(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.