself, even in the mass media. That enables some of them to harass me more, but ultimately, they only look bad when they do that.
Even people who are in the public domain aren't required to link their SL and RL names *within SL* where they are *entitled to a reasonable level of privacy* and even the fellow travellers might concede that would include *not being harassed with pictures of your RL self taken from magazines like Wired plastered on your tenants' walls or put up in infohubs*. And that would include the right to be excluded from that harassment *even if you use this picture yourself to fight people who heckle you* on your own land. Of course, nuances like that can be lost on the dumbasses of Sharia-Slun.
I fail to see the point of Cathiee McMillan. For one, none of you have come up with a bona fide case of exposure of privacy by the JLU -- none. Zip. The few cases dredged up were already very much in the public domain -- like Deadly -- or really fit a very specific state of circumstances -- Kalel going after Tux who stole his wiki by contacting the owner of servers where the wiki was housed and finding it was...Tux himself. I guess that's how it went. If the JLU complains about people stalking them and needlessly dredging up their even public domain info to harass them in world, they have a right to do that. When someone writes "Want to know who I really am? Just Google "ZenMondo" they aren't inviting harassment and griefing, they are inviting friendship and people in good faith. Putting that on a profile doesn't mean every little fuckwit is then entitled to vex them with witch-hunted info done in bad faith.
But then, this is a point that griefers and their fellow travellers endlessly improvise on, making it seem as if they have a "right" to demand maximum security of their own identity even as they use bits and pieces they can gleen from the Internet or chat in SL to ruthlessly bully people inworld. It's a very, very classic profile of hypocrisy.
As I've noted numerous times (and the last time I noted it, that excitable nut Zip Paz claimed I was "threatening" him -- sigh) -- if you persistently grief people inworld, endlessly inciting and harassing them, then you're going to have to expect that either the victims or vigilante groups who are outraged at your impunity are going to see if they can't get something on you. This occurs because the Lindens aren't effective. Likely, the Lindens can never get effective in their justice because they will never publicize all the names in the police blotter or admit adversarial defense and due process -- they're an executive authoritarian power without separation of powers, a company, not a country.
But my own belief about how to deal with both the challenge of the Lindens' ineffective executive authoritarianism, and the vigilantes themselves and the griefers, is relentless transparency. Again, this doesn't mean you report every little incident and there are times when it just isn't worth the bother or strategically worth not doing, but much of the time, it's helpful to report on the nature of griefing so that people "get it" about them and don't enter that fellow-travelling substrate -- or at least, if they are in it, realize they are going to face some heavy pushback.
I haven't seen any of these people in the wiki, except Senban due to the obvious fact that she's with the Herald, which is their megaphone. Of course, someone might turn them up as "persons of interest". But by and large, none of them have a case of invasion of privacy in RL, and the things they claim the JLU are doing aren't being done to them or indeed, anyone they can successfully point to.
