Science questions for liberals

Carleas, so far you have given nothing but plausible deniability arguments favoring those who lust for absolute power and control over every human and all life for all time (generically referred to as “Nazi’s”). What you are saying is that the Nazi’s could have been a good thing so they should have been allowed to have absolute power.

Once GMO’s are the standard, there is no going back and everything anyone eats will be 100 determined by what those in power choose to feed them. They already don’t tell you what you are being medicated with every day. When those in power choose that one race is not desirable, that race suddenly has fertility problems and dies out. Who was controlling their food, air, and diseases? Who was controlling what information and disinformation got released concerning such things?

There have been a variety of films exposing this strategy of silently and subtly gaining control of a population for the purpose of subjugating it while feigning the role of savior: Earth - Final Conflict, Stargate SG1,… Such more real and recent false flag events concerning 9/11, school shootings, disease outbreaks, and so on prove that the strategy is still quite popular and in affect.

After secretly sterilizing the home world race:
“Never under any circumstances go to P4C-970 [the home world of the Aschen-Nazis]”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dytMP6WeHIs[/youtube]

You offer only plausible deniability favoring absolute dominance. I offer plausible deniability favoring prudence against absolute control. You favor absolute global domination by the Godwannabes, as do all liberal globalists (“please Ms Government, save us from all the bad by forcing those bad people to do the good”). I don’t. I have no reason to believe that “they” are holy (or even good) people, do you? And yet, I have plenty of reasons to believe that they are not.

And no, your “antibiotics” argument is a strawman. Antibiotics are given one on one. They are not [supposed to be] put into everyone’s food, water, and air such that there is no choice and no one left untainted by them (although you would have had them do so). How else can one control all life on Earth if not by controlling their food, water, air, money, media, and medicine?

  1. I find it odd that it should be liberal to be against GM foods. It seems to if anyone a conservative would be skeptical about suddenly setting up so that nearly all americans get GM foods with little animal or human testing and despite the threats intimidation corruption bad science and history of lies of Monsanto. A literally conservative approach would be to take many decades of testing to see if these things are OK.
  2. They haven’t helped anyone yet, for all their BS.
  3. their behavior in relation to governments means that there is no way to know. So it is at best a crap shoot.

The documentary I posted does a nice overview of the damage of these products in the various areas of life, that is all of them.

No, it would not be catastrophic. Sufficient food can be grown using conventional plants.

The problem of world hunger is not lack of food … it is poor distribution and waste. Between one third and one half of all food is wasted.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_waste

fao.org/save-food/resources/keyfindings/en/

This claim is hard to square. Most corn and soybeans in the US are GMOs, if the cost of growing those crops has decreased, doesn’t that count as helping? If pesticide use has decreased while yields increased, doesn’t that count as helping? More than half of GMOs are grown in the developing world, if they’ve increased yields, decreased pesticide use, cost, and ultimately the price of food in those countries, wouldn’t that count as helping?

This reminds me of an anecdote about the federal budget, which contains a line item for “waste, fraud, and abuse”, and during budget shortfalls it’s often suggested that we can save money by just striking that line item.

Food waste is something that both producers and consumers have every incentive to avoid if they could, and the fact that it persists suggests that it’s not being wasted by choice. Food is perishable, by its nature some of it will be lost in transit from producer to consumer. If we reverted to all conventional plants, we should predict a similar rate of food waste, just of a smaller initial pool of food. That means higher prices and, especially in places where the pool of available food is already low like the developing world, shortages.

Moreover, note that your own source states that “most loss occurs during production”, and that one important way that GMOs increase yield is by reducing loss to pests. For at least some crops, we should expect that eliminating GMOs would actually increase food waste.

And I don’t think you’re wrong to criticize food waste, I agree that it would be better if less food were wasted. But I’d still argue that, even if we could eliminate most food waste, we should still adopt GMOs to decrease the amount of resources we use to produce food.

Whatever one thinks of humans in general, smart ones, use genetic technologies is one thing. One can think of this abstractly, come up with moral guidelines or precautionary ones, decide it would e OK if these were followed - say as one might with a company developing nuclear weapons.

But Monsanto has a record of lying, bribing, allowing harm, manipulating, breaking laws, strongarming, and destruction of regulation and so on.

Do we really want to allow such an organization to have that power which in the abstract we might grant to some organization under different conditions?

My position is harder than that. I do not think most humans could be trusted and no corporation can be trusted. But that is an abstract issue, one that a case can be made against in the abstract.

In the specific cases, where Monsanto is the worst of the big players but certainly not the only one who should be disbarred, it is a different matter. Here we know enough t knw they must not have this kind of power. But some of we seem not to.

