The Rejected Times | Liberty Islands Liberated

[At Sea]

What's the surprise announcement?

TSP is about to loose its Minister of the Army WA mobility.

[The Rejected Times]

What's the surprise announcement?

Unfortunately, my friend Escade has resigned from Vice Delegate of TSP. However, I hope to succeed her and run for Vice Delegate if there are elections.

[Geomania]

What's the surprise announcement?

TSP is about to loose its Minister of the Army WA mobility.

Interesting that that is what you took out of the announcement.

[The Rejected Times]

For those who can't find the article: viewtopic.php?p=20093685#p20093685

[Mousebumples]

For those who can't find the article: viewtopic.php?p=20093685#p20093685

I found a definite article! *points up* What do I win?

[Mallorea and Riva]

This is actually a case where Unibot has accidentally stumbled onto the truth. I was indeed a Commander once, when I was Head of Military in...I want to say 2009. But I rescinded that rank when I left active raiding service and returned to General. However, my current rank and position in TBH would probably be more relevant.

Even more relevant would be my service in TNP, including 10 months as Speaker of the RA, a brief stint as Chief Justice, and author of multiple successful bills. But details like that might get in the way of Unibots message the feeder politics is all about military gameplay. I'm the goddamn Minister of Communications. What does my experience as a raider have to do with that?

EDIT: Duality is a little tricky for me. I *do* consider my TNP and TBH personas to be entirely separate, so consider this post to be OOC. I considered making a "who me? I've never done any of that," post, but I always found those to be a little annoying. Nonetheless, I resent Unibot's conflation of my two personas in this article, and respectfully request that in the future, when referring to me as a TNPer, he not make reference to my other persona's TBH experience.

EDIT2: And yes, I realize both personas have the same name. I created my account on the TNP forum before I committed to duality.

Um, no. The paper will not recognize duality. That's just asking for trouble as far as a media organization is concerned. Duality has been used for years by coupers to try to cover up the truth of events and escape personal responsibility for their actions.

COE has repeatedly refused my attempts to get him to run for delegate and turn his nation over to be used by TBH. His loyalty to TNP is beyond question, and it is only a defender who abandoned TNP after attempting to force defenderism upon it who would think to claim otherwise. Some players are in fact capable of separating their interests between various regions, even I am successful in doing so with my role as the Secretary of Defense of Stargate. Perhaps the paper should look to its writers and editors when they fail to recognize duality as a concept that is valid for certain players in order to understand that simply because they can't seem to practice it, that does not exclude the ability of others to do so.

[Xiao-Yang]

For those who can't find the article: viewtopic.php?p=20093685#p20093685

I found a definite article! *points up* What do I win?

You win satisfaction.

But you lose every ounce of dignity that you own.

[Unibot III]

For those who can't find the article: viewtopic.php?p=20093685#p20093685

I found a definite article! *points up* What do I win?

The prize. The definite article you might say...

[Whiskum]

I've seen situations where defenders and imperialists have run parallel operations without cooperation. TUKB's liberation in May 2012 comes to mind. What were the fears of parallel missions?

For TUKB, there was an agreement between the LKE and the UDL to do a joint mission; I recall having a meeting with Unibot to discuss it.

However, the LKE then received the password, meaning that an immediate surprise operation had a greater likelihood of success than that mission.

As such we pursued that option, regarding which there no downsides or additional risks involved.

Additionally, we were aware that despite our deal the UDL was planning their own mission, in this former LKE colony, without having informed us of it.

Nonetheless, we were openly backing the UDL's 'liberation resolution', despite the fact the proposal had been withdrawn shortly before it could have gone to vote, delaying when it got to vote, and then resubmitted without any warning while we were in the process of publicly drafting our own resolution.

UIAF chose me to be their lead. But switching leads was a dealbreaker for Dyr and FRA. Horse encapsulated the FRA position when he said "Unless defenders lead, nope.jpg", even though I was the lead. But Christopher Bishop agreed to endorse Milograd as long as I was also being endorsed.

Never again let it be said that the UIAF regions are less prepared to be flexible than defender organisations in circumstances of this kind.

[Tlik]

Um, no. The paper will not recognize duality. That's just asking for trouble as far as a media organization is concerned. Duality has been used for years by coupers to try to cover up the truth of events and escape personal responsibility for their actions.

