certain companies that create genetically modified plants have left a bad taste in our mouths
The constant stream of fearmongering, conspiracies, and other nonsense hasn't hurt either.
i mind the fact that companies can modify their strain of a plant to be incredibly dominant
That is kind of a misconception. It isn't as if there is some genetically engineered variety that is spreading all over, it is that genes can spread, and transgenes are no exception. Genetically engineered crops are no different than any other crop except that they possess a few additional genes. The only reason you thing there is some super plant is because of how it is often portrayed.
giving the company grounds for a lawsuit.
Only given certain conditions, those conditions being the intentional selection and reproduction of transgenic material, which is quite a bit different than anything accidental.
This smells like a scheme to make GMO crops more acceptible to the public
Science is not a conspiracy.
Here's an alternative - replace monocrop orchards with polyculture farms (i.e. food forest) that are based on the same principles of natural ecosystems.
Would you be equally opposed to conventional breeding for disease resistance? I'll bet you wouldn't.
leaving something powerful like genetic modification of organisms in the hands of corporations (with their well known behavioral disorders [siivola.org]) is really a very bad idea.
Then tell the anti-GMO movement to stop promoting stronger and stronger regulations that only allow the large companies to bring a GMO to market. There's plenty of great university developed GMOs, it's just that none of them can jump the regulatory hurdles because of the overly restrictive regulation. Even something like Golden Rice is still dealing with that non-sense.
So I'd be OK with banning GMOs until we find a better way of organizing such dangerous endeavours
Replace GMO with vaccine, pharmaceuticals, or even Wi-Fi to see how bad of an idea that is.
The anti-GMO movement started by opposing the Flavr Savr tomato, which was developed by a fairly small company. It continued to oppose the GMOs of not only large companies like Monsanto and Syngenta and small companies like the Arctic apple developed by Okanagan Specialty Fruits, but universities like the Rainbow papaya, NGOs like Golden Rice, and government bodies like the wheat developed by CSIRO in Australia that some Greenpeace thug destroyed. By and large, the anti-corporate angle is nothing more than a facade for anti-science.
I am more skittish with the pesticide resistant genes since with horizontal gene transfer the resistance may pass to weeds and make the pesticide basically useless.
That's pretty unlikely. What is happening however is that over reliance on herbicide resistant crops is creating weeds that are resistant to the herbicides, which is a very bad thing because the herbicide resistant crops have been very beneficial for farmers and the environment (a lot of people like to hate on them, but they have helped replace soil damaging tillage and harsher herbicides...blind anti-agrochemical idealism won't make the weeds pack up and move).
I don't think that's a good reason to oppose such crops any more than you should oppose AIDS treatments because similar events occur. It just means we need more widespread use of better weed management practices. Over relying on a single mode of action herbicide is the problem. In the future, the best thing would be to see crops resistant to multiple modes of action of herbicide so that a weed would need a multiple mutations in order to develop resistance (of course, in the deep future, it would be nice to see allelopathic GMOs that would require no inputs to fight off weeds, but I don't see that happening in the foreseeable pipeline)
And despite this, there are no protests against the conventional breeding which developed those varieties of tomato, although strangely has there are protests against the genetic engineering that could help to fix the problem.
You mean one produced by technology? Yeah,. I hate technology! Or do you mean one that isn't a wild mustard? Did you know broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, Brussel's sprouts, and kohlrabi are all the same species, bred from an ancestral wild mustard? Doesn't get more genetically mutilated than that.
but they patented open source broccoli.
Really? Or did they develop their own variety and patent that? Which would be like making something new out of wood then some clueless/lying fearmonger says wood is patented.
Funny thing about broccoli is that, much like corn, wheat, and strawberries, it was created by humans. Go back a ways in time, and you will not find broccoli, only the wild mustard plant that it was bred from. If breeding things like broccoli and corn were developed today, there'd be plenty of folks going on about the proven dangers of broccoli that are totally scientific and not just justifications for their own superstitions, and how changing the form of the plant is totally different than standard breeding,and how we should ban it.
And speaking of which, I wonder if anyone will complain about the glucoraphanin levels like they do about the Bt in crops.
Just make sure you've had it done right before writing it off entirely. If all you've ever had was over boiled green goo, then it'll be easy to assume you don't like broccoli, but cooked so that it is firm yet tender in a good stir fry, or in any other of the many right ways to do it, broccoli's good stuff. Maybe you really don't like it, I just hope you've fairly evaluated it before coming to that decision.
