This week in Euro, the big news is obviously the Presidential election. Currently three candidates have stood in what looks to be an exciting, competitive and close race. Also in the news this week, the CA looks at party security, we’ll be having a look at the pros and cons. And finally this week a look at role-play and if it will ever truly catch on in Euro.
Strange Disease Known as “Competitiveness” Strikes Europeia!
After three elections with no competition and the one candidate in each race being elected on a super-majority, three candidates have currently stood for President this time around. It looks set to be a tight race with former Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Common-Sense Politics running along with the current Minister of WA Affairs Kaboom. Their Vice President picks don’t lower the stake either, with current Vice President Dracness running alongside Calvin, current Minister of Radio Cat running with CSP and former Speaker Rand hoping to become Kaboom’s VP.
If Kaboom was elected his administration would introduce wide reforms to the CSO. Ministers would have much smaller day to day duties in running their various Ministries with Deputies taking up more of the slack. Kaboom believes that this approach will prepare future leaders by giving them more power and control over the Ministries that they are Deputies in. Criticisms of the campaign however claim that while plenty of new ideas have been suggested there is a lack of real hard-core policy and structure.
A CSP Presidency would see a much greater focus on Foreign Affairs. The Ambassador Programme would be scrapped under his plans, while military operations would be greatly increased, he would keep the WA Ministry something which he admits is a change of opinion from his previous stance that the Ministry should be scrapped. He also showed his continued support for CAIN and promised that his nomination for Minister of Foreign Affairs would be able to cope with difficulties of CAIN. The criticisms that could be thrown at CSP’s campaign is that it is too heavily focused on FA and there is not enough detail on domestic policy. Indeed his campaign word count is 1351 for FA and Navy while just 931 for the rest of his policy agenda.
For Calvin transparency would be a key part of his administration, indeed the theme of transparency gave birth to his slogan “Eyes Open.” Calvin believes that many Europeians are going without credit for the work they do in the various Ministries of Europeia due to a lack of transparency and that this lack of transparency is what is preventing some newer members from getting involved in the region. We would therefore expect more public statements from Ministers serving in a Calvin administration and more things such as town halls and updates. Critics of this campaign would most likely point to the fact that while this ticket may have experience and detail, Calvin wants to introduce lots of minor changes, and reforms to the various Ministries on how they work, run themselves and their aims and while there is no major big change, all of these minor reforms could easily add up and make an extremely tough and ambitious workload for the new President.
With a competitive election, voters are already announcing support and grilling the candidates on the issues, their plans and work ethics. No doubt a debate or two will be on the cards and this looks set to be an election that Euro won’t soon forget!
Party Security: Yay or Nay?
This week Kaboom began a discussion on party security in the CA following information leaks from the EPP. While it is still illegal to leak information from non-government areas with restricted access it is not currently included in the criminal code, which did lead to some confusion at the start of the debate. In the day of Discord our laws also don’t seem to have updated with private Discord chats not being classified as “protected areas” under the Protection Areas Act.
Discussion quickly moved along to arguing about if political parties should be covered in the Europiean Speech Protection Act. Arguments against it were that parties do not need a legal way to punish their members for leaking information and that parties should punish their members for leaking information internally and that the social consequences of leaking information would be punishment enough.
Arguments for including political parties under the ESPA however take the view that because political parties have their own private sub-forum, that sub-forum should be given legal protection and that internal punishment would not be effective enough as any leaking would be most likely done for political gain and so any social consequence would be minimal.
Roleplay - Can Europeia Roleplay as a Roleplay Region?
Opinion Piece – By Punchwood
When I first joined NS I was only interested in the politics of the game. Spam games and roleplay had little to interest me in. To be quite honest I thought roleplay was quite sad and like many I fear I had an image in my head that roleplaying was only done by those who had nothing else to and were the most dramatic of people. However one day on the TSP forums I saw something that looked interesting, I clicked on it and soon saw that it was a roleplay story. I read it and like a fly to honey I kept coming back and back, spending longer and longer in the roleplay section of the forums. I never would have thought that I would be spending time in roleplay section of the forums and especially not enjoying my time there.
