Ah, fantasy hockey. Where you can be glad your NHL team slapped down one of their biggest rivals, but you know you have two guys from said rival on your roster, and those negative points are going to hurt.

The duality of man fan.

Quote from: King Txec on November 10, 2025, 02:14:21 PMI'm trying to weigh in but Google Docs are always conflicting with my work Google account. I'm doing my best though (even though getting them in the correct orange highlight is not fun on a phone haha)

-Txec R

For our part, we'd certainly want to help make things easier for His Majesty, but to do that we need to make sure that the debate prep process isn't poisoned by "working the refs", and instead just let the moderators do their jobs.

Welcome, Jason!

That works for me as well.

Either day next weekend would work for me. Saturday is when the polls open, so that would seem appropriate, but it depends on your schedule as well as His Majesty's and/or Sir Ian's.

Quote from: King Txec on November 07, 2025, 04:49:05 PM

Quote from: Max Maltezos on November 07, 2025, 03:53:42 PMNo, I said that because I would remove him from office if I was the king, Your Majesty.

As this is a Constitutional Monarchy, my powers are limited, and I don't have the power to remove someone from office. I would suggest reading through the Organic Law and El Lexhatx. It's actually quite interesting reading, especially if you have any plans on becoming a legislator, as I think you did declare a new political party.

-Txec R

Seconding this, @Max Maltezos . In particular, the Organic Law is our constitution, and if you want to run for office, it's best to know how everything is set up! Knowing how the Government is formed, what the Opposition does, these are all important if you want to play a part!

Quote from: Audrada Roibeardet on November 07, 2025, 05:02:54 PMI might stop by. I'm pretty sure I'll have better coffee than you. Just a heads up. Hehe.

Hmm...might be time to buy a new bag of Door County.

Quote from: Mic'haglh Autófil, O.Be on November 07, 2025, 05:08:31 PM

Quote from: Brecken Godfrey on November 07, 2025, 03:06:19 PMThere's a Talossan military?

As Barclamiu pointed out, the Zouaves are Talossa's "military", but realistically they exist to encourage and promote development of Talossan culture.

(To that end, when you become a citizen, you should consider joining!)

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on November 06, 2025, 08:00:34 PMWe've proposed some questions and heard from one of the moderators, but there's still no suggested questions from the URL... At this rate, I don't think we can do this Saturday.

We are working ours out before posting them. What does your Sunday look like? My afternoon is fairly free, though I believe you're an hour ahead.

Quote from: King Txec on November 06, 2025, 03:13:31 PMTwo points: first, it seems that if the opposition did as most other parliamentary systems do, which is to employ a shadow cabinet, then could not the Shadow Immigration Minister perform this function?

I would say this is a good idea, if not for the fact that Shadow Cabinets seem to be rare in part due to manpower. If we broaden the language a bit (again, perhaps to simply make it an appointee of the Leader of the Opposition, which is functionally equivalent to a Shadow MinImm anyway) that would achieve one of the main goals of increasing the transparency of the immigration system, since that is of course what the Opposition's purpose is in a parliamentary democracy.

The fact that awareness of this purpose is spreading is a good thing.

Quote from: Brecken Godfrey on November 07, 2025, 03:06:19 PMThere's a Talossan military?

As Barclamiu pointed out, the Zouaves are Talossa's "military", but realistically they exist to encourage and promote development of Talossan culture.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on November 05, 2025, 11:08:01 PMI'm going to try to ignore the ton of personal, mean attacks on my character here.

Truths may hurt, but the only way to truly avoid them is to earn better truths. I don't give honest criticism with the intent to be mean, I give it to offer chances for self-improvement.

QuoteWell, the reason you've given for maintaining the government secrecy around immigration control in your plan is that there'd be someone nominated by the Opposition involved.  That's like... the main thing.  You guys could do that tonight.  If you think this is a good idea, why don't you?

