I feel its time that we update our EPSA guidlines to better address harmful rhetoric and bigotry that we can encounter on NS. I feel like EPSA should be allowed to combat this when it is seen.
(AMENDMENT) The Eastern Pacific Sovereign Army Act:
…2.2.3. The griefing prohibition set out herein shall not apply to: Regions that are known to promote hateful and harmful ideologies (including but not limited to fascism, nazism, racism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia) that engage in bigotry of any group OR regions that harbor individuals known to subscribe to such harmful ideologiesregions displaying nazism, fascism or other such ideologies, regions with a history of griefing other regions, regions at war with The East Pacific or an ally of it, regions that have or attempted to overthrow legitimate government of The East Pacific or damage its community, Warzones which do not hold official relations with the East Pacific, or regions being liberated from raider control.
Please let me know any thoughts y’all may have .
(credit to Zuk for the wording :D)
Generally speaking, I’m not fond of setting rigid outlines in the law on “griefing prohibitions” - flexibility in operations, to me, has always struck me as something that the Executive would be better equipped to deal with - you’re never going to cover every situation in a law, and leaving the Delegate and Overseeing Officer to exercise their best judgement seems far more logical to me. As the act is already in place, however, I do support this. It allows the military greater operational leeway when it comes to problematic regions, rather than the limited and (somewhat paradoxically) ambiguous parameters set out by “displaying nazism, fascism or other such ideologies”.
On the topic of the act, can I ask why we have exemptions for “regions with a history of griefing other regions” and “regions being liberated from raider control”? I was not around when the prohibitions and relevant exemptions were adopted, so I’m wondering what the function of their inclusion is, if we are on the topic of amending the act.
Cant speak to the former question (my presumption is that we wanted to be able to grief as much as we could without pissing off defenders since IIRC this was written when we nearly participated in griefing Asia and our allies got miffed, and since many defenders accept griefing raider regions, that was added in, but idrk), but afaik the latter is meant to ensure we could help in any theoretical lib without violating the law, since the definition of “native” is highly debatable. Covering our asses so to speak, i think
Thanks for the swift reply - I’ll wait to see if someone could confirm the former. On the latter, it might be preferable to address that in an amendment as well, since it currently reads like we’re in the clear to ban to our hearts’ content if we liberated it from a raider op first. Ideally, we’d establish the definition of natives first before we write laws on our interaction with them. I’ll understand if the author believes that might be best kept for a separate thread, however - I’m mostly trying to understand the context in which our current laws on the matter were passed/why they have the exemptions they do.
I cannot confirm the former either as I was on my years long break i believe when it was implemented (iirc 2020?). I do want to stat that while I agree with you on the wording should be changed, this is the first in a longer discussion i would like to have regarding the EPSA Act and the griefing provisions, however I and command did not feel it was appropriate to bundle other changes with this amendment, as this is to address the fact that there are ideologies outside of the usual political suspects that are not deserving of being protected by this provision. I would invite any magister to consider what changes may need to come down the line in regards to this act.
Highly disagree. To actively grief a region (ie withdraw embassies, occupy region until operation is complete, compete against any fender org or libcord trying to siege) requires the ability to start as soon as you control the region. This amendment is also being proposed not only for EPSA planned ops, but ops that we might pile in on. If we have to go through an independent body, there is 0% guarantee that if an ally or a region we are friendly with comes to us and says, “Hey EPSA, wanna join” the answer would be “yes”.
In addition, if you believe Delegate and OO oversight is not sufficient, then I do genuinely feel sorry. The only place I can see why one would hold such belief is to believe that every single delegate we have elected, currently have elected, and will elect in the future are truly evil and are seeking to abuse their power. This law holds both the Delegate and the OO accountable for their actions. Actions that if they break or go against, we have a Court to try them in and have them answer to the Courts. There is already enough oversight. There is no additional need for burdensome bureaucracy where one is not needed and where the current system is working.
I just wanted to mention that all in-game OOC stuff is being transitioned to TEP Regional Administrative Office or RAO for short. RAO can be the oversight vessel.
This amendment is to allow griefing regions that are ‘known’ to promote hateful and harmful ideologies so why are we worried about competing against defender and liberation organizations?
The RAO currently consists of some Admins and some RMB Moderators. And me, who is technically no longer an RMB mod. EM, do you think referencing the RAO in law would be okay? If so, we could have it rubber stamp OOC bad region griefing.
Accidentally pressed enter prematurely on my previous post, so this is take two. I’m not a current magister, but I am a former OO and commander so my insights here are valuable.
Griefing can be time sensitive, especially if it’s a situation where there’s a recently CTEd founder, for example.
Beside this, our current system of letting the delegate/command decide what is and isn’t fascist has always worked fine and without issues – there is no reason to think it wouldn’t continue to work with this amendment. If a citizen feels like the delegate/OO has made a misstep they can always seek recourse through our justice system, and have always been able to. It’s what these laws are there for, but even that is getting ahead of ourselves because EPSA command has always been careful to make sure there is evidence to support that the target is fascist, which often includes detailed wading through RMB backlogs. These aren’t decisions command has made lightly, and they won’t ever be.
I, personally, firmly believe that transphobia, sexism and racism are covered by our existing laws and are a subset of fascism. This plays out in practice too: I am yet to see a viable target failing to properly moderate transphobia that also isn’t somehow expicitly tagged as or self-identifies as fascist. Fascism on its own is a concept which is fairly broad, meaning that someone somewhere presumably felt the need to more rigorously define what the EPSA regularly would (and sometimes does) grief, and all of these things are against our community values and guidelines. I doubt this particular amendment will be accompanied by an operational change to how the EPSA has functioned in the past.
(I drafted this post before the RAO stuff but these things are pretty clear cut in general, we don’t generally do the more ambiguous stuff – RAO would be just another system for rubber stamping when the current system has always been enough because the operation’s reasoning has had to hold water.)
If we’re waiting for the founder of a region to CTE, we certainly have time for the RAO or another body to actually make the ‘known’ part of the amendment mean something.
I feel like I perhaps haven’t communicated this clearly enough - we don’t wait for founders to CTE. We don’t have a bank of viable targets – what we do have is a knowledge of a who’s who in NS. We only run operations when they’re viable which means that if the founder has Ceased to Exist recently, we pounce.
In any case if citizens disagree with any EPSA determination they have always been able to puruse legal action – outsourcing to regional administration is just an extra step when there have been no issues with command doing it for the existing provisions, which are very similar to these ones in practice (no-one has pursued legal action even when though we’ve been piling in antifa ops for a long time now). The other issue with RAO approval is that as these opportunities come up quickly we don’t lead all operations – NationStates antifa, which is comprised of almost all NS militaries lead a good chunk of operations where we only really know the target an update in advance - enough time for commanders and the delegate to check it out because they’d be leading the operation anyway, but enough time for an administration body with a whole host of other responsibilities? Probably not.
Perhaps only one member of the RAO needs to approve? That way, the relevant Commander approaches the office, and the first person to respond rubber stamps it to ensure that the region is OOC bad and the region can still be griefed with due haste. It should be fast enough to get the deed done.
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