What you are saying is that the problems of food waste and food distribution cannot be solved and therefore conventional crops will not provide sufficient food for our needs and we must use GMOs.
Well if you begin with that mindset, it’s not surprising where you end up.

I have heard this many times in the past.

Automobile manufacturers saying that fuel efficiency could not be improved, emissions could not be reduced. Until legislation forced them to do it and then, not surprisingly, more efficient and cleaner engines became possible.

More coal-fired and nuclear power plants had to be constructed to meet energy needs. Turning off lights, improved efficiency bulbs, efficient air conditioners. And the number of plants which had to be constructed at great cost is significantly reduced. And the pollution problems associated with the plants is reduced.

Water supply problems. Low flush toilets, low flow faucets, improvements to infrastructure.

Philosophically, you and I approach the problems completely differently. I think we need to use what we already have … efficiently. We don’t need to increase production before we have reduced waste. This planet has finite resources and it is our responsibility to use them as best as we can.

Notice that I don’t object to technological solutions to problems. Nor do I want or expect people to live austere lives in order to solve the problems.

As I wrote before, there is huge potential for GMOs to cause damage to human health and to the environment … maybe not this batch but the next one or the one after that.

Think about GMO corn that causes sterility.The research was partly funded by the US government. Consider how that can be intentionally abused and consider the consequences if it gets out of control in the biosphere.

That’s the tip of the iceberg.

I mean to say just that it is a separate issue. Food waste exists, there’s no reason to think eliminating GMOs would affect decrease the level of food waste. We can agree that tackling food waste is a worthy policy. But given the level of food waste, GMOs seem important in producing sufficient food to feed the world, and even seem to decrease the problem of food waste by reducing the role of pests in food waste during production.

To put it clearly: food waste is bad, I’m sure we can address it and we are addressing it. But GMOs are alleviating some of the ill effects of food waste now, and they would continue to provide benefits in a world with no or negligible food waste.

But that’s just the thing: GMOs are more efficient. They take less land area, less fertilizer, less water, less money, less pesticide. They may use more herbicide, but it is less toxic. They represent a lower resource burden for food production. They are what we have, and they are more efficient.

I tried to find a study finding sterility caused by GMO corn. I found this review of literature (again one funded by an anti-GMO government) finding that “GM plants are nutritionally equivalent to their non-GM counterparts and can be safely used in food and feed.”

But this is speculative! At the very least, we can say that modern GMOs are lowering costs, increasing profits, and increasing yields, and more so in the developing world than in the developed world. Even given that there is a particularly huge potential for harm, there is already actual benefit that would be lost by the restriction or elimination of GMOs. We’re weighing a potential harm against an actual, extant benefit.

Should we be weighing in speculative benefits?

I don’t find these lines of argument compelling. I generally find conspiracy theories to be a poor explanation for how the world works, and to have low predictive power. Besides, the future looks to be decentralized: there’s currently an Indiegogo campaign for a DIY CRISPR kit.

I agree that monopolies are bad, but any government that can ban GMOs that would bene can also break up agricultural monopolies. If the best argument against GMOs is that agricultural monopolies will abuse the power, then we should focus on breaking up those monopolies, that seems to be the greater good (surely Monsanto was doing just fine with a monopoly on conventional crops as well). I think a better target for ire are agricultural subsidies, they distort the global food markets, hurt developing countries, and most of the money goes to huge agribusinesses.

In any case, this, again, seems like a separate issue. That bad actors may use something for bad says nothing about whether that thing is inherently bad.

Rubbish.

I was writing about this :

indybay.org/newsitems/2010/ … 650455.php

rense.com/general13/scientistscreate.htm

Ah, I see, I misunderstood your point. But again, this is developed to fulfill a legitimate medical need (or want, since it’s arguable that people don’t ‘need’ recreational sex). I could be misused by an evil corporation or government, but so could a lot of good things. That seems like a separate issue.

To put it another way, GMOs are empowering, and power can be used for good or evil.

I never realized that there were so many ‘separate issues’ surrounding GMOs. :open_mouth:

Practically everything that I bring up, in fact. :wink:

I don’t believe in (most) conspiracy theories. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Feed the GMO’s to Africa then, and leave the civilized people alone. We don’t NEED Gmo’s…we know how to farm!!! The fuck do civilized people need gmo’s for? Feed them to africa as an experiment…who knows, maybe it will mutate them and turn them into super geniuses, even!

Therefore it WILL be (already is) used for the good of chosen people and evil for the unchosen people.

