I want to see what the consensus is for these.

If you are a government member acting in official capacity for your government, does messaging an alliance's members for the following reasons constitute an infringement on that alliance's sovereignty?

1) Messaging to vote for a senate candidate, when the alliance member is located off-team (not on the alliance's team)

For example, you're blue and there's a member of a predominately aqua alliance in your blue trade circle right now. Would it infringe on said aqua alliance's sovereignty to message this member and ask him to vote for your alliance's blue senator?

2) Messaging to vote for a(nother) senate candidate, when the alliance member is located on-team (located on the alliance's team)

Similar to 1) but the instead of it being an aqua alliance, the guy is in a predominately blue alliance. Would it infringe on said blue alliance's sovereignty to ask him to vote for a blue senator other than the one his alliance officially supports?

3) Situation 1 but with mass messaging

Instead of messaging a specific person you know or are in a trade circle with, you message indiscriminately everyone in an orange team alliance but only if they're on the blue team. In the message you ask them to vote for your blue team senator.

4) Situation 2 but with mass messaging

Self-explanatory

5) Messaging a friend or other specific nation you know in another alliance, asking them to switch over to either your or another alliance
(OOC: By "friend" here, I mean a nation you know through playing the game, not someone you know in real life. I don't think anybody in their right mind would seriously consider you asking a co-worker or significant other to switch to your alliance being questionable behavior)

6) Mass Messaging all members in another alliance, asking them to switch over to either your or another alliance

7) Situation 6 but said alliance has either just or is in the process of disbanding/merging AND you DID have something to do with the previous alliance

For example, Alliance A merges with Alliance B. You don't like B and, as you are a member of A, decide to officially leave A and either form your own alliance or join another existing alliance. You mass message everyone still on A telling them to come to your alliance.

8) Situation 6 but said alliance has either just or is in the process of disbanding/merging AND you had nothing to do with the alliance before

Voted all, because technically they all infringe on an alliance's sovereignity.
An alliance reacting to it or not is a different question.

Can we have a "none" option please?

Does "null vote" not count in the total results? I thought it did. Ok, I'll add a none option.

Ah, voting now and looking at the vote count, looks like it does.

I want there to be an option "In contradiction of the alliance's policies."

There's probably some alliance out there (I can think of a couple examples that get close) that bans its members from all outside contact entirely.

I would say all do.

None of them do. It's just messages. They do no harm at all and can be deleted.

None of that has anything to do with sovereignty. Though you might think so if you considered nations the property of their alliance. Well that's not true... rulers rightfully consider their nations property and such messages still aren't violations of sovereignty for a nation without an alliance. Yeah, none of that has anything to do with sovereignty.

The only ones that would raise my hackles were the recruiting from another alliances, a la NSO. Other than that, its cool

It's all PMs, man.

Please explain why an alliance has this right.

Because that's, like, the way it's always been!

Someone is trying to play e-lawyer.

"Infringe on sovereignty?" Probably not. But it's extremely rude and provocative. That's enough.

If I wanted to know whether people thought it was rude and provocative, I would've asked that in the poll.

No, what I'm curious about is how predominant a view it is that those situations are all out infringements on sovereignty. Getting a few explanations for the responses would be cool too.

I understand the reasoning that the NSO used during the whole scandal, but I still don't like that they were doing it. It speaks volumes about the amount of respect that the NSO held for the neutrals and was essentially a slap in the face to them. Twist it what ever way you want, it was uncalled for.

It doesn't even really infringes on the sovereignty, but people are free to feel pissed off when things like that happens.

If that's true then I guess we have something in common, no?

Anyways, voted none, can't wait for the inevitable trainwreck.

Recruiting from other alliances is the only "not-done" scenario for me.

Hai NSO.

I voted for the last option.
I think that members of an alliance are citizens, not subjects, and that asking/proposing anything to them isn't infringing on their alliance's sovereignty.
That alliance is also within its rights to take offence for it, anyway, and to "do something" about it. Any CB is good for the people in the military...

