On Earth Day, April 8, 2020, the Alaska Green Party held an online debate using the Zoom conferencing system. The six recently made to be ‘unofficial’ GP USA candidates for the GP nomination to be ‘our’ candidate for president attended. How and when and by whom they were made to be ‘unofficial’ is a story for another time. Nevertheless the six candidates attending on April 8 were Dario Hunter (xx), Howie Hawkins (NY), Sedinam KCMC (CA), Chad Wilson (xx), Dennis Lambert (xx), and Kent Mesplay (TX). The debate format was moderated and the moderator asked more or less siimlar questions to those moderators of the Dem Party debates asked the Dem candidates. However this debate’s questions were definitely ‘slanted’ to reveal each GP candidate’s progressive points of view.
6 a.m. PDT 4/26/20 I finished watching the recorded debate online: Chad attacked Howie in his closing statement. I found that jarring and it broke the ‘solidarity’ mood I thought the debate participants had developed up to that point. Other than that his statements during the debate, as were those of the other four, were very thought provoking and motivating.
What is missing IMO is a web site where other Greens watching this and subsequent online debates like it can (a) read transcripts of everything everyone said! And replay that part of the video too. (b) Other Greens can comment and ‘riff’ on the thought provoking remarks of the candidates. This time I was imagining those comments easily leading to a large GP membership finding and ever RCV voting for a consensus on related potential GP national and state positions and policies “ex-offico” at this point. (c) Do that commenting and membership discussions and consensus making again if/when there’s another debate.
More later on how a site, even this site, might help all that happen ‘transparently’ w/o a lot of site user navigation problems coming from techie complexity interference and confusion-making because of how the site’s put together and presented to its users.