Can anyone tell me why Sir Helen Clarke deserves to be one of the 20 greatest living New Zealanders?
Is doing ones job and being paid for it worthy of great recognition?
As for ‘Mutha of the nation’ who got paid exorbitant sums to read the news getting ‘the nod’ WTF?
Who should be the 20 greatest?… Probably folk we have never heard of, and never will.
Waimarama was awesome, by the way!

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How good is this guy’s crystal ball?

http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/12/forecast-2010.html

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Trevor – the issue of ocean acidification is a good one to cite. How many people are aware of the issue? How many believe it to be true? How many would think that it will affect them personally? How many would do something to rectify the problem?
If this is one of the issues that the Greens should ‘educate’ the public on and expect to garner support and votes as a result, God help us.
Perhaps once there are naked oysters washing up on the beaches.
AGW seems to be much the same – too far off in the public mind, to stir up much response at all.
Peak all-that-stuff? Same. Not til it bites and even then, the spin will go on. Most humans will cling to their belief through thick and thin, regardless of the sounds of reality scratching at the door, especially us priviledged Westerners. We have much to lose.

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“And lets also shoot Mr Whippy.”

Farrar plumps for Food Free-for-all!

http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2010/01/ban_who_ban.html

(If there’s anything that gets Farrar of his couch, it’s the subject of food and someone getting between him and it).

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greenfly – I am not suggesting that the Greens shouldn’t be a political party. I am merely voicing my opinion on why Green Party policies are not getting the support that I think they need. The other political parties will not support Green Party policies unless their voters agree with those policies, and that will not happen unless the voters accept the issues, and then accept that those policies are an appropriate way to address those issues. Unfortunately there is an active disinformation campaign in two of these areas and the government are not acting to counter this, so what choice does the Green Party have if these issues are to be addressed?

For me, the three big issues are AGW, ocean acidification and peak oil/gas/coal/uranium. Surprisingly, the Green Party web frontpage doesn’t mention two of these and I had to follow several links to find a mention of ocean acidification. It wasn’t even on the list of campaign issues. However I am not against campaigns to clean up our rivers and address other more local issues.

Trevor.

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- “In reality, the Greens are putting up viable alternatives to what they believe to be unsustainable, unequitable practices.”

Note the sneaky conflating of “unsustainable” with “unequitable”.

Finnish television looks at what Climategate has revealed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unKZhr3JMhA

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That’s how you perceive the Green Movement, Blue. Because they are addressing issues that you don’t want to move on, you believe they are wanting to stop you, ban you, oppose the things you do. In reality, the Greens are putting up viable alternatives to what they believe to be unsustainable, unequitable practices. The ‘ban’ meme is one opponents of the Green Movement love to inflate and parade, regardless of the truth or otherwise.

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Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.

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That’s a great question BluePeter. Most of our detractors would have us as apolitical lobbiests, I believe. I don’t think that’s an attractive option at all. The Greens have obviously been through the discussions over which way to roll earlier on and chose politics. Good choice. There’s just that integrity thing getting in the way …

Asceticism – your reference?

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We’ve been learning Fly baiting in Troll school this week

The fact I’m fantastic aside, the people want plastic crap. Ask your mate Tindal – he has a good handle on it.

Question: are the Greens a serious political party with intentions to acquire power directly by mandate, or a lobby group?

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BluePeter – your uncanny ability to know the future is widely recognised and admired throughout the country (as you knew it would be).

Asceticism hasn’t been mentioned here, as far as I can determine. perhaps you could link me to where the Greens have called for it?

I’m questioning, btw, the ‘stuff’ people want, not challenging the ‘wanting’. Is there a significant difference between cheap, plastic stuff and essential, well crafted stuff.

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>>Of course they do and they shall have it, today, tomorrow and forever!

You might not like it, but that’s reality. Most people just aren’t into asceticism.

History tells us people have always aspired to more.

You need to convince them they’ll have more i.e. “a better life” by voting Green. Your campaign touched on it, but was let down by the preaching and the asceticism. I picked your vote accurately, when all the Green experts in here were convinced they’d get around 9-10%.

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Trevor29 – your comment about
‘pushing solutions to problems that most people simply do not accept as problems, or do not consider them to be serious problems’
is quite apt, but your solution, to
‘push education about these issues so that people realise the seriousness of the issues,
is puzzling – don’t the Green MP’s do that now? Is there some way that you can see that the Party could do more of that and lastly, is that the role of a political party, ‘education’ of the public? Perhaps you’d like to see the ‘Greens’ as an agency other than an political party.

