The underlying meta-conflict, and it's parallels

[Ogaden]

So, you complain about not being offered aid, but then you say that it wasn't necessary and you didn't need it, but even then, you say that this isn't the place to discuss the NPO's aid system.

Are you arguing with yourself...?

I don't really care, it wasn't me who kept bringing it up.

[ChairmanHal]

I don't really care, it wasn't me who kept bringing it up.

You make joining NPO sound so...appealing.

Let me help you out here.

This game boils down to safety in numbers vs. freedom. Some would say that GPA had both, I would argue that GPA was a bureaucratic morass that completely frustrated freedom. Safety in numbers isn't always about the largest alliance, sometimes it's about having the largest number of people willing to ally themselves with you through treaties. Ragnarok for example was and for the most part still is at the nexus of a number treaties including multiple blocs. Ditto Valhalla, a much smaller alliance that is tied to the Continuum along with a MADP directly with NPO.

The most free people in this game are the unaligned. They can do pretty much what they want, when they want, with no government to answer to but their own. They also are in the most danger, day in and day out.

You therefore don't really need to make a major political science study of this. NPO is a very large alliance that maintains a number of treaties and is a member of multiple blocs. Do you as a NPO member have freedom? Less than most. But if that appeals to you, roll with it.

[Cortath]

You make joining NPO sound so...appealing.

Let me help you out here.

This game boils down to safety in numbers vs. freedom. Some would say that GPA had both, I would argue that GPA was a bureaucratic morass that completely frustrated freedom. Safety in numbers isn't always about the largest alliance, sometimes it's about having the largest number of people willing to ally themselves with you through treaties. Ragnarok for example was and for the most part still is at the nexus of a number treaties including multiple blocs. Ditto Valhalla, a much smaller alliance that is tied to the Continuum along with a MADP directly with NPO.

The most free people in this game are the unaligned. They can do pretty much what they want, when they want, with no government to answer to but their own. They also are in the most danger, day in and day out.

You therefore don't really need to make a major political science study of this. NPO is a very large alliance that maintains a number of treaties and is a member of multiple blocs. Do you as a NPO member have freedom? Less than most. But if that appeals to you, roll with it.

This has been covered again and again.

The unaligned have freedom to do nothing. The purpose of the NPO is to remove a nation from the slavery of the unaligned.

[Morte]

This has been covered again and again.

The unaligned have freedom to do nothing. The purpose of the NPO is to remove a nation from the slavery of the unaligned.

They live in a harsher climate and are constantly in danger, but despite that they have more freedom than the rest of us.

[BarbulaM1]

The purpose of an alliance is to remove a nation from the state of nature, that is the reason for RL "social contracts" and the like, an alliance is simply CN's version of an RL concept. A nation forgoes some freedoms for protection (such as randomly being able to attack anyone), but the line at how much freedom should be taken away is a bit iffy, to define an alliance as free or unfree when the definition of an alliance includes a loss of freedom is a bit conspicuous. Though you can easily define freedom as democratic vs. authoritarian, they both take away absolute freedoms to an extent, just one more so than others.

Dominance in the game it self is simply a lack of will to be better than others, lack of politicking around for an alliance to become #1, apathy by the game's current leadership. But that is whole different story not related to freedom.

[Denial]

This has been covered again and again.

The unaligned have freedom to do nothing. The purpose of the NPO is to remove a nation from the slavery of the unaligned.

Just because the advocates of Francoism have gone on countless haughty diatribes on this subject does not mean they are correct. There is no "slavery" involved with being unaligned; rather, it is the natural state of all nations. Those nations who have surrendered a portion of their sovereignty in order to become involved in an alliance are the abnormal.

[Margrave]

How wrong you are, Margrave. Having been from one corner to another to another to another, I can say from experience that the influence of community upon our perceptions is very real. The only way objective truth can be obtained is when one actively seeks it out and works hard for it; and no-one actively seeks it out when they haven't any reason or compulsion to do so, or when it suits their current agenda to ignore it.

