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[E. Albright]

So one question I have is how would you like to see being able to target specific issues? To give an example of an idea for how to enable more focus on specific issues, you could have the LCS be able to pick a set of issues that are emphasized especially heavily, and have your actions be more effective on these issues. Activism, the Guardian, writing to papers would also focus on these issues. Perhaps the longer the LCS emphasizes the issue consistently the more experience and credibility you build with it, thus further increasing your power with the issue, a mechanic that you can see in play in the President Forever games.

I really like the idea of developing credibility. If I may be so bold as to suggest mechanics... Let the player select any or all issues to focus on with the "advocacy"-style activism (in which I'd include some of the Internet actions). Every member working towards an advocacy action would generate a certain amount of influence and credibility, based on the action and their relevant skill/stats. The gains in terms of credibility and public option would be spread amongst the issues, so if you "focus" on everything, you have minuscule gains, and if you're single-issue you have commensurately concentrated gains. Have a (hidden?) credibility score for every issue, perhaps structured like skills (if you really wanted to go overboard, have an organizational score and an individual score... it's all well and good for the ACLU to be very credible regarding free speech, but I'll pay more attention to their legal director than to a summer intern). Over time, working an issue would build up credibility, but if you then stop talking about it, your credibility would slowly decay.

[Fieari]

One thing that could be done is raising public interest in certain issues.  Once interest in the issue is up high enough, your actions will effect that issue.  Interest in issues should also DEGRADE over time.  And probably quickly.

This would be in addition to the credibility thing above.

Taxes - Mucking about with the economy would get people interested in the taxes issue.  Biggest effect would be when raiding corporations, but smaller shops could have an effect here too.  Paychecks make people care.

Abortion - More prostitution.

Animal Research - Obviously, just putting them in the news would raise interest.

Police Behavior - Get them to raid you with casualties.

Privacy - Trespassing, rifling through people's stuff, leaks on the CIA, etc.

Death Penalty - Get it in the news, probably by having a member of yours martyred.

Nuclear Power - Should this still be an issue?  Maybe a better issue would be nuclear WEAPONS.  In which case exposing power plants giving material to the military (or foreign military) would raise interest in the issue.

Pollution - Factory raids.

Worker Benefits - Have liberated immigrants engaged in activism.

Homosexual Tolerance -

Corporate Regulation - Corporate raids.

Free Speech - Publish controversial stuff in newspapers.

Flag Burning - As this is a grandstanding issue only, I think you'd need lawyer and judge sleepers in order to get this issue up in people's minds.

Gun Control - Use guns a lot.

[Little]

Or, just, you know, burn flag?

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Public interest right now amplifies the effectiveness of actions on those issues, but there isn't a minimum necessary to have an effect. It does decay over time though, dropping by 50% for each issue at the start of every month.

Flag burning is actually just a law and doesn't have its own public opinion issue. It's tied to free speech when people vote on it. But yeah, burning flag can affect the free speech issue... if you do it during a siege.

Gun control also doesn't have its own issue right now, but it should. I can imagine it going more restrictive if you kill people with legal guns, and more loose if you kill people with illegal guns. The idea is that if you're breaking the law, people lose faith in its effectiveness to stop criminal elements, and the "only criminals have guns" mentality takes hold and presses for repeal. If you're acting inside the law and still killing, people think the laws work, but need to be stricter.

[Gantolandon]

This depends. If you're arguing the police are incompetent at protecting citizens from criminals (which is, all other things being equal, what you're doing simply by not being caught if public option isn't positive towards the LCS), then yes, self-defense arguments are more applicable. If you're arguing that the police are brutal, unaccountable, uncontrolled loose cannons (i.e., publicly funded vigilantes pursuing their own agenda as they see fit), arguing that the proper response is more vigilantism would be a harder sell. The trick is to not "beat the police", but to "rip the corrupt heart out of the fascist goon squad so it can be replaced with accountable elected peacekeepers". Spin, and all that. Though yes, if public opinion on police is on the C+ end of the spectrum, I'd wholeheartedly agree that defeating the police at that time would have undesired side effects.

