Friday Special Feature; Left wing edition #1
(This weeks feature diverts from the usual format of featuring a single quote, and instead features a hot bed of witch hunting insanity) Rather than attack another crazy right winger, I have decide to plunge my righteous Libertarian anger into the left wing to balance things out. My target today is the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The center, in all of its “nanny state” goodness is of course a frequent target of libertarians. Here is what Reason Magazine, Radley Balko, and the Cato Institute have said about the Center.
The CSPI’s Nutrition Action Health letter has to feature some of the world’s only agitprop food criticism. Their features, like their right stuff V. food porn column, or in features like this one, where they describe the gory details of mass market food with words that seem purposefully chosen to send soccer moms door to door with petitions to save America’s youth. These descriptions also use traditional propaganda techniques such as claiming that anyone who wanted to eat a particular Burger King sandwich (This particular sandwich, which features four cheeseburgers and bacon does seem to be overdoing it by a good margin) was suicidal. Another propaganda technique is the groups failure to acknowledge middle of the road positions. They ignore the fact that it might be acceptable to eat the food items that they call food porn once in a while. (To view the lurid Yellow Journalism descriptions of various foodstuffs, view this link)
The group also seems to have a neo-prohibitionist(PDF LINK) agenda. Their website has a large section devoted to fighting alcohol. Their main method of fighting alchohol seems to be to raise taxes on it until no one can afford to buy any. This is a similar tactic to the religious right’s use of TRAP laws.
The official featured quote this week is as follows: Mark Jacobson, (who is the founder and appears to still be the leader of CSPI) who says about salt:
Sitting quietly in little containers on tables in just about every home and restaurant are the innocent-looking white crystals of sodium chloride that are killing a jumbo jet’s worth of Americans every day.
