Environment & Energy
In reply to the discussion: California Utilities Balk as Home Solar Producers Near 5 Percent Limit [View all]kristopher
(29,798 posts)Would you like me to post some pictures of a PV array down the road? Would you be able to tell if it were mine or not if I said it was?
That's why attempts to establish a position of respect by using screen names with "professor" or "progressive" in your screen name or by claiming to have a solar PV system must, of necessity, carry little to no weight.
The only basis for judging the arguments being made are the arguments themselves. That is how you isolate what a person's perspective actually is. For an example that is unrelated let's say you are a vegan and animal rights activist. You have a dialog with someone named "polarbearcub" that claims to be a vegan but who spends all of their time between posting vegan recipes explaining how necessary factory farming is.
The person might be exactly what they claim or they may be a complete fake on the line of that British guy who was posing as a fay woman from Lebanon. You really can never know just from what is provided on a message board.
That means the best thing to to is confine your observations to the content of the discussions themselves. It is inappropriate to claim you know the person works for a factory farm, but it is entirely appropriate to point out that their argument only makes sense when it is seen through the values of the person operating a factory farm. The person might, after all, be e vegan for health reasons only and sincerely believe that such farming, if done "humanely" (in the traditional sense of the word) does not violate animal "rights" at all.
The message is what matters, not claims of who we are.