HM Solomon I
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Blog Comments posted by HM Solomon I
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What is the rationale behind specifically banning 'o/' but allowing 'Hail' when those are identical in meaning?
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I love how NAAC is a separate category from nations and alliances in your view.
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I had an account here around....2 years ago? Ish. The community seemed very alive and the game felt alive. Coming back, it's like the afterglow of a nuclear bomb; still alive, but fading fast. And there really isn't any other nation-builder out there, working, that I can move to. It's CN or bust. And CN seems to be going bust.
P&W is a great alternative to CN, better war mechanics, better econ mechanics, and an admin team that actually gives a damn. I play both, but I mostly play CN still because of the community in my alliance and I've been playing long enough it sort of has its own inertia.
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I agree, the mods are erring on the side of even a shred of suspicion = multi. And warning those who discuss moderation issues when all they're doing is asking legitimate questions about how rules are enforced, and maybe making the not unreasonable claim that they are being enforced too harshly and not fairly, is just plain dumb.
And there's also this. Seriously warning someone for having a lowercase character rather than an uppercase one is Kafkaesque, we're talking actual insanity here.
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Certainly it is true that smaller alliances are unlikely to have the resources to send permanent representatives to every non-allied alliance but there are reasons other than signing treaties (as listed above) to send representatives to some of them.
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Actually there are many reasons to send permanent representatives to non-allies:
- Non-allies might be connected to allies, thus keeping lines of communication open is essential.
- Non-allies can be potential future allies, which won't happen without regular communication.
- Even non-allies can appreciate having one point of contact with another alliance, someone they know will be around and can be used to reach others within their alliance.
- Non-allies are nonetheless major powers in the world and having an ambassador to them allows you to monitor them.
- Likewise, it eliminates the need to get someone up to speed on their eccentricities when an urgent matter arises.
- et cetera
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For my part I enjoyed the piece.
Pacifica/10 would implicitly praise you.
Technically I'm like a sovereign directly myself, so perhaps this is explicit praise of Pacifica. Or rather, my explicit praise of HMS, being implicit praise of Pacifica.
To capstone, I hate Pacifica. Explicitly. I hope my intentions are implicitly clear.
10/10 would lol again.
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Yes, that is why NPO has never used Viceroys in the past.
Viceroys are not advisors.
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Diplomacy is not a zero-sum game where in order to get ahead you are screwing another alliance. If you are not attempting to influence your host alliance in some way for mutual benefit why waste time being an ambassador? I'm not one to waste my time on frivolous spam thread pursuits.
I never said it was a zero-sum game, and I never said in order to get ahead you must screw another alliance. I said it is disingenuous to play yourself as an advisor while being both a representative and member of another alliance. You can certainly influence alliances, but influencing does not entail advising.
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It's simple, being a good ambassador isn't simply about posting about nonsense and wasting time talking about nonsense, a good ambassador serves as an advisor to the host alliance whenever possible and guides them along a mutually beneficial path. Anytime an alliance's ambassadors are crippled by micro-management styles you tend to see a dead FA path overall.
Well for one a good ambassador does not serve as an advisor to the receiving alliance, for how can one serve as an advisor while being loyal to another? I agree that micro-management is not likely to be an optimal path for FA, ambassadors must have some leeway. That said, I have no idea how you thought I or anybody else would have gotten than from "Quite a bit of implicit authority if you are good at being an ambassador B)".
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Quite a bit of implocit authority if you are good at being an ambassador B)
wut
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Very well written
I like it a lot!Thanks.
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Going to have to agree with Myth here, the idea that there's such a thing as justice on planet Bob is a cruel joke at best
Again, that's not the point of this entry.
Justice is my stomach. Those who need it end up there.
lol
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Justice in this context is a term referring to whatever systems we use to provide negative consequences to actions we deem worthy of such a response. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with ethics. I merely use the term for lack of a better one that succinctly describes what it is I'm trying to talk about.
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I completely disagree, I think declaring war on an alliance in order to start a broader conflict is itself a Casus Belli.
