It’s in the title. Following the forum move, I think the desire for a GC is just about dead. The activity has declined for weeks (even before the move), and all proposals have been voted down. I think we should use what remains of this Great Council, and reinstate the original provisions for a Great Council, and try again down the line.
Thoughts?
I’m not sure what this is supposed to accomplish.
I think we should at least go ahead and vote on the shortened Cabinet terms and see where people stand before closing shop.
Do you mean returning to the status quo from before the Great Council began?
Ah. I have no problems with reverting to that amendment, pending some changes to the phrasings used in the original article.
Yes, indeed.
What is your alternative to addressing the issues of the Local Council, uncompetitive elections, and general malaise in the political game? I’ll note that this is your first and only proposal thus far.
People are being very quick to “abolish” the GC, but don’t acknowledge that these issues remain unaddressed and aren’t offering anything of their own to address them. The problems aren’t just going to disappear because you throw up a motion to archive a forum.
I’m wholly opposed to returning to any supermajority requirement for GCs. The only reason you view this GC as unsuccessful is because every vote has failed, and a big reason we have for that is dumb supermajority thresholds that have blocked changes most supported. If anything, the fact that an amendment to the Charter that 56% of us supported didn’t pass is the problem.
Indeed, I have not introduced any proposals, nor did I intend to. However, I have been very active in discussions of existing proposals. So to imply that by not introducing a proposal, I have not contributed is a slap in the face.
I, too, agree with your assessment of why the GC is perceived as a failure. It is a shame that a subset of people are neigh completely opposed to simple reforms of how the RMB is overseen, among other things.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to say that if you aren’t proposing anything, you shouldn’t be the one to motion ending the GC. Let those who do have things to propose work on their proposals and bring them to the floor, instead of somebody with nothing of their own to bring deciding that there’s nothing left to consider. The GC doesn’t interrupt any other part of the government, so there’s no need to end it until those who actually have been bringing forth proposals say themselves that there’s nothing else to consider.
Isn’t this what I kinda said?
Just allow everything which is granted from the Great Council to be a regular procedure within the Assembly. Yes, I’m proposing a “permanent” constitutional Assembly and quite frankly I don’t see a problem with this.
If it would be so “tiresome” and “needless” to constantly have to question, renew, invent new laws & institutions… then why are you even playing a political simulator?
At some point, you’ve pretty much covered everything possible law wise. Then you’re reduced to arguing over what the definition of “is” is.
That is what we should all want but would only happen in a utopia. The video game has been out for 20+ years and we’ve yet to see the ideal manner for how an executive Cabinet is formed.
Nah, I’m not letting this framing stand. Asking that 60% of the region agrees with something before rewriting the entire government isn’t some off the wall idea. Just because you can muster a simple majority at a given time, doesn’t mean you should be able to force through the changes we want because we miraculously called a Great Council. A Great Council should not be an opportunistic endeavor to just squeak by with the bare minimum support. Not to mention, the only proposal that even got close to 60% support seems to be disbanding the Local Council.
Anyhow, all that said, and even though I haven’t been really active here, can I suggest a new approach?
As Glen had suggested previously, we seem to be locked into this thinking that we’re tweaking the current document. (Even voting on individual pieces implies as much.) What if we restarted this all with a brainstorming session of what we think a regional government should look like and construct a Charter from there? It can either be part of the GC or separate from it.
As long as we can get to the 60% voting requirement, we can replace the entire charter whenever. It doesn’t have to be strictly within the confines of a designated “Great Council.”
Yeah, kind of what I expected the GC to be. Might explain why I feel “a bit” disappointed.
The primary reason why this was not the way is because of how controversial a “delete all” was at the time the GC started. GC laws were modified to allow a limited reforms to be doable to avoid giving PTSD to people who witnessed that back in 2016. The original intention of a GC has always been about tearing everything down and start from scratch. Looking back, we truly should just tear the entire thing down and start from scratch. Start from the bare philosophy of how our government should work aside from being a democracy.
Yeah, I was there. Still holding myself accountable not to run for an executive office until Assembly Committees become accepted.
