Off-Topic: Against Tribalism

I'm trying to avoid rants in this blog, but this entry is pretty close to one.  In a rant, you allow the lines between reasoning and value judgments to blur, and the tendency is to offer no apologies for this. However, I would like to apologize for just that in the mostly off-topic post that follows: I'm not making much of an effort here to distinguish my emotional aversions from my evaluation of fact.