John Edwards' Campaign Enters Second Life 151
politics 2.0 writes "It may not be an official effort — yet — but thanks to a grass-roots effort, John Edwards has become the first presidential candidate to set-up-shop in Second Life. Jerimee Richir, whose avatar is called Jose Rote, paid-for and developed Edwards' virtual headquarters, and, on a voluntary basis, is managing the in-world campaign. Considering that Second Life's user numbers are much smaller than other social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook — aside from generating press coverage — will campaigning in Second Life actually win many votes? Rote says yes, and that 'Second Life users are a unique audience, in that, they are first adopters. It is a smaller community, but I would argue it is a more influential community.'"
The Next VRML (Score:5, Funny)
From TFS:
You know, I really liked John Edwards; granted, he pulled the daddy worked 36 years in NC textile [johnedwards.com] thing one too many times, but his daughter [johnedwards.com] is hot.
As far as Second Life goes: you guys are just the next VRML [wikipedia.org]; deal with it.
Re:The Next VRML (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ewww. We obviously have different tastes in women. She could use some surgery on her chin...
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Dude, she got that chin from Bill Clinton! Maybe they were playing baseball or something, I seem to recall something about being hit in the face with too many balls.
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Drunk:? (Score:2)
How can anyone like Edwards? (Score:3, Insightful)
Cool (Score:2, Funny)
Is Edwards concerned about the two Second Life's? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Is Edwards concerned about the two Second Life' (Score:2)
*rolls eyes* (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeeesh! Smug SL user & lame* presidential candidate stories rolled into one! Thanks slashdot
Second life is great to show your "internet savvy", coz the mainstream press (newsites, tv, legacy print, etc) can report on your 'internet presence' with impressive pics of a 3d world.
Second life is not great for the direct influence it has on the American public.
*the story, not the candidate, dunno about him.
PS. A comment on the linked article said Obama also had a SL presence. But with no backing evidence. Anyone on SL want to confirm/deny this for us?
PPS. Did anyone else think the photo [zdnet.com] of the author of the linked article looked 'shopped?
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No. Stephen Hawking's [keirsey.com] love child, perhaps, but not 'shopped.
Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds remarkably like a Second Lifer who's gotten an inflated idea of how important their alternate reality is, asked the campaign team for permission, and then made something. The fact that the campaign itself doesn't seem to be investing money in this is telling as to how much _they_ think this is going to help. That's not to say an Internet presence isn't important, of course - but this is just a little too niche to matter.
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Indeed. Observe the Second Life guy's comment:
Whenever anyone says "I would argue...", note that they have not actually said "I am now arguing...".
In fact the phrase "I would argue" serves the same purpose as 'really', 'great', and 'literally': it is a flag to warn us that the speaker doesn't fully believe what he or she is s
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Don't laugh - second lifers *are* influential (Score:4, Funny)
(Google "second life safari" somethingawful if you want to see what I mean)
For the benefit of those outside of the USA... (Score:3, Funny)
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Finally Crossed Over? (Score:1)
your virtual president .. (Score:3, Funny)
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Only if you don't posess the cheat codes, dude. I wonder will his first virtual town hall meeting be interrupted by flying penii [gamepolitics.com] or be attended by this constituent [somethingawful.com].
USA isn't the whole world, you know... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Just as soon as the Americans manage to figure out how to lose yet another war to a bunch of peasants there.
Love,
A French guy.
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You know... (Score:2)
(Disclaimer: I'm neither French nor American)
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OK. Where is your museum so I can send the people from my museum over to bomb it?
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2) The come-back the French should use against us is that we are fat and ugly and lazy, and drink piss beer.
By conforming to rule #2 you can help spur both French and US nationalism in a humorous way. By pointing out that everyone is fucked up with fascists making inroads into the political system you are simply spreading misery and understanding.
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Lots of people surrendered to the Wehrmacht, there's not much shame in it. I'm sure the UK and the US would have surrendered too, if it wasn't for simple geography and the fact that the German Navy wasn't all that good.
It's not like the US armed forces were in any shape to take on the Germans in 1939. It took the US and all her allies over a year of fighting
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Re:USA isn't the whole world, you know... (Score:5, Funny)
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Sincerely,
A Cloggie.
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Actually that's a totally pointless question as I don't understand Dutch, so I think we may have to grant you an unrestricted licence on annoying the Germans over football. I'll trade it for your sane drugs laws.
