With all due respect, I think that is an inaccurate view. NationStates is at its core a national simulation, so the point of the game is to run our own nations. In that sense, roleplaying is the main part of the game, not regional government. I already said in A New Focus that we have to stop seeing the region as just its government. We are a region of people who post on the Regional Message Board, who roleplay in Treasure Island, who research historical events, who have fun and post spam. Government is but one part of a much more prosperous whole, and it is dangerous to assume that toxicity in government translates to toxicity in the region. Its is a problem, but not a systematic problem.

Former Delegate of the South Pacific
Posts outside High Court venues should be taken as those of any other legislator.
I do not participate in the regional server, but I am happy to talk through instant messaging or on the forum.

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I think we need spot reform. No major overhaul is really needed, except the judiciary. Which, in my opinion, no matter how many times you rewrite it, it'll never actually work.



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The issue for me is that, yeah, we can do this through the normal process. But that has created more problems than when we've done reforms through GC. We end up inconsistencies in the laws and loopholes and plain old holes. A comprehensive rewrite  of our laws is needed, in my opinion, so we can have an internally consistent and cohesive system.

The problem there lies in the lack of knowledge of the assembly of our current texts, and the lack of caring what those current laws actually state. The Chair also has the responsibility to make sure what's being proposed is not contradicting what's already law.

It seems to me that there's a general "I don't give a shit what's already law, as long as my ideals get added" feeling in the Assembly. And, on top of that, like SB had stated, there's too arguing with people, instead of debating the idea. That last reason is why I've left for periods of time.

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Honestly, not all of it is even ignorance of the law, and very few of the changes that do get made were those that devolved in personal feuds rather than legislative debates. I mean, we got rid of the Appellate Justice and added a fourth Justice a long time ago, yet the Rules and Procedures of the High Court still call for an Appellate Justice to exist. This past election, it wasn't clear to me if we could even have two run-offs, if Punchwood hadn't won, because the law is ambiguously written as assuming a second run-off would never be necessary. Our laws leave a lot of room for power grabs, and provide little to no direction of how much executive authority there is or should be, too.

A lot of this comes from how poorly written our laws are in the first place. Belschaft forced upon us the existing format, and we've struggled to write laws that stick to it while also making sense. I think we ought to write in a clearer outline format, so we can be specific in what we mean. And I think it would be really useful to just talk about how we want our government to work, and have somebody skilled in legal writing draft the laws based on the agreed points. I've been wanting to do that since before the last Great Council.

I just feel like our whole system -- the government, our laws, our customs -- is on really shaky ground. There's no deep history we can consult, but a lot of how the government functions is based on assumptions of conventions. A full discussion from the bottom up of how we want our region to work would allow us to create an authoritative reference, and the best place to do that is in a Great Council.

A lot of your analysis is based on completely ignoring opposing opinions - and I think that is having an impact on the region. When people dismiss decenting opinion and make strong executive actions to oppose that they feel disenfranchised. Again, I'm not trying to single you or anyone out on this as I freely admit that I have been part of the problem and not above any of this.

I'm not dismissing opposing or dissenting opinions. We've had healthy debates where there's a clear supporting and opposing side, with each side debating the pros and cons and ultimately trying to come up with compromising. The debate over bicameralism is a perfect example. I think you're engaging in quite a bit of false equivalency. There was no room for debate over Belschaft, no matter how much you wanted to stick to liberal notions of court justice. He had to be dealt with, and if you think that was a case of dismissing opposing opinions, then I'm fine with being called dismissive. The Empire was not a case of dissenting opinions being silenced-- it was us protecting the region from a group of people who are known to cause instability so they can take control of regions.

There's a lot of room for disagreement in this region, and we disagree healthily most of the time. There are issues, though, that you cannot point to and say it's unhealthy, because the things you keep wanting to bring up are examples of how drastic measures need to be taken to protect the community as a whole. They are not examples of how the community interacts with itself, but rather how we deal with exogenous threats.

The three players we lost weren't trolls and they were not trouble makers. It's not a corrective action, they made a decision that you disagree with. Just like the admin team acted in a way a lot of people disagreed with.

