Joining the Party

General
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(Side note: I promise I will get back to writing soon. Rebuilding networks is, alas, a slow process when they’re quite this complex.)

In a spinoff from the increasingly lengthy Post-Contact Hilarity thread, please submit your candidates and reasoning for countries (and other groups) that might find themselves interested, post-contact, in a good perusal of SO-0300 – So, You Want To Join The Empire?: Applying for Admission (or, in the latter case, probably SO-1463 – So, You Want To Be Liberated?: Requesting Imperial Interventions, unless they’re planning to have a whip-round and buy an artificial island first, or some such).

(Bonus points if there’s a cryosquid’s chance in hell of the ensuing request being accepted.)

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Honestly, I’d give the United States a good try, especially if you move out of the urban enclaves. For the most part, the issues of a lot of places in the States are failures of logistics and the damned monkey urge to imitate people “demonstrating” higher-tier behaviors.

I’m wondering what sort of muscle injuries would result if North Korea tried to fill out a SO-0300, and could we get video on that, with the full rebuttal?

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…I’m not seeing it, myself.

The admission procedure is for polities as a whole, note, which means that while they might be willing to accept individual immigrants who are fed up with the status not being quo, any application under SO-0300 has to deal with the uncomfortable facts that we (as a polity entire) currently lead the world in publicly prominent dysfunctional assholes, and that every major part of our political spectrum is currently a cheerleader for authoritarian dipshittery, differing only in flavor.

Even allowing for the discombobulating effects of first contact, it’s very hard to imagine how we could get from here to a political state inclined to make an SO-0300 application, short of postulating an unlikely coup by the Science Fiction Fans Opposed To 100%-Dick Being Party, and even then, they’re gonna be a long, long way from majority support.

Meanwhile, from the other side - hm. What’s diplomatic language for “Insofar as basically your entire public discourse indicates that despite your hopeful beginnings, y’all today wouldn’t recognize liberty if she painted herself magenta, dressed in a tutu, and danced the fandango on your empty skulls, ain’t no way this is happening,” again?

Ah, I have it –

“We commend to you the enlightened course of once again attempting to fulfil the promise of your Declaration of Independence. Once that has been achieved, or at the least some significant progress has been made in that direction, we will consider reconsidering your application.”

Disillusionment may be making me a little harsh, but I do maintain that the last few years would go a long way towards convincing them that where civilized values are concerned, we’re against them.

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SO-1463 it is, then.

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Things to note about applications under 1463:

  • They’re really, really hard, because you’re basically asking for blood and gold to be expended on you.
  • While some interventions end up as admissions or annexations, that’s neither a necessary nor the most frequent result.
  • What you get may not be what you asked for. You may have a request in mind when you send the diplomatic paperwork, but when you ask the Empire to intervene, it will intervene in whatever manner it damn well pleases. Force majeure is like that; if you call on god, you’re gonna get what It thinks you ought to have.

That being said, IMO, probably (as I am not all-knowing) the best chance anyone might have for a successful 1463 on Earth today would be Ukraine, on the grounds that (a) they do love to fight for freedom, even the imperfect kind, and (b) the type of war the Russian military is making is finely calculated to make even the most restrained IN captains give their permissive action links longing looks and contemplate just how far their discretion extends.

(Such intervention may not be entirely desirable in various eyes, inasmuch as it would probably involve an opening barrage of tactical nukes to interdict supply lines on the other side of the border, escalation be damned, and because under IMS rules of war, war criming leads directly to “no quarter” being the order of the day, Earth-local international law be fucked.

Quarter is for soldiers, belike¹.)

It is, I suppose, theoretically possible that a secessionist movement of one kind or another might attempt to make a 1463 application, but since most of those I am aware of at the moment usually want to secede at least partly because they want to be much bigger dicks to someone than their central government is prepared to be, as of now, it is most likely that such applications will end up in the big file of applications rejected under code six, “The Revolution Would Not Be Civilized”.

