I would like to ask that people get out of the habit of telling people with dissenting view not to use this site. I ask this for two reasons:

1) Indymedia is an open forum. There is no party line people are obliged to subscribe to before they post here. Reading a diversity of views allows us to get beyond binary left/right stereotypes and ist/ism dogmas and look deeper into the realities of people's lives that are often obscured by ideological conceptualizations of 'issues'.

1) There is a whole country full of people out there who do not agree with the green/ lefty activist worldview of the people who are usually claiming ownership of this forum by telling people to 'go away'. If we don't have any better arguments that that, we aren't going to make much progress in our causes.

I think the people that post counter to the prevailing beliefs here are usually sincere in their views, even if they are quite prickly and sometimes frivilous about expressing them. It may not seem that anybody ever gets influenced by rebuttals posted on comment threads. But even if they don't (and I'm not so sure) at least it makes us sharpen our own understandings of the issues and sometimes reveals we aren't all in consensus about what the correct green/ lefty line on an issue is at all.

Kotahi te aroha
Strypey