COE has repeatedly refused my attempts to get him to run for delegate and turn his nation over to be used by TBH. His loyalty to TNP is beyond question, and it is only a defender who abandoned TNP after attempting to force defenderism upon it who would think to claim otherwise. Some players are in fact capable of separating their interests between various regions, even I am successful in doing so with my role as the Secretary of Defense of Stargate. Perhaps the paper should look to its writers and editors when they fail to recognize duality as a concept that is valid for certain players in order to understand that simply because they can't seem to practice it, that does not exclude the ability of others to do so.

I don't think Uni was asserting that people could not be loyal to two things. It's a difficult line to tread, but for all the time that I've been in TNP, I'd say COE has done that job admirably. However, I'd argue that balancing two differing roles and remaining loyal to both of them does not require one to 'RP' as two different people.

[Unibot III]

However, I'd argue that balancing two differing roles and remaining loyal to both of them does not require one to 'RP' as two different people.

Exactly.

[Zaolat]

COE has repeatedly refused my attempts to get him to run for delegate and turn his nation over to be used by TBH. His loyalty to TNP is beyond question, and it is only a defender who abandoned TNP after attempting to force defenderism upon it who would think to claim otherwise. Some players are in fact capable of separating their interests between various regions, even I am successful in doing so with my role as the Secretary of Defense of Stargate. Perhaps the paper should look to its writers and editors when they fail to recognize duality as a concept that is valid for certain players in order to understand that simply because they can't seem to practice it, that does not exclude the ability of others to do so.

I don't think Uni was asserting that people could not be loyal to two things. It's a difficult line to tread, but for all the time that I've been in TNP, I'd say COE has done that job admirably. However, I'd argue that balancing two differing roles and remaining loyal to both of them does not require one to 'RP' as two different people.

But that's not impossible for the individual himself/herself to be loyal to more than one place or area at the same time. The things that matter are if they truly are (Since some cannot) & how one side they are loyal to reacts in the case of a conflict of interest.

For me, I can be loyal to more than one thing. I'm loyal in a sense to my former defender ties, I won't divulge secrets that I know of or can remember, but I that's the same case for my current invader ties. No matter what, if either groups I'm loyal in that sense try to get information out of me, I will decline. If they don't like it, they can buzz off because I wouldn't betray anyone like that.

[Unibot III]

One of our statisticians did an article for our new edition that is a headscratcher. Five years as a player, going on six. Twenty-three WA resolutions passed. Reading this article was what medieval philosophers must have felt reading Copernicus's De revolutionibus.

[Tlik]

I don't think Uni was asserting that people could not be loyal to two things. It's a difficult line to tread, but for all the time that I've been in TNP, I'd say COE has done that job admirably. However, I'd argue that balancing two differing roles and remaining loyal to both of them does not require one to 'RP' as two different people.

But that's not impossible for the individual himself/herself to be loyal to more than one place or area at the same time. The things that matter are if they truly are (Since some cannot) & how one side they are loyal to reacts in the case of a conflict of interest.

For me, I can be loyal to more than one thing. I'm loyal in a sense to my former defender ties, I won't divulge secrets that I know of or can remember, but I that's the same case for my current invader ties. No matter what, if either groups I'm loyal in that sense try to get information out of me, I will decline. If they don't like it, they can buzz off because I wouldn't betray anyone like that.

I think this is pretty much what I was trying to say: It's perfectly acceptable to be loyal to two things, and good GP'ers are trustworthy in multiple roles. You don't need to split yourself in two to be a trustworthy GP'er.

[The Rejected Times]

Thread closed

[The Leningrad Union]

Does "The Lemming Effect" Exist?
OPINION | STARRIE

We will look for evidence of the "lemming effect", the tendency for members to follow the crowd and vote towards the winning side, which causes early votes to have a greater effect.

If the effect does exist, we should be able to see that when one side has n% of the total votes, the proportion of new votes towards that side is more then n%. For example, the side 70% of the votes should be getting more than 70% of new votes. This effect is not expected to hold up when n is close to 100, because the population is not completely composed of lemmings.

Since the effect does not hold up at high proportions, we should see a downward curve in a plot of the effect if it exists which means the coefficient of the x^2 term in a quadratic regression line should be negative

The difference between the current and total proportion increases as the proportion of votes increases. Imagine the true opinion happens to be 50%. An early pile of 70% might cause less positive votes (60%) than an early pile of 90%, which might pull 70% positive votes. Therefore, the higher pile is more effective, but the difference in proportions of the current total (the current pile) and the newest votes decreases from -10% to -20%.

When all these conditions are satisfied we will be able to claim that the lemming effect does exist.

