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Trotterdam wrote:

95 minutes ago: Following new legislation in Divus, elections have been outlawed.
95 minutes ago: Divus was reclassified from "Liberal Democratic Socialists" to "Democratic Socialists".

NationStates, fillies and gentlecolts!

Well I guess they could vote on issues, just not elect ponies. At least that how I see it.

Changetria wrote:

Why let them vote on issues at all? You will have all the power. If somepony fights you on it. Erase them.

PS I'm RPing here. For the ponies who don't know.

Reminds me of my Crusader Kings II play style when I figured out how to use the kill cheat.

I basically became Light from Deathnote, except I was using Debug numbers instead of names.

I'm 3rd in the region and 297th in the world! :D

Recently passed the 300 Smiles Per Hour mark, too. (That makes... 1 every twelve seconds?)

Squalalaa wrote:

Why am I not surprised to hear this from the mouth of a changeling themed nation's leader?

On that topic, I find the idea of an autocratic changeling leader quite strange.

After all, in real beehives all power is vested in the workers, not the queen. If Dear Leader were to ever waver from her usual sedated, ever-receptive state, her subjects would swarm and mutilate her before bringing in someone more compliant.

The Vines wrote:

On that topic, I find the idea of an autocratic changeling leader quite strange.

After all, in real beehives all power is vested in the workers, not the queen. If Dear Leader were to ever waver from her usual sedated, ever-receptive state, her subjects would swarm and mutilate her before bringing in someone more compliant.

Wouldn't the workers destroy themselves though? The hive is dependent on their Queen. Without her the hive members will attack each other, wouldn't they?

The Vines wrote:

Are you talking about changelings or bees?

As for changelings, I don't think we've seen a hive without a queen in the show. Not too familiar with the comics though.

I think Squeeheart was talking about bees.

To be fair, we only saw the changelings once in the show. About the comics, Queen Chrysalis is still the leader of them.

The Vines wrote:

After all, in real beehives all power is vested in the workers, not the queen.

Not really.

There is no "bureaucrat worker" who tells the other workers what to do. Bees aren't intelligent enough to have an organized government of any sort, they just instinctively work together.

But being a queen is clearly a priviledged position that brings to mind pampered human nobles: you get to have lots of food and sex while doing little real work, and the rest of the hive will give their lives to defend you. And I read once (didn't keep the link) that in some species of... I think it was ants... multiple queens in a hive will engage in court intrigue trying to usurp each others' positions.

If you take a beehive society and up their intelligence to the point that they do start to understand the concepts of laws and following orders and bureaucracy and talking, it's really rather reasonable for the queen to use her important and indispensible position in the hive to amass political power.

Some hives, possibly, might demote their queen to a constitutional monarch with no real power, while a democratic worker council makes the real decisions. Part of being intelligent, after all, is that you're flexible enough to experiment with different government types - and humans have. (We've also occasionally revolted against an unpopular monarch to replace with a new, hopefully better monarch.) But saying that smart queens can't give orders because dumb ones don't is naive. Intelligence means more complicated behavior patterns for everyone.

Anyway, we're not talking about bees - we're talking about changelings. There isn't even any canon confirmation that changelings actually reproduce in an eusocial manner. There is, however, canon confirmation that they have something called a queen (that she's visually different from other changelings isn't indicative, since so are pony princesses) and that she's a power-hungry sort.

Now personally what I dislike about eusocial hive creatures in fiction is that they usually have a hive mind. (I'm also really tired of aliens with psychic powers in general.) Ants and bees each have a (simple) mind of their own. It's so much more interesting to have a hive society who work together because they love each other. The queen is mommy. That's more fun than just being a single mind in multiple bodies, don't you think?

Another thing writers often get wrong is there being only one queen for the whole species. There's simply no way for that to happen: evolution requires a large number of reproductive organisms competing for fitness, which in a hive species means lots of hives, each with their own queen. Besides, having a single point of failure like that puts your species on the fast track to going extinct.

It's best to think of the queen as the elder of a very tightly-knit clan.

Trotterdam wrote:

It's so much more interesting to have a hive society who work together because they love each other. The queen is mommy.

There's a reason our favored government type is "Mother Knows Best State", after all.

Trotterdam wrote:

Termites' most memorable difference from other eusocial insects is that they're more egalitarian. Reproductive kings and queens stay together in the hive rather than males mating once and then dying, and sterile workers come in both vestigially-male and vestigially-female versions.

Also their soldiers have glue guns on their heads (in some species), and build giant freaking towers out of mud and their own feces, even using the magnetic field of the f*cking planet to guide construction for when they have to building flat sided towers. I learned this recently, by the way. Magnetic termites live in water-logged soils, where underground chambers as a refuge from the sun's heat are not an option. Thus, they build towers that are flat and always face north to south, so it catches the sun in the morning so the termites can warm up, only faces the sun on the top edge at the peak of noon, then again only on one face in the afternoon when the temperature goes down again.

Oh, and elsewhere where Termites can dig underground, they construct a whole airflow ventilation system to vent stale air and freshen it up with new air from outside. The tower is full of little pore and tunnel entrances that allow fresh air into a giant central chimney (though the top is closed). Wing going around the tower to the other side creates a small suction that sucks the stale air in the chimney out through more tunnels and channels. Pretty good for creatures with brains the size of a pin's tip.

Also, the key difference between Termintes and Ants (ancient enemies, by the way. Just look at the ongoing Matabele Ant VS Bellicose Termite war.) is that Ants are descended from Wasps, who are areal hunters (carnivores). Indeed, Ants are really just wasps minus the wings plus increased social organization. (Also, leaf cutter ants, but we won't talk about them).

Termites, on the other hand, are descended from cockroaches and are herbivores.

Hugs for everypony!