What DurianJoe and FrankEarnest said. If you want to be ethical and don't want to be complicit in environmental destruction, then don't eat seafood. It's as simple as that. No need to read country of origin labels or spend 15 minutes in the canned seafood aisle or keep up with which species is overfished and which is currently "doing well" according to some research group.

If you care more about eating seafood than you do about being an ethical human being and protecting the environment, then at least don't kid yourself.

. . . and it's already too late. I'm not trying to shove my ethics down anyone's throat, area900, but express my opinion in an open forum.

I see the search for ethical seafood as similar to a search for ethical tiger meat or ethical Chinese medicine made from bear gall bladders. Or rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, if you prefer.

By and large people are uninformed about the practices of industrial fishing and ocean agriculture. I believe books like Bottomfeeder actually do a disservice to people by allowing them to think that they can continue with their destructive practices and that somehow the system will fix itself. Laws will be passed. Businesses will make better decisions. Somehow we can have the world and tuna fish sandwiches too and some smart person out there will figure it all out so I can just keep on doing what I'm doing, only maybe for a week or two I'll stop buying fish from Chile.

Perhaps, area900, you are right that people will never stop eating seafood. But I'll tell you what else is never going to happen. People are never, on any sort of large scale, ever going to check the internet for which fish are currently "good" and which are "bad" before going to the grocery store or to Red Lobster. In fact, it's much more realistic to think that people (maybe not everyone, but some people, perhaps a slow and growing movement of people) can remember one simple fact: seafood is horrifically destructive and it is not something you need to eat.

GG said:

[Iran] has never invaded another country.

This just goes to show the short memory of your average liberal. Iran invaded Greece not once, but twice in the 5th century BC. In fact, Iran (sure, it was called Persia then) was a scourge in the eastern Mediterranean. My god, they even invaded India! Iran has invaded most of its neighbors at some point in the past 2500 years. This is the truth Glenn Greenwald doesn't want you to know.

Harper's includes an article this month on a very similar subject. Any buffalo who wander out of Yellowstone are either herded back into the park or shot. In some years over a thousand buffalo are killed this way. The theoretical reason for the fear of buffalo is that they will spread disease to domesticated livestock. However no one has ever shown that wild buffalo can spread disease to domesticated livestock so in all likelihood they are being killed for nothing.

At the center of this issue is the fact that millions of acres of federal land are used for the grazing of privately owned livestock. This is a ridiculous situation that enriches a few at taxpayer expense and contributes nothing to the country. Regardless of how you feel about the raising of livestock and the eating of meat, less than 2% of meat in this country is produced by grazing livestock on federal land, and yet millions of acres are "managed" for this purpose.

Federal grazing permits could easily be phased out and this would have no impact on food supplies. The federal land could then be allowed to go wild--with pronghorn, elk, buffalo, and wolves. Once a sustainable population of buffalo and wolves was established, responsible hunting of these animals could certainly be a part of what happens on these lands.

It's pathetic that neither Obama nor Clinton has addressed this issue or signed up in support.

The idea that liberals should relax because their ideas have won out and the big bad conservatives are softening their message sounds a whole lot like what people were saying during the 2000 election. There was no major difference between the two presidential candidates. Remember that? The media assured us it was true so I know that it was.

Now that the counterrevolution has been defeated, McCain must engage in an opposite kind of triangulation, tacking to the left on issues like global warming and healthcare and invoking foreign policy multilateralism, at least in rhetoric.

McCain should come up with a name for this new brand of triangulated conservatism. Friendly Conservatism. No, Kind Conservatism. No, Conservatism with a Human Face. No, Kinder, Gentler Conservatism. Hmm. Something short, punchy, and alliterative. Any ideas?

Ah. Compassionate Conservatism. Wow, if the country is run for four or eight years by a Compassionate Conservative, we really can't go wrong.