The War in Iraq in Second Life

Here's a typical Second Life story, speaking of "bringing the war to Second Life".

I have a modest, cheap no-tell motel in Juanita that I purchased from another resident because I thought it was a cool build, made in the 1960s style. I offer it as a cheap rental in the back of a flat, non-descript sim of Juanita and it's almost never full because living in a motel right next to other avatars isn't really ideal -- but it's sort of a fun place and I keep it going. It is like the Flamingo Court/Motel of Last Resort I ran in The Sims Online. I've had this area since 2005, when I bought it all from Sue Stonebender, who was liquidating her mainland and moving to an island with her store.

Let me preface this story by the following very firm statement because otherwise, those opposing my opion here will try to exploit the fact of the nature of this site in some fashion: I have the *right* to run an adult motel in SL. It is *allowed*. It goes to the heart of the SL freedoms we are given, quite frankly, and if you find something distasteful about it, too bad. I find it useful to provide the public with this sort of place, in part, to steer them away from trespassing on my other tenants' homes and going on their poseballs, which they hate like heck.I get to do this, it is allowed, and if you have a problem with it, go and play Hello Kitty, the downloaders finally seem to be working again.

I could run a public library here with teas on Sunday afternoons and the works of Norman Vincent Peale available in tiny avataric clickable editions, but I chose to do what I wish on my land. In fact, when the Lindens started age verification, I dutily clicked off this land as "mature" and put in the age verification blocker -- but it didn't work. It was buggy. I had all of my alts on age verification, and curiously one or two of them, putting in the same identical Social Security number obviously, were blocked from this land and could never get themselves verified and through these barriers. I had long-time tenants also face this curious bug, and finally, I had to give up on the "verification" part and just keep the checkoff on "search". It's actually a very quiet place because I didn't turn it into a club, which would have made it far more of a zoo.

I noticed that business was flagging even more than usual awhile ago, because people would move in, and then move out, although before, people used to enjoy having parties by the pool and hanging out there for a few weeks anyway, sometimes longer. So I went to investigate.

I found that an Iraq War Memorial installed on the cheap liquidated land in Minoa, the next sim over, built right SMACK on the propertly line, towering up in the air over the roof of the motel with an ugly, kitschy build. Well, that was an annoying sight problem, but what can you do? People overflow with these sentimental, self-righteous notions in SL and inflict this sort of thing on the public eye all the time. Like me, they get to do what-the-fuck they wish on their land. I debated putting up trees to block the view, as I've had to do on the other borders with big ugly builds (flat sims seem to magnetize them), but that would require having to move a tenant, the entire build, etc. and I just ignored it.

Coming back *again* after a tenant moved out *again* and fixing up the place a bit, I noticed that practically every 10 or 15 minutes, I had to listen to "taps" being played on a trumpet, as you would at a memorial service. That, combined with race car motors revving which came from another no-show stupid build next to the memorial, was really annoying. People shouldn't have to listen to a funeral dirge in their homes over and over again like that. So I IM'd the owner and asked him if he could do a simple, good-neighbourly action: check off the box on his media tab on his land menu that says "restrict spatialized sound to this parcel." That's all! I always try to do that myself. It's a courtesy.

Instead, here's the self-righteous offensive and intrusive bullshit I got in reply:

-- Instant message logging enabled --
[8:28]  Ace Cassidy: (Saved Tue Jan 20 05:59:16 2009) Re: restricting the sound to the parcel at the Iraqi War Memorial....  irl, I live a block away from a large Catholic church that regularly has bells ringing throughout the neighborhood...  I am neither Catholic nor fond of bells, but I don't complain
[8:28]  Ace Cassidy: (Saved Tue Jan 20 06:00:04 2009) If the hourly sound of taps that honors the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice bothers you, I am sorry, but I'll leave the sound settings as they are
[8:38]  Prokofy Neva: Let me repeat my offline message in case in didn't go through:
[8:38]  Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
[8:38]  Prokofy Neva: Oh, cut out the dramatic bullshit, Ace. I'm  not required to listen to funeral dirges all day in my home. In RL we don't plant memorials smack next to residences. We were here first. I will abuse report you. You're a good example of why civilian needs to control military.
[8:38]  Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
[8:40]  Prokofy Neva: I've asked you politely to stop inflicting your sound on 2 sims! That's normal good neighbour behavior, to turn off an annoyance. We're not required to have your patriotic sentiments inflicted on us. You merely found some very cheap land to put up a tacky memorial that gratifies your own self-righteous vanity. If you won't voluntarily check off the sound carrying like a good neighbour, then I'll be forced to put up a giant megaprim STOP THE WAR IN IRAQ sign. It will be fitting.

Let me tell you what I find absolutely cloying and stupid here, aside from the idea that people should be forced to endure the "good works" of self-righteous nits like this:  the phrase "the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice".

You know why I find that one of the biggest, most dumb-ass sayings in the freakin' universe? Because it's a Big Lie. We know that it's a Big Lie.