For all of the following charts, the x-axis shows the proportion of total votes currently going to the winning side. The y-axis shows the proportion of the newest votes going to the winning side. Each point represents a bucket of 1000 consecutive votes.

This first graph, of all votes, has the majority of points above the line y = x, which means the first condition is met. A single sample t-test gives us a p-value of 0.0141.

(Image)

A plot of the residual values, which shows the strength of the effect, reveals that there is a upward trend, meaning that the effect becomes weaker as the proportion grows higher as expected. The 95% confidence interval for our plot, (-5.200, -0.749), is completely negative.

(Image)

Next, we use the bootstrap method to find the confidence interval for the x^2 coefficient of a quadratic regression line drawn through the original plot. The 95% interval is from -2.49 to 2.87, with a mean of 0.42. While this does not follow our expectations, it does not seriously endanger the hypothesis of the lemming effect because it merely says the effect does not decrease as we expect.

(Image)

If we look at only votes from delegates, counting all votes as a single vote, we get a p-value of 0.0003 that the points are above the line.

(Image)

A regression line for the residuals also shows a general downward trend, with the confidence interval for the slope at (-1.78,-0.55). It seems delegates are not immune to this effect.

(Image)

The confidence interval (-1.86, 1.01) for the coeffient is even less conclusive in this case. It does give some indication that the lemming effect exists though.

(Image)

If we weigh the delegates based on their vote count, a different picture shows. Although the mean is still above the y = x line, it is only slightly above, and p = 0.6135. Since endorsement-heavy delegates may participate in early vote piling, and are therefore not affected by the lemming effect, it is expected that we've failed to find conclusive evidence of it.

(Image)

As before, the regression line for the residuals is also decreasing, but the confidence interval (-2.758, 1.194) includes zero, so we do not have good evidence to suggest it really is below zero.

(Image)

Our coefficient here is in the interval (-1.95, 0.35), which is the closes out of the three to be statistically significant. However, we cannot conclude that the effect exists here because it appears that the vote piling nations not susceptible to the lemming effect.

(Image)
(note: some plots were done with buckets of 500 rather than 1000 votes, and that is why the dots do not match up exactly)

We can conclude that the lemming effect probably exists and is effectively employed with early vote piling, although a larger sample size is needed in order to achieve higher statistical significance.

Huh, I never considered this before. It makes sense, thanks for writing about it.

Largely it is western society that perpetuates the belief of the Nazi symbolism, but I believe it's time we moved forward and let that dark part of human history die, as it should have many years ago.

First of all, Max Barry has said that he doesn't want the Swastika on his website and he's the owner of NS, you can make your own nation sim if you want to allow Swastika flags as the mods have said over 9,000 times before. Secondly, why should the history die? It is taught and remembered not only to mourn the millions killed, but mainly to have history not repeat itself again.

[Unibot III]

Huh, I never considered this before. It makes sense, thanks for writing about it.

The Lemming Effect was AMOM's name, although the theory is much older. Gatesville was probably the first group to very extensively make use of it. This was an empirical piece exploring it as an effect, first to prove its existence and then to find its nuances.

Starrie did an amazing job as always. He's the best. ^^

[Cormac A Stark]

Just to be clear here, is it Funkadelia's assertion that depriving imperialists of any form of victory and maintaining a sufficient level of defender purity is more important than the liberation of founderless regions?

If so, how widespread is this point of view in Lazarus and in the Founderless Regions Alliance, or for that matter more broadly within defenderdom? Should non-defender regions that aren't explicitly raider have any expectation of being able to cooperate with defenders at all, or should they all exclusively raid?

[Mallorea and Riva]

Thing is: Crushing our Enemies is correct. I do not believe there is such thing as a “moderate” or a “centrist”.

I read the entire article but really the only commentary I have is the following question: what is it like being so far to the left that even the center seems like the extreme right?

[Solorni]

Lmao, this Funkedelia guy seems brainwashed. I didn't realize the LLA had such extremists amid their group. That is hilarious.

[Funkadelia]

Just to be clear here, is it Funkadelia's assertion that depriving imperialists of any form of victory and maintaining a sufficient level of defender purity is more important than the liberation of founderless regions?

If so, how widespread is this point of view in Lazarus and in the Founderless Regions Alliance, or for that matter more broadly within defenderdom? Should non-defender regions that aren't explicitly raider have any expectation of being able to cooperate with defenders at all, or should they all exclusively raid?

