Greens lead in Melbourne by-election because Australian socialists are to the right of Canada's Stephen Harper

Socialists unite with Libertarians to defeat Greens, again

Australia's PM Julia Gillard is from the Labor Party  (Labor = NDP in Canadian terms, supposedly) and she is opposed to gay marriage.

So she says, in public. Has to say in public (or get slaughtered by enough of the voters to render her party practically seatless).

In a state-level by-election today in inner city Melbourne, the Greens lead the pack at 38% - winning the seat in Canadian FPP terms.

But in Australia, it is proportional voting and so the Green candidate will lose on second round preferences.

The Libertarian opposition coalition is not running a candidate and told all their voters to vote Labor --- they may different sometimes on some economic issues but they are both equally death on gay rights.

The Aussie Greens do well because the local left wingers are almost as right wing, well almost as right wing,  as the Nova Scotia left wingers.

Nova Scotia Greens fail to seize "green opportunity"

But in Nova Scotia, the Greens have totally failed to seize this opportunity opening up for them as the NDP here shed many long time supporters.

Dead skunks in the middle of road would get more votes than the Greens in Nova Scotia , if an election was held right now.

I might add that the Green national leader is from Nova Scotia but still no lift under the local Greens sails ---- even the combo of Darrell Dexter and Elizabeth May can't Viagratize the flaccid Green members....

Andrew Loog Oldham Svengali to Christine Milne ? Would you let your daughter marry a GREEN ?!

For once, don't blame  Fleet Street : it was they what got took !

To this day, most people think it was a British Tabloid editor at something like the Daily Mail (or worse) who first blared out the screaming 1965 headline, "would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone ?"

If was this headline, reproduced worldwide and then forever after, that most people agreed "made" the Rolling Stones.

Actually, the original tagline was from a series of ads ran by the canny manager of the Stones, youngster Andrew Loog Oldham, in a few music weeklies --- and only later picked up and improved upon by Fleet Street heavies.

Oldham was very young - even younger than the Stones and had never run a band before - was in fact too young to legally get a music agent's license, but he made up in street smarts what he lacked in age, experience, contacts or capital.

He was half Australian which might account for a good bit of his sheer brass. Who knows, maybe he is Down Under, visiting relatives, and offering pro bono advice to our Christine.

Anyway, back to the Stones --- itt was obvious too - in hindsight - that it was a father editor , not a mother editor, who reproduced the headline along with a frantically worried editorial.

No mother would be so daft : mothers - women - in fact know damn well that lots of nice girls love to go out with bad boys.

Particularly bad boys that good old Dad can't stand and forbids them to ever see.

Okay, now cue "The Nasty".

"The Nasty", head of the Australian Liberal (libertarian ) party, is ironically enough less a libertarian on social issues and rather more a wet blanket catholic of the most hair-shirted variety.

So naturally, "The Nasty" has taken the bait that the Green party leader Christine Milne (or someone a lot like her) has so carefully laid out for him .

He and his tame newspapers are off on a tear about all the evils that will prevail upon hapless morally-muddled Aussies if they dare to think of dating a Green.

Its a risky strategy "Nasty" - just listen to ole Rupert . His papers may have gotten a one day blip in circulation out of repeating the headline ,but it was the R. Stones who have been dining out on it ever since.

And frankly, "Nasty", if you have anything left after you tithe, I 'd take it out of shares in News Corpse and put it into Sticky Fingers, PLC.

My bet is that 10 years from now, they'll be worth a lot more than a few newspaper properties filled with rusting Big Iron and no customers.

And if someday, during your watch, the Green Horror ends up in Government or Opposition, prepare to blame yourself.

Voters are a lot like daughters : they don't always like being told what NOT to do ....

Aussie papers ask "Would you let your daughter marry a Green - they drink the blood of children you know"

"Earned Media", by the tonne, for Aussie greens

If a political party sells its soul to the rich and greedy, it can afford to obtain lots of "paid media" , by buying newspaper ads.

If the newspapers talk about your party without you paying for it, then it is called "earned media" .

Normally Green parties worldwide can't get either form of media.

But not for the Australia Greens for last few weeks - or for a few weeks more apparently.

