Flag Voting

[Bill3000]

You don't just change a flag that's been around this long because it's 'ugly'. It's wrong. We're not even voting to change it for political or religious reasons, purely because of aesthetics. Regardless of whether you guys think it's ugly or not, that's a really shallow reason. I don't make strong statements often, but this is a line I am drawing in the proverbial sand. Citizens of Shireroth, I beg you reconsider what your doing. At the very least see how superficial this is! It sets a bad precedent for the future, it says that it is ok to change major parts of our country for no reason other than the fact it's ugly.

But we ought to be able to change major parts of the nation if it is aesthetically ugly. Shireroth is a project in which we should continuously improve upon!

[Gman Russell]

But at the expense of our history? and unless all the citizens of Shireroth find it ugly, then it's not really an improvement, because SOMEONE still thinks its ugly.

[CJ Miller]

You don't just change a flag that's been around this long because it's 'ugly'. It's wrong. We're not even voting to change it for political or religious reasons, purely because of aesthetics. Regardless of whether you guys think it's ugly or not, that's a really shallow reason. I don't make strong statements often, but this is a line I am drawing in the proverbial sand. Citizens of Shireroth, I beg you reconsider what your doing. At the very least see how superficial this is! It sets a bad precedent for the future, it says that it is ok to change major parts of our country for no reason other than the fact it's ugly.

But we ought to be able to change major parts of the nation if it is aesthetically ugly. Shireroth is a project in which we should continuously improve upon!

QFT

[Harvey Steffke]

You don't just change a flag that's been around this long because it's 'ugly'. It's wrong. We're not even voting to change it for political or religious reasons, purely because of aesthetics. Regardless of whether you guys think it's ugly or not, that's a really shallow reason. I don't make strong statements often, but this is a line I am drawing in the proverbial sand. Citizens of Shireroth, I beg you reconsider what your doing. At the very least see how superficial this is! It sets a bad precedent for the future, it says that it is ok to change major parts of our country for no reason other than the fact it's ugly.

*hits Gman with a moose*

Old flag is old. New Shireroth is new; therefore, we need a new flag.

CJ, you may consider yourself lucky that you have broken ties with Shireroth as quickly as you did. Your treatment of one of our most respected citizens, as well as someone I consider a close personal friend, and your irreverence towards the flag that we attempt to alter only with the heaviest of hearts show your true colors as nothing but a pest to be swatted away as soon as possible. "New Shireroth is new" is new indeed. Take your list of tired internet memes and kindly GTFO as fast as you can.

[Scott of Hyperborea]

I wanna get this before the Landsraad ASAP, but I'm waiting for Brookshire and Goldshire to sort out their potential mergers, because right now I don't know who the Duke of Goldshire is, whether they're even active, or what, and I'd hate to have something this important hinge on no one being sure exactly what the Duchies are.

I give the Goldenbrookers three days, and then I'm getting someone to propose this, and darn the consequences. I suggest if they haven't made any more progress by then, that the Kaiser just decree the two duchies merged and name a Duke.

[AryezturMejorkhor]

For all practical purposes, you can consider me the acting Duke of Goldshire as I'm the only person around.

[AryezturMejorkhor]

I'll be casting all 10 of Goldshire's votes. For the Explosion Flag.

The merger can happen after. Lets get this over with.

[Scott of Hyperborea]

Is it really fair to get Goldshire's votes when it's not even going to be a Duchy in a few days? I got to admit I was holding back on the theory you'd probably vote against it, but now it seems unfair to take advantage of your votes

If you want to propose it to the Landsraad, be my guest.

[AryezturMejorkhor]

The theory I would vote against it, hm... what was the theory based on, my traditionalism? My traditionalism also involves a sense of aesthetics and beauty and the new flag is clearly more beautiful than the old one. I only opposed it before and revolted to stir things up. I actually didn't support the old flag then.

[Gman Russell]

Choosing aesthetics over tradition is a terrible thing. Please reconsider.

[Bill3000]

Choosing aesthetics over tradition is a terrible thing. Please reconsider.

We're not a 500 year old nation with 50 million people. We're more akin to a constructed world project. We can change it, identify with it, and improve the work.

[Gman Russell]

Lots of things can change, but a flag should not be one of them.

[Bill3000]

Lots of things can change, but a flag should not be one of them.

Sure it should. There have been many nations throughout history which changed their flags. Babkha changed its flags three times. Jasonia changed its flag.

[Gman Russell]

Just because our micronational peers do it, does not mean it was a correct action.

[Kaiser Leto III]

Lots of things can change, but a flag should not be one of them.

Sure it should. There have been many nations throughout history which changed their flags. Babkha changed its flags three times. Jasonia changed its flag.

I thought they could never decide which flag would become the official one? Or was that something else? The capital maybe?

Goldbrook, one of the worst word jokes ever.

[Scott of Hyperborea]

[erik]
Bill vs Greg...fight!

