The Arguing Country

[Patroklus Murakami]

I've just published a new blog post on the political culture of the CDS. Here is the first paragraph to whet your appetite and a link to the post if you feel like reading on!

Howard Fineman's book "The Thirteen American Arguments" puts forward the view that the United States of America is 'The Arguing Country' - born in, and born to, debate. How much truer is this of the CDS - Second Life's oldest democracy born in, and born to, endless argument! Fineman considers this to be America's greatest strength. I agree, and I think our tendency to argue is one of the CDS's greatest strengths too. I have identified "Six CDS Arguments" which I have seen in my years in this community.

Link to full article.

[Jamie Palisades]

Couldn't resist a foeman worthy of my steel, so I replied, there. It's a fun read. Regards JP

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Excellent article indeed, Pat And you've even attracted Prokofy, woohoo!

[Jamie Palisades]

For those who have missed it, Prok's rant is here:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/secon ... islam.html
I found two parts interesting.

One is Prok's completely venomous, fact-free, hate-filled attack on the Al Andalus project. His Arab-hating issues seethe from the page.
And now that CDS and AA have merged, Prokofy calls all of CDS an evil, democracy-killing Caliphate.

(Presently, it's run by a German, with a socialist-majority legislature chaired by a Swiss woman.)

The other was Prok's gleeful announcement that CDS has killed free speech.
He said that because our Patroklus blogged it, in his own blog.
It appears that Pat said that, because, during the AA debates last year, while I was Chancellor and he was out of power, the RA did not let him talk for hours about the merger plan.
CDS has no free speech problem. That political principle is well defined in the real world. A "free speech" loss is when you lose property, or safety, or the right to speak in public forums, due to your opinions.
And in CDS no one has the right to interfere with postings to the Forums, political campaigns, etc. etc., either.
We did have a problem where some of our members wanted to talk at RA meetings longer than agenda time permitted. In 2009. Pat and Gwyn really wanted to talk -- a lot -- about going slow on Al Andalus, and how the transition would work, and so on. The LRA had to cut them off sometimes; and I told them on several occasions that I thought their questions were rude or dumb. But we don't call that "free speech violations"; we call that "disagreements". Or "politics." It's amusing to see that Prokofy picked up on Pat's fretting, and uses it as evidence that CDS is now a mullah-driven, dissenter-crushing Taliban.

(I'm not sure that a turban & veil would be a good look for Sonja. Get a life, guys.)

Regards JP

[Patroklus Murakami]

It's a neat trick, to lump Prok and me together, and hope that Prok's misinformed rant can be used to undermine the points I have made about the way in which the Al Andalus merger was pushed through. It's a rather underhand tactic though. I'm not responsible for Prok's attacks on the Al Andalus project.

My interpretation of Prok's comments is somewhat different from Jamie's though. Prokofy picked up on the nonsense Michel Manen spouted when setting up AA about establishing an Islamic 'Caliphate' (which him as the self-styled Khalifah lording it over his virtual subjects). Prokofy refuses to believe that AA is no longer about a Caliphate. Well, it would help to counter that view if people had not used such stupid, provocative language in the first place.

My opinion on the suppression of free speech in the CDS during the merger still stands. Jamie paints it as 'wanting to talk for hours' at RA meetings. Actually, it was more about *being allowed to ask questions* in an atmosphere free from intimidation and the stifling nonsense that *any* questioning of AAs democratic credentials was variously 'offensive', 'imperialist' or some other crap. This happened, to give just one example, when we tried to find out how AA would select the representatives to be added to the CDS Representative Assembly. That is a matter of fact and public record and, in my opinion, this represented an inhibiting effect on free speech. The RA members were told by those pushing the merger through "don't ask too many questions or it will be off". Since everyone wanted the merger to go through people raised fewer questions than they wanted to.

But the point of history is not to keep replaying the past (those who were in power are unlikely to agree with me that they suppressed dissent in the interests of the merger) but to learn from it. Next time a merger is mooted there will be questions. And these need to be articulated without people with a vested interest shouting them down as 'offensive', 'rude' or 'dumb'.

[Jamie Palisades]

Arguing about policy :) Judging by the Forum word count of the last five days, it's hard to dispute that this is a favorite CDS activity for some.

I don't lump together Patroklus and Prokofy, and no one should. Pat gave an informed set of opinions -- and we agree on most of them. On one, free speech, I happen to disagree, and see his point as posturing, not sound analysis. More on that in a later post.

Unfortunately, though, Prok took that one mistakenly-worded whine of Pat's, and read it as luridly as possible, way out of proportion from Pat's meaning. Prok has integrated that into a much larger sweep of crazy talk verging on racist.

What is it with this person, anyway? Just seeing a bunch of people from four continents, creating a Spanish Arab settlement including Islamic, Christian and Jewish temples, seems to drive him into sputtering madness.

Ignore haters and let history be your guide. Haters *usually* prefer separatism to ecumenism. Accordingly to the overwhelming report of diverse professional historians, the "Arab" values in the Andalusian period were a model of tolerance and cooperation ... and the reaction of Prok's beloved "Judeo-Christian ethics" was the culture-smashing, genocidal torturefest called "the Spanish Inquisition", which made George W. Bush look like an amateur.

