Post by studentloandebt on Aug 12, 2022 7:30:51 GMT
I have been asked multiple times over the past few years to answer questions about DSA history, from what the Cabinet Crisis was to what happened between us and NSLeft. Getting tired of typing it all out, I've decided that I'm just going to make this forum thread so I can just link to it.
Now, a word of caution with this post. While I am trying my best here to present the history as an unbiased source, it is coming from me and my experiences, so bias can be hard to avoid. Never the less, I'll at least try to be objective when possible.
Background for the Cabinet Crisis, aka the Ivory Rhodes section
Years ago, largely from 2017 to early 2019, there was a member of the DSA named Ivory Rhodes. He became a major figure in the DSA for basically being the leader of the whole region. He organized many things, worked to build up the region, actually spent money on us, got us into multiple interregional alliances, owned and operated the DSA Discord server, and did all this as President, a now nonexistent role. The President was leader of the region and helped coordinate with the Cabinet (now Council) on improving and maintaining the region. Ivory Rhodes is the biggest name for DSA Presidency because he was the longest serving president in DSA History. Even when he wasn't president, he was still a central figure for the region.
In his time as president, he got our region into NSLeft, an alliance of left-wing regions. An important note here is an unofficial policy Ivory Rhodes had regarding NSLeft. When it came to moderation of the server members, he tended to be more lenient with NSLeft members than he was with Residents, working hard to make sure they would not be upset with our region. This did not go unnoticed by the rest of the DSA who saw that NSLeft leadership would often not really receive more than a warning for misbehavior. If the topic of removing them from the server was ever an idea, that never was applied because leadership would often leave the server themselves but then come back not too long after. Following their return, Ivory Rhodes would carry on as if nothing happened.
In his time as president, whether intentional or not (he did know about and memed about it), a cult of personality formed around him, which reasonably makes sense as to why it formed considering there were times he was the only one serving in the Cabinet and he was a major reason why the DSA became a major name in the NationStates community. However, cults of personality means that it can be hard to let go of whomever the cult is based around and hard to keep them accountable. In spring of 2018, Ivory Rhodes tried to impeach himself over DSA law violations he had committed, but many of his supporters dismissed the attempt as "taking the game too serious". This cult of personality also created a rivalry between him and another DSA player named 124mm10.
124mm10 was another major player in the DSA who was, at one point, considered to be the person who would succeed Ivory Rhodes once he decided to no longer be president. 124mm10 did eventually become president, though this required Ivory Rhodes to step down after his impeachment attempt in order for that to happen. 124mm10 was also known to abuse his power, especially when it came to Discord server priviledges and his ability to restrict what server users could do. Ivory Rhodes' and 124mm10's rivalry was not a fun one but closer to what I'd consider a toxic one. Their arguments often got personal and, a couple times, exploitative. Soon they couldn't even be in a Discord voice chat with one another (casual voice chats happening between regional members were extremely common back then, weekly and often multiple times a week, so this was like people not being able to be in the same room as one another). 124mm10 also had his supporters, though it wasn't a cult of personality like Ivory Rhodes had. Eventually 124mm10 left the Discord server, to which, if I recall correctly (I could be misremembering here), Ivory Rhodes celebrated.
In addition, there was issues surrounding Discord moderation. Multiple times had the region attempted to bring the Discord server under the control of the DSA government. This whole time, the server was an unofficial place for DSA members but has grown to eventually be where the community was centered. Recognizing this, people wanted actual rules applied to the server beyond the whims of the then-owner, Ivory Rhodes. These never worked and the closest it got to success was when server moderation was distrubuted to the Cabinet. Anytime a moderation decision needed to be made, the Council would vote on it before it happened. This was also flawed due to how long it could take for a majority of the Cabinet to even respond to the moderation request, let alone a majority agreement on how to proceed.
Lastly, let's talk about the Cabinet that would be present during the Criris. In January of 2019, a new Cabinet election was up for nominations and Ivory Rhodes did not want to be President anymore. However, he couldn't exactly let go of power and still wanted to be World Assembly Delegate, of which the two roles were almost always held by the same person. I, Student Loan Debt, agreed to his request for me to be President while letting him remain World Assembly Delegate. So, in that Cabinet, he remained. This Cabinet lasted the usual 3 month term of February to April. In April, the then-Cabinet members were growing more and more tired of being Cabinet members, multiple members saying that they did not want to run for reelection. Considering that, what ends up happening shouldn't be surprising.
The Cabinet Crisis
In April of 2019, there was an argument that broke out in one of the Discord server's channels, a channel dedicated to discussion of real life news. Despite multiple attempts by myself to end the argument, one user in it refused to end it and instead attacked me. I followed by calling for a Cabinet vote on how to proceed. The Cabinet decided to (if I remember this distrubution correction) temporarily remove 2 members from that channel, ban 1 member from it (an NSLeft leader), and give warnings to 4 members. This did not go over well, especially with the one user who attacked me. The two members who were temporarily removed from the channel went to our Congress channel to denounce the decision. Many people became involved at this point in that channel's argument and it was very stressful to many.
Then, on the same day, 124mm10 and one of his friends who also left the server returned to the server. While their return had absolutely nothing to do with what was happening, Ivory Rhodes believed it did and saw this as 124mm10 trying to get in on stressing out Ivory Rhodes. So, Ivory Rhodes, in the moment of very high levels of stress, made a decision. He announced that he was going to resign from the DSA government and leave NationStates due to the stress. In addition, as he was the owner of the Discord server and had, for years, discussed his real life on the server and could not reasonably go through and delete every single message about his real life (privacy reasons), he also announced that the server would soon close. His announcement of this waas presented as a Cabinet decision, but I quickly followed up in clarifying that no one else in the Cabinet agreed to any of this and that this was a unilateral decision on his part. Following, of course, a LOT more arguments erupted across the server about all this.
