Issue IIISeptember/October 2015
How should we treat Forum Destroyers?
Rachel Eriksen
In terms of heinous acts in NationStates, very little is as despicable as forum destruction. It is very difficult for any community to recover from the deletion of a forum and such acts often spell long declines and even the end for regions. People widely despise it and oppose it, which is a far cry from the days in which it was seen as a legitimate tactic by certain branches of defenders and raiders. The punishment for this crime has been lifelong banishment and exclusion. This was something I supported quite heavily, particularly given that forum destruction was a pressing issue in 2010 and 2011 when I becoming more active in the game.
Yet, I think there is a more compelling case for a smarter approach based upon the eventual re-acceptance of people who are guilty of forum destruction. Firstly, excluding people forever does not encourage better behaviour. It gives them no incentive to not engage in forum destruction again. This is not about letting people off easy, but rather understanding that people do make mistakes and that this type of approach would reduce the motivation to perform forum destruction again. After all, what is the punishment for the second time? What is to discourage further acts?
Secondly, there is no consensus among major regions regarding the treatment of people who commit forum destruction and the treatment of regions which harbour forum destroyers. Often we see regions either stay silent when other regions harbour forum destroyers or we see a type of international gang up to try to force that region to get rid of that person. The latter type raises questions of regional independence and freedom. Do regions have the right to impose what type of people other regions can have? Do regions have a right to judge?
Personally I find the mob tendencies of the international community to be a double edged sword. It can bring regions together on just causes but it can also be misdirected and resemble a type of foreign affair bullying. I think that there should be a better streamlining of the way we deal with forum destruction in an effort to prevent such situations. As well, I think that there should be more open discussion on the issue as it would appear that while some regions have strong opinions that most in fact have remained silent on it.
I would advocate a system in which there is room for eventual clemency for one time offenders and in which they are strongly barred from any forum position which enables them the possibility of forum destruction. It would be about international co-operation and ensuring that more regions could buy into this system without the bickering so often seen in today’s NationStates. Multiple offenders would still face the steepest punishment but single offenders would have a smarter and more balanced punishment. It’s a difficult line ensuring that the punishment remains intelligent but also still serves a deterrent but I think it’s a path worth at least discussing.
Free Speech in the GCRsChristian Democrats, TRR Ambassador
A few weeks ago, Rachel invited me to write a series of articles for The Raven Post on free speech in the game-created regions (GCRs) following my friendly exchange with Unibot regarding his World Fair lecture "Speaking Truth to Power." My main criticisms of his essay were that he had not distinguished enough between free speech in law and free speech in practice and that he had advocated for the suppression of speech that does not accord with "secular and universal themes." I believe a more formal treatment of free speech is possible and set out with this end in mind in these articles.
I shall venture to analyze the status of free speech in each of the GCRs, except for Balder (the GCR that sponsors this publication) and the Rejected Realms (my home GCR) to avoid any possible claims of bias or undue editorial influence. I'll examine legal free speech and practical free speech separately. The former will be a more objective analysis based on regional constitutions and statutes; and I'll pursue the latter by interviewing several citizens in these regions, who shall remain anonymous.
My goal is to make value-free judgments on how free these regions are with respect to speech. Because I am judging freedom, I shall give regions poorer assessments if they have greater restrictions on expression even if I personally believe those regulations are justified. In other words, I am not analyzing how reasonable the GCRs are (that would be too subjective) but only how free they are in a strictly detached civil libertarian sense (less regulation means more freedom). The freest region, although probably not the best place to reside, would be the region that is anarchic when it comes to speech.
I have three motivations for agreeing to write these articles. First, as the ambassador of the Rejected Realms to Balder, I believe I can bring our regions closer together through this endeavor. The relations of our regions have been largely apathetic at times, and this is a form of cultural exchange. Second, by writing these articles here, I avoid the charge that I am trying to advance the interests of the Rejected Realms in my official capacity. Third, these articles might sway some GCR governments (or courts) to reconsider and maybe even improve their stances on the regulation of speech.
