The more I thought about it, and pondered it, I wonder if we even need a separate law for processing legislator apps, if it’s just meant to be a quick “ok yeah you’re good”. The Chair can provide the guidance on how they’re going to do it, and if the Assembly doesn’t like it, they can petition the Chair or elect them out of office next cycle. I’ve made some other changes, some grammar, some persnickety (but important to me!), and some functional that remain more in line with the spirit of the proposal as I envisioned it. I didn’t end up touching the resolution but I’ll echo Pronoun’s words on keeping it simple.
Citizens ought to be able to serve.
I disagree with this. The goal of our body of citizens is voting in elections. If they want to provide more pointed oversight (to include recalls), they should join the Assembly, where that is part of being a legislator.
Notifying them that they want the recall of a member of CitComm. The legislator that has been notified then should consider whether or not the recall order should be brought forward to the assembly. This is similar to people writing letters to their representatives in Congress to support their position on certain matters.
What is the reason to restrict political participation in TSP to only those players who are not actively involved in other regions? This doesn’t do anything to benefit TSP and severely limits the ability of our players to seek out opportunities and experiences elsewhere in the game. This seems grossly unfair and counterproductive.
That’s not what the proposal does; players can continue to be actively involved in however many other regions they’d like as long as those regions don’t have conflicting requirements for participation.
One of the very first things we encourage new members to do, and one of the things we’re most persistent in encouraging, is joining the WA and endorse the Delegate (or otherwise utilize their WA membership in service to the Coalition). It doesn’t seem like a huge hurdle; we have far more people endorsing the Delegate than we do legislators.
I have implemented the edits that you all have provided.
I have purposely left the waiver clause within the citizenship application section so that we can grant citizenship to other members on a case-by-case basis.
I…continue to fail to see much point in this reform. It will slightly deplete the population of legislators and perhaps increase the number of citizens, but it fails to take an opportunity to genuinely rework our legislature with increased accountability and incentives for legislators to actually participate. Even at its best, the proposed system will simply result in constant apply-fall inactive-apply again cycles for a set of legislators that aren’t actually interested in anything other than a title, in addition to the now separate election voting citizenry.
I guess I don’t think it’s a bad thing, I’ll probably vote for it, but I ultimately don’t think there’s much to be gained.
Some specific comments:
Absolutely not. There’s no point in having a WA requirement if we’re just going to waive people out of it. The point of a yes or no WA requirement is that it’s objective and not subject to political manipulation or popularity contests - you’re either making a commitment to the region to have your WA here or not. Otherwise, we may as well just use a “good faith” requirement like we do now. People can always find a way to say they care about TSP, after all they did in the past!, but if you’re keeping your WA elsewhere then your priorities are clearly elsewhere, and you’ll inevitably find a conflict of interest.
To be frank, allowing foreigners to run roughshod over our domestic processes through accounts that only show up here to advance their personal agendas (or worse, deliberately weaken the region to support foreign entities) is a huge problem. And anyone can seem nice enough to keep their spot as a citizen while being a parasite on our domestic processes, citizenry votes are malleable and reluctant to actually draw the line to say “no, you’re not committed here, so you can’t vote here”. Frankly, saying you have to be in an allied region isn’t sufficient, because those are at times the regions with the most interest in throwing weight around to influence our internal processes.
I also agree with all of Pronoun’s comments, except for:
I agree the provision as written isn’t particularly clear, but people can be neglectful and still operating in good faith. I applaud the sentiment of Griffindor’s proposal, establishing a barrier to Assembly membership that if you aren’t able to actually sustain it outside of when you remember TSP exists every other month then you just shouldn’t be in the Assembly.
These amendments don’t encourage people to have a WA nation in TSP and endorse the Delegate, they require them to do so if they wish to have any political rights. Don’t try and pretend otherwise, this act disenfranchises a considerable number of people.
Yes, we encourage having a WA nation in TSP because it’s important, and because it’s not a huge obstacle. I don’t think requiring it for citizenship meaningfully disenfranchises anyone, because I’m not sure why someone would be unable to have a WA nation in TSP.
It’s worth noting that a significant majority of current legislators either have their WA nation in TSP or are in the SPSF; the ‘considerable number of people’ that you refer to currently stands at 11, out of 60 legislators. I’m sure we can all form our own opinions about whether that’s considerable, but I’m also sure that those 11 are perfectly capable of using their WA membership in service to the Coalition if they wanted to.
As a member of a non-SPSF military organization, I am concerned that this proposal will force me to destroy several relationships I have created with non-TSPers to maintain my right to political representation in the region.
Frankly, I’m not sure what foreign military is demanding that you prioritize them over TSP and threatening to destroy their relationships with you if you choose otherwise, but that sounds a bit concerning.
This is why I included the waiver provision on a case-by-case basis.
If we still do not like the waiver option, I could also support a one-time grandfather clause that allows all current legislators to become citizens upon passage. If an existing legislator doesn’t meet the WA/SPSF requirements for citizenship, they will be provided an exemption to that requirement for the duration of their citizenship until they either come into compliance or lose citizenship for another of the stated reasons.
I think that would be the best of both worlds. Keeping the people we currently have while communicating the change to future players.
This proposal is extremely exclusionary and ignores what and where many great TSPers I’ve seen throughout my years here have been. I have been a member of this region for almost decade in one way or another. In that time, I also participated in other regions and military organizations all while considering TSP my home. When I was involved in Lazarus, I became a member of the CLS (their equivalent to the CRS) and had my WA nation there as part of my duties. If this law had been in effect back then, I would’ve been stripped of my political rights in TSP.