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Thanks Samiuela, those are good options. I’m tucking your advice away for later.
The alternative, of course, is to express yourself so cryptically, that no one, including the recipient, knows what you mean, thereby fluxing the mantis.

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Greenfly,

Re the SIS’s ability to monitor all your online activity. Here are some practical things you can do to hamper them intercepting and reading your Email. Unfortunately it will involve quite a bit of hassle to set up.

1) Encrypt and sign your Email using PGP or GnuPG ( http://www.gnupg.org/ ). PGP and GnuPG can be used with most Email clients. Older versions of PGP and all versions of GnuPG can be obtained for free.

You have the option of simply signing your Emails, which means anyone can still read them as plain text, but this will prevent people from tampering with the contents of the mail (if they do modify your Email, the signature will no longer match the contents). Signing mail is a good protection against people changing the contents of your mail for political reasons. For example, were the leaked Emails from the CRU tampered with? If they were signed it would have been easy to detect alterations.

If you encrypt your mail, then the receiver will also need PGP or GnuPG installed on their computer. Unfortunately most people don’t realise the importance of encrypting Email, or lack the technical ability to set up the encryption software.

2) Send mail via anonymous remailers. If you need to remain anonymous for some reason, you could use Mixmaster ( http://mixmaster.sourceforge.net/ ). There is a web interface available ( http://gilc.org/speech/anonymous/remailer.html ), but I could not seem to get it to work (maybe it is overloaded), nor do I know if it really is anonymous or not.

If you use BSD or Linux then you might find the Mutt Email client useful. It can interface with both GnuPG and mixmaster in order to make sending encrypted and anonymous Emails quite simple.

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I think the fundamental problem is that the Green Party are pushing solutions to problems that most people simply do not accept as problems, or do not consider them to be serious problems. The Green Party needs to push education about these issues so that people realise the seriousness of the issues and then they will consider these solutions.

Trevor.

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‘frogpond denizens’ – they’d be pike? Better still, carp (as they do).
It seems that our ‘advisors’ are wont to advise us to do whatever it is we are not doing, then switch to something else when it looks as though we might.
Steady as she goes!

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Kind of ironic, isn’t it, that they criticise us for having an “environment only” approach and ignoring social issues, when the familiar refrain from a number of the regular frogpond denizens is that they would support us if only we’d drop our leftie social justice agenda?

Some commentators also continue to talk, mystifyingly, of a change in political strategy from us.

Meanwhile we just continue with the same charter principles, values and policies. We worked hard in 2009 to be clearly articulating an alternative approach that the Green Party would take, with, for example our two costed and detailed Green New Deal packages of measures with both environmental and economic gains, our ‘Getting There’ package demonstrating how to easily and relatively cheaply meet a significant carbon emissions reduction goal by 2020, our support for banking and monetary policy reform through the vehicle of the banking inquiry, our support for genuinely renewable methods of electricity generation like the Stockton Hydro scheme, our support for more sustainable farming practices via the ‘Good Farms’ project etc etc. Most of which had patchy (at best) pickup from mainstream media.

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People want more stuff? STUFF?

Of course they do and they shall have it, today, tomorrow and forever!

(Til we’re stuffed!)

What political party in its right mind would ignore the human need for more stuff ?

That’s a road to irrelevence, eh Blue. With John Key, all New Zealanders are assured that there’ll always be stuff for them to have, and that’s why he’s so popular. He’s got the right stuff!

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Irrelevance is the main problem. Whilst I disagree with some of that analysis, you need to think hard about the “back pocket” factor.

People aren’t going to give stuff up. They want more, not less. Your message is out-of-sync with that desire.

The commentor “John” nails another issue:

” I think the Green party has a real attitude problem. It’s a sort of smug, we know best and if you don’t buy into the full religion you’re not really green kind of attitude. I guess I could liken it to having a conversation with a first year politics, philosophy or religious studies student. They’ve been to a few lectures and suddenly they only see the world in absolutes.And unfortunately for the Green’s this holier than thou attitude filters through into the mainstream, and is probably why, although the public probably wouldn’t be able to put their finger on it, they are turned off by the Greens.”

Key is the polar opposite of holier than thou. And look at his ratings…

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