I’m a bit surprised to see you run for Prime Minister, honestly. I already hinted at my biggest reservation in my previous question, i.e. activity. For a few months, you haven’t been terribly active here and haven’t been involved in any Ministries, so I am a bit concerned that your current ability or interest in investing time will stay. That said, I also respect that motivation dictates our investment in NS just as much as external constraints, and you do have a fairly comprehensive platform. I think you’re setting up an interesting campaign.
A few more specific questions:
This is not, in and of itself, a bad tagline and is clearly intended to contrast with the incumbent’s handling of the TNP SC votes situation. I do find it a bit odd that it’s a slogan not really brought up anywhere else in the campaign, but that’s not the root of my question.
I think Prime Minister ProfessorHenn took a lot of flack for how they handled this situation, both from those who think we should have rolled over completely to our bestestest ally The North Pacific to appease the GP hoards (which they certainly manipulated to force our hand) and from those who thought we should have started torching things ASAP. There was definitely room for improvement in how the Prime Minister handled things at various stages, but I honestly do thing the strategy was the right one. (It’s worth noting, since some have speculated otherwise, my resignation was entirely my initiation and idea, and was not under the direction of the PM.)
That said, I do think in the broad strokes the last administration made the right calls. And here’s why, and why I want to push back on your simple slogan. After LWU’s Good Friday statement, we faced an extremely bitter scene interregionally. TGW’s commanders publicly threw their own leader under the bus along with us. When TGW flipped, which we had previously seen no signs of happening, TL decided to join them in pinning the whole thing on us. XKI woke up the next morning and realized they didn’t have the consensus either. TRR was never going to be reliable in supporting this type of maneuver and all of our Independent allies were either sitting things out or ready to bite our heads off. We just didn’t have the muscle to stand by the statement.
In the midst of that, sure, one option was to double down and say “we did nothing wrong”. However, such an option was not remotely feasible. We would have had not a single region support us, all due to a manufactured outrage by some of our own citizens which badly damaged the region’s PR and foreign relationships. Damage control was not a sexy option but it was a necessary one to avert far greater losses. It was never about repairing our relationship with TNP. It was about retaining and building the rest of our relationships – ones that actually matter – with other defenders who were sounding alarm bells.
Given that set up, would you really have stood your ground? I respect taking pride in your principles. (In fact, my principles are why I resigned: the Coalition comes first and I come second.) Yet, even the most principled player, in my opinion, at some point must recognize which fights they can and cannot win. If you would have stood your ground, how would you then have won the fight? Or re-established the region’s reputation and repaired its relationships after it?
I find this idea interesting, but I have two questions.
- How will you give this Dispatch project the structure that it needs to avoid being a “camel”, which is arguably the biggest problem with our Dispatches currently?
- How would you manage the technological/coding side of this? Or, what tool would need to be created to manage it?
Somewhat relatedly, how do you feel about the Discourse Wizards and Integration and Dispatches/TGs projects/discussions?
At this point, the quiet part needs to be said out loud. I agree that Aegis can be described by strength, after all the updater might of Aegis’ regions is unparalleled. Success too, although to a bit more mixed of an extent.
Solidarity though? Solidarity does not describe the current state of the Aegis or of Defenderdom. Defender solidarity is at its lowest point since the UDL’s existence, quite arguably, and to a truly devastating effect. The TNP debacle showed that defenders don’t even have loyalty to their own regionmates, much less others in the faction, when raider smear artists in the GP forum are loud enough. The Euro/TRR incident further cemented this, possibly making things even worse in terms of setting a tone for future interactions. Trust in this faction is hard to come by right now, and as much as I would love to play the blame game for that, now we have to fix it. A few events wouldn’t hurt, but there’s some tough conversations that need to be had to restore credibility to Aegis, imo.
How would you build solidarity and cohesion in Aegis?
How is this different from the current foreign affairs council?
I think, in concept, this is good. How will this work in practice? I realize both you and @ProfessorHenn are avoiding naming names of who you’d put in your Cabinet (which, as an aside, is an interesting precedent that you’re both setting in our first ever election for PMs that appoint their Ministers!), but I am curious if you have a shortlist of names for this job. I, personally, see recent inactivity in OWL as driven by lack of interest that goes so deep it might be hard to find a WA Minister.
Full support for this. It doesn’t really matter to me what we call it, but the WA Act just doesn’t make sense given our recent government reforms, so I’d be happy for us to rework it.