And again, you propose a strawman with the corporation analogy. The food you eat infests your entire body and probably for the rest of your life. It proposes freedom to permanently infect (as has been done many times throughout history). Every time “they” come up with what they think is a good thing for the population, they infect the entire population. They haven’t learned. And they are not going to learn. They WILL NOT stop.

GMO’s are even worse than forced vaccines. With the vaccines, you at least have a chance of knowing from where your illness came. Hidden influences kill via obfuscation, even if they were otherwise doing good. The simple fact that you can’t figure out which thing is making you ill, kills you in the end.

Hey, nukes are empowering. What kind of regulation do you think companies making, say, portable nukes should have? Is that regulation in place for Monsanto?

Let’s say in this analogy that the nukes are not meant as nukes. They are supposed to be very good energy sources for homes: for heating, electricity and so on. The only potential problems might be that they can be weaponized, or leak if the contruction is shoddy in some way, etc.
If someone keeps arguming that having a widespread possession of portable nukes is good and people have been owning nukes for a while, wouldn’t you expect that the company selling portable nukes, with the very high subscriptions fees they charge those leasing those nukes, should be able to demonstrate that widespread ownership of portable nukes is postive. They could point to the effects and show that the benefits achieved already outweigh the negative effects`? But the ;GM companies cannot do that. More harm has been done. No great increase in food or reduction in poverty has happened. Now average farmers have a new bill and no extra benefits. Just like if everyone in weightlifting is on steroids has a new bill each month to pay for their injections.

You would also want to see, before taking these risks, if there are other methods that do not have the side effects, negative ones, that are already well documented.

Add in the potential risks that thankfully, as far as we know, have not been actualized, and I cannot see why anyone would want to play fast and loose with the worlds ecosystems, especially in the hands of corporations.

And the corporations do not have to be evil. In this case several of them are. But corporations are machines that demand the dismissal of long term risks and the prioritization of short term gains. It is a machine with heuristics THAT NO BABYSITTER FOR EXAMPLE SHOULD HAVE. No one would want a corporation set of priorities and decision making processes to be the parallel ones of the babysitter of their children.

One does not want a psychopath to be a babysitter. That is not a negative assessment of a corporation, it is a literal one. The way they look at their goals parallel a psychopaths. And please not a psychopath is not someone who just kills and maims. It is their lack of care and total utilitarian outlook on all other humans that makes them a psychopath. And many psychopaths are quite successful in the business world because there is no contradiction.

We need something more than the profit motive, and a fairly short term one nowadays, as driving heuristic for someone playing with the potential equivalent of global nukes.

If you have a baby, Carleas, that baby is in Monsantos hands right now. The company that lied about agent orange and PCBs for as long as it could.

Google MOnsanto Protection Act.

This act entails that Monsanto cannor be sued for any health issues related to GM foods and organisms.
globalresearch.ca/monsanto-p … aw/5329388

Now imagine the maker of portable nukes, for all sorts of great for mankind reasons in their brochure, IMMUNE FROM LAWSUITS.

There goes one of the few responses that might control a psychopath. And again this may seem like too charged a term for you. But organizations, not being people, and corporationsin particular, do not have empathy. They make decisions based on numbers. Here we have an organization with a specific criminal history. IOW in the realm of organizations, this one has been criminal and regularly has lied.

Would you hire a baby sitter without empathy who has a criminal record and can be shown to regularly lie about issues where he health of people are threatened by the miniinformation?

Well, actually you have already hired that babysitter, especially by being an apologist for them in media. But you’re hiring them for other people’s children.

Thanks.

WEll since you say generally it seems fortunately there are exceptions, which means any particularly conspiracy theory needs to be looked at individually.
But let’s just look at that sentence: it is built around a term that is irrational and used to suppress contrary opinions. Obviously there are conspiracies or most legal systems are simply foolish given the large numbers of crimes of conspiracy. So a theory that there is a conspiracy should not be pejorative term. It should be a neutral term. But it is not, and it is a term created by critics of non-mainstream hypotheses for the causes of certain events. Like say the theories about the real motivations for the Neo cons going into Iraq and the administration conspiracy theories about Hussein conspiring with Al-quaida and having WMDs. This was a mainstream conspiracy theory, and of course not wrong because it was a conspiracy theory, but wrong because it was bullshit as is clearly accepted even in the mainstream press itself, though it took a long time.

The truth is that 9/11 has two main conspiracy theories. 1) that this group of Muslim fundamentalists did it or 2) that some agency or group within the government of the US did it or allowed it. (the last is really a combination of both theories)

So if we look at your statement we know you mean the pejorative use of the term. You mean that what gets called a conspiracy theory in the mainstream press is not good for prediction. This would be poor science on your part.

