TheNakedJimbo

Even if this had nothing to do with my alliance I would still approve. Your command of the pirate dialect is without parallel, my good sir, and I salute you.

I want to have Lamuella's babies IRL. I am a man but I hope that we will find a way around this minor inconvenience.

The OP's complaint is really no different than the real world where politicians get a country into a war, and it's eighteen-year-old kids who do the dying.

The odds aren't really the salient point in this debate. The point is that the ally in question (probably) spied and is getting what they deserve for it. You have an unfortunate dichotomy: either blindly support your ally, which is pretty stupid, or sever on the grounds that someone who spies does not deserve your protection, no matter what words bind you to them. I personally prefer to honor principles rather than words. If you truly support TPF throughout all this, then wonderful and I applaud you for defending them. But if you're supporting a treaty, an inanimate object which has already been broken when TPF violated its anti-spying clause, then that's the opposite of noble. I hope what we've all learned from this is that every treaty should include anti-spying clauses so that no ally is ever put in a position where it has to choose between breaking its word or defending spies.

Oh, I know exactly what I'm talking about: shameless self-preservation, the strongest of all animal instincts

Just enough for the whole thing to blow over so they won't have to put their necks on the line, methinks.

I'll be eager to see your reaction when it's your nation about to be destroyed because your ally did something that every alliance in CN disapproves of. Your whole point hinges on the fact that allies are bound to defend their allies. But they're not. The majority of those treaties included anti-spying articles. The moment TPF spied, the treaty was already broken, and the "cooling down" period specified in the treaty does not apply, because the treaty was broken the moment TPF violated its terms. So that's five of the allies off the hook right away. As for the other three, well, I think that defending an alliance who is (probably) guilty of spying is the greater evil when compared to not honoring a treaty, but that's just me. I would think that the imperative to "do the right thing" - the condemnation of spying - is far greater than the alternative. A person's loyalty should always be to the Right Thing, not to words on a page.

Possible counterpoint: at least they will still be an alliance, and will not lose a big block of strength due to having an ally who does stupid things. That discernment would make them even more valuable to me if I was an alliance looking for allies. I think that, if any of these allies had known something like a spy scandal was coming, they would surely have written the treaty in a way that allowed them an instant sever in the event of spying. Perhaps they will be more careful in the future; perhaps it is their fault for assuming that TPF was a trustworthy and reliable partner, but I would not say it is their fault by breaking ranks with someone who (near as we can tell) was guilty of spying.

I completely agree with this as well. I sent Vilien a PM telling him how much I enjoyed debating with him and that I hope we get the chance to do it again sometime. Intelligent and articulate people are valuable to the game whether they agree with me or not. (Not all of the abolitionists have been such, of course, but neither have all the pro-choice folks either; such is humanity.)

Nobody here is mugging little old ladies. We're talking about raiding people who are perfectly capable of fighting back, defending themselves, and possibly even winning - and could easily, very easily, keep themselves from being victims at all if they merely joined an alliance. Feel free to go in search of a more accurate analogy that will let you feel smug and self-righteous.

Maybe this is true and maybe it's not; I don't have any way of knowing, other than believing one stranger's word over another. Perception matters more than reality sometimes. Perhaps this will teach you the value of the ancient proverb that says to flee even the appearance of evil.

TPF employed agents to obtain secret information. The fact that they failed to do so means that they're bad at spying, not that they weren't spies.

Thanks for the thoughtful analysis. It was very helpful.

Noooo Thanks for everything you do with the map though, Bob. It's great work and it's greatly appreciated.

