The merger between the CDS and Al Andalus is no more. At a community meeting on 21 July, the Al Andalus Estate Owner recommended that the merger be dissolved and, with some disagreement from a few, it would seem most were happy to go along with the recommendation. You can read the full transcript here.
Should we rejoice? Tear our clothes and gnash our teeth? I must confess to a mixture of feelings. They are, variously, disappointment, anger and relief. But the point is to think and not only to feel and I hope that we can learn some lessons from this experience.
I'm disappointed because I thought the merger was potentially good for both communities. I thought the CDS was getting more citizens and would benefit from an infusion of new blood. Al Andalus had got beyond being Michel Manen's vanity project (and jettisoned him in the process). Sure, some of their pet projects seemed to be achingly politically correct - 'Understanding Islam', promoting the 'Convivencia' as a golden era of enlightened Muslim rule - but so what? What would be the problem with having a few more lefties and liberals in the CDS even if some are the woolly-headed sort? None, from my perspective! I thought that Al Andalus would benefit too. They had examined how to establish their own governance arrangements and come up with similar proposals to our own representative democracy. Here is the CDS with a set of tried-and-tested institutions in place. Why not just adopt them and integrate the two electorates? I thought that the Al Andalucians would be interested in learning about how we did things in the CDS, joining factions, establishing new ones and participating in our politics. But, I was wrong both about the motives for the merger and what Al Andalus, or at least its leaders, wanted from it. That brings me to anger…
I'm angry because the CDS was sold a pup. We were told by the architects of the merger not to behave like conquering Conquistadores (i.e. ask any questions) but, in fact, the plan was for AA to conquer the CDS. AA did not join the CDS accepting the representative democracy we have or the institutions we have built up and refined over the years but in order to overturn them.
The AA leading clique and several of its representatives on the CDS Representative Assembly, aided and abetted by some CDS citizens with a foot in both camps, attacked everything they did not like about the CDS from day one. Most of the attack was rather incoherent. We were continually told that AA 'did things better' but not how. We were told that the CDS needed to be 'more like AA' but there were no proposals for actual change. In the end, "factions" were demonised as the problem, so the CDS changed its electoral laws to allow any citizen to stand for election to the Representative Assembly without needing a faction label. But, the AA clique were still not satisfied and threatened that, unless we changed, they might invoke the clause in the merger agreement that allowed them to dissolve it at the one year point.
The final straw, presented as the reason for dissolving the merger, was that the CDS side 'failed to deliver on its side of the agreement'. Critics pointed to the failure to establish a non-profit corporation for AA to transfer ownership of the AA sims to. This aspect of the merger agreement would have benefitted from greater inspection (and would have got it if the architects of the merger had not been so neuralgic about any questioning of their plans). Did it really make sense for the CDS to invest time and effort in establishing a non-profit when there was a perfectly good one already owning the sims? Did it make any sense to invest time and effort in doing this when AA could walk away from the agreement after a year (and continually threatened to do so and, in the end, did!)
I'm really angry because the architects of this aborted merger have wasted eighteen months of everyone's time, in both communities, with this crap. This merger has absorbed time and effort which could have been spent on other things such as bringing in new people, planning more interesting events, sim redevelopment, even expansion. Instead we have had a year-long dysfunctional relationship which has benefitted no one.
I am also relieved. The past year has been horrendous but the CDS is still here and fundamentally sound. Our institutions of government and the Constitution survived. Our finances remain solid. The prospect of replacing 'representative democracy' with 'collaborative democracy' or 'participatory democracy' or some other thing that means 'not democracy' has receded… but not entirely. Al Andalus is no longer part of the CDS and the people who resided solely in AA are gone but there were always a fair number of dual citizens and some of the more rabid attackers of the CDS are still around - many of them are current, or former prominent government members. So the fight is not over yet.
As for Al Andalus, well… the reasons that prompted the merger in the first place are still present - over-reliance on one person to pay all the bills and do all the work. It's questionable whether AA really pays its way or not. I predict it will continue, for now, but it is unlikely to survive another change in leadership.
Here are some lessons I hope we can learn from this experience:
1. We should welcome questions not stifle them.
When the CDS is facing a big decision - the Judiciary Act; merger with Al Andalus - we need to listen to people who disagree with, or who question, the proposal. If you don't, you miss out on potentially valuable insight and you store up problems for the future. It's never a good idea to make people feel they have not been listened to.
2. We need more direct talk between citizens and fewer people claiming to speak for others.
Part of the problem here is that we could never find out what AA people wanted because they never spoke for themselves! Views were always presented to us second hand by a spokesperson. This made it difficult to assess what people really think (as opposed to the spin put on it by others) and it meant views could not be discussed properly; you can't ask 'why do you think that?' through an intermediary. When we tried to find out if the AA people actually *wanted* the merger by holding a referendum, the AA leadership clique tried to stop it, prevented us from finding out what each community thought and then advised AA people to abstain from the referendum "because it's a trap"!
3. Small steps are better than grand gestures.
We had lots of options before the merger was settled on. We could have just colocated the sims; we could have just established joint groups and attended each others events; we could have discussed federation rather than union. But all of these small step options were put to one side and dismissed out of hand in favour of the maximalist option. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see this was not such a good idea.
4. Beware 'a man with a plan'.
The Judiciary Act, CARE, the merger. These were all big plans with a very forceful avatar behind them. We need to be firmer in subjecting 'big plans' to scrutiny and saying 'no' when we need to. We could have saved ourselves a hell of a lot of sturm und drang in the past few years if we simply learned to say 'no' firmly when 'a man with a plan' breezes into town and tells us why we are doing everything wrong. Better to point them in the direction of Caledon and export our problems!