And where exactly is the unhealthiness in what happened? TAC, Hop, and Apad made a mistake, lied about it, and then took their ball and went home when things weren't going their way. They actually did something very, very wrong. It's not my fault, nor anybody's, that they couldn't own up to their mistakes gracefully. Instead of coming out and saying, "We messed up and accidentally made it impossible for Kris to have a fair appeal" -- they decided to call Kris and myself Big Brother and make a huge deal out of something that could have been remedied so easily. It's not as if the threads were leaked as a "gotcha" kind of thing, either. Those players were given opportunity after opportunity to do the right thing. I actually counseled Kris to go straight to them and give them the chance to fix their own honest mistakes. Instead, we got denials of any wrongdoing and demonization of the whistleblowers.

All three admins were ready and willing to talk about how we handle sensitive/private information. None of us called for anybody to leave the region. At the end of the day, they made a mistake, they harmed the integrity of the court. Everybody here cares about making sure the courts are fair and honest, and expecting the players entrusted with that to own up to mistakes, or face the consequences if they don't, isn't unreasonable.

In both cases, the region has no authority to make a community decision. You didn't have a way to overturn the judical decision, and the region doesn't have a method to stop admin misconduct. So then what happens? We have a community that feud.

We did start making a community decision. We appointed acting justices. There were talks of a recall. It was all cut prematurely because those three left in righteous indignation. I'm sorry, SB, I just don't agree with your view of how the events unfolded. Nobody was pushing those players away. I've faced far more scorn and attacks for far longer, and was actually innocent of the accusations, so I feel comfortable in saying they just couldn't take was a 100% reasonable reaction to making an honest mistake and then trying to cover it up and shift blame, instead of owning up to it. That's unfortunate, but ultimately the integrity of the court was best served by getting rid of players who couldn't act judicially. They didn't have to leave, but they did, and that's their decision.

Our region isn't in a corrective state, it's in a tragic one.

I really don't think we're in a tragic state at all. We have a lot of up-and-coming players. There are a few problem spots, and then there's you trying to take unfortunate events and make them exemplary of today's era of TSPers. There was toxicity in your era, too. I remember players being chased out of the region, except back then it was applauded and celebrated. We managed to recover and survive from that, just as we will recover and survive from the unfortunate court incident, and as we survived Empire infiltration and Belschaft's scheming.

Just because it's an easy example, looking at the latest SPINN article. There was no meaningful discussion generated by something that took a lot of effort to write and most of the comments were people offended. And the unanimous critique of the paper was dismissed.

There was no "unanimous critique." The players criticized in an editorial didn't like what was written about them. Big surprise. But if we're being honest, nothing that was printed in SPINN wasn't already said on IRC and in private conversations. I haven't heard any great excitement or praise in the new judicial bench, because there's nothing to be all that excited about. They are objectively one of the least qualified benches to be elected. Punchwood was in fact banned for two weeks because he fought with his superiors and revealed their personally identifiable information.

How would ignoring any of this and pretending everything's great better serve our community? Except in the most artificial sense of there being less combative posts and more spam games instead. Honestly, that's the sense I'm getting in your post. You would rather we pretend everything is going cool, and call that "compromise." But in reality, in order for there to be be compromise, there must be a serious disagreement. You can't have one without the other.

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Part 2 is out!

Former Delegate of the South Pacific
Posts outside High Court venues should be taken as those of any other legislator.
I do not participate in the regional server, but I am happy to talk through instant messaging or on the forum.

Legal Resources:
THE MATT-DUCK Law Archive | Mavenu Diplomatic Archive | Rules of the High Court | Case Submission System | Online Rulings Consultation System

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Punchwood, I've only been here a year longer than you. You aren't exactly new.

No I'm not new however what I mean is the same old people are being elected time and time again.

Hold your horses people. The part where I bitch about the Old Guard isn't until Part 2

I'm going to read it right now!!! :hehe!:

Europeian Ambassador to The South Pacific
Former Local Council Member
Former Minister of Regional Affairs
Former High Court Justice

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