Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

johnchristopher

It's fascinating how the backlash and the anger towards organic run deep in the US and on HN.

The first time I noticed that was ten or 15 years ago when some 20-something on a train ride were complaining about how the green party was everywhere (they had just peaked at 15% in the previous election) and how soon we'll be obliged to eat green, to drink green coke, that everything is going to be organic, etc.

It was a weird mix of "i don't want to admit they are right so let just say anything bad about them" and... I don't know what. They are people in my work circle who voted for the far-right because they were "fed up with the climate campaign" (referring to the recent climate demonstrations). Like they would hold to any position to justify their own actions.

"It's the fault of environmental activists if we don't go green because they scared us too much and we didn't listen to them."

I think I see the same pattern in the anti organic arguments.

edit: Also, "they are making me feel guilty, so they are bad and manipulative". Sorry, there isn't much coherence to my post. Just my feelings.

The deontology (paper straws) and eschatology (the end is nigh) of some environmentalism smacks of religion to some. And, given that, the focus in state action incorporates many of the downsides of state adoption of religion, including sectarian bickering, a lack of grace, virtue signalling, and hypocrisy.

A reasonable response to those takes is "but this take on things happens to be true". That's fair, however that's the premise of the defense of basically every belief system.

A good amount of the uncertainties involved in climate science, though, can be laid directly at the feet of the Right, and how they've undermined and obstructed science for decades to enable their corporate donors to continue polluting the planet. Perfect example is when global warming was rebranded to climate change, largely by the Right, after which right-leaning politicians have spent every moment saying "See they had to change it from warming to change! They clearly don't know what they're talking about." Or that they've defunded departments showing the ample data on Climate Change, or instructed various departments to not use the language. Anything they can do to shut it down and make sure their corporate donors don't have to lose a minor bit of their bottom line to, oh I don't know, perpetuate the SPECIES a little longer.

IMHO such flagrant and destructive distortion of truth, especially with such an existential threat as Climate Change is, deserves some criminal charge on the order of Crimes Against Humanity. I've been watching this charade play out from inside Republican ranks for decades and whole thing makes me sick to my stomach.

I'm not really contradicting you here, but I'll point out how thoughts "rhyme".

That is, "They" and "Their" base instincts, ignorance, greed, and lies are also to blame when other belief systems are unpopular or misunderstood.

If the goal is to rile up believers, jeremiads tend to work well enough. But building a case to prosecute does not create repentance.

To describe uncertainties involved in climate science without an equally weighted consideration of the political bias in scientific research in academia, self-evidently through biases in research funding, is frankly speaking petulant, and why someone like myself takes your "existentialism" as histrionic.

>> especially with such an existential threat as Climate Change is

But it isn't, at least not for these people. The core of the right doesn't contemplate a world beyond their own lifespans. They, trump especially, are surprised when they travel to see other world leaders talking about things decades in the future. Monarchs of ages past thought about securing their kingdoms for their future descendants. Our monarchs don't think beyond the next election cycle. The longest span of time contemplated in US right-wing politics is how long a supreme court justice might live. Everything beyond that is totally irrelevant.

Framing this as a partisan issue has the causation reversed. The people funding anti-climate change propaganda are the oil and coal companies. They're only "the right" because the places with oil and coal under them happen to be red states, which allows those companies to control those politicians more easily because they have more constituents who would lose their jobs to meaningful reductions in fossil fuel usage. It only becomes partisan once the representatives of those districts push it into the party platform.

You can't defeat that in the long-term by voting the other party in because the nature of the two party system is that each party is in power half the time. The only way to fix it is to reform the Republican platform so that it's one of the issues both parties agree on rather than every administration just undoing whatever the previous one did.

> Perfect example is when global warming was rebranded to climate change, largely by the Right, after which right-leaning politicians have spent every moment saying "See they had to change it from warming to change! They clearly don't know what they're talking about."

Propaganda is propaganda. When it was called global warming they would claim that some places were getting cooler rather than warmer (due to changes in ocean and wind patterns etc.), which was true but not actually any better. If some places get drier and some places get wetter, well, droughts and floods are both bad. More to the point, the ecosystem in each place is calibrated for the previous climate and rapid changes start causing things to go extinct regardless of the direction of the local changes.

But that takes longer to explain than a talking point about how some places are getting cooler and not warmer or any of the other irrelevant nonsense about how temperatures decline every year during the period between summer and winter. Calling it climate change was an attempt to defend against that nonsense, so naturally the industry now spends all day claiming that rhetorical defeat as a victory because that's what propagandists do.