It did not end there, however, as now we need to discuss the Minister of Justice at the time; Daophin. As was their job, they needed to investigate any violations of DSA laws. With this goal, they were looking into the moderation decision the Cabinet made and came to the conclusion that it was unlawful. As result, Daophin then filed for an impeachment of the entire Cabinet for this. Following this, the majority of the Cabinet then resigned, already not wanting to serve in the Cabinet anymore, stressed from the mass arguments across the server, and now possibly being impeached. The only Cabinet members who remained were Student Loan Debt (that's me), then President, Foreign Affairs Minster, Dekks, and Minister of Justice, Daophin, who only planned on remaining only a little longer. In an attempt to block any and all investigation into him, Ivory Rhodes locked the remaining Cabinet, especially Daophin, out of the server's private Cabinet channels.
The massive number of arguments, mass resignation of the government, high levels of stress, and news that the regional Discord server would soon be deleted, was too much for many people and many people left the region as result. While not all emigrated to the region of the Social Liberal Union (SLU, our oldest allied region), many did. This will be important to remember later. Those who remained in the region were trying to deal with the breakdown of the DSA that was now also being exploited by multiple other regions trying to get a good story out of it or even trying to siphon members.
Post-Cabinet Crisis
Most of those who fled the DSA because of the Cabinet Crisis were those who were very interested in the DSA government, those who greatly enjoyed the government and supported it's central place in the region. Those who remained, however, were a majority who either were apathetic about the government or outright hated it. While some pro-government members remained (some leaving in the coming months/year), they were no longer the majority belief. Those who remained and had to deal with the fallout of the Cabinet Crisis became of the opinion that the Cabinet Crisis was as a result of the government being so central, being powerful, even existing. While never an organized thing with coordination or anything like that, there was a leading voice of this opinion and that was of a relatively recent member to the region. Dankass Communes. They were of the belief that it would be best to remove the DSA government under the belief that it is why the region was now fractured, leaking members, and highly stressed. Their voice on the matter became supported by others and, soon, the majority of the region wanted to, at the very least, reduce the size and importance of the government to the rest of the DSA.
In the month following the Cabinet Crisis, changes would be made. While Discord laws failed in the past, a new law was made to create a dedicated moderation system to the server, with Dankass Communes, the one who designed said moderation system, being voted in as the head moderator by the rest of the region. In autumn of 2019, with the assistance of a temporarily returned Ivory Rhodes, the Charter was tremendously reduced from pages numbering somewhere in the 70s down to the 30s, much of the law either being made null and void or being transferred to other law documents as separate laws.
Player dynamics also changed. 124mm10 would soon be banned from the DSA. While attempts were made to impeach Ivory Rhodes for his impeding of investigation during the Cabinet Crisis, the new Minister of Justice had no intention of attempting this investigation and did not talk about it until their term was up and insisted they couldn't find anything. Upset by how I acted during the Cabinet Crisis, I decided not to run for President again, leading player Cephesylon to become President. Ceph made decisions that were not supported by the rest of the Cabinet and these decisions would seem to reflect the direction of how our relations with SLU would go. For example: Samogkir.
Some context: Samogkir was a player who, for a long while, ran for every Cabinet position when possible as a meme. Outside of that, however, he rarely interacted with the DSA. He used to be a memeber of a now closed region called The Versutian Federation. While I don't recall why this happened, many people stopped liking TVF and many of their embassies closed. We had embassies with them and Samogkir, wanting to further isolate TVF, was appointed by Ceph as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the DSA (at a time when Ceph could appoint interim ministers instead of electing them). It was revealed that he only ran for MoFA solely to close embassies with TVF and no other reason, using the DSA government as just a tool against a region he no longer liked. He did not continue his bid for MoFA
End of Relations with SLU
In August of 2019, Samogkir made a come back. He began what was obvious trolling on the Discord server. He was pinging the government for random memes and was insulting people in our Congress channel. A 1st strike was give, then a 2nd when he continued, then a 3rd for the insulting. He was promptly banned from the Discord server, though not from the region. However, removal from the region was pending. To everyone's suprised in the DSA, SLU, in response, threatend to close embassies with us over this. After 8 1/2 years of allyship with them, they announce they want to close embassies. This caught the whole region by surprise because this sounded like it came out of nowhere. Eventually they decided to not close embassies, but this was a clear indicator that things have changed.
In response to Samogkir's ban, which the entire Cabinet supported, the then-president, Cephesylon, did not support it. He sided with SLU in thinking it was ridiculous that he was banned from the server and Ceph wanted a regional vote on it, likely of the belief that this would keep him in the server. The entire Cabinet and the mods did not understand why he thought this way about Samogkir and we were all united in the belief that this banning was right. This would continue on in September. As President, Ceph was also World Assembly Delegate and the WAD, back then, had a department under their control that could be filled by someone to help them in their responsibilities as WAD. Ceph made the choice to, of all people, appoint Samogkir to this position, someone who was banned from the server and who was still being considered for banning from the region. Ceph would support this by saying it'd be a sign of good faith towards SLU following the tense relations after the threatend embassy closure. Once again, however, the rest of the Cabinet and the mods were united in shock about this and thinking it was reward for bad behavior.
Cephesylon would eventually leave the DSA to join, not surprisngly, SLU. We would eventually find out that, of DSA members who joined SLU because of the Cabinet Crisis, a decent number became very heavily anti-DSA, including previous ministers. This spread throughout SLU until many of its leaders and major figures were regularly talking negatively about the DSA (we'd find that out later, which I'll get to). This was also noticible on our end as well. For years, even when Ivory Rhodes was involved in the DSA, there was a regular "SLU Bloc" of voters in any DSA votes. This bloc would regularly vote together, rarely interact with the DSA beyond government, and, when they did interact with the government, the vast majority of the time it was when they were against something we were doing. So, our view of SLU was also changing to start seeing them as largely not caring about the DSA, only interacting with us when they wanted to criticize us, and reguarly talking bad about us. This group of people, with the help of Ivory Rhodes for a temporary time, was also found out to have a sort of political unity in manipulating DSA politics, especially in trying to get Ceph elected as president and keep Dekks out of that.
