Congressman's Political Pressure Impacting Second Life Child Avatars

Well, for starters I'll comment on the article, but I sort of tend to wander so bear with me:

I think that this legislation and vote-phishing is just that: a politician trying to look good for votes, and slandering a good community in the process. SL might be inhabited by creeps here and there, but hey Senator: you every try walking around a back alley in DC at night? I didn't think so. There's shit everywhere, virtual or otherwise, and trying to set a higher standard for a meta-world than we have for the real world begins to border on ludicrous. And to the people who defame SL, you people are just like these idiots (Tack Jhompson, etc) if you lump all SL users and the like as "those people" and yourself as "us, the normal people." I personally find it fun to mess around in SL for a while every now and then, and I'm still a "real gamer" according to the last tournament I swept my way through. Just because people have diferent tastes doesn't make them any less, and also it doesn't remove their rights as citizens of the United States. This is so obviously a First Amendment violation that if I could, I would fly to DC and slap that congressman with a rolled up copy of the constitution. If these people are not actually "in" the game physically, then they are represented by virtual avatars, yes? Astounding logic, I know, but bear with me. If they are being represented by VIRTUAL representations, then no VCP law in the US could possibly touch this. The good Senator is getting exactly what he wants out of you: he wants a gamer society that is split, so that once we are all divided into our sub-classes (MMO, FPS, RTS) then we'll be taken down piece by piece, the same as Hitler took down the different oppostion before WWII. If we want to protect our rights and games and everything we hold dear, we need to unite against prejudicial slander like this. We can't allow ourselves to be split, because it really is true that we stand united, but fall when divided. Stand together and stop this unconstitutional and unethical crusade against games.

Tis zippy again...

Over the years I have noticed the ..err "protection" of children in fictional settings...partiality fictional children in fictional settings…this PC line of zero thought really needs to end its more disturbing and disgusting than the people that want to pretend to be children…..

I play Second Life, and have never seen this sort of stuff in an invasive way.. the way they make it sound is as if there are whole sims where child avatars are _______________ with  ________________ and ____________!! Disgusting and completely untrue.

It's mostly furries doing that.

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I jest, even they arent as bad as everyone makes it seem.. I should know.  ;)

"I don't think this has much to do with Mark Kirk's comments, and everything to do with the fact that Linden Lab started a policy against age-play about a year ago."

It has everything to do with his comments, actually.  Linden Lab did indeed start that policy, and for the most part it's been quite successful.  Linden Lab has been (and continues to) actively and aggressively enforcing that policy, and anyone who's actually familiar with how strict they are knows that Kirk is just stirring up mud in order to be able to appear to be doing something good "for the kids' sake".

Kirk's stance is much like the currently popular statements against GTA, but with less cause : "Second Life *might* have content inappropriate for minors who shouldn't be playing anyways". 

As with recent studies showing that retailers and partent are increasingly more responsible in restricting access to minors who shouldn't be playing, Second Life is provably restricting access to those who are not of an appropriate age to participate. 

It's typical politic bullshit intended to foster the appearance of justified moral outrage without any basis in reality, and is clearly targeted at those ignorant enough to take it at face value.  Unfortunately, there are a great many such ignorant people who can cause plenty of trouble without knowing actual facts, and this has definitely had an impact on Linden Lab. 

Which was, of course, Kirk's intent all along.  Standard Republican faux-conservative party line :(

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The sad part is that if this politician person was talking about Gaia Online then half of the stuff he mentioned would of probably been true......which is sad considering the site was good at one time in its existence......but it sucks to be those Second Life people....