Bypassing the diplomatic route and an alliance's leadership to contact the membership directly over matters that an alliance deals with (tech selling, senate voting, etc.) is poor form in my opinion and any alliance suffering this has every right to be cheesed off.

However it's one of those things that has always happened and unfortunately nine times out of ten it's dealt with completely the wrong way. "That's not the way things are done" is increasingly become an obsolete argument.

I voted all apart from #5, 7 and 8

Voted a resounding meh, or none of the above. At the most I could see that it would be infringing the country's "personal" sovereignty but not the Alliance's¹.

Senate: well there is probably some Alliance-wide request/order to vote for one particular candidate, and if the member is moved to vote for some one else then s/he either has a will of their own (good!) or their Alliance has failed to make them understand what to do and why (bad!).

Change Alliance: if the member is so influenced by that message that he leaves for another Alliance, then he and/or the original Alliance really was not fit for each other so who cares? Let them leave.



¹ unless it happens to be Purple, when apparently saying hello counts as a horrible offense against good taste and decency

I'm not going to vote because I don't want to get tied up in a semantic argument about what is or isn't part of an alliance's sovereignty. But all of those things are poor form and are likely to result in, at least, diplomatic consequences.

I honestly don't see anything wrong with any of these.

'Messaging specific, individual nations off-team to vote for a senate candidate'

'Messaging specific, individual nations on-team to vote for a senate candidate'

'Mass messaging all nations in an alliance to switch alliances'

These three are mostly the ones which I regard as not infringing upon an alliance's sovereignty,
but as with all of them it largely depends upon the alliances in question.

I fail to see how messages can infringe upon sovereignty, could someone explain that to me?

Simple, if the glue that holds an alliance together is ignorance and apathy, then the light of knowledge - regardless of the sort - is a threat to alliance security.

There are consequences for all actions - what those consequences are is up to the alliance in question that you messaged. Each will perceive it differently and therefore handle it differently. If you message Kronos nations with any of the above without speaking to gov first, those consequences will probably differ from the consequences if you did the same to, let's say, TOP.

Well spoken; everyone will react different, however i personally don't view any as infringement upon sovereignty.

None of these are violations of another alliance's sovereignty, although a few are a bit tasteless. The only difference is how the target alliance reacts - I mean I've been recruiting from NSO for months now and we haven't had a problem. I guess it's more of a problem with your alliance if your members don't know who to vote for in senate elections.

I didn't realize the Moralist Front had signed onto the NSO declaration of national sovereignty.

Thank you for letting me know that it has. We will start drawing up recruitment lists accordingly.'

EDIT: I hate Halloween.

I think that most of the people, myself included, voted for the options that we would react adversely to. You're right, they don't infringe on sovereignty, they're just PM's. However, that will not stop the targeted alliance from taking offense and potentially escalating things.

We'd love to have your recruitment letters, mainly because we need to learn how to recruit effectively. Thanks a bunch, Ivan.

EDIT: As someone who has made my own share of Halloween mistakes, I'll acknowledge the edit.

I think messaging an entire alliance or partial-amount of an alliance to do anything without consent of their government is asking for trouble. You should never take it upon yourself to message an entire alliance for anything unless you are in that alliance or they have given you approval.

A lot of people just like to scream "Sovereignty!" whenever something happens that they don't like. A lot of people don't like these things, and so even though none of them have anything to do with alliance sovereignty people still scream it as a knee-jerk reaction if/when it happens.

We have a lot of words that are used like that around here, without regard to what they actually mean.

Don't get Ramirus started on White Peace again...

None - else nations become like Bates in Henry V and divest themselves of any moral free agency.

Ay, or more than we should seek after; for we know enough, if we know we are the kings subjects: if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us
Henry V: Act 4

I agree with this. Mass messaging a sphere to vote for a candidate isn't infringing upon sovereignty. I've received numerous PMs regarding voting on the red team, and I don't view it as a breach of Nevermore sovereignty. It doesn't attempt to tell you as an alliance should support for a candidate, simply advertising an alternative person. Ultimately it is the nations choice who to vote for, if voting at all.