Greg opens with: unsupported assertion!
Bill counters with: questionable metaphor!
Greg continues with: unsupported assertion!
Bill tries: bandwagon argument!
Greg continues with: unsupported assertion! He's on a roll!
IMPERIAL INTERVENTION! TIME'S UP!
[/erik]

[Ari Rahikkala]

This is absolutely ridiculous. Change the flag because other people said it was ugly? I cannot think of a more shallow reason to change something so hallowed. I am thouroughly disgusted by this.

Well, Greg, I don't doubt your sincerity here, but I think there are two mistakes you're making here, and I'd like to clarify your thinking regarding them.

One, you can't compare the values of choices just by checking off the categories in which they differ. If tradition *always* overruled aesthetics, we'd never change things at all. We'd have a pixellated ugly Malarbor image because we used to have one. We'd have... uh... well, OK, granted, so we don't change things often on the forum, and I'm not going to use the duchy colours thing as an example because I'm not quite convinced of their aesthetic value yet (I like them personally, but then again I also listen to Bad Religion), but you get the point: Some value judgments can't coherently be made by just casting them as a choice between two categories of value.

Two, there's more to this than just tradition and aesthetics. Take, say, symbolism for instance. I don't actually try to see a lot of symbolism in flags most of the time, especially if it's just in the colours (*). But the old flag of Shireroth symbolises a great deal of things to me. It reminds me of all of the worst things about Shireroth. Its clashing, garish colours symbolise both the mismatching cultures *and* the fact that you can hardly find two Shirithians who actually agree about what we should be doing as a micronation in general. The thin bars and the middle blob remind me of our sloppy, half-assed execution of poorly conceived plans, and our habit of leaving everything half done... something I'm very guilty of, too, but it's not something I want our flag to constantly remind me of.

By comparison, the Explosion flag is not only based on well-founded symbolism and traditional colours, but it's also *fresh*, in a way that I find seriously impressive. The way the triangles form a parallelogram in the middle, the way the flag uses black as the "background" colour... how many flags do you know that do this? Yet it *works*. I *want* to see the Explosion flag waving in the wind. I think the shape has excellent balance, and it makes me wonder why I've never seen anyone else come up with the idea yet. Google does not seem to know of the term "invention in vexillology" so I'm not sure it should be coined just for this occasion, but if it *were* conventionally used, it is what I would call this. What better to symbolise with such a flag but a micronation? And what micronation better to symbolise with a flag that has a big B0O0/\/\ in the middle but Shireroth?



(*) I don't subscribe to the "the yellow stands for a wheat field and the blue for the sky" school of vexillology. In fact I find the whole idea of single colours in flags symbolising things to be somewhat silly - I much prefer to look at the way colours go together and form shapes. This is part of why I'm so stubbornly proud of Straylight's flag: The colours really are just primary colours and nothing but that, it's the fact that the entire flag consists of them and their mathematical interplay that actually symbolises anything.

[Malliki Tosha]

Ari, now I like the Explosion flag.

DAMN YOU!
DAMN YOU ALL TO BALGURD!

[Gman Russell]

Scott, you know i'm not a very good debater. To call me out on it is in poor taste.



Ari, I understand your reasoning. If that is honestly how you feel, then ok, I respect that. But I still think changing the flag is a bad idea, even despite your good point(s).

(are you really suprised?)

The points you bring up are tradition, aesthetics, and symbolism. You have a good point about tradition losing to aesthetics, but taste is random and varied. You find the new flag pretty because of its look, but I don't really like it because of the exact same reason. To my mind, it's very... ordinary. Nothing exciting about it, to me. Tradition is a better choice, IMHO, because it's a better reason to keep something (like our flag) someone finds ugly. Unless 100% of the citizens approve of the flag, then it's still not a very good choice, because someone out there still finds it ugly (which is the exact same reason your changing it).

...make any sense? Bah, i'll ramble on anyway.

As for symbolism, you say that it reminds you of the worst Shireroth has to offer, but to me, it reminds me of all the best in Shireroth. This place was and still is a home to me. It was a place of refuge where I could hide from my real life and be amongst people who largely felt the same way (even if we did argue all the damn time). That's not to say that everyone in Shireroth joined because they were a real life misfit, but there is some validity to a good chunk of us being socially mal-adjusted (at least back in the day).

So when you see an ugly flag that symbolises our problems, I see a flag that fills me with pride, hope, and acceptance. I see a flag I can honestly love, that symbolises everything that makes us great. Yeah, we argue alot, but that is what gives us our posting activity. The flag has mismatching colors that to you, symbolize mismatching cultures. But if our cultures did not mismatch, we would not have nearly the same amount of cultural richness that we have now. Even if that culture is half finished, if it WERE finished, what would do then? Move on, and Shireroth would probably die a Babkhan style death (I don't want to be your micronation, can't we just be friends?). So when I say it's not a good idea to change the flag for traditional purposes, that is what I mean. Not some dogged determination to keep things the same, it grows from a desire to keep that which I love from being changed.

