Response to Chipmunker

First of all, before starting, Chipmunker, I would like to congratulate you on coming back to the region, with your addition, we now have one more talented citizen in our ranks. And I also really appreciate you contributing to the discourse of this election, as the reason Thaecia has had a higher engagement rate than other UCRs is the higher amount of politically informed citizens, to which you are playing a part by encouraging debates.

First of all, I respectfully would like to make something clear. Yes, Altys, like 10-15 people, has played a role in building this Ministry. But to distantly imply that this Ministry’s backbone has been due to him, is a gross disrespect to the work others had done for the Ministry in the past. For example, I would say the current Recruitment Team’s backbone is a result of Andy and Marco’s initiatives, who I had appointed at the end of September. When they were appointed, we were at 250. Within 2 months of them assuming office, we got up to 370-400, and got the NS-Shift Crown for two months in a row! A big achievement when we were up against some of the best in the field.

So, I’ll rather issue a detailed argument over why I feel that way rather than just making some vague statement without no proof. Point to be noted, you are free to reverse-argue with me, and I’ll appreciate it.

First of all, let’s get to the recruitment part of the story. When I first joined the HAM, recruitment wasn’t a HAM stuff, it was a conjoined department, rather than a Ministry department. With the numbers going down to 250, At the end of September, I appointed Andusre in charge of our manual recruitment and stamps section while Marco kept the charge of the API. We set about restructuring the team, bringing in a-manual recruitment infrastructure, making plans on the strategy we should adapt, and constantly looking for new ideas. I had given enough independence to Andusre and Marco to try out things in the way they want while keeping close oversight and that paid some great dividends as we got the NS-Shift Crown because of the able leadership they provided Alhamdulillah. Andusre helped create a dedicated manual recruitment infrastructure, like the recruitment This is a model I want to follow for my executive as well, proper oversight to ensure progress is being made, making sure to implement the ideas I laid out in my platform, while also leaving more than enough freedom for the people in charge of the ministry to decide how to go about the stuff they are entrusted with and also keeping things organised. These four foundations of my governance model will be the model my administration will follow.

The Regional Welcome Team was something inherited from the Fishergate’s IM. At the time I assumed office, Zon was the only one carrying the whole department on his shoulders. I have managed to change that, and now many people including Nova, Zon and Dyka(he was trained)send out welcome messages, and this ensures every nation gets welcomed faster. I also initiated the sending of personalised welcome telegrams on a limited scale to ensure the people who join our region get an even warmer welcome and ensure they don’t face any problem.

The Data and Statistics Team was the newest initiative taken by me this term, and Hulldom has done a really good job maintaining it Alhamdulillah. Thanks to it, our citizens have been able to see the latest stats concerning our regional population by just clicking some buttons, and judge for themselves the direction the region is taking. We can see for easily our latest WA population, growth, CTEs numbers. I look to develop this more as detailed in my roadmap and certainly this department isn’t going to remain stagnant at this, since it shows so much promise Insha’Allah.

I agree, Altys had a big role to play in the Govt Site and Factbook Management Dept and I have tried to improve on it, and improve the website’s productivity by adding the stats over there, and also update the recruitment stats there so that the website still has some sort of function, rather than just wastefully sitting as an archive, and have also formed a sub-department led by Ashlawn to bring it up-to-date recently.

And I have also made it a point to carefully listen to what my critics say, because when Bow and Titanne raised the concern that the HAM didn’t check the candidates’ citizenship validity, even though the HAM had a strong point not to do so, I formed a sub-committee led by Nova Anglicum, which nopw checks the validity of the citizenship of Govt officials and the candidates, and have since found the citizenship of a Govt official invalid.

In order to ensure the Thaecian Dep Admin is as secured as possible, now only PM Bigtopia, me, Ashlawn and Brototh has access to it and the less number of people has access to it, the more secured it is. In fact, even in the unlikeliest scenario, the security of the Thaecian Dep Admin is compromised, I have the raw data stored on a separate Google Docs account, which can be used to immediately retrieve the data stored in it since it’s an important part of our data team.