I do feel that mass messaging could be construed as rude, insulting, or something along those lines though.

The purpose of every social order is to motivate a certain pattern of conduct in humans, to make them abstain of actions that are considered hazardrous to society and to make them execute actions that are considered utile to society.
There are various types of social orders that characterize itself with specific motivation.
Motivation can be direct or indirect. An order can associate certain advantages to the following of a certain conduct and certain disadvantages to not adhering to it, making the desire for the promised advantage or fear of the threat of disadvantage act as a motivation of conduct.
Sometimes sanctions can be established and defined by social orders, and in other situations communities might react instantly in a non-established way, effectively establishing a sanction for certain patterns of behavior.
It is undeniable that, considering the entire digiterra as a community, there is the notion that alliances have the innate right to message the nations under the sphere of their law to vote on senate candidate(s) and to stay an a determined alliance affiliation. It is considered a government function, and as such it is exclusive of the government that the nation accepts. Violating that monopoly is viewed as violanting the monopoly of governance of alliances, which is known by many as sovereignity. Its not at all at random that people scream sovereignity or that they do not like it being violated, and even though there isn't exactly a formal establishment of inter-alliace laws, there is a clear understanding of right, wrong, and of violation of individual alliance laws by third parties.

That to me is as clear as water, but (OOC:as in RL) power and influence come in the way and alliances get to twist the notion of lawful and unlawful according to their own interests, due to the fact that there isn't an established leviathan to make the customary law into an established through force. In the absence of a stronger party to force them to obey the law, they believe their might is enough to back whatever agenda they have, but they forget that communities at some point do react.


edit: typos. Really awful.

I'm not twisting it in any way. I simply asked you to explain why you thought an alliance had the right to control what enters their members' message boxes. There's no twist. It's just a simple request for you to explain yourself. Surely you have reasons for the opinions you hold.

I like how people try to turn it around so it's the governments infringing on the rights of their members.

You could say we're trying to infringe on foreign alliances right to mass message other alliances.

I think this is a little ridiculous, all of these options really have nothing to do with sovereignty, and Ill explain:

First off, I voted "None of these infringe on an alliance's sovereignty" because technically an alliance has no control over the in-game messaging system thus nothing can be infringed. I think Sovereignty should have been defined in the OP, but since it was not, I'm just going to go with Wikipedia's definition: "Sovereignty is the quality of having supreme, independent authority over a territory." If we consider the messaging system a territory of the game, then an alliance can have no sovereign clam to it as they do not have supreme, independent authority over what messages their members send or receive therefor they have no "sovereign right" to claim over it simply because the game mechanics do not allow it.

Does this make these things ethically right? well that's another discussion/poll in its self

It was a poor choice of words on my part. I wasn't trying to call you out.

You Sir, are a genious. I'd try to recruit you for my alliance, if it wasn't that...
Wait! Maybe I can do that!

Call me out? For what? You're doing an awfully poor job of it. I don't think you really thought this through.


Still don't want to tell me why you think alliances have sovereignty over their members' inboxes? At this point it seems obvious that you can't and are just trying to cover it up with some nonsense about calling me out.

I voted all but the merging options. That is only because I believe msging a disbanding alliance is ok, however a merging alliance is not.

As I said before, it all depends on the alliance on the recieving end.

If they want to control what their nations get told and sent ingame then thats their choice. Other alliances should respect the others wishes, but I don't think it's a massive deal if they don't either, not unless they keep doing it dispite you telling them not to.

Messaging another nation that is already in an alliance asking (or telling) it to switch to another AA is quite possibly the worst violation of sovereignty you can get. Poaching members is always frowned upon.

Please explain first why it's a violation of sovereignty at all and second why it's the worst.