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d3c0y2 posted:I'm opposed to genetic foods because of how it's used to sue poor farmers into oblivion This is just as much not a thing as GM foods giving you AIDS-cancer. Like most good capitalists, Monsanto prefers to gently caress over people in the Third World as much as possible, because bad press doesn't matter when you're allowed to openly bribe officials. Amarkov fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Jun 27, 2013 |
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Jun 27, 2013 05:52
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d3c0y2 posted:But i'd like to say that trying to know anything about GMO business practices is difficult, I remember that even my textbooks back in university just said that GMO food was being used to control third world farmers. I mean, like... it's true that GMO food is used to control poor people in the third world. So is every other product produced by every other large multinational. It's just that the general public does not consume Monsanto products directly, so their PR budget is smaller.
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Jun 27, 2013 06:21
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Strudel Man posted:There's been so much disinformation on this topic that I'm dubious even of this. It's my understanding, for example, that Monsanto's interactions in India are limited, through third-party intermediaries licensed to 'manufacture' (for want of a better word) and sell Monsanto's proprietary strains. The suicide of farmers there is terrible, but blame is difficult to apportion when they're killing themselves over debts owed to party A which were used to buy seeds and farming equipment from parties B and C based on intellectual property owned by party D. Yeah, my post wasn't intended to imply something beyond the generic "capitalism ruins everything" argument.
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Jun 27, 2013 06:26
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Nevvy Z posted:I've been seeing a lot of poo poo about how you feed a mouse roundup and it gets tumors. Of loving course it does. But do roundup ready plants somehow magically generate roundup in your body? Is there not a process by which this stuff is rinsed off when harvested? Glyphosate (Roundup) is one of the safest herbicides available. It's relatively nontoxic, breaks down quickly, and does not bioaccumulate. Studies have consistently shown that its use poses no health risks to consumers, minimal environmental risks, and even seems to be less dangerous for farmers to apply. Most criticisms are just ill-informed. This one makes me particularly angry, because it is literally the opposite of reality, in a way that causes very real harm to both the environment and farm workers. e: I always really want to say "glyphosphate" 
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Jun 27, 2013 20:05
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Flowers For Algeria posted:Except Roundup is not 100% glyphosate, but rather a mix of 40% glyphosate and other agents, including surfactants which are highly toxic. Accurate, but misleading. Some surfactants used have significant problems with acute toxicity; it's very dangerous to spray the stuff on yourself, and very harmful to dump it in a river or something. But it also degrades so quickly that it can't really cause significant environmental effects. This is not actually a more reasonable criticism than "irradiated food uses radioactivity!" Toxicity is not a contagion.
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Jun 27, 2013 21:13
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This is just capitalism.txt. You're taking things that basically every major multinational company does, and trying to spin them as evidence of Monsanto's horrible horribleness. Yes, Monsanto is not a paragon of virtue; nobody was saying that it was.
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Jun 28, 2013 15:46
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FRINGE posted:The relevant problem with this idea as it relates to Monsanto (in particular) is the fact that Monsanto has managed to place a rotating crew of its employees in FDA seats. GMO labeling is absolutely the wrong way to go about dealing with this. By mandating GMO labels for this reason, you would be explicitly shaping food safety regulations to achieve your political goals. Do you not see how dangerous that is?
