Cao/RC June 2022: Let’s Fix This (Victory and Thank You)

[Joseph Cao]

Bloomington–Normal, Illinois

Thank you, everyone.

I’ll cut to the chase here: the game needs fixing. And as long as people nod their heads and agree without actually doing something about it, or focus instead on corruption or domestic issues or whatever, that’s not about to change; it plays into the fantasy and lie that crime sprees are the only way to liven things up.

You know me as a longtime Senator and representative before that, as a recurring PPT and Speaker before that, as a player who tries to be fair and civil and to step up when it’s called for, whether in service of a working Congress or regional rights or the union or the everpresent danger of inactivity. My vision of governance is not a fancy one, I have seen bloated and absentee governments and others in different states of non compos mentis; I want a government that works for the people and the players, nothing more, nothing less. Serving in Atlasia for me has always been about running and fixing things where necessary. We have something unique here, eighteen-odd years of it, and I’m not about to let it go and let those narratives win without a fight, so I am taking that fight to one of the key places where this recovery is desperately needed: the Oval Office.

President Utah Neolib has been an openly transitional leader and done her best to lead us past whatever the heck March and April were. We shouldn't let that bridge collapse back into the yawning abyss of inactivity, of malaise – which make no mistake, we are in critical danger of doing. An active and engaged leadership is absolutely critical to taking us forward; everyone knows there’s plenty the president can do to generate activity without resorting to committing crimes. I want with this run for the presidency and in the event of my election to focus on making the game more fun above all else, change the incentives that have caused the various elements of the game to stagnate, and although nobody can drag people in or force activity to happen I will do my level best as President to do stuff that makes the game fun for as many of you as possible. I want with this run to bring about that long-overdue conversation about where we go from here. In the coming weeks I’m excited to share with you some of the policies I’m optimistic will get us back on track, and it is my hope that we get people to engage with that issue. This game’s engine needs fixing; having us all understand why the spark plugs are blown and the carburettor shafts are worn down and petrol is spewing out is the first part of fixing it.

I make no claims to being Dave’s gift to the game or anything. But times like these call for all good folks to come to the aid of the country and actually focus on fixing things. It’s not just me included that statement: it’s also my running mate, someone who I’ve worked with from the very beginning, who I can’t wait to introduce to you. It’s also everyone who has lent their energy to the proposals and legislative business of Congress and the regions. It's also all of you reading this – I’m going to need your help with running, and winning, and making this place work again.

I’m doing my bit for the game and the country, and I hope you’ll join me and do your part too. Let's fix this.

[Mr. Reactionary]

Endorsed for a high preference.

[Continential]

Endorsed for a high preference.

[RC]

I've known you for a long time, I know you're a good man and the right one for the job. Endorsed.

[wxtransit]

What is, in your belief, the biggest reason for Atlasia's current state of malaise? How would you plan to address that problem?

[GM Team Member and Deputy PPT WB]

Endorsed, probably for 2nd Pref after myself

[Attorney General & PPT Dwarven Dragon]

Great Speech, though I'll wait to see how the field develops before making any decision.

Also, it's not 2021 anymore (see title).

[Utah Neolib]

Congratulations on inventing time travel! Though it’s only a year back, still it’s an amazing moment for humanity.

[West_Midlander]

Endorsed for a high preference.

[Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Bodies for Biden]

I am asking this question to all presidential candidates: if elected, will you uphold the tenets of the New Great Society Act?

[Joseph Cao]

Also, it's not 2021 anymore (see title).

Congratulations on inventing time travel! Though it’s only a year back, still it’s an amazing moment for humanity.

Great Scott!

Still, can't fault me for yearning for a time when hope was high and life worth living and I got to tool around Chicago making speeches every couple of days.

What is, in your belief, the biggest reason for Atlasia's current state of malaise? How would you plan to address that problem?

