The Muppet List: An Alternative to the Blacklist Bill?

Day 2,837, 03:55 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Hail Astrid

You may have seen it on the cover of the most recent Rolling Stone:


Here it is in its full glory.

Now, FightAndProduce's article has basically revealed its faults (i.e. it being mainly useless in practice and nearly impossible to enforce via in-game mechanics), and there are also other problems with this thing (That it could turn said blacklisted person into a sort of anti-establishment "hero") but there must be reasons why it was put in place in the first place.

It seems that the aim of the bill is largely concerned about limiting the ability of these threats to gain power (or more power than they already have). Thus the need for a list of blacklisted persons, so we know who the bad guys are in this movie.

This is countered by a quote from FaP's article:

"People who are dangerous to the eUK are known already, we don't need a blacklist to tell us who we shouldn't affiliate with. This just insults our intelligence. New people can see pretty quickly once they get involved why these people aren't held in high regard, and if they don't? Chances are they aren't going to some gdoc to check out the list."

While it is definitely true that new people will not be checking a gdoc to find out about a blacklisted person, it is also true that when entering a new game, you don't really know anyone, or anything, except that you're a super low level player and everyone who's been playing longer than you has more stuff than you.

So when someone offers you free stuff, it's very likely that you'll be more than a bit fond of that person. So much so that you could ignore any bad stuff people say about them (after all, all that stuff happened before you were here, or if it happened when you were here, it didn't really affect you in particular anyway).

This is how it probably goes down:



Then a few days and a couple of articles read later...



Meanwhile, actual upstanding members of the eUK community are accused of sexual harrassment!


All of the people I interviewed are dead now.

It kind of disturbs me that certain divisive elements in the eUK community always seem to play up their "Britishness", what with the Royal Family roleplaying, slapping the Union Jack on everything they have and seemingly being ready to bust out in 'God Save the Queen' at any given moment.

Because to new players, that's probably pretty attractive. To be honest, they're probably not going to delve deep into eRepublik history to find out more about them, or why these upstanding gentlemen (who gave them free stuff!) are anti-UK.

It has been suggested that a list be created detailing the exact crimes of such persons, where being on the list is almost like having a criminal record in this game. Like, a historical archive of why people shouldn't really support this person.


What he said.

This comes with a lot of questions eg (Who decides how history will remember the event? Will it be a fair historical recount? Are there screenshots? (obvs doctored) Are there articles? (they got deleted) Does this count as cyber-bullying? etc etc). But I think it would make for interesting reading, and might be an effective deterrent against doing stupid sh*t.

I think it should be called "The Muppet List".