[chongli]

How can it be so hard to be nice to others?

As a Canadian, I can say this: I have no idea. It's really hard to develop a culture of niceness and it can be so very fleeting.

Just as the US has a huge cultural divide between the coastal big cities and the great middle of the country, so too does Canada between east and west as well as between Anglophone and Francophone. Yet somehow this divide in Canada is not quite as acute, not quite as mean.

Perhaps the biggest issue is that the moral fault lines constructively interfere with the cultural ones. I think of big-city vegans vs those who love BBQ and it becomes a microcosm for the rejection of all the respective cultural elements: yoga and country music, environmentalism and hunting/fishing, political correctness and religion.

[investinwaffles]

In defense of hunting and fishing, sportsmen and their outfitters tend to be the strongest proponents of environmental protection. This distinction does somewhat favor fishing over hunting, but hunting does serve as an important backstop against explosive population growth in the absence of apex predators.

- http://fishpondusa.com/about/corporate-responsibility

- http://wamu.org/news/11/05/23/deer_overpopulation_yields_dis...

[chongli]

Oh yeah, I'm not saying that sportsmen are against the environment. I'm referring to the cultural divide between city-dwelling vegans who rarely, if ever, venture into the wilderness and sportsmen who eat meat and fight tirelessly to preserve nature.

It's a matter of people talking past eachother.