Then, in March of 2020, again catching us by surprise, we found out that SLU drafted a bill to close embassies with the DSA. We were not even told it was a consideration before it got to vote, giving us no time to respond before votes were cast. Their reasoning for closure relied largely on criticism of our head mod, Dankass Communes, saying that they took over our region, restructed democracy for the worse, and became an unelected, unaccountable, and uncriticizable (as in criticism wasn't allowed) leader of the region. From my memory, every single person in the DSA found that ridiculous as that was not at all the position Dankass Communes held nor, as of this posting, has it ever been (I should know. Myself and her regularly fought hard on what place the government had in the DSA and my removal was never even a joke idea). A counterbill was being considered by the DSA to close embassies with SLU, but that never went through. SLU's bill won out and they closed embassies with us.
And now, on to what happened next that directly relates to this.
Growing Tension with NSLeft
The DSA's relationship with NSLeft became more strained after the Cabinet Crisis. Remember Ivory Rhode's unofficial policy of being more lenient with NSLeft leadership? Part of the changes that came after the Crisis was our policy on that. We didn't like that anymore and no longer had that in practice. However, from my guess, NSLeft leadership still expected that policy to be in place. When I talked with them about it in May 2020, they didn't know this was even a thing Ivory did, but I imagine the patterns of that policy were imprinted and they came to expect the lenient treatment even if they didn't know that's what it was. It was not common to find NSLeft leadership on the DSA server after that.
The Cabinet Crisis also altered the DSA's thoughts on Pan-Leftism. NSLeft is a pro-Pan-Leftist alliance. The DSA used to be that as well but stopped after the Crisis as those who remained in the region didn't care for that. Those who remained were more in line with libertarian leftist views, especially those near anarcho-communism. Many saw Pan-Leftism as meaning we'd have to tolerate people who vocally support atrocities commited by the governments of the USSR, China, and North Korea among a few, those who align in some way with Marxist-Leninist values. We didn't want that and became less tolerant of having that on our server. This especially esculated with the rising presence that the Uyghur genocide had in news reporting and how arguments were erupting in the DSA over whether or it is a genocide or not (you can guess who was on what side). Arguments like these further strained relationships and people in both NSLeft and the DSA were wondering if this allianceship was worth having. Already a variety of people wanted out. Some NSLeft members wanted the DSA gone and some DSA members wanted NSLeft gone, but this wasn't universal as there were members on both sides that still wanted each other.
Of the reasons to stay in NSLeft, there were a variety. NSLeft has the Red Fleet under their command, which is a Raiding and Defending organization that raids fascist regions and defends leftist ones. One reason to stay was the benefit we'd have of staying in a group that has such a powerful defender force. However, opponents argued that the Red Fleet would protect leftist regions regardless of membership as well as a raid on the DSA not being likely due to WAD's here having high endorsement counts. Another reason to stay in NSLeft was for it's importance to our WA Affairs. When Ivory Rhodes was President, he founded a WA bloc with allies of ours called the Interregional Legislative Coalition where member regions would vote together, this being to oppose the WALL bloc in the WA, this one consisting of the feeder regions of the Pacifics that had long dominated the WA. NSLeft was expanding into the World Assembly in early 2020 to become its own bloc and many of our allies in the ILC were also part of NSLeft, so we no longer saw a reason for the ILC to continue existing and it was closed. We now relied on NSLeft to be the WA bloc we were involved in.
Lastly, a reason people were hesitant to leave NSLeft was due to the benefits of being in an interregional alliance. It helped foster relations with other regions, being together for groups reasons and, due to proximity, allow a lot of cross over with other regions and increased communication. It was good for foreign affairs reasons and expanding our community to include many peoples and keep our region's name high in NationStates. Opponents argued, however, that the cost of having to tolerate Pan-Leftism and the expectations that NSLeft leaders had for more lenience on our server was not worth it.
Misley and Closure of Embassies with The Internationale
One major name to bring up before we go further is the name of Misley. Misley was one of the leaders of NSLeft and a major person in the allied region of The Internationale. He was the main person Ivory Rhodes had in mind with the unofficial policy of being lenient with NSLeft, often punishing residents more than he would Misley, of whom would often flee the server before Ivory could do anything and Ivory forgive him after. He was a Marxist-Leninist whose views were often problematic in the DSA with disagreements that anarcho-communists and MLs would have. One major incident that sicks out, back when Ivory was around, was when a news article was shared about a 6 year old girl who was dying of cancer whose Make a Wish wish was to be a police officer. She did die and, when Misley found out, he posted a meme image of a happy star with baloons saying "Officer Down" and continually saying "ACAB" about her. You know, casually happy about the death of a 6 year old girl and calling her a bastard. Everyone condemned Misley for that but he doubled down on this and, in later years, would either deny that that was he even did any of this or try and play it down and justify what he did. The combination of him a "tankie" and incidents like this led the moderators of the DSA discord to decibe to ban him from the server.
As you can guess by now, he didn't like this.
Misley called for a closure of embassies between his region of The Internationale and the DSA (called for one, didn't actually make a bill for it). He also was beginning to push for the DSA to be removed from NSLeft. The DSA Cabinet decided to respond with creating a bill to remove embassies with TI. There was also now the desire to entirely remove the authoritarian leftist elements from the DSA and codify it, further dividing us from NSLeft. However, conflict erupted with the next bill, this being created by then-president, Dekks, that being to leave NSLeft.
Departure from NSLeft
The issue was that the DSA gave no indication to NSLeft that this was even being considered and did not want to tell them about the bill until it's already at vote. You may notice that this is exactly what SLU did to the DSA with embassy closure, which got us upset, but now we were doing the same thing to NSLeft. This was HEAVILY contentious largely between the rest of the Cabinet and the Cabinet's Administrator-Emeritus, Student Loan Debt (again, me). Eventually I was able to convince the rest of the Cabinet that NSLeft should be told about this before the bill goes up for scrutiny. I told NSLeft about this and they were very confused about why we were trying to leave. Many people in the DSA were also confused with consideration that this idea being seriously entertained had hardly any public conversation. As result, Dekks, decided to push back the vote for conversations to happen. There was even the idea of taking a break from this rather than delaying it, seeing what would happen.
