Is everything exploding at Salon?

I happened to stop by Salon yesterday because someone at Facebook had pointed me to "Jonathan Franzen is guilty of 'extreme intellectual dishonesty,' according to the Audubon Society/Franzen hit first, but the National Audubon Society hit harder." Notice all that hitting and the ugly words "extreme" and "guilty." Something terrible must be happening, right? No, Jonathan Franzen just had an article in The New Yorker saying that the Audubon Society is letting the big issue of climate change divert its attention from practical things that can be done now to conserve birds. I ended up blogging the New Yorker article, but I'd left open the tab to Salon "extreme intellectual dishonesty" article. Looking at that page this morning, I'm noticing the sidebar of "most read" articles, and I'm seeing way more emotion than makes any sense. I'll add boldface to make my point:

I called him pathetic, he accused me of ruining his life: What children did to our marriage...

Boomer parents destroyed us: I needed rules and boundaries, not parents who want to be friends...

These seem to be routine articles about the challenges of living in families, but somehow it's all ruination and destruction. Absurd!

The right's made-up God: How bigots invented a white supremacist Jesus

Republicans' "Hitler" idiocy: Why their hysterical Iran pushback exposes a secret

Why I left the GOP

That last one is calm. I'll just assume "I" left the GOP because the GOP is a bunch of hysterical, bigoted, delusional, pushy, racist idiots.

Yelp users hilariously revolt against Indiana pizza shop that refuses to cater same-sex weddings

Funny or Die skewers homophobic businesses in pitch-perfect Indiana spoof

Here, the metaphorical acts of violence � revolting and skewering � are presented as wonderful comedy because they punish citizens who deserve it for not achieving the right level of acceptance of gay people.

America's angriest white men: Up close with racism, rage and Southern supremacy...

"They're human beings!": David Letterman blasts Indiana over anti-gay law...

Ted Cruz goes ballistic over "radical" idea that gay people should enjoy equality

Michelle Obama absolutely kills it in the "Evolution of Mom Dancing Part 2"

Apparently, everything is exploding. I guess Salon has its internal research showing this is what people click on. To me, it looks inane. I wish readers would develop resistance to this kind of manipulation. We should laugh at this desperation. Or � I don't know � look at Salon's evident belief that we slaver over violence and have a nuclear meltdown of outrage.

"But climate change is seductive to organizations that want to be taken seriously."

"Besides being a ready-made meme, it�s usefully imponderable: while peer-reviewed scientific estimates put the annual American death toll of birds from collisions and from outdoor cats at more than three billion, no individual bird death can be definitively attributed to climate change (since local and short-term weather patterns have nonlinear causes). Although you could demonstrably save the lives of the birds now colliding with your windows or being killed by your cats, reducing your carbon footprint even to zero saves nothing. Declaring climate change bad for birds is therefore the opposite of controversial. To demand a ban on lead ammunition (lead poisoning is the foremost cause of California condor deaths) would alienate hunters. To take an aggressive stand against the overharvesting of horseshoe crabs (the real reason that the red knot, a shorebird, had to be put on the list of threatened U.S. species this winter) might embarrass the Obama Administration, whose director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, in announcing the listing, laid the blame for the red knot�s decline primarily on 'climate change,' a politically more palatable culprit. Climate change is everyone�s fault�in other words, no one�s. We can all feel good about deploring it."

Writes Jonathan Franzen in a New Yorker article titled "Carbon Capture/Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?"