A closed source food chain is a major problem for everyone, except those who hold the patents.
Opposition to the patent aspect is certainty a lot more reasonable than trying to dismiss science, but it isn't such a simple issue when you consider the benefits to other groups, like farmers and consumers, from the creation of new varieties that are funded by patent royalties. Take the Honeycrisp apple for example. Do you like it? Most people do. It was, until the recent expiration, a patented variety (it is not GMO by the way; non-GE plants can also be patented). Despite this, growers liked it because they made more money on it (well, actually they kind of had a love-hate relationship with it because it is a finicky apple to grow but you get my point) and consumers liked it because it tasted good. The breeders got a return on the royalty fees from the nurseries that propagated the Honeycrisp apple trees, and with that made from that patent went on to create my favorite apple variety. Take patents out of the picture and the breeders who developed my favorite variety would simply not have had the money do so, and then more than the patent holder loses.
It is kind of the same thing here. Without the patents, like it or not it would not I do not see how it would be possible to invest so much money into something that you could not recover the R&D costs/deregulation costs on.
There is no such thing as bacon corn but there is such a thing as a lard nut that supposedly has a pork like taste. Maybe when human society finally gets its shit together with respect to agricultural biodiversity and starts developing and widely cultivating more of the usable species out there you might get a chance to try one.
I think it would be more like giving a health prize to a pharmaceutical company for vaccine manufacturing. Sure, despite the public controversy concerning whether or not they cause autism, it would be true that the company has produced good things that have combated disease, although giving it to a corporate suit is still kind of bullshit. That's how I feel about it. Even if their seeds are helping people (for example, this just popped up in the news), giving the prize to executives doesn't seem right. Perhaps individual scientists or teams, but corporate executives? I don't like it.
As a side not, the Frankenstein thing is pretty silly. No one calls it Frankenstein when someone picks out a somatic mutant of a fruit tree and grafts it to another tree, no one calls it Frankenstein when you chemically double the chromosomes of a plant either to cross it with a non-doubled one to get a triploid or to produce a plant with homozygous alleles from a pollen cell, no one calls it Frankenstein when you cross two plants that can't produce viable offspring and then remove the embryo before it dies to culture it into a hybrid that could never exist in nature, no one calls it Frankenstein when you blast a culture of cells with radiation or apply mutagenic chemicals to create all sorts of random mutations, and no one calls it Frankenstein when you select random mutation after random mutation in the form of artificial selection, a process that has caused such great genetic shifts as to create corn from teosinte and broccoli, kale, kohlrabi, cabbage,and cauliflower (all the same species by the way) from wild mustard. Yet now this is Frankenstein? I mean, I suppose you could go the appeal to nature route and argue that everything else is just manipulating natural forces in a beneficial way, but of course, one could point to horizontal gene transfer and say the same of genetic engineering, not that the argument means much anyway.
And then ream everyone in court who tries to keep some seed and use it to replant.
There's always the option of not buying them and going with open pollinated seed. If you get sued for violating a contract you signed, then that is on you. And before you bring up the inevitable claim of suing for cross pollination, wrong.
lobby for legislation which requires food aid from the US to be GMO crops
That's new on me. Point me to that specific legislation, because that sounds an awful lot like a load of made up bullshit that someone pulled out of the usual place. Yeah, for some crops like corn and soy, most of the aid is genetically engineered, because most of the crop is genetically engineered. This isn't a conspiracy; it's just how supply chains work.
Be grateful that you were born in a part of the world that is able to complain about that which has saved the lives of millions of people. Not everyone is so fortunate.
It also ups the ante in the arms race of evolution, which isn't universally seen as a good thing.
It certainty is a bad thing, which is why millions of people protested conventional breeding when late blight overcame the conventionally bred resistances in tomato and when hessian flies overcame conventionally bred resistance in wheat. Oh wait, that never happened because it would be absolutely idiotic, yet somehow, when genetic engineering is involved, the same basic facts of population genetics are suddenly terrible and proof that the technique itself is bad. Perhaps it is because the vast vast majority of the opposition to genetic engineering is coming from those with no background in agricultural or plant science and thus due to their complete lack of context it seems reasonable to them.
Calling objection "hysteria" doesn't make it so. Some protesters are quite enlightened and think long term.
