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A pertinent question: do you like pineapple on pizza?
Hey Dyl, thanks for your questions!
Short answer:
The Volunteer Service Corps will differ from the CSI in administration, scale, and goal. I believe that I will be able to most competently and effectively run a volunteer operation given my experience in the region and in real life. It will not be a full overhaul of and complete integration to the government like the CSI, but will instead serve as a framework and tool available to ministers, not an agenda forced upon ministers.
Similarly to item 1; I believe that since the VSC is fundamentally different in scope and administration from the CSI, it will be a much more effective and functional programme.
I will be opening portions of the Cabinet Discord to public viewing and creating channels to allow for more direct and open communication with the cabinet about cabinet affairs.
(relating to experience) While I do not wish to discredit you, I do find it absurd to claim that you have more or even equal experience than me. While in the post of Secretary you have more time, as the incumbent, in governance of the region - from both the legislative and executive branches - I have you beat. My first post was MGA in November of 2019, my first post in the executive as Minister of World Assembly Affairs in December of the same year with the 1st Llorens Cabinet. Since then I have served as MGA in 4 total General Assemblies, two of which as Speaker and one as Deputy Speaker; I have served as Minister in some capacity to every cabinet since the 1st Llorens, including as Vice Secretary. I have a lot of experience in governance, to say the least.
Now, Dyl, I'd like to return the favour and ask some questions of you.
Your platform is quite slim in the policy agenda area, claiming to make no big changes. Do you believe your methods and policies as Secretary to be the best that they can be?
While you do have experience as Secretary, you appear to be riding on that quite heavily. I have quadruple the experience in the GA, and roughly triple your executive experience. You may be the incumbent, but does this make you the most experienced for the job?
I once again look to your quite bare platform; are you going to stand by the fact that you will be introducing no changes whatsoever?
I look forward to the race, and to the future of our region no matter who ends up elected.
Unity in Diversity!
Podria
Grod Island, Dyl, and Antinios
Yes. It tastes good and it makes it healthy.
South Miruva, Pajonia, New samon, Antinios, and 3 othersSauros, Breant, and Ninduran
March 2021 general election
Nominations closed for the March 2021 general election a few hours ago. Here is the official list of candidates:
Secretary
General Assembly (6 seats)
1. 
Antinios
2. Chrysanthemumlia
3. 
Idontknowium
4. 
New Flamington
5. New samon
6. Polotsk and vitebsk
7. 
Sauros
8. Soviet catgirls
9. 
Super Awesome Fun Times
10. The isles of geese
Voting will open on March 11. Good luck to all the candidates!
All current election platforms/statements can be found here:
- Llo
The final horseman, Kavagrad, Grod Island, Argentigrad, and 9 othersPodria, New samon, Dyl, Antinios, Sauros, Soviet catgirls, Super Awesome Fun Times, Idontknowium, and Definitely not Wasc
Hello everyone, Wasc here, I wanted to try to distance myself from this election with me planning on only occasionally joking with the official delete England party nation, but there is something going on this election that I very much feel the need to speak out about, this being the plan to bring back the civil service.
so my one big question about this is Why do you feel the need to formalize something that you yourself admit is already happening? as you mention at the moment ministers can and do already get help if they need it. When I was MoCA I did this with the short story competition (which ended up failing for separate reasons) when I went to grey to write something, I was further planning on doing this for some of the new things me and dyl were going to be doing, and I know several MoI have gotten help setting up the census. formalizing this process will inherently make ministers less flexible in how and who they ask for help. the current system allows ministers to be selective about who they get help from picking people who they know will be able to do a good job at it. it will create the expectation that ministers should go to the handful of people who signed up for who as we saw during the greylyn administration aren't experienced people who know what they are doing and the ministers can trust to do the best job, it was mainly inactive new nations who rarely responded to any request. going off of who actually signed up last time I'm pretty willing to bet one of two things will happen, 1. literally no one will sign up to join the program which happened for a few ministries, or 2. people will sign up and do literally nothing which happened to the rest of the ministries except for recruitment (and even then the people in recruitment were doing useless jobs that effected nothing).
