Vladimir
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Posts posted by Vladimir
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[quote name='ktarthan' timestamp='1290192571' post='2517533']To make it more accurate would actually make it less efficient as propaganda. [img]http://cngoons.com/Board/Smileys/CN%20Emotes/eng101.gif[/img][/quote]
Propaganda has to be based around a recognisable truth or people will just look at it and go 'but nobody says that', negating any impact it might have. Thus the propaganda is probably effective for people who already have both feet in the MK camp like AirMe, but not so effective on those who should be the target audience. -
What is originality if not creative theft. I'm glad people enjoyed it.
Personally I had a wee chuckle when I saw Raffaello's. -
[quote name='AirMe' timestamp='1289921027' post='2514628']
Apparently. People want to complain that political intrigue is dead, and then complain when there is some political intrigue![/quote]
If this is what counts as political intrigue these days then things are worse than anyone could possibly have imagined. -
[quote name='Grand Emperor Burka' timestamp='1289913468' post='2514542']
The reasoning behind the Tag is over three years old. I find it hilarious that you guys can't drop a grudge over 3 years after the events took place. And that they still worry you enough for you to ban them from your forums.
[/quote]
Says the alliance manufacturing a travesty of a PR thread like this against an alliance that has barely even posted on the OWF for a year and a half.
A couple of individuals from MK were sent over specifically to mock and troll the NPO (eg. posting modified version of old NPO flags and claiming them as MK flags, and making animal noises in order to suggest certain undesirable character traits, amongst other things), and had their ambassador privileges withdrawn as a result. -
A useless self-justification based on a false dichotomy that neither explains anything about the world nor aids in its improvement (except to say 'check again in 2014 to see if it has become more fun').
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[quote name='Orthopraxis' timestamp='1288361314' post='2496301']
That is fine...
I will cut essays by 50%-60% of current size and provide an outline...
:/[/quote]
The problem isn't the length of the post or that you don't provide an outline, it's that you don't make an argument. You rant about 'fascism' and 'democracy', but you don't define either term, you don't explain how they're being applied or who they're being applied to, and moreover you don't even explain why one is good and the other is bad. You simply throw these buzz-words about over and over again and expect your prejudices to be absorbed into the reader as if by magic.
This is why I say there is no point in analysing or rebutting it. Certainly, it would be easy to tear apart your hideously flawed assumptions about the terms that you use and how they can be applied (especially the central one: democracy itself). Certainly, it would be easy to ridicule your targeting of an entity that does not even have a government, never mind a totalitarian one. Certainly, it would be easy to facepalm at the idea that "faith in things unseen and acts that cannot be understood" can form a genuine approach to politics, or even to polemics. But what would be the point? I do not challenge the premises of the angry man on the bus when he posits that the chair is following him. -
Comrades who frequent these parts will know of my fondness for critiquing articles like this which purport to engage with political theory. They will know of my joy at deconstructing the premises, at finding contradictions in the logic, at contrasting the claims to historical precedent, at taking the predictions to their logical conclusions. There is rarely a chance to engage in such that I will let slip me by. Yet here one finds oneself at a crossroads. Looking through the article it glistens with words like 'fascist', 'totalitarian', 'intellectual' and 'indoctrination', and thus superficially begs for analysis and rebuttal. But on the other hand, it is complete and utter gibberish. There is no logical argument, no structure to speak of, and no concluding claim. In substance it begins and ends with a single unsupported assumption, and in form it is of an unkempt man shouting angrily at inanimate objects on a bus.
Perhaps this, and not your self-proclaimed reason of being a "social intellectual", is why your writings were apparently rejected within the Order. -
[quote name='Trikoupis' timestamp='1286004016' post='2472058']As things are, there is room for at least one new pole to emerge and for peripherial agentas to be pursued. The reason alliances used to search the amity of the stronger was ambition, not security. Security is synonymous to neutrality on Digiterra. When a dominant coalition remains loose enough to fail in fulfilling the ambitions of those graviting it, then perhaps they will break from it and pursue their ambitions on their own : further multi-polarisation.[/quote]
There is always room for a new pole -- indeed, the appearance of such is all but inevitable. However, all we can say today is that one does not yet exist. Peripheral agendas are always pursued; it is when these become incompatible with the existing power relations that a new pole begins to form (assuming that enough power has been alienated in this way) -- which I believe is what you said.
