The backlash against Raleigh Green’s column last week has made your Editorial Team think about some things: the ethics of disclosure, cancel culture/deplatforming and local attitudes toward business.

(Green, who is more than capable of defending himself, has written a response of his own: set your alarms, it goes live 6 a.m. Wednesday.)

We were criticized in a letter for failing to mention that Green, who does marketing and public relations for a living, has worked with developers and at least one pro-growth organization. That someone who is writing a column about business in our region has dealings with businesspeople really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Does it have bearing on the opinions he expresses in his column? We assume so, but we look at this way: Do we as a publication want writers to write about what they know, or what they don’t know? We have found the former usually works out better.

While we agree disclosure of conflicts of interest is often necessary, especially for politicians and other public officials who may be deceiving the public to advance their own ends, we don’t really see such a conflict in Green’s case. Neither Green nor Kingston Wire are trying to pull a fast one. He’s a businessperson writing about business — we trust our readers to understand that and read accordingly. Put another way, should our writers be forced to post their entire resumes at the bottom of their pieces so they can be picked over for angles of attack? It seems to us that our local situation in re notoriously murky sources of funding and in-kind support for many advocacy groups is potentially much more disqualifying.

We wonder if this particular accusation against Green is a form of ad hominem attack. It seems to us the chain of reasoning goes like this: Writer presents a pro-development point of view, we disagree with that point of view, writer is therefore bad and should be attacked personally. (While deplorable from a rhetorical point of view, going ad hominem is a convenient way to dismiss an idea without having to grapple with it in good faith. Now that is not to say that Green’s critics haven’t made good issues-based arguments against what he’s written, because they have. But it needs to be said that more often than not — and the same goes for Hugh Reynolds too, by the way — arguments against Green’s ideas also come with troll-like shots at Green himself, and at us too for giving him a platform in the first place.

It also brought up a larger question: How did development and those who propose it become, for many people in Ulster County, the devil incarnate? Was it the boom-and-bust-cycle system that came with it — culminating with IBM — inflicting generational trauma upon us and, quite justifiably, leaving us with a sense of wariness when it comes to big business? Was it the feeling that many of us, also quite justifiably, have found an Edenic refuge from a fallen world here, making developers look like a snake offering us something we know is not good for us? There’s an old joke we used to hear in local newsrooms: “Why does the Woodstock Times still only cost a dollar? Because people don’t like change.” And why would we, we who so often yearn for the way we think things were 50, 60, 70, 100 years ago? There are, we figure, very few Ulster residents who would not agree that things here are feeling a little (or a lot) cramped of late, like the changes to our communities are bulging past the small scale we’ve enjoyed so much and shaped our lives around. There could also be a very justified civic repulsion to how, in some cases, rules were ignored, bent or rewritten to get projects approvals and PILOT deals they may well have not gotten if everything was on the up-and-up. Or it might be that we’re a county with a lot of born-this-way dissidents in it, and we just don’t cotton to vulgar (or any) displays of power, no matter how well-intentioned or legitimately beneficial they may be? Or is it an organic distaste, built up over the years as one ill-suited project after another reared its inappropriate head?

All of the above, plus an enhanced local disgust for the excesses of capitalism, your Editorial Team reckons. So when someone wants to look at the other side of the apple, i.e., how development can be a good thing for Kingston and Ulster, it’s certainly no surprise to us that they come in for a lot of criticism. We give Green credit for standing up for what he believes, no matter how many rotten tomatoes are thrown in his direction.

If you don’t like that we present opinions that you don’t agree with, or ones we don’t even agree with, all we can say is we’re sorry, but we’re not going to stop doing it. Actually, we are not sorry: there are plenty of self-appointed cyberbully thought police-type voices out there in our community, but that’s a chorus in which Kingston Wire will never sing. We will continue, like it or not, to present to readers things that challenge preconceived notions and contradict popular consensus. That’s because in an era where most “journalism” ought to be labeled “for entertainment purposes only,” we believe, for better or worse, that we have a duty to our readers to provide a platform for all kinds of local voices, approved or unapproved, cool or not cool. As we have written in the past, there are plenty of outlets which will tell you what you want to hear or what they want you to hear. Kingston Wire will tell you what you need to hear, or at least offer you the opportunity. In this Golden Age of BS in which we all struggle, we think that’s well worth supporting.