with that out of the way, I would like to address another point you try to bring up, this being that you are more experienced than the other candidate. Put simply this is ridiculous, you can not claim you are more experienced in an area for a position when the person you are running against literally held the position which you did not hold (in fact that last time you held a position even close to that of sec you pulled a Nixon halfway through the term and resigned before a vote of no confidence of you could be finished after you blew up at the discord admins over what was ultimately nothing). The only argument I could see you potentially making is that you’ve served as speaker twice and dyl didn’t, which isn’t exactly impressive considering your most recent term (the 20th) as far as I can tell was the least active GA since the 14th and the first one you lead (17th) was the least active since the 13th. Now was that inactivity your fault? Definitely not, but the point is that leading over relatively inactive organizations doesn’t really prove that you are more experienced than dyl considering you did relatively little when compared to other speakers, now you could also argue that you've served in 2 more GA's than dyl which is true but once again this can be argued against using activity. while dyl may have served in only 2 GA's both of those GA's were some of the most active in assemblian history. if I counted correctly the two GA's dyl has served in has passed around a similar amount of pieces of legislation as your four GA's have passed, which doesn't really give you an edge on dyl when it comes to the GA experience argument. you also try to argue off of your ministerial positions, also ridiculous considering as secretary dyl as secretary worked with every single piece of government whereas you largely worked in one section of government except for one term in which as mentioned before you resigned halfway through.
Wasc
Llorens, Zaratov, Kavagrad, Argentigrad, and 4 othersPodria, Pajonia, Ghillemear, and Sauros
Okay, I'd like to contest this please.
As you correctly identify in your ruling, the law at no point prohibits me from standing.
I would like to bring attention to multiple aspects of this ruling:
1- The Dual Citizen Act, which reads:
Dual citizens shall be prohibited from concurrently holding an elected or appointed office, or holding direct power over the given office, in another region
It does, in fact, specify that I cannot hold office in both. Standing, whilst indicating my desire to have the office of MGA, does not in itself mean I hold 2 offices, meaning I am legally compliant. Nowhere in law does it say a candidate cannot have a position elsewhere. I would ask the court to follow the word of the law when making its decisions.
2- Section 2C of the Elections Act, which reads:
All electoral citizens shall be eligible to nominate for the General Assembly
I ask the court, am I not an electoral citizen? Does this very law, the central post of our great democracies elections in any way prevent me from standing? I will answer for you- it does not.
3- At no point was I, the disenfranchised citizen of TLA, asked about my intent. I was not present nor even informed there was a legal case against my standing for Member of General Assembly.
It is for these 3 reasons that I formally request my removal be reconsidered and rectified. I fully intend to stand for office, and do so in full compliance of The Leftist Assembly's Laws.
eh, kava was able to appeal the discord ruling, see no reason why martyn wouldn't be able to appeal this decision.
It's a Supreme Court ruling that admits it doesn't have legal backing. Ergo, I shall attempt to challenge it using the word of the law.
A law which should but doesn't exist is being enforced over two which do exist. And that law is redacting something which already happened.
I will add that as per the constitution I should be entitled to a free and fair trial before actions are taken against me as a citizen.
Podria and Garbelia in tla
I will first answer your questions, then comment on your answers.
To say it simply no, since I belive there is always room for improvement. But I think Assemblians were at least somewhat happy with my methods and policies given the approval raiting.
Firstly, no you don't have quadruple the experience. I had 2 term you had 4 and as Wasc already stated that you win in over all terms for the GA the once you have been part of were far less active so even if I'm not your equal in GA experience I still bring a good amount to the table. You had two terms as Speaker, that is true.
