8 Ways to Sunday

This evening I found myself on a political commentary site called The Constitutional Matters Project. CMP lets authors on both sides of American politics post articles, apparently the more far out and divisive the better. I usually avoid these name-calling competitions, but someone had pointed to this site as having a cleverly-implemented comment form. I was there to check it out as inspiration for a site I’m developing, and ended up reading an article about patriotism.

The article, written from the “conservative” perspective, was typical of the kind of Radical Right nonsense that’s practically self-parody. What motivated the article, however, was a fallacious far-Left argument that I’ve heard repeated ad nauseam. It makes me just as mad as it made the right-wing CMP author, but my reaction is very different.

This post started out as a comment on CMP about true patriotism and its incompatibility with blind party allegiance. It became almost as long as the original article, so I ended up posting it here. Warning: mild rant ahead. (more…)

The ongoing news of a massive North American pet food recall has panicked many dog and cat owners, but the news may have just gotten worse. Del Monte Foods recently added some of their pet food products to the recall list. In response to an e-mail query from The Huffington Post’s David Goldstein, a Del Monte representative confirmed that the melamine-contaminated wheat gluten to blame for the reported pet deaths is “food grade.” That means manufacturers are allowed to use it in human food products. (more…)