Are you being deliberately obtuse with intent to frustrate?
Fact’s then.
The Federal Military is operating on previously declared and quietly extended War Powers under the oversight of Political Officers.
As a leader I do empathise with any other who is tasked with making difficult decisions.
Particularly political ones where vocal discontent is all but guaranteed, regardless of which path one chooses to take.
However it must be said that a lot of the overlapping discussions now taking place in the wake of events in Intaki are borne from questions that could have been answered, at no cost to security concerns.
Had the President liaised with the Intaki Assembly before the deployment of the Federation Navy, surely she, or at least her advisers, would have… or rather should have seen the value in referencing them in her speech that followed.
Instead the Assembly is conspicuous in its absence from her statement, which risks the conclusion that they were not consulted at all.
Such arbitrary and unilateral actions on the part of the central Federation government, over the heads of the Intaki Assembly, will always raise serious concerns and should make any supporter of the Federation uncomfortable because of the precedent it sets.
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This is true. The continued silence from the Assembly isn’t helping.
Indeed it should and indeed it does. I suppose I am simply vain enough to hope that there will be a satisfactory explanation for these events soon to come rather than allow myself to believe the worst about a government whose ideals I believe in, if not always its methods.
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What makes you think that The Assembly is not being censored?
How is the FIO any different from Heth’s Provists at this point?
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This is not my intent.
Yes, it is.
However, this doesn’t strike me as a comparison to ‘taking a parents’ rights.’ It strikes me more as simply a government not being as forthcoming as we want it to be. I’m choosing to accept that there may be more to the events than is apparently visible and hoping more information will come to light soon.
To be fair, the Assembly has a frustrating habit of being very tight lipped, as they were through the majority of the Lai Dai / Onikanabo raids, dubbed the Intaki Crisis a few years ago.
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I suspect the Assembly was not consulted in advance because of operational security concerns. I’m sure you remember reports of collaboration between some Assembly members and the occupying LDPS forces not long ago and the violence that erupted as the public became aware.
It should unquestionably have a principal role in the discussion of what next, though.
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Honestly? The impracticality of doing so.
They’re politicians. If you want to use the mechanisms of the Federal system to control people, you do it by letting politicians speak. When they don’t speak, people start asking questions. Censoring the Assembly means conspicuous silence. Letting them go in public and rant if they want to conveys a far stronger ‘everything is fine, nothing to see here, just people venting their spleens, as usual’ message at the Federal level.
So intentionally censoring them? It’d be about the most incompetent move the Federal government or the FIO could make. And the Feds are, after all, politicians themselves. They know that.
Add to that the fact that there’s no universal blackout of the Intaki system. So it wouldn’t be difficult to get a message out to say, ACN. And that’s a lot of staffers you’d have to constantly monitor to effectively censor the Assembly.
Effort-intensive, counterproductive, and completely impractical for more than a few days… all combine to point to them not being actively censored. It’s more likely they’re hunkered down waiting to see WTF happens next (and, as politicians, how they can benefit from it) before they risk upending the apple cart in ways they can’t walk back.
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A government should not allow that to happen to a citizen.
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I would argue that a neighbor shouldn’t allow that to happen to a neighbor. The burden of community care falls to the community, not the government.
A government exists to protect its citizens (realized through the armed forces at the command of that government) and to establish order (realized through the laws established and enforced by that government).
The more social burden you place on a government, the more control you give it over your life and the lives of those around you. For instance, if you make it the government’s responsibility to ensure all citizens have a minimal standard of life then the government becomes involved in both business and housing concerns in order to ensure these needs are provided. If you place the burden of ensuring citizens are fed then it becomes involved in food and so on. This pattern continues until the government has regulations and controls in every aspect of life to ensure that all citizens are given the same standard of living as all other citizens. While this isn’t inherently bad, it is also not inherently good. The more dependent upon your government you become, the less power you have to influence that government.
In the Federation, the government leaves provision to the businesses, organizations and charities throughout itself. There are thousands of options available for those needing assistance. While some may indeed find that nothing works for them, many others are provided for and given opportunity to rise above their present circumstances without becoming dependent on their government. This allows them to, in turn, be honest in their criticism of the government without becoming beholden to it.
