Legion is not ESO/Who are Legion?

Day 1,894, 16:57 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Ullok

In his needlessly dogmatically hostile article on New Era’s performance in the January 2013 congressional elections, Sage Goku sai😛

“The only thing we came second on was the activity of our members, despite it being significantly more than UKPP and TUP. 74% of our party and PCP voted which is outstanding compared to all but one other party. ESO beat us with their 97% however that is explained by many of them being "neutral" in Legion MU and not being in ESO in game.”

First the number of votes cast for each account for a maximum of 98.21% of ESO (112 members after recount) and 73.54% for NE+PCP combined membership bases(223 members after recount) .

Secondly the 35 UK citizens (which would make up 31.25% of ESO) in the 261 strong MU who are unaffiliated with a British political party are free to vote as they please, that is not to say none, some or all of them voted ESO, just that Legion doesn't endorse or condone vote directing.

Whilst ESO does make up a large percentage of the Legion, this is to be expected as they would have transferred in the switchover. ESO personnel put in a lot of time, effort and resources to turn the former “ESO Legion” into a model of what a MU could be, just to donate it to the country, and continue to put the same amount of effort into it to keep it working (rather than making a new ESO MU), because it is the right thing for the country. (o7 Emergy)

The Legion is an apolitical MU, people wanting to be spared the “Vote this way” messages that plague party MU feeds will naturally flow to somewhere (Legion, RADC, Funky, etc...) that doesn’t bombard their soldiers with propaganda. Throughout the entire election period there was (that I saw) 1 “vote for me” message put into the MU feed (admittedly from an over-eager first-time ESO candidate) and that was only yesterday. The result: it was quickly taken down.

The Legion is not a political entity, and so does not explain why ESO’s votes-to-member ratio was so high.

What could explain it was that this term, jamesw has reinvigorated ESO, contacting every single member and used the opinions of anyone willing to voice them to carve-out policies the entire party could debate, vote on and adopt.

Another possible explanation could be that with the return of practical policies and firm ideals (an article that got 53-afaik unbought-votes) unaligned people became inspired as well, by something different from the “You're in our party so you vote for us” policies we generally see.

We can never know for sure what the reason was, unless records of who voted which way were published (never happen) and we ask them why, but the above are evidently more likely than Goku’s unfounded claim.

That all said, New Era and PCP had a good result and I hope that the other parties will see this as a challenge to get activity up without resorting to the familiar methods I was calling for an end to at the start of the month.

EDIT:
I was going to turn this information into an article of its own, with a different focus, but as there is interest in it here.

WHO ARE LEGION?



As you can see the largest single group of Legionaries are members of ESO (28.57😵, followed by TUP (15.83😵, UKRP (14.29😵 and UKPP (9.27😵, but people from all the top 10 parties are members, along with some smaller parties (like Dharma Initiative).

65.49% of ESO members are also in Legion, but other large contingents can be found in UKRP (41.57😵 and TRS (37.50😵 and there are obviously smaller groups in parties who have an established associated MU of their own (RN, BA, TUPF, PA).

13.51% of Legion soldiers are unaligned British citizens, if Legion was a funnel for getting people into the any party this wouldn’t be the third largest segment of political choice in the MU.

As for Captains, the figures are weighted towards ESO because ESO members were the ones holding the responsibility when the change came and are the ones applying for the position now, there is not a ban on other party’s members being Captains as can be seen in Reg 4, 5 &6, just for the most part a job well done by people who are also ESO members. This will probably even out in time.

As has been said by Carlini below:
“Of course we have more ESO members in The Legion than other parties. This is down to two facts. 1) It was originally ESO - Obviously self explanatory. 2) ESO currently (it seems soon to change) has no official MU. For that reason ESO members have to decide where to go. There are a handful of non political MUs but most are deemed attached to a party. An ESO member then has a choice of going in an MU where they will often be victimised for their party, lower supplies due to their party or one of the few non-political MUs. Of those non-political MUs are they likely to join their friends from their political party? Seems likely to me.

Other MUs have more of a choice, they have their own MU with their current friends in their political party. However from the amount of PMs I am getting recently (and over the past 2/3 months) it really seems like people are tiring of the politics in the military and just want to fight for their country without the nonsense.”

It may be confusing to some to see how what was a political MU can possibly become apolitical (especially so quickly), but a number of people from across the spectrum of memberships have declared (below) that is just how Legion operates. It doesn’t instruct people how to vote, push the agenda or incentivise membership of one party or another and partisan posts don’t last long.

(this may seem a bit pro-ESO, but it is germane)
ESO has never been interested in forcing its views on people (that doesn’t mean to say they don’t have them or vehemently back their position,) it was and is more interested in the national “good” and when the last government run MU (BEF) collapsed it was decided that relinquishing their MU was the right thing to do, at the expense of the party. If ESO controlled Legion ESO should be twice the size of the UKPP, not have slipped from 3rd to 6th and had to battle its way back into the top 5.