To be fair we love it when anyone beats the Germans, so I think there might be grounds for some sort of copyleft licence.
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Oh hell, we've had a French President for the past six years.
Second life is influential? Its a scam! (Score:4, Informative)
"It is a smaller community, but I would argue it is a more influential community"
Second Life is a ponzi scheme.
http://randolfe.typepad.com/randolfe/2007/01/secon dlife_revo.html [typepad.com]
/ 1319236 [slashdot.org]
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/24
Re:Second life is influential? Its a scam! (Score:4, Informative)
(typing from memory, so I might get details wrong) Economist goes into SL, tries to earn cash from their internal currency which is *controlled by Linden Lab*, fails, and declares SL a scam.
There's one important detail he missed here: LL controls the currency, and buys and sells as required to maintain a stable value. That means that after the percentage LL takes for buying/selling, the amount you can earn from simple buying/selling of currency is very little, if anything at all. No surpsise that he failed. But then, since when "making money in SL" was supposed to be done like in a stock market?
SL has a services based economy. You make/do something for me, I pay you for it. The concept of a ponzi scheme simply doesn't apply in that situation, because a Ponzi scheme is an investment scam, and nobody sane earns money in SL by investing it. What there is is a straightforward system of supply and demand.
Talking to the dead (Score:1)
Guess this makes sense - he talks to the dead [wikipedia.org], might as well get their vote too.
...oh, Edward*s*, right.
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First presidential candidate ? (Score:1)
More influential? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not just about the raw numbers... Myspacers are spotty teenagers who can't vote, and Facebookers are hippie students who won't vote!
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What a pain, and I can't even get there in a flying UPS truck. ;)
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Well, you could, but you'd need a big square cannon. I was about to say, "and a damned good airbag," but the stated requirement was to "get there". If you want to get there and be able to vote - instead of being able to go home in a bucket - that'll cost extra...
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What about WOW then?
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Hmm, that could be a future way to stop the other side from making to the poles. Just make sure that you sign up the party that you don't want voting for WOW! On a side note, the company running WOW, could have a "scheduled downtime" only for those of the party it wants to get out to vote. It's a prefect plan... You just need to control Blizzard and have a vague idea of which WOW players that you'd like to be off line for one
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Call when it is official, even then it is old (Score:2)
It is not like this is the first time a political party or politician has setup a place on second life, and hey this is not even official.
Now it would be neat if he duplicated edwards new house [carolinajournal.com]
Influential? (Score:4, Interesting)
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2. The whole brouhaha about "OMG Edwards Is a Millionaire" is just ridiculously stupid. Here's a clue: Every Presidential Candidate that ran since Truman, or maybe Eisenhower, was a Millionaire. Yes, being a millionaire makes it more likely you'd know the kind of people you need to know to finance a run for President, but also, the type of peo
First *American* presidential candidate (Score:1)
"aside from generating press coverage" (Score:4, Funny)
MPGs at 11.
Pro pron! (Score:4, Funny)
in other SL news (Score:3, Informative)
From Valleywag. [valleywag.com]
Now that Linden is publishing actual user numbers, we can see that the Residents figure, as expected, is a big overcount over actual people (about 50% inflation, in fact, accounting for over a million ersatz users). Second Life doesn't have two million users. They have had two million users over the life of the service, and they've lost most of them. Of those users, the majority -- something like 5 out of 6 -- bailed in the first month.
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He just doesn't ring true (Score:5, Interesting)
He's against the Iraq war now that it's safe and popular to be, but he not only voted for it, he was actually the Co-Sponsor of Lieberman's bill.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:SJ00
Even Kerry, who caught a lot of flack for voting for the war before voting against it or whatever the mangled soundbite was, had the intelligence to not Co-Sponsor the war. But Edwards joined Zell Miller, Jesse Helms, and Sturm Thurmond to Co-Sponsor Lieberman's bill. He defended his vote for the war and even said he "wasn't duped" by the president, and said that he would invade Iraq if he were president even after no WMDs were found. He didn't back down until after 2004 was over, because he was afraid of looking "weak" on national security. Of course, now his tune has turned 180 degrees.
He also said he's a champion of the poor, citing his work suing doctors for medical malpractice on behalf of "the little guy." And yet, when you examine his legal history, he has never done a single Pro Bono case.
