Cretox
Somehow, Palpatine has returned
- TNP Nation
- Cretox State
- Discord
- Cretox#0125
When I joined @St George's defense team, @Pallaith called me a bastard.
He then elaborated: he didn't believe that I would leave my retirement from NS regional business specifically to represent St George in an espionage case, and believed that I had bad intentions to turn the entire affair into a messy farce.
Well, he was right in that representing St George wasn't my sole objective (though I did want to help him out, which I did through some freedom of information requests and advising on argumentation), and I did start making a mess, but the mess itsef wasn't the end goal. So... partial credit, I guess?
Others contacted me as well, mainly expressing disbelief that I would engage in such aggressive tactics and a feeling that doing so was wildly out of character for me. Their instincts were also largely correct.
In addition to assisting @Dreadton to the extent I felt that I could, I used this case as an opportunity to draw hopefully enduring attention to a critical threat and security risk that some of us have been warning about for years.
That threat is the region's own laws. TNP's very system of governance is broken at a fundamental level. Make no mistake, the people involved are for the most part just people with lives trying to play a political browser game in good faith. As an example, @Attempted Socialism, @Sanctaria, and @TlomzKrano have always been a pleasure to interact with and things were no different here. The issue is structural, and as such poisons the way TNP functions at the most basic level.
This region's legal system, insofar as you can call an internal rules system in a sub-community of a niche browser game a legal system, is broken. It's an utter mess that criminalizes perfectly normal behavior while containing rampant exploitable technicalities. And the fact that perfectly normal behavior can be legitimately criminal in this region has led to a dangerous dichotomy of both widespread ignoring of the law and endless opportunities to use the law as a political cudgel. We've had an actual couper get off on a technicality. We've had a period of around a year where every member of the Security Council holding another government office was committing a crime. This actually happened. Every member of the NPA who actively participated prior to the law being changed a few months ago had been committing crimes simply through normal r/d gameplay. The entire Election Commission was credibly charged with a crime very recently over a procedural deficiency related to vote counting. The ongoing espionage case I was involved in has been ground to a halt over a request for a review of a legitimate procedural deficiency, and the moderating justice credibly committed a crime by violating a frankly terrible recusal law while just doing his job.
Any one of those situations had the very real potential to escalate into a black hole with the ability to tear this region apart from the inside by turning the region's laws against itself. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is because the people involved in these situations were acting in good faith and had no interest in burning TNP to the ground. This issue is a ticking time bomb, and it's only a matter of time before it explodes in all our faces. We like to talk about a mythical couper who spends years infiltrating the government before executing a nefarious scheme long in the making, but the harsh reality is that any random person with an axe to grind, half an hour to read through the laws, and an ability to type semi-cogent English can exploit our own laws to destroy this region.
I used to think that this problem could be solved simply by writing better laws, and I personally wrote fixes to two of the examples I described above. But the harsh reality is that this is a game of whack-a-mole we just can't win. The law can easily be exploited before someone gets around to fixing it, even when there's general agreement that things like the old NPA laws were terrible. And it's impossible for gradual fixes to cover every eventuality, especially given that this is a hobby and "fixing laws in a region in NS" isn't anyone's actual job, nor will it or should it ever be.
Imagine what would've happened had the people involved in the examples I described not been acting in good faith. Imagine the damage that could be done had I not withdrawn my demonstration indictment, from both the case and any related indictments and motions I could have easily spawned from it. All it takes is one bad actor operating alone to set fire to this entire community. Even a simple garden-variety troll could do irreparable damage.
I don't have a good solution other than saying that we need to take a good hard look at how TNP operates at a fundamental level, and whether some portions of the law need to be part of the law. Am I suggesting we turn into an autocratic meritocracy? Of course not. But we should at least start by seriously thinking about the problem. That's my reason for taking certain aggressive actions: to force people to pay attention to just how easily our system can be exploited without actually having to harm anyone in the process. I hope I've at least somewhat succeeded, and wish @Dreadton and @TlomzKrano the best in arguing the actual respective merits of their positions in St George's case.