And most of the protesters are the agricultural equivalents to the anti-vaccine movement. And when you are doing little in the way of scientifically justifying your concerns, instead preferring to use bunk science, fearmongering, and outright vandalism on non-corporateprojects and farmer's fields, you shouldn't be surprised when you get characterized poorly. Hell, there is no small opposition to even things like Golden Rice (biofortified with -carotene) and the Arctic apple (which does not oxidize when cut). I'm sure there is a perfectly good reason as to why that is, if not unscientific hysteria, because this stuff isn't looking good.
Just about everything carries risk (again for context, even conventional breeding conventional breeding carries risk), just about everything has some negatives that come with the positives, there are actual issues, and not every genetically engineered organisms will necessarily turn out to be a good thing. But to paint the anti-GMO movement as a whole as anything even remotely reasonable would be like saying young earth creationists simply have a dispute with the minor details of a few phylogenies.
It's not fair to call the Dreamcast's untimely demise a fiery storm of shit. The Dreamcast had a lot of good points, even if it did ultimately fail. While mistakes were made, the Dreamcast was hardly shitty.
It's a classic straw man. There's plenty of average, well adjusted, normal people who consider themselves bronies. A common interest, name, some in jokes, and a maybe few plastic figurines do not constitute a life dominating obsession, but for whatever reason, some people take that as a starting point.
Non obsessives don't call themselves Bronies, or Trekkies, or Whovians
I'd say I'm all four. Careful when determining who's a true Scotsman.
When any interest(and that includes more socially acceptable interests like sports, sex, and alcohol) starts to define you, you're at the very least verging on engaging in some seriously unhealthy behavior.
What do you mean by starts to define you? If you mean let it control you, than yes, that's certainty a problem. If you mean taking interests as a part of yourself, as one of the things that you enjoy and makes you unique, then no. Everyone is defined by the sum of themselves, their life experiences, their interests, their hopes, their hobbies, ect. That's the nature of individuality. And if a name and a gesture are all it takes to have serious issues, then maybe the whole world's a bit nuts.
And the main character is a "nerd" portrayed in very positive light
The creator if the show did state that she wanted the main characters to have a wide variety of traits (the hard working one, the nurturing one, ect) as a kind of 'you can be who you want no matter what it is' message to the target audience of young girls. The nerdy one being the lead was a nice touch.
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What could go wrong is massive dead zones from fertilizer use. This doesn't have to be perfect, just better. Biological agriculture is the future.
Which was the result of good old fashioned conventional breeding, not genetic engineering. Funny how only one of those draws controversy.
certain companies that create genetically modified plants have left a bad taste in our mouths
The constant stream of fearmongering, conspiracies, and other nonsense hasn't hurt either.
i mind the fact that companies can modify their strain of a plant to be incredibly dominant
That is kind of a misconception. It isn't as if there is some genetically engineered variety that is spreading all over, it is that genes can spread, and transgenes are no exception. Genetically engineered crops are no different than any other crop except that they possess a few additional genes. The only reason you thing there is some super plant is because of how it is often portrayed.
giving the company grounds for a lawsuit.
Only given certain conditions, those conditions being the intentional selection and reproduction of transgenic material, which is quite a bit different than anything accidental.
This smells like a scheme to make GMO crops more acceptible to the public
Science is not a conspiracy.
Here's an alternative - replace monocrop orchards with polyculture farms (i.e. food forest) that are based on the same principles of natural ecosystems.
Would you be equally opposed to conventional breeding for disease resistance? I'll bet you wouldn't.
leaving something powerful like genetic modification of organisms in the hands of corporations (with their well known behavioral disorders [siivola.org]) is really a very bad idea.
Then tell the anti-GMO movement to stop promoting stronger and stronger regulations that only allow the large companies to bring a GMO to market. There's plenty of great university developed GMOs, it's just that none of them can jump the regulatory hurdles because of the overly restrictive regulation. Even something like Golden Rice is still dealing with that non-sense.
So I'd be OK with banning GMOs until we find a better way of organizing such dangerous endeavours
Replace GMO with vaccine, pharmaceuticals, or even Wi-Fi to see how bad of an idea that is.
The anti-GMO movement started by opposing the Flavr Savr tomato, which was developed by a fairly small company. It continued to oppose the GMOs of not only large companies like Monsanto and Syngenta and small companies like the Arctic apple developed by Okanagan Specialty Fruits, but universities like the Rainbow papaya, NGOs like Golden Rice, and government bodies like the wheat developed by CSIRO in Australia that some Greenpeace thug destroyed. By and large, the anti-corporate angle is nothing more than a facade for anti-science.
