«12. . .1,8301,8311,8321,8331,8341,8351,836. . .2,6502,651»
Post by Hstruman suppressed by a moderator.
I realized the other day that UBI isn't a policy yet... Hmmm...
Atsvea, Lord Dominator, Turbeaux, Apabeossie, and 5 othersCat-herders united, Northern Wood, Paplia, Eco-empire, and Middle Barael
Although if you are communist (the game calls it socialist, but there’s a difference) you kind of already have UBI, though I guess it is universal total income, not basic income
Edit: We’ve just passed 500 million, and now we can unlocked the custom pre-title. We are now the Most Serene Eco-Republic of Middle Barael. Please note that if ever our pre-title is something else, it is just to show our support for something (such as Pride Month, Black History Month, or the Forest Crystal Jubilee), and our official name will still be the Most Serene Eco-Republic of Middle Barael.
Edit of the Edit: And we’ve just been reclassified from Democratic Socialists to Liberal Democratic Socialists (though we are actually social democrats, not democratic socialists, though the terms are often being conflated now)! What a day for Middle Barael! Not to mention the fact that our relationship with our closest ally, Gandenia, has improved recently after we reached a compromise! (They we’re keeping a land that they had taken from a dictator as a semi-autonomous territory, but we wanted them to release it as a protectorate instead)
Mount Seymour, Atsvea, Ruinenlust, Lord Dominator, and 5 othersTurbeaux, Cat-herders united, Northern Wood, Ordand, and Eco-empire
I mean, a lot of cities are trying out UBI, so I feel like you could maybe write an issue to see if that could be inplimented
Ownzone, Atsvea, Ruinenlust, Lord Dominator, and 6 othersTurbeaux, Northern Wood, Ordand, Eco-empire, Middle Barael, and The young ur
i just want to congratulate the executive power in this region
you are possibly one of the most active of the regions' i have visited
in portugal we are also active, but out smaller size means our delegate doesnt need to use anything else than the RMB
but congratulations on a very good job
Murmuria, Verdant Haven, Atsvea, Ruinenlust, and 7 othersLord Dominator, Turbeaux, Cat-herders united, Northern Wood, Novian Republics, Eco-empire, and Middle Barael
That is one of my favorite things about Forest: there are always conversations and debates to be had, and everyone is so professional and educational in the way they write their posts in our discussions.
Unfortunately we haven’t had many debates lately, so I’ll go and start one: which is your favorite political model/test? (e.g. Politcal Compass, Sapply’s 3-axis politcal compass, 8Values, 9Axes, Political Sextant, Politiscales)
Personally, I like 8Values the best, followed by Sapply’s 3-axis politcal compass. One of my big problems with the politcal compass is that it is rare in this day and age to find someone who is authoritarian or libertarian about everything. For example, “liberals/progressives” (in the American definition) are more liberal when it comes to women’s rights, cannabis, police reform, and LGBTQ+ rights, while more authoritarian when it comes to guns and taxation. Meanwhile, “conservatives” are more liberal when it comes to guns and religious freedom (especially for Christians), while more authoritarian when it comes to government surveillance and drug use. I feel like the political compass does not take into account these trends, and so I would want to also have a 3rd axis with progressive/conservative values. Both 8Values and Sapply’s have this.
The other great thing about 8Values is that it also includes an axis for foreign policy. This is important, because many people are usually liberal, but who believe in autarky or isolationism, or they believe in globalization and interventionism. For example, Hillary Clinton is normally relatively centrist on the authoritarian/libertarian scale, but she is known for her very hawkish foreign policy. She would’ve gotten a +2 (slightly authoritarian) on the authoritarian/libertarian scale and a +8 (very hawkish) on the nationalist/pacifist scale, but because the Political Compass and Sapply’s both combine these two scales, she in the end would get a +5 (somewhat/quite authoritarian) on that scale. However, 8Values keeps these separate, hence the name (8Values = 4 Axes and 2 “extremes” per axis).