And with that, I happily return to my retirement from NS regional business and apologize to @Eluvatar for the scare.
He then elaborated: he didn't believe that I would leave my retirement from NS regional business specifically to represent St George in an espionage case, and believed that I had bad intentions to turn the entire affair into a messy farce.
Well, he was right in that representing St George wasn't my sole objective (though I did want to help him out, which I did through some freedom of information requests and advising on argumentation), and I did start making a mess, but the mess itsef wasn't the end goal. So... partial credit, I guess?
Others contacted me as well, mainly expressing disbelief that I would engage in such aggressive tactics and a feeling that doing so was wildly out of character for me. Their instincts were also largely correct.
In addition to assisting @Dreadton to the extent I felt that I could, I used this case as an opportunity to draw hopefully enduring attention to a critical threat and security risk that some of us have been warning about for years.
That threat is the region's own laws. TNP's very system of governance is broken at a fundamental level. Make no mistake, the people involved are for the most part just people with lives trying to play a political browser game in good faith. As an example, @Attempted Socialism, @Sanctaria, and @TlomzKrano have always been a pleasure to interact with and things were no different here. The issue is structural, and as such poisons the way TNP functions at the most basic level.
This region's legal system, insofar as you can call an internal rules system in a sub-community of a niche browser game a legal system, is broken. It's an utter mess that criminalizes perfectly normal behavior while containing rampant exploitable technicalities. And the fact that perfectly normal behavior can be legitimately criminal in this region has led to a dangerous dichotomy of both widespread ignoring of the law and endless opportunities to use the law as a political cudgel. We've had an actual couper get off on a technicality. We've had a period of around a year where every member of the Security Council holding another government office was committing a crime. This actually happened. Every member of the NPA who actively participated prior to the law being changed a few months ago had been committing crimes simply through normal r/d gameplay. The entire Election Commission was credibly charged with a crime very recently over a procedural deficiency related to vote counting. The ongoing espionage case I was involved in has been ground to a halt over a request for a review of a legitimate procedural deficiency, and the moderating justice credibly committed a crime by violating a frankly terrible recusal law while just doing his job.
Any one of those situations had the very real potential to escalate into a black hole with the ability to tear this region apart from the inside by turning the region's laws against itself. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is because the people involved in these situations were acting in good faith and had no interest in burning TNP to the ground. This issue is a ticking time bomb, and it's only a matter of time before it explodes in all our faces. We like to talk about a mythical couper who spends years infiltrating the government before executing a nefarious scheme long in the making, but the harsh reality is that any random person with an axe to grind, half an hour to read through the laws, and an ability to type semi-cogent English can exploit our own laws to destroy this region.
I used to think that this problem could be solved simply by writing better laws, and I personally wrote fixes to two of the examples I described above. But the harsh reality is that this is a game of whack-a-mole we just can't win. The law can easily be exploited before someone gets around to fixing it, even when there's general agreement that things like the old NPA laws were terrible. And it's impossible for gradual fixes to cover every eventuality, especially given that this is a hobby and "fixing laws in a region in NS" isn't anyone's actual job, nor will it or should it ever be.
Imagine what would've happened had the people involved in the examples I described not been acting in good faith. Imagine the damage that could be done had I not withdrawn my demonstration indictment, from both the case and any related indictments and motions I could have easily spawned from it. All it takes is one bad actor operating alone to set fire to this entire community. Even a simple garden-variety troll could do irreparable damage.
I don't have a good solution other than saying that we need to take a good hard look at how TNP operates at a fundamental level, and whether some portions of the law need to be part of the law. Am I suggesting we turn into an autocratic meritocracy? Of course not. But we should at least start by seriously thinking about the problem. That's my reason for taking certain aggressive actions: to force people to pay attention to just how easily our system can be exploited without actually having to harm anyone in the process. I hope I've at least somewhat succeeded, and wish @Dreadton and @TlomzKrano the best in arguing the actual respective merits of their positions in St George's case.
And with that, I happily return to my retirement from NS regional business and apologize to @Eluvatar for the scare.