This bill does the literal opposite of maintain secrecy, which means you're just going to either ignore everything I've written, or just claim I wrote the opposite.

QuoteYes, it wouldn't be required by law, but isn't it preferable to try it before you make it legally mandatory?

We're already trying the "honor system" version of things. You yourself don't seem to think it's working, or else we wouldn't be having this conversation to begin with. Evidently then, we have crossed into where it becomes legally mandatory.

QuoteI think probably the best and most effective solution to making the immigration process transparent is to make it transparent, not to just let more officials in on the secret.

Again -- what motivation would the Opposition have to "keep things secret"?

Your criticism of the current system, if taken at face value, stems from two (well, two-and-a-half) issues:
- One, that the Immigration Minister could discard immigration applications without first informing the public
- Two, as per the preamble to 61RZ27, that a future Immigration Minister could abuse their power to unilaterally discard immigration applications based on the perceived views of the applicant (political, religious, etc)
- Two and a half, the country would be none the wiser for this bias as a result of (One).

Now, both the Public Process Act and the Immigration Process Reform Act address the first concern, albeit in different manners. The Public Process Act simply says "the Minister has to tell everybody before they junk an application", which sounds nice in theory, but unfortunately non-compliance is hard to detect -- if they don't post it to begin with, there's no way for the public to know that there was an application to discard in the frst place, which leads us right back to...basically where we are now. The IPRA on the other hand addresses this by placing more eyeballs in the room, and at least one set of those eyeballs has every incentive imaginable to blow the whistle and alert the public if they see something sketchy.

Where they differ is that the IPRA goes further by dividing the Immigration Minister's power among those same "sets of eyeballs", which does a lot to make situation (Two) less likely in the first place. It attacks the issue from both ends, making for a more effective solution.

Mick!

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC on November 05, 2025, 06:05:58 PMThis is an utterly dishonest way of describing your conversation with Mic'haglh.

The next time I see him be honest will be the first, but as the more mature individual in the conversation I'm happy to ignore his mischaracterizations.

I will run as positive of a campaign as the truth allows me to run, but we do ourselves a grave disservice when we ignore uncomfortable truths in favor of a smiling facade.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on November 05, 2025, 05:30:03 PMNow, on the bill.  I'm a little surprised to see you bring it up... that bill was posted in September, and within the day, I pointed out some fairly serious problems with it.  And then... nothing.  No response, and here we are in November.

I was waiting for someone I can trust to engage in good faith. I still am. I do however find it very amusing that you can simply claim "well your bill has a bunch of problems with it, but mine is perfectly fine!" Like a political party containing the furthest-right politicians in the country claiming to be Progressive, it's an entire electoral campaign built on the concept of "source: just trust me bro!"

However, to correct your criticisms, I would point out that "this bill is unnecessary, the Immigration Ministry could just create the committee now" does nothing to address that simply creating the committee ad-hoc does nothing to take away the legal powers that are vested very much in the Immigration Minister alone. You have to change the law if you want to do that. And to head off your counterargument: yes, the Immigration Minister could simply agree to abide by the committee's wishes, but that's still solely on an honor system and therefore no better than the current situation.

As for the assertion that the committee approach "doesn't actually provide government transparency" -- do you honestly mean to tell me that if you were the Opposition member of the committee, and you were therefore able to witness a hypothetical situation where the Government secretly blocked or discarded an application, you would...simply sit on it? You wouldn't shriek to high heaven about alleged government malfeasance, the same way you do whenever the government does anything without your say-so? None of the standard  theatrics or hyperventilation, nothing? Because after your behavior this last term, I find that hard to believe. Actively including the Opposition in the process allows the Opposition to fulfill its most basic and important duty more effectively: namely, the duty to hold the Government to account. The fact that I need to explain the role of the Opposition in our constitutional order to the person who currently leads it is gravely concerning.