8 comments:
Hi Patroklus, First an apology : this comment is a test that I can actually post a commentary to a Google Blog at all, so that when I see this sentence, I'll know that I've done it!
And yes, I'm angry too. I joined CDS with the clear understanding that it was a democracy, a representational democracy, but above all one that was accepted and celebrated as such by everyone taking part. So when I find open advocates of what I call "mobocracy" taking advantage of a process they find to be abhorrent to them, I'm reminded of the last days of the Weimar Republic (who, according to George Mikes, were so fair that they gave every chance to its enemies to destroy the Republic) ... and feel betrayed.
Meanwhile, I still am a resident in both camps, and I notice one thing: that in AA, rancour has not ceased from the moment of the separation.
Finally, on a personal note, I hope that both the move and the change of job are turning out as you would wish.
Pip Torok
I'm glad you wrote this post on 9/11, as Islam was and is in part responsible for 9/11, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise -- just like the Catholic Church was and is in part responsible for the Holocaust, and has a moral obligation to make amends and disassociate itself from complicity and extremism. You no doubt didn't really intend that, except subconsciously, but it's good it's out there.
I'm very big on representative democracy ( don't know what you mean to do by calling it "representational" but "representative" means you elect representatives, pure and simple). I believe in the power of parliaments and congresses and the separation of powers and the legislative branch. So that part's all good. Of course, you are all terribly sectarian so you struggle because you're inflexible and impractical.
I wonder why there isn't a faction called Social Capitalism lol. Nowhere. Not in real life, even. Socialists have to qualify democracy, and hence make it free. They never think to qualify capitalism, so much do they repudiate it. But a social and moral capitalism is possible, whereas a socialist system usually tends toward crime because of its suppression of dissent/feedback and suppression of the natural human activity of marketing.
The caliphate-promoting Al Andalus may be only a caricature, and may not even have any real Muslims in it, but it does present the real problems of the Muslim world for the West -- that neuralgic thin-skinned willingess to be offended at every turn; that propensity for evasiveness and failure to disclose; these are the closed Arabic societies of our real world that present such a form of oppression to their own people.
And so much more. The analogies are there to be seen.
You should never have joined with any project promoting theocracy, a caliphate, and undermining democracy and quelling dissent. While that was obviously happening during the debate about the merger and during the merger, you should have pulled out. THat would have been the democratic thing to do.
What is it about the leftist mind that is so weak, that always seeks totalitarian order, that is always tempted by the fascistic or the communistic world? That always, in search of the "enemy of my enemies who is my friend" finds and promotes unfreedom?
Pat, you're a disgusting excuse of a human being and a disgrace to democracy. Human progress has always been about overcoming vermin like you and that is what CDS will continue to strive for along with the rest of humanity.
I hope the worst for you, your kind and their blind, despicable, foolish supporters.
thankfully, you'll be forgotten soon enough and only remembered as a lying, deceitful blight on the society.
I would personally like to ask you to please leave the CDS and never return. you're a greedy, self-serving cancer that does nothing but stifle and kill evolution.
"John". I have no idea who you are. Please be aware that you need to give a RL or SL name to post here. I'm not quite sure I understand why you are so filled with hate but you discredit your own argument with your bile. Next time, try using reasons and arguments to make your case.
john is my real name. you know me as solomon, and i know you as a dishonest and manipulative example of the drawbacks of democracy. and no, screw the arguments you want to use to twist and distort anyway, you vile coward. you know exactly what i'm talking about, as does anyone who reads your trash.
anyone who knows your politics and methods will recognize my words as truth, even if they defend you because they benefit from or share your destructive loathing of real freedom.
you're a plague on humanity and if i had my way, you'd be locked up.
and before you launch into the response you're planning that calls me a hater of freedom by wanting to restrict yours (you transparent fool), i will openly admit that i don't believe all voices have a place at the table of progress. voices like yours deserve only to be heard as distant echos from some far off prison cell, reminding us all of what we know to be wrong and want to evolve from as a society, along with the thieves, rapists, and other self-hating criminals.
Hi John/Solomon, welcome to my blog. I've often wondered why totalitarian thugs like you are attracted to an experiment in democratic self-government in a virtual world; maybe I'll write a post on that at some future point.
Hello, John/Solomon ...
An interesting set of malicious diatribes, all the more interesting for failing to address any argument on its own terms. Almost as if these gratuitous comments can be wheeled-out, whenever they're needed, to whomever, upon any given occasion.
Could this be the case, John/Solomon? Psychological projection? Let's see what The Psychology Wiki says ...
"Psychological projection (or projection bias) can be defined as unconsciously assuming that others share the same or similar thoughts, beliefs, values, or positions on any given subject. According to the theories of Sigmund Freud, it is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one "projects" one's own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings—basically parts of oneself—onto someone else (usually another person, but psychological projection onto animals and inanimate objects also occurs). The principle of projection is well-established in psychology."
If this is valid, your insults in fact become very interesting reading:
"vermin like you ..."
"lying deceitful blight on [the] society"
"greedy self-serving cancer etc."
"dishonest and manipulative example of the drawbacks [?!] of democracy"
All these delightful vignettes belong to you , John/Solomon ... if there is validity in what Jung and Freud say here.
No doubt Jung, Freud, and myself will join Pat in becoming targets to be smeared in turn by you. Meantime, I'll concentrate on the lessons we can learn, that is to say the actual subject of Pat's blog .
Pip Torok
DE NIHILO NIHIL
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