Partnership for Sovereignty | SC Voting Bloc

[Bobberino]

snip

I suggest you read through our anti-griefing laws.

[Quebecshire]

snip

I suggest you read through our anti-griefing laws.

We both know that's not going to happen.

[The Notorious Mad Jack]

It's very odd. The only regions we've ever "griefed" have been fascist ones... and surely Parx wouldn't be throwing such labels around in defence of fascist regions... right?

https://forum.thenorthpacific.org/topic/9194232/

Greater Hiveoidia
Prima Victoria
The Northern Rim
My Little Pony Equestria
Codex Ylvus
JJ McCullough Fan Club
Nebrascotialand
Hyperico
Greater Novus Britannia Empire
The Realm of Liberty
North Pacific
The Mystical Council
The Monarchy Alliance
The Moon
Renegade Islands Alliance
The League of Radiance
Usea
Confederation of the Mediterranean
Hyperico
Melayu Archipelago
Datanet
Federation of Allies
Prudentia
Confederation of the Mediterranean
Greater Hiveoidia
Loamhedge
The Region of Gargery
The Eternal Entente
Seora

The regions on ^This List^ are fascist? Since you raided/griefed them, then you must think they're fascists. That means you think The Renegade Islands Alliance is fascist. Somebody should tell the Grey Wardens they have an embassy with a fascist region!

Oh I've just realised what you're doing. You're conflating raiding with griefing to make a really fucking dumb point. Try again kid, this time with more effort.

The meme is 3/10 too.

[HumanSanity]

I realize there is no need because Tim and MadJack have it handled, but want to say 10000 Islands is delighted to have Spiritus on board with the Partnership for Sovereignty, and their admission to the organization was unanimous.

Yes, XKI and Tim had a difference of opinion over TNP quorum raiding. That's a small difference in opinion relative to the overwhelming interests we share in a strong defender faction united to defend its SC interests, not to mention that Tim wasn't speaking for Spiritus in that action and, to my knowledge, Spiritus never issued an official position on that. Plus, the PfS' voting system and the way recommendations are non-binding means the agreement has built in flexibility to withstand one-off disagreements.

Cheers to our starchy friends! Glad to see this organization continue to grow.

[Parxland]

I realize there is no need because Tim and MadJack have it handled, but want to say 10000 Islands is delighted to have Spiritus on board with the Partnership for Sovereignty, and their admission to the organization was unanimous.

Yes, XKI and Tim had a difference of opinion over TNP quorum raiding. That's a small difference in opinion relative to the overwhelming interests we share in a strong defender faction united to defend its SC interests, not to mention that Tim wasn't speaking for Spiritus in that action and, to my knowledge, Spiritus never issued an official position on that. Plus, the PfS' voting system and the way recommendations are non-binding means the agreement has built in flexibility to withstand one-off disagreements.

Cheers to our starchy friends! Glad to see this organization continue to grow.

Any question on whether people should join the PfS is a no brainer. If you want to play the game the way you want and have some reassurance against quorum raiding, you need to be a part of this.

[Bobberino]

...If you want to play the game the way you want...

What if the way I want to play the game includes the occasional quorum raid?

[Parxland]

...If you want to play the game the way you want...

What if the way I want to play the game includes the occasional quorum raid?

[Bobberino]

What if the way I want to play the game includes the occasional quorum raid?

You seem awfully upset. Something the matter? Get any boo-boos on the playground?

[Parxland]

You seem awfully upset. Something the matter? Get any boo-boos on the playground?

It's worse, so much worse! I couldn't find a better meme!

[Tinhampton]

I realize there is no need because Tim and MadJack have it handled, but want to say 10000 Islands is delighted to have Spiritus on board with the Partnership for Sovereignty, and their admission to the organization was unanimous.

Yes, XKI and Tim had a difference of opinion over TNP quorum raiding. That's a small difference in opinion relative to the overwhelming interests we share in a strong defender faction united to defend its SC interests, not to mention that Tim wasn't speaking for Spiritus in that action and, to my knowledge, Spiritus never issued an official position on that. Plus, the PfS' voting system and the way recommendations are non-binding means the agreement has built in flexibility to withstand one-off disagreements.

Cheers to our starchy friends! Glad to see this organization continue to grow.

Any question on whether people should join the PfS is a no brainer. If you want to play the game the way you want and have some reassurance against quorum raiding, you need to be a part of this.

So the only way to be free in NSGP is to join a defender org by coercion now?

[Comfed]

What if the way I want to play the game includes the occasional quorum raid?

That’s not really an answer. You, who as far as I know have nothing to do with GP are inventing ridiculous conspiracy theories based on someone’s forum sig without any knowledge whatsoever of reality.