As for NSLeft, things were contentious there as well. Some members, especially Misley, really wanted the DSA out. However, other members and member regions did not want us to leave. However, the tensions between the DSA and TI started to affect our other embassies, specifically The Leftist Assembly and The Communist Bloc. TLA and TCB issued a joint statement saying that they did not want the DSA to leave NSLeft and wanted to have the issues between us and others discussed publicly. However, the statement also took a stance very similar to what SLU said about us in their embassy closure bill in that they thought the issues stemmed from our head moderator, Dankass Communes, and the changes she implemented and thinks the opposition to Pan-Leftism was entirely her doing. This did not go over well the Cabinet with many members now, tired of everything that's been happening, no longer considering a break and now fully wanting out of NSLeft. Wileyshire, a member of the Cabinet at the time, fought heavily against this decision and wanted to try and stay in NSLeft. The arguments that came were not good, rather similiar in nature to the arguments that occurred back during the Cabinet Crisis.
There was so much division happening that the DSA also split apart as well, conversations rising of turning the DSA into a region based on syndicalism and dividing different parts of the community into different sections, including one where government was entirely separated from the rest of the region. While this was seriously talked about and even bills written up about it (which included repealing the entire Charter), it did not end up happening (luckily, in my opinion). Part of this was also seen as a solution to the NSLeft issue, in that separate communities would allow the DSA to stay in NSLeft while others in the DSA would have no interaction whatsoever with them, though that wouldn't be how it'd actually happened. While these changes never actually happened, it was a sign of further moving away from the DSA having a government, which was something that cause many DSA members to leave over the prior year and was a concern for our allies who did not like this general shift away.
By this point, embassied had closed with the DSA and TI, and then we received news that another embassy, one with the region The North Pacific, was also going to close. Their stated reasons was on the same level as SLU's and TI's, but seemed more like they were told that this was the situation in the DSA rather than actually looking at it. Our situation was not looking good.
A break was in place on the bill to leave NSLeft. However, in May, the bill did come back. Dekks organized a bill for it and started getting cosponsors for the bill. Once again, Dekks wanted this to be secret and not tell NSLeft about it until it went up for vote. I got him to agree to wait some time after telling NSLeft about it for him to release the bill, but even that was contentious. he wanted to keep this bill between the Cabinet before talking about it with the rest of the region. However, there was another major issue in specifically the number of cosponsors the bill had. It's not unsual to get cosponsors, but this bill had 22 cosponsors. That's a lot, especially considering that the average voting numbers were below that. This means that they went into people's DMs and got their support for the bill before it could even go up for debate, essentially guarenteeing that it will pass. The people that were not told about this bill were those who would be against this. What this ended up doing was creating essentially a secret congress vote where only those who would support the bill would know about it and those who wouldn't support the bill didn't know about it to where, when it would open up for scrutiny, those against the bill had no chance of talking it down. It felt like a rigged vote. Despite this, debate raged on. Wileyshire, who was no longer in the Cabinet, was told about this secret vote and, using stamps, sent out a region-wide campaign telegram against the bill. The Cabinet was going to sent out a counter telegram, but this would have been too biased and didn't happen.
What was happening in the server for NSLeft during this time was also a lot. Most of the Cabinet refused to talk with NSLeft, leaving myself and Wileyshire to be the only ones to answer questions for NSLeft, like "Why are you trying to leave?" Our foreign affairs minister at the time, Chromatica, did show up one day to answer questions, but was very passive aggressive against NSLeft, which did nothing to lessen arguments. Our Minister of Domestic Affairs, Lay Pays De Soliel, also went in and did the same, but also bragging about the DSA leaving. Dekks, still president (all this was over, like, 1 week) did not respond to any demands for answers from NSLeft until the vote was 1 day away from ending, even then hardly saying anything. Reasonable, then, to see why much of NSLeft started to not like us.
Our bill to leave NSLeft, however, was very much tampered with. In DSA history, bills often only got an average of maybe 20 votes. Our record high was 40 votes. This was back when the DSA government was very popular, back when Ivory Rhodes was in charge and got the vote to a number never thought possible. Our NSLeft vote was cast during a time when the DSA was trying to effectively abolish the government because so many people didn't like it and didn't care to be involved. Voting numbers on average dropped. Our NSLeft vote, however? It got 76 votes. That seems weird, right? In addition, there was a spike in opt-ins for congress membership prior to the vote starting and many of those belonged to DSA nations that Ceased To Exist (CTE) 1 month after the vote. Is it not obvious our voted got raided by NSLeft members?
Tracking the votes in real time, it was very contencious for a while and seemed like the bill would fail. However, in the end, it passed by 6 votes. The DSA then left NSLeft.
The Following Months and Embassy Closures
By August, a new Cabinet had entered office and then-president and long time region member, Solus Unus, entered office on the platform of abolishing the presidency and turning the Cabinet into a Council, an idea that was popular at the time. Also, new embassies were opening. We opened embassies with the region The Social Syndicalist Union and discussions were starting of opening embassies with The East Pacific. However, something big happened halfway through August.
Liossalde, a player in the Cabinet at this time but also a long while ago, was asked by then-president Dekks to look into clique behavior of certain region members who were also residents of other regions (largely SLU, if you remember my earlier mention of the SLU Bloc). How to go about it, Dekks did not specify, just to look into it. Liossalde then came up with the idea that the best way to do this was to create a secret 2nd puppet account and gain access to SLU server channels that non-residents were unable to access. In there, he complied an album of screenshots of 4 persons from SLU insulting, mocking, and berating both the DSA, its members, and particularly Dankass Communes. This decision was made unilaterally by Liossalde and no Cabinet member knew he was doing this until he presented his evidence. On the belief that this violated the Extraordinary Conduct section of the DSA Charter, the Minister of Justice submitted to the High Judge a request for the banning of 4 DSA members that the screenshots were based around.
While the motion was largely supported by DSA members, it did not sit well in the slightest with those being banned, including with their regions. The regions of TLA and TCB sided with the 4 players in thinking this was a bad decision without real basis, believing that this was further proof of our head moderator running the region undemocratically. The two regions then closed embassies with the DSA.
This concludes this post. I have provided context to understand the Cabinet Crisis, explained the Cabinet Crisis, its effects on the region, how this played into the closing of embassies between the DSA and SLU, how the tensions grew between the DSA and NSLeft and eventually us leaving the group, and the remaining rammifications of these changes.