People see what they want to see, and interpret those experiences in a way that aligns with the beliefs they already hold. The beliefs they already hold are often ones that they have been indoctrinated with. You know that story about the prisoners in the cave...

Doitzel, I'm not saying he doesn't have a bias; but some stuff is just obvious. A Horse is a Horse, no matter what; you can't spin that and call it a Bolshevik Usurper or a Fascist Invader, it's a damn Horse. Of course there is the arrogance that goes with being a member of the elite, it's the same arrogance I had in \m/ and you certainly had when you held a position of great authority and responsibility. Some things are just obvious, regardless of your biases.

Of course, this is rather abstract; his argument was flawed, and indeed was self-incriminating. He should have proof-read and considered if he should be posting or not, but in this pansy-soft OWF of the modern era, who makes new/semi-new posters afraid to post unsatisfactory topics? No-one, so people feel free to post whatever they like without doing a content check. He shoulda checked himself; he didn't, so he wrecked himself.

Edit: Virillus, I still loathe every fiber of your being. Just figured I'd give you an update.

Edit Edit: OH NOES Margrave is off-topic/obsessed with an alliance that's a year and more dead, why can't he just get over it?

Edit Of Edit of edit: 1.Yell at Virillus for disbanding \m/ 2. Defend self against any accusations by accusing myself. 3. Look devastatingly handsome 4. Profit!!!

Edited March 9, 2009 by Margrave

[Ferrous]

What an interesting topic.

A number of people have already expressed my views on the OP, but to hell with it, I might as well do so myself.

If you want to make large generalized statements, then I suggest your analysis needs closer scrutiny. If you're going from Vladimir's line of thought, then you aren't necessarily wrong, from a historical perspective. True, the more authoritarian alliances used to be the ones that championed highly ordered alliances, but does that include everyone, or just the NPO? And true enough, the "authoritarian" alliances also used to be better organized than the democratic ones, and therefore would generally do better in a war. But that's how things used to be, and a lot of those who were in loosely organized alliances have since learned their lesson, and have made their alliances - democratic and otherwise - much more organized then they were in say, GWI. Furthermore, autocracy is championed by the NPO, and while their sense of organization (as an outsider can understand it) is quite sophisticated, there are a number of other advantages that go along with the NPO, that are not necessarily due to its autocratic state of government. You'd be hard pressed to find a second autocratic alliance that has had as much success as the NPO, making me believe that the NPO owes a large part of its success to something else entirely that cannot be explained by the structure of its government.

[The Eye]

The vast majority of this thread is IC. Moving to World Affairs.

[RobertFitzy]

The NPO was successful in its diplomacy, and its willingness to step outside the box with new ideas and systems. Most of the way some alliances run themselves are somewhat based on how the NPO originally did that which has become the standard way. Its not about ruling with an iron fist or freedom that holds people back or pushes them foreword, its about willing to change things around and try things really out side of what is normal to get the edge in this world and having the power and resources to succeed with the new idea. Trying new things are risky though and most don't want to do that and that is what most of the time ironically kills them.

[Earogema]

I have been analyzing the existing structure as well as the opposition to the existing structure and the conflicts between the existing structure and it's aforementioned opponents and it really comes down to the desire of many to say whatever they want and do whatever they want to whomever they want, and those opposed to this brand of anarchy in general or at least when it comes to their own alliance.

Both sides to this debate have their benefits and drawbacks. While those fighting for law and order such as my alliance the NPO tend to be much better organized than our opponents, and therefore have strong economic and military structures in which to grow and fight, those favoring freedom and liberty tend to be able to recruit new members more successfully, and have fewer problems with discipline, but cannot grow as quickly or fight as effectively due to the lack of structure.

It is my belief that the "free" alliances will always grow very quickly, but are inevitably doomed to fall before the "ordered" alliances.

Somebody didn't real Vlad's "The Paradox of Freedom."

[XRCatD]

There are also certain alliances that utilize a lot of law and order in its recruitment system and examining its recruits, but give large amounts of freedoms and liberties once the recruits are accepted.