OK, I have never even been in the USA, so I'm not a correct person to argue in that matter. From what I heard, many Americans view the second amendment not only as a mean to protect themselves from random violence, but also from excessive government control. That's why I assumed that telling the people that the police is not to be trusted would result in people arming themselves.

OK, another random idea - organisations could be used to add some crime syndicates (the mob for example). They wouldn't try to change the law (at least by public protests), but they could:


1. Inspire fear in the population - their actions would always be seen as rampage. They are a good reason to respect the police and demand better weapon access.
2. Actually help the player - we already have the black market. I suppose that it should be controlled by one of the crime organizations. That's it, you pissed off Mr Corleone, no M16s for you.
3. "Patron" over some activities, especially illegal ones.

Animal Research - Obviously, just putting them in the news would raise interest.

Especially if you let some misshapen nightmares loose.

Death Penalty - Get it in the news, probably by having a member of yours martyred.

Police Behavior - Get them to raid you with casualties.

This could be effective when most of the casualties never did anything more outrageous than spraying graffiti. Or, even worse, they're well known from their volontary public service. Killing the "Dallas Butcher" would, in fact, encourage people to support death penalty.

Homosexual Tolerance

I'm not even sure that it should exist as a separate issue. It usually comes in a package with other, sexually-themed opinions. For example that prostititution shouldn't be penalized, condoms are not for filthy perverts who want to engage in adultery without consequences, and so. Of course an individual doesn't have to support every sexual activity or none, but they could be grouped by amount of liberalism nessesary to accept this. Most of the people who view pre-marital sex as sin would propably be opposed to homosexuality as well.

I believe that an answer to the question - should the homosexual tolerance be a separate issue? - depends from what opposition should be implemented in the game. If we assume that it's all about the religion, more generalized sexual-themed issue would be just fine. We could add a church as an organisation and/or a site and that should be OK. If we want implement, for example, feminists (who have nothing against homosexuality, but are ideologically opposed to prostitution or porn industry), at least those issues should be separated.

[E. Albright]

OK, I have never even been in the USA, so I'm not a correct person to argue in that matter. From what I heard, many Americans view the second amendment not only as a mean to protect themselves from random violence, but also from excessive government control. That's why I assumed that telling the people that the police is not to be trusted would result in people arming themselves.

I don't think it's safe to say "many" do. Some, yes, and it tends to be geographically distributed. But we're moving into militia mentalities for the most part with this.

If we want implement, for example, feminists (who have nothing against homosexuality, but are ideologically opposed to prostitution or porn industry), at least those issues should be separated.

Urk! Noooooo! Let's not go there. There are vehemently opposed pro- and anti-porn (and/or sex work) camps in the sprawling jumble of feminist ideologies, and I'd be hesitant to try to declare one predominant over the other. You're making a valid point that these issues ought to be separate (as most anti-porn liberals or feminists are likely neutral to or allied with LGBT activists), but feminists are notoriously non-homogeneous with their stances, to the point that random unnamed "feminists" can't be assumed to be for anything whatever beyond bettering the lot of women in society.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I like Gantolandon's approach to thinking about the issues and public reaction to various events. Breaking LCS mass murderers out of jail pushes people toward death penalty, while having respected LCS community members who make politically-themed graffiti murals executed pushes people away from it.

On the issue of guns being protection against tyranny vs. protection against random crime, the majority of people in the US don't think about guns as something they need to protect them from the government, as the government in the US isn't seen as particularly threatening. Plus, with the technology of today, no citizen militia is going to be able to seriously stand up to the US Army. With that said, the reason the US Constitution guarantees the right to keep and bear arms is to ensure that a militia can be formed, whether to stop external aggression or as a safeguard against a tyrannical government, and most people know that.

