Post Archive

Should probably take the “human rights” and “governmental integrity” out of the overview then. I’m leaving for somewhere that’s not toxic XD

Yeah, this escalated a lot more than I thought it could. Taking in that the topics answer should have been "relatively easy".

So what's everyone's favorite animal ?

Mine is the penguin :)

Let's hold back from being inflammatory. I'm going to take a hard line on fascism rhetoric, but it's still a one-and-done type deal. We had the one, and now we're done, no point in dragging it out. As long as I'm Arch-Admin, anti-fascism is going to be one of the non-negotiable, core tenants of the region, and that's all there is to it.

Also, some of my stats (such as my defence forces) are in the minus values; like what does that even mean? How can my war preparedness rating be a minus value? I'm not mad but it's just funny to me I guess.

Toucan!

I am so bad at maintaining my nations.

Hi folks!

I'm pleased to announce the first annual Forest Interregional Writing Contest, an opportunity for writers from Forest and our embassy regions to share their creativity and battle it out for one of our region's most prestigious honours. That's right, there are some brand new interregional accolades up for grabs - the writers of the best entries submitted to the contest will be awarded the Forestian Literary Prize!

The submission period opens today and closes on the 15th of August, but don’t panic; I've created an extraordinarily useful guide that sums up everything you need to know about the contest. You can read all of the details there for yourself, including important dates, this year's theme, the rules and the members of the judging panel. Any unanswered questions can be telegrammed to me or posted on the Forest RMB. Please share this dispatch on any offsite forums or chats if they're active so as many people as possible are able to join in!

https://www.nationstates.net/page=dispatch/id=1565117

Good luck to everyone who decides to get involved, and happy writing!

Best wishes,

Terrabod

Culture Minister of Forest

Hello discussion Refugi friends,

I just wanted to say I'm pretty strongly in support of the "Recognizing the General Assembly" proposal. At its core, it says nothing with which I disagree - the GA and the SC are both part of the WA, you have to be a member of both, ideally they'd be equal institutions, and disavowing one is also disavowing the other. It's sort of a matter of fact statement about what the WA is and how it works. So, I can't really come up with a reason to oppose. Granted, it seems like there's little reason to support it since all of those things are self-evident... to me...

But then I realized somehow this is not self evident to some people. On both sides, but mostly on the SC/Gameplay side, people are really quite aggressive in their anti-other-chamber sentiment, and that is sort of connected to a broader anti-GA, anti-RP, anti-institutionalism, anti-democracy agenda that is somewhat arrogant about how other players actually play NS and that how others play NS is their own valid and fun approach that all exists within shared institutions. So the thing that really moves me from "I guess this is fine" to "strong support" is that the against "agenda" is just really distasteful to me and doesn't align with my overall goals or vision for how NS should work.

My apologies for the delay in voting on the sc proposal, I seem to have slept for twelve hours lol.

Well, seems like this region is not fit for proper arguments, so bye ig, time to join my old mates again

Not sure I'd describe transphobia as a "proper argument".

Good luck out there. You'll need it.

Thanks for this question! I will always prefer more parties. In Canada we have five parties that regularly get seats in Parliament (Liberals, Conservatives, Bloc Quebecois, NDP, and Greens) and it feel so nice being able to vote my conscience, since our district will either be green or NDP. I'd haaaate having to choose between just the liberals or conservatives.

The Forest Interregional Writing Contest is open for submissions now. I'm not going to post the dispatch again because it has already been posted here twice.

On the subject of the current GA resolution, World Assembly Border Policy, I didn't really get the time to put together the statement and discussion post I wanted to, so for the most part we stuck to talking about it in the discord server. That being said, my against vote is now outnumbered within the region, so I am required by the Refugia Revised Statutes (7,iii) to make a statement as to why.

Per the discussion in the server, the main concern over the proposal is that it's vague, but the ways in which it is vague confuse me as to whether or not it's overreaching. One of the main concerns is the inclusion of the term 'consenting states' without ever defining what that means. As Junitaki-cho has said in the server, the lack of a definition isn't normally an issue, but it does make things strange when you come to, for example, clause 8:

So here are some further concerns of mine. In the drafting thread, the author goes on at length about how the main elements of this are opt-in, and if you don't want anything to do with it, you don't have to opt-in. But here are some clauses:

So everyone participates in the WABC Zone even if they choose not to participate in it. I'm not one for national sovereignty arguments per se, but I don't like when there's an alleged option that is not actually an option. I also don't like this one:

(Emphasis mine) This is very strange to me. Remember the difference between consenting states, which isn't defined but probably in this context means a nation that has opted to be part of the eurozone, member state, which means a member of the World Assembly, and non-member state, which is a nation that isn't in the World Assembly. I don't like the idea that this committee will just take up the space of negotiating border law with people who aren't part of its organisation, and then with people who aren't even part of the World Assembly at all.

