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Goodbye Blue Monday brought to you by your corporate sponsor: apathy



Distance can be a good thing, especially in politics. Especially in fake politics, where emotions cloud the most banal of facts. Having more distance than I am used to from much of what it going on, I feel I can speak more candidly, and hopefully more believably, on some of what I've observed in our precious kindling of media.

At one point, I had mistakenly thought that as population dwindled we would reach a point where we could be more truthful in our discourse, given that after the repetition of thousands of games, we all know each other, what makes us tic, how we respond, how we act. There is little competition for new uninformed masses, and the active player base has become almost intimate. However, given the call and response we're seeing in our newer top 5 parties, it would seem my diagnosis could not be further from the mark.

When the Pythagoreans discovered the achilles heel of their philosophy, that the square root of 2 was irrational, they drowned Hippasus for the heresy of his proof and rewrote 2 as 49/25¹, preserving their ideology at the cost of reason. Or at least that's how the story goes. The details are less important than the very human urge to maintain public consistency, even as one's actions approach the absurd. Perhaps not redefining 2, perhaps something more relatable but equally defensive and without basis.

At this point, as the reader, you're probably getting bored so I'll get to the point. Hypocrisy is omnipresent,there are the relatively harmless lies we peddle in the media and on the forums in the days leading up to the 5th, or 25th, the truths we refrain from speaking that allow us to save face in a compromised system largely defined by interpersonal relations. Then there are more blatant examples. There's Jude campaigning the SFP into the top 5 on a populist platform of lowering taxes only to act differently once in power. There's Wooky Jack complaining of the duplicity of the Federalist Party while messaging former members with the hope of manufacturing controversy. There's literally everything Artela writes on the forums. More recent reversals by members of the SFP may have appeared as an act of treachery to many in the BSP, caused perhaps by their relative newness to politics or expectation of honest dealings, but to those of us who have played this game for years, the more common reaction is amused apathy. These are characters we've known for years, at this point the doublespeak becomes so transparent that it's more aptly classified as farce.

This is not to accuse, though it shall be seen as that, rather, as this fight plays out in public, my advice to the SFP is this: your party is a contradiction, your former leaders who elevated you have lied through their teeth. This is not an indictment of your party, I enjoyed killing Arrden's misguided attempt to lower the work tax, we should do it again next week. However, to pretend otherwise, to pretend that the SFP never claimed to be a "low taxes" party, to claim the SFP is the only party that doesn't vote along party lines, to insist that the SFP is perfectly clean, none of us are, is to attempt to redefine 2.

I'm not looking to make friends, if you need a common enemy choose me, but some honesty would be refreshing. Most of you are really cool. Really. We're better than wasting our time on the petty bickering and machinations of a dying browser game.

Proteus Out~