Green Archives - More Zonkyness

Tactical Voting: Compromise, But That’s Okay

Nov 192023

Some of us who are anti-Tory are encouraging the use of tactical voting – voting not necessarily for the party you would most like to represent you, but instead voting for the party most likely to defeat the Tories. The Tory government has been so inept, corrupt, morally bankrupt, and generally icky, that giving them a total hammering is only right.

But there are plenty of people out there who don’t feel that Labour (or one of the others in certain areas) really represent their views. Labour has moved too far to the right – which is something I would agree with.

But politics is about compromise and with first-past-the-post system, we have to compromise more than other systems of voting. There will never be a political party that exactly represents my views, so I have to select the one that closest matches my views. In an ideal world anyway.

In a less than idea world, we have to compromise more and vote for the candidate in our constituency that is most likely to defeat the Tories. There is no point in voting for the Green party in a constituency where they typically get 2-3% of the vote when switching to the Liberal-Democrats are in second place and most likely to defeat the Tories.

The left in Britain is somewhat more fractured than the right (although if we give the Tories a bloody enough nose that might just change) which with the FPTP system gives the Tories an inherent advantage. We need to overcome that advantage and without a change in the voting system, tactical voting is the way to do that.

Give the Tories a bloody nose and vote tactically.

Saving the Planet

General, Politics No Responses »

Nov 272021

I can accept “Saving the Planet” as a political slogan for those who advocate taking action to combat climate change – political slogans don’t have to be entirely accurate although I might argue that “Saving People” is more accurate. Because no matter how serious climate change gets, the planet will carry on.

Don’t get me wrong, I think climate change is really serious – we will see millions of deaths at least; quite possibly billions of deaths. And climate refugees will make the Syrian refugee crisis seem like just a tiny taste of what the real thing will be like. And some historians put the collapse of the western Roman empire down to climate change refugees – I don’t think it’s that simple but it was certainly a contributing factor. That is the level of disruption from climate refugees that we can expect.

And if you’re one of those inhumane nasties that imagines military level forces using lethal force to stop refugees, you can forget it – not only are there enough of us bleeding heart liberals who will shout “fuck that shit”, but it is doubtful that any level of military force could stop millions of refugees.

Climate change won’t destroy the planet; it won’t even destroy the environment. It will change the environment catastrophically and humans are to blame. Whole species will become extinct, but probably not humans; we’re too adaptable and we’ve survived through extinction events before (although sometimes only just).

But before anyone gets too complacent, if we don’t do anything, humanity will survive by the skin of its teeth – if just 90% of us are killed, we’ll be lucky. If we act today to make drastic changes, we might keep things down to just a few million dead; if we had acted back in the 1980s, that would be considerably less.

We Are A Plague On The Earth

Politics No Responses »

Mar 152019

Not.

I encountered this sign today at lunch when walking past a bunch of environmental protesters. I agree totally with their intentions, but this particular message is just wrong.

The earth (if sentient) is just about waking up and wondering what we are – the whole of human history and pre-history (the bits that weren’t written down) is no more than a blink in the eye of the earth. If we successfully cause an extinction-level climate change event (and so far it looks pretty successful), our entire extinction will be just another layer in the geological record – just a bit more unusual than other thin extinction layers.

The earth will quite happily get used to a warmer (or colder if it eventually settles down that way) climate equilibrium and might just (if sentient) wonder where we’ve gotten to.

The earth will go on without us; barely noticing we were here.

We’re not a plague on the earth; we’re a plague on our children.

And when you come down to it, the slogan “We Are A Plague On Our Children” is far better – it’s accurate and more personal, and harder hitting.

UK Election 2015: What Went Wrong?

Politics No Responses »

May 092015

Well if you are a Tory supporter nothing went wrong; indeed you must be cock-a-hoop given that you have a Tory government when 64% of the voters wanted something else! But if you are against the Tories, you have to be wondering what went wrong.

The most obvious problem is the broken medieval electoral system we have. For practical reasons it made sense in the days of horse-drawn carts to ask each area to appoint a representative in parliament. But today we should be able to design an electoral system where MPs represent people not places, and where everybody can say their vote helped appoint someone to parliament.

As an example if all the votes for the Green party were distributed amongst the smallest UK consituencies (you did realise they are different sizes didn't you?), they would have ended up with 23 MPs instead of just 1! The Tories would end up with 240 seats rather than 331, which basically means that the Tories are very good at distributing their supporters.

In my case, my vote went towards a loser which means I'm "represented" by a politician whose policies and attitudes I find totally repulsive. There is nobody in parliament that I voted for. And the same applies to a huge swathe of the population who are now feeling alienated by the whole process.

And that is something that can and should be changed.

The alienation caused by the first past the post system is probably one of the causes of the low turnout; what is the point in voting if you live in a "safe" seat?

The most obvious difference in this election is the wholesale take-over of Scotland by the SNP, which surprised everyone. Which leads the new Tory government to a bit of a problem – with just one MP in Scotland, they essentially have no mandate to govern Scotland.

And even in England, the Tory majority is nothing to crow about – a majority of 5 is what would have been called a "fragile majority" in the past. A Tory leader with such a slim majorty is likely to run into problems if they try and ram through a radical programme.

The Tories managed to persuade many of us that a bit more self-flagellation is necessary, and punishing the poor and unfortunate is good for the country.

The effect on the Liberal Democrats is both surprising and entirely predictable. Joining a coalition with the Tories was always a mistake in terms of future elections – it was always seen as helping to put the Tories into power, and many Liberals were far less accepting of this than they would have been to see the party join a coalition with Labour. What the Liberal Democrats failed to sell was the idea that their presence in government helped to amerliorate the Tory extremes.

