Hey you guys, sorry, late to the party, just went down with a minor pandemic last week.

But I was re-reading the CRL establishment legislation, and by the looks of things, people aren't allowed to bring bills to the CRL unless they've spent 10 days in the Hopper (El Lexhatx H.6.4).

Is my reading correct? I realise we didn't do this last time, but it appears to be the law.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on May 01, 2022, 01:04:06 PM
Yes, it used to be that the party/parties who formed a majority would name their candidate for Seneschal.

An untruth. The old way was that the King would choose the Seneschál from whichever party he could be convinced had a majority - or, if he felt like it, would just pick whoever he liked and dared the Cosa to overthrow them on the VoC. In the late 1990s, the then King said that he would simply never nominate a Seneschal from the Liberal Party no matter if they got an absolute majority. And there was nothing the Libs could do but mass-renounce, which they did.

Now the Cosa elects the Seneschal. I know that's probably disappointing to the TNC because the Senator from Florencia would probably be Seneschal right now under the old system!

But to the details of the system. As A-G, I must endorse the SoS's reading of the law. Compulsory-preferential voting is quite common in elections in Australia. Yes, it means you can only vote for the people on the ballot paper. And yes, it means you have to rank a preference for each one or your vote is invalid. This means that in an elections run by these rules, you have to give a preference to the Nazi Cannibal Child-Molester Party (presumably, your last preference) or your vote won't count.

This is something that has been on my radar for quite a while as someone I'd prefer to amend myself - but when I raised it in the Hopper last term, I got no bites. Happy to endorse any popular reform proposals.

Who is still linking to the outdated talossan.com website? I thought we removed all the links to that from the wiki and the national website

Also too, the Attorney-General. Until further notice, that's me.

This is a red herring for the following reasons:

- the current SoS is being sued by a member of his own party due to responsibility for the decisions of a moderator who is the leader of the opposing party.
- we have the numbers (barely) for a nonpartisan Civil Service and Judiciary, not an apolitical one. Imagine if the plaintiff in the case mentioned above refused to recognize the authority of the CpI whose Senior Judge is a TNC MC.
- I don't remember people being that happy with Witt moderation decisions before the SoS was elected as FreeDems leader, eg. the endless complaints which ended the "Thunderdome" experiment.

So we're between the Scylla of "I don't trust someone from the opposing party to moderate me", and the Charybdis of "moderators are scared to moderate anything lest they be sued or personally harassed". If there's no protection for moderators, then doing nothing will always be the safest option. Nothing is possible in a situation where your standards of civility are marked by whether it's your political side doing it or not.

I'm informed by my colleagues that Glüc is right and I was wrong about the constitutional situation.  :-[

Back to the beginning, then - we need a new schema for Witt moderation which will be rigorously non-partisan, pro-civility, and whose decisions will be respected by both sides. I encourage the TNC to make suggestions to that end.

I encourage the TNC to consider what about their political behaviour and rhetoric might be causing hurt to their political opponents, right now. If their answer is "no errors, we're scrumdiddlyumptious", then any civil dialogue is impossible.

Let's explore this question of "hurt". The good Baron and I will likely never agree whether Rough Music was justified in response to his Beric'ht Talossan newspaper giving a platform to religious bigotry and not withdrawing it. But if the good Baron understands that, Rough Music happened because I was personally hurt by BT, then we may be a step closer to a consensus.

In situations of heightened political conflict, where existential or principled issues are at stage, both sides get hurt. The whataboutist response here would be for me to list all the times, and all the ways, in which I have been "hurt" by how people in Talossa deal with me. To which the inevitiable responses would be:

• you weren't really hurt;
• and if you were, you deserved it for your bad behaviour.

See? It never ends unless both sides agree to stop reacting and start acting. Peace is only possible at the point where both sides are willing to forgive. And I use that word in a technical sense. It doesn't mean "pretending that what you did to me was okay". It means "realising that if I don't set aside my understandable urge to get even, the cycle doesn't end".