Footnotes:

  1. This has been known to catch out people hiring those mercenary units which offer to sell people the glorious Imperial military tradition, and the commanders of such units tend, thus, to be lamentably well practiced in explaining to their employers that requiring their troops to take prisoner and not summarily execute those caught robbing, raping, murdering, and torturing civilians and prisoners would have unacceptably negative consequences for unit morale.
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…I suspect that if you wanted to see some really big changes in the US, hire an Imperial company to build a fraud-proof election system (i.e. how the dead vote early and often in Chicago and New Orleans…). I think we’ll see some of the problem that we’ve had the last 20-25 years rapidly decrease.

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Maybe. But you do realize that there’s literally no-one there who would believe in getting positive results from that for longer than it took for the incredulity to wear off?

Having just come from a “this is why we can’t have nice things” video of people robbing and vandalizing delivery robots on the streets of Austin, I feel like I should clarify one point:

It’s involuntary annexations, not voluntary admissions, where it’s considered acceptable for the satrap to give the “Now, you will all kindly conduct yourselves in a civilized and gentlesophly manner, lest I have to fuckin’ kill you all, savvy?” speech¹, and even then, it’s considered a very, very bad sign.

So, anyway. I have some candidates from East Asia.

One: Taiwan.

Who are a good candidate from the Empire’s point of view by virtue of being wealthy, civilized, and not known for the kind of social dysfunction that seems best solved by KEWs. From both perspectives, also in an excellent position to benefit hugely from infusions of capital, tech, and membership in the galaxy’s largest free trade zone.

And the elephant in the room: the PRC are getting increasingly inclined to threaten, bluster, and prepare to actually invade, and security guarantees from the US are seeming very words-on-a-page-y right now for those paying attention. The Empire, meanwhile, has an easily checkable reputation for faithfulness to its allies, and finds planetary nuclear powers an amusing if trivial challenge. (“Yah, detail a Sparkly Boy to low orbit, 'kay?”)

tl;dr if you’re probably going to end up as part of someone’s empire, you might as well pick the one that is interested in mutual profit and advancement rather than crushing the rebellious province, and which is absolutely not interested in forcing your entire society into the mold of Mao-Jinping Thought.

Two: Japan.

Repeat the first paragraph above, 'cause everything in it is pretty much the same.

Now consider that what they have to offer in this case is basically all carrot. They have a cure for demographic decline - or, at least, when you have immortagens, backups, and rejuvenation, you now have all the time in the world to solve your demographic decline, because no-one dies and everyone’s as young as they want to feel. Suddenly it takes a TFR only slightly above zero to maintain population.

(Although, really, my money says that that problem may also be self-solving inasmuch as anyone who can make this deal work is likely to observe their local economic figures going exponential with great rapidity, because of the combination of, on the one hand, picking places likely to grab the opportunity and run with it given half a chance, and on the other, the nice chaps at Gilea & Co. are basically poised to shovel capital into this sort of opportunity when it comes along.)

  1. He would prefer not to. But he has great respect for all your freedoms, including the freedom to suffer the consequences you were just warned about. Godsdammit.
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My only issue with Japan (as someone who’s been looking at the country from the outside in a semi-amateur way doing character research) is that there are probably a few cultural disconnects that would throw most Imperials. Not the least of which is a massive face culture issue-they’re more than willing to let a social problem run right off a cliff than to admit to it. Engineering, not too bad or hard sciences. Dealing with things that can be proven with facts and information, not too bad either.

But when going to see a psychologist was (and still is) considered a prima facae admittance that you need an involuntary psych commitment, there’s an issue. And let’s not talk about the bullying culture or “black” corporations, or that they actually have a word for working yourself to death for a company (Karoshi, btw)…

(And you can be assured that AI citizenship will be on the list of things passed by the Diet ASAP, as long as they get cute cat-girl bots.)

An honest election in a lot of places (mostly “blue” for reasons these days, but there’s a few “red” places as well) would be astonishing. And scary to the PTB.

The robot theft thing would be easily handled by giving the robot a taser and a clear vocal warning that is said in the poor idiot’s language. Anybody that dumb needs to be shocked.