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Jul 1, 2013 01:11
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acephalousuniverse posted:Who gives a poo poo? Honestly? Monsanto is bad, disliking Monsanto is reasonable, why the hell do you need to be a crusader in favor of "reasonableness" making sure everyone knows they should dislike a particular evil corporation JUUUUUUST the right amount? Why don't you try radicalizing people or doing what the one guy said, explaining how Monsanto IS evil but explaining why or how capitalism is the root problem? Why do you come off as a reactionary concern troll defending Monsanto rather than someone who wants to solve anything? Going around complaining about how people dislike an admittedly destructive organization for the wrong reasons accomplishes precisely nothing except to further your own smugness. Look at how someone like Chomsky for example deals with people like truthers and Paulites vs how you come off in this thread. If there were someone who hated Monsanto, but was otherwise fine with GMOs, sure. This would be a productive and effective technique. But that situation doesn't really happen. The only people I've encountered who hate Monsanto specifically are using it as a proxy to hate GMOs. Convincing them that other companies are also bad won't do anything to solve this; people are perfectly capable of both being socialist and irrationally hating GMOs. It'd be like responding to rants about how nuclear power companies cut corners with "Well, other companies also cut corners for profits!" You may convince them that capitalism is lovely, and that's not a bad result, but you'll never convince them that nuclear power isn't evil that way.
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Jul 1, 2013 17:21
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acephalousuniverse posted:The point for me here is "why on earth should I give a poo poo if anyone has scientifically wrong opinions on GMOs and devote my time to fixing that considering everything else that's wrong with the world right now, especially given the fact that people who have wrong opinions on GMOs end up hating companies that are actually evil anyway." You have a point; I'd forgotten that it is impossible to do multiple things at once. Any effort put into improving the popular perception of GMOs is counterproductive, because it will not directly lead to the glorious communist revolution. Do you not realize this is what you're saying?
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Jul 1, 2013 23:20
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acephalousuniverse posted:Do you honestly think that opening a science book or having a Calm Rational Discussion is going to dissuade those people from doing those things? It's significantly more plausible than your idea that the socialist revolution will dissuade those people from doing those things.
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Jul 2, 2013 00:58
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Buller posted:Why has so many people started randomly defended Monsanto on the internet, always talking about anti-science and such. Do you care to elaborate on what, precisely, this corruption is? Because as we have covered repeatedly, all criticisms of Monsanto seem to be either unfounded bullshit or capitalism.txt.
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Jul 2, 2013 21:55
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Buller posted:Throwing plant killing liquids into the soil (read: gonna make it into water at some point): better than tilling a field. Yes, this is literally true. I do not understand why you think "HERBICIDES  " is a sufficient refutation.
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Jul 2, 2013 22:17
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Buller posted:It's not only plants its animals too, many animals have very specific habitat demands, so theres always the risk of extinction (local or global) when you alter nature. Not to say what unknown consequences there may be to animals interacting with GMO on a mass scale (Like the butterflies in China). Through what mechanism would animals interact with GMO crops on a mass scale? As karthun said, no food crops are even close to competitive in the wild; even on specially prepared farm fields, constant human intervention is necessary to keep weeds and pests from killing them.
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Jul 2, 2013 22:29
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Buller posted:http://ag.arizona.edu/ento/courses/ento446_546/readings/Losey_1999.pdf I'm going to assume you have no understanding of the problem here. If you do, I'm sorry for sounding patronizing, but hopefully the information will be new to someone reading this. Modern scientific studies are almost always statistical. That is, studies do not have 100% certainty, meaning that a single study is never conclusive. In your specific example, Lang and Vojtech concluded that quote:...possible effects of Bt maize on European butterflies and moths must be evaluated more rigorously before Bt maize should be cultivated over large areas. Now, I can understand why this might still trouble you, if you thought that only GMOs have this type of thing happen to them. But this simply isn't the case. For instance, remember trans fats? We used them for almost a hundred years, and it wasn't until the 1990s that we realized the huge health risks they posed. This kind of thing happens; the only way to eliminate unintended environmental risks is to reduce human activity to the point where it has no environmental impact.
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Jul 2, 2013 23:18
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Buller posted:Got a link for that mate? I can find a few studies on the swallowtail from before 2006, if you want those. It's quite difficult to find studies from after 2006; I'm not in the field, so I don't know how to properly filter out all the anti-GMO groups that started spamming the Lang study after it came out.
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Jul 2, 2013 23:30
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Don't be pedantic. If you really want something that's closer to the standard idea of an "environmental risk", here you go. We're still reevaluating precisely how bad tillage is for the environment, and unless some huge development I'm not aware of has happened, it's entirely possible the science will settle on "oh god why would you just indiscriminately dig up the soil".
