The GP-US has a couple of mailing lists dedicated to the business of its national committee. The "votes" list is strictly for discussing proposals in the NC hopper. Since that's where the business is done, subscription is mandatory for NC members, the delegates to the GP-US from its affiliated state parties. Keeping up with its traffic is a serious commitment, even when nobody is abusing their posting privileges. There's an "affairs" list, subscription optional.

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Is faith in Adam Smith's "Invisible hand of the market" part of Green ideology? Anarchists and liberals over on Yahoogroups' GDI-freespeech seem to think so. Radicals disagree. I guess that makes me a radical. Forwarding my essay from there.

I believe markets are inherently exploitative. The problem is that "free markets" are a transitory phenomenon. They only exist during the period of instability that follows invention of some disruptive technology. In logic design, we call something like that "metastable."

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More subscribers to cagreens.org, greens.org, and gp-us.org mailing lists use Yahoo Mail than use any other email service provider.

Our subscribers post to over a hundred of these mailing lists through Yahoo Mail's web site. Those postings usually contain a few hundred characters of message that the subscriber actually wrote, and *tens of thousands* of characters of Yahoo advertising and formatting. The actual message is often less than 5% of the total bulk.

That is, when you send Yahoo Mail, you're sending tons of crap.

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"Party members have not only spoken frequently in favor of FOSS, but also on related issues, such as software patents and lockdown technologies in Vista."

"According to Tom Chance, Green Party speaker on intellectual property and free software, ... the GPEW remains the only major party to make such issues part of its policies..."

http://www.linux.com/feature/117245

Notice that the naysayers point to difficulties in "switching" to non-proprietary software. But the can-do folks talk about ways of "migrating." "Switching" is a straw man. Nobody does it.

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Someone wondered if Greens might do better going after "Independents" than liberal enviros, especially in "Red" states. My answer was long enough to capture. It's a ramble now, but maybe I'll come back and organize it. Bear in mind this is one side of a conversation.

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Someone reported:
> I cant log into the server. Does this have something to do with the move?

I can't do much with no details at all. Sometimes people give me enough detail, but more often we have to play "twenty questions."

What, exactly, did you do?

• Which computer were you trying to log into?
• Start an SSH session with PuTTY? On which port?
• Open an SFTP session with WinSCP or Filezilla?

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Anybody who runs mailing lists with thousands of subscribers gets blocked by AOL. That's because a significant fraction of spam complaints to AOL by AOL users are bogus. Any list with a thousand subscribers will generate at least one erroneous spam report to AOL with every posting. When you are hitting the "this is spam" button for 400 out of 500 messages, you hit the wrong message sometimes. And there are always assholes who use "this is spam" because they are too damn lazy to unsubscribe from a list they requested but don't want any more.

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Last night I "flipped the switch." The domain name "greens.org" and the various things attached to it have moved from the venerable old computer petra-k to the shiny new computer rachel. (Petra Kelly, Rachel Corrie.) Petra-k was cared for for seven years by the "boutique" Internet service provider (ISP) Explosive.net. They shut down tomorrow. Rachel is at Got.net of Santa Cruz. The rent is the same, $150/month. I looked at cheaper places but there was something wrong with each one.

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A Green working group had a Yahoogroups list. Over time, its owner abandoned it without passing on the admin keys. And it got overrun with spammers. They subscribe just so they can post their junk. Beating the CAPTCHA (type in the distorted letters from this little image to prove you're not a robot) is low wage third world work.

So he's starting a new list on the GP of Cal's Mailman installation. Advice to a new list owner:

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You may have noticed the web site http://alaska.greens.org
was abandoned by its maintainer a couple of years ago.
He simply disappeared. All of his contact information was
suddenly no good. The ISP that ran his email disappeared too,
so there wasn't even anybody to ask about him.

He left behind a Content Management System (CMS) that nobody but he knew how to maintain. Eventually it broke down, as I had been warning it would, for over a year.
That was when the web site stopped working.

When someone suggests your organization should become

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The GP-US banner ad running on the front of this site is factually incorrect. The GP is not the only national party calling for an immediate end of US presence in Iraq. The Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party take about the same position we do. The Libertarians oppose war in general for most of the same reasons we do. The Constitutionals ("American Independent" in California) are okay with wars of aggression, but only if they are sold as "defense," declared by Congress, and fought unilaterally.

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I'd like to see Green parties make clear, unequivocal statements endorsing free speech in all its forms. The Libertarians are way ahead of us on that. "Hate speech" is one excuse that's used to give
prosecutors arbitrary power over unpopular (sometimes deservedly so) groups. "National security" is another. And the one the Libertarians don't talk about concerns me the most: whistleblowing including exposing dangerous or nonfunctional technology.

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(Explaining to someone why a web site they see in an archive isn't there any more.)


Abandoned web sites and domain names are commonplace with the Greens.  People come out of an initial meeting of a caucus or working group and the very first action item is to buy a domain name.  The person they coaxed into being interim "webmaster" changes her mind, or never really signed up to do it in the first place.  Or the interim webmaster hands the server login information to someone else, without telling anybody, doesn't bother to update the registration, and the information about the Registrar account is lost.  The contact info in the domain registration goes bad within a year, and nobody gets the renewal notice.  If there was a Web site, the domain is grabbed by a scalper the instant it expires.  It happens routinely.  Eventually I notice the domain is gone from Whois, or its name servers have changed.  If the maintainer doesn't have any other projects and doesn't answer emails and phone calls, I disable the related server accounts.  Almost all candidate sites are abandoned that way after the campaign is over.  It's almost the only reason I disable GIS accounts.

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This morning another letter arrived accusing Ralph Nader and the Green Party of putting George Bush in office. In '01 and '02 they were coming in every week. We still get them now and then.

It's a lie. The arithmetical arguments commonly made to support it are not valid because they begin with false assumptions. "If pigs could fly, I would be king." The sentence is true, but it doesn't tell you anything. "If Nader had not run, Gore would be president." Likewise. Nader ran. The universe where Nader did not run does not exist. It's a fantasy.

I believe the greatest single strategic mistake in the history of Green parties in the US was embracing that lie instead of forcefully rejecting and denying it. That decision allowed the Democratic Party to define the Green Party in the journalistic and public mind. Since then, almost every mainstream media story mentioning the Greens hangs on the "hook" that Nader put Bush in office It was a shortcut: look how powerful we are, to determine the outcome of a presidential election! Of course we didn't have anywhere near that kind of power. Embracing "the spoiler effect" was a disaster for us.

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