You are correct to point to ambition, which is really just another way of saying 'self-interest'; but for this to be pursued one must first ensure security, which is the primary self-interest of all alliances (you cannot become powerful if you cannot defend your own borders). Neutrality is one way of pursuing security, but it is not the only (or most effective) way, and as you rightly imply it has the unhappy side-effect of blocking other interests.
So really the last two paragraphs were just a long way of saying that we broadly agree with one another, just using different language. -
[quote name='Altheus' timestamp='1285947244' post='2471104']
I agree with you to a point, clearly NPO & GOONS are very different alliances who respond to others in very different ways. However, too much is made of NPO's power and influence when they were on top.
The most powerful entity was never NPO per see, but the power structure once described as hegemony that NPO was part of. For sure, due to their size and more importantly their long list of contacts NPO was a big influence on the power structure, but others (including many who moved across to Karma) also had a big stake in it and were certainly not mini-NPOs.
The Karma war wasn't a revolution, instead (like all CN global wars) it was a civil war within the existing power structure. In Karma's case, the Continuum.
However your point still stands, NPO & GOONS are very different. I just wanted to add that many in Karma are closer in character to NPO than GOONS. Alliances in fact often once closely allied to NPO & that means to a certain extent that business at the top of CN carries on as normal.[/quote]
This is an incredibly important point, because it goes to the heart of how our world functions. Many, like Muddog above, see only the forms that things take -- the famous blocs, the prominent alliances -- and make their judgements on this skin-deep basis. As a result they see people saying that the Continuum was dominant in ye olden days and conclude that it was unipolar. Then they look at today and see that there are a lot of differently named blocs, and conclude that it is multipolar. This is a superficial, and thus incorrect, view to take. Before beginning we must be fair to those making this error and say that, indeed, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But to be accurate we must also qualify this by adding that sometimes it is a dialectically evolving superstructure built upon the diktats of exogenous material circumstance.
Moving forward we can see that besides being skin-deep, the superficial approach is doing things backwards -- the form builds itself atop of the power structure, not vice versa. What this means is that the form taken (the alliances, the treaties, the blocs) will vary from period to period depending on the circumstances in which they arise. So if we look back to pre-GW1, we see that a single alliance was dominant. Fast forward to pre-GW2 and see see that an extremely loose coalition was dominant. Fast forward to pre-UjW and we see that a bloc was dominant. Fast forward to pre-Karma and we see that a large grouping of blocs was dominant. Thus each era has its own characteristics, but each nevertheless remains a state of unipolarity.
If we look more closely at the period between the Unjust War and the Karma War, we can see that there were in fact a great many blocs, from Continuum to BLEU to Citadel, each with their own agendas and relationships, each jockeying for position, each liking and hating each other to varying degrees -- much like today. What made it unipolar was not the existence of a large bloc (it was no longer unipolar prior to the Karma War despite the existence of such), but the fact that the relations of power were recognised as legitimate by enough major alliances to make questioning them dangerous. This is why Altheus can correctly point out that great wars are invariably civil wars -- because barring an extraordinary strength rise in an excluded group (see: GW2 for the sole example) the only possible way for the power structure to fall is for some of its component parts to challenge it.
Thus today we can see that there are a number of blocs and alliances each generally pursuing their own agendas, just as there was pre-Karma, but the power structure remains a single interconnected whole. There is no immediate potential for a great war because no one is in an immediate position to challenge an alliance like the Mushroom Kingdom -- as demonstrated both in their dictating \m/ policy on STA last month and their involvement in the Red Raiding Safari.
To conclude on an historically self-evident note: when the world is bipolar you will know it, because the forum will be full to the brim with political battles between two great and strong camps; when the world is multipolar, you can just sit back and relax, because it will have transformed into a unipolar or bipolar world within the week -- it is a wholly unsustainable state of affairs because security-seeking alliances cannot abide it. -
[quote name='Commisar Gaunt' timestamp='1285852019' post='2469685']
Lulz is just a label that NPO and friends used to call their enemies in order to make it appear as if they were somehow a joke alliance and nothing to be taken seriously. It doesn't actually mean anything, aside from the implication that fun is bad (and whoever hates 'lulz' alliances hates fun).[/quote]
'Lulz' was a self-given title by many old alliances, and it grew naturally into a universally recognised style of activity from there. The Order had nothing to do with it. -
It is the norm on Planet Bob to consider only [i]defensive[/i] wars legitimate. Raiding cannot be considered defensive.
