The New Era of eUS Politics - Part 2

Day 2,045, 19:21 • Published in USA United Kingdom • by wingfield
Rights and Wrongs

Real life is NOT eRepublik and there are limits to what we can transfer from RL to the game or what players will accept. I will frame this discussion of rights in the context of the US Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment to the US Constitution, for the purposes of example only.

1. In the RL USA there can be no law establishing a religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, interfering with the right of peaceful assembly or prohibiting petition for government redress of grievances.

These are all pretty much guaranteed by Plato, within the limits of eRepublik’s own restrictions on what may be published or included in comments and shouts. We are all entitled to join the party of our choice, even though little is done to protect us from PTO of such parties. There is nothing to stop us petitioning for redress of grievances, if we actually had a government.

It is wrong to interfere with our right to peaceful assembly by means of taking over our political parties or even those of people we may not like.

2. We have the right to keep and bear arms.

This is a factor of game mechanics, as provided for by Plato.

3. The remaining articles of the Bill of Rights are not eRepublik concepts.

“National security” can never be a justification for the abridgement of political rights.

So, in First Amendment equivalent terms, chasing an undesirable citizen from party to party is totally wrong. Worse, it interferes with the rights to peaceful association of other citizens ordered to leave their own parties and instead provide the votes to interfere with the political rights of the offending citizen.

What sort of party life can any citizen have when he or she is deprived of the right to stand for office in his or her own party or to exercise a totally free choice in the selection of the party president? Requiring citizens to move parties for improper purposes such as so-called “ATO operations” is also wrong.

Moral questions aside, when the undesirable citizen in question has a substantial number of committed followers (in the current case around 600), it is simply not possible to keep that citizen or his faction down.

Simple math dictates that, in a system with 5 top parties, anyone controlling one-sixth of the vote or better cannot be kept out of the Top 5. It is futile and folly to attempt to do so, until and unless the math can be addressed with higher numbers.

The ATO mentality prevailing in the eUS is therefore totally wrong because it is both morally reprehensible and logically flawed. Furthermore, it weakens the remainder of the Top 5 party structure by undermining the stability of their membership.

My examination of the wrongs in our current system will continue in the next article, with a look at what has happened to our parties.