Murmuria, Verdant Haven, Gloriosya, Atsvea, and 9 othersRuinenlust, Lord Dominator, Turbeaux, The void territories, Northern Wood, Novian Republics, Eco-empire, Forestal, and Norginlajicratefe
I noticed that my flag design is leading in the poll, and I just wanted you all to know that really put a smile on my face. Regardless of whether it ends up winning or not (Middle Barael is neck and neck), it really brightened my day -- on a day which could use some brightening, too. Designing flags is probably my favorite thing about NationStates, and I've slowly been teaching myself to use a program called Inkscape, over the past year or two, in order to do so. So it means a lot that enough folks in this region thought the work good enough to vote for.
(By the way, 
Outer Bele Levy Epies, your flag made me laugh out loud...and I learned a lot from the taxonomic elements, to the point where I feel I have a pretty solid understanding of what a tree is)
Ok, enough sappy navel gazing. I now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
Verdant Haven, Mount Seymour, Atsvea, Ruinenlust, and 10 othersLord Dominator, Turbeaux, Outer Bele Levy Epies, Kinectia, Paplia, Eco-empire, Pythaga, Middle Barael, Forestal, and Norginlajicratefe
I think political compasses are somewhat flawed. Partly because you can kind of guess what effect a certain answer has so this can manipulate people. Also a lot of them don't elaborate on questions and a lot of the terms they use are vague. If you are on an extreme end then I think it is way more accurate. For me the tests tend to nail my ideology and leaning but my moderate friends complain a lot (especially about 8 values and 9 axes and tests akin to those since they give a percentage evaluation) claiming that they would add/take away 10-20% from some of their values.
That being said I prefer 9 axes. It's like 8 values but with way more question and more scales.
Atsvea, Ruinenlust, Lord Dominator, Turbeaux, and 5 othersKinectia, Paplia, Eco-empire, Faurexus, and Middle Barael
i think political compasses are overrated as many questions are poorly written and that only shows you your centre of mass politically
besides all that, its fun and i like the test "vote1" very much
Atsvea, Ruinenlust, Lord Dominator, Turbeaux, and 3 othersKinectia, Gaianists, and Middle Barael
Mount Seymour, Atsvea, Ruinenlust, Lord Dominator, and 3 othersTurbeaux, Lura, and Eco-empire
I got "Justice · Humanity · Socialism" on PoltiScales with anarchism and veganism as additional characteristics. That sounds about right. I may run through some of the others later but have not been especially impressed by them in the past.
Murmuria, Verdant Haven, Atsvea, Ruinenlust, and 3 othersLord Dominator, Eco-empire, and Middle Barael
I think politcal compasses and tests and the like are more intended as either entertainment, or as a way for the “politically illiterate” to find their ideology. I don’t think the results are exactly supposed to match with your real views, since no tests, not even IQ tests or the SAT and ACT, can account for an entire personality, so they are merely intended to be estimations.
I think the reason I love the 8Values test so much is because it provides all of the most basic and most crucial aspects of a political ideology without being overly excessive. The Politcal Compass and even Sapply’s do not give you nearly enough axes, as they both forget about the “progressive vs conservative” scale and the foreign policy scale. On the other hand, Politiscales and 9Axes are too complex to easily and quickly describe an ideology.
In addition, 8Values not only gives you your “values/coordinates”, it also tells you which politcal ideology you are closest to. For example, if economically you are social, “freedom-wise” you are liberal, socially you are very progressive, and foreign-policy-wise you are internationalist, then it’ll tell you that you are most likely a social democrat (and all of those apply to me, and definitely a social democrat).
One last thing that Verdant Haven mentioned: “liberal” as a professional politcal term is NOT THE SAME as “liberal” in the modern American sense. Liberal really means “having freedom but not excessive freedom”, or essentially “moderately libertarian”. In the US, however, it is used to mean “socially progressive”. A true liberal (in the non-US sense of the word) would be someone like Biden or Bloomber or Macron, but a liberal in the American sense would be anyone who is socially progressive, ranging from Biden to Buttigieg to Pelosi to Bernie.