It was simply my assertion that Lazarus should not be doing any cooperation with imperialists. Lazarus should have and could have found a way to carry out the mission without the "assistance" of the imperialist forces. I never said anything about the importance of defending and liberation founderless regions.

I do not know how widespread the point of view is present in either, but I would imagine that it is more prevalent in Lazarus than in the FRA as a whole.

[The Leningrad Union]

Lmao, this Funkedelia guy seems brainwashed. I didn't realize the LLA had such extremists amid their group. That is hilarious.

Who was he brainwashed by, though?

[Solorni]

Lmao, this Funkedelia guy seems brainwashed. I didn't realize the LLA had such extremists amid their group. That is hilarious.

Who was he brainwashed by, though?

I'm going to have to say the imperialists. Don't see how someone like that isn't damaging for the defender side. It's like when John McCain brought out Sarah Palin. No one knew who she was, but most people has wished she had just stayed in Alaska. Except for the Democrats that is

We should play a game. Count the articles that have a severe defender slant to them.

[Blue Wolf II]

The thread had ordered Ravania, among other soldiers, to endorse The Black Hawks in Warhammer 40000. Ravania had revolted against the order and vented to his fellow defenders which became an international media storm when Eluvatar stumbled upon the IRC Logs in the private defender channel as a part of his duties in the North Pacific Army Intelligence unit.

Since the Delegate of The Rejected Realms feels the need to badmouth The North Pacific and it's army, I feel the need to respond to the misinformation he's so keen to hand out, specifically about ex-NPA Private Ravania, although there are so any thing wrong with his article a full break down of them all would probably be a few pages long.

First, Ravania was not ordered to do anything. The mission was entirely voluntary and it just so happens he did not volunteer and did not partake in the mission as an NPA troop, however it is my understanding he did take part in the attempt to liberate the region with UDL/FRA.

Second, he was not "went after", he committed Espionage against TNP and was convicted for his crimes. He stole information from the private NPA forums and provided it to the UDL. Fortunately, Eluvatar was more loyal to TNP than he is to the UDL and informed us of Ravania's betrayal. For his efforts, Eluvatar was immediately given a dishonorable discharge from the UDL by Unibot personally, although that was later overturned.

Unibot then attempted to use this information to drive a wedge between Mcmasterdonia, whom had just stepped down as Delegate and I had just replaced due to my position as Vice Delegate, and myself. Unibot had hoped that Mcmasterdonia would support the UDL backed deployment override of NPA forces in W40K but McMaster didn't bite and the motion failed 18 to 28.

The break down in relations between TNP and the UDL was entirely on the UDL's side. They refused to cooperate with the NPIA's follow up investigation, they handed out a meaningless 2-week demotion to Ravania (which was later proven to have never been implemented at all), and they repeatedly lied about Ravania being a spy. To this day they deny that he was a spy and assert he was simply "acting on his own" and the UDL is not responsible for the actions of their own member, who was caught proving information to high ranking UDL officers in a private UDL channel.

So yes, I ended relations with them as would any other delegate in the same situation. The fact that no other TNP Delegate since then has sought to reopen relations is somewhat telling and proof that this wasn't "Blue Wolf being a big meanie invader who hates UDL for no reason" but rather a decision that the entire region supported and still supports.

On a side note, I'm wondering what the Delegate of The Rejected Realms hopes he will get out of all these negative "opinion" pieces about The North Pacific. Certainly they are not helping TNP-TRR relations, that's for sure.

[Unibot III]

1. All invader-defender missions are non-mandatory. It was however an order.

2. Eluvatar released the information and was swiftly promoted by you (while you were also battling him in a court case for treason as you simultaneously called him the paradigm of patriotism).

3. I never read the pdf until after the story broke. I was told what I was told via a different source - a non-defender source who wishes to remain anonymous for obvious reasons (he'd like to not be accused of espionage from the travelling Blue Wolf & __partisan crown attorney__ show when all he did was ramble a bit to the wrong person). I've said this for about a year now - you just don't like listening.

4. Ravania never "spied" on The North Pacific for The United Defenders League. The legal definition of espionage used by The North Pacific need not be collectively organized in any fashion that we would normally consider "espionage". He was not a spy. He was not even a member of our intelligence unit. Eluvatar would know, he led it.

5. The United Defenders League cooperated to the fullest extent as they could with The North Pacific Intelligence Agency. There are posts outlining our cooperation with your authorities.

6. You aren't a "big meanie invader". You used the region for your own political aims and have avoided directly responding to the allegations against you because that's what you do.