If I got something wrong, feel free to provide a comment below. I did not cover ALL the history that happened in this time, just the necessary ones to bring together this narrative of a history summarized. If I covered all the history, it'd include bits that have nothing to do with the rest.
Now, a word of caution with this post. While I am trying my best here to present the history as an unbiased source, it is coming from me and my experiences, so bias can be hard to avoid. Never the less, I'll at least try to be objective when possible.
Background for the Cabinet Crisis, aka the Ivory Rhodes section
Years ago, largely from 2017 to early 2019, there was a member of the DSA named Ivory Rhodes. He became a major figure in the DSA for basically being the leader of the whole region. He organized many things, worked to build up the region, actually spent money on us, got us into multiple interregional alliances, owned and operated the DSA Discord server, and did all this as President, a now nonexistent role. The President was leader of the region and helped coordinate with the Cabinet (now Council) on improving and maintaining the region. Ivory Rhodes is the biggest name for DSA Presidency because he was the longest serving president in DSA History. Even when he wasn't president, he was still a central figure for the region.
In his time as president, he got our region into NSLeft, an alliance of left-wing regions. An important note here is an unofficial policy Ivory Rhodes had regarding NSLeft. When it came to moderation of the server members, he tended to be more lenient with NSLeft members than he was with Residents, working hard to make sure they would not be upset with our region. This did not go unnoticed by the rest of the DSA who saw that NSLeft leadership would often not really receive more than a warning for misbehavior. If the topic of removing them from the server was ever an idea, that never was applied because leadership would often leave the server themselves but then come back not too long after. Following their return, Ivory Rhodes would carry on as if nothing happened.
In his time as president, whether intentional or not (he did know about and memed about it), a cult of personality formed around him, which reasonably makes sense as to why it formed considering there were times he was the only one serving in the Cabinet and he was a major reason why the DSA became a major name in the NationStates community. However, cults of personality means that it can be hard to let go of whomever the cult is based around and hard to keep them accountable. In spring of 2018, Ivory Rhodes tried to impeach himself over DSA law violations he had committed, but many of his supporters dismissed the attempt as "taking the game too serious". This cult of personality also created a rivalry between him and another DSA player named 124mm10.
124mm10 was another major player in the DSA who was, at one point, considered to be the person who would succeed Ivory Rhodes once he decided to no longer be president. 124mm10 did eventually become president, though this required Ivory Rhodes to step down after his impeachment attempt in order for that to happen. 124mm10 was also known to abuse his power, especially when it came to Discord server priviledges and his ability to restrict what server users could do. Ivory Rhodes' and 124mm10's rivalry was not a fun one but closer to what I'd consider a toxic one. Their arguments often got personal and, a couple times, exploitative. Soon they couldn't even be in a Discord voice chat with one another (casual voice chats happening between regional members were extremely common back then, weekly and often multiple times a week, so this was like people not being able to be in the same room as one another). 124mm10 also had his supporters, though it wasn't a cult of personality like Ivory Rhodes had. Eventually 124mm10 left the Discord server, to which, if I recall correctly (I could be misremembering here), Ivory Rhodes celebrated.
In addition, there was issues surrounding Discord moderation. Multiple times had the region attempted to bring the Discord server under the control of the DSA government. This whole time, the server was an unofficial place for DSA members but has grown to eventually be where the community was centered. Recognizing this, people wanted actual rules applied to the server beyond the whims of the then-owner, Ivory Rhodes. These never worked and the closest it got to success was when server moderation was distrubuted to the Cabinet. Anytime a moderation decision needed to be made, the Council would vote on it before it happened. This was also flawed due to how long it could take for a majority of the Cabinet to even respond to the moderation request, let alone a majority agreement on how to proceed.
Lastly, let's talk about the Cabinet that would be present during the Criris. In January of 2019, a new Cabinet election was up for nominations and Ivory Rhodes did not want to be President anymore. However, he couldn't exactly let go of power and still wanted to be World Assembly Delegate, of which the two roles were almost always held by the same person. I, Student Loan Debt, agreed to his request for me to be President while letting him remain World Assembly Delegate. So, in that Cabinet, he remained. This Cabinet lasted the usual 3 month term of February to April. In April, the then-Cabinet members were growing more and more tired of being Cabinet members, multiple members saying that they did not want to run for reelection. Considering that, what ends up happening shouldn't be surprising.
The Cabinet Crisis
In April of 2019, there was an argument that broke out in one of the Discord server's channels, a channel dedicated to discussion of real life news. Despite multiple attempts by myself to end the argument, one user in it refused to end it and instead attacked me. I followed by calling for a Cabinet vote on how to proceed. The Cabinet decided to (if I remember this distrubution correction) temporarily remove 2 members from that channel, ban 1 member from it (an NSLeft leader), and give warnings to 4 members. This did not go over well, especially with the one user who attacked me. The two members who were temporarily removed from the channel went to our Congress channel to denounce the decision. Many people became involved at this point in that channel's argument and it was very stressful to many.
Then, on the same day, 124mm10 and one of his friends who also left the server returned to the server. While their return had absolutely nothing to do with what was happening, Ivory Rhodes believed it did and saw this as 124mm10 trying to get in on stressing out Ivory Rhodes. So, Ivory Rhodes, in the moment of very high levels of stress, made a decision. He announced that he was going to resign from the DSA government and leave NationStates due to the stress. In addition, as he was the owner of the Discord server and had, for years, discussed his real life on the server and could not reasonably go through and delete every single message about his real life (privacy reasons), he also announced that the server would soon close. His announcement of this waas presented as a Cabinet decision, but I quickly followed up in clarifying that no one else in the Cabinet agreed to any of this and that this was a unilateral decision on his part. Following, of course, a LOT more arguments erupted across the server about all this.
It did not end there, however, as now we need to discuss the Minister of Justice at the time; Daophin. As was their job, they needed to investigate any violations of DSA laws. With this goal, they were looking into the moderation decision the Cabinet made and came to the conclusion that it was unlawful. As result, Daophin then filed for an impeachment of the entire Cabinet for this. Following this, the majority of the Cabinet then resigned, already not wanting to serve in the Cabinet anymore, stressed from the mass arguments across the server, and now possibly being impeached. The only Cabinet members who remained were Student Loan Debt (that's me), then President, Foreign Affairs Minster, Dekks, and Minister of Justice, Daophin, who only planned on remaining only a little longer. In an attempt to block any and all investigation into him, Ivory Rhodes locked the remaining Cabinet, especially Daophin, out of the server's private Cabinet channels.
