Prok's perspective

Forum to discuss issues pertaining to the organisation and operations of the judiciary.

Moderator: SC Moderators

User avatar
Prokofy
Lurker
Lurker
Posts: 9
Joined: Thu Dec 28, 2006 12:58 am

Rebuttal

Post by Prokofy »

I feel a lot about FriesWithThat sectarian politics like I feel about oh, sectarian politics in Slovakia. I wouldn't want to spend time on sorting through and battling factions. If they are in danger of re-electing Meciar, I'd sound off. If they were going to cover up or absolve that murder of the journalist and kidnapping of the president's son all over again -- well, I'd criticize them to try to prevent that from happening, just in the general interests of universality.

Gwyn and Aliasi ought to be ashamed of themselves for publishing this sort of tripe:

"Gwyneth Llewelyn wrote:
What he really doesn't seem to like is people getting a public office through a popular vote. Smile At least, he never seems to bring it up to discussion...

Aliasi wrote: he's got the same problem that many have had; all for democracy if it means they vote his way. We're hardly unaquainted with the concept here, no?"

What on earth or in cyberspace prompted Gwyneth, an ex-friend and ex tier-contributor to my rentals group, to write such tendentious drivel? And what on earth does Aliasi, a builder I once commissioned a huge build to, have grounds to say these things?

Based on what actual events inworld?

No one who advocates democracy -- as I do -- could possibly be against elections. Duh? I'm for elections? And I definitely do not care if they don't go my way -- let them not!

I'm trying to think what on earth is the basis for this crap.

Back when the Metaverse Justice Watch was formed, Anshe Chung was like various Russian leaders calling snap elections without any time to have candidates submitted to an *open* group. She closed the group immediately after getting the people she needed nominated lol. Of course, there was a risk in having a nominations group -- like MJW itself, it could fill up with W-Hat griefers and FIC hecklers -- and of course it did. That didn't trouble me for an elections that could have been run outside the group tools, however , because people could just not vote for them.

It's a problem trying to run an election in a world of spamming tools with alts. W-HAT could easily do election recalls constantly and that also paralyzed groups back then when the tools were different -- every other day someone was calling "recall" on me or Anshe or Jauani or someone else just to heckle the group. Finally, Anshe called up the Lindens and asked them to remove me by executive action, which they did. For shame -- on both of them.

Now, was this because I opposed elections? No, I merely opposed manipulation of them. I opposed closing nominations groups before the election meeting that Cocoanut had called was even convening. Read up on the history of the MJW (a kind of governance experiment mainly done by group IMs and inworld meetings, not through sim government). There was a good-faith effort to call for elections and hold meetings to show the candidates.

What I opposed about this was *process*. Aimee Weber, Lordfly, and others just came and glommed on the group. They had no interest in governance, really, they just felt it "their duty" to "stop Prok". They had never bothered with the meetings or issues, but just showed up suddenly to either form splitting groups (Lordly made one, met a few times, and then it died) or get elected as a "content-maker" which Anshe sought to have some unstoppable political machine able to deflect complaints about "all the land barons taking over".

Next, having secured her favoured 3-4 candidates, which I didn't bother to run for (I actually don't have ambitions to run sims as it happens except in a limited fashion in rentals), and because I didn't wish to reify the lack of process, Anshe then bussed in tenants. By that I mean she used the group tools to tell all the tenants they should turn out and vote in elections and began strongly hinting who to vote for.

So I called this bad old-fashioned Bolshevik packing of the meeting and bad old-fashioned Bolshevik bussing, that's all.

Taking factory workers who depend on Party-controlled factories and telling them they have to vote for the single Party-endorsed factory supervisor -- and then bussing them to elections in factory busses, from their factory-supported housing that they'll lose if they dissent -- why, that's what I call "bussing". And I view the manipulation of hundreds of tenants like that to be "bussing".

I view it as wrong, to try to take advantage of the fact that hundreds of people have a business relationship with you on a narrow basis in a rentals, and then try to "turn them out" for elections of you-- what, can they feel comfortable in a setting like that? People who rent from me didn't join a political party or sign up for a government experiment nor a scramble to lobby Lindens. They're just renting, and should be left alone. I invite them to come to Friday night discussions at the dam about land and economy, but I invite them to yardsales as well. A few announcements a week about events is all it is.

