Opinion: Coalition for Irresponsible Politics


Opinion: Coalition for Irresponsible Politics
I'm all for politicking, but let's stop pretending it's "responsible"
Written by Aexnidaral
​


​

Hi.

I'm Aexnidaral Seymour. I know most of you already know me, but some of you may know me better as "a shithead uselessfucktard shitbag who needs to be kicked out the region for extreme fail" or any number of other less interesting but equally insulting names.

Recently one of the last remaining vestiges of the politics of 2016-2017, the Coalition for Responsible Politics, (CfRP) shuttered for good. As any person thirsty for the tea would do, I decided to check their recently public-archived subforums to see exactly what went down. I had heard rumors. I wanted to take a trip down memory lane to when I was the Big Evil. What I wound up stumbling upon was something far more interesting.

Before being shuttered the Party left their Discord invitation thread up. Being still thirsty for that tea and wanting to see what shade had been thrown, my inner drama gay clicked the link and searched for my name. To my surprise Discord returned to me (drumroll please) nearly 500 direct results and about 20 pages of hits. Look ma, I'm popular! I did more digging into what was being said about me, but first I wanted to do some quick searches of other Europeians that were flashpoints or seen to be antagonists by the Party at some point.

Here are the grand totals:
Aex - 496 results, 20 pages
Rach - 432 results, 18 pages
WL / Gleg - 192 results, 8 pages
GraV - 53 results, 3 pages
Pichto - 91 results, 4 pages

That is just monumentally incredible! Look, I get that I'm often annoying politically but spending 20 pages talking about (largely) how much you hate me or how much you want me to be kicked out of the region because I'm a useless shitbag is a little much. If I'm taking up that much of anyone's headspace you may need to focus on something else. I'm neither that important nor that worthy of taking up so much time. But I get it!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not here to say that everything that was said in the forums or Discord are morally reprehensible, and we should all be outraged. In fact, fuck that. Look, this is a political simulator where we've all clashed, we've all gotten outsized egos, and most of our skin is thinner than we let on. We've all said terrible, awful things about each other to others under the auspices of it being private. We say things out of frustration, out of anger, or just out of sheer exhaustion. I've done it. We've all done it. No one has a moral high ground here.

What I am saying though is that it is hilarious, in a way that I can't accurately describe, that a political party who prided themselves as "citizens of Europeia who are working to encourage, foster, and advocate for the betterment of the political environment within our region" spent so much time not doing that at all. In fact there was engagement in some clear and disproportionately irresponsible politics.

One of the best examples of this are when GraV and I applied to join CfRP. Our applications weren't malicious; we weren't trying to be spies. I figured my application would be denied, and having been told similarly by someone in CfRP, I withdrew the application so as to not make a fuss.

​
​
When I read this, the takeaway for me was that one of the weighted reasons GraV was denied was because of his association to me. He was too close to me. Frankly GraV and I are friendly, but we're not BFFs. Even if we were, who cares? Who cares if he is associated with me? That's some pretty irresponsible politics. Obviously, political parties have the right to deny any applicant for various reasons, but this is where it gets silly to deny someone and still pretend your practicing responsible politics.

​
This was another example that just made me chuckle both because it's fundamentally untrue, and it's just dumb. Yes, when I first came to Europeia I joined the Loaded Baked Potato Party (LBPP), and we transformed it into the Action Coalition of Europeia (ACE). As the leader of the Party I did what I felt any good leader would do: engage in politicking and electioneering to help the candidate we endorsed. I can understand why certain people would feel like the party was turned against them when they supported someone else but to claim that it was all me with my friends and sycophants is misleading. Actually it is just a lie. There's some irony to this statement (and others like it), a complete lack of self awareness in calling out someone's "sycophants" in a chat where they spend 90% of their own time digging on the people they dislike. That's some pretty tone-deaf sycophantic behavior in and of itself.



​
This is just patently hypocritical, and I'm going to out myself. During the Cat/WL v Brun/Rand and Darc/Sopo v Brun/JD -> Rach elections, I helped the non-Brunhilde tickets. I did not like Brunhilde. I felt something was "off" about them and was frankly miffed that they'd run for President so soon after being appointed Vice Chancellor without really having done anything after resigning as my VP and leaving me out to dry. I didn't think they'd make a good President so I helped out the other tickets. I didn't do the Get Out the Vote (GOTV) myself, if I can remember, but I gave my advice to their campaigns and attempted to walk them through my strategy on how to target voters and get them out to vote. One election it worked; the other it didn't. What's striking to me here is the complaints that were lobbed at me for doing this until they decided that they needed, or wanted it, or until I was on their side. You can't hate me or my methods until I'm useful to you. That's not responsible politics.