It has been a two party punch-up on the Greens - the Labor party has teamed up with the Coalition-supporting daily media to go at the Greens on every possible point around the compass.

Far more extreme than the Communists, far more loonie than the Tea Party seems the thrust of the hundreds of articles against the Greens.

Millions of Australians are waking up, drinking coffee and reading papers and listening to radio and TV and learning for the very first time that the Greens are one of the serious parties - serious as in "feared".

I think the Coalition and Labor are going to regret this punch-up :
parties that are joked about or ignored, go no where.

Parties feared by the rich and powerful tend to be seen potential governments-in-waiting by the resentful non-rich and the non-powerful.

And there are lots of them about ......

Australia's top paper makes it official : Greens now a major threat to traditional parties

GREENS replace Liberals as Aussie Labour's bete noire

The Sydney Morning Herald - "Big Thunder" - says that the Labour Party is taking a big risk by its very public declaration of war against the greens rather than against its traditional opponent , the libertarian-oriented Liberals.

The Liberals have also joined in the braying, as it too is losing some of its young educateds to the Greens as well.

A wrenching voter and party re-alignment is definitely under way down under, where the green revolution all began 40 years ago this year .....

Is anything LEFT ? What is RIGHT ? Death spiral of traditional politics

Political Parties deathwatch

The only thing dying faster than paid newspapers and TV news is the political party.

Membership is down badly - even worse than voter turnout.

Above all, the greying memberships' spirit is gone - they haven't got enough energy left to get angry or to get happy.

What is so socialist about our socialist parties ?

They try to collect a grab bag of ever changing ideas to attract their supporters ----- just as the free-enterprise-less capitalist parties struggle to find their grab bag of ideas to get their 15% of the electorate to the polls.

When the winning government party got 33% of the votes of the one half of the electorate who sought to be added to the election lists and then bothered to show up to vote, you know you have serious dry rot.

Thank goodness for deniers vs greens : genuine anger and energy

God bless the deniers and the greens - at least those two still get fired up and angry at each other.

The older parties can't do it anymore - not even with the promise of government patronage to act as their Viagra.

We need to find a new line in the sand that divides and angers voters enough to take out memberships, knock on doors, put out a sign, give money, vote.

And left vs right ain't it - not after 150 years, it is just played out : both parties believe in an ever-growing economy and only quibble over the details of dividing the swag.

CATO vs CASSE , now there is an electoral fight I'd like to have a pony in : Endless Growth in the very short term versus an Eternal Steady State of Happiness.....

Before 1989 : RED tape impedes Greed. After 1989 : GREEN tape impedes Greed.

Grandpa, what was "RED-tape" ?

Remember yesterday's truths, the good old verities of life divided into left and right?

RED-tapes under the bed ; better dead than RED-tape ?

But that is soooooooo yesterday : like Democrat & Republican or Labour & Conservative.

Now it is GREEN-tape holding up Progress and it is GREEN-tape impeding greed.

What is left of the old left has joined what remains of the old right in agreeing that progress is good and growing an ever bigger economy is even better - arguing only over the details, sotto voce (a very quiet shout out to Darrell Dexter !)

The green Fifth Column

Now only one Fifth Column stands in their way : those anti-progressive green-clad climate worriers among their wives and children.

Ungrateful brood ! Can't they see how their GREEN-tape is entangling Daddy's schemes for making the family secure as the economy chills down and the climate warms up ?

Again - and ever again - I think the coining of this term GREEN-tape is a good thing for the green climate movement - first some must openly fear us before the majority deign to take our arguments seriously.......

"Common Sense Revolution" gets lost in "The Deniers' Triangle"

Common (NON) Sense

New Right deniers put a lot of faith in common sense against all "this quantum, whatever, nonsense they teach these days in university science".

This is why the New Right like to call their take on governance, "The Common Sense Revolution" .

Unfortunately for the rest of us, common sense is too often wrong about the ultimate, the real, reality - not the reality we would wish it to be, but Reality as it really is.

The deniers' world view is the simplistic "prove-definitely-by-Euclidian-Logic-world" of our high school science and math teachers, rather the real, tougher, reality outside the high school science and math labs.

