The South Pacific

COI: I have no external memberships of any kind. Past historical memberships include the United Defenders League (many years ago), and I’ve held citizenship (again, over 5 years ago) in Osiris. Internally, the positions I hold in TSP are forum & Discord administrator, member of the CRS, and associate Justice. Upon election, I would step down from my role in the Court.

 

The summer is officially over, and autumn has arrived, which means it’s time for our community to come together and decide who will sit in our executive branch for the next four months. As democracy wanes throughout the game, with more and more people advocating for a “Delegate-led” form of governance in Game-Created Regions, it’s more important than ever to show the game that the oldest and longest-running democracy in NationStates is strong as ever.

I’m standing for election because I believe that The South Pacific is the greatest region in the game. It’s the only region I’ve been involved with for the past 5 years! We’ve had some struggles over the past year, centered around previous Cabinets, that have left a lot of us dejected and demoralized. It’s time for clear and strong leadership, but it’s also time for growth and development of people who want to get involved and be our next generation of leaders. A proven strong leader, with a track record of success, is the best option for leading the ministry and developing new talent.

I have a lot of experience in this job, having the honor of being the second-longest serving Minister of Foreign Affairs since the position was first created 15 years ago. I served as our 26th, 29th, and 34th Minister, and in that time I forged alliances that pushed back against userite imperialists (the United Imperial Armed Forces) who wanted us to be a compliant backwater.

We’ve come a long way since then, having strong alliances with The Rejected Realms, The North Pacific, the New Pacific Order, and The East Pacific, along with cultural alliances with great regions like the Union of Democratic States and Conch Kingdom. Our next ministry needs to strengthen our military alliances and deepen our cultural ties. Groups like the Independent Joint Command Coalition and its signatories want to isolate our community, so it’s never been more important to keep our alliances strong.

Since my last term as minister two years ago, I’ve advised several administrations on foreign relations. I’ve been Roavin’s informal and formal adviser during his time in government. I also advised Escade while she was MoRA and MoFA; was on the MoFA Team during Tim’s terms; and I currently aid Serres in the ministry. In other words, I’ve spent the past two years training, advising, and overall helping new ministers get the lay of the land for foreign affairs. I have the experience and success necessary to implement my ideas, and I believe I can help develop a cohort of future ministers.

As your next Minister, I would have the following main goals: 

1. End the MoFA Team and return to deputies. The MoFA Team started out as a small and elite group of advisers for Escade, and it hasn’t really grown beyond that. People have come and gone, but it’s still a fairly inaccessible group where the same voices tend to control the conversation.
   
   I want to end this practice and return to appointing area-specific deputies. Instead of an elite few old-timers managing all aspects of FA, I would take applications for deputies that are in charge of executing specific policies, like cultural outreach, embassy & consulates, military affairs, etc. I believe this would be a better model for people to get the kinds of specific experience we seek in future ministers.
   
2. Deepen alliances to counteract the IJCC. Because this new usersite quasi-imperialist group is made up of so many antagonists to TSP, we need to work with our allies to be on the same page in how we deal with the IJCC and its signatories.
   
3. Forge strategic alliances in the Security Council. There’s currently only one big World Assembly-focused alliance in the game: the World Assembly Legislative League. Among the signatories of that alliance are antagonists like Balder and Europeia, making it impossible for us to join. This is an area ripe for a competing alliance that aids our military and diplomatic goals.
   
4. Stop paying so much attention to the Gameplay forum. For the past year or so, the Gameplay forum has been dominated by trolls and enemies, who constantly derail our embassy thread, twist words to stoke controversy, or just “shitpost” as if that’s the main form of interaction in the game. Simply put, it’s a waste of time. Instead of caring so much about how we’re viewed in the NS Gameplay forum or Discord server, we should focus on communicating directly with our allies and on our own forum, where trolls and shitposting aren’t tolerated.
   
5. Making the Cabinet accountability for its activity. I’ve been an adviser in some capacity to the Prime Minister or MoFA for years, and the past couple terms have been plagued by decreased activity. It’s often like pulling teeth to hold a simple vote. More worryingly, sometimes Cabinet members simply don’t care and don’t want to do anything, preferring to pass the buck to others. This isn’t acceptable and something needs to be done to ensure accountability. I think the Cabinet should be more transparent in its votes, so the community can see how long it’s taking the Cabinet to do something. I also think progress reports are useful and the Cabinet should adopt the practice again.
   

(1) Which regions do you consider as potential allies?

(2) What will be the extent of your participation in the Gameplay forum if you are elected?

(3) How often do you think the Cabinet should provide a report on its activities to the Assembly?

(4) How long is the period of inactivity by a Cabinet Minister before you would agree that it amounts to a dereliction of duty?

(10-03-2018, 08:13 PM)Amerion Wrote: [ -> ](1) Which regions do you consider as potential allies?

(2) What will be the extent of your participation in the Gameplay forum if you are elected?

(3) How often do you think the Cabinet should provide a report on its activities to the Assembly?

