–So that impressionable newbies and young people see that this thrilling movement they find so attractive actually has its critics and opponents and that their own internal misgivings about it might actually have some merit.
–So that young and impressionable people or old and foolish people can see that there is some kind of community standard which people aspire to — freedom from slavery, violence, and coercion — and see that there are choices in this life.
–So that those who use the BDSM lifestyle as a means to place others in their thrall, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, will see that they are judged, and that they cannot aspire to the legitimacy they crave but do not deserve — because they are violent and practice slavery
–So that AV is not overrun with BDSM lots so that other neighborhoods not involved with BDSM feel they still live in an open society where they don’t have to face violence and subordination everywhere in their city.

It’s about freedom, alternatives, and openness, James. I’m sorry you can’t see that. Far from “hiding,” the BDSM practioners have come out into the light of 100,000 people subscribed to a massive RP game. And they find that far from obtaining the legitimacy they crave, they aren’t getting it, because their slavery and their violence are rejected by free people in a free and equal world. End of story.

Wouldn’t it be funny if they were actually the same person?

You think BDSM won’t become an accepted act? You’re a fool then. Do you believe that it will just go away? How do you think that will happen? The only way to remove BDSM entirely from society would be to become a totalitarian state. Now do you understand why I said you sounded like a dictator yourself?

The only reason that BDSM is a “closed society” is because of people like you. They have to hide themselves, just like the followers of Christianity did 2000 years ago. Back then Christianity was labled a cult as well, wasn’t it? Perhaps now you’ll open your eyes and see that there is more than just your side to a story.

I started off posting to tell you to keep your objectivity when posting. Now I’m posting because your close-minded views disgust me. Since I doubt anything I say here will actually make you think, this will be my last post. When people tell you to keep an open mind, you obviously don’t understand what they mean. Learn to challenge your views, or you’ll get left behind. It’s time to join the 21st century Dyerbrook. Leave your outdated opinions at the door.

Who said “I flatly disagree with your opinions, but I will fight to the death for your right to express them”?

I was fascinated to read your opinions, so lucidly put, about SSG, BDSM and totalitarianism … I am general supportive of your opinions on totalitarianism and SSG, but not BDSM.

SUGGESTION:

You should spend more time developing your initial point (that pseudo “nice” PC censorship supports totalitarians) and less on your own opinions about minorities, however well argued.

PERSONAL COMMENT:

Totalitarianism seems to be on the rise these days at the highest levels of society. “You are either for us or against us” “Bring them on” etc etc. Lets hope it dies down. Regrettably human societies are generally instable in the long run as one party learns to eliminate competition and assign all resources to it’s own benefit.

It occurs to me that you seek an audience for your views … this is what the others seek .. so there is no fundamental difference. How is one to achieve balance I wonder?

Europeans have a horror of totalitarianism having had a horrific bout of it in the 20th Century. I hope enough of them have tripped to USA in the meantime to prevent it happening there too.

So have many others. It is a shame they have been censored or intimidated or bribed into silence.

Nothing that happened to you will ever justify the kind of people you and your group are or the things you have done to others.

Keeping Alphaville free of mafia is a nice sideline, but it isn’t the only line you are in. And taking the government thing too seriously is something you and your gang of thugs ought to consider thinking about.

You can fool some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

It may come as a surprise to you that I hardly watch television and certainly not Faux News or War TV (Fox News). Your smug assurances that I am in the dark and you are in the light would be humorous if it were not for a serious matter, at least in the virtual world — but the virtual world has consequences in real life. I’m going to start with the assumption that this is a discussion where no one is going to say “oh, it’s just a game, go pound your gnomes” and that we are both interested in how virtual worlds evolve. One hundred thousand of our fellow citizens and neighbors in Canada, Europe, Australia, etc., many of them teenagers, are living in a world now which is penetrated by evil, and spending many, many hours in that world night and day. I know it is politically incorrect to speak about evil, but I shall, because it it true. And please, I am not some yahoo indoctrinated by the U.S. media, even though I have different views than you do, since I read world media in a variety of languages for many hours a day and have many, many sources of news and commentary across the spectrum.

