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I am in so much trouble. I thought that the recommendations were the maximum amount; that was recommendations! I need foreign Aid really bad. May I please have help from the black market?
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I humbly request that the New Pacific Order levy formal charges against Invicta. The vagueness of the crime, makes it hard for me to counter. I may be guilty. But I want you to charge me. Give it to me straight. I want you to tell me why. If you do so privately, if you reply here; if the reason is something concrete, or you simply wanted some spice. I demand you respond. Yours sincerely, -KingWilliam
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This afternoon, I noticed that a month ago I was asked what I thought about the Polaris-NG treaty. Yes, a month, I love you all, but I just don't care too much, anymore. I read my answer at Polaris' forum, and decided that it is sufficiently interesting to me that I know everyone else will be thrilled to read it. You're quite welcome. In all seriousness, even though the treaty itself is old news, the question became a platform to discuss philosophy, and I love talking foreign policy. I understand you're reducing your big FA moment down to a gotcha on me, but here's the serious answer. We will examine my opinion on Polaris' FA decision through the philosophy I have always used in regards to FA, illuminated by personal example. My opinion springs from my ideology, and ideology guides my actions, it all fits. My thoughts/philosophy on treaties in general should be well known enough, by now, (1, 2, 3) but I am keenly aware that my personality has overshadowed my message for a long time. So to recap, in short: First: A treaty is an endorsement, and a partnership, and it ties responsibility for one AA's actions to the other. For example, New Polar Order in 2007 can't PZI 20 people a year without being shored up by 3 or 4 different blocs, or NPO in 2008 can't keep GATO at war indefinitely for using peace mode without having 16 top flight AAs backing them up. Lip service does not change culpability. For example, if OsRavan says "I'm totally against reps" 500 times a day, then sits down in peace talks and says to Cult of Justitia "you will have no peace with ODN until you agree to pay GOONS $200,000,000" and to Legion "you will not have peace until you pay our allies $1 Billion" then what matters? The principles ODN says they hold, or the actions ODN takes? There can be no denying that a treaty is an endorsement and a partnership. Any such denial is intellectual dishonesty at best and in reality is simply a lie politicians tell each other, themselves, and the people in their AAs. Second: Alliances are organic entities. They are not static, they change. Recognition of that fact in foreign affairs and public discourse has always been central to my political stances. For example, Vox Populi was a reactionary popular movement against the Continuum bloc's "hegemony" (I never really liked that word, but that's the parlance)—not because a hegemony existed, but because of how it acted: Viceroys, people banned from being gov, ZI transforming from a harsh punishment to PZI lists as eternal black lists that removed people from the game and then to EZI (parlance again, EZI is just PZI), forced disbandment, OOC attacks by the hegemony against their enemies, and so on. New Pacific Order and New Polar Order were central to that. It was a feedback loop: they did harsh crap by the endorsement of their allies, but their allies often did worse things while NPO/NpO pretended to be more civilized villains—they were all responsible for the results of their power politics, the results of their power politics were the point of their treaties. In 2007-08 New Polar Order wrecked my AA GOONS (which was a vile AA and I was too new to the game to really know it), then spent a year chasing all of us around, PZIing us, threatening alliances we joined, setting up proxy blocs on Black to dominate the Senate, and everything else in the history books. Post-Vox, as the leader of CoJ I penned blistering attacks on New Polar Order. Yet here I am, member of New Polar Order. Because I'm a hypocrite? No, because between the time Polaris PZIed me to the end of Karma, Polaris changed wildly. And then from the time I founded CoJ and wrote that essay to the time I allied CoJ to Polaris and then dissolved CoJ and joined Polaris, Polaris had undergone even more transformations. Therefore: Treaties and military cooperation are endorsement and culpability; therefore, alliances should choose allies whose actions align with their character and ideals, or accept the hypocrisy that their actions are at odds with their identity and move on. (Realpolitik is just that, the allegiance to a distasteful ally to get a hard job done.) But the prospective allies out their, alliances, are not beholden to the past. There is no inherent hypocrisy in allying an alliance that wasn't in line with one's ideals 5 years ago or even 5 weeks ago for that matter if they have changed. There is no hypocrisy in recognizing change. People make lazy ad hominem arguments, obsess about my over-the-top persona and ego, and simply label any shifting allegiance I make as "hypocrisy" or selling out. These processes are a complicated ideological discernment and judgement. Politics from ideology is complicated, people don't like it, they don't like to wade through it. What do I think about this treaty in particular? I haven't paid any attention at all to Planet Bob in at least a year. I've been quiet because I hate retractions; I don't post unless I know. It's fun to stick my head out and rip