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Jul 2, 2013 23:47
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Opposition to reckless and unresearched GMO implementation is fine. I'm also opposed to that. It just doesn't happen very often, and I'm not aware of any instances where Monsanto specifically has done it. So I'm not sure why it's relevant here.
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Jul 2, 2013 23:53
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Buller posted:Why don't you post some more papers about GMO - Animal interaction then? Ok, sure. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871141307002442 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301622602000167 http://www.pnas.org/content/98/21/11937.short http://www.pnas.org/content/97/14/7700.short Note that it's difficult to find studies about "GMO - Animal interaction", because nobody without an axe to grind would frame a study that way. Different kinds of transgenic crops have no relevant factors in common, so there are very few reasons to study them as a group. Most good studies will focus on an individual strain of crop as it interacts with a particular animal species.
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Jul 3, 2013 00:34
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Buller posted:This is the main problem with GMO, is the human imagination large enough for us to truly understand the impact of throwing this huge unknown factor into a (of course affected by the changing landscape and human manipulation) stabile and established genepool. If this is truly your problem, you've got to be opposed to a lot more things than GMOs. You need to be opposed to most modern agriculture, including that from the organic movement. You need to be opposed to any sort of systemic use of pharmaceuticals. You definitely need to be opposed to coal, wind, and hydroelectric power. (Solar power is less troubling but still problematic, and nuclear power is fineish.) And basically every building material is verboten; I hope you're cool with plastic, which escapes concern only because we understand very well the horrible effects the production chain for most plastics has. And that's without even getting into how absurd it is to think that there was anything like a "stable and established gene pool" before GMOs came on the scene. "Won't cause any unexpected systemic consequences" is an absurd bar that very few human activities clear; the alternatives to GMOs certainly aren't exceptions.
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Jul 3, 2013 01:09
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acephalousuniverse posted:I absolutely don't care about GMOs one way or the other as I've said before, but "we've acted recklessly and continue to act recklessly in countless numbers of ways, one more can't hurt!" does not strike me as a very good argument. It's not, but that's also not what my argument is. In order to do anything, we must accept the possibility of unintended consequences; as has been covered, even going full Luddite doesn't insulate us from the possibility of serious environmental damage.
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Jul 3, 2013 02:41
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Puddums posted:The fact that it has been ruled as "illegal" to label foods with GM products (what is it, 80% of processed foods?) totally sketches me out maximally. What are you referring to? Nothing like this has happened.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:21
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Also note that the US has taken some action against the problem. Bt resistance in corn pests is expected to evolve as a recessive trait, so Bt corn fields are required to have non-Bt corn planted nearby, under the theory that genetic drift will prevent an explosion in the Bt resistant population. It's almost like regulatory bodies respond to evidence of possible environmental harm 
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Jul 3, 2013 16:40
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spikenigma posted:I see you've gone for the scattergun approach: try to make your 'opponent' look stupid by asking pointless questions. An interesting tactic. They're herbicide resistant. There's no such thing as a pesticide resistant plant because there's no need for such a thing; there are plenty of available pesticides that already don't significantly interact with plants.
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Jul 3, 2013 17:20
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I mean, it's right there in the name!
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I mean... okay. You managed to confuse an issue by using different terminology than everyone else, and simply repeating it rather than trying to understand what other people were saying. Good for you?
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Jul 3, 2013 17:33
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Puddums posted:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/prop-37-defeated-californ_n_2088402.html Here's one article. drat it's hard to find "reliable news sources" for things like thing because of all the activism that surrounds it. I don't disagree with independent news sources but some people don't see them as viable. Let me see if i can find that news story, I read a great synopsis of the case with some quotes from Monsanto Reps. regarding their argument ... Except that's not at all the same thing. If you wish to label your food as GMO-containing or GMO-free, that's not illegal, quotes or otherwise. What was rejected was a law that would require foods containing GMOs to put this on the label. Even if the kind of thing you're talking about did happen, though, I'm not sure that would be bad. It seems analogous to the treatment of "rBST free!" claims, where you have to add a clearly visible note that there are no actual reasons drinking rBST milk is bad for human health.