I don't know, I'm going to be honest the more I read it the weirder it seems to me. I'd just rather not for myself personally, but obviously everyone is able to chip in here and give your own thoughts. And, in fact, please do, I'm always curious what you have to think.

I interpreted the lack of definition of "consenting" to imply the possibility of differing agreements between "consenting" nations and the WABC. I would personally have a bigger problem with the resolution if it gave a very specific definition of what a consenting state ought to do because that would seem to me like a one-size-fits-all model which i don't believe would work. For me, the word "consenting" here is simply a synonym for "countries who have made an agreement with the WABC regarding border policy."

Furthermore, as a staunch globalist, I have no problem with Clause 6 which states that the WABC is able to override the national sovereignty of a consenting nation to enforce a single unified border policy. I believe it is generally more effective for international organisations to have the power to override national laws and sovereignty as it reduces the chance of protectionism and corruption.

Those are just my thoughts on the resolution and why I voted to pass it. I almost exclusively vote with our region, however in this vote the WA Delegate and Refugia as a whole had differing views so I ending up voting for what i thought was right.

Hello hello

We'll be playing skribbl.io in about 6 hours. I'll post the link here when the time comes. Hope to see you there ^-^

I can only speak for myself, but I really appreciated your timely and thorough write-up. Thank you for it :)

dang it, wish i wasnt busy

Welcome!

Welcome to the region ^-^ I'm glad that you felt comfy enough with us to move your main in!

If you're happy handing out endorsements, I wouldn't mind one as the delegate :P

It can take a very long time, it's super random once you meet the criteria. I put 'Reborn' as a trigger in March, I think? And still not a whiff.

Apparently the zombie one can trigger on reborn, since I'm not going to let my nation CTE I thought I'd give it a try.

It’s a well-written resolution that's straight to the point and easy for everyone to understand. It’s beneficial for UCRs and is in line with my positions when I was in leadership over in the New West Indies. Full support! :)

IFV for Interregional Recruitment posted!

https://www.nationstates.net/page=dispatch/id=1571699

I just want to start a debate on whether or nor feeder regions should be allowed to have WA delegates.

Personally, I don't think it's fair that regions with no coherent ideology which are also, through game mechanics, far larger than other regions are allowed to have 1 nation represent the entire region. For example, our own region of Refugia clearly has an ideology and it makes sense that we have a delegate who represents that ideology in the WA, however a region like The North Pacific (whose delegate has 977 endorsements/votes) has such a wide range of ideologies but is represented by a single nation. Furthermore, I don't think it's fair that regions, which most nations don't choose to join, get to have huge influence in the WA. In this current Security council debate for instance, the delegate for The North Pacific makes up 36.8% of all against votes (and 20.6% of all votes) at the time of writing, meaning they can single-handedly change the outcome of a vote. I don't think this is fair and I don't think this represents the goals of the WA.

Maybe I should write a resolution on this. I wonder what other people's thoughts are? I would love to here what other nations have to say.

Alas, the WA resolutions have no authority over such a question. It is a game-side issue and is up to the decsion of the game's owner, Max Barry.

I prefer multi-party, since two-party tends to polarize the two major parties. That said, multi-party systems can impede the ability of the biggest party to govern, making it dependent on forming a coalition with other parties. In my IRL-country, the coalition is made up of 8 parties, ranging from 20 to 4 seats each, and the Prime Minister is of a 6-member party, one of whom usually sides with the opposition.

Mechanically, they really have to have a delegate.

In Refugia, I'm the founder and all the executive power of the region rests on my account. We run elections to see who will be doing what Councillor jobs, but that executive power is what allows us to actually put those election winners into their regional officer slots and give out the powers that those councillors can use. In the event of me leaving or being removed from the game, executive power would transfer to the WA delegate by the circumstance of my absence.

In feeders and sinkers, there never was a founder, so the delegates have always been executive there. Consequently, those delegates mechanically (if not legally) control the entire region and all regional officers are appointed/dismissed by the delegate. Not having a delegate at all would basically mean that the government had no gameside abilities because it would have no point of origin.

