Happy 140th Birthday, Vladimir Ilyich!

It's already April 22 in Russia, and today is the 140th anniversary of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's birthday in Ulyanovsk.

It seems that in honour of this anniversary of the birth of the founder of Bolshevism -- or maybe because it's Earth Day -- Linden Lab has seized the sims and even mainland parcels of Woodbury University run by Tizzy Teardrop (the former Tizzers Foxchase) and has also the MCFX group which MC Fizgig used to own the land for the Woodbury/Digital Woodbury Hat. Linden Lab has done this before: in 2007, Linden Lab seized the Woodbury University island due to systematic and egregious griefing, TOS violation, sim crashing, etc. and in 2008 Fizgig's land in Furness, which Intlibber had become involved in paying for apparently, was seized for a time before it was eventually given back.

I see that some of the main Woodbury goons, starting with Tizzy Teardrop and MC Fizgig are gone from the People list. I see Joanna Falmer, an alt of Tizzy's is gone; so is Merato Zilz, another frequent-flyer event griefer; Crawlingin Meskin (who was said to be a newish Hazim Gazov alt), Maayan Warden, Katelyn Manamiko are all gone.

But there's a group of regular griefers still dancing around the Ravenglass "campus" as follows:  Tayste Waydelich, Epacsten Subagia, Anna Voix, Yeehaw Ragu, Meif Ling, Charity Stohr,
Killua Kawaguichi. Epacsten is saying the following to me: Epacsten Subagja: I dunno if you'd like to know this or not, but the owners and estate managers were banned, and the sims were taken offline. The group wasn't deleted for some reason. It's still there, just without any owners or anyone who can invite, so it's effectively a dead group at this time.

Meif Ling, who goes around dressed as a 1940s gangster-style rat carrying a gun, is one of the frequent flyer chicken killers and harassers of events -- he's still here.

The group Woodbury University is still findable in search, but when you try to pull it up, you get Nobody as founder.

I imagine the latter-day Leninists are going to spin this as follows: greedy evil imperialist land baron Prokofy Neva falsely reported TOS offenses of the Woodbury group so as to seize their land in Ravenglass. I hear the ACLU is being contacted, although as we know from our dear not-yet-lawyer, Linden Lab is not a government actor, but a non-state actor, and in these cases, freedom of association under the U.S. constitution trumps freedom of speech. I'm one of the first people to point out that in virtual worlds, it should not, and that we can and should find a better balance ensuring all rights for all, but I don't view the Woodbury phenomenon as a free speech problem. If they stayed on their sims and did their thing, which could include anything from building kitschy replicas of their California diploma mill in RL to building homely homilies to various Soviet buildings with giant hammers and sickles, who could care? Art can be tasteless, even insulting, but it has its right to exist.

It's when it comes after you with a giant penis and knocks you over your head in a virtual world that it ceases to be "art," and becomes harassment. It certainly is in real life; even in virtual life it is an offense. That quite a few legal nihilists and cynics in the IRC and the somethingawful.com forums and 4chan think that it still gets to be art just because it's pixelated isn't a notion that will persist as the Metaverse becomes more settled with people who want to live and work in civilization.

What Woodburies do above all is *lie*. It's part of a traditional Leninist tactic, of course, to dissemble, distract, disinform, use body doubles and disguises, and cover their tracks and pin crimes on other people. The Woodburies from the first minute I began writing about them have been angrily replying with faux self-righteous indignation that they didn't do anything wrong, that they didn't do it, that they are just a bunch of wacky kids. Gee, Officer Krupke...

Regarding the claims that will inevitably come from these word-salading Leninists, I have no need of more land. I'm filled up on tier. I would find it hard to justify any more land given the downturn in the economy. I have no objective need to own every parcel on sims where I own a majority land and live happily with many other neighbours on the mainland -- my rentals are spread across 50 sims, making up about 17 sims worth of land. Woodbury grabbed the plot in Ravenglass about two years ago, when they were reinstated after their 2007 expulsion, deliberately to come and harass and taunt me after their return, and the reinstatement of their new Woodbury sim where they swore they wouldn't violate the TOS and put up a fake disclaimer to this effect on their group menu.