In regards to executive expirence, you were Minister of World Assembly Affairs, this portfolio dosen't exist anymore and I as Secretary did WA recommendations. You served two terms as Minister of Roleplay granted, but with the Roleplay basically running indepentent from TLA affairs I don't see in which aspect this would improve the quality of a Secretary since they usually do not interfere much with the Roleplay besided appointing the Minister. For Community Affairs, you held that portfolio for one month in which you hosted one game night which I have done too. I also was involved with holding the poll for non-discord assemblians for game nights and was involved in the planning for new concepts for Community Affairs.
Now onto the portfolio which is closest to Secretary, your term as Vice Secretary. I don't know how much resposibilites you had under Greylyn as VS so I can only go off the way I utilised my VS, which was mostly an advisor role. So yeah that will most likely granted you good experience, but you also didn't serve the full term.
But what you either forgetting or are unaware of, I as Secretary was involved with all of the decisions. I was involved in the opening of both of our new embassies, as already stated earlier I was involved in the planing of new cocepts for Community Affairs, I run the recruitment API since January and I recorded Population Data for the Pop Tracker.
So yeah I do belive I have more experience for Secretary because I served a term as one, while you did not. That does not mean that I do not think you could be a good Secretary.Yes my platform look quite bare, one part being that I simply formulated thing way shorter than you did and do not intend to bring back an old concept. The second half of your "What will I do?" section is nearly the same thing as I have in my "What can I expect if you get re-elected?" the main difference is I said it in a single sentence.
I said I will introduce no big changes, that does not mean no changes. With big changes I meant things like your Volunteer program or a new ministry. I will still try to get new faces into offices where I think that is an option and I would continue the ideas for changes to Community Affairs, that I dropped after Wasc resignation. They were named in the State of the Assembly.Now to your answers, Wasc already said a thing to this.
I simply don't see why we need to create a program where you have to rely on the people signing up, when we already utilise it where it is needed. For Foreign Affairs and Roleplay we already utilise such system. For Information it would only work in a very limited way, since Llorens was only able to help Argentigrad out with it was because Llorens already had the form from a previous year, or at least that is my understanding of the situation and the same thing goes for Recruitment. For the Population Tracker you could have one person writing down the data I doubt you need a volunteer for that, this should stay the resposiblity of the Minister since they are the ones with access to the Account where the Data is presented. Running the API wouldn't work well either, the main issue we had with recruitment was that it halted after an error so I run the script and wrote a short restart script for it that could work in a handful of limited setups. And no they did not really got outside help, only if you count the Secretary as outside. So we already have volunteers where it is needed, why create a program when the ministries create their own suited to their needs when needed.
I fear your proposal would make talking points less public, let me explain why.
The GA and SC server have 1/4 or less members than the social server and I reckon the same would be true for the open cabinet server. Also not everyone reads ever message, so maybe 20-30 people would read the messages there, that is at least my guess. So why not continue it the way we currently do where people use the ping feature on the social discord? There it is more likely people would read it. For an example I use the difficulties we had with the API in early December, if Llorens would have asked if everything runs smooth there how many people would have known these issues? Or when people asked when will the census be posted? Far less people would have read that. But in the social server people have a significatly higher chance of knowing these things. Also which channels would you make public to read? Because if you make the department channels public wouldn't that increase the chance of moving some communications to DMs? And for non-discord members that would keep them just as uninformed about happening as they currently are. So this proposal does not help non-discord assemblians and it would make it harder for people already using discord to get the information since they would have to join another server.
Podria, Antinios, Idontknowium, Yoodong, and 1 otherDefinitely not Wasc
how are yalls day today?
Hello everyone!
I'm good, how about you?
Podria and Breant
im good, i get to try the gay drink from starbucks
edit: im gay dont come for me for homophobia
Podria, Yoodong, and Kentauria
Thanks Wasc! I'm always happy to see people getting engaged in politics, and I'm glad to see you after your sudden departure from the region.
