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Why the Green Party is shit

Coolfonz said:
I've visited Vienna a good few times. Always thought we should have bombed its ass a bit more in WW2. ( ;) ) Its like fash-statue heaven. Vikings with swords, Odin, men in chariots, sunwheels. Felt like any second they were going to round me up. Good techno scene mind.
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I've been to a lot of places around the world - and I know for a fact that Vienna is the only one of them I could never live in. The architecture you describe became genuinely oppressive after a week.
 
Some of the statutes on the Ringstrasse are ludicrous, and there's that massive Red Army monument which the Viennese refer to as 'the tomb of the unknown rapist'
 
out of interest, for the greens arent policies decided by conference as a wish list, and therefore the costing is done once they've already agreed to all the things theyd like to do?
 
I've met my local green candidate a number of times and he's pretty good ....he's certainly" involved " Pity he's not an independent , would have had my vote .
 
bluescreen said:
Not snarking here and you'll probably just say GIYF. I totally understand the need for passiv houses and if we are building new ones they are absolutely what we should build. But how does the carbon balance sheet look when we are demolishing houses that can cheaply be made sort-of OK vs new build? I'd like to see some figures on this, otherwise it can look like nice contracts.
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it wouldn't be cheap to make them 'sort of okay' - not to the extent needed. Especially when you consider how so many would need drastic remodelling in order to accommodate the kind of households who are currently homeless. It's not just a question of improving heating efficiency etc, it is the fact that there are simply too few homes for our needs. Half a million comes close to how many new homes are needed, but still doesn't quite cover everything.
 
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Coolfonz said:
I've visited Vienna a good few times. Always thought we should have bombed its ass a bit more in WW2. ( ;) ) Its like fash-statue heaven. Vikings with swords, Odin, men in chariots, sunwheels. Felt like any second they were going to round me up. Good techno scene mind.
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Did you go to the Kunsthistoriches Museum? it wouldn't be so bad if most of the martial statues weren't either Habsburg rulers, or allegories of Habsburg rulers! Statue of Zeus? That's not a statue of Zeus, it's an allegorical representation of the world-spanning power and Olympian wisdom of some dead cousin-fucker called Habsburg! :D
 
Coolfonz said:
I've visited Vienna a good few times. Always thought we should have bombed its ass a bit more in WW2. ( ;) ) Its like fash-statue heaven. Vikings with swords, Odin, men in chariots, sunwheels. Felt like any second they were going to round me up. Good techno scene mind.
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I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. Constantinople suited me better.
 
The ability to think on your feet in a tight corner is what differentiates a front line politician from the rest of us political anoraks. But I like Natalie Bennett on a personal level and I didn't feel the schadenfreude that I did with Cameron flailing with Pink News when asked why his party is in coalition with homophobic nutjobs in the EP. There's always the Boris option when you frequently can't answer a question; bluster out some noises, make an unfunny joke and say something in Latin. Just think what a 'character' Natalie could become.
 
I got stuck in Vienna for three days when a gig fell through in Bratislava. Bank holiday weekend, waking up too late on a Saturday to make it to the shops before they closed for two and a half days. Even right in the middle of the city nothing was open and nobody was about, proper 28 days later sort of atmosphere. Everyone just fucks off on holiday. I doubt it would have been much more exciting with people there.
 
youngian said:
The ability to think on your feet in a tight corner is what differentiates a front line politician from the rest of us political anoraks. But I like Natalie Bennett on a personal level and I didn't feel the schadenfreude that I did with Cameron flailing with Pink News when asked why his party is in coalition with homophobic nutjobs in the EP. There's always the Boris option when you frequently can't answer a question; bluster out some noises, make an unfunny joke and say something in Latin. Just think what a 'character' Natalie could become.
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Is that really the front line? It seems very very distant from the vast majority of everyday life, which is what politicians tell us they are trying to make better.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice
 
Louis MacNeice said:
Is that really the front line? It seems very very distant from the vast majority of everyday life, which is what politicians tell us they are trying to make better.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice
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Yes see your point, would the people at the top that are watched by millions on the telly if would be more accurate? Anyway there's no way I could think of a quick plausible answer to every subject going and I take my hat off to anyone who can, its a rare skill. I know its not very fashionable to praise the skills of politicians who are of course corrupt, useless and evil. Whereas we're all brilliant.
 
Brighton Green reverse anti-cuts vote? I find this quite hard to follow but seems to the gist of it.

Cuts of at least £20m to local services look certain to be agreed tomorrow as a tiny minority of ‘rogue’ Green councillors have overturned the party’s anti-austerity position ahead of a meeting to decide Brighton Council’s budget for the next year.

