Something, something,
"the Secretariat is too powerful because they can mark any proposal as illegal in order to further their own secret agenda". I've never understood why some people are so negative towards the idea of the Secretariat. Yes, they have the ability to mark any proposal as illegal, which gives them a certain influence over what will and what will not reach the voting floor, but the only time they are to utilize this ability is when they deem a proposal to be in violation of one of the GA's proposal laws (not counting the SC, because that's still done by the mods). If one member abuses their powers, the rest of the Secretariat will ensure that this abuse won't achieve anything. If a majority of them abuses their powers and cooperates this abuse, it can be reported to the mods in order to replace said corrupted members.
Speaking of the mods, how is this any different from the situation that reigned before the appearance of the Secretariat? Back then, it was the moderators who had to check whether a proposal was illegal or not, a task that now falls upon the Secretariat to carry out. The only difference that I can see is the difference in tasks that those responsible for the upholding of proposal rules have to carry out alongside their GA duties; if anything, the existence of a separate Secretariat would be better under this logic of mine, as it allows the mods to focus on their other duties without having to check and discuss a varying amount of GA proposals, whilst the Secretariat focuses entirely on their field of expertise.
As for the stuff related to the SC, how do you intend to give defenders the tools to permanently end raider groups? Because in order to end raider groups, you'd most likely have to make raiding against the site rules, which would in turn kill off one of the major aspects of NationStates. Either that, or you'd need to make it possible for the SC to somehow...I dunno, take away the right for residents of raider regions to join the WA (not that such a thing would actually help)? I'm honestly not entirely sure what you intend to do in order to make raiding go extinct.
And as for delegates, I don't really see the issue. In a lot of cases, the system of delegate approval seems to do wonders in order to keep poorly-written proposals that are still technically legal from actually reaching the voting floor and wasting everyone's time. You could call that some form of elitism, but the alternative of having to read through a wide array of proposals that clearly should've gone through a drafting process on the forums does not sound too appealing to me.
Tarchuna and Ravenna wrote:Araraukar wrote:...and exactly how was it
not an "oligarchy" when the moderation team was making the calls? Especially given that even in the best of times we had all of three mods with the necessary experience to tackle GA legality calls.
If
your proposal gets rejected because you contradict previous resolutions (
it wasn't, by the way), post the draft on the forum first; people here will help you spot the issues so you can fix them. Contradiction avoidance is part of how the game functions, GenSec didn't invent it at random.
Come on now, who do you think would be better at ruling an empire? A council of intellectuals or the fickle public?
What part of Araraukar's post is this a response to? Just curious.