I am standing down as a candidate. I will not endorse another candidate in my place, however I maintain my policy criticisms of the previous Government.

Also, after a day away from civcraft, I have cleared my head a bit and I have a more constructive take on the meeting we held Friday night. Yes, we're still a freaking banana republic, but let's discuss the reasons instead of calling each other names.

The key problem on Friday was, different people had very different understandings of what the rules were.

I thought we were under Sashimii's speakership, conducting business according to commonly accepted "rules of order", combined with precedents from previous meetings which had instituted proxies and set 50% as a quorum. I've learned since then that a meeting happened before Friday - of which no record exists except in the memory of its participants - where sash quit and a new Speaker was elected. The rest though is just what we had been doing at the other meetings. We used rules of order, a majority quorum, and proxies in the meeting where we passed our constitution, so people claiming that I hijacked the Friday meeting by making up rules, should also in the same breath deny that our constitution was ever passed. And they may be right about both; I'm not judging. It's obvious though that different people were living in different worlds.

There are two huge problems with our pre-Friday system of slack parliament meetings, either one of which kills it as a working system. First, nobody is making official records or minutes, so everything we do in there is literally lost to the bit bucket the next day. Second, few of us are familiar with rules of order in general, or are even generally aware of the principles behind them, or why we would have a use for any such thing.

It was a mistake for me to expect everyone else besides me to also binge wikipedia in order to learn enough about rules of order to make a meeting work. It was a worse mistake to assume everyone had done that. And the worst mistake was to misinterpret that lack of shared knowledge and experience as malice or dishonesty. I apologize to all of you for this, and especially to specificlanguage.

One reason I was tempted to leap to expecting that from all of you is, I'm aware there is no other way to make that kind of meeting anything but chaos. With rules of order slack parliament could be really awesome; but there would be no escaping it, people would have to learn some stuff. Rules of order are the result of centuries of experimentation on best way to run a group by democratic principles. If we learn and use them they will work. Cupidity has been a parliamentarian in real life, and he'd be a great person to take us in that direction if we want. But there is no way 20 person slack meetings will ever work without organization.

This is more important than policy disagreements. After we disintegrate altogether there won't be any Government to have a policy argument about.

Another thing: Quinnel has been going on and on about how I abused the system and swindled people out of their proxy votes.

Well I didn't ask anyone for a proxy vote. I was offered two proxies when I was waiting in the channel for the meeting to start. I didn't care because I knew my opposition didn't even need two extra votes... as the subreddit no-con vote has since proved.

And I ignored Quinnel's accusations in chat in the Friday meeting because he was speaking out of turn without having the floor.