But the best one is that I love every second of it.

Oh and I'm impulsive.

I'm incredibly arrogant and manipulative.

At least answer the stupid question.

It's a distinction not even worth making; you run the fucking country.

i've actually never participated in one of these before, what do i do?

You basically run the country.

Each page (set it at 25 posts) is equal to a year, so you'd do things like build diplomatic relations with other countries, maintain and build your army, alter your economy, research technology and the like. The GMs are around to make sure you're not doing anything unrealistic, or popping up with shit you don't have.

No government is good or fair, and if you think one is you're fucking delusional.

The key is to stop caring.

That's kind of cheating though, isn't it?

I don't see how.

The royal family don't have to surrender their lands' revenues, they just always have done since George III.

Stats:
Country: England
Government: Absolute Monarchy.
Leader: Sweyn Forkbeard.
Religion: Lutheranism
Population: 2,000,000
Currency: Silver-backed Groat
Economy: Regulated market economy

Natural Assets:
-Wool trade
-Fishing
-Agriculture
-Silver and iron mining

Military Assets:
-5,000 armoured serjeants with iron mail, spears and broadswords
-18,000 levy spearmen with spears
-2,000 archers
-No horsemen
-500 sokesman manning a fleet of 50 wooden longships

Social Organisation:
-Dukes control vast swathes of land, known as dukedoms.
-Margraves control the marches between England and Scotland, as well as Wales. Margraves are required to maintain their own inactive standing armies of men-at-arms. Margraves also have royal immediacy, meaning they answer to no Duke, but to the King directly.
-Landgraves also hold vast swathes of land, but their holdings are not vast enough to be considered Dukedoms. They, like Margraves, have royal immediacy.
-Graves/Vanngraves/Waldgraves/Raugraves control standard Graviates under a Duke, after swearing a pledge of fealty and promising to supply taxes or a quota of fish, lumber or iron/silver respectively.
-Knights are nobles who are gifted a certain parcel of land by their Graves and given a degree of autonomy. In a sense, they are the Graves' local policemen, charged with defending the King's Peace.
-Thralls are employed by especially rich knights to act as a king of lieutenant.
-Freeholders are freemen who own enough property to afford employing their own labourers. They pay a property tax levied by their lord, although their numbers are low given the manorial system.
-Husbandmen are freemen who rent the land they work on.
-Labourers are freemen who sell their labour for a wage.
-Serfs are labourers who work for their lord, and are allowed to keep some of their produce for survival as well as to sell any excess provided their lord didn't seize it.

Although one thing I don't understand is why they need the taxpayer to fund them, surely they can provide for themselves.

They could, but the salary the taxpayers pay them is smaller than the revenue from royal lands that the government gets in return.

So basically ABA, anything but america.

I think everybody agrees with that; America's healthcare system is a mess.

Universal Healthcare = Fundamental yoomin roight

Sure, but there's a difference between universal and national.

Most countries don't have nationalised healthcare, but they do have universal healthcare.

Any Bongs here consider themselves republicans? And what perspectives to foreigners have of our royal family?

I'm a fairly staunch supporter of the monarchy, for both economic and diplomatic reasons. One of the problems I have with anti-Monarchists is that they never seem to have any good reasons for supporting a republic.

. . .

it's all ogre

lol

President Barack Obama is less than stalwart in the fight against ISIS and doesn’t seem overly concerned about Vladimir Putin’s predation in Ukraine or China’s aggression in the South China Sea. It is the fight against climate change, an allegedly dire threat to the nation’s security, that brings out his inner Churchill.

In remarks at the Coast Guard Academy commencement, Obama pledged his undying hostility to climate change and his determination to fight it on the beaches and in the fields. He called it “one of the most severe threats” we face and “an immediate risk to our national security.” President Obama is to climate change what Cato the Elder was to Carthage.

He hailed the Coast Guard for building more fuel-efficient cutters, and the Marines for deploying with portable solar panels. It was one of the most insipid calls to arms ever made by an American commander-in-chief, and there is unlikely to be much competition until President Elizabeth Warren rallies the U.S. Navy against income inequality.

From the president’s urgency, you would think that climate change is beheading American hostages and taking over large swathes of Middle Eastern countries, toward the end of establishing a hostile climate-change empire. The reality is that, even accepting his premises about the state of the science, he can point only to laughably tenuous connections between climate change and national security.

The president cited drought as one of the causes of the Syrian civil war. Yet an article in the journal Middle Eastern Studies notes that Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon experienced drought in 2007–2008. None of them collapsed into a genocidal hellhole. Nor is drought unusual in Syria. According to the article, “Over the last 50 years, from 1961 to 2009, Syria experienced nearly 25 years of drought, which represents over 40 percent of the period.”

Quite reasonably, the article counsels focusing on the corrupt and dysfunctional Syrian government as the fundamental cause of the uprising. The drought “should be considered the backdrop of years of mismanagement, unsustainable policy making and rising rural poverty, which fueled pre-existing discontent and sparked the first protests.” Not to mention the fact that countries all over the Middle East and North Africa experienced revolts at the same time.

The president warned of how climate change could create “mass migrations,” the kind of disruption that a White House document says will disproportionately affect Africa and Asia. Even if this is true, how will it implicate our national security? The United States was content to stand by while 800,000 people died in the Rwandan genocide and more than 5 million in Congo’s civil war. If that mass slaughter didn’t move us, we aren’t going to mobilize the troops to manage climate-driven mass migrations.

Another climate-change hot spot is the Arctic, with President Obama predicting that summers could be ice-free there by around 2050. Man the battle stations? Well, no. A Brookings Institution article notes that “what we’re seeing in the Arctic is that receding ice is triggering commercial competition and governance cooperation; not conflict.”

Typically, the president implied clear and present dangers from climate change, although the “consensus” science he purports to champion projects effects on extreme weather roughly 80 years from now. By then today’s cadets will have long ago passed the baton of the fearsome battle against climate change to subsequent generations.

Of course, if climate change were a true enemy of the United States, President Obama would extend a hand of peace, or declare victory and go home.

Defining climate change as a national-security threat is simply a rhetorical ploy to stoke alarmism, in hopes of creating support for self-sacrificial anti-carbon policies that can’t survive any reasonable cost-benefit analysis. War is the health of the state, the writer Randolph Bourne once said. In this case, it is specifically the health of Environmental Protection Agency rules and global regulations.

He's just saying it wouldn't feel right. It doesn't feel right to endorse smoking crack. Because it isn't right. It destroys communities.

Saying "it doesn't feel right" isn't an argument; saying "it destroys communities" is an argument. Just leaving it at "it doesn't feel right" has no weight whatsoever.

And then you get into the whole argument about whether legalising = endorsement, or whether regulation is better than criminalisation at controlling drug use. I'd argue the two aren't equivalent, and that regulation is superior.