Lately, I have become warry of reading any "article" posted on digg.com that deals with anything remotely environmental. It's not that the articles are bad reads, it's that the comments irritate me. They used to at least start out as intelligent conversation that eventually degraded to name calling and mud slinging, but now they seem to skip the intelligent conversation and go straight for the mud slinging. I'm tired of reading and hearing how environmentalism, at any level, is equated to radical liberalism! Just as "liberal" has become a tabu word in the US vernacular, "green", "tree hugger", "environmentalist" all have joined this it seems. I'll be the first to admit, I am a liberal, and an environmentalist, but I don't see the two as equal.
I was reading a post today about the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables (nothing mentioned about "conventional" vs. organic means) declining over the past 50 years (which happens to coincide with the rise of industrial farming). Most of the comments seemed to be a flame war about the benefits of organic vs. GMO/conventional, not at all what the article was discussing, but a valid tangent none the less. I'm not sure where some of these people are getting their information, or for what reason they equate "environmental" with evil, but one flagrant example of this in a comment was this:
Clearly this is another liberal lie circulated by hippies, terrorists, Osama Bin Laden, satan, Karl Marx, and the boogie man. These alarmists hate freedom and if we believe them, the terrorists win. YOU DON'T HATE FREEDOM, DO YOU????
I have no explenation for their irrational behavior, nor do I put any stock in their arguments and with simple research, their "facts" that they spew turn out to be inaccurate. For example, a big one for hybrid cars is the battery leaking acid all over the driver in an accident. With only a minute or two worth of research, I was able to discover that the batteries used in the hybrids (Toyota to be specific) are NiMH, which is a solid, not a liquid. If people would simply take the time and energy to research their rants rather than write them, they would realize they have been mislead, their "fears" are unfounded, and environmentalism IS NOT liberalism.
Posted by doug at April 21, 2006 02:41 PM