Defining "member." "Nation," "player"

Grosseschnauzer

Grosseschnauzer

TNPer
In an effort to resolve any actual or potential misunderstandings in how the Constitution and laws of TNP refers to those described as "Nation," "member," "member nation," and even “player” (see the Preamble), I am proposing that the Constitution be amended to remove such misunderstanding by declaring that these words are synonyms of the same concept and refer to the same thing.

I believe this would be a simplier approach than changing each and every instance where these words appear in the Constitution and the legal Code.

This wording also makes clear that if the contexts of one of these words is clear that some other meaning applies to one of those words, then that other meaning applies. This primarily applies to the different uses of the word “member,” as it is used in connection with the Regional Assembly, the Security Council, the North Pacific Army, or other references.

A Constitutional Amendment to standardize the meaning of certain words in the Constitution and laws of The North Pacific.

Section 1. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution is amended to read:

ARTICLE II. Membership and Registration.

Section 1. Requirements.

In order to remain as legal members of The North Pacific, a Nation is expected to adhere to the following requirements:
1) Each member Nation will abide by the Constitution of The North Pacific and The North Pacific Legal Code enacted pursuant to Article IV of this Constitution.
2) Each member Nation shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other nation or region in a manner inconsistent with the Constitution of The North Pacific.
3) Each member Nation shall refrain from giving assistance to any nation or region against which The North Pacific is taking defensive or enforcement action. Exceptions shall be given to Nations acting with official authorization of the North Pacific Army or the North Pacific Intelligence Agency, and is subject to the consent of the Cabinet minister having appropriate jurisdiction.
Unless the context of such terms clearly indicate a contrary intent, the words “Nation,” “member nation,” or “member” as used in this Constitution, or in the Legal Code, or in any other law of The North Pacific, are synonyms and refer to an individual player.
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Section 2. This amendment shall take effect upon its adoption.
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Would this mean that every nation a player holds would be subject to TNP laws on a 24-7 basis?

Getting rid of duality in the region of The North Pacific is just fine by me, trying to get rid of it in all of NationStates is not.
 
Would this mean that every nation a player holds would be subject to TNP laws on a 24-7 basis?
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As others have pointed out at various times, the terms that are being defined have had this meaning all along, i.e., that Nation meant member, or more accurately the player behind the member, member nation, or Nation. The key is is the use of the word player is in the preamble. (Among others, Flem pointed that intent out to the Cabinet when he proposed the addition to the RA application oath back in late October.

I doubt that its application would change from the current prevailing view. The only time it can become an issue is when a player comes into conflict with TNP or properly authorized NPA deployments.
 
You do in fact realize that this would make membership in all "non-democratic" regions illegal because it does not up-hold certain aspects of the Constitution.
 
You do in fact realize that this would make membership in all "non-democratic" regions illegal because it does not up-hold certain aspects of the Constitution.
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The last part of your statement is unclear. In any event. I don't agree. All this language does is to make explicit what has always been implicit in the Constitution, and its use of these particular words.

As an example, it does not change the scope of the provisions in the Regional Assembly application oath, or the language of Article V, Section 5 on the grounds for a proceeding in the Court of The North Pacific. it does not change the meaning of the Declaration of Rights. Nor does it change the requirements for membership provision in Article II.
 
TNP Constitution:
2) Each member Nation shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other nation or region in a manner inconsistent with the Constitution of The North Pacific.
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Here is a hypothetical, let us suppose that the NPO decided to take action against one of the spammers who are always violating NPO laws in The Pacific as they did with Supreme Union. Let's say they warn said region, like they did with Supreme Union, that the Pacific Army will invade the region if they do not stop. Under your revision any member of the NPO who is in the RA is in violation of the law.
 
The key words there are "in a manner inconsistent with the Constitution of The North Pacific."

It is still no different that what exists today; as I've said, this merely makes explicit what has been implicit all along.
 
At least it clarifies arguments about these terms that have been rumbling round the region since we got the constitution.

