Bam railing against evil self-interested entities like banks and utilities in his commie community organizing-days.
One of the fakest and most illegitimate things on two legs in our real life -- and by extension, our simulated life -- is "community organizing". It rarely involves anything like a real, large authentic community; it usually only involves something small *calling itself* "thecommunity". It is usually artificially induced from outside by those "who know better" and have a decided agenda, often hidden; it is usually funded by small groups with political ideologies and goals that they seek to cover with "community organizing" to get themselves legitimacy. Oh sure, you do find authentic community organizers who are not these things. Usually, you don't find them among politically aggressive people in Chicago who become president of the USA lol.
Many people never focused on what this "community" stuff meant until Barack Obama began batting around the term in a bid to get elected. It's one of the many demagogic things he said to get elected -- and we can see it worked. I was one of those who elected him.
But that hardly means I'm going to be uncritical, and of course I cast a very weather eye on all his leftwing associations, which do indeed, unequivocally, include at least one former Weatherman undergound violent radical and at least one Communist Party member who were, respectively, an acquaintance and a mentor. The milieu that Barack moved in consisted unabashedly of lefties, and especially lefties of the old Chicago type, who include radical Islamists like Farrakhan and Obama's old preacher, whom he denounced, and various Communists and socialists and "progressives" who deny they are technocommies like Lawrence Lessig.
Never forgot Obama's first words upon appearing in public after his election: "Helloooooo Chicago!" And Hellooooo Chicago, with all its radicals, is what we will be seeing for the next 4 years (along with the rewarmed Hillary moderates seeking payback time) -- you are warned.
So the first question you have to ask about the "community" that Obama was "organizing" is as follows: who paid? A private foundation or NGO? A storefront funded with a city grant in the Daly machine? Who? And...what was the community" Himself and other urban intellectuals with an agenda? Poor people who got services who may have been dependent on these storefronts? Who? Who and what was organized?
And...what does it mean to be a "community organizer"? Generally, community organizing is an activity that socialists, trade-unions of the socialist bent, and communists have used for as long as these movements have been in existence. The formula usually consists of an intellectual, usually urban, usually non-working class, adapting an extremist ideology of the left, socialism or communism, or even a milder variant thereof, and going out to "organize the People". These "People" are usually idealized within these ideologies as "the masses" who "need" organizing or "the downtrodden" or "the workers" -- who have always been a special object of paternalist obsession by communists and socialists who -- with few exceptions -- rarely did actual hard manual work. (I can think of the delightful editor of New Politics, Julius Jacobson, a Schachtmanite, who fought in the war and also used to work in old fashioned hot-type printing, for example).
Not surprisingly, Hamlet nee Linden Au is touting the concept, and pointing to Saul Linsky. Oh, dear. A Chicago leftie, author of Rules for Radicals and coiner of the term "Think Globally, Act Locally," whom Hamlet credits with inventing the concept of community organizing, as does Wikipedia, but that's silly, as there have been community organizers as long as there have been communities. But give me a third-camp socialist like Jacobson over Linsky any day, especially when it comes to Second Life -- where we would likely have to repudiate both of them, to start with a concept more basic than communities, which is private property and land rights. Land rights, as even the Sandinistas can tell you, are essentially to "community organizing". Usually what community organizers want to do is get rich people OFF the land, and put poor people ON it even if they didn't pay for it. They want to "spread the wealth around" -- as our friend Obama does.
But...we already have that in Second Life. We already have a minority of land owners, with a vast majority of renters and accounts with no payment information on file, or even with information on file, who don't even own or rent but fly around using everybody else's land. The Sandinistas or even the Bolsheviks would have a very hard time getting anything done in SL -- it's already been done for them, and the system has already fast-forwarded to the oligarchic state capitalism that Julius would have railed against in particular, even if Saul was silent (and sure, surprise me with a statement of Saul's during his lifetime condemning the Soviet Union, I'd be glad to be educated). In fact, even the landowners use socialism on sims -- just as under socialism, any one of them can grab the FPS and CPUs of any sim and hog it all to themselves, with no repercussions; there really isn't any viable "private property". There is only absolutist propertarianism, leading to the strong victimizing the weak, a situation that commie organizers look at and say "How can I take the place of that strong power?" even as they pretend to say, "How can I help those victims?"
So when leftwing urban intellectuals set about "organizing the People" or "teh ppl" as we call them now online, what do they do? They go around preaching leftwing ideologies with the help of pamphlets by sectarians (or today, with Wikipedia entries and online viral memes in blogs) which basically say the rich are evil, capitalists are evil, government is evil, and it should all be overthrown -- and they, as enlightened ones, should be put in charge. They know best!
Of course...not so fast there, big guy, because if you overthrow government, you might overthrow the vast assortment of entitlement programs that a city like Chicago and its people in fact benefit from enormously, to the point that their city becomes a magnate for Poles or Nigerians who wish to escape the tyranny of their own country, where they overthrew the government and redistributed the wealth...well, at least to some people.