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Jul 4, 2013 00:43
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acephalousuniverse posted:I don't want to bend nature to Man's will Too bad. We crossed that bridge when we started agriculture; at this point, even some sort of species-wide suicide would bend nature. You can attempt to ensure that this bending is for the best, or you can stick your head under a rock and insist that all the systemic consequences of billions of human beings existing are "nature".
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Jul 4, 2013 07:56
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Strudel Man posted:By which you mean, "they were one of several companies the U.S. government contracted to manufacture agent orange," right? This is actually more reasonable than you're thinking. The problem here isn't the toxicity, which all available evidence indicates nobody knew about. The problem is that the US specifically used Agent Orange to target food crops, in the hopes of driving Vietnamese citizens to the slums where they could be more easily policed. This wasn't widely publicized, but it was a matter of public record. So Monsanto definitely either knew or should have known about this, and should have refused to produce it. The rest of that post is basically textbook "I believe every negative thing I hear about Monsanto", though. (They're probably one of the best companies in the world about not aggressively using the law; people have too many imaginary stories of Monsanto bullying farmers to let them get away with a real one.) Amarkov fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Jul 4, 2013 |
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Jul 4, 2013 21:15
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icantfindaname posted:the fact that farmers have contractual obligations to follow if they want to plant Monsanto crops (and not even "sacrifice your firstborn" type obligations, more "you have to buy all Monsanto or none") Is this actually a fact? I've never actually been given an example of such a contract. e: quote:How on earth would they have known? The nominal purpose of Agent Orange was as a defoliant to remove air cover from the jungle. That's what the government said when they were purchasing it. No, this isn't true. It wasn't talked about very much in the media, so not many people were aware of it, but the fact that Agent Orange would be used to destroy crops was not secret. Monsanto (and Dow) had a responsibility to be more informed about this than the average guy on the street. Amarkov fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Jul 4, 2013 |
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Jul 4, 2013 21:26
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Deteriorata posted:You also have to consider that the guys running Dow and Monsanto and DuPont and the others at the time were largely veterans of WWII. Supplying what their government asked for to fight a war would be an act of patriotic duty for them. They would not even think to ask what it was going to be used for. Yeah, I suppose this is a good point. It's a lot easier to say "oh well they should have checked if the US wanted to commit genocide" post-Vietnam.
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Jul 4, 2013 21:41
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FRINGE posted:You can't have choice without information. No, I have no interest in hiding information from people. If companies wish for some reason to advertise that their products are GMO-free, they should be permitted to do so. But they are permitted to do that. quote:http://earthopensource.org/index.ph...eart-of-science quote:Fast forward to September 2012, when the scientific journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) published a study that caused an international storm (Séralini, et al. 2012). The study, led by Prof Gilles-Eric Séralini of the University of Caen, France, suggested a Monsanto genetically modified (GM) maize, and the Roundup herbicide it is grown with, pose serious health risks. The two-year feeding study found that rats fed both suffered severe organ damage and increased rates of tumors and premature death. - See more at: http://earthopensource.org/index.php/news/147-the-goodman-affair-monsanto-targets-the-heart-of-science#sthash.9anfn4AS.dpuf Your source is citing the Séralini study as valid, and declaring the fact that it's discredited to be an "orchestrated campaign". I do not trust anything else it has to say.
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Jul 5, 2013 01:40
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I could have and did look it up. But in a world where "McDonalds had to pay millions for some dumb lady who spilled coffee!" is a serious thing that serious people discussed, I'm not willing to uncritically accept the idea that Elsevier would just straight up publish a fake journal. At the least, I'd need multiple primary sources; the fact that everyone who talks about it refers to The Scientist is fishy.
