This friend is, as my father would quaintly put it, a "shit stirrer". If there is no conflict, she will do her darnest to make one.

I have absolutely no argument with those who choose a vegan lifestyle. I agree that it can have a lot of benefits and I'd spent six months trying it. I just found it too restrictive to maintain over long term and have gone back to a whole grains/fruits and veggies with a little bit of meat diet. Where I have issues is the nearly evangelical zeal that some (not all) vegans display towards friends and family. I've been on the receiving end of the vegan argument many times, and it does become irritating after awhile. I can imagine how frustrating it becomes if it's constantly coming from a "friend".

This is no less an intrusive argument than when my friend, a former pagan who "found Jesus" after she married a Christian husband spent nearly every conversation demanding to know why I was a Wiccan. I ended up breaking off our friendship because nearly every conversation we had verred into this debate and it just became very tiresome.

To the LW, I would just advise letting your friend know that you have discussed this many times in the past. It's time to drop the argument. If she is incapable of doing so, then perhaps it is time to drop her too.

Because she doesn't like Al Gore and, dammit, too people people think that it is real and she is such a contrarian that she'll go against the trend no matter what the scientific evidence says? Please... her overwhelming sense of self-importance is enough to make even the most open-minded thinker ready to hurl in disgust.

As well-thought and well-read Paglia might be, she is hardly a scientist. She has not done the field studies like drilling ice cores in Antartica that have trapped air molecules from hundreds of thousands of years ago. She has not read the thousands of articles published in scientific journals over the past decade documenting the very real climate changes that are occuring and the research showing that human activity are behind these changes. She ignores the evidence that worldwide, there have been radical shifts in rainfall patterns (resulting in droughts and flooding), increased glacier melt in both Antartica and Greenland, increasing spread of disease from pests that can take advantage of a warming climate... the list goes on.

She would like to pretent that the massive levels of greenhouse gases that humans have been steadily pumping into the atmosphere have had no effect because we're only poor little humans? How could we have an effect on something like our atmospher? Well, it wasnt' all that long ago that the atmospher had a big hole in it that was a result of chlorofluorocarbons from things like styrofoam and hair spray propellant. Chlorofluorocarbons are banned worldwide and look at what happens in just a few years... the hole starts to repair itself. So mankind is too small to have an effect, huh?

Having taken a geology class or two in college does not make one a scientist. I've taken plenty of biology classes in high school and college, but I hardly think that anyone would want me performing open heart surgery on them.

Perhaps someone should remind Ms. Paglia that going against the group simply for the sake of a perception of indepenance doesn't always prove you to be a radical free thinker. Sometimes it just makes you wrong.