Terrorism is a violent attack on innocents for the sake of a political or religious cause or for the sake of disruption of a society in order to gain power. OF COURSE TSO is a virtual world where “terrorism” as it is understood in the real world has no real equivalent because nobody really dies and any Sim can come back to life, recreate, or rebuild their lot — I’ve done so many times after the terror attacks of the SSG, mafias, and just destructive kids. But in discussing this virtual world, I reserve the right to use the same terms to describe the same patterns of human behavior one sees in RL. And the smuggling of a roomie on to a lot, and the misuse of the old architectural privileges to destroy that lot *is* terrorism in the Sims world, especially for those who don’t use third-party cheats and ebay money, but honestly board or gnome or preserve their way up to a size 8 lot. The harassment of Sims with remote roomie invites, lot pissings, plate dumpings, spreading of boycotts on the basis of false news — this *is* terrorism and harassment and is the classic method of violent cults or authoritarian movements seeking to come to power and destroy civil society and democratic governance.

I see no reason why, in the name of RP, we are to smile at these worrisome developments in our world, and I choose to RP right back at these thugs and try to keep AV an open society free of such thuggery. Indeed the SSG does hide itself. You’ve obviously never fought the SSG or taken testimony from those who fight it or accidently or deliberately get in its way. They send a slew of 0-day Sims, often with clown-faces or other ugly Sim faces, and then delete themselves if someone manages to glove them and write something about them in the balloon. They hide all the time. They are called the Shadow Government because they’re in the shadows, duh.

What you need to realize — and I know it may come as a shock to you — is that I’m not a person with wacky, extremist viewpoint that deserves a lecturing tone from an enlightened majority. Probaby 95 percent of the people playing TSO are highly disturbed at the presence of BDSM, and do not choose BDSM as their lifestyle, nor do they want it for their children, nor do they want the 13 and up teens who are permitted to play in this game to be exposed to it and indeed recruited by it. It’s you who are in the minority, and you who need to realize that people have created community standards through a variety of civilizations over the centuries, and they have the right to uphold them. The hard-won Constitution of the United States says “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”. The centuries of law and practice following this 1776 Constitution established that “all people — all men and women of any kind” are created equal and their rights are inherent by natural law, not a construct. Feminism means something, and BDSM reverses its progress.

Therefore when a cult like BDSM comes along that seeks to use the attributes of an open society to establish a closed society where men and women become subordinate to each other, use violence on each other in the name of sexual pleasure, and enslave others, using cult-like techniques, it surely is completely fine for me and others to stand up and say, “Hey, wait a minute? What is this?”.

BDSM people themselves tell us that as much as 85 percent of their adherents are victims of sexual abuse. That suggests we are dealing with a severely troubled population, and we ought not to take at face value *even their own proclamations of being involved in BDSM voluntarily* any more than we would say this of a drug user or Moonie adherent or anyone else who voluntarily joins something that in fact has merely played on their weaknesses or ignorance through the sophisticated techniques of a cult.

I’ve researched BDSM fairly extensively. I’ve had many interesting dialogues with the BDSM people, and I have told them to their face my concerns, and gotten some very helpful answers from some, and ignores and boots from others, and some hands-on night-and-day nasty harassment from still other. There are different forms of the cult in the game, and they even argue or fight among themselves. Some are Goreans, which believe in slavery and apparently going against people’s will and do not have guards and checks like some of the other versions of the cult, that use a code word that is the equivalent of “uncle” to signal to someone that they should stop their violence. I do not fear such BDSM, I face it head on, and I stand up to it, because it is wrong and undermines civil society. That’s perfectly fine. The media has not “gotten” to me, but Marxist liberal university education or leftist media must have gotten to *you* because you are not thinking of the consequences of allowing a closed, non-transparent, non-democratic cult to flourish and gain recruits in an open society. It exploits an open society ultimately to impose a closed society. In its world, if elections are held, they are the last elections, because after that, there are no elections because subs would not be enfranchised — they would have to vote how their masters told them. Don’t you see it, James? These issues aren’t virtual. They matter. It is a game, but it was an experiment in community-building set up by Will Wright and I intend to play it seriously and take it to its logical consequences.

Yes, people are indeed tortured in some versions of BDSM, they say so themselves. They admit openly that the lots in the virtual world tie up to RL scenes and that some very disturbing things can happen there. They say some practice restraint, and some don’t. *How are we concerned outsiders to know the difference?* I don’t know if you realize there is a heavy debate about this in the BDSM community at large and within the game itself. The arguments, to my mind, are something like the debate about “harm reduction” and clean-needle programs. Some people think it is important to look at overall crime and health statistics and give out clean needles without judgement, and other people think that enables drug addiction to continue unabated or even facilitates it, and still others point out that even when you reduce harm in this practical way, you haven’t solved the problem of the lives destroyed by addiction.

