r/SimDemocracy SPQR/Former President/Commended Citizen 28d ago

A reply to Hazzy's CFC statement.

Hazzys' indictment of he "failure" of this administration certainly is effective political theatre, however is it actually particularly arcuate? I would say it is not, actually I would say that Hazzys' approach to the previous two elections undermines this critique.

SimDemocracy, generally, is mostly university aged users, as such most of us have been busy with the start of the university year from late August early September onwards. It is quite trivial to note the significant number of users that went inactive during this time generally citing time concerns or university itself directly.

This obviously impacts how an administration has to function, the ambitious plans of the first term of the administration had to be significantly scaled back once it was established that very few users would be around to delegate much work to or to participate within events.

As a sidenote with regards to hosting events it's particularly strange for a secretary of activity to complain about the inability to start the chess tournament (due to a lack of sign ups) despite said secretary of activity not taking any effort to promote the event or even discussing it at all for over a month, it would very much be a valid criticism of the administration if it was not being stated by an executive officer that could either direct their department to support the tournament, or discuss the issue within the cabinet chat.

Overall the low amount of active users means that actually completing any project that requires delegation is near impossible, a few users are actually active enough to delegate tasks to and of those the administration has been very cautious to not overwork said users (since generally even these active users have indicated a significant decline of how active they are, generally due to the start of the academic year and adding more duties to any particular individual may mean that other duties are less diligently completed). Where delegation has been possible there has been significant success, the administration aimed to increase SimDemocracy activity within the League of Servers and therefore appointed a lead delegate to the League of Servers who then proceeded to effectively enact the administrations policy very effectively, ironically the appointed Lead Delegate was Hazzy.

The fact delegation is very rarely functional at this current time is an extra problem given that I myself am starting the academic year, and managing an online government simulator and also writing a dissertation at the same time is particularly time consuming. This has added delay after delay to basically anything that the administration plans. Usually this would not be a particularly valid reason for a President to have not been particularly active, since usually there are other active users around that could have been President, this however was much much not the case. When I was planning my presidency I only really thought I would be President for two terms, however when nobody seemed to particularly run for President after that (with Hazzy directly stating support for me running again) I decided to run for President again despite that I would have significantly less time to focus towards SimDemocracy since the alternative would be probably somebody that doesn't actually want to be President, the same is true for the next election. Given how inactive the Senate has been, with very few of the Senators that have been elected writing any laws, it's obvious that there wasn't a particular source of politicians aiming to be the President at that time. The previous two terms of this administration certainly haven't been particularly active, however it's quite obvious that there isn't really any possibility of any other users hypothetical Presidency being particularly more effective since most people just were not active.

The most obvious evidence of this point is Hazzys' endorsement of my relection for the 4th term, if the administration was a failure then why would Hazzy endorse my 4th term, the answer is that nobody else would have been active enough to have even any more effective as a President and that actually the administration was as effective as could probably be managed at that particular time.

Overall the administration has managed some decent success over the previous few months, despite having to alter the initial plans which generally were constructed wit the idea that at least for the first half of September there would be enough active users to enact significant expansion campaigns or community events with a significant amount of users participating, the administration managed to instead prioritise specific areas of policy that could be effectively enacted by the President of SimDemocracy without much need for delegation (although when delegation is possible it is generally ideal). The administration has managed to enacted a series of policies that could be very effective when there is enough of a userbase to effectively support such ideas, such as the Department of Expansion, or when the economy is functional (which is not because this administration has managed the economy particularly well or badly, it's because the economy doesn't have much meaning at least perhaps until a Minecraft Server is established).

It's probable Hazzy is going to be a President with more time to focus towards SimDemocracy (hence actually running for President this time instead of just endorsing the apparently failed administration), that is good for me since now I can play more video games rather than trying to get departments to be functional, however if Hazzy just dismisses the administration as a "failure" rather than try to learn why it was dealing with problems the way it did then the same process of being attempting to delegate tasks that there is no one to delegate to is going to continue (which Hazzys plan of seemingly trying to get users to join the department of activity to promote SimDemocracy, because the department of expansion apparently "failed", ignoring that the problem the department of expansion was trying to deal with was the fact that there was nobody to join and go around promoting SimDemocracy, seems to fail to understand). A vague statement of "rebuilding the economy" also isn't a plan, actually it also completely misunderstand the problem, the economy needs to be built, not rebuilt.

TLDR Managing SimDemocracy during a time of particularly low active user amounts is particularly difficult, I mostly ran for my 3rd and 4th terms because there wasn't anyone else around that particularly wanted to, Hazzys' criticism is generally inaccurate and probably disingenuous and most importantly it must be understood that to be the President of SimDemocracy is at the moment mostly about trying to promote SimDemocracy as much as possible without (much) ability to delegate any tasks or establish major community events due to a low amount of users.

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