The massive number of arguments, mass resignation of the government, high levels of stress, and news that the regional Discord server would soon be deleted, was too much for many people and many people left the region as result. While not all emigrated to the region of the Social Liberal Union (SLU, our oldest allied region), many did. This will be important to remember later. Those who remained in the region were trying to deal with the breakdown of the DSA that was now also being exploited by multiple other regions trying to get a good story out of it or even trying to siphon members.
Post-Cabinet Crisis
Most of those who fled the DSA because of the Cabinet Crisis were those who were very interested in the DSA government, those who greatly enjoyed the government and supported it's central place in the region. Those who remained, however, were a majority who either were apathetic about the government or outright hated it. While some pro-government members remained (some leaving in the coming months/year), they were no longer the majority belief. Those who remained and had to deal with the fallout of the Cabinet Crisis became of the opinion that the Cabinet Crisis was as a result of the government being so central, being powerful, even existing. While never an organized thing with coordination or anything like that, there was a leading voice of this opinion and that was of a relatively recent member to the region. Dankass Communes. They were of the belief that it would be best to remove the DSA government under the belief that it is why the region was now fractured, leaking members, and highly stressed. Their voice on the matter became supported by others and, soon, the majority of the region wanted to, at the very least, reduce the size and importance of the government to the rest of the DSA.
In the month following the Cabinet Crisis, changes would be made. While Discord laws failed in the past, a new law was made to create a dedicated moderation system to the server, with Dankass Communes, the one who designed said moderation system, being voted in as the head moderator by the rest of the region. In autumn of 2019, with the assistance of a temporarily returned Ivory Rhodes, the Charter was tremendously reduced from pages numbering somewhere in the 70s down to the 30s, much of the law either being made null and void or being transferred to other law documents as separate laws.
Player dynamics also changed. 124mm10 would soon be banned from the DSA. While attempts were made to impeach Ivory Rhodes for his impeding of investigation during the Cabinet Crisis, the new Minister of Justice had no intention of attempting this investigation and did not talk about it until their term was up and insisted they couldn't find anything. Upset by how I acted during the Cabinet Crisis, I decided not to run for President again, leading player Cephesylon to become President. Ceph made decisions that were not supported by the rest of the Cabinet and these decisions would seem to reflect the direction of how our relations with SLU would go. For example: Samogkir.
Some context: Samogkir was a player who, for a long while, ran for every Cabinet position when possible as a meme. Outside of that, however, he rarely interacted with the DSA. He used to be a memeber of a now closed region called The Versutian Federation. While I don't recall why this happened, many people stopped liking TVF and many of their embassies closed. We had embassies with them and Samogkir, wanting to further isolate TVF, was appointed by Ceph as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the DSA (at a time when Ceph could appoint interim ministers instead of electing them). It was revealed that he only ran for MoFA solely to close embassies with TVF and no other reason, using the DSA government as just a tool against a region he no longer liked. He did not continue his bid for MoFA
End of Relations with SLU
In August of 2019, Samogkir made a come back. He began what was obvious trolling on the Discord server. He was pinging the government for random memes and was insulting people in our Congress channel. A 1st strike was give, then a 2nd when he continued, then a 3rd for the insulting. He was promptly banned from the Discord server, though not from the region. However, removal from the region was pending. To everyone's suprised in the DSA, SLU, in response, threatend to close embassies with us over this. After 8 1/2 years of allyship with them, they announce they want to close embassies. This caught the whole region by surprise because this sounded like it came out of nowhere. Eventually they decided to not close embassies, but this was a clear indicator that things have changed.
In response to Samogkir's ban, which the entire Cabinet supported, the then-president, Cephesylon, did not support it. He sided with SLU in thinking it was ridiculous that he was banned from the server and Ceph wanted a regional vote on it, likely of the belief that this would keep him in the server. The entire Cabinet and the mods did not understand why he thought this way about Samogkir and we were all united in the belief that this banning was right. This would continue on in September. As President, Ceph was also World Assembly Delegate and the WAD, back then, had a department under their control that could be filled by someone to help them in their responsibilities as WAD. Ceph made the choice to, of all people, appoint Samogkir to this position, someone who was banned from the server and who was still being considered for banning from the region. Ceph would support this by saying it'd be a sign of good faith towards SLU following the tense relations after the threatend embassy closure. Once again, however, the rest of the Cabinet and the mods were united in shock about this and thinking it was reward for bad behavior.
Cephesylon would eventually leave the DSA to join, not surprisngly, SLU. We would eventually find out that, of DSA members who joined SLU because of the Cabinet Crisis, a decent number became very heavily anti-DSA, including previous ministers. This spread throughout SLU until many of its leaders and major figures were regularly talking negatively about the DSA (we'd find that out later, which I'll get to). This was also noticible on our end as well. For years, even when Ivory Rhodes was involved in the DSA, there was a regular "SLU Bloc" of voters in any DSA votes. This bloc would regularly vote together, rarely interact with the DSA beyond government, and, when they did interact with the government, the vast majority of the time it was when they were against something we were doing. So, our view of SLU was also changing to start seeing them as largely not caring about the DSA, only interacting with us when they wanted to criticize us, and reguarly talking bad about us. This group of people, with the help of Ivory Rhodes for a temporary time, was also found out to have a sort of political unity in manipulating DSA politics, especially in trying to get Ceph elected as president and keep Dekks out of that.
Then, in March of 2020, again catching us by surprise, we found out that SLU drafted a bill to close embassies with the DSA. We were not even told it was a consideration before it got to vote, giving us no time to respond before votes were cast. Their reasoning for closure relied largely on criticism of our head mod, Dankass Communes, saying that they took over our region, restructed democracy for the worse, and became an unelected, unaccountable, and uncriticizable (as in criticism wasn't allowed) leader of the region. From my memory, every single person in the DSA found that ridiculous as that was not at all the position Dankass Communes held nor, as of this posting, has it ever been (I should know. Myself and her regularly fought hard on what place the government had in the DSA and my removal was never even a joke idea). A counterbill was being considered by the DSA to close embassies with SLU, but that never went through. SLU's bill won out and they closed embassies with us.