I think if I had heard "it was not the player it was the nation" one more time I would have gone "awk awk awk", flapped my arms like a chicken and gone and sat in the corner of the room with a bucket on my head.
 
flemingovia:
I think if I had heard "it was not the player it was the nation" one more time I would have gone "awk awk awk", flapped my arms like a chicken and gone and sat in the corner of the room with a bucket on my head.
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>_>

It was not the player it was the nation.

*Gaspo turns on the video camera



In other news, I have reservations about this along the lines of what BW has already mentioned, but I will tentatively support it.

Edit: Spelling.
 
It is easy to tell whether one has taken legitimate care to craft a separate national persona, or whether he is simply pretending everyone else is a total dumbass. Unfortunately, precedence in TNP has tended more to reflect the latter.
 
There is a middle ground, Kirby, where people haven't gone out of their way to craft totally separate personas, but at the same time are reasonable, responsible people, who don't abuse loopholes and, as you say, pretend that everyone else is a total dumbass. Maybe I'm just vain, but I'm pretty sure I fall into that third category, as ddoes BW. He and I don't abuse TNP's laws, but we also haven't gone out of our way to construct elaborate personas. Hell, when I first joined TNP, the thought of my other regions at that time conflicting with TNP was rather far-fetched, Nasicournia having been my home at that time. Now, however, it is a legitimate concern for me.
 
I'm sorta in the "separate persona" category. I consider my nations to be separate from each other. I don't do it to try to get away with anything, I do it because that's how I prefer to play the game. I'll admit I probably don't have the acting skills to fool anyone if 2 of my nations were posting in the same region for any length of time, and there isn't much difference between my TNP nation and my Taijitu nation, but that is my general intent.
 
Even before this proposal, under the implicit approach TNP has been taking, the key has not been whether a player uses mo re than one" "persona," but what happens when a player uses more than one "persona, has a "persona" to acts against what TNP would consider the reion's interests, and the player involved behaves in such a way that would make others think the player is using his TNP persona in a way that injures TNP.

TNP as a region has a right to protect itself from harm through deception, and basically, those are the circumstances where duality creates problems, I personally am not interested in eliminating duality just for the sake of doing so, but I am not interested in letting dulity be used to injure TNP either.

So yes, there is a middle ground, and so far, most of the time, people who want to play the duality route seem to understand such distinctions. but there are those who don't, and those are the ones who apparently need this to be made explicitly clear.

I don't know that this makes what I've meant any clearer, but what I've described seems to be how most of us in the Region have viewed the matter, and how the concept has been applied.
 
Totally against because this will only be used to go after people you don't like. And as BW pointed out this is now enforcable on "players" not nations. So basically if any of my other nations in other regions, violates the TNP constitution, I, the player can be tried here under TNP rules because of it. A little bit of a god-complex don't you think? You are also then wrapping all OOC stuff in IC because that definition extends beyond the IC realm. So if I go off on the management of the region in any thread or make any desparaging remarks about this region with one of my other nations(and I'm not talking puppets), I, the player can be kicked out of the region for it. This is ludicrous. Again with the all or nothing in the TNP. You guys are making it as hard to want to stay here as IP did to stay in the Lex, which is not a compliment,....goverment by heavy-handed dictatorship. Oh wait, we have the RA which half the time seems to vote blindly and if this goes into effect, all opposition will be swiftly dealt with by expulsion since you've learned there is no such thing as a quick trial(See FL's trial). Democracy allows for dissent. This just opens the flood gates for those who disagree with the current management to be swept under the rug and into the pit of alligators.

Why not just lobby for a change of all of those terms to player and eliminate any confusion at all.
ARTICLE II. Membership and Registration.

Section 1. Requirements.

