I just now found the Organisation of Active Micronations and would wish to get out of here.

I will not remain a Shirithian nor a Yardistani.

Sorry.

I lol'd.

I think someone is about to get a very valuable life lesson about how intermicronational organizations are not quite as sexy and exciting as they may appear.

[*Scott prepares to shout "YAMO", then thinks better of it, puts on a ridiculous costume and breaks into song*]

Goodbye and Godspeed old chap.

May you expire whilst voiding lurid green mucus from every conceivable orifice over an agonisingly long period of time.

And we thought Jess was annoying.

Remember that time the freakin' OAM solved our problem for us? I remember that...

Woah! The OAM-bashing is giving me headaches

Oh and for those who don't know, I'm the Secretary-General of the OAM (makes it sound unnecessarily grand and pompous...)

I hate YAMOs as much as anyone; the 5 minute forum and a MicroWiki page with "bringing all micronations together in peace and harmony" etc is painful to watch. BUT, and I wasn't expecting this, the OAM is actually active and we're different (and not YAMO!

Ok admittedly, it started off as an experiment suggested by another A1 government member - to see how long we could get an intermicronational organisation to last whilst annoying the living hell out of as many YAMOs as possible. That (of course) changed to a serious proposal (I liked the original one better though ).


SO...what have we done???

Oh and kudos on the song

Oh, my, this is going to be rough. I'm still working on precisely what to say at the OAM to make some of their members stop considering us to be subhuman waste, and now you had to come along and post and I have to do the same in Shireroth for OAM too .

Ehh. I think all I can do for now is mention that the organisation happens to share an abbreviation with a previous micronation, Oira Arnanorë Menelmacariva, that some of us used to be members of. So, if something we say about your organisation doesn't make sense, it might just be a historical in-joke. The "OAM solved our problem for us" isn't one, though - that's just Harvey being happy about Kanto (which he considers to be subhuman waste) getting out from our sight and into the OAM.

Not going to go so far as subhuman waste (Sir Philip seems nice enough, even if his last name has Balgurdian associations ) but I'm still not convinced that the organization has a point. My number one complaint about LOSS and LOM was that all they ever did was debate whether or not to accept or expel members and who the leader should be, which was a little too meta for my tastes. And looking at the OAM's resolutions, except for the media one they're all about member acceptance, member rejection, and leadership elections.

The other projects don't impress me either. The micronational dictionary only has a dozen or so terms and most of them are either useless (did we really need another definition for "micronation"?) or really biased ("Organisation of Active Micronations - a non-corrupt, non-bureaucratic micronational organisation with purely active members" vs. "Grand Unified Micronational - a seemingly corrupt micronational organisation with a largely inactive member base.")

As for http://forum.oamicro.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=79 , well, guy talks a big talk for a guy who forgets to put a six between five and seven.

I'd be totally in favor of opening relations with Sir Phillip's country of A1, and marginally in favor of joining OAM just long enough to add a "Shireroth - proper noun - THE BEST MICRONATION EVER!!" to the Dictionary Of Unsupported Opinions, but I just can't see a reason for longer term association. Ari, I usually agree with you about things, but I haven't seen you give any reasons for your interest in the place.

Scott, I'm on it. Seriously. Could everyone please shut up so I can actually go in and make... actually a lot of the same arguments as Scott made, but in the appropriate sort of manner that there's a chance people will actually accept them and change what they are doing? I don't see a reason to join the organisation, either, but I'm going to at least try to be helpful anyway because they've got a lot of good micronationalists there and I think they deserve better from us than us yelling/singing "YAMO" at them.

If you would prefer to discuss this somewhere more private (and that might be a good idea now) start up a thread in SEP or IAC or one of the appropriate venues. I think we could have a productive discussion.

...Philip Fish? Running the OAM?

All yours, Ari. Let us know if you need anything.

I can only assume that 'Philip Fish' was another guy also???

Oh and thanks for clearing that up. I did a search of 'OAM' on these forums and a lot of the results had me scratching my head...

And yes I agree - a lot of our resolutions have been about annoying bureaucratic internal stuff (I hate red tape and PC with a passion ), but quite a few of our failed resolutions haven't been internal stuff.

I'm not trying to recruit Shireroth or anything, just trying to salvage a tattered reputation

Oh and about the Micronational Dictionary - just an important point. It's very much a WIP and the "definitions" that you see on the forum are not actually the definitions that will go up. I actually only asked for WORD suggestions from members, but somehow that snowballed into suggestion crazy "definitions". I've explained it in more detail on the OAM forum, but that's really the most important point.

And Ari's done the rest

is roughly why I don't care at all about the OAM.

Fair enough.

Our resolutions are going to be published soon, if you're interested (to which I suspect the answer is a resounding 'NO' )

Shockingly perhaps to you, I am fairly interested. But I'll let Ari handle any official communications.