At RedState! It's true! I know, you may not believe our right-wing friends would shun opposing viewpoints, but they do (at least the ones at Red State).
Make the jump to hear the story of my untimely demise.
It was an interesting day around here yesterday, what with the impeachment debate, Bill O'Reilly and all. So, all the excitement got me back on the ol' blog saddle after a long quiet spell, and I dug into the comments in the diary posted by a conservative defending Daily Kos against Bill O'Reilly.
Here's an interesting one by YoyogiBear:
RedState is insulated to the point of suffocation (30+ / 0-)
My God, what an echo chamber that little band of huddlers has become. I read them early on, and occasionally found a tidbit of interest, but never posted, not imagining that they'd entertain me for a minute.
They've only gotten more self-isolated and willfully ignorant in the months since, and I hardly go over there to read anymore. They have slightly higher intellectual pretensions than the Freepers, but no more truth or logic.
I've spent some time at RedState, so I decided to jump over there again just to check it out. Low and behold, they had a diary up criticizing environmentalists.
United Nations Cannot Feed the World Because of Environmentalists and Big Government Policies
Exactly! Those pesky environmentalists screwing things up again! Now, I'm employed as a sort of full-time environmentalists, and our movement is subject to many legitimate criticisms. So, I figured, why not check it out and see what they've got on us.
Here's the gem that got me to make my first comment:
At this point, opposition to GMOs is now to a large percentage of the industrialized world, the United States included... I find this odd because it, like most other hysterics, runs counter to the facts (obviously). Our current agricultural system is safer than it has ever been, more rigorously tested than it has ever been, and yet people are scared out of their wits that something they eat might kill them a few decades down the road. Other than a couple of extremely isolated cases of allergies caused by some GM grain (which the MSM jumped on in about, oh, .17 seconds), there hasn't been any health problems that can be linked to these crops (also, contrary to the fear-mongering, are being tested for safety).
Even if we took all reasonable precautions to safeguard our food supply, it wouldn't be enough for those who want to see us get all of our food the same way we did in the 18th Century; through small farmers using "organic" farming methods, and having less overall food safety and higher prices than ever before, not to mention needing more people to farm in order to supply the demand (and, last I knew, most people don't exactly consider farming a vocation that's right for them). All this from the "enlightened" crowd.
To which I replied:
monarch butterfly larvae when they eat the silk from GM corn. Nobody knows why.
what do you have against organic farming?
So, the conservative logic fired back:
. I can happily accept that the Monarch butterflies that are stupid enough to try to eat my food will die.
I wish it worked on terrorists!
You can see where this is going. You can read the full post (linked above). I made some comments, went to bed, and then checked it this morning, and I awoke to a challenge made in response to my claim environmentalists don't support ethanol (it's true):
Oh really? Then you won't have any problems producing a link to validate that statement.
You've been here six hours, my guess on the O/U is 8.75.
I managed to reply to this, but got banned about 2 minutes later in the middle of posting a comment replying to another challenge! Those RedStates are quick with the keyboard! I don't know why they weren't interested in my response. . .
So, all this probably isn't news to a lot of people, but I thought this brings up some interesting questions. At first, I was going to post a diary urging people to go over to Redstate and post civil, logical, documented comments and make them ban all of us. But that seemed petty, and pointless.
So here's the question: Do exchanges like this serve any point other than making me fell good?