Okay, we're making more videos at the suggestion of @Françal I. Lux .  If there's something you'd like to see a video about, please let me know here!  I'll be talking about our platform, but I can also discuss Talossan history or culture or the language.

Shared!  I am very eager for this.  I think it will be a lot of fun.

At absolute best, the Most Honourable Seneschal is confused about events.  Thankfully, the thread is right here.

Original Context
I wrote and posted my simple bill on August 12th.  At that time, there had been zero immigration for four months.  Literally, zero.  We hadn't yet lucked out with the Tiktok video or magazine article of last month.

The Process
MC Somelieir objected to one of the introductory clauses, since I said the bill was to resolve a legal ambiguity.  She said that I wasn't allowed to say that.  We argued about it briefly, but I decided that it wasn't important and just deleted the entire clause to which she objected.

Then the Most Honourable Seneschal posted what she calls a "snide comment," saying "I do think that E.5 probably is a bit wider in scope than appropriate. And the Government would be willing to discuss softening it - if we weren't having these discussions with an individual whose whole political 'shtick' right now is angry condemnation that the Government isn't jumping and hollering and doing political theatre around immigration."

Then when I Clarked it, she has already confessed to lobbying her party to vote against it.  And so it failed to pass.

The Motivation
Please notice that I am directly recounting and often quoting from the public record about this, whereas the Most Honourable Seneschal feels free to be a little more creative.

That's also why she says, over and over again, that she's afraid she's going to be prosecuted.  At this point, this has to be called what it is... a falsehood.  She's lying.  She knows that I have repeatedly told her that's outright impossible.  But it's a more sympathetic story than killing a necessary bill just because you don't like the sponsor.

The Most Honourable Seneschal feels caught out on a deeply unpopular decision, knows that there will be a reckoning with the voters, and she's looking for an excuse to explain it.  But there's no excuse that holds water, folks.  There's no good explanation for the Government demanding the power to secretly control immigration.  There's no good explanation for lying about it.

Let's change the subject to something more positive, and expand on these ideas!

Provide hosting.  Both the national website and the wiki use software which are designed to allow people to easily contribute.  They have WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interfaces that are widely used, with a ton of tutorials available to people.

In the past, when we had much more difficult web services, the Government still went out of its way to ensure that people had access.  On the old kingdomoftalossa.net, you had to write pages out in some kind of weird language that wasn't HTML, but we still had a lot of people use it.

Maybe we won't want the regular wiki hosting such things, since that should stay informational but we could establish a part of the wiki for this purpose.  I did this with the Law section of the wiki, for example, which is a special namespace that is used for legal articles and which only the Scribe can edit.  Why not a Community namespace?

Or the website!  It's just WordPress, and very easy to use.  We should give a lot more people access to the site to improve it.  If we're worried they're going to mess something up, we can use existing WordPress permissions to lock important pages away from most folks.

Getting something started is great, but making something public will pull more people in.  It's always hardest to get the second person dancing at a party, after all.  And it will help the country by giving us more interesting things to do!

Establish a resource library.  We have a lot of images and designs that people have made over the years.  Some of them exist in a Google Drive that I created for a past government, and which is now used as a common depository.  Not a lot, since no one else ever used it.  But it's a start.

Let's get together files and resources that people find helpful, and put them all in one place!  It can be as simple as a single page on the website with a lot of links and images.  This isn't even a big task... it would be the work of one afternoon, but it would pay off many times over by making it easier for people to do stuff.  Let's lower the barrier to entry for Talossa!

Develop starter kits.  It would be worthwhile for the Government to create one-page starter kits to help people with suggestions and possible paths.  For example, a lot of people don't know how to write BBCode for our forum.  Let's grab some stuff from an existing tutorial and help people with some ready-made BBCode headers and images, then they can just copy and paste it into a post.  Suddenly their new little idea is looking a lot more attractive!

I mean, how else are we going to get some media going here?  We can help people create Talossan news blogs and get some commentary and reporting.  It's not like there's a ton of news -- it's definitely a task one person can handle.  Wouldn't it be cool to read some news reporting on Talossa?

The Progressive Alliance doesn't just want to do stuff... we want to make it easier for you to do stuff, too!

