Comment by InsideOutSanta
2 days ago
> A large number of California wildfires have been set by arsonists and arson is a key tactic used by ecoterrorist groups like ELF
This is misleading. Ecoterrorist groups do use arson, but they target cars and buildings, like car dealerships or chain stores, not forests.
If you're engaged in a fight against logging, burning down forests is likely not the first thing on your mind.
Immediately jumping to conclusions and then using that conclusion as a political weapon is part of the insanity. Everything that happens has to be qualified as either beneficial to your political position or detrimental to it, dictating how you respond to it. Everything has to be framed as the fault of your "evil" opponents or as a lie and fake news.
This is extremely detrimental to societal cohesion and to democratic political processes, and I wish people would stop before it's too late.
> Ecoterrorist groups do use arson, but they target cars and buildings, like car dealerships or chain stores, not forests.
False. If you know anything about forests you know that before “European colonizers” (not my preferred terminology tbh) wildfire was very common and a tool wielded by indigenous peoples to control overgrowth of the sort that is now common given “intrusion” of housing into forested land which is often a subject of the ecoterrorist’s disdain.
When a major serial arsonist is caught and he explains, “f** you f*** pigs!” a natural response is to pattern match to anarchist or ecoterrorist fringe groups and anti-authoritarian personality types. When the news censors or conspicuously avoids discussion of specific individuals and their motives, preferring an imo more beneficial focus on climate change (a very real and pressing threat) even more pattern matching occurs.
I’m not saying such speculation is useful or accurate, but I don’t think it’s insanity by any stretch.
The specific individual I’m talking about, good luck finding through google btw, is Gary Stephen Maynard.