The danger the LCS faces is that by taking up arms against the government, they serve to bring the militia theory into light more than it is now, and that can work against them. If they are violent and more popular than the police, people may begin to see the LCS as a sort of popular militia standing up to protect the people from government brutality, thus reinforcing the need to allow them to have access to weapons. If they are unpopular, or the police are respected, there will be little merit to the militia argument, and the debate will just be whether more guns on the street will make life harder or easier for criminals. The other risk is that if the LCS is really hated, and the CCS is giving them a hard time, that kind of vigilantism could be seen as a militia force.

It is a good point that feminism is very diverse. This is probably a big part of the decline in respect a lot of people give toward the feminist label in general, as for just about any point of view you might have there are going to be a lot of people who call themselves feminists that have ideas you find offensive. A pretty sad place to be for an otherwise laudable ideology.

[E. Albright]

If they are violent and more popular than the police, people may begin to see the LCS as a sort of popular militia standing up to protect the people from government brutality, thus reinforcing the need to allow them to have access to weapons. If they are unpopular, or the police are respected, there will be little merit to the militia argument, and the debate will just be whether more guns on the street will make life harder or easier for criminals.

In this respect, if an Apolitical Crime Squad (i.e., organized crime) faction were added at some point, the LCS could bolster its legitimacy by battling it as well. As you point out, the key goal is to be more popular than your opponents. This hinges on the same point as the old counterinsurgency maxim: the government succeeds not just when it shows the people that it can protect them from the insurgents, but also that the insurgents can't protect them from it. A lot of that comes down to convincing the people that they need to be protected, and that spin is the basic difference between a people's militia and domestic terrorists.

Which is to say, more interleaved consequences! Nothing but violence should be fairly easy to twist and spin as terrorism; community outreach should be needed to stay on the right side of public opinion. Currently, the police will target some of your outreach (e.g., tagging, civil disobedience); it might be nice to be able to undercut CCS outreach as well (but then, they'd be free to hit you back, too, hehehe...)

It is a good point that feminism is very diverse. This is probably a big part of the decline in respect a lot of people give toward the feminist label in general, as for just about any point of view you might have there are going to be a lot of people who call themselves feminists that have ideas you find offensive. A pretty sad place to be for an otherwise laudable ideology.

While it's true that brand dilution from rampant ideological splintering has done a lot to hurt the reputation of feminism (to say nothing of what such circular-firing-squad diversity has done to its ability to present a united front), I'd suspect that reactionary pushback has probably played a larger role. Since the heyday of 2nd-wave feminism, anti-feminists have keenly pushed the idea that the feminists won, and there's no more need for feminism in the West (though of course it remains a handy bludgeon to attack foreign rivals with). Just like, ya know, the civil rights movement in the US abolished racism back in the 60s. This idea, while eminently silly, has a disturbing amount of traction in popular culture, leaving the stereotype of a feminist as a dour, humorless misandrist, whose goal cannot possibly be equal rights for women, since, why, they already have them! Being re-defined and re-framed by the movement's enemies has done as much if not more damage to its credibility than the actual splintering of the movement (with its subsequent watering down of the specificity of the label to nigh incoherence).

Which brings us back to LCS; I strongly support the idea that your popularity should very much determine how you're able to positively affect public opinion, up to the point of some issues being toxic for you until you "rehabilitate" your image (or drag your rivals down to your level ). If you're unpopular, there's a fairly limited amount of non-advocacy activism you could perform and evade bad press. Loosing mutant monstrosities is actually the only thing that springs to mind; everything else should be fairly spinable, depending on your foes' credibility...