A government exists to marshal the aggregate resources of a people in service of the aggregate interests1 of that people, within the framework established and mandated by that people.
One society may say ‘government should exist to provide cooperative military defense against hostile powers, and establish a system by which we can maintain domestic order through the application of justice and redress of civil wrongs with the state as a neutral arbiter’, and that’s fine.
Another may say ‘government should do those things, yes. However, as a society, we all have common needs that our common resources should be applied to meeting, such as emergency services to ensure my house doesn’t burn down, and someone having a sudden medical emergency is cared for quickly’, and that’s fine too.
Yet another may say ‘That’s all well and good, but everyone needs medical care and housing, too. These are common burdens that we as a society should be committing to ensuring all of us have. So we should form a group to marshal our combined resources in aggregate to meet the needs of the community that we’d have difficulty meeting as individuals. And because life in a modern society tends to make many demands on our time, attention, and knowledge2, it’s more efficient if we have the people involved doing it as their full-time job, not a side-issue they’re trying to pay attention to in their spare time. Oh, wait, we already have a group of people whose full-time job is marshaling our shared resources to meet our common needs… it’s called a government. Make them do it!’
And that, too, is perfectly fine.
There are pros and cons to all levels of government involvement. But to say that a government exists to do X and Y without recognizing that a government exists to do what the people it governs decide it exists to do misses the point of government in the first place. It is, after all, simply the aggregation of the masses’ money, power, and will.
Even in the Empire. If all of the commoners decided to off the Houses and be done with the Throne, even the Empire doesn’t have enough firepower to force them all to obey. Only to kill them. And if they kill all the masses, they won’t have an empire.
1. ‘Interests’, remember, is different from ‘wants’. People want many things. Most of them aren’t healthy or wise. It’s the job of government to make sure society is being guided in ways that are good and serve the long-term interests of the whole, even if those are not the ways the current majority want to go in the short-term.
2. Neither you, nor I, nor random average joe on the street, has the time at their disposal to be an expert in all things. We have lives. We have things we need to know. We have things we need our focus and attention to be on. I have watched incredibly intelligent people trip over themselves attempting to do ridiculously basic things simply because they have not had the mental bandwidth to add ‘walk and chew gum’ to the list of things their brains were already dealing with. Government is similar. Law and policy is similar. You want specialists doing those jobs, because there is a depth of knowledge needed, on a breadth of topics, that is never useful in any other role.
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And in the Federation all these choices exist to be exercised by Member States in accordance with the democratically expressed wishes of their citizens. The Federal Government has experimented with social policy in the past and it did not go well.
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You are correct, I did not intend to imply that all governments shared the same purpose but did imply that through exclusion of clarification. Thank you for providing it.
Sure, but that’s just a factor of scale. It only works if there’s general consensus at your operating scale, and one you get to a certain size, achieving that consensus becomes unwieldy and awkward.
By comparison, we leave most of those decisions of the role of leadership to each of the Clans. Then the Tribes decide among themselves how things should work within the Tribe. And then at the very top, the Sanmatar sends around assassins to murder anyone who might be a threat and plant evidence that they were spies working with the Amarr. 
But this isn’t about us. 
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Sounds strangely familiar though!
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It does.
I was tempted to reply to say that here we leave most of those decisions of the role of leadership to each of the member states. Then the District governments decide among themselves how things should work within the District. And then at the very top, the President sends around the Black Eagles, who are absolutely not involved in the deaths, in purely coincidental traffic accidents, of anyone who might be a threat, and plant evidence that they were spies working with the Caldari.
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The entire purpose of a government is to combine the resources of a community, in order to take care of problems identified by the community.
Being the President of the Gallente Federation, and thus representing trillions of individual souls, is perhaps the most challenging job in the entire cluster. While my views may not always line up with President Aguard, she certainly has accomplished more in her short tenure than any of her previous predecessors. For that, she undoubtedly has my respect.
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