Ex: the Grämlins

Edited March 9, 2009 by XRCatD

[Ferrous]

Somebody didn't real Vlad's "The Paradox of Freedom."

Oh, the irony.

[Kaiser Martens]

What the OP says has been argued ever since the times of GWI, heh.

[KingEsus]

but you've yet to fight in a war where you didnt have back up or aid.

with NPO, victory is assured simply because NPO has the most treaties and ns attached to said treaties, until that changes NPO will always win, and I see alot more Agressive Wars than defensive, not to mention your opponents are quite small at that point and 15 million can rebuild more than you'd lose, you've experienced war, yes, but you've yet to experience the losing end of war.

It is alot less bloody and vicious, I've experienced both, when you're getting hit with a nuke and losing 200 million worth of infra, land and tech, it hurts alot worse than getting nuked in the 10-20k range and losing 20 or 30 million worth of infra/land/tech, not to mention as I stated before, you always have 2 other people attacking the same single target you're facing, as opposed to being on your own against 3 or more opponents.

And now do you see the beauty of the Pacifican machine? A machine made of pure white hate. Behold its blinding light! Where whilst learning the ways of the warrior our young are suckled from the teat of Moo, they learn to destroy and then they are rebuilt whilst their enemies fade away. Training is all Vox and its ilk give us, they teach our young how to fight and then they die, whilst our members grow and become borg.

It really is quite beautiful.

[Neboe]

. . . whilst our members grow and become borg.

Are you sure insinuating that your members are mindless obsequious sycophants is a good thing?

[Freelancer]

Are you sure insinuating that your members are mindless obsequious sycophants is a good thing?

Remove the word insinuating, he's telling you they are, however I do like this new bold attitude coming from the NPO, it should give the words civil unrest a whole new meaning.

Edited March 10, 2009 by Freelancer

[Vladimir]

Oh, the irony.

I too got a chuckle out of that.

But what sort of Vladimir would I be if I left the post at that without getting into an argument about something.

If you want to make large generalized statements, then I suggest your analysis needs closer scrutiny. If you're going from Vladimir's line of thought, then you aren't necessarily wrong, from a historical perspective. True, the more authoritarian alliances used to be the ones that championed highly ordered alliances, but does that include everyone, or just the NPO? And true enough, the "authoritarian" alliances also used to be better organized than the democratic ones, and therefore would generally do better in a war. But that's how things used to be, and a lot of those who were in loosely organized alliances have since learned their lesson, and have made their alliances - democratic and otherwise - much more organized then they were in say, GWI. Furthermore, autocracy is championed by the NPO, and while their sense of organization (as an outsider can understand it) is quite sophisticated, there are a number of other advantages that go along with the NPO, that are not necessarily due to its autocratic state of government. You'd be hard pressed to find a second autocratic alliance that has had as much success as the NPO, making me believe that the NPO owes a large part of its success to something else entirely that cannot be explained by the structure of its government.

I would argue (and often do) that the autocratic vs. democratic dichotomy is not the fundamentally important one (so much so that in The Meaning of Freedom (take note, MegaAros) I argued that conflict, in certain circumstances, could be superseded within an electorally democratic structure). The important factor is the degree of conflict that exists within the alliance, and it is only in regards to this that government type comes in. As a general rule autocratic alliances will reduce conflict to a greater extent than an electoral democracy -- but this is far too simplistic to be seen as a law; a much broader picture of the way an alliance works is necessary; I would hardly argue that the GGA under Prodigal Chieftain's autocratic reign reached the ideal of stability and free development, for example.

If we take things in broad strokes as you do, then you can say that Democratic Alliance A was bad, now Democratic Alliance A has changed and is better, and leave it at that. But you ignore the important question: what were the changes that improved it? In general you will find a greater degree of delegation over election, of centralisation over decentralisation, and of authoritarianism over rule of law. They may have kept the same basic electoral structure, and the same basic legal system, but the way in which things work internally have changed a great deal.

