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The Cable - July 2020
The Cable
July 2020 | The Embassy
Welcome to the second edition of The Cable, which aims to build communications between our embassies. You're encouraged to share this newsletter with your region-mates by posting a link on your RMB.
A manic May was followed by a jarring June. This month saw the demise of our peer region SECFanatics, one of the most notable "embassy collector" regions that NS has ever seen. This was followed by an opportunist offensive SC Liberation proposal, aimed at bringing down The Embassy. And then came the departure of our delegate Durcane. On a brighter note, our TourAdvisor project is growing at a steady pace, and we're getting some great insights on the wider NS-verse. Our polls looked at some real world events. NS agreed that Black Live Matter more than the Thin Blue Line. Then we predicted the Polish presidential election incorrectly, showing that, fifty-one years after the New York Stonewall riots, Pride still has a long road to travel.
But if you're just thinking, "I don't care about any of this. Why did I get a notification?", then this section is for you.
In early June, reacting to the outrageous killing of George Floyd by police, protests and riots rocked America. By the time our poll closed, at least 200 cities had imposed curfew. Our "This or That" polls deliberately exclude explanations, middle-ground, or alternative solutions. A decisive 71% declared that Black Live Matter more than the Thin Blue Line.
Aethelia,Kasterborous gallifrey,Trabardia,PotatoFarmers,Windchia,Gopnikea,Explodeingtnt,Aleixandria,Voxija,Vorounovia,The Age of Utopia,Durcane,Dollystana,Balaslandia,Ostrovskiy,Sword island,Poafmersia,McClandia Doge 2,Matthuvan union,The Imagination Animals,The peoples caribbean union,Casetaria 2,Amwich,Silvedania,Kingdom of casetaria,Free state of ancapistan,Sultanate sultanate,Northeast punston,Sebian ultra-nationalists,Pmoulitc,The industrial city,Quotes from history,The wandering elmo,Nouguinkelospianland,Disterious,Gangnamtopia,[nation]thousan,The Soylent Green Party,Louis20,Haarmony,Ubekibekibekibekistanstan,Wiranath,Synergetik,Subadent,Federation of sarawak,Deacarsia,Sallodar,The Yeetusa,The gold mines,Burnerburn,Timmybean,La Xingan Sports Association
In the Polish presidential elections, the leading candidates were existing president Andrzej Duda (whose recent attacks on “LGBT ideology” drew widespread criticism), and Rafał Trzaskowski, the liberal mayor of Warsaw. Large sections of Poland are deeply conservative, so although Duda tried to distance himself from some of the more extreme homophobic language, Trzaskowski tried to avoid firm declarations of support for LGBT rights. We asked who you thought would win (not who you'd like to win). NS predicted a win for the liberal Trzaskowski. However, on the 28th, Duda took 44% of the vote, and Trzaskowski 30%. There'll be a run-off on 12th July between the two. Will their fortunes reverse?
Kustonia,Louis20,Ubekibekibekibekistanstan,Marxist germany,Deacarsia,La Xinga,The tsardom of atopless,Pagan horde,Click-here,Hellenic strategoi,Goathland,Nuovoiork,Wintermoore,Winterset isles,Averra,Wei jing,Aleixandria,2 and 2 is Fish,Rajputura,Ziconean east indian company,Sail nation,Prelet,Team Leo,Rikanhimel,Vander toferd,Nationstates in all caps,Bjornkilde,Winchwear,The reformation of qing dynasty
Following Trump's terrible Tulsa turnout, TikTok teens and K-Pop connoisseurs claimed credit for co-ordinating a crippling campaign, capping the crowds far below the 19,000 capacity. But going head to head, which would NS choose - TikTok or K-Pop?
Smiley Bob,Aethelia,Quelsh,Bienenhalde,Kenmoria,Hagston,Nyjorkalloid,The Yeetusa,Imperial Commonwealth of Nations,Old zealand founder,Central california republic,Grishahakkaverchynot,Featuleria,The Doggos Free Land,Neuenhanse,Freshi,New chosun,NAXIMOVISTAN,Zigistania,Denizciland,Evbesbires,Palins,Graag brom,PotatoFarmers,The Hanzanburg Union,Aleixandria,Reyo,Piper mclean,South Ring,Huannaland,Holy lovebug empire,Nassaa,New odessus
SECFanatics, as the name indicates, was never concieved as an embassy collector, but as a sports themed region. It was over a year after founding that the embassy count became a focus.
At it's peak, SECFanatics had an astounding 3126 embassies open, a record only ever beaten by The Embassy. Many regions CTE over time, so this peak doesn't reflect the full 6851 embassies that were opened through the years.Much earlier, on 3 April 2018, The Embassy had set the record for most embassies ever, at 3055. The embassy count had then been left to decline. On 16 October 2018, with over 1800 embassies, SECFanatics took over as the region with most embassies. They held that position continuously until 11 January 2019, growing their embassy count to over 2500 in that time.
With a renewed surge of embassy building, The Embassy caught up on 11 January 2019. There followed weeks of jostling for position.
On 17 February, SECFanatics held 3009 embassies, 44 more than The Embassy, and looked set to beat that all time record of 3055 embassies. To keep the title, The Embassy tried a sneak tactic. Reasoning that regions who had relations with SECFanatics were likely to accept embassy requests, The Embassy targetted them, and gained enough new embassies to break the existing record on 18 February, just ahead of SECFanatics. SECFanatics went on to reach that incredible count of 3126 embassies on 28 February.
A year later, on 31 May 2020, founder RBBF's account was deleted by moderators for an unspecified reason, leaving SECFanatics open to raids. Shortly after, the region was raided, and all embassies closed.