The GC amendment didn’t mention its’ actual strength changing but because it became easier to motion one passing, limited only to an annual term from the last one ending, I guess it had an effect on proposals since Glee would also say that (paraphrase) “The people who were against the GC at the beginning won with the amendment”.
I think that the only way a burn-down would be accepted is if a convincing coup attempt occurred now (during the forums transfers) at the NS region itself. Legally, as it is now, the only way you get a full review is proposing the introduction of a ‘higher’-than-statutory law (such as a constitution) and have that proposal be widely accepted. Although, having the convention of such a law come from the GC is questionable in itself so idk.
Our supermajoritarianism has served little purpose other than to enforce a stagnant status quo. It was designed to do just that. I know, because I designed our current version of it and that was 100% the intention. Except the status quo at the time wasn’t stagnant.
There’s nothing magical about having 6 out of 10 people agree to things. Does that 6th person’s support really subjectively, objectively make an idea better than one that 5 out of 10 people agree on? No. I think you’re committed to an abstract idea, that has a time and a place. And unfortunately that idea, at this time, is slowly killing off the community.
For a variety of reasons, we’ve had an exodus of senior members, the people who created our current law book and rules to uphold their (our) preferences, and they didn’t put in any real work in ensuring the community prospers once they abandoned it. So from where I sit, we have a community composed of people who’ve never had the opportunity to craft TSP in their own image, haven’t ever written laws, are relatively new to the political simulation, and they’re saddled with supermajority requirements that just make navigating successfully even harder. All out of some fidelity to a set of status quo-enforcing rules written by people who no longer are part of TSP, that exist mostly to ensure their power & preferences were hard to dislodge.
When we’re at this crossroads, the justification for supermajorities doesn’t exist. We don’t need to ensure 60%+ of the community agrees on a path forward. We just need a path forward that most people agree on. Otherwise there’s no path forward at all, if there isn’t a 6th person to seal the deal. And yet we all know the status quo isn’t sustainable.
I mean really, our moderation team barely exists anymore, we’re definitely going to need to add new mods very soon because the team thus far has been composed of the same senior members who are leaving. The CRS is 1 or 2 active people, definitely only 1 person that’s actually really active and knows how to secure the region. Our Cabinet elections are non-competitive. We’re rotating the same few people in the same roles, until they also retire, leave, or get bored of doing it. The only active legislative business the community’s been debating is over the Local Council, which isn’t resolvable because entrenched councilors refuse to do anything that might mean they no longer get to bear their titles hold just enough voting power to kill reform efforts under the supermajority rules you want to keep.
What exactly is the plan for the next year of TSP? Next 2 years? Under the requirement that 60% of the community must approve of it? Because I think we can have a lot of new players coming in and being active and productive, but only if they have the ability and permission to change things. If we never get to the point where we can cross that 60% threshold on anything “controversial”, then I’d be worried that we’ll still get new players coming in, but they’ll leave before we hit that critical mass.
And to address the obvious political issue here… Even if we do completely rewrite the Charter from scratch, we’re being held at gunpoint by Local Councilors. They will vote down any Charter that doesn’t save their titles. It’s almost illegitimate the way we have a preference the clear majority of the community holds, but we can’t move forward because of self-interested office-holders who have continuously failed to do anything worthwhile with their roles.
I’ve continuously said to revoke the fact that the LC has an autonomous-to-separate jurisdiction. This was mostly ignored, in my opinion more because of who it was proposed by than the proposal itself - naturally I wholeheartedly agree with a stagnant moderation team, in my personal experience.
I digress. Chapter Sovereignty of the Charter where it’s stated that The Coalition is the only legitimate representative of the TSP region might be interpreted in a way where the colloquial gunpoint is circumvented.
The supermajority discussions are really secondary to me. If there is will for a new Constitution to be adopted and there are certain pesky issues with such a change; I will paraphrase a message I’ve read months ago saying “Liberate Yourselves”. Essentially, staging an interior coup would be ethically justified to me and that is the only justification I need. It should be noted that THIS idea is coming from the same user who has called TSP’s current regime a “client-agent oligarchy” not too long ago.