Talk Elections

Press Release

The Speaker will be flying down to Miami for the purposes of making a very important announcement. Once the announcement is concluded, he will return to Nyman for the resumption of House Business later this evening.

Press Release -

As many aware, my views on exclusive chat mediums have been well known for the better part of five years now and I think I can say without fear of contradiction that my expressed concerns were prophetic in the way that first Mibbit and now Discord have harmed the game.

These include for one the exclusive nature in that you are replacing any time response with real time response and even with the ability to scroll back on discord, on the more popular channels it would take hours to find what takes minutes on the boards. There is also the tendency towards clique and plot formation, and the bloody road from Rimjob in June 2013 to Bloody July in 2015, can be traced on the #Atlasforum channel. Part and parcel to this is the tendency for false narratives to get kicked up regarding peoples positions/actions/statements, that get kicked around enough to where some people believe them and vote based on them and because of the power of the clique, chances are no one will challenge it when it would make a difference because they would risk their own support from the group, thus forming an echo chamber. As one of the first to warn of the dangers, I was thus also one of its first targets and first victims.

At the same time I have also been present for pioneering acts of constructive work that can be accomplished when a small group of respectable individuals can get together as then Senators Lumine, shua and myself got together with President Duke and hammered out a rather complex healthcare law in the space of several hours, the product of which passed with support from 4 major parties and served as a basis for the 2017 law. Such a productive utilization of the Mibbit platform I think served as a model for bipartisan and effective legislative composition. This interaction served as the basis for how one could have effective cabinet meetings, and National Security Council Meetings as well. If you take a group of focused and competent people, focus on a task at hand and avoid distraction you can accomplish great work.

With Discord we already see a repeat of some of the problems that came about from the rise of Mibbit, but we also have greater knowledge and experience with which to approach it because we have people who went through the Mibbit era and can help avoid the pitfalls that it presents. Or we can ignore said advice and repeat the same bloody mistakes only having the "damn I should have listened moment" once the courtyard is littered with the bodies of the victims.

Like with everything a balance is needed. Where it is effective and efficient like with composing legislation (considering the crap that gets churned out some legislative working groups wouldn't be a bad idea ;)), we should utilize it and then you have full open debate through normal legislative processes (which should absolutely not be conducted on Mibbit or Discord or anywhere else but the boards). But in general on these mediums we should strive to maintain competing voices, and not hesitate to say, "yeah don't do that". Or "that's a really bad idea", that way you don't have the echo chamber that can cause so much damage.

You need to challenge false narratives, bad ideas and stuff that is inappropriate always, but do so respectfully, that is the only way to kill the echo chamber on the exclusive platforms and avoid a repeat of what has happened in the past and to mitigate the effects of narrowed viewership caused by the medium.

Like a lot of people, I have a real life. I have a job, I have to run a household basically now, I cannot be on 24/7, and even if I could be one all the time, one person alone cannot effect this change. Therefore, I encourage every Atlasian, if you want a better game and you want these chat mediums to be beneficial and not harmful and you think you see something bad happening speak up in the chat medium. This goes doubly so for any of my people. Some of my people have a bad reputation for talking first and thinking second (some take even longer than note) and some of them cannot help themselves, but I do trust that each of them is sincere in trying to be better. I do fully appreciate the PMs I have received warning me of inappropriate actions on Discord tonight and I encourage people to contact me if they see something inappropriate so I can take action.

Just the fact in knowing that such will be occurring, will act as a deterrent towards such actions. No one, not myself, nor my distinguished opponents can flip a switch in either turn off or clean up discord, or make "bad" people go away. But what we can do is take actions that will make continuance of these behaviors impossible, and we can only do it by working together, standing up for what is right and holding people accountable where appropriate, because doing nothing is not going to change what happens on Discord or Mibbit or whatever the next shiny, new chat medium is. 

Press Release

With the start of the new congress a week and a half ago, I decided to pull back on some of the speeches but we will be back on the campaign trail in the coming days including some shorter than the ones so far and some not as short. :P Lots of important topics coming up including more on the economy, foreign policy and we might even get to see dfw make a speech or two, it will be awesome.

Also in the meantime I will continue to link all my debate answers in the OP for easy access.