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[quote name='wickedj' timestamp='1285127206' post='2460588']
said previous tactics are still in use and look no further than the attacks on unaligned nations for using a FLAG..that they likely chose at random because blue and black are quite popular colors
'nuf said
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You misrepresent the issue. Nations aren't just attacked out of the blue; they are sent numerous messages and only after conscious and informed refusal to remove our colours over a period of weeks are things escalated. It also has absolutely nothing to do with what Comrade Unko Kalaikz is discussing. -
[url="http://z15.invisionfree.com/Cyber_Nations/index.php?showtopic=64163&st=0&hl="]Why the NPO is the best socialist alliance in CN[/url] -- EuroSoviets
[Since it's a complex piece I made an attempt to explain it [url="http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?app=blog&module=display§ion=blog&blogid=104&showentry=555"]here[/url].] -
I think this is a little simplistic.
For a start, no one in an alliance is fully supporting the state of nature, since they refuse to live in it themselves. They may tech-raid frequently, but this is a one way fight and in no way correlates -- they have provided security for themselves through membership of an alliance, it is only the defenceless nation being raided that continues to exist in the state of nature. As demonstrated then your attempt at an ideological analysis lacks one extremely fundamental material element: the power structure. -
[quote name='The MVP' timestamp='1284675318' post='2456045']It seems today [...] nothing appears to be so simple anymore.[/quote]
Nothing was ever simple. There were only simple minds. -
Alliances run on the basis of electoral democracy are anti-freedom, enslaving their denizens to the chaos of nature. It is therefore notable but unsurprising that alliances in general have increasingly moved away from these so-called 'democratic' practices over the past four years and towards more autocratic systems -- in terms of the executive, but more importantly in terms of day-to-day functions (when was the last time we had an international incident caused by an independent judiciary, or by the 72 hour debate period necessary for a minor political move). Of course, if you had all accepted Francoism into your hearts you could have understood this and saved yourselves those four years of painfully slow evolution.
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[quote name='Banksy' timestamp='1283765853' post='2443577']
Another important aspect was how it created the spying CB.
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No it didn't. ODN spies were being caught left and right, but the spark for the conflict was leaked ODN war plans -- the NPO attack was essentially a pre-emptive strike. -
GATO-INC was insignificant (more a skirmish between two nations than a world-changing war between two alliances).
NPO-Polar signalled the NPO's full arrival as a global power, but it was the NPO-ODN war that left it as the first hegemonic power -- before that both GATO and the ODN (despite how quickly the collapsed under pressure) had the presence to be seen as rivals. I would include both.
Personally I'd leave out the FAN wars and Vox -- neither had a significant impact on the direction of the world. I could understand the desire to include Vox on purely sentimental grounds, if you are so inclined, but both FAN wars were accepted and ignored for years before propagandists decided to make issue of them -- and the fact that they were ignored for so long indicates that it was other factors rather than the wars themselves which moved things. -
I agree with SynthFG. LGBTs should be more like heterosexuals, who [i]never[/i] splash their sexual preferences, appetites and conquests about in public. It's just common decency.
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[quote name='Olaf Styke' timestamp='1283246938' post='2436890']There is literally no other conclusion this poll can show--NO MATTER HOW VOTES ARE CAST--other than "NPO > Sparta".[/quote]
Some things are just fact. -
The day when world history changed course: when tyranny met its end, when freedom reigned, and when a great journey began. And a day that continues to shape the course of history year after year: that causes tyranny to shake in all its forms, that advances the cause of freedom to every corner of the known world, and that takes the journey beyond what our revolutionary forefathers could ever have imagined.
Hail Pacifica!
Hail Franco!
Glory to the Emperor! -
The OWF will generally admire its own -- those who spent a lot of time wandering about on the OWF. I admire those working quietly behind the scenes, content to do a good job and not inform the world about it. Not as glamorous, but that's what makes it admirable.
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I can't applaud STA enough for this move (or for their victory in negotiations).
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The point of the logs is to demonstrate that Omniscientone cancelled the treaty to avoid war, rather than for the reason he gave. They do this quite well even with the added line (which was rendered irrelevant later on by the treaty cancellation).
Remember When?
in Open World RP
Posted
[quote name='Chief Savage Man' timestamp='1290654755' post='2522688']
Looking at these old threads, I remember that the posting back then was worse than the posting now. There really is a higher standard these days with regards to grammar.[/quote]
Be glad you don't remember early 2006, when the NPO arrived to find people posting in AOLspeak (I'm looking at you, NAAC). I like to think we did our part to mock that habit out of them.