Hark, hear the llamas sing!

Here in the South Pacific, our Special Forces perform at an exceptional level. The cadre of Ensigns, Lieutenants, Captains, and Admirals that make up our defender military continue to turn out to updates and fight the good fight, day in, night out. Today (well, yesterday and the day before), two highly qualified individuals were promoted to their next rank, and we salute them for their service.

Lieutenant Vrigny

Quote:At the SPSF (South Pacific Special Forces), we are always looking for new officers to join our force, and our sitting Minister of Defense, Vrigny, has shown plenty of promise. First joining the SPSF in August 2022, he started more actively updating and participating in April 2024, getting promoted to an ensign later that month. He soon was nominated as Minister of Defense, overseeing an uptick in activity and training several new recruits. He has also been a reliable updater at minors, with more than 50 updates under his belt, most of which are in the last few months.

In his role as Minister of Defense, Vrigny has shown great ability in leading operations and rallying troops to liberations, with the SPSF consistently being among the top militaries, if not the top military, in liberation turnout. Vrigny has also recruited several new SPSFers and has kept morale high among the Force during his term.

As he has met the necessary promotion criteria, the Admiralty is proud to announce, with a unanimous vote, that Vrigny has been promoted from Ensign to Lieutenant of the South Pacific Special Forces.

Quote:It is with great happiness we announce the promotion of one of the SPSF’s most prominent figures; who could even be given the title of “savior of the SPSF” thanks to all of his actions both during his time as Minister of Defense as well as his great commanding and leading skill as a lieutenant. I’m obviously talking about our great Concrete Slab! In fact, most of the SPSF’s officer corps today is composed of members recruited by him.

This is not surprising at all, considering that his skill to recruit new members to the SPSF is unmatched by many, if not all. When he served as Minister of Defense, he greatly expanded SPSF’s numbers. Slab’s recruitment during and even after his term was truly special. As a result of his great enthusiasm, many of his recruits regularly attended updates and liberations, and do so even to this day.

When talking about Slab, we shouldn’t forget about his most impressive merit. When he was still a mere soldier (the rank equivalent to ensign at his time), during the major update of 18 March 2023, he led the SPSF to its largest turnout in its long history, with a total of 24 SPSF members showing up to liberate England! These numbers were consistently high with other updates during the England campaign, and his efforts during the operation were the difference between victory and crushing defeat.

With all of this said, the Admiralty is extremely excited to proclaim that, after everything that he’s done, Concrete Slab truly deserves this promotion from a Lieutenant to the SPSF’s newest, and coolest, Captain!

I made this package of bills as a sort of counter-proposal to the amendments proposed by Quebec on Discord. I know it all looks completely different, but the majority of the region is functionally exactly the same. I tried to patch up as many holes as possible, and I changed the structure of the government. I got rid of the separation of powers and put everything in one de jure bicameral legislature (Council on the bottom, Consulate on top), but it doesn't operate like a bicameral legislature at all. Only one vote takes place, and both houses vote at the same time. The way the Consulate exercises their veto is different as well; instead of just saying "this bill is vetoed," a majority of Consuls must vote against a bill for it to be vetoed.

Some other minor changes include a set of directions on how to move bills from debate to voting, and instructions on how to hold votes. I also introduced a Clerk position for the Council, which was notably missing from Quebec's proposal. I changed TRA to the "Department of Roleplay" because the way TRA is structured is reminiscent of the LCN rather than The League. I removed the Consulate power to unilaterally make changes to the Constitution. I also included instructions on how to allow new regions to enter if we decide to ever do that in the future. This way, we don't have to edit all of our laws.

I like the formatting, but I'm not super attached so if it becomes a problem I'll change it. I'm just not a fan of the current way we format our laws, and I'd rather type out Article x.x when citing our laws instead of Article x Section x.x, which is a mouthful. Still, fine with changing it.

The three bills that make up the package are available for comment here. Feel free to leave all your comments on this thread too. Questions are good too- everything is here for a reason and I'd like you to know that reason before deciding you don't like it.

Hi friends,

You are cordially invited to this year's EuroPride festival! The event will be held in its own EuroPride 2024 Discord server, and the pre-event party starts now. As with previous iterations of the festival, we hope it will be a wonderful opportunity for LGBTQ+ members and allies alike to reflect on our experiences, share stories, and generally have an absolute blast!!! The Ministry of Culture has been hard at work organising game nights, radio shows, contests, and a movie night – more details are shown in the graphic below, and official opening coming soon.

Don't miss out! The event runs for eight days starting June 20th. We can't wait to see you there!!!

Text version

Poster with rainbow gradient background & Republic of Europeia logo adapted with progress pride flag colour scheme

Come Celebrate With Us: EuroPride, June 20 - 27
Movie Night, Art Competition, Party Games, Writing Contest, Radio Shows, Poetry Contest!

by Ellenburg, Sanjurika, Sincluda, and UPC

Per the title, I built a bot (or at least part of it) that can make automated posts to our forum through the forum account Great Eastern. I've had a few ideas on things to do with it personally, but it would be cool to hear any other suggestions or ideas on functionalities it could have before going ahead and building it out.

Quote:“Chaps, this IS the system working, don’t you see?” explains an elder statesman, who has woken from a short nap, and is still wearing his nightcap. “The mechanisms of democracy have tangled the powers-that-be into blissful inaction, and befuddled the populace beneath a barrage of bureaucratic bewitchery. Politics drags on, the entire process of government is kicked to the long grass, and the country prospers because old fools like us don’t try to run things. Just sit back, listen, relax. The decades will fly by, and before you know it you’ll be retiring to the quango, cushy corporate advisory role or tropical island of your choice.” A black cat walks past and for a moment you experience a weird sense of déjà vu.