An oldbie who had originally bought land from me back when I had the audacity and naivete to try to make a mainland community selling the parcels rather than renting them, who turned against me because she didn't like my critique of the FIC, gave or sold the land to a punk store that was related to some of the griefers. Then this person put up the land for sale after a RL accident at an outrageous extortionist price, so I ignored it. Woodbury either bought it at that price (Intlibber or Shaun Altman may have been involved) or it was given to them, and they proceeded to build a series of annoying, obnoxious, grief builds that were not about art or helping, um, minority kids in the inner city, but were designed to deliberately stalk and harass me with communist symbols, which the group in part adopted due to affinity with the leftist ideals, but mainly just to annoy and shock and supposedly "get my goat" due to my anti-communist views and my characterization of their group as Leninist in its tactics and terrorist-like actions. They camped up this shtick with the Stalin uniforms and such thinking it was terribly cutting edge and humorous, egged on by Pixeleen who kept giving it gushing cheer-leading at the Herald, but the truth was, it was just lame and banal.

A prank or a gag or a Saturday Night or  Laugh-in skit is funny once or twice, but day after day, it is like a tooth ache, no longer funny. If all this group did was just cavort and caper and camp on their land with the Red act and various Soviet slogans, there is little one could do. I couldn't abuse report them on those grounds, and I wouldn't want to have such a regime in SL where you could have someone removed for their speech.

But that's not what they did -- just talk or put up "art" and Soviet slogans. They instead constantly crashed the sim, subjected it to monstrous ugly particle attacks with gross pictures, ran tenants off their land with all kinds of ruses, like telling them I was instilling a "newbie quarantine" or "going out of business". They bullied and harassed people constantly, flying into their home and raping them on poseballs or whacking them with giant cocks. They littered crap everywhere and menaced and constantly caused trouble -- in packs of griefers who changed their alts constantly as soon as the Lindens caught them. Why is that ok? Why is that acceptable? Why is that "educational" and to be "tolerated"?

Before the Herald and the Chronicle of Current Education and whatever California lib press that Mark McCahill can drum up on this climbs on the "free speech" bandwagon, let me list the things that all these people who are banned actually *do*, what they've been doing not only to me and my tenants, but other community groups, which is not about art and not about free speech or creativity and certainly not about education:

RIGHT TO SWING ARM ENDS AT MY NOSE

o grief builds with giant glowing cubes and communist symbols, driving tenants away from the waterfront -- at what point is aggressive "art" that is deliberately deployed to harass and annoy and incite hatred and cause everyone surrounding it to suffer and lose business lose its free speech protection? There isn't an equivalent in RL for people to put huge glowing communist symbols in the sky above your home, facing into your window, glowing visibly for miles, even spinning on to your land.

o dollar and even $10 payments to annoy and grief and "send signals", to keep getting attention
o deliberate rentals to try to infiltrate and annoy and pretend outrage at being expellled
o flying around and buzzing tenants and taunting them -- at what point can protected speech become harassment and stalking?
o joining the rentals group (which is open) to annoy, make comments, and fly around with the tag to confuse others
o stalking with TPV god mode, particularly in invisi-mode, and pranking by ringing doorbells or clicking on things so that people are spooked
o invading homes, being banned, skipping to the next lot, requiring another ban, etc.
o event griefing, usually by hanging around the edges of the venue on Linden land or neighbours' land
o putting of my name in the search terms of their land in search so that it looks as if I'm associated with their griefing and their abusive sandboxes -- this confuses tenants
o making groups with my real life picture (there are now two of them) and sending message from members with the tag to harass me

When these 'broken window" offenses are tolerated, they move to other worse crimes:

o moving anything accidently left in share around, breaking it, burying it, blowing it up, returning it
o crashing sims and crashing viewers
o invading homes and going on poseballs to sexually harass people
o flying around with giant penises
o flying around with offensive tags meant to incite hatred, like "Jews in SL"
o scattering prim litter with objects on physics and particles and hate/racist slogans
o invasion of chat with apocalyptic messages
o encroachment on land with spinning objects, etc.