If any of you had been present at the events surrounding MJW, you would have seen how unfair it is, and how wrong it was, and if you call yourself "democratic" you would have opted out or critiqued it yourselves.

Now, why haven't I started a government? Because...I don't wish to run other people? I don't wish to govern them without their consent? Hello? Why would I start a "government sim" and try to create a "government" under such unjust circumstances?

Any exercise in a "government" is doomed to the worst kind of fictionality, and not only because it is a digital online virtual world. It's because the Lindens will not or possibly cannot share power. They cannot even declare separation of church and state (we could try to get them to do that, of course).

Any normal government exercise has to first establish some kind of constituent assembly body. To find the groups of citizens, the "correspondence committees", the associations, the trade unions, whatever the elements of civil society might have gotten started, and form some kind of congress or assembly, to try to see what sort of constitution -- or better yet -- fundamental legal principles could be required for that country's government.

That step is ALWAYS skipped over in SL. People fear having anything as open and informal as a constituent assembly because basically, they never want to have anything dilute their own bid for power and control. That means a very important exercise in first shaping some principles of like-mindedness is skipped every time -- as it was with Neualtenberg -- which began merely because Haney Linden gave Ulrika Zugzwang and her friends a snow sim in a contest in which there was only one applicant, and hence one winner. Nobody ever seems to have the patience to make a contest like that fair; or better yet, skip such socialist utopianism as Linden-sponsored sims, and to just find 10 good men and women to share a sim and try their luck out at governing it.

What Nberg has evolved into now is filled with bloody coups, uprisings, suppression of dissent, and now factionalism, confusion of agendas and purpose, and certain leaders looking to "distract men's minds with foreign wars" by aspiring to create laws for the entire grid -- under the guise of making suggestions to Lindens about tools.

I think in a situation where there is no basic separation of power; nor fair assemblage (say, of all sim owners; or of all tier-payers; or of all pledging labour or participation in some way), how can you have a government? Everybody wants to play government -- kids say "let's play police and detective" and swagger around "taking care of griefers"; adults say "let's draft an entire complex judicial law and play at placing liens on one another for fun". Hence they get bogged down in idiocies (for SL) like "let's have a court order to reclaim land when tier is defaulted upon -- even though the Linden tools already unfortunately code-as-law that for you -- no tier paid to you, you as a sim owner are out of luck unless you front a loan to keep the sim afloat because your tier will come due to LL regardless with unyielding certainty, like death and taxes. No one thinks to supply a loan to the titular sim owner while they play at "due process" and "court orders" dithering over whether land can be reclaimed, hmmm?

The grid introduces so many harsh exigencies like this, that you simply can't have a proper government. You are forced to deal with the limping group tools; the brutal problems of crashing and prims autoreturning when not set to group, etc. etc. not to mention rampant and horrible griefing.

That's why I call it FriesWithThat -- all this busy-work on "governance" and you can *still* get a job at McDonald's! And to think people's aim is actually to create a structure they can port to RL from their utopia!

I think the job of governance has to be much simpler. Very basic principles first should be established where people could really find a common ground. No one can find a common ground around an elaborate and complex Judicial Law drafted by just one aggressive party, not in a parliamentary committee of elected people (and I don't consider an election within the confines of 60 people under the situation of Nberg here to be something that can yield a law that should EVER be applicable to anyone else even as a model -- and of course, that's how they'll slip it in).

So there's really only two jobs right now as far as I'm concerned.

One is to battle hard to prevent the Lindens from putting forth any sort of inworld resmod-type figures in the line of mediators, judges, facilitators, or even just "good models" that they feature in Second Opinion. No way. Non pasarant. No inworld resmods, no quislings, regents, seconds, Lindesidents -- no mentors, helpers, volunteers. Nothing. Nado. Zilch.

Now, they claim they aren't going to do this. I just checked with a relevant Linden on this again last night and he swore "pinkie promise" they weren't going to do this.

But sadly, these Lindens are not to be trusted. They foisted resmods on us in the forums, after all, without the consent of the public at large; they created a sycophantic and corrupt system of mentors/helpers/volunteers/instructors who lord it over other lesser mortals with their titles and sell their stores to newbies -- so their track record is clear.

