The Alphaville Herald

Commie Award Winner: Kalel Venkman

by Alphaville Herald on 17/01/08 at 11:07 pm

A note from the Editrix:
Here at the Herald we maintain the highest possible standards of journalism and literary arts. This means that we are careful about handing out awards. For instance, the “commie” or comment-of-the-week award, has only been awarded once previously – but Kalel Venkman has risen to the occasion with a terse, yet world-class comment, reproduced below:

I’m going to humor this silliness for a while, because there are a few things that I think really need to be said.

Tizzers Foxchase is no martyr. He was not banned for pasting a single chat log. To my knowledge, he was banned for a number of serious ongoing violations of Terms of Service and community standards, including but not limited to unnumerable counts of disclosure, harassment, disturbing the peace, intolerance, a possible misrepresentation of the educational status of the Woodbury University sim (the potential fallout of which would have been the defrauding of Linden Labs out of approximately two thousand dollars in United States currency), creating a monument to intolerance in the form of Woodbury University (as has been well documented in other Herald articles) and knowingly contributing to organized griefing. Despite his claims to the contrary, he was in full knowledge that the PN were at Woodbury the entire time they were there – I have been told by Lindens that the chat logs bore this out.

I am not privy to everything Foxchase ever said about anyone else, or everything he ever did, but the only true friend he had in Second Life was himself. The others were his playthings to manipulate or torment.

At the very moment he was trying to apologize to me for the multiple ToS violations it took to orchestrate a trip to my home in real life, and swearing off griefing, he was photographed trolling Prokofy Neva using his Azzu Manga alt ( http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/11/lindens-deny-gr.html ).

The Justice League gives out emergency signals so that residents can call for assistance if they’re being griefed. At the same time as Tizzers was attempting to negotiate peace with me a second time on January 1, the day of his final permaban, he was also working with a member of the Patriotic Nigras to reverse engineer one of the emergency signals so that the Patriotic Nigras could either break into our database or destroy our ability to communicate with one another.

There has been a quixotic campaign in the Herald of late, to perform a character assassination of myself and the Justice League. Two articles were penned by Nikola Shirakawa, decrying me as the root of all evil in Second Life. Nikola himself was a member of the Justice League, and when it became clear to him that he could not commandeer the group to his own purposes, decided he would attempt to destroy it instead. He used his inside access to feed a near-continuous stream of information to the Patriotic Nigras. When caught, he at first tried to shift the blame to innocent League members to avoid having to face the music. Once ejected, he committed dozens of acts of disclosure within Second Life and received a suspension for that. He also published my personal information in such specific and great detail in the Herald that he would have gotten an instant permaban had he done these things in Second Life. He uses the Herald as a shield to commit acts of aggression against myself and others without fear of consequences.

He formed the Free Fandom Project. This was to make science fiction and media fandom more accessible to the average fan – these things should be free, he said. This appeared very noble. Four months later, he wrote a letter of resignation complaining that the members all wanted things for free and weren’t contributing, and complained that he was perfectly justified in taking the free things that others had donated to his group and selling them on SLExchange for a personal profit.

He called this a “service fee”, but what had actually happened was that he, once again, had gotten caught with his hand in the cookie-jar, having said one thing and then doing the opposite.

We once had a picture of the Teen Titans Unlimited in the Justice League Watchtower – however, this had been taken down in August of 2007. The only “recently ejected JLU” that could have seen it to report its existence to Ms. Mason would have been Nikola Shirakawa, so this very directly identifies this article as yet another attempt by Nikola to take his revenge on the people he once counted as his friends, and then betrayed.

Nikola was ejected from the League – let’s see now – it would have been over half a year ago, and he still hasn’t gotten over it, and he’s still deeply engaged in his complex (though transparent) vendetta against both myself and the Justice League.

His vendetta, these articles and the vitriolic posts, arent’ about the saving civilization as we know it from the “evil” Justice League – a group of teachers, doctors, lawyers and creative professionals from all walks of life who have come together in the common goal of trying to make Second Life a better place for its residents. It’s about Nikola Shirakawa, Tizzers Foxchase and others being angry
about getting caught doing something they know in their hearts they’re not supposed to have been doing, and being forced to take responsibility for their own actions.

And because the League reports what we see to the people who can evaluate their actions and do something about them, we’re “evil”. Almost without exception, the posts here in the Herald against me and the Justice League have been made by people who have had to face the music as an indirect result of our actions. Since they cannot do anything to the Lindens, they take aim at us instead.

Shoot the messenger.

We’re not the bad guys here. Let me illuminate.

The “bad guys” are those people who make us afraid to stand up for what’s right, because we might be the victims of character assassination in public if we try it.

The bad guys are those who make us distrust joy and dread victory, because of the retribution it might bring, who make us hide in our holes and sit on our hands, doing nothing instead of rising up.

The bad guys are those who try to stamp out every scrap of generosity, and decency, openness and courage, who’ve made reaching upward to something more, to try to lift those around them nothing more than an an exercise in futility. They have taken hope and made it a horrible thing, to be feared and shunned, and bound and gagged it and thrown it into the abyss.

The bad guys belittle caring about your fellows, standing squarely in the sun and speaking the truth, and tell you that the only possible path is despair. They make us forget what we are capable of as God’s creations, and we turn our backs on what we could become and what we could truly accomplish. We lie hidden in the half light and when somebody comes along to tell us it doesn’t have to be that way, we cover our ears because we’re just as sure that it does.

They want us to stop caring and surrender to all this, because hope is dead – we should surrender instead of fighting, because there’s nothing we can do, and never will be.

Why did we pick comic books as our theme? Why not more police, another SWAT team, another fake FBI group? Or just plain clothes?

The flashy costumes and comic book personnae are a lot of fun – if it wasn’t fun, we wouldn’t do it. But they do more than that. These costumes are a part of our culture. They stand for something people want to believe in. They represent truth, and justice. We’re more than people in brightly colored costumes. By wearing these costumes, we become symbols of hope – not only to other residents of Second Life, but to each other as well. They remind us of what being on the side of good is really all about.

When I first came to Second Life, I didn’t realize how much like real life this place can be. This virtual world is populated by the complete spectrum of humanity. The vast majority are generous, thoughtful, intelligent and caring. A few, however, take delight in tormenting others. It’s these few that can destroy the very fabric of this virtual society.

So when you read the posts that will surely follow this one, think about all this. We don’t have to be afraid to stand up for what’s right and just and true in the world. We don’t have to let other people push us back into the darkness for trying to make the world a better place. And we don’t have to be afraid to join together in that common goal.

Let us not allow those who carry hate in their hearts to dissuade us. Our allies are still truth, and justice, and hope. And above all, our faith and belief in each other.
The Justice League still exists and is thriving despite all that’s happened – and despite everything that’s happened to me at the hands of Nikola Shirakawa, Tizzers Foxchase and people like them, I still believe.

-

Okay – go ahead and start posting lies and vitriol, and get it out of your systems. But you should really consider just letting go of it and moving on. Hate is a luxury no one can afford – it taxes you, and takes your energies away from the important things in your lives that really need your attention – like your families, your relationships, your jobs and your schoolwork. Think about the futures you have and what you’re sacrificing.

All the griefers I have known have far greater potential than they realize – even the really heinous ones. Everyone has something in them that makes them worthwhile. Take a moment, and breath for a while, and find that something, and spend some of that boundless energy on something that will do you some good.

- Kalel