Regarding that particular election, again I'm not sure if that was the one, but even SD says he was asked to run ~he kinda said~ "Every time you guys need me to step in and take over Taijitu I'm completely free to do as I've been summoned in the past".
The rest, yeah, you're mixing up the many skeletons I might have said here or in the past, when I said there were many skeletons, I didn't mean "just now". Those are different timelines / regimes, yes. I do think that some of the way it was done was to keep the power in the "family". Many of the times disregarding the difference of opinion and having closed discussions, like the bills for the constitution right before Ecclesia, where things got moved to vote before I (or anyone besides "that" group) had the chance to finish my proposals, I mentioned the last version got to go to vote not even a full day away, I mentioned in open IRC channel I was reading a drafting a revision proposal from my notes and previous proposals and suddenly, while I was drafting, the bill was moved to vote, ah...dick move. Tell me otherwise if you want, I'll always see it another way.
Regarding Ecclesia-era (contemporary) I have always argued that there was too much power transfer to offices and little offices and sub-comission offices and more and more, that Ecclesia was losing power to unlock the participative potential our creative members had, I always argued those were mere titles, pure status quo, which is completely the opposite of the notion of a participative democracy where everyone is equal, horizontal structure, etc. I've always argued that foreign policy couldn't be driven by a single person of delegated by such, those are issues everyone should discuss. If you want to go back to all those discussions, we're having them again right now, and I'm not the one talking about those issues, and apparently we as a collective are realizing how much bullshit those "offices" were. I'm pretty happy we're having this discussions and maybe something can come up from them. Learning from past mistakes is pretty important for a collective.
We have a quite recent case where "fossils" stepped in to direct a process and were forced to compromise in paper, but forced their views in practice - and this was in the Ecclesia era. Our GP strategy is complete bullshit, we were all "regionalism" and "sovereigntists" which many wanted to be a middle stance, neither defender nor raider, probably both to whatever whim. Yet it was always pushed to "Defenderism", still in paper is called "Sovereigntism" but whoever was in charge of the militia made sure we were with "their team" of Defenders. Sovereign my ass.
It's a normal reaction, in group dynamics it's called collective narcissism, and all the "inter-group aggression" and "charisma following" is all part of a collective of weak individuals who cannot lead themselves (I'm kinda pushing interpretation one way but this is studied, go search). We are here, now, trying to make this a "direct" - although I much rather - Participative Democracy, I'm pretty sure we can let the the past be water under the bridge.
There must be another way. We just have to imagine it
