ePioneer Political - Citizenship and Party Recruitment

Day 1,921, 10:13 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by BluesFish

Welcome to my newspaper. I'm hoping to make this a weekly article published on Friday evenings, focusing on the key issues of the previous week.



Luckily we don't have eUK equivalent of the Daily Express!

Citizenship Procedure Debate

Immigration has two threats in this game: a political take-over and individual sabotage. The former is a real threat whereas the latter is pretty negligible, but we must take these threats seriously. To lay it out simply there seems to be two prevailing views on how citizenship applications should be handled. The first or as I like to call it the common sense approach:

- An individual or small group with significant experience and contacts within the international community handle all applications and then notify which requests to accept or deny.

I believe this method has been used in the past successfully. There are a couple of weaknesses I can identify in this method; a corrupt official in charge could take advantage of this for their own means or congress could choose to ignore the official and work individually. In a way these two weaknesses counteract each other: a corrupt leader can simply be stopped by congress refusing to grant his applications. However if congress doesn't get behind the administrator in charge of citizenship then it can lead to chaos.

This is partly what we are seeing now, with a second perspective on how applications should be handled coming to the fore:

- Each party creates their own guidelines and rules for accepting citizenship requests and enforces it upon their congressmen.

This clearly has many more weaknesses. Each party is going to have differing views on what a trustworthy citizen is and this is going to lead to a discrepancy on who is let into the country or not. A second weakness is the fact that parties could use this to their own ends, only allowing acceptance on the guarantee of joining their particular party for instance. Also some parties are not going to have as big a contact list in other countries as others, meaning it will be much harder for them to determine a responsible applicant.

This should lead to the conclusion that common sense should prevail and party politics take a back-seat, especially for an issue as important as national security and prevention of a political take-over. However it seems that the UK is going to become divided on such a simple issue, allowing petty advantages to be reaped by those who seek them and a substantial risk to the country left open.



An example message

Hostile Party Recruitment

So another issue that has come up over this week is that of immoral recruiting by certain parties and specifically by UKPP Party President BigAnt. Immoral how, I hear you ask? Well, he sent PM’s to members of other parties denouncing their own party with a subtle bribe at the end.

First of all, this is not against any rules. BigAnt is certainly within rights to do this both in game and within the community, he isn’t going to be banned from anything.

But there are some issues with it. One of them is simple common courtesy. We’re supposed to be a community and communities don’t insult other parties just to gain a member. The age old phrase of 'do to others what you would have them do to you' comes to mind. I don’t think that BigAnt would be too chuffed if other parties started using similar tactics.

Another problem is the cadre of people this type of recruitment is likely to attract. This type of messaging isn't going to attract the type of people who are going to benefit your party. It is going to attract citizens that want an easy ride, whether it is through food or weapons or just a quick trip into Congress. I don’t know about the UKPP but I certainly don’t think that is a way to run a party.

The issue of how to deal with this is quite simple as well. The community at large can only point out this behaviour and criticise, we can’t make a proper change. The UKPP needs to deal with this internally, I suggest that if they have a problem with the way recruitment is handled, or would have a problem if the reverse happened to them, to voice their opinions to their Party President. It is their party after all and as far as I can tell it is only going to damage their party in the long run.


Thank you for reading - discussion in the comments of the topics discussed is very much encouraged!