Like many I believe I overlooked roleplay believing that it was boring and only those interested in drama would get involved. Yet I was completely wrong, the people getting involved in roleplay were just the regular people who were also excellent legislators, legal minds, foreign affairs experts and in real life these were the people studying law, international relations, physics and so on. I let a prejudice that I believe so many of us have or had make be avoid something that became so much fun to me.
I haven’t had a shot at the roleplay in Europeia yet mainly as I wanted to get involved in the politics of this region straight away and I saw such little activity in the roleplay section of the forums. Yet after reading the Presidential campaigns and seeing that it is being mentioned made me decide to check out Euro’s roleplay and I know I’ll be taking a bash at it soon.
For roleplay to grow and to be successful in Europeia which I know it can be, we need to ditch the stereotype of roleplay. Roleplay is great fun if you get involved in a roleplay which you’ll like. Europeia is known for being a very political region and so the roleplays in Europeia should mostly be political based. May it be a roleplay over forming a government, a foreign affairs disaster, an invasion, treaty negation or whatever. These things are not only fun to roleplay about but they also improve many of your skills which you’ll use in Europeia.
I’m not saying that every roleplay has to be politically based, not everyone will be interested in that or will want to try different kinds of roleplay such as murder mysteries for example or whatever as that’s the beauty of roleplay, it can be whatever you want.
So my challenge to you the reader is to give roleplay a shot and maybe like me you’ll be totally shocked to discover that roleplay is actually incredibly fun! If at the moment there is no roleplay that interest you, then make one up and see if others are interested!
Roleplay is often overlooked and is seen as being petty or less important than the politics of a region, but it’s not true. Roleplay can truly get a region active and engaged, it can improve relationships between members, improve so many of the skills that we use in Europeia from just basic things such as communicating to improving your temperament and problem-solving skills. There is a whole world to discover in roleplay and you should start to discover that world today.
Strange Disease Known as “Competitiveness” Strikes Europeia!
After three elections with no competition and the one candidate in each race being elected on a super-majority, three candidates have currently stood for President this time around. It looks set to be a tight race with former Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Common-Sense Politics running along with the current Minister of WA Affairs Kaboom. Their Vice President picks don’t lower the stake either, with current Vice President Dracness running alongside Calvin, current Minister of Radio Cat running with CSP and former Speaker Rand hoping to become Kaboom’s VP.
If Kaboom was elected his administration would introduce wide reforms to the CSO. Ministers would have much smaller day to day duties in running their various Ministries with Deputies taking up more of the slack. Kaboom believes that this approach will prepare future leaders by giving them more power and control over the Ministries that they are Deputies in. Criticisms of the campaign however claim that while plenty of new ideas have been suggested there is a lack of real hard-core policy and structure.
A CSP Presidency would see a much greater focus on Foreign Affairs. The Ambassador Programme would be scrapped under his plans, while military operations would be greatly increased, he would keep the WA Ministry something which he admits is a change of opinion from his previous stance that the Ministry should be scrapped. He also showed his continued support for CAIN and promised that his nomination for Minister of Foreign Affairs would be able to cope with difficulties of CAIN. The criticisms that could be thrown at CSP’s campaign is that it is too heavily focused on FA and there is not enough detail on domestic policy. Indeed his campaign word count is 1351 for FA and Navy while just 931 for the rest of his policy agenda.
For Calvin transparency would be a key part of his administration, indeed the theme of transparency gave birth to his slogan “Eyes Open.” Calvin believes that many Europeians are going without credit for the work they do in the various Ministries of Europeia due to a lack of transparency and that this lack of transparency is what is preventing some newer members from getting involved in the region. We would therefore expect more public statements from Ministers serving in a Calvin administration and more things such as town halls and updates. Critics of this campaign would most likely point to the fact that while this ticket may have experience and detail, Calvin wants to introduce lots of minor changes, and reforms to the various Ministries on how they work, run themselves and their aims and while there is no major big change, all of these minor reforms could easily add up and make an extremely tough and ambitious workload for the new President.