In order to remain as legal players of The North Pacific, a player is expected to adhere to the following requirements:
1) Each player will abide by the Constitution of The North Pacific and The North Pacific Legal Code enacted pursuant to Article IV of this Constitution.
2) Each player shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other player or region in a manner inconsistent with the Constitution of The North Pacific.
3) Each player shall refrain from giving assistance to any player or region against which The North Pacific is taking defensive or enforcement action. Exceptions shall be given to players acting with official authorization of the North Pacific Army or the North Pacific Intelligence Agency, and is subject to the consent of the Cabinet minister having appropriate jurisdiction.
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Isn't that so much less ambiguous?
 
When they run out of any real arguments to use, they always pull out the persecution argument.

Baloney! baloney once! baloney a thousand times!

The way I have worded this it does not change anthing in the current law except to make explicit the implicit definition that has been in the Constitution since at least the Constitutional Convention, if not going back to the work of the first revision committee prior to my arrival in Nationstates.

(I went back and checked the records of the Constitutional Convention. And Thyrtica, the founder of the Order of Gryphons, and one of the first Justces in the Court of The North Pacific, originally prposed using the word "player" in the Constitution as part of the preamble. Many other supported it. And as I noted previously, I in fact voted against the revision of the preamble. (I did note that someone with the word Wolf in its user name voted for that revision of the preamble; I think it might have been Blue Wolf, but I hinestly don't know.) The bottom line is that the introduction of the word "player" into the constitution at the Constitutional Convention was supported with only 2 no votes. (Mine and Ator Peoples')

The use of first-person references in what is now the regional assembly oath goes back to the orginal revisision committee, and was already part of the draft of the original revision draft when I came into the game.

So what this tells us is that the concept of viewing the player, rather than a nation, has been part of the Constitution for most of its existence. It really is a fundamental concept of the Constitution and making it explicit is not a major change, or even a minor change. But if putting this sentence in the Constitution will bring an end to what is meant by the use of the words, player, member, member natin, and nation, and serve as a coda to the question of how The North Pacific views duality, then let's get this adopted and settle the issue.

I don't buy tyhis absurd argument that this would stretch the jurisdiction of TNP law outside of the region unilaterally. To argue that you would also have to argue that it also would cause the application of the protections of the Declaration of Rights and the jury system as well.

All this does is make explicit what has been implicit; it does not widen or narrow how TNP law would apply, and bottom line, it is a way to get a vote on how TNP views "duality" for whatever voting on that question is worth.
 
OOC:

The problem is, IMHO, a misleading and incorrect (well I think it's incorrect) useage of "IC" and "OOC".

By default, unless stated otherwise (or in an OOC area) everything on the forum should be IC. I am not the MoEA of TNP, a representative from the nation of Haor Chall is. And it is therefore that representative who is posting in the MoEA office, etc. The idea, put forward in the recent Fulhead trial, that IC refers only to actions taken within the actual game website is misleading and shows a lack of understanding about what RP is. From a certain technical stance, it can be argued that it is the case, but most standing precedent would suggest otherwise. Something which might be helpful in this regard is increased application (perhaps put it somewhere in the Intro forum or something) of the "OOC:" tag.

Um, I'm not sure what that infers about this proposal really. Something should be defined to address "duality" but I wonder if there might be a better, more "IC" (as the constitution should really be), way to do so.
 
Grosse:
(I went back and checked the records of the Constitutional Convention. And Thyrtica, the founder of the Order of Gryphons, and one of the first Justces in the Court of The North Pacific, originally prposed using the word "player" in the Constitution as part of the preamble. Many other supported it. And as I noted previously, I in fact voted against the revision of the preamble. (I did note that someone with the word Wolf in its user name voted for that revision of the preamble; I think it might have been Blue Wolf, but I hinestly don't know.)
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Ummm...no. :eyebrow:
 
I disagree with this proposal. It is not the business of this region to legislate the person behind this post.

This looks like yet another "Defining Treason" to me.
 
Zemnaya Svoboda:
I disagree with this proposal. It is not the business of this region to legislate the person behind this post.