That's why they need to keep getting a clear, sharp, strong signal: no residents nominated, appointed, head-patted as being the model students.

Why is this important to do? It's all part of nudging LL to get out of the civic space. They have encroached upon it far, far too much in their supposed autonomous metaverse-hatchling. And their paws are all over a million things, starting with roads that look like macadam to voting tools where you can't vote "no". So they need to recede to the edges of the Metaverse -- and just as important as opening up the source code is for some people to obtain freedom of development, so their opening up of governance and leaving the civic space is as important for liberal democracy to take root in the Metaverse. Liberal democracy never takes root "just like that" -- a hundred rigid orthodoxies and sects and authoritarianisms have to be fought to keep the space open.

So something like the first amendment needs to be drafted as the minimum hedge on Linden Lab:

First Amendment Text:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Fundamental Principle of Law for Self-Governance:

Linden Lab shall make no law respecting an establishment of any resident or group, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, under the TOS/CS; or the right of the residents peaceably to assemble, and to petition LL for a redress of grievances after exhausting all local remedies.

The redactions I've put in aren't there because I believe in them in RL -- they'd undo and claw back freedoms in fact established in the first place by the amendment -- but I offer that as a compromise due to the exigency of the situation -- LL owns the servers and software, we are mere share-croppers or quit-renters.

So having established some basic separation between Church and State as it were (residents stand in for the role of the church or churches here, with their notions of how people should live, what moral code to follow, etc. and LL stands in for the State, as the federal force creating the infrastructure of roads, electricity, etc.) ONLY THEN would one embark on the formation of a government with three separate powers or branches -- maybe even four if you add in the press as something that would have to be defended.

I'm well aware that many will find much to disagree with even on this point. They'll say LL has every right to pick their pets and advisors and interlocutors and feature whomever they damn please in Second Opinion, the media, whatever, I would disagree. If they truly want to be neutral, they need to refrain from picking pets, massaging, feting, steering, and featuring. Otherwise it's unjust. It's like making first-graders read the Bible in a public school that has a diversity of religious followers or non-religious children in the class.

What some are also likely to say is that this is a total non-issue. If the Lindens said they won't have resmods, well, take them at their word. Except...I bet within a year, they will be forced to concede them.

Example of how it will happen: if they are to keep open dozens of welcome areas, orientation areas on the mainland, infohubs, etc. they won't have the staff to run the disciplining of them. A major reason of lack of retention is that these areas quickly become overrun with kids who grief them -- bombing, shooting, running annoying sound clips, harassing people, swearing in PG, flying around bumping into them, etc. Right now, even with the land on "no push" people still shoot and make fires to make a nuisance. With no automatic pvp abuse record created and no willingness anymore to try to review the more than 2,000 abuse reports, the reports go no where. People sometimes turn and leave SL all together, or they go off and write a bl0g or even an article in Time Magazine describing how they were griefed or hijacked off to a sex club or a store.

Police groups come and deal with the griefers -- and are worse than the police, and the Lindens are called in to settle problems and often ban from the area. So...first they'll share the ban list from Governor Linden (a subject for a separate post), then they'll start saying, let's have these lands grouped in Linden Maintenance Group, let's say. Let's have just some of our trusted mentors have the right at least to eject people who grief. The bans could be reviewed later...but they'll have eject and prim return powers....so easy to give them just that...it's not really resident government...it's not really blessing any one resident or group...it's just helping out at the welcome area...what, how could you be against THAT? Do you hate newbies and love griefing or something???

See how it will work? And I've challenged specific Lindens on JUST this very plausible evolution of a resmod inworld and they deny it, and say, emphatically, "We own the servers".

Ok. Own them then.

Which brings me to the next point. Making LL have ownership of certain kinds of abuse that they should have domain over, and not residents. The list might include:

o first-life disclosure
o systematic hate speech and actions, i.e. anti-gay, racist, etc.
o crashing the entire grid etc

Even though you'd think that LL would know its own mind about what it should have jurisdiction, again, judge by their track record, not by their stated intentions. Their track record shows abysmal policing -- ignoring most complaints while claiming to review them; posting a fraction of the cases, with no strategic selectivity; selective and biased prosecution (cases of that abound); executions at dawn (many problems, especially if they look like alts, they solve by simply deleting accounts with no due process).