You touched on this when you said "lot of those who were in loosely organized alliances have since learned their lesson, and have made their alliances - democratic and otherwise - much more organized," you just failed to highlight that in becoming more "organised" and less "decentralised" they were necessarily becoming more autocratic.

How often, for example, do we now hear of these 'changed' alliances being unable to remove a rogue due to their constitutional rights, or unable to take some life-or-death decision without a vote by the membership over the following 72 hours. Now, admittedly I don't directly deal with such matters personally any more, but I can't remember the last time I heard of it occurring -- maybe prior to the GPA war?

We can see then that alliances have been busy internally resolving the contradictions that lead to destructive conflict, and in the process they have become distinctly more autocratic. If one were predisposed towards clichéd sound-bites, perhaps they could say "We're all Francoists now."

[Ferrous]

I too got a chuckle out of that.

But what sort of Vladimir would I be if I left the post at that without getting into an argument about something.

(lots of stuff)

I was wondering when you'd show up

To be fair, I think nearly ever alliance is a "hybrid" of some sort, where they include both autocratic and democratic elements in their structure. Obviously, this idea operates on a spectrum of sorts - NPO would be at one end of the spectrum, and an alliance like, say, ODN would be somewhere on the other side. Therefore, for the purposes of finding flaws in the OP, nearly every alliance has some elements of both, but you can still argue that an alliance is still primarily democratic and another primarily autocratic (and even that has room for grey area). Therefore, we can say that for any two alliances, A and B, should A be primarily democratic and B be primarily autocratic, we can still find that A may be better organized internally (using some forms of autocratic systems), while B may only be a cult following, with no real structure. So, I will concede a point in that yes, in order to become better organized - and therefore more effective - an alliance is likely to include some autocratic elements in their organization. However, that does not mean that a primarily autocratic alliance is necessarily more effective than a democratic one. As you pointed out yourself, "I would hardly argue that the GGA under Prodigal Chieftain's autocratic reign reached the ideal of stability and free development, for example." Whereas the NPO autocratic reign (under Ivan, Dilber and Moo) did do those things. Therefore, we cannot say that it is the system of autocracy that necessarily makes an alliance more effective - though it can certainly be a useful tool if used correctly - but something more inherent within the membership itself. What that may be is another discussion altogether, so I will refrain on expanding on that line of thought for now.

[Timitz]

The discussion that has evolved from the OP has been interesting.

[James Wilson]

I look forward to watch Vlad and Ferrous continue to argue in this interesting topic.

[Vladimir]

I thought we'd bored everyone else out of the thread. I mean, if it can't be said in a one-line witticism, is it really worth saying? I was going to incorporate further thoughts into the ongoing 'Vladimir and Ferrous Blog Wars: this time, it's academic!' project. That said, I will take the bait and put down some further preliminary thoughts.

It seems to me that you're still looking at it purely from the autocratic-democratic dichotomy, where I have since moved on to look at the underlying points that make such systems potentially (in)effective. It obviously isn't enough to say 'autocracy works' or 'democracy works' because this says nothing at all. What is autocracy/democracy? What makes it work? What about its failures? Why did it have successes? To go deeper into the subject we must be able to look at these questions and ultimately put them in a structure that makes sense of them. This structure, it seems to me, is that of conflict. Electoral democracy isn't generally negative because it's electoral democracy, but because it fails to resolve the conflict inherent between nations, which in turn has negative effects (as outlined in The Meaning of Freedom, and as I hope to further outline over the coming weeks). Likewise autocracy is generally positive not because it's autocracy, but because it does a better job at resolving the conflict.

But democracies and autocracies are not homogeneous. They vary heavily, and as such some will be more successful than others. An electoral democracy such as TOP, for example, seems well able to resolve conflict, while an autocrat such as the aforementioned Prodigal Chieftain was not. Why? Well, I believe TOP falls nicely into the outline of electoral democracy I have in Freedom, while Prodigal Chieftain's erratic and irrational style caused a significant split between the autocrat and the alliance, leading to such conflict that it brought about a coup.