The tragedy of this situation is that I fully realize this is a mexican standoff. The changing of the flag obviously means something to you, or you wouldn't have bothered to put together that well thought out arguement. It obviously means something to me as well, or I wouldn't have bothered to make myself look like a fool with my half-assed arguements. But their the best arguements I can come up with, and I sincerely mean everything I just said. If my logic doesn't convince you, then let the honesty of my passion convince you. Changing the flag is changing everything that is Shireroth, both good and bad. To change that flag is to remove the conotations, good or bad, from peoples minds, that make it a real flag.

[Aurangzeb Khan]

Shireroth would probably die a Babkhan style death

On the basis that our members still correspond with each other I would dispute the notion that we are dead, albeit somewhat unmicronational these days.

[Scott of Hyperborea]

Greg, you're an excellent debater, and all I'm calling you out on is that you didn't even try until now.

I feel for everything you said about Shireroth being a place of refuge and a place of friendship, and I agree with it. But Shireroth is not the same as Shireroth's flag. To me, the flag was just an ugly .gif image that was sitting on top of the boards annoying us while all these good things were going on. Changing the flags no more removes the good memories than changing the old Malarbor background did.

But I also feel like I was in Shireroth when I was fifteen years old, and now I'm 25. And mark my words, we have all changed beyond recognition in the interim. I couldn't imagine a thread like this one today. And there's a side of me that says "You don't really wanna be in that country with the elves and the evil tree demons and the horrible flag anymore, do you?" There's a part of me that says if I'm going to be a grown adult with a real job and everything, all this sort of micronational stuff is too childish. And so far I've resisted that voice, because I really like it here, and even though it's a guilty pleasure, it is a pleasure.

But while I'm (awkwardly) growing up and becoming more "professional", I would identify more with Shireroth if it did the same. No, I wouldn't immediately quit if the flag wasn't changed. But eventually? If I was 35 years old, and married with a house and a job, could I see myself sticking in a country with a blurry WoW picture as the background and a crazy garish mspaint flag? I dunno. I'd rather not find out. I'd rather make Shireroth into the kind of country that I could very happily show to my wife and my coworkers, and even if they think it's crazy and silly, they at least admit that it looks like people put some work into it.

That's why I'm on this drive to change the flag and the forum colors now. It may be that this is out of my own weakness - that a more self-confident person would have no trouble playing somewhere that looked childish even as an adult. If so, I am weak. I know that growing up is neither popular nor laudable, but it seems to be happening anyway. I blame hormones.

And the new flag is a way of saying that Shireroth, too, is growing up to keep pace with us. It's a symbol of our personal growth (you're ten years older same as I am) and of our hope that even though Shireroth has to change shape as it goes from a nation of teenagers to a nation of twentysomethings, we're in it for the long haul and we want to be as proud of it now as we were in our youth.

Unlike Ari, I'm not enraptured by the explosion flag. I never expected it to get this far. But the die is cast. It's either that, or keep the outward face of Shireroth the same forever. If Shireroth stays the same and we keep getting older, I worry that one day we're going to realize that it's not our sort of thing anymore. I'm willing to change the flag, the forum colors, and whatever else it takes to prevent that from happening.

Like you, I realize this is a horrible situation, where some people are going to be upset no matter what. That's why I did the poll - I wanted to make sure this would unupset more people than it upset. And I think maybe the same things are preying on your mind as on mine, only you're interpreting it the opposite way: you don't want us to start looking all adult and professional, because the stupid professional corporate world is what we come here to escape from. I can't argue with that. I guess I'd just say that even though we're escaping from them here, part of that escape is showing everyone else that we are just as good as they are, only different, that even though we're capable of as much as anyone else we still choose to stay here and invent a new nation. Having a good-looking flag would help me think that.

[Harvey Steffke]

Am I the only one here that doesn't see Shireroth's flag as anything more than just an image that I occasionally see when browsing the wiki? Good flag, bad flag; Shireroth is still going to be what Shireroth is. Changing the flag and the forum colors won't change the fact that there are huge spiders in Elwynn or elves in Goldshire and Amity and a group of people that always grab and never think in Yardistan. If Shireroth is childish, it's the whole country that's childish, not just the flag. Claiming the flag symbolizes all that is either good or bad with the country is only managing to blow this debate way out of proportion.

I don't tell my friends about micronationalism because I don't want to have to explain the concept of micronationalism, not because Shireroth is a little silly.

[Kaiser Leto III]

Am I the only one who really likes the forum style?

[Aurangzeb Khan]

After a while the retinas are cauterised and you barely notice it at all.

[Allot]

Am I the only one here that doesn't see Shireroth's flag as anything more than just an image that I occasionally see when browsing the wiki? Good flag, bad flag; Shireroth is still going to be what Shireroth is. Changing the flag and the forum colors won't change the fact that there are huge spiders in Elwynn or elves in Goldshire and Amity and a group of people that always grab and never think in Yardistan.

Amen. Agreed.

[Gman Russell]

If you look at your micronations flag and don't see ANY symbolism in it, good or bad, then your missing the point of a micronation.