In addition, the term “libertarian” in the politcal ideology sense is NOT THE SAME as libertarian in the American sense. In the US, Libertarian is a specific set of extreme neoliberals, those who economically are laissez-fairs capitalists (ew) but socially progressive (but in a very weird way, I doubt they’d support social justice), like a moderate version of the stereotypical person who wants everything to be legal so that they can make money however they want and do whatever they want. In the international sense of the word, libertarian simply means “supporting freedom, often to an excessive or dangerous extent”. This can be both leftist (such as libertarian socialists, anarcho-socialists, or libertarian social democrats), or rightist (such as the American Libertarian Party, anarcho-capitalists, and some radical neoliberals).
Thus when you hear the term “libertarian socialism” or “libertarian leftism”, those are perfectly possible ideologies (though they are rare in our modern society, social democrats are the only liberal-leftist ideology that is super common), and they have nothing to do with the Libertarian Party in America (ew), so don’t worry if they gross you out.
Mount Seymour, Atsvea, Ruinenlust, Lord Dominator, and 2 othersTurbeaux, and Eco-empire
Wait... don't most of you who are slicing and dicing yourselves into poorly defined political boxes live in a country that "thrives" on the 2-party system? I'm baffled by the persistent attention being given to the micro-measurement of parts of your psyche [or maybe anatomy], and the time and attention given to comparisons thereof. Politically I'm all for coalition governments, where there's more chances for non-dominant views to be heard. Does the US even have a viable Green Party? (No, don't answer that, it was a rhetorical question.) Personally I'm still objecting to the very idea of being pigeonholed.
Pigeonholing is the new identity.
Atsvea, Ruinenlust, Lord Dominator, Turbeaux, and 1 otherKinectia
It is looking good already and I am sure most of you know about it, but I just would like to wish the fellow Forestian 
Frieden-und Freudenland all the best with the SC Commendation! ♥
Effazio, Octopus islands, Frieden-und Freudenland, Mount Seymour, and 10 othersAtsvea, Ruinenlust, Lord Dominator, Turbeaux, Canaltia, Ordand, Wernher Magnus Maximilian Von Braun, Eco-empire, Pythaga, and The canadian peoples republic
I don't quite understand the idea of "libertarian socialism", considering that socialism is the redistribution of wealth and forcing people to give up their property doesn't seem very "free" to me. Anarchocommunism is different, as they actually belive in the abolition of the idea of private property, but to my knowledge that isn't always a core tenet of socialism. Sure, socialist societies could have liberal aspects, but I personally believe that socialism cannot be inherently libertarian in any society where redistribution of wealth is mandatory and non-consensual. And if it is consensual, then isn't it just capitalism with charity?
Also, I wouldn't say Biden is liberal at all. He supports fairly authoritarian tax and gun control policies, supports military funding increases, and does not support federal legalization of marinjuana or other drugs. He's definitely at the very least centrist in my books. I'd consider him authoritarian, along with most other establishment candidates in America.
I would generally consider myself somewhat libertarian, but my biggest gripe with (American) libertarianism is their environmental policy, as you might expect. The idea of using the NAP as a moral compass is a pretty clear ideological aspect of American libertarianism, yet they often fail to see the clear hypocrisy of supporting environmental deregulation. Pollution very clearly violates the NAP, yet every single year, the Libertarian Party pulls out a new candidate who is sceptical of climate experts and says that the "free market will do what's best!". Having less government is not always more free.
Atsvea, Ruinenlust, Lord Dominator, Turbeaux, and 2 othersPythaga, and Norginlajicratefe
As I understand it, the abolition of private property (as distinguished from personal property -- private property is things whose ownership generates wealth simply by virtue of owning them, like factories or companies or land, whereas personal property is just things you own for yourself, like clothing) is an inherent aspect of socialism. Libertarian socialists consider themselves libertarian because they believe private property's existence is an authoritarian concept, since it's depriving people of their right to the fruits of their labor. You are depriving some people of the things they own, but by that same logic you could call the Allies authoritarian for depriving the Nazis of all the Europe they owned. A libertarian socialist society would allow you to do practically anything you want, so long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others, which capitalism could be argued to do.
