Free Canada Movement

[Marokai Backbeat]

. Each province is also considered, for regional voting purposes, to be associated with one of the five regions.

...and this is where things get dubious. That's fycking with Canada's territorial integrity and effectively deleting its sovereignty from the map.

From the perspective of how the game works, it was an treaty both countries agreed to. It wasn't foisted upon them.

[Marokai Backbeat]

Except that no country (and certainly not Canada!) would willingly agree to sacrifice their territorial integrity in that manner. I mean it's like something out of Infinite Jest. This is a really great example of why the GM position needs to go.

With any other group of people, in any less structured situation, people would just randomly declare "We annexed Canada for the lulz!" and this would be treated as every bit as valid as any other crank's delusions.

The GM and SoEA were equal partners in implementing the Common Market Agreement, which wasn't just a random declaration, but rather a lengthy proposal passed through the Senate before it became a thing. Canada remains an independent nation and we merely consider certain provinces as part of certain regions for voting purposes. Nothing's been taken away from them and everything was done on the up-and-up. I made sure this was done in as "serious" a manner as possible relative to how most other things get done around here precisely because I didn't want it considered a joke done on a whim.

[Marokai Backbeat]

It's more than a little amusing to me that someone advocating the abolishment of the one position that gives actions context, seriousness, and meaning, is basically saying "What?! This happened?! How silly, that would've never happened in real life! Grow up, guys!"

Exactly how would you intend to enforce that particular mentality, without a GM? In a position where what anyone makes up is equally valid?

[Marokai Backbeat]

You can think whatever the hell you want of the proposal itself; the point was that whatever the actual idea was, it was dealt with as seriously and sincerely as you could possibly get in this game. It was put in Labor's platform, I ran on it, Nix and I wrote it (and I wrote a speech on it, which few Presidents bother doing with anything), the Senate debated and passed it, and the the SoEA and GM did stories on it and cooperated in its implementation.

Calling it "one off plot vomit" is offensive to me (and should be to anyone who spent hours of their time working on it), and presenting it as a GM-related problem is irrelevant to the GM's issues at best, and at worst actually a good example for the importance of maintaining the GM position, since the proposal of it was going to happen with or without a Game Moderator.

This gets back to exactly what I criticized Al's posting of this for in the first place: You simultaneously complain someone should've stopped these supposedly silly and unrealistic Canada policies, but use this as an example of why we should get rid of the Game Moderator. But it wasn't, in fact, the Game Moderator that put it into place, or even came up with the idea to begin with. A single Senator stood against it at the time. From your perspective, the Game Moderator would be the person best suited to stop alleged "silliness" like this, since they are the sole individual with the weight to stop it in its tracks. Without the GM, we end up with a "nothing is true, everything is permitted" situation where more situations like that are likely, not less. Do you remember what happened after DemPGH resigned and Tyrion was banned? That's what you get without a Game Moderator.

The push to abolish the GM is utterly shortsighted, and evidently, influenced by half-cocked information to begin with.

Annexing Canada was rather en vogue at the time, and considering the nature of what we ended up with, you should be thankful. The exact Common Market proposal was my idea, meant to stem the tide of people just shouting "Let's annex another country on a whim! Yay!" and to accomplish the same ends in a more "serious" fashion that respected the way the game works, in as grounded a manner as possible. The only thing that makes this different than a Common Market, free-movement zone wherein residents abroad can vote in at-home elections is that we designate residents of certain foreign regions to certain electoral districts. You can call that unrealistic, but I call the obsession on that single (minor) detail of it petty.