And now, on to what happened next that directly relates to this.
Growing Tension with NSLeft
The DSA's relationship with NSLeft became more strained after the Cabinet Crisis. Remember Ivory Rhode's unofficial policy of being more lenient with NSLeft leadership? Part of the changes that came after the Crisis was our policy on that. We didn't like that anymore and no longer had that in practice. However, from my guess, NSLeft leadership still expected that policy to be in place. When I talked with them about it in May 2020, they didn't know this was even a thing Ivory did, but I imagine the patterns of that policy were imprinted and they came to expect the lenient treatment even if they didn't know that's what it was. It was not common to find NSLeft leadership on the DSA server after that.
The Cabinet Crisis also altered the DSA's thoughts on Pan-Leftism. NSLeft is a pro-Pan-Leftist alliance. The DSA used to be that as well but stopped after the Crisis as those who remained in the region didn't care for that. Those who remained were more in line with libertarian leftist views, especially those near anarcho-communism. Many saw Pan-Leftism as meaning we'd have to tolerate people who vocally support atrocities commited by the governments of the USSR, China, and North Korea among a few, those who align in some way with Marxist-Leninist values. We didn't want that and became less tolerant of having that on our server. This especially esculated with the rising presence that the Uyghur genocide had in news reporting and how arguments were erupting in the DSA over whether or it is a genocide or not (you can guess who was on what side). Arguments like these further strained relationships and people in both NSLeft and the DSA were wondering if this allianceship was worth having. Already a variety of people wanted out. Some NSLeft members wanted the DSA gone and some DSA members wanted NSLeft gone, but this wasn't universal as there were members on both sides that still wanted each other.
Of the reasons to stay in NSLeft, there were a variety. NSLeft has the Red Fleet under their command, which is a Raiding and Defending organization that raids fascist regions and defends leftist ones. One reason to stay was the benefit we'd have of staying in a group that has such a powerful defender force. However, opponents argued that the Red Fleet would protect leftist regions regardless of membership as well as a raid on the DSA not being likely due to WAD's here having high endorsement counts. Another reason to stay in NSLeft was for it's importance to our WA Affairs. When Ivory Rhodes was President, he founded a WA bloc with allies of ours called the Interregional Legislative Coalition where member regions would vote together, this being to oppose the WALL bloc in the WA, this one consisting of the feeder regions of the Pacifics that had long dominated the WA. NSLeft was expanding into the World Assembly in early 2020 to become its own bloc and many of our allies in the ILC were also part of NSLeft, so we no longer saw a reason for the ILC to continue existing and it was closed. We now relied on NSLeft to be the WA bloc we were involved in.
Lastly, a reason people were hesitant to leave NSLeft was due to the benefits of being in an interregional alliance. It helped foster relations with other regions, being together for groups reasons and, due to proximity, allow a lot of cross over with other regions and increased communication. It was good for foreign affairs reasons and expanding our community to include many peoples and keep our region's name high in NationStates. Opponents argued, however, that the cost of having to tolerate Pan-Leftism and the expectations that NSLeft leaders had for more lenience on our server was not worth it.
Misley and Closure of Embassies with The Internationale
One major name to bring up before we go further is the name of Misley. Misley was one of the leaders of NSLeft and a major person in the allied region of The Internationale. He was the main person Ivory Rhodes had in mind with the unofficial policy of being lenient with NSLeft, often punishing residents more than he would Misley, of whom would often flee the server before Ivory could do anything and Ivory forgive him after. He was a Marxist-Leninist whose views were often problematic in the DSA with disagreements that anarcho-communists and MLs would have. One major incident that sicks out, back when Ivory was around, was when a news article was shared about a 6 year old girl who was dying of cancer whose Make a Wish wish was to be a police officer. She did die and, when Misley found out, he posted a meme image of a happy star with baloons saying "Officer Down" and continually saying "ACAB" about her. You know, casually happy about the death of a 6 year old girl and calling her a bastard. Everyone condemned Misley for that but he doubled down on this and, in later years, would either deny that that was he even did any of this or try and play it down and justify what he did. The combination of him a "tankie" and incidents like this led the moderators of the DSA discord to decibe to ban him from the server.
As you can guess by now, he didn't like this.
Misley called for a closure of embassies between his region of The Internationale and the DSA (called for one, didn't actually make a bill for it). He also was beginning to push for the DSA to be removed from NSLeft. The DSA Cabinet decided to respond with creating a bill to remove embassies with TI. There was also now the desire to entirely remove the authoritarian leftist elements from the DSA and codify it, further dividing us from NSLeft. However, conflict erupted with the next bill, this being created by then-president, Dekks, that being to leave NSLeft.
Departure from NSLeft
The issue was that the DSA gave no indication to NSLeft that this was even being considered and did not want to tell them about the bill until it's already at vote. You may notice that this is exactly what SLU did to the DSA with embassy closure, which got us upset, but now we were doing the same thing to NSLeft. This was HEAVILY contentious largely between the rest of the Cabinet and the Cabinet's Administrator-Emeritus, Student Loan Debt (again, me). Eventually I was able to convince the rest of the Cabinet that NSLeft should be told about this before the bill goes up for scrutiny. I told NSLeft about this and they were very confused about why we were trying to leave. Many people in the DSA were also confused with consideration that this idea being seriously entertained had hardly any public conversation. As result, Dekks, decided to push back the vote for conversations to happen. There was even the idea of taking a break from this rather than delaying it, seeing what would happen.