Also hi! I don't think I've posted in this RMB yet 👋
Octopus islands, Mount Seymour, Gloriosya, Atsvea, and 5 othersRuinenlust, Lord Dominator, Turbeaux, Cat-herders united, and Eco-empire
Yes, I'd agree if we're going by a fairly purist definition of socialism. Socialism itself isn't really about wealth redistribution at all -- if there is no great income gap because production and capital are owned by everyone, then there's nothing to redistribute. In a socialist society, there would be no forcing people to give up their property in order to equalize wealth -- because the property that generates wealth would already be socially owned.
Of course, I personally wouldn't go that far. I'm often placed as a 'libertarian socialist' on these types of charts, but really I'm a sort of pragmatic social democrat, I imagine somewhat akin to 
Verdant Haven, who is rather okay with a welfare capitalist system that includes a lot of redistribution as well as fairly liberal social policies.
Also: hey, and welcome to the Forest RMB! I'm pretty sure we overlapped briefly as moderators in Tiandi, but I don't think we interacted much. :P
Verdant Haven, New Kvenland, Atsvea, Ruinenlust, and 2 othersLord Dominator, and Turbeaux
i think that is basically it
a book that made me understand that vision is the following: "What is porperty? An inquiry into the principle of right and of government", by Pierre-Joseph Proudhorn
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/360/360-h/360-h.htm
i must say i tried my best to read it until the end, but like "The rights of man" and "God and the state" i got really bored reading it XD
to add to the discussion of political compasses, the compass "vote1" that i talked about has a great library with 23 books they recommend for each ideology, it's where i read "The Prince" and i quite like it
On the PolitiScales test, my three results are "Ecology ~ Justice ~ Work," with the additional characteristic of "pragmatism."
Similarly to Verdant Haven, I found that the gray area in the middle added some nuance to these rather complex topics. In several of the axes, the bar was mostly gray. There are always many questions and issues where my answer is that "it depends," or else that there are other parameters that I see things through that would entirely transform the topic itself, if they were taken into account.
Quite right. I wonder sometimes if Americans have a penchant for political compass tests and things of that sort precisely because there only two viable options in American politics. Then again, so many Americans are also sucked in by astrology, personal alien sighting stories, and conspiracy theories galore. We're not exactly a bastion of rational thought...
And yet we are a place of contradictions! As I write this, the US Space Agency has launched the Martian robot Perseverance, which will look for signs of life on Mars and hopefully bring back rock samples at some point. And of course, the Holy Grail will eventually be launched: the Webb Telescope. Why are we so smart and also so stupid? We could have had the best civilization, the best society, and while this one is obviously much better for the individual than prior societies (even less than a century ago), it's so unfortunate that we are always stumbling, taking two steps forward and either one or two backward.
Hello! Feel free to chime in whenever you want! It tends to run on the heavier, larger side of RMBs, but there are moments of levity as well. :-D
And sometimes Elmo decides to rear its head, but we put a stop to that fairly quickly.
Verdant Haven, New Kvenland, Mount Seymour, Gloriosya, and 7 othersAtsvea, Lord Dominator, Turbeaux, Northern Wood, Kinectia, Lura, and Forestal
I just took this test myself, and my results were "Ecology - Equality - Humanity" with pragmatism as an additional characteristic. All but one axis had a plurality or majority of the bar grey. The most I scored in any aspect was 50% for "progressism", which I'm pretty sure is not a word. Maybe I was being too neutral in answering my quiz, because I believe in rehabilitation over punishment much more than that axis result would tell you (only 17%, though it is 73% grey).
Overall, it is kind of accurate, as I consider myself left-of-centre but not terribly so, and I do find myself looking at everything in a non-committal 'it depends' kind of way.
