Vladimir

[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in order to suggest certain undesirable character traits, amongst other things), and had their ambassador privileges withdrawn as a result.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').

Comrade AFK 47 needs to meet a few actual Marxists. Once he does he'll be clinging to Obama's policies for dear life.

[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.

Maybe they should add that question to the job interview -- "and do you think that any sub-set of students should kill themselves?"

One could argue that he is defrauding anyone who goes on to hire him on the basis of the qualifications that he holds (which, after all, is the entire point of the qualification). They are losing resources purchasing something which is not as advertised.

[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.

Profits are made primarily through selling a product; the higher the price charged (assuming static costs) the higher the profit. This of course means that suddenly roads all start charging tolls, you get charged when the police investigate your mugging, and so forth. This in itself is a horrifying prospect. It also loses the potential for hugely popular and effective systems like the NHS, both because things could no longer be free at the point of delivery and because services could no longer be run on the basis of people's needs. As we always see in this shift towards profit services get worse, prices go up, and 'unprofitable' people suffer. Moreover, the government is not a business and cannot be run like one without completely changing the way society operates. And it also means that Ktarthan is right when he says that you are really just shifting the method of collecting tax. But it is more than this, because with such a shift we also drastically shift the burden of who is paying. With the loss of the ability to create a direct and progressive method of taxation, we now rely on what is effectively a huge sales tax, which by its nature is regressive and falls disproportionately on the poor. Also, the attempt to paint taxes as a specifically feudal mode of fund-raising is pretty silly and weakens rather than strengthens your argument.

It is the norm on Planet Bob to consider only [i]defensive[/i] wars legitimate. Raiding cannot be considered defensive.

[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 [/quote] 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&section=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.

It means a threat to our existence (contrary to the link, it does not necessarily have to be a military threat). If you consider these to be intellectual words then you need to read more.

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.

An odd question. It serves the purpose of political analysis with the aim of bringing a better understanding of the world.

I question myself constantly. Indeed, Comrade Triyun just wrote an internal article on the matter. Self-criticism is of the utmost importance, always. [Link works for NPO members only]

People attack me because I outline the often ugly structures that underlie their ideologies and activities. I bring the motto of 'question everything' with me, and it is rarely popular with those being questioned. That was true before the Order was in power, while the Order was in power, and so it is little surprise that it is also true after the Order was in power. I have not experienced this American prejudice you speak of -- at least not explicitly. But if people let emotion cloud their judgement then that is their weakness, not mine.

Dear me. From one end of the silliness to the other. I think it's around this point that Trotsky would be going off on the vacillations of the degenerate bureaucracy. The quote was to emphasise the fact that people are now sitting here defending the fact that nothing has changed and then rationalising it to themselves by sticking their tongue out at the NPO. As you might expect given my name, and given my library of prior writings, I do not agree with Bakunin on the the wider point. My correctness on this is self-evident when it comes to the August Revolution. It is Karma that blames Karma for the population loss, which was the point of the article. If they never believed it to begin with then that's a pretty appalling abuse of OOC arguments for IC ends. But regardless, no, I wouldn't say that it's a cop-out. The premise that in a world defined almost entirely by its community, the community might be somewhat important for nation retention, is quite sound. [Yes I am a communist (which is very different from being a fascist), and no I don't live in America. However, I am not sure what you mean by 'these ideas' -- the population of Earth is booming!]