Sisyphus

You could've just said that was a double negative. But spoiled !@#$es just don't get grammar, yah?

This must be some kind of chaining, paperless aggression. That's a fun new feature! Figured first at Roq never giving you nothing would've suited you better.

Watch that wording, Buorhann. He didn't explicitly state whether it was happy or happily and that's the sort of wordy syntax we simply can't ignore these days. You never know when a direct ally, or some vaguely connected reaching af dumb posturing entity (Malalolol) might take advantage of a poorly worded statement such as yours.

Or you could just answer the question posited by the OP. The answer is yes. Protect means protect. This is unverifiable until Alexsheepy adorns us with alliance bling.

You should've put the Syndicate flag on everyone.

I've never claimed to be a mastermind, to be fair, but you're missing a lot of context and lead up to this that is very important to the position The Syndicate was in back in June and leading up to current affairs. Delving into that is both time consuming and distracting from the fact that NPO just planned an attack on their ally's protectorates with an alliance they aren't even tied to and refuses to honor the treaty they're using to shield their play.

"1. N$O was approached in general terms by BK Sphere about hitting two spheres concurrently, as well as your own about hitting BK Sphere. We had not agreed to any plans." The fact that both of our strikes were planned for mid June is just a coincidence. BK certainly wasn't informed about these plans at all - no way - definitely not. There's got to be some other reason a government member from a completely different sphere "thought" they had our support for a war on a specific date, that lines up with our plans, that also involves random chance, says the alliance that never tries to leave anything to random chance as a rule. "2. N$O had planned its own single sphere v single sphere conflict (wasn't this the point of minispheres), independent of BK Sphere and had fixed a time and a place." Hilmes ghosts but the Board did commit to a war on KETOG for mid June before the Sphunx leak, and that was a serious concern of mine when I took on Strategic Planning. Because I was definitely interested in maintaining our commitment there. 1.) Because it was a hard commitment and 2.) Because Whales. "3. Surf's Up starts, plans in 2. are scrapped." A classic NPO duality. Plans in 2 are scrapped but now I'm an !@#$ for having different interests and wanting to discuss different options and possibilities because I'm concerned this is a PR disaster and entering in any way that overtly supports BK would reinforce a resurgent IQ narrative and collapse the minispheres dynamic. I stated that we have no interest in bailing out BK from the beginning. This is the point where I suggest the rules. There is plenty of discussion and overt conversation about the terms of The Syndicates entry and the conditions and limits under which that entry is presupposed. Roquentin even provides "tacit" approval, for those not at home keeping notes that means "saying whatever he needed to say to get his way, while knowing full well he'll break his commitment to suit his interests regardless of the consequences". And since you keep railing on it, the fact that you want to e-lawyer your way around the exact words and ignore the debate and discussion surrounding the rules of our involvement against KETOG, which I did go through pains to make explicit and reach a consensus on, is a pretty solid indicator that you either weren't paying attention or didn't care. Hence our impromptu exit, which was a quick draw response and unexpected even for me but absolutely a direct result of us making it clear in advance that we didn't approve of your entry on anything but defensive terms and you entering anyway. Was it the right thing to do? One could argue the merits but maintaining a war against KETOG to support your blatant aggression on a separate sphere when we don't share a mutual aggression pact is a pretty messed up double standard, when you consider we made it blatantly clear we didn't approve of that aggression. We did not form N$O to defend BK. Hilmes agreeing to leave BK off the table as an option despite their repeated pattern of aggression and belligerence against The Syndicate to make you guys feel better about "dropping" them was more than enough to secure them against anything other than their own incompetence. "4. Months old logs are released, two spheres agree to fight one. N$O agrees as a sphere that this is bad news and that we should do something." This is just point 3 but reworded and also one of those half truths. We certainly agreed that it was bad news but we definitely didn't agree on the way to proceed. If I had known about your conflicting interests I would have made drastically different decisions but up until you entered, I was offering you guys the benefit of every doubt, and oh boy were there plenty of doubts. We either agreed or I blew the whole thing up. You can't have your cake and eat it too. We agreed on the problem at face value but it's apparent we didn't see eye to eye on the root causes nor the potential solutions. "5. Rest is history." This is true enough, but it's pretty ridiculous for you guys to come up with some narrative that tries to spin your alliance as some good faith actor trying to make minispheres work. You admitted it yourselves that you never bought into the minispheres idea, and that you prefer bipolarity. At a certain point it became impossible to trust you with anything, constantly making appeals to your alliance's sovereignty (which is fine) but never respecting anyone else's interests or sovereignty isn't exactly the best model for a healthy partnership.

It's a fair sentiment.

Also, to comment on Itachi's point, it was embarrassing but not the reason we've reacted the way we have. It has much more to do with being coerced, having vital information withheld from us, and clearly having some line of communication leaking directly to BK. Roq having a meltdown about BK contacts never working with him again if NPO didn't save them before entering the war against TKR certainly didn't help comfort my suspicions.

I was more than explicit about the rules in our conversation. Particularly, and explicitly about not expanding since at that point the only consensus we could agree on was targeting whale tier nations. I think the only possible way you could've gotten confused is by reading "We" to mean "The Syndicate" but there was a ton of contextual debate around the originally proposed rules to indicate that was a royal "We" that encompassed the sphere as a whole. Roq publically admitted he gave it tacit approval. It's pretty obvious at this point you guys were more interested in simply compelling us to be involved than operating in good faith. The only thing I changed on the fly was including the affiliation bit, to make it clear all of our sphere's alliances were allowed to hit Grumpy and Guard - because that's what we had planned. For further context we explicitly stated we were not interested expanding past Grumpy and Guardian unless we were attacked first.

My lack of activity, which was communicated in good faith, does not excuse their egregious incompetence, I'm afraid.

Let's not forget the fact that they tried to demand we co-sign these terms and be responsible if they were broken. Let's also not forget they declared on more than "4 specific war dodgers". Protect means protect. Let's ALSO not forget they declared in the middle of negotiations which had just started in earnest within the last day or so.

I believe you based on your long track record of being an upstanding and honest member of the community. It must have been Polaris, then.

Thank the lord I saw this thread before we all jumped into Vacation Mode.

The plot thickens.

Could you repeat that, Abbas? I'm afraid I didn't hear me the first time.

I feel betrayed by the Enterprise.

Hard fought and well deserved.

The preamble to this treaty is still one of my favorite examples of pith. Looking forward to those things we'll be working on!

Those flags look really good together.

I bid 2,100,001

I'm not sure Sheepy was ever prepared for this. Welcome to the game, GOONS.

[Insert thatsbait.gif]

We'll just let time tell the story on this one. As with everything.