This has already been pointed out, but protecting someone from raiding is not the only way to reach the end of "freedom to grow their nation." They can also join an alliance - which often times will allow them to grow a lot faster, because many alliances hand out joining / training aid, and provide people with whom the nation ruler can do tech trades for still more cash. If a person really wants to grow his nation in peace, any fool can see that joining an alliance is the right thing to do. A person does not have the right to two things which are mutually exclusive - he does not have a "right" to grow as fast as he would in an alliance without joining an alliance. You don't have a "right" to a house as safe as one that has a burglar alarm, without paying for a burglar alarm. If you want the security, you pay the price. Also ktarthan made a wonderful post, the likes of which I was going to write myself last night. Let's look at the situation a slightly different way. There are three possibilities. 1. Tech raiding is a valid moral philosophy and those who wish to curtail it are wrong for attempting to infringe it. This would, obviously, be okay with the tech raiders. 2. Tech raiding is valid, but so is the desire to abolish tech raiding. This is ktarthan's "all internal moralities" idea. This possibility is also okay with the tech raiders, because it still provides a moral ground for raiding, and the practice can continue. 3. Tech raiding is not a valid moral philosophy (for some reason which its opponents have failed to adequately explain in twelve pages of trying), and the abolitionists hold the most valid or only valid philosophy. Solely this, out of the three possibilities, is okay with the abolitionist - yet we can see that, in order for him to be in the right in his attempt to abolish tech raiding, he must not only prove that his position is more moral or correct than the other, but also prove that the other has zero credibility and merit to it. This is a substantial burden of proof. Now would be a good time for a review of the four systems of morality. When the abolitionists attempt to explain why tech raiding is always immoral, they will need to provide a reason why, not merely state it as if it's a fact. 1. Morality is socially defined, by the collective will of the majority. Problem: tech raiding used to be widely accepted in CN. 2. Morality is individually defined, and each person's is different (see: ktarthan). Problem: your individual morality does not supercede mine, so you cannot tell me what to do. 3. Morality is defined as "non-harm" to others. Problem: this philosophy is convoluted and hypocritical, because everything you do in this game keeps someone else, however indirectly, from getting what they want. See pages 4-7 of this thread. 4. Morality is an absolute standard which exists in the universe, usually explained as coming from a deity. Problem: CN has no deity, so this is not valid. The closest thing that CN has to a deity has programmed the game in such a way that tech raiding is possible and hiding in peace mode for a long time is crippling. What should this tell you about the way he intended the game to be played? No one has yet answered this question.

If this was the only way to keep people from being beaten up, then you would have a point. But there are other options, which have been floated in the thread, meaning that your solution is not the best even of the options that have already been suggested. It's also not a win-win at all. It's a compromise, and a pisspoor one at that. If tech raiders want to make a profit by raiding tech, how do you think it's a "win" by restricting them to raiding certain people? Edit: let me elaborate. A win-win is where both parties get what they want. A win plus a win. A compromise is where neither party gets exactly what they want, but they both get something. In your suggestion, the abolitionists get the protection of all unaligned people from tech raiding - exactly what they're after - while the pro-choice folks get their choice of targets profoundly restricted. That is why it's not a win-win, and that's why it's a terrible attempt at a compromise. Please try again. How precisely do you think people should be able to choose whether they want to participate in tech raiding or not? Maybe there could be a setting in the game where you can specify that war is not an option for your nation? Why, precisely, do you think that admin programmed the game in such a way that sitting in peace mode indefinitely is damaging to a country?

Unsupported assertion + ad hominem attack. Come on. I know I'm not the only person in this place who understands the basic rules of logic. Tech raiders don't like that plan because it's not profitable. It's not a win-win; it's restricting the practice of tech raiding. How can you possibly call that a win for the pro-choice camp?

Yes, you do tend to get more tech from someone who doesn't know you're coming than from someone who is simultaneously raiding you. I'm not sure exactly what your point is. Nations could also minimize their risk of being tech raided by keeping a low tech:infra ratio. The cost is much lower than the cost of peace mode; the only major loss would be a bit of happiness (negligible) and a lack of military preparation (unnecessary because their nation is an unappealing raid target anyway). Most people who get tech raided do it because they buy tech stupidly fast and make themselves appealing targets. "But that's not fair," you say, "they don't know any better." So wait: you mean to tell me there are sometimes consequences for ignorance and poor choices?! That's outrageous! A CN-wide nanny-state is exactly what we need here to shield people from their own failure to educate themselves. It might even help to have some place where people could go to talk to other players and get advice and insight into the game - we could call them "forums" or "alliances." edit: VV That's fair, I stand corrected and will edit.

The value of an opinion is inversely proportionate to the number of opinions. Therefore, merely by having one, I'm cheapening everybody else's. Opinion inflation, suckas!

This is a really good insight. You're essentially saying to look for the win-win situation, rather than merely trying to win the argument. In real life, training yourself to look for the win-win is one of the most important things you can ever do. The difficulty in this situation is that the two groups of people can't both have their way. Tech raiding is either going to be possible (in which case some will be angry), or impossible/outlawed/deterred (in which case the rest will be angry). We're almost forced, just by the nature of the dispute, to address the question of who has the more legitimate - which really means only legitimate - claim, which is what we've spent most of the thread doing. It would be nice if we could find a win-win here, but it seems difficult, and I have a feeling a lot of the anti-raiding camp would object to a compromise on the grounds that it legitimizes raiding, a behavior they find to be inherently immoral.