The beginning of a permanent solution to this in Talossa will be agreeing to a new regime of Wittenberg moderation which is respected by both sides and cleans up the discourse while protecting robust debate and free speech.

(I should add as a PS that the reference to "bullying" is a response more to the IMHO outlandish response of the TNC leader to the Coalition party's IMHO courteous request that he cut out trying to subvert the election result. The flip side to "anything goes" smears of your enemies is attempts to cast political pushback as morally impermissible. It's not the sort of thing that can be banned but it's the kind of thing that poisons the discourse.)

^^^^ Just as I said. The problem with "cleaning up Talossan discourse" is that every proposal is "whatabout"ed to death.

Just like in the United States - there is a lack of social consensus on where the line between "robust political debate" and "disinformation, personal abuse and smear tactics" lies. Achieving that will have to be the first step to cleaning up the discourse. And I think it would have to start with finding a mechanism for Wittenberg moderation in which mods couldn't be pestered out of their decisions, which is what happened with Thunderdome.

Quote from: Antonio Montagnha, Ed. D. on April 24, 2022, 10:49:08 AM
Or calling someone stupid, or going after their mental health therapy...

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN on April 23, 2022, 04:46:14 PM
I'm pretty sure that there's no way to make "being a jerk" or "acting in bad faith" or "accusing people of being bullies for calling you out for being a jerk" illegal, nor should it be in a free society. I don't want to live in a society where everything that's legal is considered socially acceptable, though.

Indeed. The question then becomes: how do we pull Talossans back in line when they go over the edge of civil discourse?

The whole problem is similar to that that pertains in the United States: one side will excuse any bad behaviour if it's done by their political allies. This means that moderation of Wittenberg is totally politicised. Both sides will support the Wittenberg death penalty for the least snarky comment from their opponent ("JUST STOP BULLYING ME!!!", they'll shriek), whereas any pushback on their own slander and personal abuse will be met with pearl-clutching about freedom of speech.

My own "Thunderdome" proposal - not deleting angry and nasty posts, but moving them to a separate forum where they could be engaged with or ignored - was trialled, but failed because people refused to respect the moderator's decisions in that regard. The problem in Talossa is there are no effective sanctions on bad behaviour that both political sides will endorse - or even an agreed definition of what "bad behaviour" is.

I wonder if that can be fixed, or whether we're in a situation of "our miéida doesn't stink" - i.e. one side will never admit to going too far in their political invective, or will always argue that whatever they do is justified. And we can't have impartial moderation because there's no "referee" whom both sides will respect and trust and whose decisions they will abide by.

deleted because of cluelessness on my part

I'm pretty sure that there's no way to make "being a jerk" or "acting in bad faith" or "accusing people of being bullies for calling you out for being a jerk" illegal, nor should it be in a free society. I don't want to live in a society where everything that's legal is considered socially acceptable, though.

However, such behaviour should attract a political cost. If parties do things like this and it's universally condemned, and perhaps even their own voters tell their leaders they went too far trying to get political advantage, then maybe it won't happen again.

Which is why this shouldn't be a pile-on of FreeDems/PdR supporters. It would be great to see at least one person who voted TNC saying that this isn't acceptable behaviour from the person they voted for as Seneschal.

partly deleted due to cluelessness on my part

Utterly inappropriate to attempt to enmesh a new citizen in such screwery and hi-jinks.

It's also good that I can revive this political cartoon from way back in the day. Third-biggest party asks the biggest party to pretty plz not solicit its members to turn its back on what they were elected for? BULLYING!!!

If Carlüs makes a Wiki account and lets me know what it is, I'll grant it full Citizen rights

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on April 20, 2022, 05:58:14 PM
The evidence keeps piling up for a change to our systems! Shouldn't be such a hassle for you to do that.

This is going to be a priority for the incoming Government, as I like to think I've repeated countless time.