WOULD PROF. JENKINS LIKE A DICK IN HIS FACE IN RL?

Henry Jenkins may go on endlessly pontificating about this sort of behaviour as "transgressive," in the studied academic euphemism, but if he had a giant penis knocking him on the head in real life, a giant glowing communist sign shoved in his face, and hateful cubes taunting him with knowledge taken from stalking, revolving in his office and obstructing him, he wouldn't last long. He would be calling campus security. So why is it ok online? It's not.

I've *been* calling "campus security" for four years now, with little result. Sometimes a day-old with obvious abusive behaviour like rape or flying around with giant cocks or crashing sims will be dealt with. Often it would take a hugely long time to get anybody to respond, which made me boycott the Lindens some time ago.

VIRTUAL HARASSMENT LEADS TO REAL HARASSMENT

There's a silly notion that if it is all online, it doesn't count. "What happens in SL stays in SL" people write on profiles, as if they were in Vegas. Bullshit. Very often, behaviour in SL spills out to RL -- people in immersive environments become very emotionally engaged and sometimes agitated and enraged and "take it to real," as we saw from this group that took a bus to LL headquarters and vandalized the building, chalking "BAN PROK!" on the building to create a climate of coercion and seeming tacit agreement with the Lab to forcing me out of SL. That was a classic example of the virtual becoming the real, as it often does. Those with this "virtuality always gets a pass" philosophy can't explain why in a goodly percentage of the time, the bad behaviour extends to RL harassment. They don't have a "theory" for that. They pretend it doesn't happen. But it does, and that's because what is morally and legally wrong in virtuality should be taken at face value, as indeed it extends to real life; it is not in some isolated and special category of human life.

In the last weeks since spring break, I've been targeted ferociously by this group and its related back-ups from Jesse, the Communist Party, the b-tards, W-hat, etc. -- collectively I call them the "w-hoods".

The reason for this is clear: not only my abuse reporting of them, which is routine and justified, but my critique of the thuggish opensource software movement in Second Life and in general, and it's outrageously cynical and nihilist behaviour with not only content theft and privacy invasion but aggressive harassment and stalking.

This week, I even had one of them calling me at home in real life at 1:30 in the morning, upsetting my children, loudly shouting nonsense about trolling me etc.

NO COVER UNDER 'NO GUILT BY ASSOCIATION' DOCTRINE FOR THOSE ASSOCIATED WITH GUILT

People consistently doing that in systematic, egregious ways over and over again don't get to keep hiding behind the notion of "art" or "guilt by association" in their groups. The group, once it has 100s of people who have been found to be crashing sims and spewing racist textures all over the place, especiallly given that it is an invite-only group with only certain officers able to make the invitation, loses the ability to go on pretending they are suffering from "guilt by association". When I looked at the Chicken List, as I called it, all the people coming to Ravenglass to fly around and harass me and fool around in their communist sandbox, I could see 25 percent or more of this group were permabanned instantly or in the course of a few weeks, and most of the others were AR'd for cause for one offense or another, many times over. The few who may have escaped actually being documented as committing any abuses were merely alts, or mains who were playing the plausible deniabilty game, smirking like Eddie Haskell.

What Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, whatever leftists and libs are going to get on this crusade and cry "freedom of expression" have to explain is why griefing, harassment, stalking and bullying that stops *the freedom of expression of me and my tenants and guests* gets to stand. Week after week, as many of you have seen, the Sutherland Dam meeting gets harassed and slammed and bullied in an effort to get me to shut up, and stop my principled critique not only of the virtual world and its providers but those who insist on coercing us into their program of "no srious business" and an endless jackboot stamping on a face. I often ignore it and put the event on anyway, but some weeks, I don't have the stamina; last week, after the previous griefing which was the worst it had been in years was dealt with by nothing than a deletion of a day-old, I didn't get the energy up to put it on once again. I know that I will be browbeaten and harassed, likely even more, if I attempt to put it on again, but I will anyway. You have to. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states clearly in Art. 30 -- no one can use one right to take away another. Using freedom of speech to bully and silence and crush other people, even shutting off their sim so that they cannot function in a virtual world at some point becomes crime. It is right and just for Linden Lab to take action just as RL governments would, who recognize first of all that freedom of speech can be restricted in "time, place, and manner" and who increasingly find some legal response to stalking and cyberbullying online.