🌍 TourAdvisor is the searchable, crowd-sourced guide of places to go in NS. Build the best browsable guide to the NS-verse by reviewing the places you've been, and the things that you've seen. Read our guidelines, and post your review!
Our tourist database more than doubled in size this month, thanks to the prolific efforts of Sail nation travellers and Pagan horde, with additional contributions from Indusse, Robostania, and Mercenary ceo. These reviews are great to read, and I love clicking through to take a peek at those regions.
On 5th June, Jakker city drafted a proposal on the Security Council forum to Liberate The Embassy. A successful SC Liberation would have removed our regional password, leaving us vulnerable to raids. Jakker, who had headed up the raid on SECFanatics, was obviously just after a chance to destroy another embassy collector region.
In the proposal, Jakker said that the council should approve the Liberation because we had fascist regions amongst our embassies, and (as we had all available tags attached to our region) were tagged fascist. But it's a huge leap of imagination to believe that the proposal was driven by any genuine concerns over fascism.
We haven't been opening embassies with fascist regions for a very long time. We use a script to identify new regions to send embassy requests to. The script excludes regions tagged as fascist, and any that have "Nazi", "fascist", or "national socialist" in the name. Literally hundreds of our embassies CTE each month, and that includes the fascist ones. By simply not opening new fascist embassies, the number of those embassies was dropping. We never went back to close existing embassies. There never really seemed any point. They didn't post on our RMB, and we didn't post on theirs. You had to look pretty hard at our list of embassies to notice that they existed at all. So was there any real validity in the argument that we gave legitimacy to fascist regions?
On reflection, yes. No-one makes this argument on the thread, but while you could look at The Embassy and not see any obvious signs of fascists, the opposite was not true. If you looked at a fascist region, you could see they had an embassy with us. And so from that point of view, we were "normalising" fascism.
The Liberation proposal was a bully tactic, using the threat of aggression unless we took a particular course of action. Which was heavily ironic. In 1944, George Orwell wrote:
"Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathisers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’."
We don't give in to bullies, so we had to choose to keep those embassies open. We reasoned that it was unlikely that the Liberation would pass anyway. And even if it did, we agreed that we could easily refound our region. We request hundreds of embassies each week. Sending fresh embassy requests to our existing embassies wouldn't have been too demanding. We also later (incorrectly!) thought that the Liberation wouldn't actually remove the password - the wording on Liberations state that they are "A resolution to strike down Delegate-imposed barriers to free entry in a region". As our password was added by a regional officer and not the delegate, it looked like this proposal was toothless*.
So we planned to wait it out, watch the Liberation fail, and then deal with the fascist issue. But then Vippertooth33 got in touch. Vippertooth heads up The MT Army, which is an embassy collector region of sorts. The MT Army have over a thousand embassies - regions captured from fascists.
Vippertooth had posted on the thread that The Embassy had "a moral duty to remove their fascist tag and end embassies with any Nazi/Fascist regions on NationStates, however I do not support liberating the region (effectively destroying it) to achieve this goal."
Vippertooth had an alternate approach. Recognising our motivations as an embassy collector, they proposed:
"If embassies is what you seek, check the embassies attached to The MT Army I am the founder of most of these…
I can easily replace any lost number of embassies you may get from removing Fascist embassies from your region"
It was a no-brainer. We removed the fascist tag, and closed our fascist embassies.
* It's important to note that the wording on Liberations is misleading. They actually remove any regional password in a founderless region, no matter who set it. And they don't remove passwords on a region with an active founder, no matter who set it. I raised a thread on the Technical forum to get the wording fixed. If feel you have anything to add to the discussion, please do!
Our embassy count plummeted by a few hundred this month. Usually the vast majority of closures are down to embassy regions CTEing. This month was an exception though. Although we chose to close embassies with over eighty regions that were tagged fascist, it looked like a larger number of our embassies were closed by tag raiders Lily. I'm pretty sure that this was the first time since 2018 that we had more embassies being actively closed by tag raiders than we were managing to open. You can read about how busy Lily have been this month here. Although our WFE links to advice about how not to get raided, it looks like we should make that advice more prominent.
The Diplomacy Awards celebrate the foreign dignitaries that interacted with our RMB in the past month, either by making posts, or clicking 'Like'.
We think it is great to appreciate a state. This month's 'like' button bashers are:
Hearts | Like Count | Nations |
❤ | 90 | |
🧡 | 50 | |
💛 | 47 |
We like to host posts, and toast those who post most. This month's prolific posters are:
Volume | Post Count | Nations |
🔊 | 43 | |
🔉 | 22 | |
🔈 | 19 |
We get really psyched about those who were 'liked'. This month's most praised posters are:
Awards | Like Count | Nations |
🥇 | 39 | |
🥈 | 34 | |
🥉 | 25 |
We can't say it straighter - you're the greater orator. This month's premiers of praises per post are:
Style | Likes per Post | Nations |
🖋 | 3.5 | |
🖊 | 3 | |
🖍 | 2.67 |
* Nations making multiple posts during the month are eligible for The Floored Award.
The Free press is a new nation that appeared this month, sharing the lowdown on CCD, Save Our Planet, an Thaecia. If you'd like to subscribe to their news stories, details are here.
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Dominant Oppressors, Doom soul, Dorchester and sussex, Eternal hallownest, Mathuvan Union, New hyannisport, Oneid, Ostrovskiy, Romagina, Smiley Bob, Sultanate sultanate, The industrial city, The new empire of bigboom, The peoples caribbean union