What I mean is that the category is made by people in a vague, hard to pin down real world specific variables way. It puts all kinds of theories from Flat Earth to reptile illuminati to yes, that issue with WMDs in Iraq to critics of GM corps to people who think there were immoral conspirational aspects to how Aspartame got passed by the FDA and so.

IOW hypotheses made by different people with varying degrees of evidence and thoroughness that are different from mainstream CURRENTLY accepted explanations.

These all get batched as conspiracy theories and these are dismissed by you and others as a batch.

Here couched in a what might be considered epistemologically as scientific terms.

But for you to conclude this in this batched way you 1) make the error of batching and 2) have no doubt reached this conclusion via non-scientific intuitive methods, unless you have done incredibly research.

First you would need a control study. How well do conspiracy theories of the mainstream work predictively? What could we predict based on the 9/11 mainstream conspiracy theory with the Muslim team? How did you verify the predictive value of that theory? What events since 9/11 that you have verified with that and how does this compare with one of the better conspiracy theories on the other side?

Easy to do intuitively. But damn hard in any off the cuff not actually carefully reading both theories and then analyzing events since to see which is better predictively.

How much harder to do this when one wants to lump all non-mainstream conspiracy theories and make a conclusive statement about their predictive value.

But that corporations put financial goals ahead of people’s health at least, often, is easy to verify. And I will bet we can predict rather well using that hypothesis.
The hypotheis that Monsanto has incredible control of the very agencies meant to regulate them is already demonstrable.
That Monsanto has lied, and for years, about the risks of its products is also historical fact.
That Monsanto has bribed and threatened government officials of other countries is also a demonstrable fact. That Monsantos products already cause much damage to soil, people’s health and financial status is already demonstrable.

Monstantos theory that their products help people has had NO PREDICTIVE VALUE AT ALL.

If you demanded as much predictive value from Monsantos claims as you do for what you are calling conspiracy theories, you would stop making statements about being in favor of GM as tool without at least including a serious critique of the usefulness and safefy of GM products now. You would not feel responsible leaving the real world current status out.

Monsantos claims about what they can do, are doing, and will do are not a conspiracy theory, per se. But is it a theory about what a group of people are collaborating on and the motivations. I do not see that theory holding up in the least.

It will take introspection on your part to find out why you treat epistemologically the claims of corporations known to be liars with less rigor than you do the entire batch of theories of people how vary greatly in expertise and background.

I hope you can do this introspection.

WEll since you say generally it seems fortunately there are exceptions, which means any particularly conspiracy theory needs to be looked at individually.
But let’s just look at that sentence: it is built around a term that is irrational and used to suppress contrary opinions. Obviously there are conspiracies or most legal systems are simply foolish given the large numbers of crimes of conspiracy. So a theory that there is a conspiracy should not be pejorative term. It should be a neutral term. But it is not, and it is a term created by critics of non-mainstream hypotheses for the causes of certain events. Like say the theories about the real motivations for the Neo cons going into Iraq and the administration conspiracy theories about Hussein conspiring with Al-quaida and having WMDs. This was a mainstream conspiracy theory, and of course not wrong because it was a conspiracy theory, but wrong because it was bullshit as is clearly accepted even in the mainstream press itself, though it took a long time.

The truth is that 9/11 has two main conspiracy theories. 1) that this group of Muslim fundamentalists did it or 2) that some agency or group within the government of the US did it or allowed it. (the last is really a combination of both theories)

So if we look at your statement we know you mean the pejorative use of the term. You mean that what gets called a conspiracy theory in the mainstream press is not good for prediction. This would be poor science on your part.

What I mean is that the category is made by people in a vague, hard to pin down real world specific variables way. It puts all kinds of theories from Flat Earth to reptile illuminati to yes, that issue with WMDs in Iraq to critics of GM corps to people who think there were immoral conspirational aspects to how Aspartame got passed by the FDA and so.

IOW hypotheses made by different people with varying degrees of evidence and thoroughness that are different from mainstream CURRENTLY accepted explanations.

These all get batched as conspiracy theories and these are dismissed by you and others as a batch.

Here couched in a what might be considered epistemologically as scientific terms.

But for you to conclude this in this batched way you 1) make the error of batching and 2) have no doubt reached this conclusion via non-scientific intuitive methods, unless you have done incredibly research.