THE PATHETIC LAMENESS OF WOODBURY

Recently, I had a letter from a sad individual, Madelina Rossini, who for a time hooked up with the Woodbury gang and even got a job as an adjunct professor at the RL Woodbury for a time. She asked me not to publicize her email because it contained many personal details. But I will publicize one line that is relevant to understanding this discussion: 

"I also ended up for one semester 'teaching' a virtual worlds class at Woodbury. I will be honest with you and say it was a joke. There were four students and one TA and myself. I don't even really remember much about it. I just think they needed me to fill a gap for a short period of time while Clift was Dean and so couldn't teach."

Dean Edward Clift has hardly any publications on line. I remember finding only one paper he had read at a conference on communications and media in Russia some time ago, and now he has a book on business communications, which he was in part able to hustle because of the SL connection.  He has a completely mediocre career and his post at Woodbury, hardly an Ivy League colleague but a mediocre college in California, clinches it.

One of the things Clift has done in the past is utterly word-salad the griefing and harassment of the Woodbury goons, who if anything, give a new meaning to the "banality of evil" with their repetitive harassment and obscenity. He'll describe the Woodbury mission, in true Mau-Mauing the Flak Catcher "radical chic" fashion as "helping minorities". He made all sorts of "critical" and "Marxist' analyses of this sort -- total bilge -- in his original outrageously tendentious Herald interview which Pixeleen made with him, taking his side, after my critical report of 2007, calling them basically a lot of griefing Trustifarians.

These kids aren't minorities; the 24-year-old Bellino (some say he could be younger) is a white kid, said to be a son of a wealthy father. Cam Mitchell/Cam Scientist and some of the others are all white kids, everyone saw them at SLCC and their pictures are scattered all over Flickr and Facebook. There aren't any blacks or Hispanics in this bunch -- if anything, their racist schtick, using memes of 1970s black sitcoms and outrageous minstrely and cliches about Africa-Americans taken from popular culture, is offensive, and would not pass muster as acceptable speech on any of the politically-correct campuses of California today, and likely even Woodbury.

ANDRES SERRANO DOESN'T PISS IN YOUR LIVING ROOM

According to a post on the Soviet Woodbury page, Clift is "firing up the jets" of the Woodbury legal team. Huh? On what grounds can a group of Internet hackers and griefers keep pretending they have nobless oblige and eminent domain to do whatever the fuck they want? They could never be content to actually create and enlarge on their freedom of expression on sims they owned. They constantly had to deliver the message to others through rampant harassment and vicious disruptive behaviour -- the scale and repetitiveness and monstrousness of it makes it go beyond the sly "transgressive" of the simpering Henry Jenkins and cunning Peter Ludlow who knows full wel what is up with these people -- it's crime.

Some nimwad on Twitter who always argues with my critique of opensource quipped "One man's crime is another man's freedom of expression". Um, yeah, we get that there is a glorious history of all kinds of things illustrating the persistence in the face of oppression -- the Jews facing the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust, the Salem Witch Trials, Lady Chatterly's Lover, Lenny Bruce, Rushdie's Satanic Verses, the piss Christ. Many, many cases of people hounded in one era and celebrated in another, exiled from country and received with favour in another.All good. And all not a heritage that Woodbury University in SL can rightfully claim.

What is different about this in scale and magnitude and substance is that it's about the old adage, "your right to swing your arm ends at my nose." Crashing sims and depriving people of their Second Life enjoyment; bullying them with stalking messages, IMs, buzzes, persistent hopping from one parcel to another - that's vandalism and misdeameanors in real life, not "art" and recogized as such. Lenny Bruce did not make self-replicating Goatse and Tub Girl photos and constantly unleash them in a storm in your living room. He performed in a club and you could come or not come. Andres Serrano, the artist who made the piss Christ showed his work in a museum, and that was controversial enough; he didn't come in your living room and piss on your rug along with his Christ.