These people did not make the ultimate sacrifice, deliberately, selflessly, deciding to offer their lives for mine or yours in some conscious, noble act. That isn't how it worked at all. Instead, they got killed in a stupid, pointless war. They didn't even *think* they were doing something noble, because they didn't think they'd get killed. Nobody willingly going into a war believes they will REALLY get killed and ever REALLY has to face a choice between *not* getting killed, and getting killed and "making the ultimate sacrifice".

A sacrifice is something you make willingly and consciously. Many people joining the army tend to be poor, uneducated, or blindly following imperatives from military families, and wanting to get the perks that the military sign-up gives them -- free housing, free education, bonuses, etc. They think they will be the exception to the rule of getting killed in a war -- and many of them make it out without even being injured. I have actually talked to people in Second Life who tell me that they don't see how they will pay for college unless they join the army. That seems hugely retarded (haven't they got any state loans for state universities?!), but that's the sort of whiney victimology you find in America these days, people imaginging that they would have to risk themselves getting killed to get college funds that their parents couldn't save for them. Honestly, our nation is a disgrace sometimes.

But let's just say that there *are* some cases of people who literally have a split second when they can decide to run and save their own skins or fall on a mine and save, say 12 Iraqi civilians and 10 of their buddies from being blown up -- and they make the ultimate sacrifice. Sure, there are likely cases like that in this war. But they don't make up the overwhelming majority of deaths, some of which happen from friendly fire, stupid accidents, idiot terrorists planting IEDs all over the roads. 

Do you make the ultimate sacrifice when you die stupidly in a stupid-ass war? Well, I think it's important to raise the question. I don't think really you do. No one is "defending our country and our way of life and our freedoms" when they fight in Iraq. Let's be clear on that. At least the way President Bush put the entire cause to us.

If you want to explain to the American people that Iran is waging a proxy war against the West, and specifically the U.S., in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and a bunch of other places, then...let's hear the facts on that. Let's examine them. And let's determine if we need a worldwide war against Iran, per se, and what the costs and benefits are of such an exercise. Let's have a debate about it. Perhaps it makes sense to keep fighting Iranian and Al Qaeda proxies in Iraq; perhaps it doesn't. I'd like to hear the pros and cons here. But that isn't what we were told about going to Iraq -- well, I don't need to belabour what we were told, and the lies about it (although I personally always felt the Russians spirited the WMDs out of their crony Sadam Hussein's Iraq via Syria -- but that's just me and my tinfoil hat).

Could someone volunteering to go "over there" be engaged in a selfless, civic act, consciously prepared to make the "ultimate sacrifice"? Oh, perhaps.  There might be some. I've heard of a few. But by and large, it's not the mass of soldiers. Joining the army isn't at all the glamorous and glorious act of sacrifice people like Ace would have you imagine, and their deaths, pointless and ignoble in a foreign land that mainly doesn't want them there, isn't "sacrifice" in the sense of something noble, either. War is hell.

Now, let's look a little closer at what Ace Cassidy is about. Ace Cassidy, of course, is one of the beloved characters of the smarmy Hamlet nee Linden Au stories, a subject Hamlet has returned to again and again to appear "balanced". (Please refresh my memory, as I can't find a reference to it now, as to whether, on an alt, Ace is also the wounded veteran and casino owner who lost his living when the Lindens removed gambling -- I think that's a separate person completely.)

But Ace Cassidy himself appears to question the war, if you read Hamlet, so he's not really entirely genuine in that piece of it, ither.

Here's the emotional blackmail that Ace engages in -- pretending that he can create a space that is "neither for or against the war but just honouring the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifce"
When somebody starts spouting anti-war sentiments, here's what he says for New World Notes:

" "I have those myself. But this is NOT a place for airing those issues. It is solely for the memory of those who are no longer with us." Behind him, the names of individual soldiers are displayed across the memorial's marble plaque. Cassidy compiled this list of the honored dead from a website that keeps track of all coalition fatalities, and he's now gathering up .jpegs of their faces, so that those can be displayed at the memorial, too. As the memorial's informational notecard reads, “Mothers have lost sons, wives their husbands, children their parents, men their girlfriends. Each of the names that appear on the sign here represents a real person who is no longer with us.""

Bullshit. There is no more perfect place than airing your views about the war than a...war memorial (especially a home-made kitschy one that should have architects protesting against it on that grounds alone lol).

And even Hamlet is forced to point out the inconsistency of his protege when he notes how quickly Ace thrust aside his own caveat of only discussing "the American fallen" and quickly morphed over to an emotional pitch about all the Iraqi men, women, and children who pointlessly lost their lives in this war. Honestly, the self-righteous, self-important stench of this entire exercise is overpowering.

There isn't anything I can think of as more dishonest, and manipulative and controlling of others' genuine pro- or anti-war sentiments than pretending to preside over a "neutral space" where you "merely honour the soldiers". It's as fake as the day as long. War memorials in societies don't take place in neutral vacuums devoid of sentiment; to do so is to in fact dishonour the real memory of what happened to these real people. Some of them may have had noble pro-war sentiments; some of them may have developed noble anti-war sentiments as a result of going naively into a war and seeing what it was really like. Don't step on that honest feeling by creating some numb, glassine fake space where we mainly engage in an exercise involving the massaging of Ace Cassidy's ego for providing the space.