on OsRavan once a year, but it's also simply the case that the past is just about the only topic I'm informed to speak on intelligently. I don't know if this treaty is realpolitik, or if Non Grata has become significantly different to a degree that you're a perfect fit for Polaris. Or maybe Polaris has changed sufficiently that we're a perfect fit for an unchanged Non Grata (in which case I'll start AA shopping :P ) A dear old friend left Polaris because of this treaty, I respect his discernment and principled stance for his own nation. If there is a meeting of minds between NG and Polaris, I'm glad we're working together. If Polaris and NG are engaged in realpolitik, that's a reality an idealist like me has to swallow sometimes to get things done (I always was a chaos agent with a conscience, myself)—my problem would be if Polaris lent its NS to seriously bad behavior, or if Polaris shifted what should be a short-term cooperation (realpolitik) into a long term FA position (hypocrisy). I said "in short" so there you have it, Schattenmann is a liar.
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Good afternoon. This weekend marked the ninth year since the founding of Schloss Eggenberg on Digiterra, the tiny Alpine domain which hides the Schattenmann, its enigmatic and long-lived protector, body-swapping observer of time. Over the past nine years, my star on Planet Bob has pulsated, burning high when passions rose, and dimming alternatively. Since 2013, I have receded from the public stage, so many of you will not know me, and it is not my intention to type out my history again. Below this post, I will quote myself from the past for those who are interested in history. Despite my increasing inactivity, I still receive many letters asking for advice or help. It pains me every time that I have little to say in the way of specifics, anymore. What I think about the state of things is that the solution to the atrophied nature of the political scene, the silence across IRC and this OWF, the solution to breaking this gridlock of apathy is to at last discover the nature of your alliances and follow your hearts. What we have is not peace or order, as some believe or claim, but walking death. An alliance is the sum of its constituent nations regardless of the political nature of its form, whether it takes the form of a democratic autocracy (as Pacifica and Polaris) or democracy, or whatever else, the entity is the nations acting in unison. You control your alliance by your association with it. You must examine your own values, and you must examine the values of your alliance. Every alliance exists for the same reason: mutual protection, mutual growth, but every alliance differs out from that. Find the alliance whose character aligns with your own, or work to build a consensus within your alliance around the character you want it to have. Is techraiding wrong or not? Are compulsory (M-level) treaties acceptable or not? How should team Senators be used? The answers to questions like these are the character of your alliance. Once an alliance understands its identity, it must understand that to sign military treaties with alliances whose character are opposed to its own ideals is to betray itself. Would you deny your values and embrace hypocrisy for, not peace, but false truce? War is not the inevitable result or even desired result of drawing a line between yourselves and those who do not share your values. This is not a call for chaos but for fidelity. And where conflict arises between alliances of differing values, are your ideals, your character, your values not worth war? Passion stirs activity. Alliances must work to create a global situation which draws their individual members into this world and enthralls their passions to better the alliance, to better their nations, to stand apart in the world and if necessary stand opposed to the world. This mewling stagnation born of political self-betrayal is the death of interest. This has been my message since Vox Populi overthrew the global order and showed that rulers do matter, that rulers of nations are the foundation of political play, and that when rulers associate and act based upon their shared values they are powerful. It is my message to you still on the event of my ninth anniversary. The idealist can only battle the world for so long. I am sorry that I have left you all. I regret that my growing disillusion across the years made me so acerbic as to be ineffectual in the twilight of my influential years. I am so glad that Van Hoo and Doitzel have returned lately, and I hope you will stick around, and make sparks. When no one else would touch me after Vox, Van Hoo put his fledgling alliance on the line, and invested in my ideas, and made Cult of Justitia and everything that flowed from it possible; anyone who insults him insults me. I miss my old friends, I was never good at keeping in touch from one alliance to the next. I am grateful to anyone who ever read my essays, tirades, and declarations and took some part of them to heart. Writing for all of you gave me joy, and I am glad that you were entertained or moved. I am proud of the things I accomplished, though so many were in the shadows, or seemed very small in the wider world—I always prided myself on making a big bang with a small charge. Yours, Schattenmann
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Are the alliances in this game divided over political issues (democracy vs. totalitarianism, capitalism vs. socialism, what have you)? I can't find manifestos in any single place, so it is hard to tell the political shape of the world. I'm a new and idealistic nation that wants to be on the side of what it thinks of as "good".