There's an even more obvious solution to raiding: take it out of the game. Get Kevin to change the code so you can't steal tech from people. If tech raiding really was driving people (and potential donations) away from the game, don't you think he would be the first one to throw the hammer down on it? On the contrary, he specifically programmed the game so that tech raiding was possible and profitable. Is it possible that its existence in the game is an indication that Kevin knows that tech raiding is fun, and is one of the things keeping older and more established nations in the game? Maybe and maybe not, but as the one person who stands to lose the most from tech raiding in the form of advertisement and donation money, if it was really as bad a thing as you people say, he would be doing everything possible to keep people in his game.

You could at least try to cobble together a logical and reasonable argument that explains why your position is correct, and does not rely on an appeal to the masses, some dubious inner compass, or any of the other flawed things that the other people in this thread have leaned on. If you really are that much more correct than me, you should have no problem whatsoever destroying the flaws in my arguments and countering with your own. My point is merely that "my inner morality" is probably the worst possible method of determining what is right. How do you know, right at this point in time, that your inner compass is actually pointing you toward what is true and right? Again, if you're really as correct as you think you are, you should have no problem answering this question and building an argument that stands up to scrutiny at least as well as the ones I have offered.

Well, I disagree with your morality. It doesn't apply to me, so don't bother me with it. Your personal morality can't tell me what to do, because I have a different personal morality. You're right; you didn't exactly use an appeal to the masses. You didn't use an appeal to anything. You said: That falls under an unsupported assertion. You simply declared that tech raiding was wrong without offering any proof whatsoever, except this dubious inner morality, which is unreliable. What if you change your mind? I'll make a confession, because I believe in honesty, but I used to be a racist. My inner morality told me it was okay to be mean to people who weren't white. Then some things happened and my inner morality changed. That's why I say it's not reliable. That's why I say you can't impose your inner morality on any other person. That would be the second system of morality I talked about, the idea that morality is individually defined, and it's no more workable than the appeal to the masses.

That's the first system of morality I discussed, the belief that morality is societally defined. It's also a logical fallacy called "appeal to the masses." The problem with this attitude is that, the last time I played the game, tech raiding was really not frowned on. Others in the thread have observed this as well: it used to be a lot more widely accepted. So are you telling me it was moral back then but has since become immoral? That doesn't work because most of the people in this thread who have argued against tech raiding do it on the grounds that invading another country's sovereignty is always immoral. So how could it have been moral at some previous point? If it was immoral, then "most people" were wrong once upon a time. If it is moral, then "most people" are wrong now. But either way you cannot appeal to "most people" as your standard of morality because it doesn't work that way. Is that "logically and morally distorted" enough for you?

As nippy observed, I'm afraid you misunderstood. I didn't say that all the people who read without commenting are pro-raiding. I said they're too apathetic to spend five seconds typing out their opinion. The fact that so many people read without having an opinion strong enough to post demonstrates that this is not a major issue that many people feel strongly about. It has nothing to do with how many of those people approve or disapprove of raiding. Can I take you to logical fallacy school? Strawman + false generalization. I haven't seen anyone claim that, nor have I seen the "Nazi" comment that you posted. Based on your track record I'm inclined to wonder if you misunderstood him the same way you misunderstood me, and if his real point was something quite different. Unsupported assertion. Are you really arguing that a majority, or even a substantial number, of people who are in alliances would otherwise be unaligned, but have joined an alliance not for friendship, not for economic aid, but for the one and only purpose of not being tech raided? You need to post some serious proof if you want to claim this. Unsupported assertion mark 2. "Normally"? Please prove yourself. You can't simply claim things like this as if they were facts. Gross generalization + unsupported assertion. Is this based on a scientific study involving a representative sample of the CN public, or are you making stuff up as you go along again? This is not a logical fallacy as such, but you're countering an argument that no one has made. We're not talking about why people tech raid, whether it's profitable, or the ways that some people stoop to intimidation and extortion to get their way. We're talking about tech raiding as a concept and as a philosophy, and we're discussing whether there is any standard of morality to which a person can appeal short of divine mandate) to argue that tech raiding could qualify as immoral. The answer thus far in the thread has been "no."