Pitting both sides against each other is how corporations get what they want. The enemy is Exxon, not the people of the state of Nebraska.

I don't think it's true to say that the rebranding to "climate change" came from the right.

It came from academics who realized that saying "global warming" was confusing to people when the climate swung wildly from unusually hot to unusually cold. It takes some time and a willing listener to explain that "warming" means increased energy in the climate system, and therefore more dramatic swings between hot and cold weather.

Saying "global warming" also does nothing to communicate things like change in precipitation patterns.

Using the phrase "climate change" does a much better job of encompassing these phenomenon.

(FTR: I am not downvoting you).

I share your sentiment. I used to be active in a local food buyer group (7-15 people getting together to collect vegetables and food from local producers) and I saw how to the tribe factor plays a huge role in one's allegiance and political stance.

Basically, people gather to be together. The end goal was second to that. Buying local or organic food ? No brainer. Joining the Sunday demonstration against the nuclear plant ? No room for debate. It's assumed everyone will go and it'll be friendly (almost in a kid way) and everyone is in it together. It's about the tribe and mutual reassurance (are we all friends ? are we all okay ?)

Scary thing is when you realize some people fall into the happy gang of buying fresh vegetables from the farm and spend an afternoon or two during summers tending to the crops with the farmer (and then have a nice bbq) but some people, because they were put in classroom A or B in elementary school or anything else really, end up roaming the street at night looking for troubles.

It's all really basic physiological needs: humans like to be together. The political (in the city sense) reasons for that often seem to come second.

So, yes, the exterior signs of belonging to a group have to be defended. And the online discourse make it looks like everyone is a hard-liner and conversations get hot real quick.

It's like the vegan thing on Imgur. I know some hard core vegan. None of them are anything like the straw men I see, the made up extremist version of vegans, being derided on the front page.

There's one guy in my facebook friends who can't let two days past without posting something along the lines of "do vegans think of mama carrot when they eat baby carrots ?". I counter joked once that he must have been bitten by a lettuce or his parents forced him to eat his soup too many times when he was a kid to hold such grudges against vegans.

Now on the other hand I have another friend in the first stage of veganism that can't let two days go without posting outrage cryporn about the beef or chicken industry.

So. They all clash. Social networks are social status validators and all the tribes are mixing in but their core values aren't compatible.

Sorry, I am rambling.

For what it's worth I don't have strong feelings on all this. I'm just describing what folks say about environmentalism when it's safe to be frank.

"...and I saw how to the tribe factor plays a huge role in one's allegiance and political stance."

Unfortunately, it gets even harder.

Scene: Bloomington, IN Saturday city farmers market.

A vendor named "Schooner Creek Farms" was outed by an FBI informant and a hacktivist collective that the owners were Identify Evropa. Because the market is run by the city, the city refuses (or has no cause to) throw them out.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/farmers-markets-have-new-unwel...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/18/us/indiana-farmers-market...

Even worse, there was a spraypaint attack on a church locally. Swastikas, and the like were some of the things done. Turns out, one of the 2 white males worked at the local co-op food market. The co-op runs their own 'Nazi-free farmers market' sinice the city is unable/unwilling to eject Schooner Creek Farms.

This whole situation is still ongoing. We had last week the head of Identify Evropa, now called "American Identitarian Movement", make a presence and buy produce in support. It's pretty terrible, with no end in sight.

But yeah, even organic veggies have significant politics enmeshed - and sometimes those politics are ones that nobody in their right mind would ever buy from had they know. I know I bought unwillingly from them.

> It's fascinating how the backlash and the anger towards organic run deep in the US and on HN.

There's organic and then there's organic.

Moving to carbon-neutral methods and creating processes which are sustainable or actively improve the world? Great. We need to be doing that.

Eating food labelled as "Organic" and shunning GMOs as if they were actively toxic? No. That's bullshit and actively harming the legitimacy Greens have. It's barely a step above pushing "detox" and thinking chemtrails are a thing.

Green should be about using the best current scientific knowledge to improve the world, not thinking science is actively harmful and rejecting it in favor of crap that makes you feel better. Ceding the intellectual high ground to people who crack jokes about Al Gore every time someone mentions that the Arctic is melting is the exact opposite of a good idea.

How is what you're describing any different from the anti-Greens who complain climate change isn't real because it gets cold sometimes?

Because he isn't complaining about it? You felt like making him a member of the "denier" tribe. See how easy it is to fall in that thought pattern to try and silence and ignore someone you don't agree with.

Some things that certain greens push are ridiculous, many are not.

