I'm Not Falling For You

Covering the Woodbury story gets dull after awhile, even for me, who is alive to its rich possibilities of analogies to real life problems of liberal values and civil rights and the problem of preventing and stopping terrorism, so aptly addressed in Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, one of my favourite books. I can't wait to see his new book that is coming out next week, The Flight of the Intellectuals which I will rush to buy in my nearest bookstore the old-fashioned way. I understand from reading amazon.com that he takes on Tariq Ramadan, a controversial Muslim thinker and speaker who was previously barred from a visa to the U.S. after being invited to Notre Dame. (The Catholic intellectuals are particularly in flight, I could add). We have our own little mini-series on these issues in SL with the Islamification of the Confederation of Democratic Simulators, one of the most disgraceful episodes of suppression of the intellectual's free speech and universality n Second Life, and of course we have it daily in lessons disseminated from Woodbury word-saladers.

There are so many other things about SL and social media and even real life that I'd rather be writing, and I find the long polemics I'm forced to pen tire even me. I remember Urizenus, a better man than Peter Ludlow, once said in defense of my long writing that Chomsky (!) had taught him that you had to write long passages sometimes to polemicize. Long ago I learned the lesson that polemics make for really bad reading, but I don't care, I feel the job of chronicler of the current events of SL is more important to do than to worry about style and form. That's why nobody is going to be grooming me for greatness and cleaning up my swear words or ad hominems which I will insist on retaining as part of our Times v. Sullivan heritage of free speech.

Still, the Woodbury problem, about which I've written for something like nearly four years, remains and needs to be relentlessly addressed. So I will do it this way -- posting brief police blotters about their harassment. There's a theory that if you never talk about griefers, they will not grief you. Or you will not make them worse. I think there's a far, far worse problem. If nobody ever talks about griefers -- and you know who you are, and you know you've been griefed by Woodbury too, and you know you don't talk about it because you think it will go away if you don't -- then they can constantly win the rhetorical battles on places like sluniverse.com where they can show up and say "Waaaaaa we didn't do anything! We wuz framed!". Huns Valen is incorrigible and will never tell the truth that he has seen in action and knows and covers up. But you can make it harder for those swayed by Huns Valen by keeping the record. And so I shall.

This story of Woodbury actually goes back before Woodbury appeared qua Woodbury, but I again submit that Woodbury's core existed before Woodbury, and it was a deliberate plan to invite certain W-hat and the PNs into the campus to make havoc in the secret playroom underneath the seemingly innocuous campus build, and then spread the havoc to the rest of SL. Prof. Edward Clift and student Jordan Bellino admit that.

But the theorizing, the theological underpinnings of all this go back to an early era of Second Life, when everyone was very disturbed about a build that went up in the avowed W-hat sim of Baku, which was a replication of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in flames with jumpers and the slogan "I'm falling for you," as if this was a kind of love story. We were supposed to "learn" from this abhorrence ridiculing the deaths by terrorists of some 3,000 people about "American jingoism" blah blah. We were supposed to learn all sorts of pious lessons about evil Amerika and we were supposed to "poke fun at ourselvse" in our virtual world as pompous so-and-sos who cared too much about virtual buildings falling and couldn't understand the sophisticated lessons of "art." Apparently even the Lindens at that time ended up banning some of the people or even removing the build as "broadly offensive" (I'm not sure of the exact details.)

At least, that's how Mark McCahill and Peter Ludlow want to force it, and naturally the Herald milked the faux hipster scene for all it was worth. The usual suspects all showed up to make the usual cynical and nihilist arguments.

More fascinating was the dialogue on the more-free old Linden forums, in which people who weren't in the cynical magnetic field of the Herald discussed the issues, many of them sincerely, without the trolling that always takes place on the Herald.

Of course the trolls were evident on the old forums, too, and that notorious apologist for online vandalism, Huns Valen, showed up to make the usual apologia. What was interesting were all the replies and counter-arguments. I could analyze it endlessly, but just go read it here, it makes for a very instructive read and a very telling historical document from Second Life.

The problem of the terrorism of the entire grid by the W-hat Plastic Duck (AKA Gene Replacement) -- back when it was possible to take all of SL down for an entire day because it was smaller and had less checks against grey goo flooding and such, was discussed predictably by the liberal blogosphere as well, in the old "Clickable Culture" run by Tony Walsh (since closed). You can see all the same issues we face constantly in SL and RL there in spades -- a Linden telling the media that in their view they should not be celebrating Plastic Duck because he crashed the grid, and self-righteous posturing by lefties believing this put a "chill" on free speech blah blah -- although the statement by Catherine Linden at the time itself was a product of the company's own right to free speech, obviously, and the real chill wasn't put on the topic by a small then struggling software company having its grid crashed regularly, but by liberal mainstream media trying to make a fake censorship issue out of it (which is happening now as the Peter Ludlow media campaign grinds on to get respectable publications pick up the spun Woodbury story.)