[mainiac]

[quote author=Jonathan S. Fox
Gun control also doesn't have its own issue right now, but it should. I can imagine it going more restrictive if you kill people with legal guns, and more loose if you kill people with illegal guns. The idea is that if you're breaking the law, people lose faith in its effectiveness to stop criminal elements, and the "only criminals have guns" mentality takes hold and presses for repeal. If you're acting inside the law and still killing, people think the laws work, but need to be stricter.
[/quote]

This idea is awesome sauce.



Could all of sex be clustered together as one issue?  The L+ possition could be free love (gay marriage, public nudity legal, prostitution legal, etc.) while the C+ would be well, conservative (homosexuality illegal, strict decency laws, etc.)  Seems simpler that a society open about sex is open about all aspects.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I'm thinking perhaps it's wrapped into one public opinion, with multiple laws tied to that public opinion. Thus you are generally influencing the sexual morals of society, but gay rights laws are not necessarily prostitution legalization, and prostitution legalization is not necessarily public nudity legalization.

With more laws added it does make the game change more slowly over time, but I wonder if the main drawbacks to this couldn't be changed by altering the win conditions. Or maybe the win condition is fine, and the game doesn't have to be winnable in a reasonable amount of time anyway. Maybe we're just lucky LCS actually HAS a win condition.

[EuchreJack]

As long as sleepers remain effective, the length of time to victory shouldn't be a major problem, just as long as all the sleepers don't die of old age before victory can be achieved.

[Servant Corps]

Two ideas:
1) If you have a Military issue, the EL position could be having no military whatsoever, instead allowing for ad-hoc milita committes to defend the nation rather than a standing force (which would very well justify the existance of the "LCS" in an EL nation where guns are banned except for the military, since the "LCS" would be one of those ad-hoc militas).

2) What about a "Terrorism" issue? Conservatives would call for high jail sentences, punishments, and military raids in order to counter terrorism, while Liberals will address the "roots of the problems" (i.e., give into the demands of the LCS in order to make them stop committing terrorism).

[Little]

I think we're making too many issues.

[E. Albright]

One thing to remember when looking to add issues is whether they can be affected at the municipal level, and whether their effects at that level would be distinct from other issues. E.g., "Terrorism" at the local level is (for functional purposes) covered by privacy and police regulation.

[Servant Corps]

I think I have came up with three possible new laws, the last one being a retread of the 'international politics' law...My goal is to fit Liberal Elite's goal, of these debates being severely outdated. Since I am against creating new threads, I bumped this old one instead.

---LAW_TORT: Connected to views on Corporation Regulation, and likely might be considered a subset of regulation. This law determines how much corporations can be sued by private citizens for violating their rights. Conservatives would push for "tort reform" that will provide immunity to Corporations, while Liberals will push for less limits on private citizens' rights to sue Corporations. At L+ laws, LCS would be allowed to launch lawsuits against Corporate mercs.

---LAW_EARMARKS: Earmarks are basically the money the government hands out to local states to fund specific projects, thereby helping the local state out. Composed of about 1% of the national budget (meaning it's fairly minor), and parties do switch on the issue depending on who's actually in power. But it can be assumed in the twisted world of LCS, conservatives desire to end earmarks (seeing earmarks as a symbol of big government and a pointless waste of money), while liberals desire earmarks to be protected as a way to help local communities out, but regulated heavily to prevent abuse.

---LAW_DIPLOMACY && LAW_IDEOLOGY: This affects the foreign policy of the government, dividing it into two laws. LAW_IDEOLOGY focuses on what is America's goal in the international community: Promoting American freedom/'interests' (C+) or Promoting Human Rights (L+). LAW_DIPLOMACY focuses on how America seeks to achieve the goals set out in LAW_IDEOLOGY, either being adverse and confrontational (C+) or cooperative and willing to work within the international framework (L+). Perhaps a bit too complicated, but due to the complexities of how the two ideologies view "international politics", it seems better to just have two scales.

The only problem is, I don't know of exactly how LAW_DIPLOMACY && LAW_IDEOLOGY can really affect America back at home. So it does seem a tad stupid.