This looks like yet another "Defining Treason" to me.
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:agree:


So what I am to understand by all of this is that "the player" behind the nation is IC?? How is that possible? I agree that the vast majority of stuff posted in the forum should be done in character as a representative of your respective nation(with the exception of the OOC area and posts tagged as OOC:). That's not my point. You are trying to govern the player behind the representative as I read it. And that is just ridiculous. That's my point.
 
OOC: I agree with the above statements. To me, there's a difference between the IC spokesman of Winter Vacationers, the IC spokespeople of my other nations, and the OOC player behind all those nations. And I do consider IC as the default in my postings, though I've sometimes been a bit sloppy about tagging the OOC stuff. Obviously, any talk about a "player" is OOC, since the Nation of Winter Vacationers knows of no "player".
 
This prposal does not go to a 100 percent "no duality" or a 100 percent "all duality" posture. It is the middle of the road approach that basically formalizes the apporach that has developed and evolved within TNP over a long, long period of time.

I would suspect that because it is the middle of the road, many will not be entirely happy with the pproach. But I honestly do not believe any other solution is going to be found to address it.

The bottom line is that unless you can insure that absolute duality can be maintained, and that a player won't use knowledge gained by one persona from being used by another persona of that same player, and thereby unfairly benefit a region or a group to the detriment of other regions or groups unnaturally (in the sense of being compared to the way things would be if true and absolutely followed duality), then that is not the solution. Misuse of duality has to be addressed, and has to be subject to action because of the harm created by the failure to maintain absolute duality.

That is what the TNP attitude towards duality has been as long as I've been here. That is why this proposal addresses the issue the way it does. It addresses the abuse of duality on the one hand, and extends the protection of law as it already exists in TNP to those who do not abuse duality on the other.
 
Grosseschnauzer:
This prposal does not go to a 100 percent "no duality" or a 100 percent "all duality" posture. It is the middle of the road approach that basically formalizes the apporach that has developed and evolved within TNP over a long, long period of time.

I would suspect that because it is the middle of the road, many will not be entirely happy with the pproach. But I honestly do not believe any other solution is going to be found to address it.
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I disagree. This calls for an all or nothing duality claim by saying at the root every nation and member is the said player. To call this as middle of the road is a plain out lie, as their was another proposal before that at the very least for the duality portion singled out the root in terms of actions detrimental to the region as a whole.
 
What this proposal does is recognize the long-standing principle that the North Pacific has described the same concepts in different ways, but that in fact, there is only one concept being used.

You haven't been able to demonstrate anything different, because there is not anything different. Although this proposed amendment doesn't use a reference to the Regional Assembly application oath directly, even that paragraph reflects the same principle as these other terms by the direction of the oath that it include a first-person reference to the name of the forum user, and directs the inclusion of its TNP nation by which application is made, as well as the forum user's UN nation which may or may not be the same nation as the designated TNP Nation, as well as the restriction against any forum user from being able to use more than one Nation from casting a vote. On the other hand. in the series of posts I have made in this thread, I have been able to point to instance after instance where prior enactments in this Region are consistent with the current proposal.

This region has the right to protect itself from having "duality" abused by those who are unable or unwilling to use it responsibly. If everyone were in fact using it responsibility and honorably, this proposal would not be necessary, and the debate on duality would not even be an issue. It is the willingness of some to abuse the principle of duality that has dictated this region's policy for a long, long time, and nothing you have said points to any other approach to address that abuse.
 
I have in no way said that the North Pacific shouldn't defend itself from duality, which is why this proposal is ENDING duality instead of defending itself from it. This is just a blanket law that will make the player liable for all acts that could be seen as against the law rather than just against the region. We've already seen the law abused by not clarifying where duality should be an issue, you're calling for an to duality by claiming all right and privilleges subject to the original player. Not just the nation, not just the member nor the member nation. Just player.
 
This proposal does not end duality; to make that argument you would have to contend that under the law as it is and has been for a long time, duality was already ended.

