I’ve now ruled on them.

I’m genuinely surprised and disappointed by your rulings.

You’re free to CFJ to overturn them, but I will honestly say that I was surprised by the first one especially. I thought there was a scam there too :(

I also think that both judgements are incorrect, but I shan’t contest them further - I’m not convinced that the appetite for further resistance exists and I don’t want to hold up the game with a vanity row.

Fair enough. It’s nice when everyone agrees, but in the end, not everyone will interpret things the same way. I think the issue of how BlogNomic handles simultaneous actions to be fascinating, actually, as I don’t see anything that explicitly says that you couldn’t stuff multiple Tabloid Headlines into one post, or even that you couldn’t take a single cost to satisfy multiple requirements, but the latter seems almost implicit and I’d lead to saying that you couldn’t multi-Headline as well. But I’m pretty comfortable ruling that you can putting multiple voting icons in a comment to support or oppose, even though if it said “posting a comment to the Coup containing a For or Against icon, respectively” I probably would have ruled the other way.

I think partly there’s an old-ruleset resistance - combining actions used to be specifically illegal, although I think that went when Fair Play was tightened up - but also the general principle that the ruleset specifically permits actions, and didn’t need to specifically prohibit them. The existence of a specific exemption for the GNDT to me supports but does not constitute an argument that concurrence is illegal; for me, that argument comes because concurrence is *not* legal, and an action that isn’t permitted is by definition prohibited.

Perhaps that’s a view that has had it’s time, but if “in the spirit of” is the new law I suspect that will need to be codified.

There always needs to be “in the spirit of” in interpreting rules, and it can’t really be codified. With the first point of order, about the grammatical interpretation, I was influenced to at least some degree by the history of BlogNomic generally interpreting rules in ways that don’t give rise to scams, when an ambiguity exists. I could certainly conceive of a nomic that did it differently and would have found a scam there. But I don’t think that BlogNomic has ever been a game about creative interpretation of the rules. Loopholes, yes, but not sticking a needle through the fabric and trying to thread a shoe through.

I guess that a better way to argue would be to vote against the DoV anyway. If it gets defeated, then passing a CFJ to officially overturn should be pretty straightforward.

I disagree strongly that BlogNomic has never been about “creative interpretation of the rules” - when it’s been at it’s best it’s always been about that, albeit with a greater emphasis on mechanical formulation in addition to that. This dynasty was also specifically cited as taking a different approach. It’s a shame to see that abandoned at the last. On a personal note, it also feels weird for me to be defending ruleset scams against you, but that’s the way it goes.

Voting against the DoV because I disagree with the point of order would actually be borderline illegal under the current ruleset (“For the duration of the dynasty, the Speaker’s rulings shall be used in interpreting the rules”) and, as I said, I’m not going to obstruct on principle, but I do think you got this one wrong.