As for NSLeft, things were contentious there as well. Some members, especially Misley, really wanted the DSA out. However, other members and member regions did not want us to leave. However, the tensions between the DSA and TI started to affect our other embassies, specifically The Leftist Assembly and The Communist Bloc. TLA and TCB issued a joint statement saying that they did not want the DSA to leave NSLeft and wanted to have the issues between us and others discussed publicly. However, the statement also took a stance very similar to what SLU said about us in their embassy closure bill in that they thought the issues stemmed from our head moderator, Dankass Communes, and the changes she implemented and thinks the opposition to Pan-Leftism was entirely her doing. This did not go over well the Cabinet with many members now, tired of everything that's been happening, no longer considering a break and now fully wanting out of NSLeft. Wileyshire, a member of the Cabinet at the time, fought heavily against this decision and wanted to try and stay in NSLeft. The arguments that came were not good, rather similiar in nature to the arguments that occurred back during the Cabinet Crisis.
There was so much division happening that the DSA also split apart as well, conversations rising of turning the DSA into a region based on syndicalism and dividing different parts of the community into different sections, including one where government was entirely separated from the rest of the region. While this was seriously talked about and even bills written up about it (which included repealing the entire Charter), it did not end up happening (luckily, in my opinion). Part of this was also seen as a solution to the NSLeft issue, in that separate communities would allow the DSA to stay in NSLeft while others in the DSA would have no interaction whatsoever with them, though that wouldn't be how it'd actually happened. While these changes never actually happened, it was a sign of further moving away from the DSA having a government, which was something that cause many DSA members to leave over the prior year and was a concern for our allies who did not like this general shift away.
By this point, embassied had closed with the DSA and TI, and then we received news that another embassy, one with the region The North Pacific, was also going to close. Their stated reasons was on the same level as SLU's and TI's, but seemed more like they were told that this was the situation in the DSA rather than actually looking at it. Our situation was not looking good.
A break was in place on the bill to leave NSLeft. However, in May, the bill did come back. Dekks organized a bill for it and started getting cosponsors for the bill. Once again, Dekks wanted this to be secret and not tell NSLeft about it until it went up for vote. I got him to agree to wait some time after telling NSLeft about it for him to release the bill, but even that was contentious. he wanted to keep this bill between the Cabinet before talking about it with the rest of the region. However, there was another major issue in specifically the number of cosponsors the bill had. It's not unsual to get cosponsors, but this bill had 22 cosponsors. That's a lot, especially considering that the average voting numbers were below that. This means that they went into people's DMs and got their support for the bill before it could even go up for debate, essentially guarenteeing that it will pass. The people that were not told about this bill were those who would be against this. What this ended up doing was creating essentially a secret congress vote where only those who would support the bill would know about it and those who wouldn't support the bill didn't know about it to where, when it would open up for scrutiny, those against the bill had no chance of talking it down. It felt like a rigged vote. Despite this, debate raged on. Wileyshire, who was no longer in the Cabinet, was told about this secret vote and, using stamps, sent out a region-wide campaign telegram against the bill. The Cabinet was going to sent out a counter telegram, but this would have been too biased and didn't happen.
What was happening in the server for NSLeft during this time was also a lot. Most of the Cabinet refused to talk with NSLeft, leaving myself and Wileyshire to be the only ones to answer questions for NSLeft, like "Why are you trying to leave?" Our foreign affairs minister at the time, Chromatica, did show up one day to answer questions, but was very passive aggressive against NSLeft, which did nothing to lessen arguments. Our Minister of Domestic Affairs, Lay Pays De Soliel, also went in and did the same, but also bragging about the DSA leaving. Dekks, still president (all this was over, like, 1 week) did not respond to any demands for answers from NSLeft until the vote was 1 day away from ending, even then hardly saying anything. Reasonable, then, to see why much of NSLeft started to not like us.
Our bill to leave NSLeft, however, was very much tampered with. In DSA history, bills often only got an average of maybe 20 votes. Our record high was 40 votes. This was back when the DSA government was very popular, back when Ivory Rhodes was in charge and got the vote to a number never thought possible. Our NSLeft vote was cast during a time when the DSA was trying to effectively abolish the government because so many people didn't like it and didn't care to be involved. Voting numbers on average dropped. Our NSLeft vote, however? It got 76 votes. That seems weird, right? In addition, there was a spike in opt-ins for congress membership prior to the vote starting and many of those belonged to DSA nations that Ceased To Exist (CTE) 1 month after the vote. Is it not obvious our voted got raided by NSLeft members?
Tracking the votes in real time, it was very contencious for a while and seemed like the bill would fail. However, in the end, it passed by 6 votes. The DSA then left NSLeft.
The Following Months and Embassy Closures
By August, a new Cabinet had entered office and then-president and long time region member, Solus Unus, entered office on the platform of abolishing the presidency and turning the Cabinet into a Council, an idea that was popular at the time. Also, new embassies were opening. We opened embassies with the region The Social Syndicalist Union and discussions were starting of opening embassies with The East Pacific. However, something big happened halfway through August.
Liossalde, a player in the Cabinet at this time but also a long while ago, was asked by then-president Dekks to look into clique behavior of certain region members who were also residents of other regions (largely SLU, if you remember my earlier mention of the SLU Bloc). How to go about it, Dekks did not specify, just to look into it. Liossalde then came up with the idea that the best way to do this was to create a secret 2nd puppet account and gain access to SLU server channels that non-residents were unable to access. In there, he complied an album of screenshots of 4 persons from SLU insulting, mocking, and berating both the DSA, its members, and particularly Dankass Communes. This decision was made unilaterally by Liossalde and no Cabinet member knew he was doing this until he presented his evidence. On the belief that this violated the Extraordinary Conduct section of the DSA Charter, the Minister of Justice submitted to the High Judge a request for the banning of 4 DSA members that the screenshots were based around.
While the motion was largely supported by DSA members, it did not sit well in the slightest with those being banned, including with their regions. The regions of TLA and TCB sided with the 4 players in thinking this was a bad decision without real basis, believing that this was further proof of our head moderator running the region undemocratically. The two regions then closed embassies with the DSA.
This concludes this post. I have provided context to understand the Cabinet Crisis, explained the Cabinet Crisis, its effects on the region, how this played into the closing of embassies between the DSA and SLU, how the tensions grew between the DSA and NSLeft and eventually us leaving the group, and the remaining rammifications of these changes.
If I got something wrong, feel free to provide a comment below. I did not cover ALL the history that happened in this time, just the necessary ones to bring together this narrative of a history summarized. If I covered all the history, it'd include bits that have nothing to do with the rest.