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Political Parties are Stupid and Counterproductive
Malik Shabazz posted a blog entry in Brother Malcolm Speaks
With that out of the way, I would like to get into my discussion. We Americans like to think that we have this perfect utopia-like democracy, where people get a free vote. I think that this is funny, because there is no free vote. Look at the last Presidential election, out of the six people that ran; only two were allowed to debate. Yea, so much for "free and fair" elections. Our government likes to talk about "upholding democracy" around the world, when our republic is so flawed. Our republic has a lot of flaws, but to be specific one of the biggest flaws it has are the self-serving political parties. Americans, take a look at our country: Our economy is in the toilet and we have a do-nothing government. Why? Because of political parties. It has been argued that political parties are the foundation of any democracy. I think that this is a load of crap, because they only encourage division. Why do you think that every bill that has been proposed to fix our economy has gone nowhere? One of the two political parties always shuts the plan down, that's why. Then, the sheep who don't know any better argue about who's party is better and which party is responsible for what. Whenever I hear or see Americans argue about things like this, I . The reality is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans care about you or you interests, but only their own. Proof of this: When a plan is proposed that will fix the economy, depending on who's proposing it, one of the two parties will instantly vote against it. In contrast, when it's time to go to war or bail out some greedy corporation; they'll agree in an instant. Brothers and sisters, the reality is, political parties are not democratic. You can sit here and say that our founding fathers envisioned a republic and not a democracy, and as such it really does not matter whether or not they are democratic. As you can see in the quotes above, our founding fathers warned us against political parties and how they will divide the United States. Now they have. We have no one to blame but ourselves, because these are the people we vote into office. I'm not saying we should ban political parties, because that would also be undemocratic. I'm saying that we should grow balls and call these politicians out, even if they are in the same political party as you. Let's stop pointing fingers: "Those damn liberals, conservatives are retarded", and come to the realization that they're all just two separate turds in the same toilet. This is From the Mind of Loki, Thank You and God Bless, -Loki Laufeyson -
In case you have not noticed, there is a new CN radio network, CyberNations International Broadcasting. Bloodfury and bros have put in a huge amount of work to put up the infrastructure, and several DJs have begun populating the network. After much pushing and pulling, Bloodfury got me to sign on to a bi-weekly show Thursdays at 9 PM EST (8 PM server). This week in CN will be a political talkshow dedicated to current events and interviews with headline-makers. Shows will be archived and re-played for those who couldn't tune in for the live broadcast. Our first show saw Pacifican Emperor and Bootleg Radio host Brehon as the guest for the hour. It will air again on Monday the 19th at 8 PM EST (7 PM server). Future re-runs might not be in that timeframe depending on how the DJ schedule pans out (right now that time slot is not occupied). After each replay, I'll post a link to a permanent stream. You can tune in directly from the network's forum, or via your favorite media program (WinAMP, WMP, REAL, or Quicktime) here: http://www.cnib-group.com/boards/index.php Enjoy!