I tried to expose the fakeries of W-hat back in the Herald then as well in describing the incident of Rotten Thatch on his fake Muslim alt crashing into my event in an airplane, then after I attempted to ban him but somehow only ended up returning his airplane, coming back with a giant replica of the World Trade Center and deliberately, repeatedly barging into me.

The reason he picked my event to crash (his lie that he happened to be just passing by in his airplane is a hoax) was because he read the forums discussion, again, and saw that I had tears in my eyes about the World Trade Center, and decided I was a ripe victim for being "set straight" about how you can't take the Internet seriously. I had a meeting about mainland groups and campaigining to keep the 10 percent bonus for mainland groups, something that the disgusting forums troll Jauani Wu was deliberately stumping against just to be a fucktard even though he himself sold mainland and benefited from it. 

I believe Rotten Thatch is Hazim Gazom, who is also said to be Crawlingin Meskin who in turn resembles Railwyn and other alts. Of course, they may all be different people. But SL is small and basically all this time, there have been only one or two people consistently and boringly harassing me nearly ever day, and that's the Hazim Gazov character who is either Tizzers himself or related closely to Tizzers, and the Alyx Stoklitsky character, who claims he no longer harasses me but of course, keeps showing up on alts and performing the exact same tricks. This one or two persons and their alts simply decided that they had to "get" me for what I wrote against them on the forums, because they as cynics and extreme leftists who blessed the terrorism against America (not being real Muslims). The actual identity of Hazim Gazov remains a mystery, although somebody wants to either out him or get revenge on him, because they are putting in Pastebin, so it shows up on Google, that he is Jean du Plessis, itself a name of a historical figure a common name that might or not be a real life person in computers and finance in RL. There's no question that at SLCC 2 in Chicago, the disgusting little wimp Jordan Bellino came up to me literally stalking and dogging my heels, saying gleefully "I'm Hazim Gazov" and then "Want to talk to Tizzers on the phone?" Now, he may have mixed himself up there. He may have meant to say "I'm Tizzers, want to talk to Hazim."

and of course, it's always possibly *I* mixed up what he was saying by the surprise disgust at being stalked. I don't think so. That's because when I looked at the physical view of this little man who had bullied and tormented me in SL, I remember thinking to myself, oh, maybe he really is of Muslim or Jewish heritage. I tend to think it quite possible that his story is that his family is likely Albanians who passed as Italians, a common defensive measure for this immigrant group in America, until Saturday Night Live comic John Belushi made being Albanian a matter of pride. But in America, which is the Second Life of nations, anything is possible and you can reinvent yourself any way.

Whether the same person or "talking on the phone to" Hazim or Tizzers, the two were partners in SL on the partner box.

Tizzers, an American, even cynical and nihilist, would have a hard time continuing to stop for a tasteless parody of the World Trade Center terrorist act. I'm not sure at which point Tizzers came into contact with W-hat and made common cause with them and it may not have been at that time. But Hazim Gazov, if he is French Canadian, might have reason to hate America just as some extremists hate English-speaking Canada, and possibly adopt some leftist and extreme view point about world, and find it easy to jeer the WTC falling down. His text in the thread is right out of the textbook of any Chomsky-educated extreme leftist.

Under peer pressure, Rotten Thatch who I believe is Hazim Gazov or related to him, starts to revise his story. He wasn't really meaning to go grief the meeting, he was flying by. He really didn't mean to pull the World Trade Center replica out of his inventory, he accidently rezzed it when he was really trying to rez it. He didn't really mean to rez it *and* go after Prokofy and hit him over the head with it; that was just a bump. He didn't *really* mean to do that *again* after circuling around, it was just, um, hard to control, and so on. The usual outrageous fisking and literalism and splitting and wrecking of the usual criminals. Of course it was all deliberate; we know it; he knows it.

And that's the crux of the matter. Many people, myself included, would tolerate offensive art on its own sim. In the original discussion, I said I thought possibly the Lindens might wish to remove it because it was definitely qualifying under their category "broadly offensive" although they had not developed their theory and jurisprudence of that category at that time in 2005. The Lindens let the discussion go, perhaps themselves actualy wishing to see "what the community would say" because if it were up to the Lindens at that juncture in time, they'd shrug and even laugh at the "art" of w-hat and were likely enthusiastic visitors of the site themselves. That's the problem. Jeska finally came in and closed the discussion not because the nihilists were winning, but because those opposing nihilism were winning.

Comments

[Gisele]

Huns Valen in that thread you linked:

'Anyway. It's on our land! Don't come here, thanks in advance.'

'our land'. Note his use of the plural pronoun. He still imagines that we believe that he was just a bystander. ROFL.

[Prokofy Neva]

Good eye, good eye, Gisele!