With a competitive election, voters are already announcing support and grilling the candidates on the issues, their plans and work ethics. No doubt a debate or two will be on the cards and this looks set to be an election that Euro won’t soon forget!
Party Security: Yay or Nay?
This week Kaboom began a discussion on party security in the CA following information leaks from the EPP. While it is still illegal to leak information from non-government areas with restricted access it is not currently included in the criminal code, which did lead to some confusion at the start of the debate. In the day of Discord our laws also don’t seem to have updated with private Discord chats not being classified as “protected areas” under the Protection Areas Act.
Discussion quickly moved along to arguing about if political parties should be covered in the Europiean Speech Protection Act. Arguments against it were that parties do not need a legal way to punish their members for leaking information and that parties should punish their members for leaking information internally and that the social consequences of leaking information would be punishment enough.
Arguments for including political parties under the ESPA however take the view that because political parties have their own private sub-forum, that sub-forum should be given legal protection and that internal punishment would not be effective enough as any leaking would be most likely done for political gain and so any social consequence would be minimal.
Roleplay - Can Europeia Roleplay as a Roleplay Region?
Opinion Piece – By Punchwood
When I first joined NS I was only interested in the politics of the game. Spam games and roleplay had little to interest me in. To be quite honest I thought roleplay was quite sad and like many I fear I had an image in my head that roleplaying was only done by those who had nothing else to and were the most dramatic of people. However one day on the TSP forums I saw something that looked interesting, I clicked on it and soon saw that it was a roleplay story. I read it and like a fly to honey I kept coming back and back, spending longer and longer in the roleplay section of the forums. I never would have thought that I would be spending time in roleplay section of the forums and especially not enjoying my time there.
Like many I believe I overlooked roleplay believing that it was boring and only those interested in drama would get involved. Yet I was completely wrong, the people getting involved in roleplay were just the regular people who were also excellent legislators, legal minds, foreign affairs experts and in real life these were the people studying law, international relations, physics and so on. I let a prejudice that I believe so many of us have or had make be avoid something that became so much fun to me.
I haven’t had a shot at the roleplay in Europeia yet mainly as I wanted to get involved in the politics of this region straight away and I saw such little activity in the roleplay section of the forums. Yet after reading the Presidential campaigns and seeing that it is being mentioned made me decide to check out Euro’s roleplay and I know I’ll be taking a bash at it soon.
For roleplay to grow and to be successful in Europeia which I know it can be, we need to ditch the stereotype of roleplay. Roleplay is great fun if you get involved in a roleplay which you’ll like. Europeia is known for being a very political region and so the roleplays in Europeia should mostly be political based. May it be a roleplay over forming a government, a foreign affairs disaster, an invasion, treaty negation or whatever. These things are not only fun to roleplay about but they also improve many of your skills which you’ll use in Europeia.
I’m not saying that every roleplay has to be politically based, not everyone will be interested in that or will want to try different kinds of roleplay such as murder mysteries for example or whatever as that’s the beauty of roleplay, it can be whatever you want.
So my challenge to you the reader is to give roleplay a shot and maybe like me you’ll be totally shocked to discover that roleplay is actually incredibly fun! If at the moment there is no roleplay that interest you, then make one up and see if others are interested!
Roleplay is often overlooked and is seen as being petty or less important than the politics of a region, but it’s not true. Roleplay can truly get a region active and engaged, it can improve relationships between members, improve so many of the skills that we use in Europeia from just basic things such as communicating to improving your temperament and problem-solving skills. There is a whole world to discover in roleplay and you should start to discover that world today.