Maybe I’m some random semi-retired person who hasn’t been in this side of TSP life for quite some time now, so my opinion shouldn’t matter, and it probably won’t. Feel free to pay no heed to it. But I simply can’t stomach the fact that I and many other people who have called this region home for ages can be disenfranchised and considered “not committed enough” to participate fully in our community. If some outside group wanted to manipulate TSP’s political affairs to the scale this WA rule would seemingly be protecting against, why wouldn’t they just fulfill those requirements and continue on with their plot? The amount of investment a nefarious actor would need to destabilize TSP domestically in a meaningful way means that this is likely to become an irrelevant, phony security measure.
I recall TEP’s last coup. It’s been a long time, so my memory may be faulty (feel free to correct me), but one of the reasons Fedele and his cronies were able to coup the region was due to the community’s inactivity and lack of political participation resulting from their stringent WA rules similar to the ones being proposed, making it easier for a committed - or just plain ol’ chaotic - set of individuals to subvert the government. This won’t be a safeguard that’ll be hard to breach. This won’t necessarily promote more engagement. The opposite may be true. The cost? The exclusion of those who can’t abide by these strict requirements, and not all of them are “subversive cosmos”. Some of them, shockingly enough, still consider this region and its community their home, and others would be interested in good faith to be part of this community.
Just my two cents I suppose. If you want to incentivize meaningful participation, excluding people isn’t the way to go.
If you’re a part of the security apparatus of a foreign region, then I don’t think you’re putting TSP at the front of your NS involvement. If you care deeply enough about TSP to want to be meaningfully involved, then I think a WA requirement is a perfectly fine bar that is easy to cross over.
You don’t need to destabilize the region to meaningfully affect how we operate or what policy we take. That doesn’t make this an irrelevant security measure. The level of commitment that an actor would need to maintain is vastly increased through a WA requirement, frequently past what our enemies are able and willing to do.
It’s worth noting that the East Pacific requires a World Assembly presence before you can register to vote, and they have an active political process. That coup also failed.
It’s not hard to breach, unless your WA is tied up in another region or military. There’s nothing wrong with that, citizenship is not the only way to participate in TSP, and you can always apply for it once your WA is able to be in the South Pacific. This is just another safeguard in our security organization against foreign intervention of our political processes.
I’m not sure who’s saying there are “subversive cosmos” in TSP? I’d appreciate some clarification on this.
As a general matter, I support the current proposal as it stands in Griffindor’s post.
A few small edits / comments:
The Charter and Citizenship Act still conflict as to who can be a member of the Citizenship Committee. I continue to believe that any Citizen should be eligible, but either way the requirement should be the same in both documents.
The Charter refers to a “standing commission” charged with granting / revoking citizenship. But the Citizenship Act refers to the same body as a “committee.” Should the language be made consistent?
Now a somewhat more substantive comment / question. The discussion over the last few days has reignited my initial concern over the exclusionary nature of the WA requirement for citizenship. I see the arguments on both sides, and I am wondering if there is any room for compromise.
My initial proposal imposed a WA requirement for Legislator status but not citizenship. My thought at the time was that requiring an additional level of commitment to TSP might make sense before one is permitted to directly influence the region’s laws, but that same level of commitment might not be necessary (or, to put it differently, might be overly exclusionary) with respect to voting in general elections.
I’m curious to hear what both sides think of this position. For the folks who are concerned with disenfranchisement / exclusion, does limiting the WA requirement to Legislators sufficiently address those concerns, or are you opposed to any WA-based limitations on political engagement? And for those who are concerned with commitment levels / foreign influence, would it be enough to ensure that regional laws are enacted only by those who have met the WA requirement?
Feel free to tear this idea to shreds if you don’t agree–compromise positions rarely attract much support from either side, so I’m ready for that reaction. Just thought I would throw it out there in an effort to bridge what seems to be the primary obstacle to broader support for this proposal as a whole.
I’m not sure how you can claim that stripping 18% of current legislators of their political rights for no reason whatsoever doesn’t constitute disenfranchisment.
What is the harm this law is meant to resolve? People you don’t think are ‘committed’ or ‘loyal’ enough to TSP having the vote?
This entire proposal is nothing but a clear and unambiguous attack on the political rights of a sub-set of TSPers.
I feel it’s not disenfranchisement because I’m still not sure why those legislators can’t simply move their WA here. Maybe they don’t want to, and instead, they want to actively prioritize another region over TSP with their WA membership. Clearly, you feel that’s an unreasonable ask and not a big deal, and that’s fair! But I also think we’re just talking in circles at this point and we’d all be more productive if we moved on and tried to find a compromise.
…seriously? This entire proposal? If you oppose the rest of the proposal as well, we really ought to debate that properly — not by using one specific clause as a bludgeon to dismiss the entire proposal.
I’d prefer that we have a WA requirement for members of the executive as well, but other than that, I can settle for this.
Yes, I agree with a WA requirement for Prime Minister and all Cabinet Ministers. One clarifying question is whether those officers should be required to be legislators as well, which would subsume the WA requirement, or if there should just be a freestanding WA requirement for them but no requirement that they be legislators. I prefer the legislator requirement, given that it is (1) simpler to administer and (2) hard to imagine the Prime Minister or Cabinet officials not being legislators.