Congratulations, Spiritus.

[Boston Castle]

That's a whole lot of potatoes to pass out, but if anyone can do it....Spiritus can.

Congrats on joining the PfS, Spiritus!

[Westinor]

Congrats, Spiritus! The starchy hand of the potato overlord reaches further...

[ROM]

Omg! I'm so proud Spiritus decided to join the PfS. Hopefully this is the beginning of greater things to come ~

[Quebecshire]

The government of the Republic of The League of Conservative Nations was recently informed that our application to the Partnership for Sovereignty agreement was rejected by a margin of 1-2, with 3 abstentions. We have asked to be informed of the voting decisions of each region, but have not yet been updated on that request.

We would like to thank the organization for considering us, however, now that the issue is finally formally resolved, we have a few other comments we would like to make. Continuing, we fully recognize the right of the partnership to make this decision, but feel it was handled extremely poorly.

We are immensely disappointed with how our application was managed. The Office of the Consulate fully understands that exist concerns about previous out-of-character practices, that much is obvious. We do not feel, however, that it warranted the treatment our application received. We applied to the Partnership for Sovereignty on the 27th of January, the same day as The Union of Democratic States. They were accepted on the 3rd of February, and we were not even officially told that our application was finally being voted on until the 1st of March.

What was originally a foreign policy no-brainer for the LCN Council of the Republic to agree upon slowly became a point of skepticism and annoyance, to no fault of our own. The LCN feels it was treated both unfairly and unreasonably from the submission of its application until the beginning of the voting process (as in, the management of our application was unreasonable treatment, not the result of the vote). There was not a justified excuse for us to have been continually postponed for a month with no definitive information on our status. We understand that several member regions were busy and had other affairs occurring in this timeframe, but it would be dishonest if we said we felt this excused the extreme and repeated delays our application was subject to with little to no information passed on to us regarding that.

We wish the Partnership for Sovereignty the best, but we seriously hope their ability to review, schedule, and manage the entry process is corrected and made uniform for all applicants. Our region and its officials became more and more discouraged as the process went on, and it is both unfair to the regions applying and hypothetically detrimental to the organization to be so ambiguous and unclear to those who might seek membership in the future and subject to similar controversy in the review.

We are disappointed with the rejection but primarily with the amount of time it took for the rejection to come to fruition, and we hope to move forward quickly in foreign affairs after having spent a month waiting for the result of this bureaucracy.

[HumanSanity]

Decisions about admitting members to any interregional agreement, including the Partnership for Sovereignty, are taken seriously and include a full deliberative process. Foreign affairs matters are sensitive and require flexibility in dealing with them. When LCN applied, there were lingering concerns about LCN's past out of character issues which necessitated further investigation and evaluation by the PfS. In fact, it would have been discourteous to the LCN for us to vote without doing our due diligence on these matters.

You point to the admission of UDS, FNR, and Spiritus as signs of inequity in the process. The admission of regions which are established within the Gameplay community, have long-standing defender alignments, and standing diplomatic relations and alliances with many existing PfS members is understandably going to require less lengthy consideration than a region which is re-emergent in interregional relations due to a history of OOC issues.

Respectfully, the LCN statement is an unreasonable standard, ignores the complexity of the situation involving their admission, and attempts to impose a false standard of perfect efficient equity on interregional negotiations.

[Quebecshire]

Decisions about admitting members to any interregional agreement, including the Partnership for Sovereignty, are taken seriously and include a full deliberative process.

Yes, a deliberative process which we were kept in the dark completely on. We have no awareness of what was done or not done to investigate those things. All we know is from our conversations with the UDS, the only member region that really sat down and had an extended discussion with us about that and PfS affairs (which was a very pleasant surprise - we admittedly did not expect that from them).

Foreign affairs matters are sensitive and require flexibility in dealing with them. When LCN applied, there were lingering concerns about LCN's past out of character issues which necessitated further investigation and evaluation by the PfS. In fact, it would have been discourteous to the LCN for us to vote without doing our due diligence on these matters.

I'd have more to comment on this if I knew what the investigations and deliberations actually entailed. I have both optimism and skepticism about what occurred, as I got no real information on what was going on.

You point to the admission of UDS, FNR, and Spiritus as signs of inequity in the process. The admission of regions which are established within the Gameplay community, have long-standing defender alignments, and standing diplomatic relations and alliances with many existing PfS members is understandably going to require less lengthy consideration than a region which is re-emergent in interregional relations due to a history of OOC issues.

