Bad Website Ideas - Greenpeace hosts 236,840 email “Spam” facility on website

From the desk of admin ·May 31, 2007 at 2:59 pm · Filed under Ethics - Religion, Internet / Technical, Politics

I came across this while I was researching an article about Greenpeace earlier this week.

The Greenpeace website hosts a form and a programmed script to let any visitor to their site to mass-email all British Members of the European Parliament who disagree with the Greenpeace policy on a blanket-wide ban on incandescent lightbulbs.

To me this looks like a typical, rather crude, Greenpeace campaign - use chopsticks when you actually need tweezers. Have they thought about all the nuanced results of such a simple policy? What do you think?

Greenpeace Email all MEPs Campaign form

Greenpeace is hosting a form to send these mass emails here (local copy). The thumbnails down the right hand side link to screenshots of the different stages in the process. The process has several steps:

1. Fill in your name, email address and country.
2. Check text of email.
3. Click on link to confirm that you are who you say you are.
4. Send email.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (5)

Lib Dem Voice on the Skids - due to Close

From the desk of admin ·May 31, 2007 at 12:36 pm · Filed under Breaking News, Political Blogging

Rob Fenwick, who has run the Lib Dem Voice activists’ blog for the last year or so has decided that it is time to pull the plug:

Over the last couple of months I’ve been advertising for someone to take over the running of Lib Dem Voice, as unfortunately I’m unable to continue for various reasons - not least of which the amount of time running a site of this nature takes up (Iain Dale may well pop up now and tell me he warned me… and he did!).  

I had discussions with a couple of people, and after some investigation it’s been decided that the Lib Dem Voice blog will close to new contributions and comments on June 19th, and the forum will close on the same day. The blog will continue to be available as an archive for some time thereafter, forum posts will not - please ensure you take a copy of any posts that are valuable to you (maybe someone could create a private wiki ‘campaign manual’ out of the useful stuff?).

As a domain, libdemvoice.org has 1300 backlinks on Google - quite a lot. It would take somebody around 4-6 months to rebuild that sort of profile, even with a fair wind.

If nothing comes of it, the party nationally could take the domain on for its newspaper or speech archives.

Hmmm. A thought.

Lib Dem MPS are about to cop half a million (£10k each) under the new communications allowance (via Matt Dean). Can they not find a way to spend 5% of that on a grassroots blog - a far better way of communicating with many constituents than a propaganda sheet.

Tags: libdemvoice, liberal democrat, politics, rob fenwick, lib dem voice

Comments

Joke of the Day - Friendship

From the desk of admin ·May 31, 2007 at 8:26 am · Filed under Humourous

Friendship between women: A woman doesn’t come home one night. The next day she tells her husband that she had slept over at a girlfriend’s house. The husband calls his wife’s 10 best friends. None of them know anything about it.

Friendship between men: A man doesn’t come home one night. The next day he tells his wife that he had slept over at a friend’s house. The wife calls her husband’s 10 best men friends. Eight of them confirm that he had slept over, and two claim that he is still there.

From the Adam Smith Institute blog

Comments

Asking Questions of Greenpeace - Where are the checks and balances?

From the desk of admin ·May 30, 2007 at 12:26 pm · Filed under News - Current Affairs, Politics

Iain Dale has been commenting (over vigorously perhaps!) on a refusal by Greenpeace to engage in a debate about Global Warming - effectively “there are no questions left to be answered, so we are not interested”.

I’m not commenting on the particular letter and debate, but I have been taught by history and the behaviour of the organisation to treat Greenpeace sourced material and views with strong sceticism, if not suspicion.

Greenpeace is a Top Down organisation

Like many non-governmental organisations, Greenpeace not accountable to the wider society in any direct or meaningful way - creating “loose cannon” potential. They are a hierarchical organisation lacking in checks and balances:

In re-shaping Greenpeace as a centrally coordinated, hierarchical organisation, McTaggart went against the anti-authoritarian ethos that prevailed in other environmental organisations that came of age in the 1970s. While this pragmatic structure granted Greenpeace the persistence and narrow focus necessary to match forces with government and industry, it would lead to the recurrent criticism that Greenpeace had adopted the same methods of governance as its chief foes — the multinational corporations. (Wikipedia)

Of course, international corporations are accountable to their shareholders.

Greenpeace has form for Supplying False Evidence

Greenpeace has form for supplying false evidence. Do you remember the arguments over the Brent Spar case? This was a campaign against a proposal to abandon a decommissioned oil rig in deep water as an artificial reefs.

Greenpeace first got their science about the toxic waste present in the wreck wrong, then organised a huge campaign and boycott - causing widespread economic damage - on the basis of that wrong science. From Wikipedia:

Greenpeace organised a worldwide, high-profile media campaign against this plan, including calls for boycotts of Shell service stations. Its activists occupied the Brent Spar for more than three weeks. In the face of public and political opposition in northern Europe (including some physical attacks and an arson attack on a service station in Germany), Shell abandoned its plans to dispose of Brent Spar at sea - whilst continuing to stand by its claim that this was the safest option, both from an environmental and an industrial health and safety perspective. Greenpeace’s own reputation also suffered during the campaign, when it had to acknowledge that sampling errors had led to an over-estimate of more than one hundred-fold of the oil remaining in Brent Spar’s storage tanks.

Eventually, Greenpeace admitted that its figures were simply wrong. An independent audit later showed that the exaggeration multiplied the actual quantity of oil left in the rig by many times.

The Greenpeace campaign triggered both vandalism of Shell facilities, and violence against Shell staff members.

Here, Greenpeace were not only incompetent, they were also reckless as to the consequences of their own mistake - any responsible organisation would have considered the possibility that they could be wrong.

It seems to me, the concept of “we may be wrong, and need to think about the possible consequences” is foreign to Greenpeace.

Wrapping Up

I have not attempted to show that Greenpeace is all bad - they are not.

But it is a very powerful organisation which is also extremely capricious, and every claim made by Greenpeace - expecially in any campaigns - should be examined very, very carefully.

Comments (2)

Quote of the Day - Why bother counting?

From the desk of admin ·May 30, 2007 at 8:07 am · Filed under Not Cricket, Quote of the Day

 

If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep the score

- Vince Lombardi