condemning Monsanto with bad science is dumb

[shava]

32. When people respond to a news story, it's as though it weren't to a real situation

with real people.

"Someone should do something about this..."

"We should have standards about these sorts of things...' (who is this we?)

"We should only approach these things if we can do them correctly..." (again, what we and with what funding...?)

Then when activists, often scrappy people with no budget and a lot of guts and a few friends who have the heart to jump off cliffs with them, go out to try to save the world, and "do something about this," all they hear is that they are doing it wrong -- the classic syndrome of the left eating our young.

Because we don't fund things. Or hang together rather than allowing various folks to hang separately. We are very quick to criticize and play armchair general from the sidelines.

The people who do these things are often real people struggling with what they see as real and present dangers, very much wishing for our help (even if it were to tell them in this case, "we'll do studies to show conclusively that there's not a danger so you can sleep better, and we'll make sure that money is clean and untainted and so are the studies.&quot Activists operate in an environment of strapped resources.

So it's not ad hominem, sorry -- it's just that your comment seemed like a conversation spark on that very thing. That we should be thinking of these projects as catalytic, not incompetent, and realizing how difficult it would be to do them as competently as you wish, then perhaps accepting that doing them at this level furthers the conversation adequately for the risk/benefit for society over the alternative of [nothing at all].

It was right around WWI that mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote a classic on leftist movements, New Roads to Freedom, I think it was, where he tried to explain how the burgeoning labor movements of contemporary England were, in fact, not scary but trying to aid the stuffy middle class of the time. In the introduction he has one of the best descriptions of the character of the activist leader that has ever been written. He talked about how they often come off as angry and bitter and arrogant, because they are men (product of his time) of vision, and it is to clear to them how the run of ordinary men are blind to paths that would liberate them and easily make their lives and society better in so many ways, yet they are rebuffed by the society they try to help.

When I see people tearing down the efforts of young people trying to help society like this rather than rushing to help them -- even if it's to help them modify their approach or to analyze what is wrong with academia that forces this approach -- I feel forced into Russell's model -- a curmudgeon basically grousing in a corner that everyone is "doing it wrong."

See why I lurk, now that I can't just rush to help instead of just bitching about it all?

It's not about you. In another time, I'd be off doing something about it myself, or catalyzing someone to do so more directly. Now I mostly get to just analyze why it won't likely happen.