faetal on 10/3/2015 at 08:40
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
Because it's going to be perceived that way.
Of course it is. Ignorance x fear > fact.
faetal on 10/3/2015 at 08:53
As for GMO - the first thing to get straight is that Monsanto being dicks is not the same as GMO being bad technology. Ordinary maize is a genetically modified organism simply due to the selective farming practices used over the years. Gene splicing is just adding speed and selectivity to the process. It's a standard baby vs bathwater scenario. Crops engineered to express a non-toxic (to humans) insecticidal protein, allowing pesticide use to decrease = good thing. Genes which allow crops to be grown in soil with less water = good thing. Terminator genes, not so much, but on to that...
Genes which make subsequent generations sterile is a technology which was being researched but has not been implemented. Probably because it would be a PR nightmare. I'm sure they'd love to do it, because any publicly traded entity gives zero fucks about service provision or morality when the bottom line is at stake, but since this bottom line gets hit by bad publicity too, the terminator gene was too hot either way. What they resort to instead is things like (
http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/why-does-monsanto-sue-farmers-who-save-seeds.aspx) this. At face value, it's a dick move. However, as with the pharma industry, if the product has to be R&D'd, the money has to come from somewhere. Not only that, but the successful products has to pay for all of the failed ones and the ratio of success:fail is often not great. If Monsanto just sold their seed batches and let people go off and keep re-using their seeds, their bottom line gets hit. They probably couldn't stop a black market of farmers selling their seeds for less than Monsanto also, so their only tenable tool here is legal action.
I don't like it, but then I don't like about 95% of how market-based economies work - I think they inherently de-synchronise against the needs of the majority and equilibrate to douchebaggery. But if you want capitalism, you can't blame the lion for acting like a lion.
Tony_Tarantula on 11/3/2015 at 02:23
Quote Posted by faetal
As for GMO - the first thing to get straight is that Monsanto being dicks is not the same as GMO being bad technology. Ordinary maize is a genetically modified organism simply due to the selective farming practices used over the years. Gene splicing is just adding speed and selectivity to the process.
It's the difference between horizontal and vertical gene transfer.....although calling it "faster" is a fallacy because it assumes that the plants would have evolved that way on their own. The changes that occurred to Monsanto's strain are ones that are unlikely to have evolved through controlled breeding".
Quote:
But if you want capitalism, you can't blame the lion for acting like a lion.
It's not capitalism. Once you have the government picking winners and losers via subsidies, writing legislation intended to benefit specific companies, and selective enforcement of regulations(all of which are prevalent in the USA) then the term "capitalism" goes out the window and what you have is much closer to fascism.
Basically the difference between America and "capitalism" is the same as the difference between a fair football game and one where the referees are employees of one of the teams.
There's a decent article in the Harvard Business Review about how it is a massive stretch of the imagination call America's system "capitalism"
(
https://hbr.org/2013/10/this-isnt-capitalism-its-growthism-and-its-bad-for-us)
There's also a good posting by Forbes about "capitalism"
(
http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardsalsman/2011/12/07/capitalism-is-decidedly-not-corporatism-or-cronyism/)
Anyways, there's much dumber than all of this on the web:
Inline Image:
https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/8458331904/h7C016352/faetal on 11/3/2015 at 09:00
It's a logical end game of capitalism. When rules restrict you and you realise you have enough money to sway the rules - you continue to obey the bottom line. It may not be capitalism by its optimistic brochure definition, but it's a logical progression of free market systems. Government isn't picking the winners, capital is picking the winners with the government acting at its behest.
Also, what you say about gene transfer is mildly fallacious. Horizontal gene transfer can happen naturally - by humans splicing them in. Unless humans are somehow exempt from nature. We're as much a natural process as anything else which emerged from the soup. If GMO is not natural, then neither is honey, it's an unnatural deviation of plant sugar which wouldn't have have happened without artificial interference from bees. The trick is not to freak out at something because it couldn't have happened without our input, but only when it can be demonstrated as being harmful. So fewer "my friend who used to do GMO stuff" anecdotes and more links to studies showing deleterious effects of GMO.
Bit of a semantic argument, but I think drawing of a line between human activity and the rest of nature needs stronger justification than the emphatic leanings of the like of Natural News etc...
Tony_Tarantula on 15/3/2015 at 15:45
You're subtly misdirecting.
From where I'm sitting I can't figure out why ANYONE is surprised that......a strain of maize designed to be more toxic than regular corn(to kill pests, I know) might be more toxic than regular corn.
Quote:
It may not be capitalism by its optimistic brochure definition, but it's a logical progression of free market systems. Government isn't picking the winners, capital is picking the winners with the government acting at its behest.
It's an inevitable result of combining capitalism and democratic systems, not an inevitable result of capitalism. Although to be fair no government has lasted incorrupt for any long period of time.
(
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/10/29/best-form-of-government-will-anything-ever-work/)
Muzman on 16/3/2015 at 02:07
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
It's not capitalism. Once you have the government picking winners and losers via subsidies, writing legislation intended to benefit specific companies, and selective enforcement of regulations(all of which are prevalent in the USA) then the term "capitalism" goes out the window and what you have is much closer to fascism.
Basically the difference between America and "capitalism" is the same as the difference between a fair football game and one where the referees are employees of one of the teams.
BS propaganda spread by fundamentalist neo-liberals and Randists. It's not even remotely like fascism unless you redefine the word entirely and start again. It's fairly ordinary protectionism, which has its ups and downs, its blind alleys and traps but has been the way capitalism has been done most of the time in most places.