Ridiculous include:

- rage against nuclear power

- rage against GMO

- rage against pesticides that are better than alternatives

- trying to force everyone to go vegan

Non ridiculous include:

- blocking road building projects through nature preserve

- trying to convince others to reduce their carbon and energy footprint

- promoting renewable energy and electric cars

- trying to save bees

- outcry against oil spills and burning off gas from oil wells

- increasing awareness of climate change

- getting people to eat more vegetables and local foods

- fighting for unpolluted water

Irrelevant include:

- strains of antiglobalism

Because everything I'm in favor of is backed by the best current scientific understanding as I understand it, and everything I'm against is opposed to that understanding as I understand it.

AGW is real. Clean coal is a contradiction in terms. GMOs are largely a good thing. "Organic" food (that is, food labeled "Organic") is no better than the alternatives, and potentially worse in some ways. Nuclear power is potentially a very good thing, but there are so many possible reactor designs and waste strategies it's impossible to make a blanket statement. Homeopathy and chiropractic and alternative medicine are all outright shit, and Reiki is such shit it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously enough to be debunked.

If you can't distinguish me from the "Global warming? AL GORE! HAW HAW HAW!" crowd now, you really need to do some re-calibration.

Crop monocultures and habitat destruction enabled by the use of pesticides are a real issue though, which significantly reduces the resilience of our food supply to future threats.

These are also issues around patented seeds, and soil degredation that organic producers tend to be better at, even if it's not technically what organic means...

Thing is, it's more subtle than that.

Unlike most of the vague or meaningless standards, care and production labelling and logos, Organic is a legally defined and enforced standard. It may be a weaker standard in the US compared to the EU, but it's a definite marker wherever you are.

Most of the organic production results in far better animal treatment, and lower carbon methods than conventional agriculture, and tries to create processes that are sustainable. Unsurprisingly it's not perfect.

If I want the most animal friendly meat rearing standards, the "most free range" free range eggs - with more space and better conditions than those labelled free range(!), most grass fed dairy cows, most sustainably produced veggies and so on, I should buy organically labelled. In the EU at least - there may be higher legally mandated standards of rearing elsewhere - though I think not. That's regardless whether or not I care about organic aims or dislike the rejection of GMO or some specific product or process.

If I buy conventionally produced I am reliant on non-binding marketing phrases and trust of the producers. Of which I have little.

Dismissing organic as illegitimate chemtrail bullshit that should be dismissed, when there is nothing better is incredibly counter productive. Far better to try and improve organic standards bodies to be a little less dogmatic about accepting new discoveries and processes that fit the sustainability aims, or to agitate for better mandated definitions, accepting GMOs on the precautionary principle of approval as the EU does for conventional use.

> accepting GMOs on the precautionary principle of approval as the EU does for conventional use.

Where "precautionary principle" means not using them because people actively lie about how safe they are and then agitate to force labels on them. You might just as well label vaccines with WARNING: PROTEINS and then spread misinformation about how injecting proteins causes autism-cancer.

Precaution, taken on its own, is fine. In the context of GMOs, it means implicitly accepting a whole raft of lies.

>No. That's bullshit and actively harming the legitimacy Greens have.

Bullshit is the word. Some examples:

- Farmer #1 uses a plethora of organic pesticides on every crop. Can label produce as Certified Organic.

- Farmer #2 uses no pesticides whatsoever, with the exception of glyphosate once a year for weed control. Not Organic.

- Farmer #3 applies B. thuringiensis (Bt) innoculate for fighting fungal infections in corn. Compatible with Organic.

- Farmer #4 sows GM Bt corn that already has B. thuringiensis, with the added benefit of avoiding carbon emissions for using a tractor. Not Organic.

- Farmer #5 gives his free-ranging animals no antibiotics. In line with Organic practice.

- Farmer #6 gets paid regular visits by a certified veterinary, that prescribes antibiotics when strictly necessary. Not Organic.

for fighting fungal infections

Duh I meant fighting insects. B. thuringiensis has nothing to do with fungi.

Want to see real anger, look into how many US food producers have gone halal/kosher over the years. Often the halal and non-halal versions come from exactly the same place. The same has happened with nut-free foods. The label only appears when selling to that particular market because they know that other customers will react badly.

McDonalds goy boycotted for selling halal meat. There's also facebook group to boycott any manufacturer who sells halal meat. Me don't understand. It's not away from normal customers, so??

The biggest push is from the US prison system. If you want to sell to US prisons, a massive customer, you need to be halal. Being all-halal simplifies things for prisons that have to cater to Muslim prisoners.

A good case for the minority rule: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

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