Here's the explanation from the Most Honourable Seneschal for why she lobbied her party to kill the bill:

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC on October 22, 2025, 02:37:30 PMThe Baron put the Public Process Bill in the Hopper at the height of his dudgeon ... I made one snide comment, then more or less ignored it. I hoped he would calm down about it and it would go by the wayside; so I was disappointed that he took it to the CRL for the Sixth Clark. It was clearly too late by then to make further principled arguments against it. So, I just decided to lobby my party to vote against it.

With the utmost respect, I think this shows a lot about priorities.

This is a question of civil liberties, good government, and transparency.  The Seneschal claims that they have the power to take any immigration application and "chuck it in the bin" in secret, as she puts it.  It is completely unacceptable for any government to have this power, and the Progressive Alliance proposed a bill that would require them to disclose any "binning" to the public.

It should have been a priority.  Instead, the URL killed it.

Let me say this right now:  If I am fortunate enough to get the support to lead our amazing little country, I won't be turning away anyone's help.

• If you present a bill fixing an important issue, I'll vote for it.  Even if you're not in my party.  If I don't agree with the bill, I'll work with you to amend it.  If that's not possible, I'll try to fix it myself in my own version.  We won't ignore it or fight it, just out of partisanship.
• If you pose a terpelaziun identifying a problem, I will listen to you.  And if you're right, I'll try to fix that problem.  I won't always succeed.  Some problems are difficult and thorny.  But we'll try, and we'll commiserate together if we fail.
• If I fall short in representing Talossa, speaking intemperately, I will apologize.  And I'll try to do better.  I'm only human, but one of the best things about being human is that we can always try to improve.
• If you want to help the country with something, or you have an idea, or you have a question: we'll be there to try to help you.  We're all in this little community together, and we can all help make it a great place to be.
• If you remind me of this pledge when I have broken it, I will thank you for the reminder.  And I'll try again.

Listen: I have said, over and over and over again, that I'm specifically not accusing anyone, including you, of abusing the current government power to secretly control immigration.  I think I've been careful to say that almost every post I've made about this, actually.  Here's just a few examples:

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on October 08, 2025, 09:18:52 AMThe Government also claims that they have never used this power.  There is no evidence to the contrary, and we believe them.
...
We believe the Government when they say that they're not using their secret power to control immigration.  But we also don't think they should even have that power.  The Progressive Alliance doesn't think a bureaucrat should get to secretly control who gets to apply to immigrate.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on October 22, 2025, 09:33:18 AMFrom the start, we've been very clear: we believe the current Government when they say that they haven't done this.  But they're not the only government we've ever had.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on November 02, 2025, 09:08:13 AMFrom the start, we've been very clear: we believe the current Government when they say that they haven't done this.  But they're not the only government we've ever had.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on November 02, 2025, 01:47:04 PMBut... I didn't accuse you of criminality?  I didn't threaten to subpoena anything?  I've actually said, over and over, that I believe you when you say that you're not engaging in this abuse of power.  I said it like five times in this thread!

Maybe you're just confused, since you also keep saying that you're not reading my posts?  But you're very angry at me about something that isn't true.  You invented some threats and now you're angry at me about your own imagination.

For like the twentieth time: we are not saying you abused this power.  We are saying the Government shouldn't have this power, whether or not it has been abused.  And we're saying we want to investigate to see if this power has ever been abused by anyone.  Please stop lighting yourself on fire and shouting about arson.

There are so very many reasons why the government shouldn't be allowed to secretly discard immigration applications.

• A minister who's a bit prejudiced might quietly delete the application of a member of the queer community if that person seems "off" or "weird."
• A minister who has strong political beliefs might delete the application of someone who's likely to join another party.
• A minister who just doesn't like someone might delete their application because they don't have the right "vibes."
• A progressive might delete the application of a conservative.
• A conservative might delete the application of a progressive.
• Someone might just not like an applicant.

Let's join forces and pass my Public Process Act and reform this problem!  And then if you're worried, you can even volunteer to help look into possible abuses of the practice... surely if you're helping doing the investigation, you can't be afraid of it!  It will be like a buddy cop movie.  We're unwilling partners, but the Chief demands that we solve the crime together!  We've got just 24 hours to solve it, or we're off the force!

That's not very skibidi toilet Ohio sigma 67 41 of you.

Typo! "Doesn't sound fun."

Thank you, Your Majesty!

Tagging @Mic'haglh Autófil, O.Be since I haven't heard from him.  Let's get planning on this, if we're going to do it.

I think that Francal should certainly hear you out.  And if you have better arguments, I think he'll change his mind.