And even as Discord Admin, I had proposed a thing to help us boost up regional participation by suggesting the formation of the #adverts channel where anyone can look for a job they want to take part in, and from where I applied for the Ambassador post to Europeia as well.

And for the elections, I would like to ask people to vote for me based on my work and the ideas I proposed under my platform, not because I am better than Altys or any other sort of regions. If you feel I am better than Altys, but you are still not content with me, then I would suggest you to prop up a better candidate or run yourself or abstain from voting, vote for a choice you are confident in.

And questions about my temperations has also risen up lately even though events in the last one year should have made it clear where I stand on this. But even then, I’ll like to address it.

So guys, as I have been telling what's more important to me than getting you guys to vote for me is to ensure you make the right and informed decision. And I believe you won't be able to make the informed choice if you don't know completely about one of the main contenders in the elections. So, it must have been known to you, 2 years ago, I was a very different person in Thaecia, very very angry, uncompromising and perhaps rude. Even though many of you say I have improved a lot, a view which I endorse, it's imperative you know what led to all those in the past. I used to struggle with anger issues, like most young angry teens. As you must have seen, I have worked on it and have been much calmer and I don't believe in the last one year, I haven't gone close to imitating those behaviours Alhamdulillah and you can expect me not to do so either if you guys give me a mandate Insha'Allah. My interactions with you all have been very respectful, in my view, and I believe respect is universal,which should be a bare minimum for a person. And my improvement was visible when I became Admin of this server, where even though I was strict about rules(since some of you are under 18), I always prefered to deal with others only after talking with them in a calm setting and had never muted, warned or banned a person, especially without discussions. I have also served a Cabinet Minister for 8 months, so I know of the etiquettes expected of a Govt Official. If I hadn't improved on my issues, I wouldn't have been entrusted with such critical posts. I needed you to know all these because I wanted you all to connect the dots and know about my past in Thaecia. To ensure a brigter future, we need to make peace with out past as well. Whether you choose to count my temperament as a contributing factor or not depends entirely on you, now that you have both sides of the story.

And about the supposedly poor integration of newcomers, the Ministry certainly didn’t do a bad job integrating them when you see the list of candidates for the elections, where you see almost 1/3rd of the candidates are newcomers or newly involved in Thaecian Politics.

And one more contradiction appeared in your campaigning, if you claim Islonia is the one who’s responsible for setting up the system that’s currently in place and he will fix the broken system, is this an implied admission that the system that he helped build was broken in the first place?

And most of the experience you listed for Islonia, are in the areas of judicial and legislative areas, separate from the executive branch, and inter-regional events.

And if we hold this mentality “He has more experience than you, so move aside”, if we adopt this mentailty, we’ll never be able to invite a new fresh leadership in place, and power will be consolidated only by the people who had the luck of joining these regions earlier, and it should not be like this. This doesn’t mean, the people who joined comparatively later are any less talented, if we just close off the region’s prime position to these kind of people, we’ll soon suffer from the thing Chip had ironically warned a few weeks ago is happening, a lack of opportunities in this region.

If we just decide to vote against a candidate even though we find his ideas better and immediate past governance record pretty good, due to the fact he didn’t have the luck to serve in more positions during his career and because of some mistakes he had done in the past, we’ll be sending out the message that if anyone ever makes a mistake, there shall only a limit to how much a person can rise even if he improves drastically later on, and this is certainly not a perception we want to build, as we want Thaecia to be a region of opportunities, not a region of trials.

And also joy comes from distributing credit, not from taking it.

And Chip, I really thank you for participating in these debates and wish you would make your stay here permanent, I admire your enthusiasm about the stances you take, and if you still feel I am not qualified to be PM, and I am elected PM Insha’Allah, I’ll request you to scrutinise my actions and point them out, and make you case.

And as for Altys, I am not running against him, I am running for my ideas, we both respect each other :)