I mean, obviously, those regions are more established, but let's be real, an entire month isn't reasonable, and you know it isn't because you apologized to me for the delays in the process, and you cited reasons other than just OOC investigations, like plenty of IC stuff, for also being factors. I'm not going to air out or drop transcripts to our DMs or anything, but we did talk about that. There was a clear presence of unfair mismanagement here. We were both excessively delayed and that was made worse by us being kept in the dark.

Respectfully, the LCN statement is an unreasonable standard, ignores the complexity of the situation involving their admission, and attempts to impose a false standard of perfect efficient equity on interregional negotiations.

Respectfully, we are not the only region on that docket with any recent (and keep in mind recent means like, since last summer) OOC issues or problems. The most public and widespread? Sure, no point in avoiding that. But it's pretty obvious and recognizable that those have been resolved and changed, so it should have been fairly easy to look at it and say "this is either enough for us or it isn't" and have made a decision in a much shorter timeframe for both our sakes.

[Kanglia]

The government of the Republic of The League of Conservative Nations was recently informed that our application to the Partnership for Sovereignty agreement was rejected by a margin of 1-2, with 3 abstentions. We have asked to be informed of the voting decisions of each region, but have not yet been updated on that request.

We would like to thank the organization for considering us, however, now that the issue is finally formally resolved, we have a few other comments we would like to make. Continuing, we fully recognize the right of the partnership to make this decision, but feel it was handled extremely poorly.

We are immensely disappointed with how our application was managed. The Office of the Consulate fully understands that exist concerns about previous out-of-character practices, that much is obvious. We do not feel, however, that it warranted the treatment our application received. We applied to the Partnership for Sovereignty on the 27th of January, the same day as The Union of Democratic States. They were accepted on the 3rd of February, and we were not even officially told that our application was finally being voted on until the 1st of March.

What was originally a foreign policy no-brainer for the LCN Council of the Republic to agree upon slowly became a point of skepticism and annoyance, to no fault of our own. The LCN feels it was treated both unfairly and unreasonably from the submission of its application until the beginning of the voting process (as in, the management of our application was unreasonable treatment, not the result of the vote). There was not a justified excuse for us to have been continually postponed for a month with no definitive information on our status. We understand that several member regions were busy and had other affairs occurring in this timeframe, but it would be dishonest if we said we felt this excused the extreme and repeated delays our application was subject to with little to no information passed on to us regarding that.

We wish the Partnership for Sovereignty the best, but we seriously hope their ability to review, schedule, and manage the entry process is corrected and made uniform for all applicants. Our region and its officials became more and more discouraged as the process went on, and it is both unfair to the regions applying and hypothetically detrimental to the organization to be so ambiguous and unclear to those who might seek membership in the future and subject to similar controversy in the review.

We are disappointed with the rejection but primarily with the amount of time it took for the rejection to come to fruition, and we hope to move forward quickly in foreign affairs after having spent a month waiting for the result of this bureaucracy.

Now I most certainly have no involvement whatsoever with the Partnership of Sovereignty, I'd like to make that clear from the onset of this statement. However, it appears, at least to me, that you are holding the members to a very high standard and that this particular post is not in good faith. For starters, like HS stated, the UDS and Spiritus are long-standing notable regions with longstanding relationships with XKI, TSP, and TRR. I mean hell, TSP & UDS have had a treaty for like, four years now, and that's just one example. Not only has there been a long-standing diplomatic relationship between the new regions and the original, but there's also been a long history of positive relations between each. LCN merely doesn't have the same cache that the UDS and Spiritus had and therefore more deliberation seems to be a natural and logical thing to do.
As for the " deliberative process which we were kept in the dark completely on", I don't truly believe that you nor anyone else is really owed much of an explanation beyond the final verdict. And making a public statement about it where this matter could have honestly been handled privately seems to be a little bit much in my eyes.

[Quebecshire]

Hey Kang, how ya doin?

holding the members to a very high standard and that this particular post is not in good faith.

I don't know what to tell you here, we're a little annoyed, and I don't think that's unfair. I don't think it's bad faith to criticize what pretty much everyone agrees was a very delayed process. I think we have the right to air out our concerns after waiting a month for this verdict.

We did our best to be extremely patient with a process we had no concrete information about, and our Heads of State encouraged as much in our legislature. We're entitled to express our concerns having waited for consideration to be complete.

EDIT: I made it my point to place my criticism on the process, not the result of the vote. If I wanted to engage in bad faith, I'd go full swing

As for the " deliberative process which we were kept in the dark completely on", I don't truly believe that you nor anyone else is really owed much of an explanation beyond the final verdict. And making a public statement about it where this matter could have honestly been handled privately seems to be a little bit much in my eyes.