Moreover, you continue only to pay real attention to the very top layer when considering an alliance, when this is clearly inadequate. It isn't enough just to point to the man at the top and discuss how he got there; just as important are the lower institutions and structures, and the degree to which these resolve conflict. Thus while the man at the top may still be elected, the old pre-Initiative systems of direct democracy and legal trials have largely disappeared for exactly this reason, and have been replaced by meritocracies. Here we see conflict again empirically manifest itself, but this time in line with the dichotomy.

Thus we see that the underlying cause of success or failure manifests itself beyond the dichotomy, while nevertheless remaining closely linked to it. Or to put it another way: the exceptions prove the rule.

So we can look at the Order and see that it has been successful. We can also see that it has been an autocracy. We can also see that other autocracies have failed or succeeded. You move that this strikes autocracy as something worth considering at all. I say that this is a superficial look at the situation and that a deeper analysis will indicate that while autocracy isn't the fundamental concept to consider (accounting for why autocracies vary in effectiveness), it remains a matter of the utmost importance.

[Ferrous]

Alright, so let us move forward in the debate under the Francoist framework - for the sake of argument. Successful alliances, I will agree, are ones that resolve conflict, not necessarily remove it. For instance, debate is a form of conflict, and can be a healthy one if eventually resolved. However, a debate that turns into a heated argument can stir tensions within an alliance, and make the alliance itself weaker. I think you and I would both agree on that point, I simply prefer to think of it as "resolution" of conflict rather than "removal" of conflict. But I start with this because you have agreed that certain democratic alliances have the capacity to resolve conflict just as effectively as autocratic alliances, but have failed to illustrate how - both here, and in your previous works - and simply have given acknowledgment of their success without really going into the deeper reasons as to their success. This has always struck me as a "autocratic systems are generally better than democratic systems" argument without giving the latter side much credit. We both acknowledge that there are highly successful democratic alliances, but I continue to argue more pro-democratic side because it often seems that you ignore their benefits.

Generally, I maintain that a hybrid system - some elements of both autocratic and democratic systems are typically the ideal, depending on the alliance membership - but I refuse to believe that simply there is a correlation between the NPO's success and the fact that NPO is heavily autocratic necessarily dictates that there is a cause and effect relationship between the two.

I apologize that my wording comes off aggressively - I'm a little short on time right now and this seemed like the most straightforward response I could give. If there was anything I misunderstood in your arguments, forgive me and enlighten me with your response.

[arentak]

The lower echelons of NPO are the victims of the higher echelon's successes, but this is by and large a good thing. By the time an NPO nation is large enough to get involved in inter-alliance wars, they usually have several months worth of combat experience.

What's been going on for the last 9 months is "low intensity" warfare, like in the jungles of Congo.

If you think it's any less bloody and vicious than "high intensity" warfare, then I suggest you try it sometime.

How very Ironic that so-called "successes" of Pacifica's enemies actually make the Order stronger, and help ensure its continued Dominance.

[Earogema]

And now do you see the beauty of the Pacifican machine? A machine made of pure white hate. Behold its blinding light! Where whilst learning the ways of the warrior our young are suckled from the teat of Moo, they learn to destroy and then they are rebuilt whilst their enemies fade away. Training is all Vox and its ilk give us, they teach our young how to fight and then they die, whilst our members grow and become borg.

It really is quite beautiful.

Training my foot. If you don't have camps, your members suck at fighting. To get full camps, you'd have to have around 7-800 infra, and delete enough of it to fall into my range. That's your stategy really. You've got members like Trigon and Sirrontail. If it weren't for them, and them alone, why I dare say NOBODY in the NPO lower rank is learning ANYTHING about how to fight.

You honestly think you're training the more inexperienced members? Please. You don't know anything about lower level fighting if you do. And believe me, I am a master at lower level fighting. I've been there for a while you know (speaking of, where's my ZI )