(And in some cases better parenting. The absolute knowledge that you might be safer in jail than having your abuela come and drag you home by your ear could be an interesting deterrent…)

But, I fully agree that we’re not letting Darwin take off the curdled top-scum of the pond on a regular enough basis. I just wish it wasn’t messy to do the cleaning…

“What did that fuckwit do?”
“Tried to outrun an angry dar-bandal. After being warned about three times.”
“…suicide by stupid?”
“Going to make an intersting report.”

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I suspect New Zealand would seriously consider it, maybe even get to the point of having a vote about it, and then realise there isn’t enough popular support.1

Although unlike many similar situations in Earth history, I suspect the Imperials would not take offense to New Zealand thinking about it very carefully and then declining due to dissent. It shows they’re trying.

  1. Where in this case “enough popular support” could well require “an absolute thumping majority”; if the minority against it was small enough, Australia would probably be willing to offer citizenship to those opposed. Less because Australia would want that group in particular, more because Australia would love the trade opportunities, would be willing and capable of absorbing a large town’s worth of annoyances in exchange, and has the mutual legal framework2 to pull it off.

  2. Although aussie law scholars might then have a minor headache figuring out if we need to amend our own constitution; due to the slightly odd circumstances of how Australia and New Zealand gained their independence, there’s actually provisions for the two countries deciding to merge. I have no idea what happens to those if they decide to merge with someone else.

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Oh, that’s an interesting bit of technicality… and in the constitution, too!

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Yeah, but for these purposes, you have to look at it from their point of view. (Not that, were it politically possible, that would stop anyone from selling a nice foolproof voting system, anticipating gleefully both the chaos to come from the actual results and the many, many trouble tickets soon to be closed as “Working As Designed”.)

Completely disregarding anything I might think, from their perspective, any election no matter how honest has people choosing between the Republican Party, who they find utterly contemptible in every form, aspect, and manifestation; the Democratic Party, who they find utterly contemptible in every form, aspect, and manifestation; and as a distant third runner, the Libertarian Party, who are even worse.

Oh, it would certainly be a messy and difficult integration, but from a realistic point of view, they’re all messy and difficult integrations.

(The trick is picking the messy and difficult integrations that can work out without blood in the streets, belike.)

Ooh, interesting.

/me does some reading on current New Zealand politics.

Interesting indeed.

Oh, certainly. And the process is arranged with a number of intermediate stages (allies, client-states of various degree, satrapies), too, just to let people figure out what they’re getting into and if they really want to do so. These days, the Empire is very clear that it only wants members who want to be in the club - and the Ministry of State and Outlands, Highly Unofficial Recruitment Ad-Hoc, are pretty damn confident that they can make the benefits sell themselves.

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…the chaos would be a big part of it. Huge part, even. Massively hilarious part, even.

Even if the people I hated won, it would be “welp! Time for me to get out of this territory,” and find somewhere sane to reside.

Mars is starting to look like a good option…

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Added a post relevant to this one over here: Collections: The Status Quo Coalition - #2 by avatar

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Three: Singapore?

Same basic reasons.

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Meh. In our current state both the populace and the government would probably want in due to the goodies, the toys, and the trade, but we’d fail every ideological pre-requisite needed for acceptance.

That’s not going to stop the government immediately creating a crash-course to educate the entire population on the Imperial way of thinking, of course.

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It occurs to me the Hong Kong seccessionists might have a strong case the eldrae could appreciate. The PRC clearly broke the terms, and what was said about Taiwan certainly applied to HK.

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Apropos of nothing, although it will be coming back around to this thread at the end, this morning I happened to read an article about a city in Michigan whose activist community have found occasion to go from being terribly proud about being the first city in the US with an all-Muslim city government only to be shocked and horrified and surprised that their new city government is not totally on board with such things as queer folk, and is happy to do the things that Republicans probably couldn’t get away with by way of repressing public signifiers of querity.