'Bash the Fash!': Anti-Fascist Action in NationStatesMisley
Ask most people inside the world of NationStates military gameplay what the fundamental dichotomy is, and they'll tell you Raiding versus Defending—giving rise to the term "R/D" as shorthand for Gameplay. Many will quickly follow up with a mention of imperialism and independents. While imperialists, independents, raiders, and defenders make up the majority of the military scene, some of us exist outside the traditional framework. For some players, the fundamental dichotomy by which we play is not rooted in natives against invaders. Instead, our battle is connected to real-world ideologies: Antifa versus Fascism.
Antifa is short for the German word "Antifaschismus," and typically refers to militant left-wing opposition. In NationStates, "Antifa" is a broad alliance of predominantly leftist regions and militaries that have united to combat fascists. Behind Antifa's actions is the theory of "No Platform." No Platform is the belief that fascists should be denied a platform from which to express their ideology of hatred and violence. By this we do not suggest that governments should prohibit fascist speech, but rather that communities should organize to kick fascists out of their neighborhoods through direct action—marching, demonstrating, and protesting against fascists directly.
In NationStates, this direct action takes the form of defending regions that come under fascist occupation and tagging, raiding, and hawking fascist home regions whenever we can. Since the major fascist regions do not have executive delegates, this war typically plays out in satellite regions, such as Antifa-aligned Leninist Russia, which was successfully defended against a Greater German Reich infiltration by The Red Fleet and its allies, or in Fascist and Imperialist Union, a bronze-level member of the former Right Wing Uprising that was originally tag raided by The MT Army, but the inactivity and eventual CTE of the founder led to it being refounded.
There is a frequent argument raised in Gameplay by players who are unfamiliar with this anti-fascist struggle that the "fascists" and "Nazis" that inhabit fascist and Nazi-themed regions are just roleplaying and are not fascists outside of NationStates. There is no mistaking that these regions are in fact inhabited by true Nazis, some of whom deny the Holocaust and spend their time arguing the finer points of National Socialist race theory. The non-fascist players and roleplayers who inhabit these regions that accept this discussion without rebuttal are just as guilty as the players posting it. Much of this discussion takes place in off-site forums, to avoid coming under the scrutiny of this website's moderation staff, which can be seen in admonitions to move racist and bigoted conversations off of the RMB in several high-profile regions.
Despite this attempt to avoid moderator action, some high-profile Nazi players have been removed from NationStates or labeled Delete On Sight. Perhaps the most notable such player is Aryan Shield Command, who was DOSed in August 2014 for posting a modified version of the Nazi anthem "Horst-Wessel-Lied" on hundreds of regions' world factbook entries, according to a post by him on the Greater German Reich RMB. The puppet sweep of ASC dismantled his "Nationalsozialistische Volksstaaten" empire of almost 900 regions, from which 750 were placed under the guardianship of The Red Fleet and North Korea. Over the past three months, 350 of these have been allowed to cease to exist, while others have been returned to verifiable non-fascist communities.
We see direct action, both "violent" (raiding) and "non-violent" (region hawking, defending), as a crucial component in the process of defeating fascism that also includes denying fascists platforms (i.e., regions) from which to spread their ideology and educating the wider NationStates community about the realities and dangers of modern fascism. Thankfully, the wider NationStates community is already opposed to fascism. For proof, you only need to look to the broad coalitions that united to drive the fash from Liberal Haven and Anne Frank and demolish Nazi Europe.
Adolf Hitler believed that the only way the rise of the Nazi party could have been prevented was if its opponents had recognized it for what it was and had from the first day fought brutally against it. As the Scottish punk band Oi Polloi put it, "For once, we agree with him. The only way to stop Nazi scum is by confronting them and literally kicking them off our streets." Antifa's soldiers and sailors work in the background, united with the common purpose of kicking fascists off the streets of NationStates to prevent the rise of fascism in this game.