But, yeah, you rise good points about delegate voting and what their stomp power is compared to all other regions. The second to last dispatch that I put out has a lot of detailed graphs on how GCRs and feeders specifically have been disproportionately consolidating power for the last nine years. This consolidation has some pretty stark implications. In that dispatch we can also look at delegate volume, the total number of delegates that exist at all, and find that this number has been regularly shrinking for five years. Around the time I published this two months ago, there were 1,000 delegates, the lowest ever on this dataset. Now there are 883, breaking the record in a massive way.

Where have those minor delegates gone, even as the total number of WA nations are going up? Well they're staying inside feeders OR intentionally moving to them for the power/prestige advantages. Regional diversity across NationStates is being hurt in the process because the odds that a region like Refugia will ever be founded are a lot lower than they were in 2016.

There's a lot that factors into why nations are staying in their foundation spots and dump their power into these already powerful regions more than they used to. I think that the actual source of the issue is how admin changed the telegram system to be stamp (or money) operated, which allowed easy access to a whole mess of recruitment spam that a lot of folks take one glance at and block. If they have no invitation to leave, likely they won't. Through the rule of large numbers, out of all of the people who make an account, eventually you're going to luck into those power-players who have the motivation and desire to do massive region-building. So feeders look even better to stay in, that keeps snowballing, and now feeders are not just political giants, but tech and infrastructure giants that most UCRs can't match.

So what's the solution to all that? Probably to axe stamp recruitment, remove spawning abilities from current feeders and replace them with an equal number of new feeders with a zero population, and take back gameside advocacy for founding your own region instead of having a new founder/delegate syphoned to a raider/imperialist aligned reeducation camp about how you should give up. But that all seems unlikely, so they're discussing far worse solution ideas.

The World Assembly (or WA for short) is Nationstates' international lawmaking body-- basically the game's version of the United Nations. Members can create and/or vote on proposals for international legislation, vote to commend or condemn other nations or regions, and endorse nations in their region whom they support. You don't have to do any of those things to be in the WA, though.

Unsure of what I'm looking for out of this game but the recruitment telegram I got very much drew me in that's probably a good start, hi everyone.

Welcome! It's okay if you don't have anything in particular you're looking for just yet. We're mostly concerned with being friends and getting along in this community. As Adawu said, we have a discord server you're welcome to join and chat with us in. We've also got people who are pretty highly accomplished at just about everything that there is to do in NationStates, so if and when you find something that's interesting to you, you're in good company ^-^

Thank you for the thorough explanation!

It was also called the United Nations before. :)

But yes, even though I don’t have to do that to be in the WA, I do it, with my WA nation. :P

lmao, welcome to Refugia

Thank you both! And yeah, I'm a nervous wreck when it comes to new communities! XD

Ooh, that one's tricky. I remember having zombie in my pretitle for ages yet never got it. What worked was also having brains in your motto. Although not sure how you'd pass that one off :p

Hello I am here to make an official statement as to why I'm not supporting the current WA proposal at vote, Volcanic Activity Convention (Volcano-Con, if you will).

This is an incredibly vague proposal, to the point that I don’t think there’s any point to enacting it at all. There’s some interest due to the fact that, as the proposal states, this particular niche has not been legislated as of yet. That being said, it is hamstrung by several things, which pushed me from ambivalent-leaning-for to a decent against vote.

First off, there are no real mandates here. You might respond that article 2(a) has the word ‘Mandates’ in it. That’s true, but ultimately meaningless as, as with a lot of resolutions we were talking about back in December and January, subclauses i, ii, and iii consistently mince their words and dance around the subject with vagueries like mandating all member nations (who risk volcanic activity harming their population) address any volcanic activity by:

(Emphasis mine.) Our old friend ‘reasonable’ shows up yet again. As we’ve always stated, giving such leeway in your proposal does nothing but give countries who weren’t keen on taking care of their citizens anyway an excuse to do it. The rest of the subclauses aren’t much better:

This is an absolutely nothing statement. “Prevent volcano damage” how? “Distribute relevant resources to where they are needed.” What are the relevant resources, what is the situation you’re talking about at all?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I recommend taking a look through the rest of it. It’s incredibly vague and ultimately not helpful. The entire proposal boils down to “Do the things you should do so that the bad things don’t happen” without becoming any more specific.

The thing that ultimately pushed me to vote against, however, was the author’s casually dismissive and antagonistic behaviour when provided with these concerns in our discord server. It’s hard for me to want to take any extra step to take a proposal seriously when it’s clear the author doesn’t actually care about it, and I think it’s a classic Refugi standby that we rate these proposals on their merits, whether that be mechanical construction or bad intentions on the part of the author.