​
​
​
​
​
I have to admit that when I first read the "#reasons" quote I sent it to a few people, including WL himself, and asked them what they thought of it. I'm not sure what the implication was, and I don't want to say that I 100% know it was malicious but what immediately came into my mind was how the air quotes could imply something less innocuous. "That ol' WL is endorsin' Aex for *eyebrow waggle* 'reasons'." That's probably not a fair reading of it, and I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt that it isn't but, regardless, I would like to clear the air and say that WL and I have no attraction to one another, and the only reason WL and I have ever endorsed each other is because we think we're qualified or would do well in the position. It's not because we think the other is smoking hot. Throw me a grimace emoji, folks. The follow-up I want to say here is that all of these people endorsed me when I ran for World Assembly Delegate (WAD) for their own reasons. It doesn't mean that they did it so I would owe them favors or vice versa.


There's dozens upon dozens of other examples of this kind of hypocrisy... I mean a lot of plainly nasty, cruel, and untrue things said about fellow Europeians in that chat. But what bothers me the most having read through it is the "Aex/WL/Rach turn everything into Us v Them while we advocate Us v Them, but it's okay because we're us, and they're them.", this "GOTV is awful but lets coordinate our campaigns and messaging to canvass for votes-- oh good they're on our side this time", irresponsible politicking while pretending to have the moral high ground. They played the part of Anakin thinking they were Obi-Wan and much like Anakin now they've got no legs to stand on.

As an outsider looking in, as someone who was seen as one of the primary antagonists for CfRP, it seems to me that the party was animated around combating me first and foremost when I was President. Then, when I started to fade away and become less of a Big Evil, Writinglegend took up that mantle. When Writinglegend started to fade away again, Rach took up that mantle. When Rach started to fade away again there was...not much left. Alliances shifted, politics shifted, and the primary pushers against the Big Evils retired or left.

I'm not here to pretend to have the moral high ground and say I haven't engaged in politicking or that I haven't said things I regret - because holy shit I absolutely have. I have engaged in dark, seedy politics, some of which I regret, but frankly no more or less than anyone else in Europeia that's held or run for high office. This is a political simulator; this is what happens. But we need to make sure we don't repeat some of this nonsense from behind the auspices of the morality of "Responsible Politics".

This is your mostly incompetent fool, that you don't want to be like signing off!
 
Click to expand...
During Aex's presidency, I wrote a critical article titled The Mirage of Foreign Policy. The irony is that Aexnidaral has served with distinction this term as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and he has been indispensable as an advisor to HEM and me. I was a member of the CRP, and my recollection of the party, while I was in it, was of people trying to do good in the region by mentoring new players and promoting positive politics in the region. Maybe I was blind to some of this going on, or maybe it got worse after I left, but there was good in that party too.

What you're seeing here is people at their worst. I've seen plenty of people in this region at their worst (and vice versa). I don't want history to be rewritten to show that people like Mouse and Seven Deaths were the "bad guys" while Aex and Gleg were the "good guys," because it's fundamentally more complicated than that. I will not excuse the behavior in this article or some of the truly awful things said (mostly by Kylia). Hypocrisy is real, and you see it here.

Given that most of the people featured in this article are no longer active here, I just want to say that this is not the extent of who they are/were as players, and this should not be their only legacy. I hope people will remember this as a part of a larger picture, which included a lot of good work for our region.

Let it also be a lesson. No one is perfect, and we all sometimes give in to our baser instincts. But Europeia is a community. We should always strive to treat each other with respect and compassion, even in private where we suspect others will never see it.
 
When people were showing me some of the things these individuals were saying particularly about me privately, I was upset and honestly wanted and still want nothing to do with it. I'd much rather put my head in the ground like an ostrich and pretend it doesn't exist. I can definitely go too far at times, and my public outbursts are great examples of times I've behaved poorly. But the key distinction is that they are nearly always in public (as far as I can recall) or to the individual in question. In fact, in private I tend to be more respectful & neutral. It has always been like "I" might have an issue with an individual but that does not make me right about them and likely makes me more biased. So in discussions with people in private it didn't make sense for me to encourage them one way or another about those individuals.

As well I'm not really in agreement with HEM that the main issue was that this was a party for "responsible politics" and that it did not live up to that. I went through some of the FEP discord logs to compare and on a quick search of "mouse" here is everything that I said about Mouse in the FEP (I'm not going to bring up other peoples quotes but they were in a similar vein...):

Solorni - 05/24/2017
there are times where Mouse has illegally postsedclassified information, but these instances are very minor

It was also my only post on Mouse and is offensive only because of the poor spelling mistake & that it is missing a space. So I do not really like this idea that it was only an issue for the CfRP because they stood for "responsible politics" and the sort of implied notion that this happens to a degree in other political parties & movements. It strikes me that it is similar to the excuse of "locker room talk" in the notion this sort of "political room talk" happens all the time and is just how people discuss politics. This is not how people remotely discussed politics in the FEP or other parties that I have been part of.



So the culture of the CPrF was uniquely toxic and not just "political room talk".
 
I would really urge most here to avoid the "holier than thou" shtick that is pretty tempting in situations like these.
Click to expand...

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top