Out here, on planet Earth (a sphere) real triangles are NOT shaped as they are within in the cozy world of Euclid .

Out here, it is a non-Euclidian World and the deniers don't want to admit it - they are still stuck in a Modernity.

Lost in  time warp from before 1945.

Green Realism vs Denier Idealism

Certainty and certitudes are the Right's emotional meat and potatoes.

Greens, on the other hand, "get" non-Euclidian math and a world governed quantum uncertainty and chaos theory and probability.

The Greens' reality, in scientific terms, is realistic : the Deniers's reality is idealistic - still hoping for triangles as straight as an arrow, on a globe where real triangles are anything but.

I almost feel sorry for them - poor lost souls, in a world and reality they no longer like --- or understand....

1789 French Revolution, 1917 Russian Revolution, 1972 Tasmanian Revolution (!!)

the Greens' revolution

In yesterday's post, I noted the neat 100 year interval between the French revolution of 1789, the Second Socialist International of 1889 and the rapid rise of the Greens' issues following the fall of Communism in 1989.

Today let us look at the geographic spread of these three revolutions.

Europe held the first radical (and Radical) revolution, which then rapidly spread  ----- to Latin America in particular.

(The American Revolution certainly did not contain the radicalism of the French Revolution - I am not denying its great importance and global impact - but even Americans can admit it was above all a revolution in favour of Moderation.)

Asia was the site for the next big revolution - first  in the USSR and its satellites and then in China and its satellites. We tend to call it (rightly)  East versus West as well as Left versus Right.

The new - Green - revolution arose on its own, starting in tiny, far off Tasmania in the geographic region of the world we call Oceania.

But it arose to prominence (despite an attempt by "desperate Old  Right guys" to hype Moslems as a serious Russian-level threat to western hegemony) because (and only because) the New Right was anxious to find a new enemy to vent over.

With solid enemies like the New Right, the new Green Revolution hardly needed solid friends.

(Just as beavers will die if they don't constantly gnaw, right wingers would die happy and content, if they didn't have paranoid fears to occupy themselves with.)

The Greens were truly lucky to have the New Right take them seriously as a global threat right from the start, because no one else did.

But why Tasmania ?

It was in the spring of 1972 that the world's first Green party arose in the tiny Australian state (and island)  of Tasmania.

The last two national Australian Green leaders have come from this state with but 2% of the total Australian electorate - a strong sign it still remains an Green powerhouse, punching well above its demographic weight.

So our third world shaking revolution has not come from the centre of the 18th century intellectual world or from the territorial and demographic powerhouses of the 20th century.

Instead we must admit that Oceania - and Tasmania in particular - are small in population, isolated geographically from the main body of humanity and not usually thought of as intellectually, militarily or economically strong.

In the two previous urban, industrializing, imperialistically-minded revolutions, this would have been fatal.

But for a revolution that saunters forth under the banner that the small is beautiful, the personal is political and we should think globally but act locally, tiny rural Tasmania is the natural (as well as Natural) home of the Green Revolution.

But 40 years on, the Greens still fail to be taken seriously by mainstream world opinion : instead they suffer the worst fate a revolution can experience : everyone likes them, in the same manner as one likes small children.

And just as with small children, we do not fear them or ask them for advice.

Seeking advice from them still seems a long way off, but with the New Right deniers fearing them, a significant start has been made.

Ironic Congrats to the deniers

This year will mark the 40th Anniversary of the Green Revolution and so , sincere congratulations to Green leaders from Tasmania like Bob Brown, Christine Milne and Nick McKim.

But it is also fitting to also mark 40 years of Green-baiting and Green-denial from the only people smart enough to recognize that they represented a new revolution (besides the Greens themselves).

 So ironic congrats too then, to their long time opponents from among the New Right deniers, who unwittingly have helped the rest of the world to learn to take the Green revolution seriously .....

GREEN, hopefully not around the ears ...

renewing my GREEN card

Well, I renewed my membership in Canada's (national)  Green Party.

Once extremely active nationally and provincially: organizer, candidate, donor, you name it , today I limit myself to voting and attending rallies, maybe putting up an election sign and offering a small donation.

