To discovery

[Harcourt.Fenton.Mudd]

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I have a little announcement to make. I'm not making it as an admin, nor as a player, I'm making this announcement as Joe. Just, the-guy-who-lives-and-works-and-thinks-and-is-called-Joe.

Lately, I've spotted that a lot of people are finding excuses to bring their ideas over race, religion and nationality to the server. The majority of the time this makes me sad. I've seen islamaphobic comments, anti-eastern european comments, anti-american comments, anti just-about-effin'-everything infact.

Here's a story of something which happened to me when I was about 17 years old. I was born in a city in England called Coventry. In Coventry there is a large multicultural society, drawing it's population from all over the world. You can walk down one end of Sky Blue Road on a market day, past the Sikh Gurdwara and through a market, selling food from the far east, the indian subcontinent, the middle east, north africa, the carribean... All over the world.

Now, I went back there to visit some friends of mine who live there. Three people who I consider to be good friends of mine. Rishi, Imran and Steve. Rishi is of indian decent, Imran's background is Pakistani and Steve is as english as cricket. We went for some drinks, and on the way home, we walked through a housing estate and got jumped by some guys. We got the sh*t kicked out of us. Why? Because these people had taken objection to the colour of Imran and Rishi's skin. Myself and Steve were on the receiving end too, because we were clearly freiends with these guys.

Intolerance makes me feel angry. Very angry. We all ended up in hospital that night, Rishi was in hospital for a week.

In short, please don't bring your racial predjudice to the game. There's no place for nationalism here. There's not place for intolerance. This is and multicultural community. This is not the place to pass judgement on a racial group for the actions of a few. Chances are, if you look at your own racial group they've done the same or worse, yet you'd feel massively offended if someone made a statement which generalises their behaviour in a negative light.

I'll list a few examples.

- A middle eastern themed group is instantly deemed to be middle eastern islamic extremists. Despite not making any reference to islam in their RP.

- People beleiving their group is targetted by players from a specific racial or cultural background.

- People bashing on americans as a whole for a foriegn policy they find distasteful.

I don't think I need to go on. I expect each and every one of you is intelligent enough to understand what I'm saying. Basically, whatever your predjudice, think hard about it, recognise it, and then don't bring it to discovery.

Thank you.

1- that story you told. I wish I could go to tea and crumpet land to assist you in shanking the sh*t out of those people.

2- Well they sure act a hell of a lot like islamic extremists. Oh, and the whole 'Yalalalaa' chanting doesnt help. Infact, one could almost say it were intended as a deleberite troll.