I think people were justifiably rattled by the aforementioned June 2021. Not to go into too much detail, but that seems to have been a turning point with regard to the way a large number of players viewed the game and their continued enjoyment of it to the extent of stepping back from previous AFE activities in favor of storming Nashville or trolling people in their office threads or the LT court case cluster. Essentially individual players within this category have felt disinclined to continue "business as usual" in favor of doing things that felt fun to them, usually also things intended to make the game less fun for other players. And this is especially serious now since large swathes of major players including Truman and the West Coast posters and, well, LT all seem to have fallen into it at once.

(I do firmly believe the two separate attempts we got at aping Trump are both a symptom of nothing better going on in AFE and a cause of the continuing slide away from previous Fantasyland parameters of discourse.)

This is at the end of the day a problem with individual players which can't be legislated away if they feel like smashing Trumpists or owning libs is the main reason they derive enjoyment from continued participation. But we still have a base of posters, both major and minor ones, who don't subscribe to that and can potentially help with the restoration of enough of the distinct AFE/AFG culture that mostly disappeared after last June.

I am asking this question to all presidential candidates: if elected, will you uphold the tenets of the New Great Society Act?

I can elaborate further on this if needed, but broadly yes.

[Pink Panther]

Endorsed

[Attorney General & PPT Dwarven Dragon]

Do you have interest in participating in debates hosted by me? Thinking like this weekend/early next week and another shortly before the election.

[Joseph Cao]

Do you have interest in participating in debates hosted by me? Thinking like this weekend/early next week and another shortly before the election.

Sure, no objections.

[OBD]

fix deez nuts

[Joseph Cao]

fix deez nuts

Funny you should mention that…

Cracking the Nut: Revitalizing the Regions, In Brief

My first ever run in Atlasia was for the Lincoln Council. I believe as I did then, and as the rest of the Federalist Party has long held, that the regions and their governments still hold the key to this game and its events. We focus too much on the Senate, to too little effect – as I’ll elaborate on in an upcoming post – and we don’t engage the regions enough. Quite simply, this kind of constructive engagement has not been a priority of recent presidents despite the last several of them having previously had illustrious careers leading their respective regions. I propose to change that.

Not simply with the establishment of a regional commission or something – the fundamental question now is what people find fun. I’m not one to just foist a random issue onto Lincoln or wherever. What will best engage Dave and the members of the General Court? What will work best with Frémont’s or the South’s recent policies, or be of interest to the Southern AG? Activity levels are continually changing and I want to keep as closely in touch with the regions’ respective executives as possible in order to keep on top of these things. To the best of my ability as president, my policies on continued economic progress, our environmental goals, national security, various facets of technological development and implementation, and so on will be a partnership of sorts with the regions; I am going to do my best to encourage continued interest in the regional legislatures and what they are doing, up to and including publicizing good policies or suggested improvements on AFE.

In return it needs to be noted that there are approaching twenty of these regional officials and while not all of them are particularly active, it’s essential that they hold up their end of things. Activity can’t be artificially pushed, but regional leaders’ initiatives in whipping votes like the South has been doing are the first step toward actually engaging the most important people in their respective regions. Having a presence on AFE to display their progress on issue X or question Y, whether individual legislators’ offices or a Regional Self-Aggrandizing Thread or Dave’s office, is how we get a healthy active exchange between regions. When this happens nowadays it’s exclusively in AFG; let’s bring some of it, the discussion that doesn’t pertain directly to a certain bill, over to AFE! When these meth labs of democracy come up with something it ought to be talked about: whether by regional officials themselves, by the GM, by the courts when a bill inevitably gets challenged, by the Senate when a good example is set, by anyone and everyone.

A huge part of Fantasyland is bound up in the dynamic between federal and regional governments and between the regions themselves. We’ve seen what an unhealthy dynamic looks like. Let’s strive for a healthy one, on AFE, on AFG, wherever. And while the president has the potential and ability to be a major player in kickstarting this, and you can bet I’ll be making full use of that, so does the Senate. I’ll talk about that in an upcoming post.