You're trying to oppose corporate dominance and global capital with the arguments of people who want these things completely unrestrained. What do you think Monsanto and whoever else might do to the food supply then?
DDL on 16/3/2015 at 07:54
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
From where I'm sitting I can't figure out why ANYONE is surprised that......a strain of maize designed to be more toxic than regular corn(to kill pests, I know) might be more toxic than regular corn.
To the insects, maybe yes. To everything else, no. Seriously.
It's a pretty specific toxin even among insects (requires specific gut pH, even): there are limited studies suggesting it might have effects on butterflies (in slightly hypothetical situations), but nothing on humans or other mammals whatsoever.
demagogue on 16/3/2015 at 08:10
The butterfly study got heavily criticized for bad methods, and the ungrounded conclusions people were pulling from it. The rat studies, speaking of mammals, were criticized even more. When I brought up my "bad science - not salient - illegitimate" trilemma, those are two of the textbook studies on the "bad science" pole. That doesn't stop them getting paraded in the popular and activist media as the bellwethers of the coming GMO apocalypse.
As a side note, I'm not liking how science is abused in hacktivism generally anyway. How many times a day do we see some Buzz Feed that's something like, 10 reasons you're harboring unconscious racism because here's a study saying 87% of respondents rated a white doll more attractive than the black doll, therefore the events in Ferguson were a crime against humanity? I don't doubt such kinds of studies are saying something, but I'm almost positive, with the level of non-biased scrutiny people give it, it's nothing like the point they are taking away from it, and if they really started digging into that subject, they'd realize the real world is almost always an embarrassing clusterfuck that can't support anywhere near the clear-cut slogans people want science to say, the kinds they want to lead parades with like "Don't shoot!" and "preference of white dollies in a badly designed study obviously means cops shoot blacks because of racism."
You want to know what a sobering study in behavioral science is: interviewers tend to sympathize with respondents more after they've held a warm beverage as opposed to a cold one. That's the scale of correlational relationships researchers deal with in behavioral studies, but tell me how that fits into activists' worldview? It flips the finger to the whole charade.
Edit: Let me make a proposition. I'm not a fan of bad science or facts being marshaled to make otherwise respectable points. If monoculture or race is a problem in your country, you don't need to go scrounging for bad science or facts to make it, just because it's more alarmist and gets a rise out of people. You can use sound science just as well. But use the bad variety, and you're invariably lead them down the wrong path, and the original problem will still be there to boot because you're not responding to it correctly. Whatever. Fuck popular activism and policy suggestions. They always get it wrong. Unless something is peer reviewed or otherwise survives a sanity check by someone that knows what they're talking about in the field, I'm not going to give "facts" thrown at me in a photoshopped screenshot much credence.
faetal on 16/3/2015 at 09:21
Dema - I couldn't agree more. If there is a downside to google, it's that people can now prop up their predispositions with an armful of mined studies. That's what a lot of internet debates are now, a tennis game where people throw links where people can read the outcome of a study which backs up someone's preferred world view. No analysis of the weight of overall evidence, no weighting for study quality, just "this link shows X, therefore X is true and Y is not". Research is far more nuanced than that.
Tony - "where you're sitting" is as someone who has presumably a passing interest in science, but not enough to spend years becoming qualified in it. My chosen field has a sizeable Venn overlap with environmental toxicology and like DDL says - toxic to insects != toxic to people. It's not like insecticides work by being kind of toxic, and insects die because they're smaller and therefore get higher dose per kg, it's more like "here's a vital nervous system enzyme which exists in insects, but not mammals - let's inhibit that".
There are some bad aspects to some of the research which has gone into GMO. There are plenty of bad aspects about some of the companies profiting from GMO, which are generic to free-market systems. Saying GMO on the whole is bad is a sweeping generalisation and needs a huge weight of evidence. We are screwing up our environment faster than evolution will be able to deal with, so I for one want a card up the sleeve for helping it along if or when it becomes necessary.
Xorak on 19/3/2015 at 07:43
Quote Posted by Kolya
Given enough time everyone could become an expert in almost every field today. And that leads us to think that we are on par with any expert, after reading the wikipedia entry on a subject or some opinionated blogs.
To me it's the logical but cynical outcome of the mentality of handing out a gold medal to every kid merely for participating and telling them that they've done just as good a job as those who won. The kid is the last person to actually believe it, yet even from that time we start programming our kids to be cynical of their teachers and parents.
Then later in life, these kids fall back on that same position, that when they see an artist paint something or an athlete strive for greatness the natural response becomes, “I can do that too, it's so simple,” because we've purposely trained them from childhood to believe that they can do it merely by saying they can do it, since speaking and participating becomes equal to actually achieving or winning. This is the outcome of the post-modern drivel we teach our kids.
Secondly, it's because these elite are in many cases just garbage and demonic individuals who don't even live by their own self-professed truths or ideals. When some goof like Al Gore spouts his crap the response by any non-believer is ultimately cynicism, not only because of his mendacious facade, but because he lives exactly the opposite of what he preaches. Say what you want of St. Francis Assisi, but holy hell he walked the walk and nobody responds with suspicion to that. In fact that's what creates real trust and understanding, since people look at him and say that if he was willing to live the way he lived there must be something to it.
Nobody says this of Mr. Gore. And ultimately people not only turn him off, but all others like him who try to control your life with their sententious and false teachings. Thus people become distrustful of all such experts. Honestly, to me there's no difference between someone like Mr. Gore and the High Priest of Enlil who in 3500 BC would stand on the top step of a Sumerian ziggurat and demand you believe and sacrifice or humanity will suffer for it. Same experts, same spoutings, new ziggurats.
