I do believe that there are certain ministries that should exist at all times. These are ministries that I would consider “constitutional ministries” because they serve such an important purpose that it would not make sense to get rid of them. There are three such portfolios that I cannot envision being thrown away at a PM’s whim: foreign affairs, defense, and the World Assembly. Even if we did away with the textual permanence of our ministries, any PM who did away with the MoFA, MoD, or future MoWL would not reasonably last too long as a PM.
I plan to lead the cabinet based on faith and confidence in my appointees’ judgment. I don’t agree that decisions in the cabinet necessarily have to be based on a vote, more so on consensus-based decisions. When I served in the cabinet in the past, we didn’t make many decisions based on votes. Most decisions we made came after a thorough and fleshed-out discussion, reaching an agreement on a course of action. I envision more of the same in the next term.
Man, I really want to vote for you. Most of your campaign is reasonable, even the FA parts. But your stance on the TNP debacle is just … almost disqualifyingly wrong. I can respect your desire to see the Aurora Alliance end (even if I disagreed), but to say TSP (or TGW/XKI/TL) did nothing wrong going into it is also clearly wrong, for all the reasons that I’ve outlined elsewhere.
Where I do agree is that we can’t change it now and can learn from it. I just feel like you’re taking principally correct lessons from very wrong reasons.
I do have to reply to some specific things:
No no, this is wrong. The “scheming bastards” (by which I assume you mean LWU, Hulldom, and the peanut gallery) grabbed four mics in the first place, and then XKI/TGW/TL took their respective mics back by simply owning up to it. TSP took much, much longer, and that was peanut gallery fuel of the highest order.
No, this is wrong, and as proof I don’t need to point further than my 5 terms as TSP PM and my year-long tenure as First Warden of TGW, not to mention general prevailing attitude of TGW as well as (to a lesser extent) TL. XKI, TRR, and TSP (when I wasn’t PM and/or Glen wasn’t involved in Cabinet) have been more like you described traditionally. It’s not a Defender thing, it’s a thing with specific regions (including TSP).
It’s funny. Both Roavin and I disagree with Em’s position on the end of the Aurora Alliance. But Roavin is engaging in some highest order historical revisionism.
As we all know, the way “scheming bastards” typically work their magic is by having Ministers of Foreign Affairs directly approach the Delegates, First Wardens, and Consuls of other regions and having honest conversations about their strategic interests, agreeing on a course of action, and then following through on it.
Wait…that’s actually…the most straight-forward and legitimate way of executing foreign policy in the history of NationStates. You can’t even argue that the people involved were in some way not “real” governments of their regions – not only were they the representatives identified in legally-binding treaties but also they were the people putting in the actual work to run their regions (and, tbh, the entire faction) for months (bordering on a whole year) prior. They also all were people with sole interests in the regions they led, not people with fingers in multiple regions trying to maintain their grip on an interregional consensus of power despite it actively harming their regions.
You know what is the move of a “scheming bastard”? It’s having a conversation about a regional policy you don’t like right in front of your face for weeks and then not commenting, and instead working in concert with foreign actors to raise a massive shitstink in NSGP to the utter detriment of the public relations of not just one but two regions of which you’re a citizen, all before opting to use the internal methods of expressing your opinions that you are well within your rights to use.
It would’ve been one thing if you had taken your issue to the Assembly and initiated a recall against the PM, or just raised a very very loud stink in the Private Halls. Those things are well within your rights. As Glen said when this all happened, issues with TSP government policy can be handled fully within the four corners of TSP.
Making the GP forum your first stop for a complaint with your own government, and checking the TSP server on an important issue only when pinged in NSGP by MadJack (who just received his third Court conviction in his home region)…those are not the actions of an honest legislator of this Assembly
I mean, yeah, I’ve posted in some length in Private Hall about things I could’ve done better… I’ll concede it looks that way. But a point that I do want to push back on is the notion that we had four individuals who grabbed mics for themselves. I’m not angry enough at anyone to call them “scheming bastards,” sorry, because I think that misses the point. It definitely misses the point when it comes to TSP, at least.
In our apology to TNP, Henn and I specifically noted our regret for relying excessively on individual foreign policy actors. When we discover a single point of failure in a system, it isn’t productive to say that they grabbed a mic for themselves, that the problem starts and ends with them, and that they deserve all the blame. We’re better off as a region looking at how we ended up with that kind of single point of failure in the first place, and learning about how we can make our decision-making processes more robust going forwards.
To an extent, Em’s right here? I think most of us can agree that we could’ve done a better job of influencing the public narrative, even if we disagree about what that narrative should have been. It’s not like HS was out on the warpath in the GP forums, hogging the mic… they literally resigned? I know you were quoting Em, but I really don’t see how HS was a “scheming bastard.”
HS, you completely misunderstood me. With “scheming bastards”, I meant the people that took this public, not you/GK/Q/etc… Which … should be obvious, because I was replying to Em directly. I’ll go back and edit to make it more clear regardless.
Since the rest of your post is basically incoherent (and inaccurate) “roavin bad” based on that misunderstanding, I’ll pretend like you didn’t write it.
Oh cry me a river. “Disqualifyingly wrong.” If the same thing happened in real life, which it in fact does all the time, no one would be yelling extortion or whining and crying about it like little children. The defenders engaged in what was otherwise standard FA, and the only thing that was wrong about it (in the eyes of our enemies) was that we engaged in it. If anything’s disqualifyingly wrong, it was your near-constant appeasement of the raiders during the whole debacle, your desperate quest for their social approval, and the constant bashing of your own region for something that was never morally or ethically wrong, which was defending the interests of our region and the cause.
I’m probably in the minority here, but TSP did nothing wrong and even if it did, as a matter of principle, the government should never have apologised.