Sure, that's true. It would be a reason, but it's not enough for that to be the result. For it to be ethically permissible, the party making war would need to have that as a reason going in. Wars cannot be justified after the fact. I can certainly conceive of situations in which they do not have a reason in mind beforehand and that would be unethical.
The point of this article was to establish the minimum needed to meet the obligation implied by ethics, which is that one needs a reason. It doesn't have to be a good reason, it just has to be a reason. Further reasoning will be needed to determine what else is required by ethics. For one, do CBs need to be "valid" to be ethical? If so, what makes a CB valid? Is a war justified by a valid or even non-valid CB ethical per se or is more required to make a war ethical?
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I think a useful point that the OP brings up is how CN is ultimately meaningless apart from the importance that we invest in it. The more we forgo politics and strip things down to pixels and numbers, the harder it becomes to maintain any illusion of meaning here.
Yes, that's definitely part of it.
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Holy !@#$! I regret opening this door.
*Quietly closes door*
Are you impressed/horrified at how much can actually be written about this subject?
Perhaps we should also have a conversation on the ethics of words, specifically on whether it is ethical to use words as weapons to take out others eyeballs with sheer volume.
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btw I like how you say declaring for fun is arbitrary and based on feelings they no one else can understand.. then you say to White Chocolate that fun can be defined and isn't simply based on feelings.
I didn't actually say that, I said that declaring a war for fun is effectively the equivalent to declaring a war because you feel like it, and that cannot be reasonably understood by others. But more significantly, there is a difference between being able to determine if someone would have fun given some set of circumstances and making a decision just for the sake of fun. One is a judgement, the other is an action; comparing them does not make sense.
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So your saying that Tennis is more fun than Racquetball and therefore also a more ethical game to play and people who claim they think otherwise are being being facetious or intentionally obtuse?
lol
But to be serious, that misses the point entirely. Even in racquetball there are rules, others involved, and such. There is a context, it isn't just a bare room with a ball and nothing else in the world.
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The issue that I have with your attempt is that you're taking something that is both outside the realm of the game and also is entirely based on individual preference (i.e. what is "fun" to some people is not necessarily "fun" to others and this is perfectly okay) and you try to use it to argue an ethical stance. It just does not work.
At best, you're taking one definition of "fun" (and there are plenty of people who have other definitions and who would argue that "politics" are the least fun aspect of CN) and arguing as if it's the only one out there when it is not.
I think there are ways to argue effectively that a CB of some sort is a requirement for a war to be ethical. Keeping things "fun" is just not one of them. It's improssible to define fun for anyone but yourself.
It is absolutely not impossible to define fun for anyone but yourself because of context. Politics is merely the term we assign to the context in which we play this game: the structure of the world in which interactions occur. Without context, there can be no fun.
Picture this as a thought experiment: You are in a white walled room. There is nothing that you can see except one rubber ball. You start bouncing the ball against the wall, and you quickly realize that nothing changes and nothing happens except the ball coming back to you repeatedly. Then you find yourself in another room exactly the same in every way except that now when you begin to bounce the ball, the wall changes and begins to split into sections and move about. The ball bounces differently each time as the wall moves around to change angles and surfaces.
Which room would you prefer? I would guess that nearly everyone would say room two, and those that don't are merely being facetious or intentionally obtuse. Politics is the moving wall sections, it causes the same action to have different responses depending on the exact circumstances (how the wall is arranged at the precise moment). This context is omnipresent, and I'd say that it may be a lot harder to separate out from this game than one might think. Even neutrals experience this context though maybe to a lesser extent; in any event, neutrality is defined by the context in which it is practiced. Different context would change the response to an assertion of neutrality.
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OP is thinking correctly, although I would tackle the issue from another angle than ethics. The casus belli is one.of the core cultural values of CN civilization, regardless of whether you think the CB is legit an attempt has always been made during significant wars to establish the righteousness of the aggressor. An alliance which disregards these principles should be considered to be hostile to any alliance which values these shared and ancient cultural values. The would be reformist risks this alienation by nature, and has an uphill battle in convincing the traditional alliance to adopt this new and chaotic state of affairs. Considering that doomsphere has already alienated so many alliances with their physical transgressions of sovereignty I highly doubt this will end well for Doom Squad.