On EmbassiesAvakael
So, set the scene. It's a rainy Saturday morning in Australia in January (and I have literally no idea why it's raining in January). I've slept in until roughly 11am and nobody gives a damn. I turn on my computer and boot up IRC, and while browsing forums to see if anything that I can point and laugh at happened overnight, Rachel Anumia contacts me and tells me I can write about any topic I choose and it'll be published. This is excellent, because it means I can say literally whatever I want and a strange GCR apparently devoted to Norse culture (I think? Never visited) will take the fallout for me. In fact, I've decided to take the opportunity to ruin Balder as much as possible, because that's how I roll. Place the blame squarely on everyone else but myself (calling them dimwits or the equivalent thereof in the process), throw in obscure references to regions that were dead before 2011 was out, and conclude the rotten mess by pointing out that The Devil's Game is a much better game that makes far more sense than this one.
Brief investigation made my task much harder. It turns out, for example, that making jokes about bald people for a region named 'Balder' is extremely unfunny, and so that was about half of my original ideas down the drain. After deciding that an essay on how Proboards is actually a horrifying war crime isn't going to do much to a region without any embassies from regions that use Proboards, I decided to just browse the embassies themselves for ideas, and that'd be where my inspiration for this article came from. You see, I cannot, for the life of me, work out what the point of these things are.
A forum embassy exists, as far as I can tell, as a spot for someone to put increasingly infrequent glorified junk mail. Pure and simple. It's not a big deal, FA wise, unless someone signs a treaty that requires embassy presence (What? Why?). It has virtually no recruitment value, even if the junk mail is hilarious and well written, because the junk mail is never read by more than two or three people at each destination. I know this because I've tested it- I've been Minister of Foreign Affairs or equivalent in some regions for probably about four or five years combined of my time in NationStates and nobody gives a damn what you put in your chain letters. I'm afraid I must conclude that the rest of the denizens of NationStates, those who happily participates in the pamphlet frenzy, are either in denial, place far too much importance on this antiquated system, or have never thought about what they are doing.
Also, the business is all so serious! From start to finish the embassy exchange program is full of official process and rules. Ambassadors are generally expected to fill out a special application, after which they get a special mask and a special constitutional status that sometimes even places them outside of the reach of local courts. They then get a special forum to put their dour "foreign update" in, which is full of official heraldry and pictures of the royal family or elected officials. Also, get this- despite the total lack of readership, many regions demand that such "foreign updates" be posted at least once every two or three months, and threaten to close these embassies and revoke the special status and archive the special forum if they don't do it!
Set the scene for my glorious rebellion against the system. It was four or five years ago and I was the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Unknown. Some random, irrelevant, British themed and defender aligned region (might have even been an FRA member but I'm not certain) appeared in Unknown, a raider organization, and applied for an embassy. I performed a cardinal sin and I knocked the application back. Why bother? Why would we care about what goes on in that region, at all? Futhermore, I didn't want this "ambassador" sneaking around the most holy ground of Cruor, for only Cruor would know what he'd get up to. Probably pee on something he shouldn't, or pinch a relic. But this aspirant "diplomat" was shell shocked. He couldn't comprehend that we just weren't interested in the place he'd come to represent. It was astounding how little people thought about the system they participated in and I dare say I'd have received the same reaction from many other regions if I'd knocked back their application, too.
Now, lets be reasonable. I don't think the concept of embassies and ambassadors is beyond recovery or completely without merit. I think we should change what these things do. Ambassadors shouldn't post scripted updates, beyond perhaps updating a pinned topic with the current government of their home region. They should visit far more often than once every two months, and actively socialize with the general population of their assigned region as well, to learn more about them. I have fond memories from Equinox of one Ambassador Zybodia of Yggdrasil, who is the best example in my memory of doing exactly that and racked up just under 700 posts in the process and a "Silver Spork" (quad annual award) for funniest quote (no mean feat in Equinox!)- someone who truly deserved the title of "Ambassador". The embassies themselves should be dedicated to actual dialogue between ambassadors and members of the region, and made hidden or private or government access only if that makes participants more comfortable to engage in that dialogue. The best way to exchange information, from personal experience, is an open question and answer session between the two sides where either side can ask whatever they want, within reason. This will give much needed meaning and depth to the embassy exchange system. I should quickly note that this is the current way of doing things in The Devil's Game, and it obviously works far better.
So anyway, that's that. In my humble opinion, one of the best pieces I've ever written. You can send all your complaints to your embassy in Balder. Don't worry, they'll absolutely be read.