edit [[i deleted an earlier post. i thought better of it and replaced it with this]]
here's a nice compact-ish history of conservative and industry attempts to take over the category "environmentalist" and use it to discredit an entire set of concerns:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m.../ai_n29440361/
in ace's infotainment above, we aren't really talking about anything in particular when the word "environmentalist" comes up--it's just another conservative boogeyman, another evil faction of the liberal elite which sucks the blood of right-thinking americans and the corporate practices for which they stand. we're dealing with straight-up conservative ideology then that's being fobbed off as viable information.
i have an agenda in this thread. my agenda is trying to understand what the fuck is happening at the site of the deepwater horizon disaster. i am interested in its political and by extension regulation-based conditions of possibility. i am interested in the specific history of bp in the gulf and the ways in which these converge on the disaster itself, as explanations of it. i am interested in the politics that have taken shape around the attempts to stop the massive flow of oil into the waters of the gulf of mexico. i'm interested in the conflicts that are taking shape between the federal and state governments and bp around the clean-up, to the extent that there is one. i am interested in assessments of damage and proposals for remedies. i'm interested to see what, if anything, happens to the corporate persons involved with this mess. i'm interested to see what, if any, role other stakeholders in the gulf area are allowed to take in shaping what happens with the oil.
i'm interested in the appalling brand triage that bp's been running and that its starting to fall apart.
and i'm interested in the longer run to see how this disaster changes the regulatory framework first and more generally the politics of petroleum.
the information i gather and post here is shaped by this range of interests, but since the thread is a real-time research project, it's not shaped by the interests.
i say this to demonstrate why i consider what you are now doing, ace darling, to be a threadjack.