To be frank, this is simply how government works. There is a repeated and significant pattern of people volunteering to work with the government, and having channels and systems in place to maximise the efficiency and usefulness of this volunteer labour will make our government be able to use these volunteers best. Your argument could be extrapolated to "Why should we formalise embassy requirements?" or "Why should we formalise electoral processes?" or "Why should we formalise the founder?" and the answer to all of these questions and "Why should we formalise government volunteers?" is that is how governments work; they are a formal collection of people, processes, and goals that serve a community and work towards something.
And the Volunteer Service Corps wouldn't change that; I wouldn't, as you put it,
I've already stated that I will not force any minister to use the VSC whatsoever, and I will also not force ministers who use the VSC to select in a random fashion. You're drumming up a lot of fear that I'm going to overcomplicate this or rule it with an iron fist or absolutely bungle this; what's actually happening is the equivalent of putting lines onto a road, allowing for more controlled and easy to navigate ways for volunteer work to get to government; not force anybody to use those roads if they don't want to.
As I have said before; if we look specifically and only at the post of Secretary, I am not and will not contest the fact that he is more experienced than me given the fact that he has been Secretary (currently is, in fact) and I have not. I will, however, dispute the fact that if we look at governance in general that I am less experienced. Of course, comparing experience with a simple numbered system is tough because out government works in nuanced and ever-changing ways, and to say that I have X amount of experience while Dyl has Y amount of experience is a little absurdist, but numbers are a useful and easy to digest metric. Looking at raw time, I have spent a cumulative total of 427 days in TLA's government, of which I spent 176 as Speaker. This compared to Dyl's 264 days, gives me 163 days or 1.617 times more time in government than Dyl. While an argument could be made into quality of experience, and I will cede that there is no better experience for being Secretary than being Secretary, to say that the only thing that can qualify someone for being Secretary is previous experience as Secretary is once again, absurd.
Once again Wasc, I really do thank you for the opportunity to further communicate my platform and ideas with the region. Please, keep the questions coming, it's quite enjoyable to be challenged and get to answer them!
Unity in Diversity!
- Podria
Zaratov, Grod Island, New samon, Dyl, and 3 othersAntinios, Idontknowium, and Definitely not Wasc
Grod Island, New samon, Dyl, Antinios, and 1 otherDefinitely not Wasc
I will just say a handful of short last word to you responses.
To the experience part, I think the main issue that I had with it was your wording. I understood it as something along those lines "I have served in these positions and with the expirence therefore I have more expirence as Secretary and am better suited." My main issue was that I understood it as a claim to having more expirence as Secretary then I do.
I didn't mean to say shorter = better, just that I still have a few points in my platform even with less text. I also have something about Community Affairs in it, which you did not address in any way.
For the VSC, I still l think it is unnecessary to introduce/formalize a system for volunteers when the biggest benefactors already have
a systems to do it. Ambassadors are formalized and for the RP that is up to the minister who to appoint to the RP committee so they would not benefit much from that. Recruitment and Information simply do not need such systems. You can not really utilise volunteers in the recruitment and Information can only use them on a very limited scale. And if you move the census to volunteers the MoI only handles Dual/MV citizens and Endocap violations. Which might create the question why even have it as an portfolio, maybe this could additionally done by another Minister.
For the changes to the cabinet server, I think we stay in disagreement. I don't think there will be less communication, simply less people would see it and therefore hinder the proposed goal.
I also look forward to the rest of the debate.
Unity in Diversity!
Grod Island, New samon, Antinios, Sauros, and 1 otherDefinitely not Wasc
Will it be more efficient and useful though? I don't really see how adding a layer of sign up in between the minister and the people they need help from will do anything but make the system more bureaucratic and inefficient for the ministers. furthermore, you're comparing apples to oranges here, the way ministers get help is by no means comparable to "the foundations of how we run this region" seems like one would be a lot more important to formalize than the other no?