[Joseph Cao]

For the Enterprising Senator About Town: Making the Senate Work Again, In Brief

So you’re a serving senator, or looking to run for the Senate (not right now – who am I kidding? – but perhaps you’re reading this a few weeks or months down the line). If the PPT is even halfway competent they will be keeping every senator abreast of what’s going on in the chamber. If the PPT is actually competent they will be emphasizing with every remaining breath that senators are free to do stuff with their offices beyond just showing up to vote. In an ideal world senators would be able to absorb this without needing a whole unwieldy orientation in PMs. Guess what world we’re living in?

A world without the original AFE culture in which anyone making it as far as Congress would already know what they might be able to do with their office in the first place, that’s what.

Think about how someone gets into Congress to begin with. If you took the initiative to make a campaign thread and message voters, great! You’re a senator, part of your job is to engage with voters and the public. Campaign thread and announcement is the bare minimum really. Make an office! Update it every so often! Talk to people! Trumpet your achievements! Right now there are roughly a half dozen threads to go round between eighteen senators and it's supposed to be the height of campaign season. Even someone with a busy RL life can squeeze that in during the course of an average campaign.

The other part of your job if you’re a senator is to do Senate stuff and write bills and showboat and debate instead of expecting others to do that for you, but while all this should be blindingly obvious the moment you swear in and take a gander around AFG it is also equally obviously a problem that plagues every single legislative body in existence, and as its current leader you’ll hopefully understand if I don’t feel quite up to wearing my voice hoarse on this topic yet again.

If you’re not a senator but are reading this, there is still plenty you can do to encourage this type of thing from whoever your senators are. At every point in the history of Fantasyland there have been regular citizens and non-federal officeholders placing exactly this kind of pressure on those in power. If we lack the proportions of engaged unelected citizenry of years past we still have people actually holding office who know the same things and have the same available recourse of talking to their officeholders. This is a simulator, it would be good for everyone to actually treat it like one: take actions and see what the consequences are, instead of sitting back and expecting it to run on its own.

And I know Yankee has spent years banging on about a more welcoming Atlasia and creating an environment where this becomes obvious to new players who wander in. If this sounds like a repackaging, forgive me for prescribing medicine for the same problem he talked about before at length that has now cropped up with far greater intensity than any other period of Atlasian history bar maybe 2014-15. We can’t build this culture back, any kind of culture that welcomes new players and keeps the game feeling alive, without a concerted effort by as many people as possible. The president can do plenty to drive things, but they can’t do it alone. The Senate can’t do it alone. The regions can’t do it alone.

All this seems like a lot of emphasis on the part played by regular players. How are we going to get these players to do that, then? That’s going to be part of my next post.

[Joseph Cao]

Before I go on with the next post I just want to let everyone know that I have impeccable digital art skills, as the logo now up on my announcement will attest. And I can't wait to introduce my running mate to y'all!

[Joseph Cao]

Your Country Needs You: The Role of the Players, in Brief

The past few posts have touched on the distinct Fantasyland culture that this game has gradually cultivated. And there is a very a good reason for that. AFE and AFG are Fantasyland, we have a long history with more than enough material to go on with instead of importing “American” debates and flashpoints wholesale. There’s a trade control nobody ever talks about! I won't say there should be a moratorium on that kind of thing, but personally as President I will try to lead a revival of interest in the ramifications of past policies that have actually been implemented and past debates that have actually been argued.

As a regular player in my first couple of months in the game I found myself in the middle of the COVID debate, the strike business, the dearth of activity in the Lincoln Council and the Southern gubernatorial imbroglio. I was not on Discord where a lot of the actual drama around that last one played out and I am very thankful that that has been essentially removed as a distraction. I didn’t necessarily have a dog in the PSOL fight. But since I could do something about the Council I took the opportunity to run for the vacant seat, and before and after my run I read up on what the Council had been doing in the relevant threads, as I also did later when I ran for Congress. Every new player has access to the same threads, the same Introduction to Atlasia announcement, the same government boards. Every new player theoretically has the same resources for this kind of launching pad. The missing link for a lot of people may be the more experienced players willing to explain stuff – and that is an area where everyone reading this should be ready and willing to step in, help engage in activity and discussion that revolves around real Atlasian events.