You may very well want to tackle it from a different angle from ethics, but that is irrelevant to a discussion on ethics unless you are claiming it cannot actually be tackled from the perspective of ethics.
The thing is, the CB for virtually every major war has been manufactured or forced when it wasn't truly necessary. To put it bluntly, a vast majority of them have been !@#$%^&*, and thus we are all sick of seeing them. The real reasons have been and always will be "for fun, for power, to settle grudges"
At the same time, much of the general populace will only accept defensive wars as justified. (And also at the same time, they get bored and want war).
My question: is it ethical for casuals to do nothing but come in when there is a CB and judge it based on OOC ethics & muh feels?
The noCB DoW is a symptom, not the disease.
Even if their real reason is to settle grudges or to gain power that's still a reason. Just to have fun wouldn't be a reason though since that's effectively the same as declaring war because one feels like it. The reason has to be or involve something external to the person feelings of those making war since making decisions based entirely on one's own feelings is arbitrary. Here one could define arbitrariness as a condition which exists when no one could reasonably understand the motivations behind a decision. Doesn't mean they do, it just means they could (and no one can ever truly understand the personal feelings of another since they do not themselves experience them).
"Because we don't like you" was always a viable CB, in my opinion, and one I had to be talked out of on several occasions. Then again, I think that whatever reason an alliance has to attack another is "viable" as there is no governing body to tell us what constitutes a "viable CB". Of course, when attacking another entity, you need to be aware of the consequences (both militarily and politically) of your actions and be willing to accept them ... especially when you know that your CB is one that won't fly with the community as a whole. I openly admit that when I disliked an alliance, I tried to find ways to attack them. I also didn't want to let go of what the community would consider an "airtight CB" if I had one, even if the other party wanted to make ammends. My alliance came to expect a war every couple of months, and come Hell or high water I was going to give them one.
Because we don't like you is a reason if you have a reason not to like them other than it simply striking your fancy (as per the reasoning I gave above). Even if it's just that they're a threat and you want to silence said threat.
More importantly, I never claimed to be arguing for what constitutes a "viable CB". I am only concerning myself here with whether one ethically needs any CB at all to declare war.
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I never said it had to be accepted as valid. Even if it's just an attempt at justifying a war, it satisfies the above conditions because then the war wouldn't be truly arbitrary; under the above logic, you'd be ethically required to provide a justification, but you wouldn't be required to provide one that even anyone else would find acceptable. If you have some reason, then it isn't arbitrary (some reason beyond "I felt like it" or the equivalent of course).
It also doesn't need to be publicized either. I said when making war, one needs a reason, I never said it had to be posted anywhere in public, though presumably those directly involved on both sides would know it simply by virtue of them being involved.
I also never commented on whether having a CB makes a war "ethical", I was merely commenting on whether it was ethical to have no CB at all.
And yes, there are neutrals and presumably they find it fun to just build, but without politics what would neutrality even mean. You can't have neutrality in a vacuum, at least some of the fun of being neutral and building ones nation is based on the context provided by politics.
I think you've read a lot more into this piece than was actually there, bringing the typical baggage associated with this topic to bear even when no one else has brought it up. I urge you to reconsider it without this baggage, as I've attempted to do. I don't claim to have been entirely successful, but I don't think all that many have made a genuine attempt to reason without the baggage.
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Question: are you going to be employing any game theory? I think that'd be a fun one.
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Looking forward to seeing your first full entry. I love that someone is writing a blog with a more academic slant, especially in the field of economics which obviously has loads of applications here.
Adjustment to Our Policy on Spam
in Moderation Team Blog
A group blog by Moderation Team in General
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Except the rules specifically allow the one-word meaning of that emoticon. I don't see how specifically prohibiting the emoticon makes sense in that context. I can understand banning other emoticons, but not that one tbh.