I guess the reasons for my withdrawal match the reasons why I started up this blog ; they occurred at the same time and for the same reasons.

I felt that the greens worldwide hadn't really explained the reasons why people didn't vote for them in any sense except to blame a lack of electoral effort.

Ie, a little bit more elbow grease on the doorsteps and better ads on the internet and "they" will see life "our" way.

I didn't buy that as the main reason and so for a number of years, I have been reading and thinking, thinking and reading, trying to find the deeper reasons for the greens being ignored.

God bless the DENIERS

The denier movement has been a great help in focusing the answer: because they, at least, take us seriously.

They make it very clear why they dislike us and what they like better.

For in this supposedly post-modern age, modernity still thrives. We are definitely in a post-hegemony age , the old shattered hegemony was Modernity.

We now see two parallel hegemonies : one modernist and one post modernist/green/alternative/counter cultural/globally commensalist etc.

I call the deniers vs the greens, metaphorically, skygods vs earthlings, because I think its exaggerations better highlight just where we and they stand on the new , post-1989 , Global divide.....

Blogosphere OWNS climate change debate: bad news if you own newspaper shares

Newspaper shares worth almost as much as RIM shares

The new global divide is over the Globe itself, over climate change in particular.

And unlike the tired old left versus right divide, it is largely being fought over on the blog-o-sphere, not in the mainstream media.

This is bad news if you are still part of the left and right wing or if you own newspaper shares.

(These two categories actually tend to go together: old ideologies huddled for warmth around old technology).

By ignoring the new global divide between greens and deniers, the oldstream media risks becoming irrelevant to the biggest issue dividing the 21st century.

The biggest news story of the 21st century.

And the mainstream isn't covering it.

How irrelevant is that ......

The revolutions of 1789,1889 and 1989 : coincidences ?

100 year LIFE cycle ?

The rise of first the Radical (Liberal) parties, then the Socialist parties and finally the Green parties in 100 year increments may just be a coincidence ---- or it might tie into a theory that historians of science have long had.

Historians of science have long noted the very long time period powerful personalities in science can have to be dominant in their field.

They make their major discovery in their twenties which quickly leads to powerful positions on department hiring committees, on scientific society boards, as editors of big science journals, as advisors to government and industry.

Nominally they retire at 65, but actually remain professors emeritus, still writing journal articles and books. Their lifestyle and income often ensures they remain healthy and productive into their late nineties.

Their power only wanes  years after their deaths, as textbooks gradually get updated to include newer ideas.

So it is truly said " older science opinions don't get changed by new evidence, only by the deaths of their original proponents."

Ideologies like Science Theories ?

This idea from the world of science neatly ties in with the rise, apogee and fall of political ideologies : each gets one long, long, human lifetime to flourish.

I believe that the revolution of 1989 did see the fall of one (outdated) global divide (Left vs Right) and the rise of a new global divide I call - metaphorically - Skygods vs Earthlings.

It might be gone by 2089, I certainly will be - and so might our current human civilization unless we all wake up and start healing this Earth, not killing it ....

Why the rise of the DENIERS is the best news for GREENs in 40 years

Soul Mates

If you are a physical scientist - or think like a physical scientist - the unexpected rise of the number of passionate climate change Deniers has to seem both a disappointment and a nightmare.

You had assumed that if only the world had sufficient evidence of human-caused global warming, then all nations would respond rationally and quickly move to change their behavior, if only out of selfish interest in their own survival.

But, seemingly, the more scientific evidence that is released, the more Deniers that have emerged out of the woodwork - each new one more angrier than the others, as if emboldened by the signs they are not alone but rather representative of a silent (slight) majority.

But if you are a more politically minded Climate Change believer,
(we'll call you a Green, for sake of argument) the rise of the Deniers is the best news your rag tag movement has had since it was formed in the 1970s, almost 40 years ago.

Because to you, the Deniers are almost (almost) soul mates.

You both care - passionately - about Climate Change, albeit from opposing sides of the debate.

This makes a welcome relief from Greens trying to engage the other political parties.

These parties  usually make 'mouth movement sounds' about worrying and caring about climate change --- but then quickly turn to more familiar divides from the 19th and 20th century.