What some BDSM adherents tell you is that they are working to make everything “safe, sane, and consensual”. *That means they realize they have a problem with a potentially violent cult themselves.* They even provide lessons to newbies, a form of step plan of indoctrination, to make it “safer”. But how can we know how effective this is when they will not discuss it openly, and liberal outsiders like yourself are reluctant to appear politically incorrect and stand up to their propaganda?

Let’s say you see a person in the game whom you got to know at a mutual friend’s lot, who has been first so scared by the SSG that they fear even talking about it to you, then, a little while later, you suddenly see them on a BDSM lot with a rose drawing in their profile. (I have definite proof that the high eschelons of the SSG are into BDSM and the world intertwine.) You ask them with concern how they got involved in this scene, since they weren’t before — what happened? Were they lured in somehow? But they can’t talk to you because “any problem with me, talk to my master” as they write on their profile. If you press, and talk to them one on one — as a free citizen of a free world — you only earn the wrath of their dom or domme, who comes down like a ton of bricks on you for being so “bigoted” so as to ask these questions of their sub. You see how it works? They suppress inquiry and concern, and they are not transparent about their actions, and when you call them on that, they call you a bigot. On each and every lot, they tell you not to be a bigot and “keep an open mind,” but if you sit and listen to their lectures, and begin to express some dissent to their worldview, and any sense of shock or dismay at their pratices and their propaganda, you will feel the boot in the back. It is truly Orwellian — they tell you that far from serving as a means of annihilation of another person, their violent acts, their rigged domination, builds a sense of trust and intimacy. But surely there are other ways to gain trust and intimacy that are not violent?

You’re willing to say that BDSM RP in public spaces, that is at other “vanilla” lots, is “a little disconcerting”. Imagine you are on a romance or skill lot, fooling around and speaking openly and happily as equals to the other women and men on the lot, and suddenly, some girl in medieval garb whispers to some guy in tights “May I green now, Master?”. He tells her when she may or may not go to the toilet, or even go AFK to RL. Some of these doms and dommes order everyone around, not just their subs, and think this mode of behavior is acceptable to those outside their world. If they did their thing on their own lots or their own neighborhood, it would be none of our business, and if we didn’t want to go there, we wouldn’t have to. In fact, some of them have the courtesy to put this sign on their lots.

Still, I worry about the smart and savvy teens in the game for whom the Internet is a babysitter or an after-school program, lonely teens who can easily pose as over 21, who will come to these lots precisely because there are people very eager to spread the gospel of BDSM, show off their drop-dead gorgeous lots, and provide a sense of community and that thrilling sense of combativeness against that uncaring, bigoted world. It’s heady stuff. It’s cool, and many teens and young people or just confused people will find it thrilling and cool, even though they really don’t intend to subordinate their will to another, leave the virtual world and meet people from the Internet, or accept violence done to their person. The BDSM people think they can always tell under 21, because they assume they are griefers and bad spellers, but guess what, I’ve had it tested myself, and I can see how easy it is for younger people to pass sometimes merely by being good spellers, so low is the expectation. After all, the child prostitute Dorian/Evangeline was able to snooker many people on a lot that was ostensibly 18 and over during the beta.

One of the AV Herald’s biggest stories is the one about child prostitution. That ought to be sufficient proof to you that children in the game can be abusive or be abused quite easily. And there are other examples. I disagree that in 50 years, it will be acceptable to inflict pain through violent acts on other humans as a public norm, the way gay love has become — or should become — a public norm. There are very major differences between GLBT and BDSM regardless of where it overlaps.

James! This sentence was the absolute last one I’d expect to read on an AV Herald Forum: “The reason Maxis put that ban in the TOS was to ensure there are no flame wars within the game, and to ensure no one had to go around being harrased and bad-mouthed by others, no matter what they do.” Oh, really? Then why are we all complaining about the demise of Urizenus??? It’s a justification for booting Urizenus from the game and suppressing his discussions on the Stratics BBS. It goes to the heart of the matter what is wrong with TSO. It’s wrong. If they could just overcome their puerile desire to have everything be “nice” they would realize that when someone makes a false allegation about another, or flames him, the best way to address it is not by silencing, but providing simultaneously many other alternative viewpoints and sources of information. I am a moderator of several Sim forums, and this has always been the policy I have followed. Look at the frustrations of Urizenus on the board, when he is misunderstood, or not allowed to post, and yet judged or hated. He has no outlet for setting the record straight, and no one else has any way to defend him.The essense of a democratic society is such freedom to provide alternative sources of information and expression so that people can learn the truth and make up their own minds.