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Firstly, the Viridian war on Polar, which expanded due to the entry on both sides of several allies. The CB for our war is clear, laid out by Impero in our DoW thread and honestly I am surprised so many people seem to think it is weak. There are logs there of a foreign official discussing potential target alliances with a spy and telling him he should spy on VE, which he then did and reported back to the leader in question. I am in Viridian government and have been fully in support of Impero's moves since the logs were first brought to us. Yes, Dajobo and Polar got played by Lennox, who wasn't really trying to help them get information, he was trying to start a war. But he still sent Lennox to spy on VE. As for jumping straight into war, the political moves recently meant that when a good reason for war was presented to us, against an alliance in one of the Orders' power spheres, it was likely to be advantageous to take it. That made it extra silly to provide such a good one. Regarding the 'exposure' made by RV in World Affairs: a sting operation was carried out, after we had already received the logs and were fairly sure that there was a CB against Polar, to make absolutely sure that we weren't just being played by Lennox and that it really was Dajobo and Polaris involved. We did not set up the original logs, the meeting between Lennox and Dajobo or anything apart from the final screenshot handover that acts as final proof of Dajobo's involvement. And secondly, the Doomhouse war on Pacifica, which is also escalating through the entry of allies – alliances which were tangentially bound to the Polar war but had found ways not to enter find their own power sphere (and MDP partner, in many cases) under direct attack and have to respond. While I can understand some of the reasoning behind this attack, I cannot support it. I am not against pre-emptive or aggressive attacks in all circumstances. For example, one could argue that the Polar front of the War of the Coalition was pre-emptive, and it was certainly aggressive. I criticised C&G for playing the moral high ground card so strongly in Bipolar, because I believed TOP and IRON's move to mostly be a strategic mistake, rather than morally abhorrent as the C&G propaganda corps would have had you believe. However, there are two things which make this attack unsupportable to me. Firstly there is the obvious hypocrisy. Some ex-Hegemony propagandists who care more about PR than I do have gone through the Bipolar War threads and selected some relevant quotes to demonstrate it, but I'm sure we all remember how MK in particular (but also other alliances now fighting with them or supporting them) railed against the injustice of the pre-emptive attack on them, and used it as justification for imposing very large reparations on the pre-emptive attackers. It is then deeply hypocritical to perform a pre-emptive attack themselves. And the second problem with it is that it is not (unlike TOP and IRON) a genuine pre-empt. The NPO was attempting to stay out of the Polar part of this war – if the rumours are to be believed, going so far as to pressure mutual allies of the Polar and Pacific power spheres to find ways to stay out. That makes this not a pre-emptive attack, but simply an aggressive attack on an alliance at its moment of weakness. It is a sound material strategic move, but it is exactly the sort of actions that the Orders-led Hegemony was (rightly) demonised for. A lot of nonsense gets talked about Karma every time there is political drama. But I, at least, did not fight Karma simply to put a new alliance at the top of the tree – and, in fairness, the 'better world' really has been better so far. Rolling alliances because you don't like them and they represent some vague threat in the future is something most of us explicitly fought against, either from a moralist platform or through the experience of it happening to them. Have MK really forgotten the lessons of noCB? This war, or these wars, remind me strongly of the position Citadel found itself in in the War of the Coalition. We attacked Polar with a fairly good CB, but at the same time, some allies and allies-by-proxy attacked a related alliance with pretty much no CB at all. We ended up linked to them in the mess of coalition warfare, even though we were justified and they were not. Once again, my alliance and its coalition attacks Polar, and then a related but not aggressive alliance is attacked with (in this case literally) no CB. The dogs of war are now well and truly loosed, and the political fallout will come later. But I would ask those who have attacked simply because they could to look in the mirror and to pull back from the abyss. Do not become what you once fought against.