So I was thinking about this fine example of the We Are Struggling Together trope (with a side order of “no-one explained to you that not everyone buys into the universal alliance of all oppressed peoples theory, huh?”), and thinking about certain remarks about the “narrow culture” of the Empire, and it occurs to me to wonder if I have been too subtle in noting certain things. (If anything, I would have thought rather the opposite, but y’all’re the readers, not me. It’s hard to look at your own work with an outside view.)

Specifically that right from its beginnings, the Empire was the creation of people who valued a cosmopolitan, eudaemonic, open, consensual, high-trust culture, and made damn sure to build right into its institutions and culture the needful to ensure that it stayed one, starting with not giving citizen-shareholdership (“a privilege, not a right”) away to just anyone, and ending with assorted semi-formal and informal mechanisms intended to ensure that people who aren’t willing to get with the fuckin’ niceness and harmony program can either not let the door hit them in the ass on the way out voluntarily, or be ground to a fine and bitter paste in the course of being thrown out otherwise.

Now, they’re a lot better at fine-tuning it than most Earthly examples, and do a good job of avoiding turning the preservation of harmony into an excuse for xenophobia, neophobia, or the brute hammer of conformity enforcement, for a variety of reasons of which the simplest is that the values being defended are explicitly against all of those things.

But if there’s one notion that the government of the Empire and those of Singapore, Japan, et al. could most absolutely find to bond over, it’s that there’s a place for the persistently socially disharmonious who are determined to go around shitting up the place, and more specifically, that place is on the other side of the airlock in some other bugger’s country where they put up with that sort of thing. The poor dumb bastards.

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Apropos of even less, as I may have mentioned before, the only way to acquire Imperial citizen-shareholdership is individually and by action. No jus soli, no jus sanguini, only “ask the membership committee if they’d be so good as to let you into the club”.

So what happens when a new constituent nation is either admitted or annexed?

I’m so glad you asked. In that case, said nation’s population is admitted as -E metics, a legal status meaning, well, “former citizens of a nation admitted or annexed who haven’t elected to take up citizen-shareholdership yet”. (Said status offers you Imperial civic rights by courtesy, just like any resident, and some other minor benefits depending on exactly how the ad/an went, such as being able to roll the value of long-term promises by your previous governance over into an offset on the price of your citizen-shareholdership and the attached dividend.)

However, populations include both good eggs and bad apples, and as such I have concluded that the Empire might have use for a second classification here. To borrow a term from the Spartans, let us call them -H “hypomeiones”, except while the Spartans used that (lit. “lesser ones”) to mean, essentially, “inferiors”, the nuance here and the translation from the original Eldraeic would be “unworthy”.

As in “former citizens of a nation admitted or annexed who have been deemed unworthy of citizen-shareholdership”. The blackballed, if you will. Who do retain all their Contract-derived fundamental rights of the sophont, because they’re inherent, and no-one can take 'em away, but who do not receive the courtesy of Imperial civic rights, because those require a measure of trust, and if they could afford you a measure of trust, you’d be a metic, not a hypomeion.

I mention all this in this thread 'cause, well, one of those questions that might well be in want of an answer before answering the question this thread poses is – well, how many hypomeiones are you going to create, and how long is it going to take them to figure out that a -H SI is basically short for “for fuck’s sake, fucking fuck off already, you fucks”?

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Given the Empire is an ideostate, does “fuck off” mean deportation from the annexed polity, or that suddenly fence-builders and sentry-gun salesmen are the number one and two hot new jobs in the polity?

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I’m not sure it would be deportation, at least not for all. Mostly because people can change. It does happen for a bigot here to be closely exposed to someone of the “wrong type” that they would like to be/remain close to, and after a period of grumbling start to dismantle those discriminatory views and start on the path to becoming a better person.

So I wonder if some portion of hypomeions would be sad at being left out in the cold, especially if their friends and family were not, and slowly start to improve? And “former hypomeion who got their act together until they became a decent chap” is a better outcome for everyone. At least for those who fall into the category of “unpleasant people with bad views but who aren’t ACTIVELY tempted to do anything we’d want to shoot them for”; there’s also going to be some percentage of hypomeions who try physically intimidating the wrong person and stop being a problem that way.

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