[DRAFT] The Great Gig in the Sky

[New Anarchisticstan]

Sorry, Lord Verdant. New issue draft, new purgatory stay.

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Title: The Great Gig in the Sky
Description: While having a walk in @@CAPITAL@@'s most gentrified streets, you lift your head and take a glance at the pristine, cerulean sky, only for heaps of paper to come out of it, burying you. You swim your way up the mountain of leaflets, and gaze at the similarly terrified pedestrians and your chaperone sticking their head out.

validity: invalid for nations with no airplanes

Option 1:"Oh for f@#$'s sake, 50% off on clothes? Bull-crap!" shouts a suited man, while fixing his undone tie frantically. "These came from a corporate airplane, I saw it! You, heck, why don't you get off your @#$ and get some drone patrols in the sky? Ban this advertising tactic too! Maybe this way they'll stop shoving us with this corporate propaganda!".

Fallout: airplanes have gatling guns for self-defence

Option 2: An old lady spits a bunch of paper out, turning towards you. "Oh dearie @@LEADER@@, see, it's these advertising airplanes. I always look at them flying while with my little grandson, and then, buried! Cellulose tastes worse than my aspirin... I implore you, sweetie, force manufacturers into making paper sweet, then maybe it wouldn't be that bad!".

fallout: homework is eaten more by children than by dogs

Option 3: You gape your mouth at the sight of your Minister of Defence half naked with boxers and a swimming ring. "Fun! Amazing! Hey over there, @@LEADER@@, this is perfect! We can use this same tactic to spread leaflet propaganda into our enemies, destabilising them, and all it requires is a printer! Woohooo, let's do just that!".

fallout: brancalandians use the nearest leaflet as toilet paper.

Option 4: "Uhh, umm, may I please have a word with you?" whispers your chaperone, brushing his hat off in the process. "See, these un-gentlemanly abominations are covering up our beautiful blue sky, you see. Well, see, what if we kindly make them verboten? We could be able to enjoy the shooting stars of @@NATION@@, with no distractions!".

fallout: strangely, there are no more shooting stars in @@NATION@@.

[Trotterdam]

I have never seen anyone advertise this way.

[New Anarchisticstan]

I have never seen anyone advertise this way.

You're not wrong... But in Nationstates, where you can achieve things such as sentient AI and economies hundreds of times bigger than the US', such a thing could happen. Or not, do not know. I will leave the editors to decide.

[Urine Town]

Eh, I’ll have to agree to disagree with Trotterdam on this one. Leaflet advertising is still very much within modern technology, even if it is a colossal waste of money.

Option 2, while funny, is too ridiculous of a premise to work. Who would eat paper, and who would enable their son (who, given it’s an old lady, is probably an adult son), to eat the paper? I would assume it doesn’t matter if it comes from trees or airplanes?

Option 3’s fallout is either a reference to Germany during World War 1, or an OverSimplified YouTube reference (I love Oversimplified ). I’d personally rework that fallout

[The Grand Fifth Imperium]

objects falling from airplanes could be dangerous... if there's enough paper to bury Leader it could cause some serious damage to someone (other than a bazillion paper cuts). you know... just saying...

[New Anarchisticstan]

Eh, I’ll have to agree to disagree with Trotterdam on this one. Leaflet advertising is still very much within modern technology, even if it is a colossal waste of money.

Option 2, while funny, is too ridiculous of a premise to work. Who would eat paper, and who would enable their son (who, given it’s an old lady, is probably an adult son), to eat the paper? I would assume it doesn’t matter if it comes from trees or airplanes?

Option 3’s fallout is either a reference to Germany during World War 1, or an OverSimplified YouTube reference (I love Oversimplified ). I’d personally rework that fallout

Fallout 3 is no reference.
I will think about option 2. And you're right! I forgot that the son would be too old to look at airplanes. I will hereby make them... a grandson.

objects falling from airplanes could be dangerous... if there's enough paper to bury Leader it could cause some serious damage to someone (other than a bazillion paper cuts). you know... just saying...

From what I know, option 2 seems the weakest in the draft, so I may replace it with a "safety" argument. Maybe later, laptop broke. Thanks for the idea.

[Trotterdam]

Eh, I’ll have to agree to disagree with Trotterdam on this one. Leaflet advertising is still very much within modern technology, even if it is a colossal waste of money.

I never said it wasn't.

If anything, people not doing something despite it clearly being possible makes it even less credible of an issue than a hypothetical scenario involving technology that doesn't currently exist but that plausibly might in the future.

[Verdant Haven]

- This seems like a completely bizarre advertising tactic, and people are going to have no idea what you're on about. If you want to introduce the idea of a plane dropping leaflets to advertise, that's fair, but really *introduce* the idea and keep it believable. This is simply too off the wall to treat as if it's normal in the manner it is presented.

- I would also perhaps tone down the idea of burying people in paper. Having a scattering of leaflets floating down from the sky would be something that could happen. Dropping pallets-worth and burying people would be inefficient, not to mention deadly.

- Chaperone is an odd word to use in the description, as the word implies that the person has supervisory or custodial authority over you.

- The options feel like they really don't have any common theme. The description (adjusted to be reasonable) feels like it would most readily fit into the category of environmental regulation (such as littering laws). Having options being to shoot down planes, to make paper taste good, to spread propaganda, or to ban... leaflets? Planes? really don't seem to be addressing a common problem in a meaningful way. What is the actual *dilemma* here?

[Australian rePublic]

Option 1- it sounds like the promotion is bullshit.

[Candlewhisper Archive]

On the other hand, airborne drops of leaflets have been carried out for military propaganda purposes many times in the 20th century and continues to be used to the modern day when targeting populations with little access to manipulable media, right up to 2015 when leaflets were dropped on Syria to discourage folk from joining the Islamic State.

There's a potential issue from that direction, though you'd need to find some underlying conflict / dilemma to drive the issue, as right now it'd be too easy to say "why not? doesn't cost much and might work", which is more or less the approach of most military operations of this sort at present.

Maybe the target zone could be a warlord-riven former nation that is in near anarchy, with an extremist anti-((NATION)) faction on the rise, but with no clear military targets to strike at. You could be asked whether you should be authorising low altitude leaflet drops on the off chance that it might reduce support for that faction, balances against the risk of loss of aircraft / life to anti-aircraft fire, and the probable low literacy of the target populations.