The GM Independence Amendment (Passed)

[Marokai Backbeat]

We shouldn't be legislating for super-edge-cases. The President should have the authority to dismiss the GM. In over five and ahalf years, this hasn't been done for partisan or personal reasons until last night and I believe the consequences of the action have spoken for themselves.

I value and respect the GM position, as a person who was there when we reformed the GM, besties with the best GM we've ever had, and a former GM myself. The position is vitally important and demands respect. But it should not be impossible to dismiss if the situation calls for it.

What DemPGH did was a terrible abuse of power and a taboo, but this is an emotional reaction that you are not thinking through the long-term consequences of.

[Marokai Backbeat]

The reason the Game Moderator position rose back into any sort of prominence whatsoever is when Purple State rallied the Senate against President Bgwah's complacency and refusal to fire GM Ebowed. There was no way to have any outside oversight of the position and it allowed the position to waste away.

I realize this is an unsatisfying answer for those who want to "reform" the GM position somehow, but there is no way to "reform" this position without creating a dozen more potential hazards. The risk of what happened last night is a risk you have in a game like this and you just have to elect the right people and exercise the right amount of oversight to ensure that it never happens. Virtually everyone agreed what DemPGH did was outrageous and it led to his resignation. No other President in their right mind would step over that line again.

Maybe there is a case for reforming this position, but I have yet to see how anything like this helps the GM position in any way. People disrespect the authority of the position because some people are just going to be that way. The problems with the GM position (the obscene workload, the lack of real consequence to legislation we pass) aren't solved by these proposals.

[Marokai Backbeat]

So, if I'm getting you correctly, your argument is that we should allow the president to be able to dismiss the GM whenever, because this one time the senate overruled a president refusing to fire the GM of the time?

Surely that provides all the evidence we need that the senate would be capable of firing the GM if necessary?

I was more arguing against Nix's suggestion that there be no oversight of the position whatsoever.

I otherwise maintain that this does nothing but protect against something that happened one time in over five years, if ever, and would almost assuredly not happen again. This Amendment purely makes oversight of the GM more bureaucratic and does nothing to solve the broader problems that plague the position, which largely can't be legislated against. You can't force people to respect the position.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Besides, the position has been dysfunctional for as long as most of us have been here. Even promising candidates burn out after a few weeks, or, at best, a couple of months, and now that the office's credibility has collapsed, it has ceased to add anything of value to the game. Trying something reasonable is less risky than letting it rot.

I don't disagree with the sentiment behind this, but I still fail to see what this specific proposal would do to resolve that problem. We would merely be making it harder to get rid of a GM, and nothing more. It doesn't touch on any problem aside from preventing an astronomically rare abuse of power.

Out of interest then, apart from yesterday, has a president ever directly dismissed a GM?

I believe so, but as we don't keep records particularly well, the only way to be sure of this would be to look back on White House threads for the last five years.

The larger problem I have with this is that, aside from being shortsighted, it's arbitrarily applied. The rationale for protecting the GM from abrupt dismissal by the President is that the powers the GM has should be better respected, but what of the SoIA and SoEA? Those positions have equivalent powers in their respective fields. How is it logical to protect the GM from executive dismissal because of the power that office holds, but not the SoIA and SoEA positions despite them holding near-identical powers. The only thing that makes the GM different is that positions power to override them, but they still have immense authority. What's to stop SoIA and SoEAs from being dismissed for political reasons as well?

[Marokai Backbeat]

Besides, the position has been dysfunctional for as long as most of us have been here. Even promising candidates burn out after a few weeks, or, at best, a couple of months, and now that the office's credibility has collapsed, it has ceased to add anything of value to the game. Trying something reasonable is less risky than letting it rot.

I don't disagree with the sentiment behind this, but I still fail to see what this specific proposal would do to resolve that problem. We would merely be making it harder to get rid of a GM, and nothing more. It doesn't touch on any problem aside from preventing an astronomically rare abuse of power.

The Game Moderator shouldn't be subject to summary dismissal for the same reasons why members of the Supreme Court should not be vulnerable to summary dismissal. Making it more difficult to fire someone makes that position more independent, less contingent on the priorities of other political actors, and less subject to political pressure which at least four of the past five GMs (Adam, Simfan, Sirnick, and I) admit to having felt.

When I was GM I wrote recurring stories about a nativist resistance movement in parts of Oceania, and this was repeatedly ignored every time I tried to get people to pay attention to it. It infuriated me. I also wrote a story about abortion law in the Mideast that caused a bunch of them to get on my ass and accuse me of writing partisan stories.

In the end, I resigned out of protest because the authority of the position was not being respected enough, but it had nothing to do with political pressure or the threat of being fired that brought me down or caused people to not listen to my narratives. Protection from dismissal wouldn't have made people suddenly start listening. These are completely separate problems.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Fair enough. I hope the Senate will exercise oversight in the future if needed.