Order in the Chaos: Blacklist Laws

Day 2,498, 12:05 • Published in Netherlands Netherlands • by Spir Tus

A couple of months ago I was writing a few concept versions of articles, but I didn't publish them, because it was very hard to understand everything I needed to know. At this moment the article below is actual again and I've changed it a little. The perspective of this article is of a younger me, when I was 2 weeks old.

Almost everyday there will be new reactions in debates about things nobody seems to really understand. There are a lot of opinions and people who are reffering to old debates. There seems to be an ethos of common knowledge and habits. Information is not needed, because everyone understands the common, usual things. This is called experience, and I do not have it. For someone new, or someone who does not follow all the debates, it is hard to understand a debate and to participate. The aim of this column is to creat order in the chaos. It will mainly be an article for myself, to create an overview for myself. Maybe this writing about a debate will help others eventually to get to know what the debate is all about.

By the way, this article (and all other articles which I will ever write) won't have any pictures, funny things or other useless stuff. The aim of this newspaper is to provide articles with qualitative content in the future. The articles will be long, so if you don't like to read, you don't like my newspaper.

In this first article of this series, I will talk about the blacklist debate. Since the beginning of eRepublik and eNL, there are people who do things other people don't like. The result of this problem, is the blacklist. First blacklisting whole countries and their citizens, now it is just about blacklisting congressmembers. The actual debate is a debate about what to do with people who flee to another country when they have done something wrong. I will try to summarize the debate and all actual alternatives. Also I will show the current laws about the blacklist, to show the actual situation. At the end I will give my own perspective on this debate.

The whole blacklist debates are very complicated, because it is connected to a Persona non Grata list, which people want to set up. The most recent debate of this connection is about an additional Blacklist Clause, posted on 3 May 2014. A connection was suggested between the Blacklist and the SCI (Security Council of Immigration), so a Persona Non Grata list (PNG) wasn't needed. Simply said, people with a foreign status, who are also blacklisted, would be banned from the country. This PNG list is a seperate part of the blacklist debate, so I will focus on another part, which are the blacklist laws itself.

Recently we had a new proposal to put someone on the blacklist. In this case Zeeuwsmeisje was banned from Congress because she fought for our enemies in the war against Norway. There was a lot of debate about this specific blacklisting. She's blacklisted indefinite until revoked by congress. But to understand how this works, we need to take a closer look to the blacklist laws themselves.

To create order in the chaos, it is necessary to know what the Blacklist laws are. For experienced people this is obvious and not interesting, for new people like me, it is not clear, and very interesting. In Chapter 2 of the Lawbook, Congress, article 13, the blacklist laws are describe😛

Article 13 – Blacklist
1. The Blacklist is a list of Citizens of the eNetherlands who are excluded from the offices and rights of Member of Congress, Chairman of Congress, Deputy Chairman of Congress, Keykeeper, or any office in or for the Government of the eNetherlands, nor are they to request or be given supplies from the Dutch armed forces.
2. Citizens of the eNetherlands can be put on the Blacklist by means of a motion of Congress as laid down in Article 7, but only after a debate and a voting procedure as laid down in Articles 8 and 9, and with a two third majority of votes in favour.
3. Citizens of the eNetherlands can be removed from the Blacklist by means of a motion of Congress as laid down in Article 7, but only after a debate and a voting procedure as laid down in Articles 8 and 9, and with a two third majority of votes in favour.
4. Citizens of the eNetherlands who are on the Blacklist will receive a negative voting advice, with their names published in an article by the Chairman of Congress or the Deputy Chairman of Congress, if they run in the Congress elections.
5. The Blacklist and the articles with negative voting advices will be managed by the Chairman of Congress and the Deputy Chairman of Congress.

Nothing wrong with the law, it seems. The procedures and consequences of being put on the Blacklist are clear. The only strange thing I noticed is the fact there is no description about why people are put on the Blacklist. The Blacklist laws are meaningless (in a way they have no content), and have only a procedural meaning. This means there is an open interpretation about why someone should be blacklisted. According to the law, every Congress Member has the possibility to put someone on the blacklist for every reason they can think of. The only obstacle for this Congress Member to put someone on the list he doesn't like, are the other Congress Mebers, or more specific, 2/3 of the votes of the Congress Members, with a minimum amount of votes of 40% of the total. This means it is very easy to put someone on the blacklist, because there is no reason needed. I think this is the reason why there were a lot of blacklisting proposals in the past. I'm very curious about the reason why there are no reasons for blacklisting in the Law book.

We have got some great immigration protocol which will prevend PTO from the outside. But it is, as you can see, the only thing that will stop the PTO threat. When 'bad' people are in, they can do whatever they want, legally. It seems there is no big difference. If someone takes over the country, it doesn't matter if he's breaking the rules or not. But I think it is much more likely to take over a country where you can legally take it over. If there is a proposal to blacklist an important person of our nation, and they have enough votes, they can ban us all. We can do nothing about it, legally. You need to ask youself the question, is this desirable? I think it isn't.

These blacklist laws are a product of the elite, for the elite. The content of these laws are vague, because the 'bastion' will fill in the content different in every case. There is no protection for the citizens and the Congress Members against randomness of the government and the congress. In other words, we don't have a judicial power which will protect our citizens against the power of the elite. It is very obvious why we haven't one, because it is very hard to find neutral persons, who act like judges. That isn't the aim of this point. We can still protect citizens against randomness, to make general laws which will be applied on individual cases. In the case of the blacklist laws, this will be the reasons when people get blacklisted. One reason why people get blacklisted is when they don't pay Congress tax. This isn't in the blacklist laws, but somewhere else in the laws. This is an example of a good general reason to get people blacklisted. This will prevent the case when you don't blacklist someone because he is your best friend.

Writing this article has helped me to understand more about the blacklisting process and the creation of laws in general. Eventually this article is probably more chaotic then I wanted, but I hope this will be better in next articles.

SpirTus
A Bastion of Truth