If you were actually concerned about inordinate amounts of power being vested in a single role, you would agree that the best and most effective solution would be to dilute that power among multiple individuals. There are at least two reasons I can think of off the top of my head to believe that you are not actually concerned:

One, part of your platform explicitly calls for concentrating roles and power in the hands of a small number of individuals, and this explicitly runs counter to that.

Two, there is no reason to believe your stances on any issue are taken for any reason other than to use as a cudgel against your opponents. For example, this is why you've changed your tack on immigration at least three times in the last six months, or why you don't believe in devoting a mailer to warn unaware citizens (the ones who never visit Witt) of the dangers of electorally validating S:reu Tzaracomprada -- the only calculation that matters to you is "how can I use [thing] for electoral success".

While I am glad to see that you are at least claiming to abandon your plan to bring lawfare to Talossa, one of the other massive flaws with 61RZ27 that we haven't even addressed yet is that it involves the Chancery, which is a poor plan for at least three reasons:
- From a practical standpoint, the Chancery has enough of a workload as it is.
- This act would require the Chancery to render a decision on whether or not the Government has broken the law, a decision process best left to the judiciary (surely the Clerk of Corts remembers the judiciary?)
- Requiring this decision from the Chancery could open the Secretary of State to baseless accusations of favoritism, something we have seen for other reasons in recent years.

It's pretty obvious that in this case, creating a bit more bureaucracy is preferable to simply stacking more on the desk of the existing positions.

Quotewe can pass that bill immediately while we work on what you call "very much a draft?"

"Just give us what we want and trust us to give you want you want later!" Yeah, no.

Benveneschti, Max!


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The problem with "Step Three" as listed above is that it completely ignores the Immigration Process Reform Act, which I myself currently have in the Hopper and will be continuing to refine with feedback from the community once the new Cosa is seated.

One of the central tenets of the bill — one I am more adamant on proceeding with — is that the review of immigration applications is handled by a committee of at least three, as opposed to the unilateral, "secret" discretion of the Immigration Minister. In other words, it neutralizes the same concerns to Public Process Act claims to address.

Additionally, one of the committee members must be nominated by the Opposition — meaning that the workings of the Ministry will be known to the very people intended to keep the Government accountable. This also serves to better balance the committee politically, assuaging concerns about political bias affecting immigration applications.

One of the big advantages in the committee method under the IPRA as compared to the Public Process Act is that the committee approach still increases transparency and Ziu oversight of the immigration process, without subjecting the Ministry's day-to-day operations to Ziu micromanagement. There is a difference between the two.

To claim that a government run by the person who put this committee approach forward (me) would somehow be more secretive is a level of dishonesty bordering on the comical.


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Quote from: Françal I. Lux on November 04, 2025, 08:08:24 AMSure let's try it! I appreciate your help :)


F. I. Lux

How's something like this? I used a different shape for the escutcheon (rather fond of the Tudor arch tbh), muted the colors a bit, and made it so that all the diagonals that make up the chevronels and lozenges are parallel.

I mean, your arms are pretty simple as they are, haha. I have an idea or two on how we could at least make them a bit more visually appealing, if you're willing to give me a day to work on it.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on November 02, 2025, 12:05:29 PMSo how about it?  Should we get started figuring out the questions, and maybe we can do it on the ninth?

Suggested rules:
Five questions from each party.  The moderators (His Majesty and Sir Ian) may request questions be rephrased before they accept them.  After the questions are finalized, the moderators will decide on the order in which they will be asked.  They will alternate, but otherwise questions on the same topic will be together.

During the debate, no one will interrupt.  Candidates will be afforded three minutes apiece on each topic.  Moderators will decide who goes first for each question.

The goal is to help citizens make an informed choice.  All decisions should reflect that goal.

If Mic'halgh and Sir Ian send me their preferred email address, I'll them to a Google Doc I started for this.

I think that sounds good. My email for Talossan business is pretty straightforward, lol: m.autofil@gmail.com