Disputed territories????????? *gasp* Drama???? Or like Denmark and Canada switching back and forth an island they dispute with a flag and a national drink left for the other nation to see?

Hi! Welcome to Refugia ^-^ you can see your population on your nation page, in the infobox about halfway down the page on the right-> side. You currently have 7 million.

えっ

The leader system isn't aimed for councils despite the special issue for the leader having a council option. It's humorous seeing a issue for the Federal People's Council and what it's hobbys are.

I love this game so much for how ridiculous it can be and how humorous it can be.

You brought up some good points. I was pretty vague with 2aii, and I should've been clearer. I don't think your concern with 2ai carries the same weight but I suppose I could've specified which situations in which you shouldn't be expected to save every bit of nature you can. The same applies to your concern about 2aiii. And finally, sorry if I came off as dismissive or antagonistic. I was defending my proposal.

H E L L O

Hope you guys wanted more of my stupid ass culture events, because that's what you're getting.

I need YOU. Specifically, your ideas, your characters, your desires for the greatest combatants the world has ever known. You have one month to come up with up to two characters to enter into The Battle of All Things

https://www.nationstates.net/page=dispatch/id=1573233

Who is qualified to turn in a character app? Anyone with a forum account 😃 Last month we had an event on our community Discord server to bet in the Euro 2020 games, this one doesn't require any discord account at all. Just turn in a post in the application thread and next month when I've collected all the apps, we'll have a tournament of sorts with them.

Enter today: https://calref.cc/index.php?topic=163.0

Hi there!

I don't mean to be that person because I'm new(ish) here, but I figured I'd bring in a different perspective.

So, I voted FOR because, while yes, the sentences are long, they do describe DYP's achievements in much detail and very well.

One of the main things I look for within these proposals is:

[list][*]Whether a newcomer can easily understand what the proposal is for.

[*]Are nation-specific terms defined?

[*]Would the newcomer reading the proposal need to look up terms and information to fully understand it?

[*]Also, with the information the newcomer would need to find, are resources for this consistent and, if not, could inconsistencies lead to misinterpretations of the proposal?[/list]

As for the grammar, I didn’t find anything that bad. In fact, I'm impressed by the formal tone and description used here. Does it get a bit long-winded? Yes, but DYP's been around for at least 13 years from my understanding? And this proposal is about a page and a half which I think is a good length. Provides enough information yet is straight to the point.

I also want to note that I, personally, am not a HUGE fan of judging one's grammar too much considering that it can get into elitist territory. I mean...if I understand it, it's fine to me. In fact, some of the other previous proposals that were majority voted FOR I've seen so far have not been as understandable...to me at least which is why I was against those.

I do want to note that this is from my perspective here and the English degree holder in Anerchestia was bugging me while the sociologist was nagging about the social construct of language.

But yeah...hi? I guess? *nervous laughs*

But OOC, if there are any norms I'm not aware of here, please feel free to let me know. I just didn't want to look like I'm voting the opposite way of everyone else on purpose. I do have a reason! I swear!

The helped helped shouldn't have been overlooked, yeah. Noticed that pretty quickly when looking over it. Although I'm not exactly one to talk since I forgot to add an s back in a part I tweaked a little to see how it'd work in Commend PS2. Oops. Isn't too noticeable though :p

The word "infra" was new to me too, but webster's seems to declare this as correct usage.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/infra

What really bothers me is no attempt to define or constraint what the clause 3 sanctions might be. While I suppose sanctions can be applied to non-member nations as they interact and endanger WA members, how needs to be more carefully stated than this.

Also clause four ends with the following:

"must consent to levies against their nation for healthcare costs incurred by WA employees operating under the auspices of this resolution."

What now are "auspices"?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/auspice

Patronage and guidance? Which WA employees are not patrons under guidance of resolutions such as this would be?

Somewhat late, but those are rebel territories, and will be dealt with accordingly.

Oh damn, not the pesky Chacapoyan Breakaway States again...

Hai Lulu, caaaan you catch me :>

I don't really have a lot to say about today's Security Council proposal, "Declaration on Hippopotamuses". It's a joke resolution, but since it's referring back to the olden days of NationStates, people will jump right on it no matter what. I'm keeping to my principles of taking the World Assembly reasonably seriously. After all, if people on this site were so concerned over not wasting any space as to repeal a 12-year-old GA resolution just a couple weeks ago, they should absolutely be against this :P

So yes

Just a general question but is it possible to have a bigger landmass other than the established territories than what's shown on the map?

Aha, alright! Good to know regardless, and thanks for the answer! :)