Here in CDS, let's assume we already know we support religious tolerance, and move on from that. Let's just focus on the smaller, rational disagreement that Pat and I have.
Which is about what free speech is. Next post.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Prokofy has long expressed his idea that the current slide towards a world where fanatical Islamism (which all rational people know to be an infinitesimal proportion of the world population — they just happen to capture a lot of prime time on TV) is related to the way that most European countries try to adopt "soft" measures against radical extremism, and a policy that focus on making the countries where radical extremists are likely to live more rich, improving their quality of life, instead of selling them a package of morals. Prok calls this a mix of technocratic communism and Euro-Arabic thinking, or something like that, and he argues that the current state of the "war on terror" has been aggravated by the "softness" of European politics. Extrapolating from that, he sees projects like Al Andalus, which is an historical and cultural representation of the tolerance of the Caliphate during what has been the Golden Age of Islamic civilisation, science, and culture, to be an "insidious plot" to bring European "softness" into the US mindset, by exposing Americans to what he considers a dangerous, misleading way of white-washing a problem...

Seriously, he does believe those things. He's not just pretending to believe them to troll forums and blogs. The scary thing is that he's not the only one thinking that way, but he certainly doesn't flinch from making sure that everybody knows his position. Since it stems from an irrational belief that is deeply emotionally ingrained in his own personal world-view, it's impossible to argue with him otherwise. The notion that the Caliphate was the best example of freedom, democracy, and religious tolerance in a very backwards-thinking 10-12th century Europe (which, after an equivalent period during the Roman Empire, definitely collapsed into obscurantism) simply fails to register with Prokofy He only sees this as a devious plot to make terrorism "palatable" or something like that. Arguing with him that in that period of time the prevailing values of the "Judeo-Christian ethics" were based on internal terror, subjugation, and all-out warfare against all not sharing the same world-view, while Islam was patiently establishing what we would today see as a model of tolerant civilisation, simply fails to persuade Prok — and yes, it immediately drives him to madness and rage

As always, it's safest to ignore him and deal with our issues instead

[Jamie Palisades]

Now let's talk about free speech. :) I take that value seriously, because it is very important to CDS as a democratic experiment that we protect the right of free speech, and answer all legitimate claims that it's violated.

Free speech is a tenet of the Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which is CDS law also), and also recognized in international RL law in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. There's a lot of serious study on what this means, beyond Wikipedia, but a summary is simple:

• * Free speech is not endangered by open political debate.
  * Free speech is not endangered by the limits under rules of order in fairly-run legislatures.
  * It is the “notion that the expression of dissent or subversive views should be tolerated, not censured or punished by law.”

The phrase "by law" does not mean "disagreed with." What the UDHR means, and what RL groups like the Freedom Forum Organization or the Index on Censorship monitor, is that no one should lose property or be jailed, be excluded from running for office, or have their comments de-published or erased, by a government … because that would be a misuse of power, and thwart open political debate.

And, of course, none of that happened here. What did happen is that we had an open political disagreement, on a fair playing field. Politics causes disagreements sometimes. I lose sometimes. But on the Al-Andalus merger, I won, he lost. And apparently that makes it a rights violation:

My opinion on the suppression of free speech in the CDS during the merger still stands. Jamie paints it as 'wanting to talk for hours' at RA meetings. Actually, it was more about *being allowed to ask questions* in an atmosphere free from intimidation and the stifling nonsense that *any* questioning of AAs democratic credentials was variously 'offensive', 'imperialist' or some other crap.

Intimidation? Let's be clear. Did the CDS Stasi throw Pat into Guantanamo? Was his speech on the Marktplatz curtailed, banned, or overrun by tanks? Did the government put a special tax on him for opposing it? Or, if we prefer socialist-style strategies, did someone give him Кофе Сацюк? Noooo …

When one political leader says to another "You are picking fights and adding nothing, please do shut up", that is not a human rights violation. As a CDS official, and would-be peacemaker in raucous circumstances at one time or another, I had to say something like that to people, occasionally: Manen, Beathan, ThePrincess, Gwyneth, Patroklus, others. In my own experience of a few years as a community leader in CDS … similar to work as a moderator and negotiator in RL … I always tried to be receptive and facilitative towards all polite, good-will efforts to participate. But I also sometimes needed to enforce limits … and to be harsher with people, when their only desire seemed to be to disrupt, monopolize or exclude others. It's part of being a good moderator. So long as all that is conducted under our rules, according to our laws, and without retaliations, it's just normal government & politics.

Oh, in CDS politics, people have told me to shut up too :) But importantly: always in open debate, with only the force of persuasion, and no coercion. So that's fine. Being rude is just rude, not illegal.

We have a judicial branch in CDS: our SC. If a Chancellor ever overstepped the rules, or tried to “punish” an opponent for dissenting, in any way other than open disagreement, Patroklus could have had the bad guy removed by a bunch of neutrals! And should have. But there was no complaint to the SC. No allegations of the kind that UHDR considers intimidating or wrong. Because nothing happened. Pat feeling intimidated? Well, he has been one of our strongest, and sometimes caustic, debaters in CDS for years, long preceding me. And in fact, Pat and I are cordial neighbors. So this is all just what Ke$ha calls “blah blah blah.” I read recently that she described the theme of her album as being this: don't take minor issues in life too seriously.

Good advice. CDS free speech is alive and well. And because I am a private citizen now, with no power at all, I think I can say so without intimidating anyone. :)

Regards JP

[Patroklus Murakami]

Methinks the lady doth protest too much

[Jamie Palisades]

Trust me, I'm no lady. Cheers JP