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War has started once more. The propaganda machine has been turned on, slowly gearing up to churn out the drivel and rhetoric that infests the forums around war time. The usual heavy hitters can be seen advocating and debating for their respective side's (actions/stances, take your pick) in this rapidly engulfing conflict. Was NEW in the right? No. Was it ethical for them to do so? Undoubtedly no. Was it moral for them to take vengeance? Vengeance has never been moral. Did NEW exercise their right to take vengeance? Indeed, they did. Were PC/iFOK cowards for not outright defending their ally in NEW? Subjective to each person's independent view, though personally I can understand their position. Is it obvious that they tried their best at ending the conflict peacefully? Undoubtedly so. Did the current power structure surrounding Pandora's Box play a part in this situation? Yes. I do admit that it is a bit surprising to see the past motto of 'Friends > Infra' being used by the side labeled by most as Ex-heg/Polaris against SG/PB. Then again, politics is always in motion and the power that used to rest at Q's hand is now in the hands of SG/PB, there is no doubt about that. Will this war be a curbstomp? That still has to be seen depending on how the counter DoW's are done. Either way, war is war even when it might be vastly overwhelming on one side. All we're here is to play a war game behind a thin veil of a political simulator, not to stagnate the war game by overusing the "realpolitik" of the political simulator. PS: Happy Christmas and Happy Holidays, everybody.
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It's war time again, and that means the inevitable attempts by both sides to paint themselves as the holy defenders beating back the barbarian aggressor hordes. That makes it a good time to look at aggression and defence in an objective fashion. First, let's make clear that there two different concepts here. There is the concept of aggression versus defence, and the concept of a justified or unjustified war ('valid CB' or 'invalid CB'). In this case, Ragnarok's CB is cast iron: a government official deliberately and knowingly aiding an enemy after being warned not to do so is the best CB of any war for some time. This is not a note about the CB, but about what it actually means to be the aggressor. There is a longstanding precedent that being provoked into a war doesn't make you the defender. The most obvious recent example is Karma, where NPO is almost universally considered to be the aggressor, despite their rather feeble attempts to justify it based on OV accepting screenshots. That situation is perhaps a little different in that they did not manage to prove that OV had committed 'acts of war' as so considered by most alliances, but no-one outside their immediate circle of friends would consider that anything other than aggressive. (And because OV couldn't be shown to have done anything seriously wrong, unjustified aggression at that, which is why so many alliances joined together to fight them at that moment.) Another approach to the argument is to point out that 'acts of war' – aid and in-game spying – do not actually put you in a state of war at all. It's therefore non-sensical to claim that such acts immediate put you in a state of defensive war – if you don't choose to start a war over them, there is no war at all, so how can it be defensive. With spying this is particularly true as many spy ops are not even revealed, so they clearly don't start a war because you don't even know who you're supposedly fighting! You can test this by aiding a rogue nation and observing how it doesn't immediately put you at war with the alliance upon which the rogue is going rogue, though you should expect to pay reparations for such an experiment. Let's take a look at a document which was well respected for a long time, and which actually defined the concept of 'aggression', the Citadel treaty: [OOC: Note that the Lux Aeterna was written before in-game spying. Espionage doesn't mean that.] It's one of the very few documents to actually make a stab at defining aggression and defence for legal purposes, and as far as I'm aware no-one ever challenged these definitions. In less lawyerly terms, it means that you are acting aggressively if you start a war unless (i) someone attacked you, (ii) you are activating an MDP or (iii) someone is (out of game, i.e. forum) spying on you. The addition of that third clause is interesting in itself, as in general spying is considered to be a solid CB but not in itself aggression, and in point of fact Citadel did not actually follow that clause when TOP was spied upon by Vox (Grämlins, FCC and Umbrella did not declare war on Vox). However, forum spying is so rare these days (everyone realises how dumb it is) that the presence of the espionage clause can be considered an interesting anomaly and is not directly relevant. What is clear is that being provoked into a war by words (TOP/IRON in Bipolar) or aid (RoK here) relieves you from being aggressors. Another place to look is the labyrinthine legalities of OBR treaties. For example, in their MDP with GR, we find this exception to defensive obligations: The second part of that is a standard non-chaining clause, but the first defines 'aggression' in the context of the treaty, and a declaration of war is considered aggressive (i.e. voids the defensive obligation) whatever justification it may have. (In the Writ de Credo one can find a very broad definition of 'hostility', but that treaty was, as we now know, drafted as a legal trap and its definitions chosen accordingly.) So we can see from three separate approaches – precedent, logic and well regarded legal documentation – that what counts as aggression is being the first ones to start the war. It can become blurred later in a war (for example is all of Karma defensive? or just the alliances which were attacked and their MDP partners?), but at the outset it is clear: the alliances which start the war (NPO in Karma, NpO in Bipolar, and RoK/GOD/R&R/VE here) are aggressors, and their immediate targets (OV, \m/ or NSO) are defenders. A final reminder that this is not a post about justification. It is possible to be a justified aggressor; a good example from history would be the attack on Golden Sabres for supporting FAN's senator during the FAN war. In this case that is unusually clear-cut because of NSO's willingness to put their alliance in a dangerous position (taking in active rogues) that others wouldn't.