This is really just a difference of opinion, and I respectfully disagree. I think we deserved as much information as was given to other regions about the process. We simply didn't get that. We were never given specific info about our status, and we were told we couldn't know who else applied, and that doesn't seem to have been the case for other applicant regions.

[Kanglia]

Hey Kang, how ya doin?

Proper shit, I've been drug back to this.
All jokes aside, I'm as well as I can be, hope the same for you

snip for brevity

I do get your frustration, I just feel that you lot would have been better suited to take this matter up privately. Just feels to me, as an outsider to all of it, that this course of action only opens you up for criticism that I don't really think you all in LCN have earned over this particular matter.

[Quebecshire]

I do get your frustration, I just feel that you lot would have been better suited to take this matter up privately. Just feels to me, as an outsider to all of it, that this course of action only opens you up for criticism that I don't really think you all in LCN have earned over this particular matter.

That's a fair take, and I'm not going to die on the hill yelling that we needed to say it all publicly. I do think I've been reasonable, though, even if there is disagreement with the statement - I wish the PfS well and obviously, the vote is the vote, we just had some stuff about the process we felt important to us.

Personally, my line of reasoning to say something publicly was that our region, the Consulate and Council in particular, despite some annoyance with the process, heeded my and the other Consuls' suggestions to stay patient and respect what HumanSanity asked us to not make public as the process went on. Now that the process is over and final, I think it's fair for those concerns from our region, and those that experienced the application process firsthand, to say our piece on that. We kept quiet and whatnot when the PfS were the ones reviewing everything, and we feel it's fair to be able to reflect on it now with our opinion, one way or another if that makes sense.

[Toerana]

I do get your frustration, I just feel that you lot would have been better suited to take this matter up privately. Just feels to me, as an outsider to all of it, that this course of action only opens you up for criticism that I don't really think you all in LCN have earned over this particular matter.

This tbh ^ If you want a continued positive relationship with the Partnership, airing your dirty laundry out in the open instead of privately is not really the best way to go about this :P

[Quebecshire]

...airing your dirty laundry...

I don't really see how this is anyone's "dirty laundry", it's not a scandal or something anyone did objectively wrong.

Also, we'd probably be able to better decide if we wanted a "continued relationship with the partnership" (whatever that means) if we had any information about where anything stands. We were refused the ability to know how each region voted and HS heavily implied the reason for rejection was the previous OOC stuff.

A fair reason, of course, but how are we supposed to know what the issue is there? We fixed stuff. Is it an issue of time, other changes, etc? We don't have any info to literally make any judgements other than "we think we were handled a bit unreasonably."

[Toerana]

...airing your dirty laundry...

I don't really see how this is anyone's "dirty laundry", it's not a scandal or something anyone did objectively wrong.

Also, we'd probably be able to better decide if we wanted a "continued relationship with the partnership" (whatever that means) if we had any information about where anything stands. We were refused the ability to know how each region voted and HS heavily implied the reason for rejection was the previous OOC stuff.

A fair reason, of course, but how are we supposed to know what the issue is there? We fixed stuff. Is it an issue of time, other changes, etc? We don't have any info to literally make any judgements other than "we think we were handled a bit unreasonably."

What I was attempting to say was dumping it all out in the open is not necessarily the best way to go about this - Contacting the Partnership directly and privately about your denial would have been the best route. Save the public statements for after this, I doubt you'll be able to publicly pressure the Partnership into publicly releasing details and their reasoning, especially without trying privately first.

Giving feedback is fine, and always will be, but public statements first, without trying the back channels route isn't going to do much for you.

[Quebecshire]

What I was attempting to say was dumping it all out in the open is not necessarily the best way to go about this - Contacting the Partnership directly and privately about your denial would have been the best route. Save the public statements for after this, I doubt you'll be able to publicly pressure the Partnership into publicly releasing details and their reasoning, especially without trying privately first.

Giving feedback is fine, and always will be, but public statements first, without trying the back channels route isn't going to do much for you.

Look, we're all ears, but there doesn't seem like much to contact them about. We asked privately to know how the vote went and was told no (beyond the verdict margin, anyway).

I'm personally not rushing to be like "oh well how can we have a relationship with the partnership" based on how this went. We waited a month and were told to go away, which is again, entirely their right, but I'm not looking to bend over backwards to force a relationship if the partnership doesn't want one (which it doesn't seem to), to be honest with you.

We reached out to a couple of individual regions in the partnership too and we got mixed results, so I'm not in a rush to be super close with the partnership as an overall entity right now, and I think that's pretty fair.