It's rather like Eureka Dejavu's fake discussion space about the Middle East, where she pretends to be an honest broker of passions, when she herself is passionately devout to one side, which she perceives as the underdog.

At the time, when this column was on the Linden servers and Hamlet couldn't ban me without cause (as he did pre-emptively when he moved his fan operation outside of LL), you can see I posted an additional concer: concern about the real-life families of these real-life dead soldiers who might object to having their loved ones' images and names coopted into a strange vanity memorial organized in a 3-D online world mainly to bring glory to one person. This would especially be the case if they felt there was something cartoonish and frivolous about Second Life -- and they'd be right about that.

And frankly, there's a larger fake context here. There is nothing more self-righteous and smarmy than the left, and those opposing the war, grabbing the issue of the soldiers and veterans to wring your heart with "support our troops" propaganda. Bleh, are they ever phony! Their self-serving idiotic campaigns sending packages that only create headaches for security and delivery burdens. Their fake exploitation of this issue to appear "patriotic" even when they question the president of the United States and our nation's security.

Seriously, one of the lamest-ass aspects of the left in this last 8 years has been its utterly supine posture about this hideous war killing numerous civilians a day, and their absence of any credible antiwar activity, which, because of the prevailing opinion, they simply abdicated, refusing to carry out regular and visible antiwar demonstrations (as they did during the Vietnam War).

Had they been real men and real women, and had been willing to have a small and unpopular but important peace movement, that might have mitigated the war and hastened its closure. Instead, they opportunistically draped themselves in the flag, to appear as if they were patriotic and attempt to get votes from the right, and flogged the "support our troops" bullshit for all it was worth -- as if you can support troops in a vacuum, without also supporting a war! Good God on a crutch. What indefensible nonsense. It's one of the biggest, most fiercely-held shills the left and the Democrats have shielded their inactivity on the war with, and I definitely have to call them on it. I did this on Twitter when all these brainless e-moms were organizing mailings to the troops which is of course a pointless exercise, as due to logistics and security reasons, the U.S. armed forces can't let the general public contact the troops and send them crap in the mail. Honestly people, get a fucking grip here. If you care about troops, persuade someone not to join the army and get killed. If you care about veterans, make sure they don't close down the veterans' hospital in your city, which happens all the time due to lack of funds. That's all. And if you think there ought to be a clash of civilizations, then figure out where the war needs to be fought to win, not to be lost, as it is lost in Iraq.

Where you can see that Ace Cassidy isn't really an honest broker with his "memorial" exercise is when you see him a) controlling debate and trying to shove patriotism down the throats of people even if they oppose the war, exploiting the memory of dead soldiers and b) when he is willing to inflict his memorial on other people's land, even over on the next sim. That's when you smell bullshit, and you realize this is entirely about Ace Cassidy and his vanity and his silly belief he is helping mankind, of course, a common afflication in SL.

Ace, born in 2004, is vintage FIC. Friends with the odious Lektor Hannibal, who helped him with this memorial, he is part of the notorious secretitive FIC Cartel del Juarez a group that has had an impact on SL all out of proportion to its members actual RL selves.

Comments

[Ace Cassidy]

You're a peach, Prokofy. A real peach.

And you wonder why you are considered the SL town asshole, and nobody gives you any respect?

If it had been anyone else asking, the sound would have been restricted in a heartbeat. But for you, dear Prokofy, maybe I'll see if I can make the .WAV's I built to play taps even louder, just to piss you off even more.

[Prokofy Neva]

I don't care if I'm considered "the town asshole" in this cow town, and I don't care if I don't have any respect from the hicks here.

I'm glad to have you on record as showing that you are willing to drag the, er, sacred memories of the men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice into a war on somebody whose forums comments you didn't like in 2004 lol. That speaks volumes about your own assholery, and that's the purpose of this blog : )

WAV away, Big Guy, I will simply keep abuse reporting and getting tenants to abuse report, and other neighbours who aren't thrilled with this either. Keep your goddamn war to yourself.

[Viggo Recreant]

You can tick Restrict spatialized sound to this parcel (about land -> media), which makes all sounds private to your land. You will not hear sounds coming from nearby parcels (not even typing).

[Prokofy Neva]

Viggo, duh. That's exactly what I asked him to do. That way he can hear his taps, but not bother his neighbours. His sounds are carrying not only to nearby parcels on that sim, but over to the next sim! But he REFUSES to check off that box, and is being a dick, because he needs to force this crap on me.

I was there again today, and I have to wonder if the fallen's relatives know that they are being memorialized by a goof in a game, next to a sex motel. I feel for them.

[Viggo Recreant]

What I meant was you could set that checkbox on your parcel which would block off the sounds from all outside sources.

[Ace Albion]

"maybe I'll see if I can make the .WAV's I built to play taps even louder, just to piss you off even more."

A self serving spiteful action like this seems like a good way to piss on the graves of those people who died in conflict. You turned real people, who suffered real deaths, into game pieces in a stupid, childish fantasy made of prims thinner than paper. Well done, you.