Now that he's wooing Labor Unions for primary support, he's done a lot of good work campaigning for raising the minimum wage, even though it doesn't take political courage for a Democrat to say he's in favor of it, since it plays well to the base. But if you look at his Senate record, he's responsible for a lot of stuff that went against Labor Union interests. He voted to give China most favored nation status and the attendant trade conditions of that status, even though we have a huge trade deficit with China and their taking of our manufacturing base. Edwards also voted for expansion of the H1B visa program that allows companies to import foreign high tech workers (such as programmers and computer engineers) to fill American jobs but deny them immigration status. This work visa is a non-immigration visa, so they end up taking American jobs but not being able to contribute to America's future by becoming citizens. H1-Bs have been blamed for helping to keep American software wages depressed.
He tries to cater to the environmentalists and the poor, but then he engages in a major act of conspicuous consumption by tearing down wilderness to construct a new mansion. I think he has the right to live however he wishes, and his house is a silly issue to focus on, but it does underscore a lack of congruity.
Now, people do change over time, and the positions of career politicians certainly do. Surely he has seen the error of Iraq by now, and perhaps he started to grow a focus on poverty and labor long after he left the Senate, thus accounting for why he didn't sponsor any anti-poverty legislation in congress. But when you see that he changes significantly on several major issues, a pattern begins to emerge.
When I look for candidates, I try to see if their past actions match their current rhetoric and pandering. I try to see if their private faces out of the spotlight match their current public faces on the campaign trail.
Unfortunately for Edwards, he falls short in my eyes. It rings false.
He voted for....nay, CO-SPONSOREd...the Iraq War and now apologizes. Two ways of looking at it...Honest mistake, in which case he lacks the judgment on matters of war and peace to be president...or disingenious jockeying to follow public opinion, in which case he lacks the political courage to follow his conscience instead of the polls.
I put a lot of thought into examining candidates who want to be my president...and I just cannot in good conscience vote for Edwards.
Okay, pro-Edwards partisans may now troll-rate me.
Mod up! (Score:1, Informative)
Unfortunately it looks like NO candidates in the major parties are worth supporting this go around. Sigh
no kidding (Score:4, Insightful)
Silly? His political wing wants us to all live in crowded cities and use public transportation all the time. He's against "urban sprawl" in the sense that he doesn't want you and me to have any space because it might "sprawl" towards his splendid wilderness vistas in his huge, private country living space.
His house is not so silly of an issue, if you ask me.
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I don't understand why your political wing is opposed to sidewalks. Maybe you could help explain that to me.
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Anyway, I honestly don't know much about Smart Growth. And I don't have a problem with people wanting to live far away from the city. I went to college in Iowa, I grew up in the country. I understand the appeal.
But what I do think is fundamental, is that people see the real costs of choosing to live somewhere and not have those costs subsidized by others who are trying to make intelligent decisions of their ow
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This is one of the primo reasons why senators don't generally get elected president. If you want your party to win the general election, you should really be supporting a governor or former military leader. You want someone who can talk about things accomplished by the large bureaucracy they ran, not someone who's going to be talking about all the funny l
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I'll probably get troll rated by Edwards partisans, but he just doesn't ring true to me.
Isn't he a tort lawyer? And a politician on top of that. By definition he's constructed of pure molecular distortium. The truth, like light, can never escape from his intense obfuscation field.
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Being an Australian (Score:2)
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Maybe in the 2012 Election (Score:3, Funny)
I'd like to ask him (Score:3, Informative)
I've been in SL for over 2 year now and it seems to draw the worst kind of people.
For instance there are huge communities of people who are obsessed over the torture and enslavement of women, to the end that they treat women as animals. This has also leaked onto real life (ala Kaotians). Not to mention the horror stories I've heard from people who got into this after being involved in similar cults online.
I've had a friend from UK, who used to be a slave in one of these online cults. Her online Dom (Master) ordered her execution after not being satisfied with her. The order was carried out by her roommate who was also a slave to this dude (guy is in Denmark). This girl tied a rope around my friend while she was unconscious and tied the other end to her car and drove. Lucky the rope snapped and broke, but it put my friend in hospital for over 200+ days. While the girl who did this is in prison, the person who ordered this crime is still free.
Then there are the pedophiles, I've been campaigning against them for quite a while in Second Life. For the life of me, I cannot think why an adult want to have have sexual role play with another who is pretending to be a 2 or 5 year old boy or girl, and wears a photo mapped skin of real child (completely realistic with nothing censored). I do not understand these people and I think by their use of the photo mapped skin they are doing something illegal.