Duality isn't the problem, it is the abuse of duality that has been the problem. TNP law does not prohibit duality now, it hasn't prohibited duality in the past, but it does prohibit and has prohibited the abuse of duality to harm TNP and its interests. All this proposal does is to affirm that governing principle.
 
Duality isn't the problem, it is the abuse of duality that has been the problem. TNP law does not prohibit duality now, it hasn't prohibited duality in the past, but it does prohibit and has prohibited the abuse of duality to harm TNP and its interests. All this proposal does is to affirm that governing principle.
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Unless at some point a region one of your other nations is in somehow gets entangled into a war with TNP. Your whole "Defining Treason" thing brought out this issue. It was even ignorantly proposed to my argument at the time that if that happens you should just change the region your other nation is in during the conflict. That just re-affirms the TNP or nothing stance.

Protecting yourself from the abuse of duality is like defending yourself from spies. That is basically the idea. The abuse of the knowledge that one nation has learned. However the burden of proof then falls on government and intelligence agencies that this has happened which they get via their own spies. Perhaps an amendment defining a breach of duality as spying and creating a law against that would be better. At least then you draw that abuse of duality into an IC situation where it can be punished by the law instead of trying to take the law OOC.

And that all just came to me so I want to get it posted before it all goes away and maybe someone can work up the necessary changes.
 
Take a look at the current regional assembly application oath.

A violation does not come into play except by a treaty, other displomatix agreement, or a NPA deployment that has been approved by the Security Council. A violation does not come into play except by an abuse of duality, either.

Treaties and other diplomatic agreements are always going to be a matter of public record. Security Council approval of deployments would arise in response to a request to thw Security Council for approval in order to respond to a request for assistance. That would, normally, become public, but I can't guarantee the exact time frame, because that would vary with the circumstances.

But a nation engaged in invading where there is a connection to TNP only becomes subject to sanction if that deployment is approved by the SC, and if it is not yet a matter of public knowledge, then it is reasonable to assume that lack of publicity might be a defense.

That is the law in TNP now. This proposal changes none of that. It just makes the implicit connective reasoning explicit. The Declaration of Rights does not disappear in all of this; that still applies, even the right to due process, and the right of notice implicit in due process.

So the ability of the government to act, and the rights of others to defend themselves remain present.

I happen to believe that this amendment adequately deals with the problems caused by an abuse of duality, we do not need anything that is more complex than this proposal.
 
I'm bumping this in as much as there have been no further questions concerning this proposal since the 5th of March, and it certainly can propceed to formal discussion since there have been no further changes in the text of this proposal.
 
Grosseschnauzer:
I'm bumping this in as much as there have been no further questions concerning this proposal since the 5th of March, and it certainly can propceed to formal discussion since there have been no further changes in the text of this proposal.
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I didn't see much support for this proposal and took it that you were giving up, but I'll move it along.

Do you have a final version?
 
A Constitutional Amendment to standardize the meaning of certain words in the Constitution and laws of The North Pacific.

Section 1. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution is amended to read:

ARTICLE II. Membership and Registration.

Section 1. Requirements.

In order to remain as legal members of The North Pacific, a Nation is expected to adhere to the following requirements:
1) Each member Nation will abide by the Constitution of The North Pacific and The North Pacific Legal Code enacted pursuant to Article IV of this Constitution.
2) Each member Nation shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other nation or region in a manner inconsistent with the Constitution of The North Pacific.
3) Each member Nation shall refrain from giving assistance to any nation or region against which The North Pacific is taking defensive or enforcement action. Exceptions shall be given to Nations acting with official authorization of the North Pacific Army or the North Pacific Intelligence Agency, and is subject to the consent of the Cabinet minister having appropriate jurisdiction.
Unless the context of such terms clearly indicate a contrary intent, the words “Nation,” “member nation,” or “member” as used in this Constitution, or in the Legal Code, or in any other law of The North Pacific, are synonyms and refer to an individual player.
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Section 2. This amendment shall take effect upon its adoption.
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