Yep, the good old Left/Right divide.

These politically minded people don't hate or fear Greens, may even admire their passion and commitment a little.

But damagingly, they largely dismiss them as a one-issue party, seeing them as more a protest group than a real multi-issue political party.

the old Left/Right Divide

They ignore Greens ---- the worst thing that can happen in politics.

Let me contrast this with the democratic socialists.

In most countries they were almost immediately seen as the major threat to the existing parties, even when their popular vote and seat winning was almost non-existent.

Only the United States (which characteristically preferred to fear secret conspiracies from the Communist socialists) tended to ignore its homegrown democratic socialist parties.

In Canada, in the early 1960s, in older, rural areas - like the Maritimes where I grew up, democratic socialists got very few votes except in the industrial or mining areas.

 But they were never ignored.

Socialism was seen as a fully relevant alternative to capitalist parties in modern,urban, industrial cities --- but were just dismissed as irrelevant in the Maritimes' pre-capitalist, rural culture.

It was fully relevant intellectually (elsewhere), but currently irrelevant electorally (locally).

Today, the position in the Maritimes is reversed --- socialism is seen as fully relevant, if not increasingly dominant, electorally.

But intellectually it is irrelevant : seen as a mildly more reformist version of the other mixed economy parties which themselves have moved their positions closer to those of the democratic "socialists", in practise if not yet in rhetoric.

Left or Right still exist in rhetoric, but are irrelevant in practise.

Their ideologically passion has all drained away.

The only ideological passion found on Earth today is not found in the chat rooms of leftish or rightish parties.

Instead, it is found outside our current formally organized parties, in the chat rooms of the environmentalists and their sworn enemy/soul mates, the deniers.

The old Left/Right divide was global in its dimension but not in its substance.

the new Global divide

Both left and right agreed on their underlying hegemony: Modernity's industry and technology would grow an ever bigger pie.

One Hegemony : Modernity but two ideologies : Socialism and Capitalism.

Because Left and Right then fought viciously over who deserved more of that ever growing pie : workers or bosses ?

The fight then, intellectually at least, was an internal family squabble (albeit played out with real guns in much of the world).

Worrisomely, the current divide between Green and Denier is much wider : they live within wildly different, parallel, hegemonies in our post-hegemonic world.

This conflict could easily end in bloodshed - not just between the sides, but within both camps..

Our best hope is that many of the deniers turn out to be mild skygods, really more like high technology-consumed Earthlings and that many of the greens do not reveal themselves to their green brethren as having skygods beliefs.

(Briefly - too briefly - an Earthling is committed fully to staying on planet Earth no matter what , while a Skygod is willing, nay eager, to ditch Earth 1.0 and start a new Earth 2.0 on Mars or elsewhere.)

The second thing that is different about the new global divide is that it literally a division of opinion about the Globe - its condition now and where that condition is headed.

So now we have an entire world divided ideologically and this is very new. Remember the Canadian Maritimes - it could ignore the Left/Right wars because it was only fitfully a part of a modernizing, urbanizing, industrial world.

Most of the world in the first half of the 20th century - albeit  poorer in income and education and in serious demographic decline - fitted in that category : they could avoid having a serious pony in the Left/Right divide.

But who can avoid having an interest in and an opinion on the fate of the planet they live on ?

Wait, wait !

It gets even more complicated. Because we are not just 6.7 billion onlookers in this battle : we are 6.7 billion foot soldiers in it as well.

It is our individual lifestyle and consumption habits that will settle this issue : not the tiny bit that national government politicians can do to alter our consumption habits (and still win re-election).
William Wordsworth's take

I am a political science graduate, a long time political activist, organizer and candidate, with a strong interest in the history of politics and I can tell you this is not like anything the world has seen before.

It is a whole new ball of wax and I am just so excited to be here as it happens, exploring it as it unfolds, rather than simply reading about what my fore bearers experienced, from a history book.

Our post-1989 world feels, to a Green, like it must have felt to Radicals in the post-1789 world, or to Socialists in the post-1889 world: simply alive with pregnant, exciting, new possibilities.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!--Oh!