John Brownlee

Interview With John Edwards Second Life Perps

Wow. 10 Zen Monkeys has a great interview up with the perpetrators of the John Edwards “Feces Spewing Obscenity” Second Life vandalism scandal. It’s a fantastic read. Not surprisingly, the guys who portrayed John Edwards in blackface and wore “Bush ’08” pins weren’t Republicans. I think it’s pretty hysterical frankly, that anyone could think they […]

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Wow. 10 Zen Monkeys has a great interview up with the perpetrators of the John Edwards "Feces Spewing Obscenity" Second Life vandalism scandal.

It's a fantastic read. Not surprisingly, the guys who portrayed John Edwards in blackface and wore "Bush '08" pins weren't Republicans. I think it's pretty hysterical frankly, that anyone could think they were, but never forget the fact that instinct tells us to dehumanize the enemy and that any person on the Internet with a sense of humor can play right into that, even if they are on your philosophical side.

LOU CABRON: Why did your attacking avatars wear “Bush ‘08″ buttons? MUDKIPS ACRONYM: Everything we do is for laughs, and we thought “Bush ‘08″ would be interpreted as humor — as I’m sure you know, Bush obviously can’t be re-elected in ‘08.

However, the resulting aftershock from the “blogosphere”, particularly on the left, has been enormous, when they thought the raiders were Republicans. This was completely unexpected, and frankly hilarious. I’m a bit disillusioned with my own party after this event, actually, as someone who did read blogs like the Daily Kos and expected some honest and truthful journalism. However, it seems as if everyone played a giant game of telephone, taking the Republican assumption and adding on more and more anger and hostility as it went on.

Another not particularly surprising development is that these guys are articulate and intelligent... although they have an unfortunate predilection for citing Encyclopedia Dramatica and thinking "lulz", "evar" and "nubz" are funny. Everyone take note: jokes repeated a million times by everyone on the Internet are by the very definition of humor not funny.

Anyway, these guys are my heroes. You know, I sometimes wonder what will happen if we ever do get an open source metaverse up and running. At that point, corporations and political parties will have to start playing ball with the pranksters of the internet. That could be a lot of fun.

Who are Second Life’s “Patriotic Nigras”? [10 Zen Monkeys]