The twin-pronged attack on the party’s ‘anti-cuts’ position was agreed at a ‘crisis’ meeting last night.

First, the party’s national council ruled the original position didn’t apply ~ citing a technical argument about the number of people at the meeting ~ overturning an earlier ruling by local party bosses.

Second, a motion seeking the party’s support for a budget that would see some £20m of cuts next year was presented to the 90 or so party members present.

With the ‘proxy votes’ of people not even there, the motion carried ~ and now the city’s 20 Green Party councillors have been told to vote for the cuts budget after all.
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So, what is the point of voting Green?, I've been having doubts about them, new councillors here could not be described as 'left wing', but what is the alternative?
 
treelover said:
So, what is the point of voting Green?, I've been having doubts about them, new councillors here could not be described as 'left wing', but what is the alternative?
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Not voting Green.

Bollocks - need to learn to read the thread to the end before replying :oops:
 
BigTom said:
The second part of your question is truly awful, the supposition being that people wouldn't like to live in a house that costs nothing (or close to nothing) to heat each winter. Wouldn't you like to live in a house with zero heating costs?

Your actual question, I am thinking of carbon / climate change more than general pollution concerns. My understanding is that it's very difficult to retro-fit a single skin house in such a way that would get it anywhere near being a passiv house. External insulation can get you close to a cavity wall house but even that's not great compared to what can be done, especially on terraced housing where the whole terrace would need to be done together - extremely difficult if there's not a single owner of that terrace - at least if you are rebuilding you can compulsory purchase order houses if needs be. There's a carbon/energy/pollution cost to retro-fitting the houses which you also need to factor in. That's a calculation to be made but over a long enough time frame (which may not be very long at all, I don't know if anyone has tried to calculate this or not) the new house will definitely use less energy and less carbon - just no idea how long it'd take for the relative extra carbon costs of rebuilding rather than renovating until you've made that back.
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Even if that is the case, there is the small matter of compulsorily purchasing millions of houses from people living in settled communities who do not want to leave. Even if there was enough money to do so, history suggests such forced resettlements do not work out well for those evicted against their will.

It is worth repeating, construction is a horribly polluting industry.
 
Sparkle Motion said:
Even if that is the case, there is the small matter of compulsorily purchasing millions of houses from people living in settled communities who do not want to leave. Even if there was enough money to do so, history suggests such forced resettlements do not work out well for those evicted against their will.

It is worth repeating, construction is a horribly polluting industry.
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Yeah, I can't disagree with that, and I don't know what the best solution would be, unless you could work out a way to do a (more or less) like for like replacement of homes so people would move for a shortish period and then have a right to return if they wanted to. I don't think there'd be anything ideal here, but I think it's going to be necessary for us to replace that housing stock in order to have a zero-carbon economy. Unless you could build homes individually (which I doubt) in which case you could set about purchasing all those empty houses and replacing them and putting them back in use. Probably daydreaming there though, and it'd be more expensive and less time efficient to do for sure, if it was even possible at all.
 
Will these councillors be expelled for fundamentally going against stated party policy? (rhetorical question btw)
 
BigTom said:
Yeah, I can't disagree with that, and I don't know what the best solution would be, unless you could work out a way to do a (more or less) like for like replacement of homes so people would move for a shortish period and then have a right to return if they wanted to. I don't think there'd be anything ideal here, but I think it's going to be necessary for us to replace that housing stock in order to have a zero-carbon economy. Unless you could build homes individually (which I doubt) in which case you could set about purchasing all those empty houses and replacing them and putting them back in use. Probably daydreaming there though, and it'd be more expensive and less time efficient to do for sure, if it was even possible at all.
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just to point out that zero carbon should never be seen as being the only important factor - sustainability should place as much emphasis on the community element of things as it does on the environmental element.

Mass forced relocations . dispersals of strong working class communities have almost always led to the destruction of the cohesion of those communities, and what goes back in it's place is no longer a strong community, just a collection of individuals who happen to live there, but without the roots for them to really give a shit about the place.
 
free spirit said:
just a collection of individuals who happen to live there, but without the roots for them to really give a shit about the place.
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I agree with the rest of your point entirely but just point out there are either strong communities or potentially strong communities - almost never realistically just collections of individuals.
 
Clear illustration of the point I was making up-thread. If you're going to refuse to pass a budget, you better have significant public support for that approach already in place.

( ... and ideally an angry mob waiting for Pickles et. al. when they show up to put the Anschluss in place.)
 
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