Also, a speech attacking me is a weird way to respond to the charge that you're running a negative campaign.  If you absolutely have to write another long speech just attacking me, maybe space them out more.  You don't want your whole campaign to just be personal attacks.   An angry campaign just doesn't sound fun.  Let's be positive!

I mean, Mic'haglh is a great guy, so it might make sense to focus on him.  Talk about his personal attributes.  He's usually kind, he helps people in the Coletx a lot, he's an amazing graphic designer, and het gets along with people.  And there's nothing to make me think he wouldn't also be an effective leader.  And the point you guys made about him being a fresh face is a great one!  That would be a great thing to focus on!

Or talk about the things you're proud of accomplishing.  After two full terms, there must be a decent list of them.  You simplified the immigration reform a couple of months ago, for example. 

Or even better, a discussion of some of the specific policy plans and promises you guys intend to accomplish would be great.  We're asking them to trust us with our vote, so let's tell them what we want to get done!  Mic'haglh has some posts up with a few things, so you already have a start with that.

Overall, I just think it would be better for Talossa if both parties are running positive campaigns full of pride and promises.  People will feel more comfortable, it will make us seem friendlier, and overall it will also be more fun.  It's certainly our plan, at least.

Awesome!  The URL does have some good ideas, though -- for example, I do think we should prioritize a Living Cosa, as Mic'halgh has suggested.  It would be good to do a live video one.

And also, on a personal note, I'm glad to see you back and active with us, Francal!

Tric'hard... what have I done to you... why are my poor Mençeis suffering one defeat after another?

I think it would be great to fix this issue as one of the first things next term.  My bill essentially makes the most minimal change imaginable, just saying that the public must be made aware of any applications that are rejected.

It adds in just this clause: "5.1. This decision may only be made after the application has been processed and posted, and the public must be informed of the minister's decision and the justification for the decision."

As mentioned, this would still allow for applications from spammers and bots to be rejected as incomplete by the minister under the existing provisions of the law.  And loathsome applications could still be halted by the Ziu, the King, or the Corts... or by the minister, as long as they did it with public disclosure.

Party Name: Progressive Alliance

Leader: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu

50-word statement:
Reject negativity, embrace accountability, preserve institutions, and move forward with new ideas: repeal the government's secret control on immigration; remove red tape; fix up the website; and put a human face on the government.  Promote the fun stuff that's happening... and let the world know about our amazing little nation!

Cosa list:

• Þerxh Sant-Enogat
• Alexandreu Davinescu
• X. Pol Briga
• Tric'hard Lenxheir
• Eovart Xhorxh
• Mximo Carbonèl
• Françal I. Lux

Platform: https://wittenberg.talossa.com/index.php?topic=4399.0

Alternate Party Name: Aliançù Progreßïu

Authorized Agents: Þerxh Sant-Enogat, Sir X. Pol Briga

Preferred Abbreviation: Prog

---

I would like to note that there was some dissent inside the party over this when we were hammering it out.  While some thought it was good, at least one Talossan (who I won't name here) said,

Quote from: Tric'hard Lenxheir on November 02, 2025, 12:11:25 AMYou forgot to mention stealing the King's money!

So we are including that promise, among others, in an additional fifty words which we will send to voters by courier pigeon.

Unrelated: thank you to the Secretary of State for this:

Quote from: Sir Lüc on November 01, 2025, 05:44:32 AM(In an attempt to boost the number of Senate candidacies over the 1.33 average candidates per race during the last GE, I have posted reminders on all relevant provincial boards)

This is a good idea!  (Also, see, I finally read the election rules.)

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC on November 02, 2025, 04:23:55 PMThe fact that there are no actual suspects is precisely what makes this a witch-hunt.

Okay, just so I can get this straight:

In your eyes, this is a witch-hunt because we're not seeking to investigate a specific person?  Like... it's bad that we want to just make sure no one's been abusing this power, no matter who it might be?

I'm not sure I agree with that.  Or that a lot of other people would agree with it.  But you're certainly entitled to your opinion.

It's certainly possible that it will be a challenge to investigate past abuses.  I think it will actually be pretty easy, personally.  I mean, there's only like a hundred applications a year or so, and some years much less than that.  Put them into a spreadsheet, see which ones are missing replies with application postings, and I bet the list is not very long.

Even if it's a bit difficult... I mean, okay?  So?  Sometimes things are worth doing, even if it takes a bit of thinking.