I kind of find political compass tests fun, and I enjoy seeing my placements even if I don't really think they're terribly representative of my real views (but they are usually in the ball park somewhere). It's an online quiz at the end of the day, so it's not going to be any more accurate than those other silly online tests, like "Which tarot major arcana are you?" or "How did you die in your past life?". I'd assume the only reason people take this one any more seriously is because it regards a more serious topic, but obviously it should still be taken with a grain of salt.
Mount Seymour, Atsvea, Ruinenlust, Lord Dominator, and 4 othersTurbeaux, Terrabod, Northern Wood, and Gaianists
I did a double-take over that as well, but it turns out it is actually a word. The terms it uses - Progressism and Conservatism - are synonyms for the more commonly used terms we hear now (Progressivism and Conservativism). Based on the language structure, I would hazard a guess that at their origins there was a slight difference - the used terms (-ism) refer to a commitment to the core values at play, while the more common terms (-ivism) would have refered to a commitment to the act of representing those values (being a progressive or a conservative), but any distinction, if indeed there was one, is no longer at play in common parlance. Both versions of both words can be found in the wild, being used interchangeably. I'd love to hear from any academic political theorists we have here whether or not there is currently a distinction in the scholarly arena!
Hear, hear.
Honestly, one of the reasons I enjoy these is because it makes me think about my own views. While the results are "internet quiz" in quality, it's always worth being challenged to consider one's own views on subjects that might not always be at the forefront of the mind.
Mount Seymour, Atsvea, Ruinenlust, Lord Dominator, and 5 othersTurbeaux, Northern Wood, Lura, Eco-empire, and Middle Barael
Hi.
Atsvea, Ruinenlust, Lord Dominator, Turbeaux, and 5 othersMyordas, Northern Wood, Pythaga, Middle Barael, and Forestal
Official Post
It's time for the run-off in our Crystal Jubilee Flag Contest! This is a contest between the top two vote-getters in the first round. Take a look in this dispatch, and carefully consider which one you'd like to see flying over Forest for our Jubilee:
It's time for the run-off! The top two vote-getters of the first round are...
Please cast your vote for round 2! The winner of this round will become the Forest Crystal Jubilee Flag!
-------
Round 1
Please select your favorite from among the following submissions!
Should a design receive a majority of the votes in the first round, it shall be declared the winner. If no flag receives a majority in the first round, a run-off shall be held between the two submissions receiving the most votes.
Thank you for the great participation in round one! I hope to see the same here in the second round.
Mozworld, Alcantaria, Mount Seymour, Gloriosya, and 7 othersAtsvea, Ruinenlust, Lord Dominator, Turbeaux, Northern Wood, Middle Barael, and Norginlajicratefe
PolitiScales Results
Equality · Humanity · Socialism
Constructivism 38% – 45% – 17% Essentialism
Rehabilitative Justice 71% – 24% – 5% Punitive Justice
Progressivism 43% – 36% – 21% Conservatism
Internationalism 33% – 53% – 14% Nationalism
Communism 33% – 53% – 14% Capitalism
Regulation 48% – 47% – 5% Laissez-faire
Ecology 36% – 47% – 17% Productivism
Revolution 14% – 43% – 43% Reformist
Pragmatism & Monarchism
Overall, the majority my results did not surprise me. However the high 'communism' rating as well as the key value of 'socialism' greatly surprised me. I have tried greatly to distance myself from being coined 'communist' or 'socialist'...as discussed here on many occasions in the United States these two terms are used in the context of Anti-Americanism and as ammunition in political feuds.
Though despite my own personal and albeit forced separation from the terminology of the left, my results are clear and I will admit many socialistic and communistic views resonate with me. My issue is though I do believe in the capitalistic system, though I do not believe in a pure capitalistic society much like what was seen during the Gilded Age in the U.S. Nor do I think or believe that a pure communistic society is possible. Frankly at this point I just don't know what to do and believe in regard to my own apparently communistic and socialistic views.
«12. . .1,8301,8311,8321,8331,8341,8351,836. . .2,6502,651»
Advertisement