Of course, I realize people like Woodbury "students" and their very adult supporters have a theory of "guerilla art" or certain kinds of "conceptual art" that means you have to, um, take the art to the people and splash red paint or even actual blood everywhere and tear up stuff and get in your face. It's often those with a radical or "progressive" line that claims they are acting for some higher social justice goal that they get to be, um, "transgressive" like this. They claim that *unless* the "disrupt" society they are not performing true "art for the people"  For example, the riotous group Act-Up followed this line in bursting into St. Patrick's Cathedral during Mass to demonsrate about AIDs/HIV funding and staged various "die-ins" disrupting traffic. All and old story since the 1960s. You get scenes like rabid Palestinian haters not only heckling speakers so they can't even be heard over the shouting, but setting up tables on campuses and selling actual cans of soup decorated to say they are made out of Jews' bones. Of course, not only is the ACLU nowhere to be found in a case like this, which wouldn't suit their mandate, but the campus PC police are missing in action. Also lurking behind the incitement and acceptance of violence and coercion in "art" is the terrorist notion of "the propaganda of the deed" -- for a lot of professors, the "propaganda of the deed" gets a free speech license no matter if it kills or harms people, real or virtual. Virtual, for him, means it gets a moral pass.

'OH, BUT THEY'LL JUST MAKE ANOTHER GROUP'

There will be some who say that the closure or freezing of Woodbury University group doesn't do any good. They have other groups such as the awful "Prokofy Fan Club" which the Lindens have never seen fit to remove, although on the forums, they have a rule that you cannot start a thread solely to harass one person (not a rule I support). They will "make just one more" which is why you shouldn't ban groups.

Baloney. These groups cling to their identities like limpets. They love making the avatar head tags to show off in world; they are tremendously wedded to all the props, artifacts, buildings, logos, etc. that go with their group. They can't just "make another" *like that one* which in this case bore the name of a RL university which they dined out on for all it was worth with evidently no WU RL administration really paying attention -- and worse, when it was brought to their attention, taking an utterly cynical view -- the vice president told me in an email that he would abide by the terms of "any successful civil action" that I might bring against his professor and students (!). Another version of the "California business model" -- be an asshole, and force people to litigate against you to stop. I would have to somehow mount a civil court case against this better-resourced word-salad chef cooking institute, and get local police or state authorities to enforce it against a virtual world provider online, i.e. the virtual equivalent of an order of protection. I hope some day such cases will be tried and become successful -- they are needed in virtual as well as real life.

Groups matter terribly to these gangs -- that's why you freeze their group. Interestingly, although Woodbury claimed an enormous amount of support (500 people), a lot of them were day-olds forgotten or banned, no-shows who long ago left SL, and interestingly, a lot of people who *fled the group membership* with the "leave" option the minute the Lindens froze it and seized land because *they did not want to be associated with guilt that was being established*.

DON'T WANT TO BE GUILT-ASSOCIATED? DON'T ASSOCIATE WITH GUILT

Leninists, take note. Don't want to be associated with guilt? Don't associate with it yourself, then. Take a cue from your fellow griefers and griefer apologists who fled en masse from this group the minute they realized just how toxic it could be to the enjoyment of their SL.

I submit that when a group reaches a threshold of persistent and planned and systematic griefing, it's a group conspiracy and the group can not longer enjoy shielding under a liberal notion of "guilt by association". As I have often said, it's like the rule in high schools that gang insignia such as jackets and caps cannot be used in school, because gangs cannot grow and recruit and gain turf by using this insignia disruptively in school. I don't think you could mount a Constitutional defense of the right of a group to endlessly enjoy freedom of action under the law when they endlessly commit crime. Sooner of later, it's qualified as a gang, not a group. And that's ok. That's not about ending freedom of association' it's about ensuring one violent non-state actor doesn't take it away from another.