I can see why you fear BDSM; it’s something you know almost nothing about. Do you really think people are being tortured? That it’s a pagan ritual? I hardly think a wife spanking her husband with a paddle is a pagan ritual. I can just imagine what comes to your mind when you think about it; people bleeding, broken limbs, begging for their master to stop, but he/she doesn’t. Unfortunately, the media has gotten to you a little too much again. The few cases where such events occur are horrifying, and are completely unacceptable in a civilised society. However, you paint everyone who partakes in BDSM with the same brush. In most BDSM relationships, blood is almost never spilt. Do you think these people would cause injuries requiring a hospitalization? Wouldn’t that bring unwanted attention to them? Besides, many are decent human beings, who chose to vent their darker sides in a controlled manner.

I agree that roleplaying BDSM in public places is a little disconcerting though. However, I doubt it will be the last time such things happen. They do it in game because they cannot do so IRL. And besides, it’s all roleplaying. In many relationships, a couple will take turns being the master. Unfortunately I am no expert on BDSM, but I have known people who are, and they are good people with strong morals. If their partner asks them to stop, they stop without hesitation.

Your concerns regarding the TOS and it’s ban on speaking about other sims in a negative manner are justified, but it’s been discussed to death. This site alone has numerous articles about it. You can say you “want to discuss it with other players”, but you wouldn’t stop there given the chance. What you essentially want is to be able to tell these people, to their face, that you think what they are doing is wrong. You have the right to believe that, but really, what good will it do? They’ll simply turn ignore on. The reason Maxis put that ban in the TOS was to ensure there are no flame wars within the game, and to ensure no one had to go around being harrased and bad-mouthed by others, no matter what they do.

You know, people say the same thing about gays and lesbians showing affection for eachother in public that you saying about BDSM couples. It seems wrong and evil, but only because we have been taught that. Fifty years ago, gays and lesbians were persecuted for trying to love eachother. Perhaps in another fifty years, the world will have a different outlook on BDSM couples.

One last thing: if these people are barring anyone under 21 from their lots, do you really think it’s because they feel they have to? I believe it’s because they want to. So what makes you think these same people are trying to lure children into RL BDSM relationships? While it’s certainly possible that has happened, I have a hard time believing that everyone is out to do so.

“I am also surprised at how easy it is for people to swallow BS whole and ask for more. People who have been in TSO for any length of time know that the SSG is not the noble group it touts itself to be. Other than the core group, I doubt the rest are even aware of the damage these people cause in game.”

I don’t believe that I, my husband PMCruiser, or Snow White ever *once* “touted” SSG to be the noble group that you suggest here. There have been many times where people have asked us what SSG is about and had this poster bothered to read and remember Snow White’s answer to that they may have stopped before critizing in this way.

SSG was and remains to be a group of friends, a government in name only. If you offend my friend, you offend me. Its as easy as that.

If what SSG stands for somehow confuses you then I ask you how you’d feel if someone broke into your best friend’s apartment down the street and looted the place for all its worth. I’d imagine a bit more precautious, a bit more paranoid for at least a few days. You might invite your friend to stay with you so they didn’t have to toss and turn in their own bed, wondering if the crook was coming back. You’d probably tell your other friends about it and let them know, either in passing or because you know that they keep their doors unlocked.

The SSG does the same thing. If SSG knows that someone is running a scam, we want to let people know. If we know that someone has a “hit” out on them, we want to let them know. If you must place a label to the SSG, let it not be “government” but instead “Neighborhood Watch.” Had we known that the name Sim Shadow Government would be taken so literally, we may have rethought it.

Different players in TSO and SWG react differently and it is their choice to do so. If its The Sims Online, the ignore/ban feature may be enacted as a preventive measure. In SWG, a war may be declared if the offense was deserving of one, otherwise the ignore feature exists there as well.

We don’t place ourselves on pedistals but perhaps crude soapboxes in the hopes that someone will hear what we say and not be the next victim of a known scammer or thief.

We’ve never asked anyone to listen to us, yet people always want to challenge what we say.

Thank you for your time,
Sayeh

PS Dyerbrook, its good to see that you’re still so very long winded.