(4) How long is the period of inactivity by a Cabinet Minister before you would agree that it amounts to a dereliction of duty?

(1) Currently, I'm not sure we should be concentrating on expanding our alliance network, but rather deepening it. This could involve, just for an example, multilateral treaties with current allies on things like World Assembly cooperation. If an opportunity presents itself to gain another ally, we shouldn't ignore it, of course. But I would want to spend the 4 months of the term making us even more tight-knit with our existing allies.

(2) After the reaction to our administrative temporary bans of Tim and Escade, and the routine disrespect and hostility launched at pretty much anyone in TSP who tries to defend our community on any matter (just look at how PS2 was just treated), I have little to no interest in being active on the Gameplay forum. There are too many people who are only interested in being mean, saying horrible things, and rehashing baseless accusations over and over again. I read it regularly so I'm up to date on the goings-on of the game. But our embassy thread is a net negative for us, and that's because the Gameplay forum is dominated by trolls, enemies, and "shitposters." I think we should abandon our Gameplay embassy and utilize our own forum and post relevant links to our allies directly.

(3) I think a weekly or bi-weekly check-in is doable. That would be a total of 8 or 16 updates, which isn't a huge burden. Generally, I think there's been a serious inactivity problem with the past two Cabinets. It's been described as pulling teeth to get people to even vote on something, much less have an in-depth discussion. There's been 2 open LegComm seats for months, for example. I'm not sure anybody who isn't privy to the behind-the-scenes stuff would even be able to say what the Cabinet has been doing this term, because there's be no communication from them at all. This is something that needs to be fixed. If you've lost interest or are too apathetic to be active, you should resign and let someone else have the opportunity to hold the position. If you aren't being timely and aren't participating in a discussion, the Cabinet shouldn't grind to halt waiting for your input or your vote. And the Assembly should be able to know what's generally going on in the executive branch, which requires being open and regularly updating the community. This was common back when I was in the Cabinet in 2014-2016 -- if you didn't have a general idea of what the Cabinet was up to, it's because you were inactive or not paying attention.

(4) I partially touched on this in the previous answer. If the Cabinet is waiting more than a week for you, then you're derelict. Speaking of our government in general -- every branch -- we've gotten into this bad habit of thinking our timeline operates in weeks. It's become regular for a simple decision to take 2 weeks, for a debate to go on for a month, etc. It's stymied our activity and dynamism as a region. A Cabinet term is 4 months because, when that time frame was decided, you could get *a lot done* in 4 months. For modern-day Cabinets to even compete with Cabinets from a couple years ago in terms of activity/output, our terms would have to be like a year long. I don't really know why this happened.

Quote:Islands of Unity (on Discord):

How do you feel about the black sheep Pacific (twp)?

Our history with TWP is long and consists of alternating between being enemies and ignoring each other. We're currently in the latter phase. We've tried extending olive branches to them -- sending an ambassador, for example -- and it hasn't done much. They elected somebody as their Delegate (Neenee) who's been prohibited from being in TSP for years now, due to her long history infiltrating and subverting GCRs. Davelands and Badger (TWP Guardians) have said pretty ridiculous things about TSP, showing how much they view us as inferior and contemptible. They've personally been nasty to me the few times I've ever interacted with them. Other people have had similar experiences, too.

Perhaps something could change here, but I don't think all it takes is extending more olive branches. Geopolitically, TWP belongs to an anti-TSP regional bloc. Their allies include Europeia and The Land of Kings and Emperors. Europeia considers us an enemy. LKE is led by Onder, who currently leads Balder (another enemy) and formerly led the United Imperial Armed Forces (an arch-enemy when it existed). TWP's foreign affairs revolves around the Europeia-Balder-Imperialists center of gravity. They've been hostile to us in very recent history, and for a time we dealt with privileged information leaking from our forums to their government.

So, if there's some colossal ground-shifting changes in TWP's Gameplay alignments (not necessarily R/D, but rather which bloc they prefer), that's an opening for thawing in our relationship. But as it stands now, there are more negatives than positives in the TSP-TWP relationship. It will take more than a simple diplomatic gesture to change things. There's no point in being active antagonists, but also I don't want us to get hoodwinked by asymmetric optimism. By that I mean, TSP has done this thing a lot in the past where we approach Gameplay with a kind of naive optimism, that just being nice means we can be friends, and we should be friends with everyone. But we're the only region that ever thinks that way, which means we tend to be taken advantage of and we eventually get burned. I have a more "realist" view of the politics of that part of the game.

(1) Good

(2) While I am not in favour of abandoning our Gameplay forum embassy in the long term, I am fine with trialling a different form of diplomatic presence across our allies' forums.

(3) I have no idea what any of the Cabinet Ministers and Prime Minister have been doing for this past term. However, it's only fair to overlook their reclusiveness given the toxicity of our most recent internal dispute. With that being said, I don't want this to be the case in the upcoming term and am more than willing to push for recalls if I sniff even the presence of inactive bottoms.

