"Intelligent and rational" and "Greens party" are two concepts that do not belong together.

I’m not comfortable with the shift from protest to activism and now vigilantism. The spectrum starts with the democratic right to peaceful protest. The basic principle being “do no harm”.

We seem to have progressed, with the help of the internet and social media, through a series of stages where it seems activism is permitted to “do harm”. GetUp type groups can organize boycott of major companies and so called “rights” groups can destroy GM research crops and adulterate livestock feed to protest live animal exports.

Other examples from such as the Close the Gates anti-coal group, include the fabrication and distribution of fraudulent documents that inflict financial damage on stock markets.

More recently the escalating and dangerous activism of Sea Shepherd has drawn fire from legal opinion that this constitutes Piracy.

We are progressively moving along this continuum towards the other extreme which is terrorism. It already seems to be hard to distinguish between activism, vigilantism and terrorism.

It doesn’t matter what we call it, it is just ugly and increasingly unacceptable in any democratic society.

I still prefer to vote for those who seek to represent me.

Ah Spindoc, and having voted for them, what if they don't?

Well there's three minutes of my life I'll never get back.

Spindoc,
True but the high profile "Activists" are all sponsored by the vested interests, they're not real resistance groups, a "Green capitalist" is still a capitalist first and a green second, solar and wind power is going to mean big money in the future so that's why they want to undermine the hydrocarbon industry. The mainstream groups like Occupy,Sea Shepherd and Get Up!, WWF etc are cookie cutter globalist capitalist mouthpieces, they exist in every Western country and a few of the better off third world ones as well. You'll also notice that in every country we now have identical prime time pop panel shows spruiking the globalist message of the day, here it's "The Drum", and "The Project", in the U.S it's "The Young Turks", I'm not au fait with European media trends but you can be sure a similar format exists in every Western nation.
The we have the online "News" format, again spruiking globalism, 'Crikey", "The Huffington Post", "The Drum" etc.
The real resistance is tiny, not very flamboyant and totally non violent, it's also censored by the corporate media.

>>Ah Spindoc, and having voted for them, what if they don't?<<

You vote for someone else.

Cheers,

Tony

Yeah, JOM, I know just what you mean : )

Nice little job opportunity going here - activists for hire?:

http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/01/25/mystery-company-posts-job-opportunity-anti-wind-power-protesters?utm