I've asked many times why Lindens allow this, but they have refused to answer this question.
Given the debacle of his "official bloggers"... (Score:2, Insightful)
The *real* way to make a Splash on the Net (Score:1)
Step 2: Convince Blizzard to incorporate a virtual Arnold that wanders around Ironforge and occasionally hands out Epics.
Step 3: Size Maria for an inauguration dress.
In France too (Score:1)
SL Elections (Score:1)
furries? (Score:1)
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But he isn't spending anything on this.
While I'm not supporter of Edwards and frankly think that Second Life is a bore I think this is a no-harm no-foul situation.
Yeah, it's neat to a point but it'll be about as influential as getting the man a billboard spot in Antarctica.
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If a candidate spends any significant effort on campaigning in SL, that candidate is basically saying "I have no sense of priorities but please vote for me!!!"
John Edwards is no such candidate so far.
My comment about John Edwards targeting furries was jab at SL.
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That said, I think most SLers think of political figures coming into SL as a PR stunt. If the political figures took SL seriously (set up a permanent presenceon the grid with actual staffers manning it) that would be different. I personally have more respect for the artists/academics/writers who show up in SL than the politicians.
This is good news (Score:1)
For Great Lulz (Score:1)
Wrong Platform (Score:1, Insightful)
Never one to be upstaged, Hillary Clinton (Score:2)
contest to be the "John Dean" of 2008 (Score:2)
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Who actually *plays* SL anyway? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a question that's been bugging me for a while: even if you use the non-inflated numbers, who and where are the people that actually play Second Life? I do not know a single person who has played it for longer than a trivial amount of time, even though my social circle is overrepresented in practically every other area of the online world. I find it strange that SL receives so much press even though the usual reason for unjustified media hype (being owned by a media conglomerate) doesn't apply to this situation.
I had a discussion about this with my friends recently; the best answers I got about Second Life are that it's bigger in Europe than here in the U.S., it caters more to the MySpace crowd than, say, the WoW crowd, and that, of course, it's mostly for porn anyway.
Re:Who actually *plays* SL anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Who actually *reads* slashdot?" Well, the people who find that sort of thing interesting of course. SL at its base is graphical IRC with scripts. Many people use SL for the same reason people come here: because they found a place they like and where they can talk to interesting people.
Where all the hype is coming from I'm not sure, but it's certainly not a bad place. If you're a geek, then there's a lot to tinker with, if you're a social kind of person then there are all kinds of people to meet and talk to.
Re:Who actually *plays* SL anyway? (Score:4, Informative)
SL is more popular in the US than in other parts of the world, but the demographics are changing. (Mor French and Italians showing up, for example)
SL appeals not to hardcore geeks, or to the WoW crowd but to several groups:
artistic folks, like those who use photoshop for work/study in RL, RL jewelry designers, clothing designers, art students, etc.
social geeks: these folks might have hung out in certain communities in IRC and do pretty much the same in SL, The furries might be considered part of this group
those who see something interesting in the scripting and object creation tools and try to make cool stuff.
but overall, everyone who is in SL is in there just to have whatever fun and enjoyment they can find that they like. It could be pr0n and boobehs, it could be just hanging out with friends, it could even be shopping, or playing Tringo.
I guess SL is what the individual makes of it.
Stillborn (Score:2)
Editorial cartoon (Score:2)
Edwards ---->
.
Of course (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish it would enter "Half Life" (Score:3, Insightful)
Furry for president? (Score:2)
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Secret Service Rules of Engagement? (Score:2)
But what if my SL avatar is a rabbit, or jackass, or a giant penis orbited by throbbing breasts, and I go visit John Edwards online? Will the Secret Service come visit me IRL? Or will they have a deal with SL to drop me from the service? Or... What?
If I throw a rotten ve
Re:Secret Service Rules of Engagement? (Score:2)
Rabbit avatar, fine
Penis with orbiting boobies, not fine (It would be interesting to see though)
The venue would probably have scripts, llPush, and object creation turned off so throwing stuff wouldn't work. You could try spamming the chat channel but any security around (and most serious events have it) would kick you out.
Alpha World? (Score:2)
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There will ALWAYS be a call for entertainment. What is the difference in energy cost between running a computer to play Second Life, versus watching tv instead? I doubt very much people will sit around and twiddle their thumbs all evening.
I do not understand why people are using virtual communities like Second life^H^H^H^H^H^H Slashdo
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