I also definitely don’t want to abandon our Gameplay embassy long-term either. There’s just too much negativity in the near-term, though, that *any* post just feeds the trolls. And NS mods either don’t know how or don’t want to enforce threadjacking, trolling, or baiting rules. Eventually things will blow over, people will lose interest, and then we can start posting again.

Due to the fact that I truly want to see Glen's mantra in action in the FA I am going to endorse him as a candidate. the Foreign Affairs office has been run the same way for a long while and while I can't exactly say it has been an ineffective set up, I can say that due to the massive changes during last term and the term before that a different approach is 100% worth trying. Not to mention that Glen has vast experience in FA and if given the role of leadership I wholeheartedly believe he will make the office succeed. IT is my recommendation that you give your vote to Glenn this election cycle.

What is your view on festivals as a FA tool?

Somy's campaign is explicitly positive. What are your views on positive FA as Somy describes versus your approach?

(10-07-2018, 03:32 PM)The Serres Republic Wrote: [ -> ]Due to the fact that I truly want to see Glen's mantra in action in the FA I am going to endorse him as a candidate. the Foreign Affairs office has been run the same way for a long while and while I can't exactly say it has been an ineffective set up, I can say that due to the massive changes during last term and the term before that a different approach is 100% worth trying. Not to mention that Glen has vast experience in FA and if given the role of leadership I wholeheartedly believe he will make the office succeed. IT is my recommendation that you give your vote to Glenn this election cycle.

Thank you! I've enjoyed the stability and respectfulness you brought back to our FA ministry. I appreciate the endorsement <3
 

(10-09-2018, 06:16 AM)Roavin Wrote: [ -> ]What is your view on festivals as a FA tool?

I think festivals are great, though I'll admit I don't often participate in them myself. But lots of a people do, and holding festivals has brought us closer to other regions. People get to know each other, which is the most important outcome. I don't think festivals are something that we should expect the FA ministry to do itself, though. The skill set for organizing those and running those are what we look for in the Ministry of Regional Affairs. The two ministries work together to hold festivals, which is a good way of doing things in my experience.
 

(10-09-2018, 06:16 AM)Roavin Wrote: [ -> ]Somy's campaign is explicitly positive. What are your views on positive FA as Somy describes versus your approach?

There isn't a competition being "positive" versus "negative." I wouldn't call anything in my approach to FA negative, even. Foreign affairs in this game is just a fancy term for two things: knowing who's playing the game and knowing how they play it. The role is fundamentally one where you need a good grasp of how things outside of our region work, and then figuring out the best way to interact with that in a way that works for us. We can't force other people in the game to be chill and happy-go-lucky and peaceful. A good minister needs to have a dose of both optimism and, I'll call it, pragmatic pessimism. They shouldn't dismiss one over the other. Balance.

For example, WA cooperation is a positive element of my foreign affairs agenda, because we'd be working with our allies in a mutually beneficial, virtuous circle-y way. But it's also important because Balder and Europeia have their own very powerful WA alliance that can be used to make our own region's military and FA ministry suffer.

We can't ignore the very real fact that other regions consider us enemies and will take any opportunity to act on it. That takes a minister who doesn't shy away from the "negative" aspects of the game, because it's stressful or because they just prefer to only deal with the positive. I've seen that type of viewpoint play out a lot throughout my time in TSP, and it's been bad for us more often than not. Stressing positivity and making "negativity" taboo tends to mean that people are shunned for "being negative." The players pointing out red flags are often silenced as being paranoid pessimists, even when they're completely correct in their warnings. It's a slippery slope that can end up blinding people from knowing how everybody else is playing the game.

I think I have a good balance of optimism and pessimism. I'm optimistic about our allies and the prospects of deepening our relationships with them. I'm pessimistic about regions like Balder and Europeia, the IJCC alliance, and Gameplay culture, because you have to be willfully blind to see how these regions and people talk about us and think about us, and not see a very real threat. Above all else, the job of the government is to protect the region against threats.

(10-09-2018, 06:34 PM)sandaoguo Wrote: [ -> ] 

(10-09-2018, 06:16 AM)Roavin Wrote: [ -> ]What is your view on festivals as a FA tool?

I think festivals are great, though I'll admit I don't often participate in them myself. But lots of a people do, and holding festivals has brought us closer to other regions. People get to know each other, which is the most important outcome. I don't think festivals are something that we should expect the FA ministry to do itself, though. The skill set for organizing those and running those are what we look for in the Ministry of Regional Affairs. The two ministries work together to hold festivals, which is a good way of doing things in my experience. 

What are your views on other, less "formal" events? Would you be willing to head those kind of inter-regional get togethers?

(10-10-2018, 09:32 AM)Rebeltopia Wrote: [ -> ]What are your views on other, less "formal" events? Would you be willing to head those kind of inter-regional get togethers?

Can you provide examples of what you mean by less formal events? I want to make sure I’m answering the question you’re actually asking!


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