Ragoth for Belgium

Day 859, 12:08 • Published in Belgium Belgium • by Ragoth


My name is Ragoth (well, technically it's Calvin) and I am running for president. There are many things I love about Belgium, but there are things that need to be done, I am committed to a free and neutral Belgium, with a government of experienced, active, and competent citizens. Belgium is not a big country, it does not have large amounts of resources, for Belgium to prosper we have to Play Smart. We have to know how this game called eRepublik works, we can not be caught in bush league mistakes and we have to know whats going on. The BfB has run this country with the philosophy that enthusiasm makes up for inexperience, after 3 months of nothing getting done I can safely say that this does not work. By experience I am not talking about time in game or anything like that, I am talking about familiarity with both the mechanics of the game and the rules of the new world the former attribute relates to the rules and technical nature of how the game works, the latter to the social norms the players of the game create either explicitly or as an unintentional by product of emergence theory type phenomena. My familiarity with the mechanics comes from the curious situation of me being under employed until about two months ago causing me to, out of shear boredom, more or less memorize all of the mechanics of the game. My familiarity with the social rules comes from both spending my boredom phase lurking/observing the goings on and the fact that my boredom phase ended with me being hired to a RL political campain which has shown me that politics, unlike economics, is one area where RL is very similar to eRep. In real terms what does this mean? It means that we have to think of policies not how they might work but how they have worked in other countries. We need to use this to be realistic with our goals and realize that hoping for the good intentions of others is a very good way to have others kick us when we're down, and we need to use this to make our neutrality work.



We need to remember why we became neutral in the first place: because the alliances do not care about the little countries and will walk all over us. But we must realize that our value to each alliance is not in them controlling us, it is the other alliance NOT controlling us. This is a fine distinction, but to put it bluntly EDEN and PHOENIX don't care what the hell goes on here as long as we aren't in their rival alliance. We need to stop thinking of our neutrality as being about tip toeing between the two alliances with out ruffling any feathers and instead think about it as convincing both alliances that we might get pissy and join the other alliance if you don't do this one small favor for us. Take the MPP crisis, why was there any debate about the gold afterwords? if two countries at each others throat both send you money unsolicited for things, if you reject the proposals on both sides to you send back the gold HELL NO YOU DO NOT SEND BACK THE GOLD! You keep it, because it quite neutrally pisses off both alliances equally and convinces each of them that you are not likely to join the other because you just STOLE GOLD FROM THEM!

But we also must stay on good terms with our neighbors, the Netherlands have been very supportive of us and it took them a long time to finally become (rightly) annoyed at us in the negotiations about asset division. We must strive to have a diplomatic core both active and competent to deal with future issues like this.

On a similar note, it has also become clear that neither alliance has it's stuff together enough, or cares enough for the BLT talks to work. Thus I propose there needs to be a neutral party to oversee these talks, a country like ... well we can find one, and they can supervise the Belgian Outsider Ouster Bilateral Symposium



The other major problem in this country is cruel and wanton abuse to the English language, but thankfully there is a cure, it is called, eRepublik Plus. Answer me this, underneath the title of this article and next to number of comments and how long ago it was published, is there a button that says "translate," if it does not, you need to click here and get the eRepublik Plus grease monkey script. It lets you translate newspaper articles into your native language. It means that people from Wallonia do not need to publish their articles in bad English, they can publish them in good French, and the Flemish can do the same in Dutch. It will be glorious!

The next part of my platform will deal with how I want to reorganize the bureaucracy of the government to make it more effective.

Ragoth
eBelgian
Congress Member For Wallonia
Party President of Res Belgica
Your Next President