The tempest in a teapot over my criticisms of biofuels (and especially of the post blasting Oregon League of Conservation Voters’ decision to grade legislators up or down based on whether they support using tax dollars and subsidizing them) and the criticism of Onward Oregon for allowing me to post under a nom de plume make me wonder about the the strange state of discourse among so-called progressives.

I prefer to not blog about blogging. The net is full of people writing about writing and gazing into their navels as if blogging were anything more special than the guys who sit and solve the world’s problems over a beer at the corner bar. I’d rather spend my time writing about issues of substance.

But the weird assumptions expressed here — that the Onward Oregon collective has a right (if not the duty) to police posts made here for ideological conformity, and that posting under a psuedonym is somehow inconsistent with the purpose of this site — require a response.

The masthead here — the sign over the bar door, if you will — reads

“Building an online community to champion the public interest.”

Building such an online community requires dialog about, naturally, the public interest. Dialog about the public interest requires that policies be examined critically — asking of any given proposal or idea “Is this in the public interest?”

Oregon recently made (imo, a terrifically unwise) decision to subsidize biofuels production (rather than research) and to build in an escalating subsidy by requiring biofuel percentages in fuels down the road. I’ve made many, many posts on this and why I think this is most definitely not in the Oregon’s interest, so I won’t review those here (anyone interested can look for posts under “Energy Future” and “Environment” and you would find them)–although I will note that more and more serious environmentalists of significant national and international stature are waking up to the problems posed by biofuels.

But leaving aside the merits for the moment, the question is how we are supposed to critically examine policies like that one if we are only supposed to agree with each other? Consider gun control, for example. I don’t think anyone would say boo if I or any other OO blogger blasted the NRA”s positions on gun control here, under their given name or a nom de plume. Nor do I expect I would be challenged if I criticized James Dobson, Oregonians in Action, Loren Parks, or the folks trying to shove sexual minorities back into the closet.

Are biofuels and the green groups (and the huge corporations behind the national biofuels effort) pushing subsidies somehow exempt from criticism? Is it taboo to suggest that folks like Oregon League of Conservation Voters (which I support through contributions) can reach a wrong conclusion on policy or make a significant blunder?

In one of those cosmic coincidences, the same week that this site is suddenly taking flack for having a blogger who uses a psuedonym, a small phony flap, we have another phony flap at the national level, this one over a MoveOn.org ad, where the GOP and the neocons are in high dudgeon over a stupid headline (“General Petraus or General Betray Us?”) — the flap that will not die because it’s so very functional for the pro-war folks. It’s simply a way to shift the conversation away from the disaster that is Iraq and to attack the bonafides of war critics, just like attacks on a blogger for using an assumed name are about avoiding the substantive issues.

A community in which dissenting views are not tolerated is no community at all — it’s a prison camp. We already have a corporate-controlled media that enforces strict ideological limits on what can be said — why would we need to replicate that here?

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 10:56 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.