'A FEW BAD EGGS'

Another frequent alibis of these word-salad sous-chefs is to claim that it is not the leadership, or not those clever and talented kids who know Photoshop and LSL and everything, but a "few bad eggs". People from other schools or other places, not Woodbury (few of the Woodbury "students" are actually at WU).

That's of course utter bilge, as the group is invite-only with officers deilberately inviting literally hundreds of people with obvious griefer names like the variants of Blak Hax, and also providing space for the griefing of day-olds  like one that was recently through here and didn't last long, even without any AR from me named "BlackRigths Foehammer" with a profile saying "I am kinggoon" who has scattered furniture and gross anime pics over the Woodbury lot in Furness. There are countless "bad eggs" roaming in packs, and even allowing for the handful of really regular griefers like Tizzers (most griefers in SL who aren't suffering from conduct disorder or other anti-social conditions get bored and leave for greener griefing pastures or just games that are more fun -- the open-ended creative aspect of SL, once it has been pushed to its extreme and found to have its limits, becomes dull, especially if the griefer can't get any attention in such a big and diverse world.

DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL

Another school of thought says you should never publicize griefers, never talk about them, never give them attention. Bullshit, says I -- you have to strategically report on them now and then, or they win. You have to expose what they really do, because they lie. We don't take up this attitude about the mafia's crimes or Al Qaeda, even though news outlets struggle with how to report on them without giving them a platform to deliver their "message" without a frame. Here, for example, is the sage advice of one of the Woodbury griefers harassing me now with IMs inworld:

"Epacsten Subagja: Believe it or not, I pretty much thought everyone in woodbury was exactly like how you describe them, until I started hanging around there. I only went there in the first place because a friend invited me to watch a movie, and I found that for the most part, nobody did anything except stand around talking and get crashed by Digital Worlds. There are definitely people who do things that I don't like, but they're going to do it regardless of the group they're in, so I just ignore it."

Bullshit. These people are concerted, serial, hands-on, deliberate, systematic and egregious griefers -- that means violators of the TOS. Ignoring it doesn't make it go away. Pretending that you can be above it because it's only pixels doesn't stop the draining of revenue from your business. I'm not some rich greedy corporate tycoon -- my RL wage is probably a fraction of what Ludlow or Jenkins make. Even Linden Lab can't be described as some rapacious capitalist monster -- it barely scrapes by, really, in the scheme of things in Silicon Valley. Any effort to misportray this issue as a Marxian class struggle with evil rich exploiting oppressed poor should realize who is doing the oppressing here: the poor themselves, who have broadband, endless discretionary time on daddy's dime, DSL lines and high-end computers to waste their days making giant Soviet kitsch grief builds.

BUT IT'S EDUCATIONAL

Yet another group of apologists will excuse almost anything these miscreants do under the notion of "education". Little that was actually educational even by the very stretched notions of Marxists and leftists on campuses today went on at Woodbury University, as educators even of the most "progressive" type can explain in SL if the press actually researches this and doesn't just listen to whatever drivel Ludlow and McCahill will come up with, and whatever gullible or like-minded media studies cynics like Henry Jenkins they can find to buy this crap. Back in 2007, one of the PN griefers who had some relationship to a RL library posted endlessly justifying crap about the lovely art and creativity of this group in which he claimed he saw no wrong -- it's part of the shtick to lie, dissemble, distract, propagandize, disinform, order executions to be performed by cutaways. Happy Birthday, Vladimir Ilyich!

Comments

[Martini India]

Oh my, you sure are spinning this one. Once again, please get some professional help and on some meds!

[David McNaughten]

I almost never read one of your posts in its entirety. But I read this one. Finally somebody with the courage to call a spade a fricking shovel.

And Bellino launching a media campaign? Against whom? Linden Lab? You? The world? The kid's a sociopath. And he's probably also fully screwed himself out of any kind of professional career, let alone a real job with a paper trail like this to haunt him the rest of his life. What was he thinking?

[みみか 王]

“Bullying is an act of repeated aggressive behavior in order to intentionally hurt another person, physically or mentally.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying

All bullying is despicable.

[Martin Meiser]

Prokofy, grab a mirror, what are you thinking you're doing? You have ruined your repution worse than anyone else.