Labour's failure was probably down to several things :-

The failure to demolish the myth of Labour's economic incompetance that "caused" the recession. It was the global failure of the banking system that caused that failure. Labour's spending was actually reasonably restrained until the need to rescue the banks arose.
The failure to come up with a true alternative to the austerity plan of the Tories. Given the level of government debt that would be a hard job, but it could be started by pointing out (quite rightly) that simplistic austerity makes the debt problem worse.
The inability to persuade that most voters are actually "working class". There is a historic problem with the class system by which people think of the working class as cloth-capped horned handed manual workers of one kind or another. In reality, everybody who works for a living is working class.

Of course whinging about it is not going to change things. We have five years of Tory mismanagement and punishing austerity to accept now.

Being Vegetarian

General, Politics No Responses »

Feb 012013

Every so often I get asked why I am a vegetarian, and I usually come up with some sort of humorous answer; partially because the real reasons are a little mixed up and confused. Probably the biggest reason I am a vegetarian today, is that I was a vegetarian yesterday. I have been a vegetarian long enough that the thought of eating dead animals just doesn’t occur to me.

Although I’ll be honest in this little rant, I am not a proselytising vegetarian. I am not even an especially good vegetarian given that I have on occasions worn leather (belts, and shoes mostly). But I’m also not a “vegetarian” who eats fish, which is not vegetarian at all. I don’t object to eggs (with the exception of stuff like balut) or dairy products. I also try to avoid products made with animal rennet and gelatin without making a fetish of it.

I became one of those nutty vegetarians way back in 1987 or 1988 whilst I was at University for a variety of reasons :-

I was never that keen on eating meat for taste reasons. Most of the “real” meat dishes were unpalatable – steak, lamb, mutton, etc.
I was becoming increasingly concerned with killing animals for food; animal welfare in meat production during the 1980s was practically non-existent.
Someone asked me. Whilst this is no reason to give up in itself, it pushed me over the edge.

Since then, I have discovered other reasons. Some of which you may agree with; some may seem like complete rubbish. But that is not the point as these are the reasons why I am a vegetarian.

But We’ve Evolved To Eat Meat!

No we have not evolved to eat meat; we have evolved to eat everything (omnivores).

Although we have evolved to eat everything, we have decided not to eat certain kinds of food:- carrion, insects, horses, dogs, and of course our fellow humans. But all of those things are a matter of taste or morality. So we have evolved to eat everything yet we can choose not to eat certain foods because of concerns bigger than filling our bellies.

One mistake that people make when they portray people as omnivores is to assume that we are evolved to eat meat on a daily basis. Perhaps, but the information on the diets of hunter gatherers is understandably somewhat vague. What is known is that many of the hunter-gatherer groups still around today will eat meat as and when it is available; and it is not available on a daily basis in the large quantities that meat eaters in the West consume it.

Or to put it another way, we may be evolved to eat everything, but not meat every day. And the kind of meat that we eat is definitely not the same as that eaten by a hunter-gatherer who would be eating very lean meat indeed.

So you could say that going vegetarian or partly vegetarian is good for health reasons, although that is not why I’m veggy.

Meat Is Murder!

Perhaps that is putting it a little extremely, but some kinds of meat are murder – cannibalism.

The suspicions are that the annoying fellow in the next valley has been on the menu for most of human history, and cannibalism is rather quickly resorted to in times of extreme necessity. We all accept that going out and shooting your neighbour to fill the larder would qualify as murder. So does killing a gorilla or a chimpanzee qualify as murder?

Without specifying physical or biological attributes, it is actually quite hard to distinguish between chimpanzees and humans. Communications? We both do it. Tool use? We both do it. Mourning the dead? We both do it.

It is true that most humans can communicate and reason better than chimpanzees, but they are not that far behind. And if you accept that they are perhaps a bit more than “mere” animals, are they not worthy of some level of respect? At the very least not killing them. Indeed the average ape is probably more worthy of respect than some humans (think of Harold Shipman).

And if you accept that chimps are worthy of enough respect not to kill and eat them, where do you draw the line? Some people eat horses; some don’t. Some people eat dogs; some don’t. And it goes on.

And some people choose not to eat animals at all. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with liking animals. There’s very few animals I like, but as far as I’m concerned just because you don’t like somebody is no excuse to chop ’em up and put them in your freezer.

It’s Green

In the old days, vegetarians used to argue that producing livestock was an inefficient way of feeding the world, which it is. After all the feed that livestock eat has to be grown itself. It turns out that we have more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet; starvation is caused by poor storage and poor transportation.

However it has also been discovered that livestock is one of the largest contributors to total greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities. The figures are disputed but transport is supposed to contribute 13% of greenhouse gas emissions and livestock production up to 18% of emissions.

See :-

The criticisms of the 2006 UN report boils down to the fact that the UN took all of the emissions due to meat production into account and overestimated the effect of methane, whereas they only took into account the direct emissions caused by transport. This is a valid criticism, but on the other hand transport accounts for practically no rain forest deforestation whereas livestock production is right up there. And those who criticise the UN for their report come up with daft statements like less meat production would result in “…more hunger in poor countries”; of course in the global sense, people in poorer countries cannot afford meat!

If you don’t consume vast amounts of electricity and gas, and don’t drive a chelsea tractor down to the corner shop it may very well be that the biggest single change you can make to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to cut down or eliminate meat consumption.

Don’t You Miss It?

No.

It is true that for the first few years of being a vegetarian, you get occasional cravings for certain meat products – in my case it was BLT sandwiches. But as time goes on, the cravings disappear.