How much have you changed in five years? I've changed a lot. The League has, too. It changed its name- from the League of Conservative Nations to simply the League. It added a new region in the form of Concord, showing the world that our community, our region, can hold its ground in multiple places at once while still being able to have one of if not the largest defender military on NS. It has grown from hovering just around 100 nations to over 1300! It went from being a GP pariah to one of the most influential regions in all of GP. It underwent huge moderation reforms, purging bad actors and making the region shine cleaner than ever. It has a massively active community, challenging even feeders in the number of people who choose to call our community their home.

Why, then, has our Constitution not changed? By my count, the Constitution has been amended only once by a Council vote, and it was just for the regional move from LCN to the League (Also the addition of Concord and the removal of the Court(?), but these appear to have not been voted on by the Council). This is compounded by the fact that our Constitution is incredibly short and leaves many things up for interpretation- for example, the Speaker has no real powers, only being granted the vague role of "encouraging and facilitating improvements in regional legislation" which makes the position of Speaker seem more ceremonial than anything. It seems to me that this was more of a transitional Constitution, and that the government of the League for the last five years has just been transitional.

I'm not arguing for the full democratization of the League. Instead, what I envision is similar to a semi-constitutional monarchy like Monaco, where the monarch- in this case, the Consulate- retains some government power, but other power is delegated to other bodies and the legislature. I, personally, do not like investing too much power into a small group of people- it creates too much risk for disaster, especially if one or more people in the group are volatile- so I may be more inclined to give less power to the Consulate and more power to an elected head of government and legislature. Although, that's all up for discussion- everything is, that's why I made this thread.

I'd like to put out some major points of discussion and my opinions:

The Consulate

The Consulate should remain as it is- a group of three, led by a Chief Consul. However, my idea is to strip away some of its powers. Currently, the Consulate receives virtually unchecked power under Article 2, Section 2.I of the current Constitution which states, "The Consulate shall use their authority to facilitate regional development and progress." What "regional development and progress" is isn't defined, meaning the Consulate can do virtually anything under the guise of regional development. This is made worse by the fact that the Council has no way to stop the Consulate from doing something, as the Consulate could simply veto anything the Council passes under Article 2, Section 2.IV- "The Consulate maintains veto rights over the Council of the Republic in dire situations..." What are "dire situations?" The Constitution does go on to provide examples, like "Constitutional questionability" and "regional security," but those are just examples and "dire situations" could mean anything, such as the perpetual state of war we are in. After all, the reasoning is as simple as "we are in war, we need to commandeer the region and rule by decree."

Instead, the Consulate should have limited veto powers. The Council should be able to override Consulate veto. In addition, I would propose adding "Consulate Orders" or some other, better name which are immediately effective orders issued by the Consulate that can be struck down by the Council at any time.

The Speaker

The Speaker has barely any legal definition other than what I mentioned earlier. Instead of what we have now, I propose having an elected Speaker that serves as a head of government. They share the executive with the Consulate. The Speaker appoints cabinet members or ministers or whatever we want to call them to run departments or ministries, like we have now. So, instead of having a law defining the Department of Culture like we have now, a Speaker will choose if they want to have a Department of Culture and then appoints whoever they see fit for the job.

The Council

Nominations are stupid and bad and we should get rid of them. What I propose instead is an application system, similar to citizenship, where someone applies to be a Council Delegate and then they are either approved or not. Instead of using the nominations as a kind of de facto activity check, we could instead have an actual activity check at the end of every month or every other month and anyone who hasn't voted in at least half the votes in an activity check period (or CTEs or left or any other thing that would cause them to be ineligible) gets removed and will have to reapply.

In addition, we need to have some kind of Council clerk or something who updates the law archive on the forums and on the wiki and runs votes. In general, they would just manage the day-to-day operations of the Council instead of just tacking that responsibility onto the Consulate. I'm thinking something like what TSP has where the clerk would be voted in and then would serve until resignation or ineligibility, and they could appoint deputies who would help with their duties. The clerk could also manage Council Delegate applications as anyone who goes that far should have already been thoroughly vetted during their citizen application.

• Defining the DSB as a legal institution. Right now it just kind of "exists" with no legal basis and it would be nice to fix that.
  
• WA Delegates. I think the best way to handle this is to have the Delegate of the League be a specific Consul and the Delegate of Concord just be anyone on the DSB. We could always have appointed Delegates for Concord, but I think with the nature of the frontier it may just be easier to allow either Spode, Fandom, or Neo to be Delegate at any given time. The status quo works too, though.
  
• Generally we just need to elaborate on more things and give specifics. The current Constitution feels incredibly rushed.
  
• We should have a Criminal Code.
  
• The judiciary: No. Although that doesn't necessarily mean the status quo is good, either. An idea I came up with was the concept of the "legislative court," where the Speaker, a Consul, or perhaps a Chief Justice (although I don't like this) appoints three Council Delegates (who are willing to participate and do not have a conflict of interest) to a jury, which hears the case and then comes up with an opinion. This seems to me as the best way to take the responsibility off of the Consulate while not having an actual court.
  
• The Council should be perpetually convened, and there should be a specific way to bring a proposed bill to a vote, e.g. a seconded motion after a bit of time.
  
• A motion of no confidence by the Council against the Speaker, the Consulate, or a specific Consul could also be added. We could also add a way to recall the clerk or whatever we decide to call it.
  
• New Consuls should be approved by the Council.
  
• Anything else I'm forgetting.