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Jul 5, 2013 01:50
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FRINGE posted:You can keep re-posting this meaningless crap, and I will keep replying that looking at likelihoods and analogous practices/circumstances is a worthy pursuit when analyzing anything in a social, public, psychological, or political sphere. Well, so what? If you're right, you've successfully demonstrated that GMO studies should get more scrutiny than studies about fish breeding or whatever. Which is fine, because they do get more scrutiny, including entire advocacy groups that attempt to explain why each positive study doesn't count.
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Jul 5, 2013 03:55
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FRINGE posted:Also there was a piece in 2012 (that I just found) that is interesting in discussing the players in that game name by name. Why is this interesting? If someone releases a scientific study that has a potential to hurt my company, of course I'm going to sponsor some of my own guys to check it out. Of course if the scientists I sponsored find horrible flaws in it, they're going to get angry and demand something be done. What's troubling about this?
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Jul 5, 2013 04:06
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FRINGE posted:Since there is so much interest in awareness around here, why are people not expressing any concern for the fact that after thousands of failures, there are two widely marketed GMO products. Two. The various Bt stuff and the glyphosate resistant stuff. Thats it. That is Monsantos brave bold claims to *cough* "advanced food". The first successful recombinant DNA experiments were performed 41 years ago. Trials for the first commercial transgenic plants began 26 years ago, and approval in Western countries began 19 years ago. I don't see why we would be concerned here.
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Jul 5, 2013 06:15
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Count Chocula posted:This still makes more sense then the "GMOs are bad because nature is good" argument. The Earth is the creator of decay and death. I'd rather food engineered as closely by people as possible rather than trusting to random evolutionary chance. Monsanto may be 'evil' (though I think that cedes ground to the Luddites) but its still done more net good than people trying to stop its crops (who tend to also try and stop vaccines and fluoride). Just show them this:  Every food crop in existence today has been modified an absurd amount from what it was like in nature.
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Jul 5, 2013 17:32
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Moritastic posted:"We don't know what's wrong with you therefore your suffering isn't real" should be it's own special category of scientific ignorance. I have fibromyalgia and my suffering is very real. But I guess it's easier to poo poo on people than admit ignorance. Psychosomatic conditions are no less "real". We know that MSG sensitivity is not actually a thing, because people who claim they have it aren't affected in blinded trials and don't have problems eating natural glutamate sources. But people who are MSG sensitive really do suffer, in the same way that you are; there's just no physical cause behind it. The lack of evidence that there was a physical cause of fibromyalgia wasn't some kind of scientific malpractice.
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Jul 25, 2013 18:35
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hseiken posted:I'm not sure I understand the argument there. One one hand you're saying non-GMO foods can proudly display that. But as we've seen recently, there have been legislation and lawsuits in similar situations of no-hormone-in-the-cows milk. You're misunderstanding what the case was about. The major issue Monsanto had was that, in their view, Oakhurst was claiming that their milk did not contain any artificial growth hormones. This would be highly misleading if it were true, since milk from rBST treated cows also does not contain artificial growth hormones.
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Sep 1, 2013 06:47
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amoraxkaka posted:Shouldn't consumers still be allowed to choose which type of food they would prefer? Most of the people on this forum would say people who choose to buy bibles 'don't know their loving science' either, but they're still allowed to buy them. Yes, consumers should be allowed to choose which type of food they would prefer. They just don't necessarily have the right to compel every company to inform their arbitrary preferences. There are some people who don't want to read things where religion is presented in a positive light; that doesn't somehow mean Barnes&Noble should slap a "contains religious morality" sticker on things.
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Sep 1, 2013 19:26
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Kalman posted:Well, for one thing, Monsanto doesn't really employ field workers. I cannot emphasize how much everything is a carcinogen. California has nicely demonstrated this by mandating that all carcinogens be labeled, including those that apparently abound in grocery stores.
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Dec 18, 2013 10:46
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