To that end I’m going to work with whoever is in the GM’s office, be that Lumine or whoever succeeds him, to make sure their storylines offer potential for engagement. The federal government has the most to be concerned about in regard to foreign policy, where GM storylines have recently been very good thanks to communication with the Secretary of State and an active person in that office. That is the model I plan for domestic events as well: the GM and SoIA should confer on domestic policy and other players need to be in a position to react to them when made public. To the extent that the wiki provides the necessary background for players to engage with past gameplay, I also intend to have an archivist up for the job of making sure it stays up to date for the time being at least so that players can refer to it.

All this is the main job of a player, anyway, to play by reacting and engaging. Poll people, write stuff, make noise, be a yellow journalist, do whatever – the boards are littered with plenty of examples of other things previous players have done. I certainly intend to do my part as president and make the public office open for press conferences and accompanying questions about what the executive branch has been up to. It should go without saying that other officeholders are advised to do their part too. Certainly that would be more productive than kvetching on Discord about how the game’s death is imminent.

I can’t end without mentioning that this is where a certain former President would talk about the Framers and the respect due to them, so I’ll just say that what I said in a previous post doesn't just apply to officeholders, it applies to everyone: this is a game, it exists for you to play it no matter how old or new a player you are. The game is nothing if its players don't act.

[Joseph Cao]

New York City, New York

Folks, it’s an honor to be here tonight and introduce you all to my running mate, someone who I’ve had the pleasure to work with from the very beginning of my career, Lincoln Speaker ReaganClinton!

RC was one of the first people I got to vote for and had the pleasure of serving alongside in the House in my first term, where he joined others in showing me the ropes – an example I’ve tried to follow with the subsequent waves of new representatives and senators serving in this chamber. He’s followed that up with stints in the Lincoln regional legislature and now serves as the head of that body in addition to having helped shake up the party system and make life interesting for all of us. He’s a pragmatic player in both politics and disposition, qualities that the President of the Senate absolutely needs and that I am confident his activity levels will allow him to provide.

And most importantly, ironically, one of the lessons he showed early on when he resigned from Congress in that same first term of mine was the value of knowing one’s limits. If we are to fix things in this game, that is a lesson whose importance cannot be overstated – the players are the core of everything that gets done here. And we are going to do everything we can within those limits to make this game work for you again as it has for both of us.

[RC]

New York City, New York

Good evening everyone!

It's an honor to join Senator Cao tonight as his running mate. Atlasia has seen its share of termoil in the past few months, war in our homeland and corruption in our government have given us a sign that it's time for a change in Nyman. I cannot show enough appreciation to President UTN for presiding over our government and nation in a time like this, but it's no time to slow down or turn back to the figures who brought us into this mess.

Senator Cao is an excellent leader, I've seen it firsthand when he was up and coming in the House, he's proven himself to be an effective leader as a Representative, House Speaker, and Senator, and I'm excited to help him become our next President. As a former regional executive, I know a leader when I see one, and Cao is hands down the best candidate for the job.

As for me, I've served as a Governor and Representative among other offices over the past several years. I know how it is to deal with Congress and pledge to be active in working with our public servants to find bipartisan solutions to the ever-evolving issues in the nation.

I've promised my whole career to work solely in the name of the people of this nation, and I assure you that the sentiment holds true for Senator Cao. This ticket isn't about being the partisan option for only a select group of voters, this is a campaign for unity in the face of a barely avoided disaster. This is a fight for the future of this country, and I hope you all come along to keep that future possible.

Let's fix this. Together.

[Continential]

Fantastic choice!

[Joseph Cao]

I'd like to congratulate Spark for the good run and his efforts toward painting a good-government vision of Atlasia – and I hope we as a party have the same drive to translate our ideas into legislation as he's had for those efforts.

Let's go forward and win this thing this weekend and start fixing things.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Endorsed

[Senator Spark]

Endorsed. Good luck