I am more skittish with the pesticide resistant genes since with horizontal gene transfer the resistance may pass to weeds and make the pesticide basically useless.
That's pretty unlikely. What is happening however is that over reliance on herbicide resistant crops is creating weeds that are resistant to the herbicides, which is a very bad thing because the herbicide resistant crops have been very beneficial for farmers and the environment (a lot of people like to hate on them, but they have helped replace soil damaging tillage and harsher herbicides...blind anti-agrochemical idealism won't make the weeds pack up and move).
I don't think that's a good reason to oppose such crops any more than you should oppose AIDS treatments because similar events occur. It just means we need more widespread use of better weed management practices. Over relying on a single mode of action herbicide is the problem. In the future, the best thing would be to see crops resistant to multiple modes of action of herbicide so that a weed would need a multiple mutations in order to develop resistance (of course, in the deep future, it would be nice to see allelopathic GMOs that would require no inputs to fight off weeds, but I don't see that happening in the foreseeable pipeline)
And despite this, there are no protests against the conventional breeding which developed those varieties of tomato, although strangely has there are protests against the genetic engineering that could help to fix the problem.
Congratulations! You're part of the problem.
a genetically mutilated Monsanto broccoli
You mean one produced by technology? Yeah,. I hate technology! Or do you mean one that isn't a wild mustard? Did you know broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, Brussel's sprouts, and kohlrabi are all the same species, bred from an ancestral wild mustard? Doesn't get more genetically mutilated than that.
but they patented open source broccoli.
Really? Or did they develop their own variety and patent that? Which would be like making something new out of wood then some clueless/lying fearmonger says wood is patented.
Funny thing about broccoli is that, much like corn, wheat, and strawberries, it was created by humans. Go back a ways in time, and you will not find broccoli, only the wild mustard plant that it was bred from. If breeding things like broccoli and corn were developed today, there'd be plenty of folks going on about the proven dangers of broccoli that are totally scientific and not just justifications for their own superstitions, and how changing the form of the plant is totally different than standard breeding,and how we should ban it.
And speaking of which, I wonder if anyone will complain about the glucoraphanin levels like they do about the Bt in crops.
You can grill broccoli too you know. I find that meat is often overrated and vegetables to be much better main dishes than most would assume.
Just make sure you've had it done right before writing it off entirely. If all you've ever had was over boiled green goo, then it'll be easy to assume you don't like broccoli, but cooked so that it is firm yet tender in a good stir fry, or in any other of the many right ways to do it, broccoli's good stuff. Maybe you really don't like it, I just hope you've fairly evaluated it before coming to that decision.
That's basically what normal flora is.
A closed source food chain is a major problem for everyone, except those who hold the patents.
Opposition to the patent aspect is certainty a lot more reasonable than trying to dismiss science, but it isn't such a simple issue when you consider the benefits to other groups, like farmers and consumers, from the creation of new varieties that are funded by patent royalties. Take the Honeycrisp apple for example. Do you like it? Most people do. It was, until the recent expiration, a patented variety (it is not GMO by the way; non-GE plants can also be patented). Despite this, growers liked it because they made more money on it (well, actually they kind of had a love-hate relationship with it because it is a finicky apple to grow but you get my point) and consumers liked it because it tasted good. The breeders got a return on the royalty fees from the nurseries that propagated the Honeycrisp apple trees, and with that made from that patent went on to create my favorite apple variety. Take patents out of the picture and the breeders who developed my favorite variety would simply not have had the money do so, and then more than the patent holder loses.
It is kind of the same thing here. Without the patents, like it or not it would not I do not see how it would be possible to invest so much money into something that you could not recover the R&D costs/deregulation costs on.
There is no such thing as bacon corn but there is such a thing as a lard nut that supposedly has a pork like taste. Maybe when human society finally gets its shit together with respect to agricultural biodiversity and starts developing and widely cultivating more of the usable species out there you might get a chance to try one.
I think it would be more like giving a health prize to a pharmaceutical company for vaccine manufacturing. Sure, despite the public controversy concerning whether or not they cause autism, it would be true that the company has produced good things that have combated disease, although giving it to a corporate suit is still kind of bullshit. That's how I feel about it. Even if their seeds are helping people (for example, this just popped up in the news), giving the prize to executives doesn't seem right. Perhaps individual scientists or teams, but corporate executives? I don't like it.