[Brinda Allen]

@ Martini India...
"Oh my, you sure are spinning this one. Once again, please get some professional help and on some meds!"
********
Obviously I haven't a clue who this avatar is, and if it's someone that has no connection to any of what was posted above...
Then either they are new, or naive.

While I stand behind a persons right to associate with anyone they choose...I will condemn them if they participate in riotist acts. Is providing moral support to active griefing groups actually helping to promote more griefing? Maybe.
A few years ago some young men went *wilding* in New Yorks Central Park. Wilding, if you're not familiar is just that.. running wild and doing anything to anyone. These young "men", (I use that term loosely), asssaulted and raped a young woman in front of a crowd of people. A crowd that not only did nothing to stop the assault...they cheered the assaulters on. I don't remember now if any of that crowd were charged with a crime...they certainly should have been...but I wonder how those people could possibly go home and sleep.

A couple of years ago various P/N group associated people/alts continously griefed a part of the mainland that I owned, a place I had spent a lot of time and a lot of real USD on. You know, in my case it wasn't because of me...they were just obscene particle spamming...anyone and everyone. I gave up. I dumped the land to land bots...ate the large sum I had spent on landscaping...and bought and island.
Makes one wonder sometimes...does griefing end up making the Benevolent Monarchy money in the end?

The discussion groups that I try to attend have been harassed repeatedly...you know why I attend these groups? It's not for perceived status...I attend in an effort to gain a better understanding of our Secondlife culture...I want to be able to contribute something to this platform.
Goddamn it Prok...you hold discussions and there will always be those of us that show up...it's important.

The last thing...While I'm not nearly as smart as I think I am...I'm a lot brighter than I look/sound. When who ever it was actually had the lack of sense to go and viewer crash at Joe Lindens brown bag meeting...any fool could see that that was a step too far.

[Gisele Trost]

Spoiled kids whose mommies and daddies are probably immature assholes too. The irony of nerds who bully.

[Aya P.]

SL will me better without them. I will never forget the day I signed into my home and found the words "We are watching you" with a picture of a virus in my living room from a woodbury member. Not knowing who it was or what I did to piss someone off to do this I abuse reported the group and the perpetrator and signed off from second life for a few weeks. It scared me to the point of paranoia. I hope they will not be welcomed back.

[Darien Caldwell]

I found this article, it has some interesting tidbits, if they are true. Among them are that LL has told Woodbury in effect "get out and do not come back", and that MC Fizgig was actually Edward Clift's account in SL.

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Woodbury-U-Banned-From-Second/23352/

[Whatsup]

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/general-sl-discussion/43467-farewell-woodbury.html

http://www.secondcitizen.net/Forum/showthread.php?t=6934

[Daniel]

I want to thank you for this 'white paper' on WU...I have a close friend who runs with the group though not quite as facist as they are...this person merely trolls, doesn't grief and is in actuality a great person when you get past the veneer.

But when I asked this person who is closely associated with WU...why? Why were the sims taken back, what is this group up to? I got the standard, "I have no idea! Its arbitratry! We dun nuttin! Honest!" response from them/this person.

I mildly mocked the response. LL doesn't take such drastic action simply because, as this person said said, "LL has a buyer and they are cleaning up the undesireables..." So then most of SL can be thought of as undesireable in one way or another. I didn't buy it and I have been trying to find out the past few days, intensively asking questions, what did this nerd-gang do to merit such a sweep.

I have been griefed at WU with an offensive weapon...I thought it was goofy and laffed it off. But when you are engaging in sim crashing and disruption that actually affects people minding their own damn business you are disgusting to me and you find no refuge of pity with me.

Many say they do the communist thing tongue-in-cheek but it appears its a lie and a ruse, their own tongue-in-cheek defense is in itself cynically tongue-in-cheek. I don't buy into any of it. They are thugs pure and simple if they have been doing the things you have outlined in your well-written and thought-out essay here.

Thanks again and good riddance with all of you via LL actions even if it means I lose a few close friends associated with them, Egads...get over yourself WU and the worthless snarks associated with them.