As I read these comments, I feel that they are just proving Matt's point. I don't expect that someone like Matt would be embraced here at Salon, but cut the guy a little bit of slack and give him a bit of respect. He chose to write this column as a guest at Salon. If you do disagree, do so respectfully. All you are doing is confirming his (and the right's) suspicion of an intolerant left (hey, I thought that was supposed to be an oxymoron).

That being said, let me (respectfully) disagree on a couple of things he wrote:

• I didn't like porn's liberalism. In porn, everything taboo is trivialized and everything trivial is magnified.

  I don't see how this is liberalism. Liberalism, to me, is more about being able to see issues from multiple sides. It's not about trivializing anything.

• Matt is also being disingenuous when he calls his stint in porn "a summer job". My understanding is that he took part in a dozen or so movies.

Perhaps the right is treating him so well because they want to show how "open" and "tolerant" a group they are, and that "they really don't hate gays". Maybe those are all true statements, but based on the comments I'm reading here, it doesn't look like the left adheres to any of these.

Perhaps one of the reasons why we romanticize indigenous cultures and their relationship to nature is that the only ones that survived to meet the white colonizers were the ones with just such idealistic attitudes towards their natural surroundings.

Jared Diamond in his excellent book Collapse goes into this in detail. As he describes it, civilizations such as the Mayas and the inhabitants of Easter Island overpopulated and destroyed their environment and themselves along with it.

On the other hand, natives of Papua New Guinea, for example, learned how to control their population (sometimes through brutal infanticide). Because of this, however, their civilization was able to survive despite the limited resources found on their island.

What I am saying is that civilizations that did not take care of their environment (and did not expand to take over others) did not live to tell the tale. Those that do survive and take care of their surroundings are not representative of all indigenous cultures out there.

(I may have some of the details wrong, but the point remains the same.)

Maybe the problem is---gasp!---blogs. Or at least part of the problem. The problem is too much information being printed too quickly. Rumors and innuendos that later turn out to be wrong or only half true are too easy to act upon.

Don't get me wrong, blogs and all the other modern mechanisms for getting information to the masses quickly are wonderful inventions, and in most cases beneficial to humanity. But, they also allow the impulsive among us to cause economic downturns based on the comments of one man.

I really think that the organic movement needs to reconsider its stance on GMOs. Why is the organic movement against the idea of GMO? What exactly about GMOs makes it incongruous with organic? Is it just "scary"? Is it the politics of the word? If we could find a GMO variant of, say, corn that requires no pesticides and *really* is safe for the environment (however you define safe) and is cheap to produce by small farmers, should the organic industry go wild over this?

Before I get too far on this, I have to say that I (almost) completely agree with what jebldmm is saying. Many of the GMO pushers are acting immorally and not in the best interest of the country or the world. They are advocating for crops that are potentially unsafe to the environment. They are advocating for lower regulations on these potentially unsafe crops. They are undermining local economies with monopolistic practices. Etc.

However, GMOs are here to stay. The GMO world of the future will either be one where wild strains of GMO crops run rampant and destroy local ecosystems (this is bad!), or a world where GMO crops are used only after much testing and safety controls are in place and only when they are shown to be substantially better than alternatives (this is good!).

If things continue the way they are going with GMO pushers going full steam ahead, and organic pushers trying for a complete block, we will end up in a bad world. To prevent this, we need more testing of GMOs and this idea has to be adopted by the organics industry.

I am looking forward to the day when organic and GMO foods can live together peacefully (albeit far enough away so that the winds can't contaminate). I am sick of the "frankenfood" criers who believe that GMOs are inherently evil, but I also can't believe the hubris of Monsanto et. al. who try to push forward the idea that GMO is all good and will be the savior of humanity.

I think organic and GMO are not inherently at odds. It is the current state of each movement that make them so. The GMO pushers are, by and large in the developed world at least, driven by greed with no thought on how their (business) practices affect the world. The organic movement, on the other hand is far too splintered to really effect change on the way GMOs are pushed on the world. Is the organic movement promoting health, the environment, local farming? Is it anti-big business, or just another big business itself? Is its goal to convert the world to organics, or to preach to the converted? Ask 10 pro-organic people, and you'll get 12 answers.

I appreciate your in depth analysis on this subject.