It will though, creating this volunteer program inherently creates an expectation, whether that be official or cultural, that you can’t approach people to help you with certain things if they haven’t signed up with the volunteer program even if you think they’d objectively do better at it.
As I said above, just because you don’t officially enforce a policy doesn’t mean that there won’t be cultural and implied expectations that come with having this volunteer program, it doesn’t matter if you don’t force anything on the ministers just having this will create that expectation. I’d also question the actual use of such a program even from your perspective if you plan on just letting the ministers completely ignore it and approach people who hadn’t signed up for it, what even is the point of it if they can do that.
as you yourself admit experience isn't just "I served x amount of time and dyl served y amount of time" it's also about how much you actually did during that time, and if we're going by that metric then I think dyl definitely has you beat out considering while he may have served for a shorter amount of time than you the sheer amount of stuff that was done during that time at the very least makes you two equals. by the logic of dyl served less time than you so therefore he is less experienced could also be made about me and antinios, if you really wanted to go by that metric you would have to say that I am more experienced than antinios (something I will very much deny and disagree with no matter what anyone says) or (not to criticize someone who isn't here to defend themselves but just for an example) using this you could also argue that by the end of my first term as MoCA that my predecessor was just as experienced as me (something that I don't think anyone, including my predecessor, would agree with).
with that out of the way, I would also like to bump an argument I made that you seem to have completely ignored. so I once again ask you how you intend to prevent this from happening
New samon, Dyl, Antinios, Sauros, and 1 otherIdontknowium
I hope you'll stay active on this account, because I miss your involvement with the community.
South Miruva, Kavagrad, Dyl, Antinios, and 1 otherIdontknowium
Thanks Dyl, I'll follow suit and keep my statements brief.
Yes, perhaps I could have been more clear in my wording - I mean to say that I have more experience in government not as Secretary, although the distinction is quite minute and I think my experience will translate over well as it has for Secretaries in the past.
The VSC can and at least it is my hope, will, be used by the Ministries of Community Affairs, Roleplay, Foreign Affairs, and perhaps others as well, if the Minister gets creative. (Again, I do not intend to force any minister to use the VSC)
I'm fine continuing in disagreement with you on this point, no qualms here.
Looking forward to it all!
- Podria
Hey Wasc, happy to answer your questions!
Yes, it absolutely will make it more efficient and useful. As I said before, it will turn what is a messy and informal under-the-table-esque business into a formal process endorsed and promoted by the government. I absolutely am not comparing apples to oranges here, governments create systems and processes because that is how governments work.
It quite literally will not. I will be the one running this and I am saying that is not how I am going to run it, simple as that.
Well saying I'm going to let government ministers "just ignore it" is just twisting my words; it is in use already through informal means, it's not going to stop happening because it is formalised.
My qualm was not that I think time is irrelevant, it's that I think pointing to one object and saying "that's it, that's the thing that determines experience" is reductionist. I believe that in looking at all of governance, I have a more varied, thorough, and comprehensive set of experience than Dyl.
Alright, but this will not be the same as the Greylyn administration because I am not Greylyn. I have significant amount of experience in volunteer work, both as a volunteer and as a leader of volunteers, as well as political organising, and I will bring that to TLA with my added political experience and the lessons from the CSI to make it a better programme. I have said it multiple times before and I will say it again, this will not be the same as the Civil Service Initiative and continuously saying that this will be the same the CSI is simply being intentionally dense.
Thanks again, Wasc!
Unity in Diversity!
- Podria
Dyl and Antinios
As an Italian, I am truly disappointed and have lost all hope of leftist unity. I have now converted to right libertarianism.
Llorens, South Miruva, Kavagrad, Grod Island, and 5 othersPodria, New samon, Antinios, Sauros, and Idontknowium
Achenoderus octomaculatus is a species of beetle in the family Cerambycidae, the only species in the genus Achenoderus.
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