First you would need a control study. How well do conspiracy theories of the mainstream work predictively? What could we predict based on the 9/11 mainstream conspiracy theory with the Muslim team? How did you verify the predictive value of that theory? What events since 9/11 that you have verified with that and how does this compare with one of the better conspiracy theories on the other side?

Easy to do intuitively. But damn hard in any off the cuff not actually carefully reading both theories and then analyzing events since to see which is better predictively.

How much harder to do this when one wants to lump all non-mainstream conspiracy theories and make a conclusive statement about their predictive value.

But that corporations put financial goals ahead of people’s health at least, often, is easy to verify. And I will bet we can predict rather well using that hypothesis.
The hypotheis that Monsanto has incredible control of the very agencies meant to regulate them is already demonstrable.
That Monsanto has lied, and for years, about the risks of its products is also historical fact.
That Monsanto has bribed and threatened government officials of other countries is also a demonstrable fact. That Monsantos products already cause much damage to soil, people’s health and financial status is already demonstrable.

Monstantos theory that their products help people has had NO PREDICTIVE VALUE AT ALL.

If you demanded as much predictive value from Monsantos claims as you do for what you are calling conspiracy theories, you would stop making statements about being in favor of GM as tool without at least including a serious critique of the usefulness and safefy of GM products now. You would not feel responsible leaving the real world current status out.

Monsantos claims about what they can do, are doing, and will do are not a conspiracy theory, per se. But is it a theory about what a group of people are collaborating on and the motivations. I do not see that theory holding up in the least.

It will take introspection on your part to find out why you treat epistemologically the claims of corporations known to be liars with less rigor than you do the entire batch of theories of people how vary greatly in expertise and background.

I hope you can do this introspection.

The impartial evidence does not back up this claim. As the study I posted earlier shows, yields are significantly higher, costs significantly lower, profits significantly higher, pesticide use significantly lower. As for harm done, no comparably strong studies support those claims. The studies that have porported to find harm have been debunked and withdrawn (although one was republished after being retracted, the problems identified by its critics were not changed: the republished version relied on the same data from the same flawed experimental design).

I don’t disagree with this (though it’s risky to apply human psychological diagnoses to non-human collections of humans). But as you note, that does not mean that they are evil, only that they are ruthlessly pragmatic. But that ruthless pragmatism entails a deep concern for appearances. Companies perceived as evil don’t survive. That’s why every major corporation makes corporate giving and dogoodery a priority. Even Monsanto has a charitable arm in its Monsanto Fund. Certainly they value the tax write-off, but the charity is a net cost, which they undertake to maintain neutral-to-good public opinion.

Because remember: human moral intuitions evolved in a competitive system. Human are moral because cooperation is important, and being good to others means gain allies, support, etc. Monsanto’s greatest incentive to not be that evil is that their business would suffer much more than the evil would pay. Goodness is much more profitable.

I did this, and I don’t find your source to be a fair representation of what the act did. The wikipedia page has the actual text. This language does not make anyone “immune from lawsuits”. The effect is quite a bit narrower: If a crop that has been approved for use by the USDA is the subject of a court order vacating that approval, this law gives the Secretary of Agriculture the power to allow the continued use of that crop in the interim while the court-mandated review is conducted. Thus, (1) the Secretary has discretion to condition the use as necessary, (2) it applies to crops that have already been approved, and (3) it applies only during the period while the review is conducted. Certainly this is something that Monsanto wants, but given the way administrative law works in the US, it is also not a totally unreasonable provision: administrative decisions are regularly struck down on purely procedural grounds, and the re-reviews can be time consuming and will often reach the same conclusion anyway. This law prevents the procedural hurdles from impacting GMOs that can be useful now.

I can see why people would oppose this law; on the assumption that courts will mostly be striking down GMO approvals on findings of harmful effects, it could allow continued use of harmful GMOs. But that’s not how most administrative rulings are likely to be grounded, and in any case if that situation ever came up, the USDA could add significant conditions to the temporary permits that would effectively restrict the use to experimental settings.

Re: your remarks on conspiracy theories, you are correct, I was using the term unscientifically and pejoratively. By it, I mean that the worry that tyrannical governments or corporations might use GMOs to quietly exterminate particular groups of people is not a concern I see as having much merit, and certainly it is not one supported by any evidence. It should be trivially easy to detect such attempts, e.g. is produce sold in poor areas or covered by food stamps more likely to have compounds know to cause infertility? I am open to a study advancing that finding, but I am very confident that no such finding has been or will be made.

If the best argument against GMOs is that a global or even national conspiracy to target certain groups for extinction might employ them, I would consider the net benefits of GMOs to be established.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p5A30sufZQ[/youtube]