So their poor policing is likely to continue, even after they shunt the load of governance over shooting or harassment speech on to residents who are supposed to just ban and mute the hell out of everybody.

They claim (you can hear Robin speaking of this at the Commonwealth Club tape at fora.tv) that they are going to jigger some kind of thing that will enable you to verify if what a person present as is verified in RL or something. These will be the verified verified accounts...Or they will have some way of dealing with trust issues off-site using some kind of verifying technology.

But...of course there will be things they run -- and we will have no way of knowing if they run them well or badly (remember they compromised all of our CC and personal data on September 6, 2006 and had to reset all the passwords). They may not do this out of ill will; but merely out of running a very big complex revolutionary thingie.

So how can we protect ourselves from the state; and enable the state and us to protect us from each other? These are hard questions but also have very simple answers -- the first fundamental principle must be that the Lindens do not appoint, establish, nominate, fete any single resident or group. And that they identify clearly -- and we should help this process -- what is their jurisdiction, and what it the residents' jurisdiction.

It's not a very happy situation at all. You can't have a normal government when the executive branch -- LL itself -- will not share power, has no legislature or judicial branch whatsoever, but has some newfangled and idiotic notion that they can code "tools" that the residents will "run themselves" which will be as smooth as a pianola -- and can replace the politics of factions, which as, Thomas Jefferson said, was the oxygen and lifeblood of democracy in his day.

Honestly, these conditions are not one in which anybody should be spending any time at all tooling and dying elaborate Judicial Laws for use on their sim -- as they pretend -- and "only a model for others".

No.

The only things that should be done after clearing up these two fundamental issues I've already raised are establishing certain likeminded principles for either island covenants and mainland sim associations. Things like "let's not have spinning signs allowed in the sky" or "let's say people shouldn't build right SMACK at the property line".

It's those real, practical issues that I have spent two years elaborating in Ravenglass Rentals, and any one can examine my lease and FAQs and such to see how I've tried to deal with all the myriad issues that mere prims can cause.

I find most people getting involved in governance in SL want to pull the blanket on themselves, like the proverbial quarrelling old couple in bed. Each is ambitious but hides behind their so-called dedication to the public weal. I take pride in not doing that myself -- I represent an interest group -- landlords concerned about land groups, group tools, sim prices, etc. and a staunch supporter of free enterprise. I don't pretend to make universalities out of interest-group politics. I think governments in SL of any sort of far, far too premature given the basic unfree situation of the people -- only interest groups, civic associations, unions, etc. make sense in this environment.

User avatar
Desmond Shang
Passionate Protagonist
Passionate Protagonist
Posts: 115
Joined: Sun Oct 22, 2006 12:56 pm

Post by Desmond Shang »

Fascinating topic. :)

A few brief, hopefully constructive comments here:

1) I rather agree with what Prokofy is saying, in regards to the importance of "the government shall make no law... " clauses when considering anything grid-wide. I think the scope of authority would be a concern of many.

2) I have the sense that in-world representatives with Company consent are inevitable. Simply because that's the 'easy way out' when social issues overwhelm, and eventually they will. Do I like the concept? Absolutely not. But I'm a realist, and have seen it happen before.

Perhaps it has already happened, in a way. Sim owners becoming de facto Company representatives, in areas where interests align.

3) The following is in response to both some (I presume) light-hearted banter inworld, and some speculative blog comments:

Caledon will not be joining a Confederacy of Democratic Sims. Period. Ever.

Why? Well, first off, we are no democracy. Democratic committees don't seem to run sims very efficiently or effectively, especially when it comes to the business side of things. Can't afford it.

Second, because nobody in my sims signed up to enter into anything like the CDS, so I won't force it upon anyone. The 'none of my business' clause.

Lastly, handing over my 14 sims to the CDS would be a business blunder of epic proportion.

Of course, this would not preclude Caledon from being in a simple 'group of micronations' or part of any discussion/debate group, so long as there was nothing at all imposed upon us.

Specifically, we are not going to participate in any universal ban list, or ever seize property due to a treaty with outsiders, &c.

Would this make us a rogue nation? I think not. Should a scammer ever attempt to hide behind Caledon's borders and I found out about it, they would have a very serious domestic problem. :) But not one to be necessarily decided by an external court.

Post Reply

Return to “Judiciary Discussion”