[MDP] Dam-busting

Day 2,530, 19:29 • Published in Canada Canada • by Xander Kross

Recently, there has been some unpleasantness involving me, McVicker and my friend Thedillpickl. I have made my semi-private apologies to Dill for the abrupt tone of the discussion, but for the rest of you, I should like to relate my side of this situation.

As we all know, Prince Sheogorath has/had been working against eCanada for months, building an army of foreign invaders inside our borders to further his own anti-Canadian agenda. Sheogorath has gone away (for now, at least), but has left his invasion force inside our borders, concentrated within the party once called Libertatia and later renamed the Shaved Beaver Party. Not every member of that party was a member of the foreign invasion force, but the bulk of the party was.



Unfortunately, that party had grown in size, large enough to enter the top 5. This is an obvious danger to national security, as the bulk of the party still consists of the invasion force brought in by Sheogorath and his hired lackeys. Should that party gain enough influence, they could potentially elect harmful congressmen, including individuals who have been blacklisted and permanently banned from eCanadian congress.

Further complicating this problem, Dill was trying to make the best of a bad situation and turn the party legitimate. I have no problem with Dill trying to run a legitimate party, even if it means more competition for MDP, but attempting to legitimize that party while that invasion force still sat within it was premature and likely to cause problems.



Essentially, we had three ways to deal with this situation:

1) Ignore it and hope it goes away and everyone lives happily ever after, because the world is full of magic and sparkle-ponies.

2) Shuffle people into the party, artificially inflating that party's numbers, in order that the Party President can run "blockers" for congress to keep the malcontents and terrorists from gaining political power they could abuse.

3) Relocate legitimate people away from the party, and shuffle people into the number 6 party so the two parties switch places, thus preventing the "bad" party from appearing on the Congressional election ballot.


Amputations are seldom pretty, but sometimes necessary.

Thedillpickl was engaging in plan 2). I have no doubts as to his sincerity in the matter, and believe absolutely that he would have gone through with the plan to run blockers and to encourage people to vote for a party other than his.

But let us look at this situation by way of analogy.

Imagine you have a loaded pistol on a table in a room full of curious babies. You can engage the safety, apply a trigger lock, cram a bolt down the end of the barrel, wrap the thing in boxing tape, etc. But the loaded pistol is still on the table, and the room is still full of curious babies. Even with all the safeguards in place, there's still a potential for disaster.



The safest thing to do is to remove the loaded pistol from the room and lock it away, out of reach. That way, tiny fingers cannot find their way into danger, and no babies get shot or maimed. Obviously, the safest thing to do is to unload the gun, take it apart and store all the pieces separately, but removing the loaded gun from the room full of babies is the first step, because that's the immediate situation. Get it out of there so harm cannot be done.

This is why I opted for plan 3). And we accomplished this not by threat of force or ultimatums (though some of my arguments may have initially come across as such). We did it with reasoned discussion. Points were presented and weighed and a decision was ultimately reached. As a result, the invasion force party will not appear on the Congressional ballot, and therefore there is no risk of terrorists and blacklisted miscreants accidentally finding their way into Congress due to acts of Plato, political instability or voter shenanigans. The loaded pistol has been locked away in the gun safe, and no babies will cause a terrible boo-boo.


Even the hippies would be horrified at the results of leaving the loaded gun in the room full of babies.

Again, it is not because I think that Dill would have done something foolish or harmful, or would fail to meet his promise of putting the "bad people" at the bottom of the list and the "good people" at the top. My goal was to eliminate risk, not patch it with good intentions and hope.

Those of you who don't like what I did or how I did it can suck it up and move on. I'm not going to apologize for it. And I won't bother to pretend that the remaining members of that party are all just poor, misunderstood, oppressed victims of tyranny. We know who and what they are, and so do they.



I am a goal-oriented person; when I see a problem, I find a way to fix it. I did what I felt was necessary given the situation, and would do the same thing again. It was not the popular, easy, "feel-good" approach, but it was the one that is effective and gets shit done. You can all thank me later when we're not under the thumb of Sheogorath's invasion force.

In the meantime, I'm happy to be vilified by the terrorists, miscreants and malcontents who have taken up arms against eCanada, who have proven themselves to be nuisances at best and traitors at worst. Your protest only underscores the need for such actions to be taken against you. And I will continue to do so in the future.

MDP Gets Shit Done.

EVER FORWARD!