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A month and a half: How long is 'aggressive defence' justified?
Bob Janova posted a blog entry in Serian News Corporation
As we stand here today, the TOP/IRON-C&G front of the Bi-Polar War has been raging for a month and a half (the entirety of February, 12 days of March and 3 of January), and for almost all of that time has been a one sided destruction of the pre-emptive attackers. Peace negotiations are taking place, but so far the only terms offered by the winners are quite outrageous, and the rhetoric from C&G is not conciliatory – for example they have called the TOP/IRON counter-offer 'insulting' and suggested that they did not highball the original offer. The question begins to arise, how long can a war (and a defensive front of a war) be permitted to go on before it becomes oppression, extended war and all those other things used to describe Hegemonic wars? How long should C&G be able to claim the moral high ground associated with 'defence' (even though they could have avoided the front, as explained elsewhere, should they have not wished for the war) before bringing serious offers to the peace table? On this particular issue we are short of precedents. In Karma, the NPO was kept down for just on three months – but the NPO was paying for the sins of the entire Hegemony, and a large part of that time was a waiting game attempting to goad the larger nations out of peace mode. IRON received peace after one month, Echelon a month and a half, and as part of the 'Coalition of Cowards', their entry was considered aggressive by Karma. (The rest of the CoC received peace earlier and with lighter terms.) During the BLEU war and noCB, hostilities lasted one month in total (excluding OcUK). This conflict has also been used as precedent for peace terms, with then-record reparations being demanded, and the beginning of the end for 'draconian terms' like wonder decom and forced government changes, but today we are looking at the duration of war. Unlike in this war, the pre-empters won, but the arguments around the timing and terms of the peace were similar to today; Polaris was attacked for being a threat and peace was only offered when that was deemed to be no longer the case. This war – and the peace after – has long been used as an example of injustice, starting with the Vox Populi movement in the immediate aftermath of that war. Previous major wars also lasted one month or less. The time for the first 'extended war' in modern history – VietFAN (part 1), described as an 'occupation-like conflict' in its official history – was three months. FAN attacked the protectorate of a bloc member out of the blue, a significantly worse crime of aggression than a pre-emptive attack during an existing war. The CoC during Karma attacked already militarily engaged alliances during an existing war, a lesser crime of aggression. That would put the answer to the question at somewhere between one month and three for the intermediate crime of TOP/IRON. The only directly comparable precedent is that of Legion during GW3, though that war is not modern enough to be a direct guide – but Legion received a broadly comparable peace to the other League alliances, after three weeks. If directly applied now, that would mean a white peace or 1 billion reps applied several weeks ago! In conclusion, it appears that by the only direct precedent of the treatment of pre-emptive attacks during war, C&G would already have overstepped the mark for what is reasonable (in fact kept TOP/IRON down for twice as long as Legion were). On more recent precedents, of related but not identical situations, that time is round about now. People may point to the NPO in Karma, but most alliances in Karma received peace in less time than TOP/IRON have been kept at war, and the extended duration of the NPO front was down to waiting for 'peace mode warriors' (and perhaps nascent hegemonic thoughts from Athens, who have been at the forefront of neo-hegemonist actions since C&G became strong enough to do them). C&G should be coming to the table with the intention of actually negotiating a fair and reasonable peace settlement, not continuing with an extended, unbalanced war of occupation under the fig leaf of 'defence'.