As a side not, the Frankenstein thing is pretty silly. No one calls it Frankenstein when someone picks out a somatic mutant of a fruit tree and grafts it to another tree, no one calls it Frankenstein when you chemically double the chromosomes of a plant either to cross it with a non-doubled one to get a triploid or to produce a plant with homozygous alleles from a pollen cell, no one calls it Frankenstein when you cross two plants that can't produce viable offspring and then remove the embryo before it dies to culture it into a hybrid that could never exist in nature, no one calls it Frankenstein when you blast a culture of cells with radiation or apply mutagenic chemicals to create all sorts of random mutations, and no one calls it Frankenstein when you select random mutation after random mutation in the form of artificial selection, a process that has caused such great genetic shifts as to create corn from teosinte and broccoli, kale, kohlrabi, cabbage,and cauliflower (all the same species by the way) from wild mustard. Yet now this is Frankenstein? I mean, I suppose you could go the appeal to nature route and argue that everything else is just manipulating natural forces in a beneficial way, but of course, one could point to horizontal gene transfer and say the same of genetic engineering, not that the argument means much anyway.
And then ream everyone in court who tries to keep some seed and use it to replant.
There's always the option of not buying them and going with open pollinated seed. If you get sued for violating a contract you signed, then that is on you. And before you bring up the inevitable claim of suing for cross pollination, wrong.
lobby for legislation which requires food aid from the US to be GMO crops
That's new on me. Point me to that specific legislation, because that sounds an awful lot like a load of made up bullshit that someone pulled out of the usual place. Yeah, for some crops like corn and soy, most of the aid is genetically engineered, because most of the crop is genetically engineered. This isn't a conspiracy; it's just how supply chains work.
Be grateful that you were born in a part of the world that is able to complain about that which has saved the lives of millions of people. Not everyone is so fortunate.
It also ups the ante in the arms race of evolution, which isn't universally seen as a good thing.
It certainty is a bad thing, which is why millions of people protested conventional breeding when late blight overcame the conventionally bred resistances in tomato and when hessian flies overcame conventionally bred resistance in wheat. Oh wait, that never happened because it would be absolutely idiotic, yet somehow, when genetic engineering is involved, the same basic facts of population genetics are suddenly terrible and proof that the technique itself is bad. Perhaps it is because the vast vast majority of the opposition to genetic engineering is coming from those with no background in agricultural or plant science and thus due to their complete lack of context it seems reasonable to them.
Calling objection "hysteria" doesn't make it so. Some protesters are quite enlightened and think long term.
And most of the protesters are the agricultural equivalents to the anti-vaccine movement. And when you are doing little in the way of scientifically justifying your concerns, instead preferring to use bunk science, fearmongering, and outright vandalism on non-corporate projects and farmer's fields, you shouldn't be surprised when you get characterized poorly. Hell, there is no small opposition to even things like Golden Rice (biofortified with -carotene) and the Arctic apple (which does not oxidize when cut). I'm sure there is a perfectly good reason as to why that is, if not unscientific hysteria, because this stuff isn't looking good.
Just about everything carries risk (again for context, even conventional breeding conventional breeding carries risk), just about everything has some negatives that come with the positives, there are actual issues, and not every genetically engineered organisms will necessarily turn out to be a good thing. But to paint the anti-GMO movement as a whole as anything even remotely reasonable would be like saying young earth creationists simply have a dispute with the minor details of a few phylogenies.
It's not fair to call the Dreamcast's untimely demise a fiery storm of shit. The Dreamcast had a lot of good points, even if it did ultimately fail. While mistakes were made, the Dreamcast was hardly shitty.
Don't you worry about blank, let me worry about blank!
And what relevance does this have to bronies?
It's a classic straw man. There's plenty of average, well adjusted, normal people who consider themselves bronies. A common interest, name, some in jokes, and a maybe few plastic figurines do not constitute a life dominating obsession, but for whatever reason, some people take that as a starting point.
Non obsessives don't call themselves Bronies, or Trekkies, or Whovians
I'd say I'm all four. Careful when determining who's a true Scotsman.
When any interest(and that includes more socially acceptable interests like sports, sex, and alcohol) starts to define you, you're at the very least verging on engaging in some seriously unhealthy behavior.
What do you mean by starts to define you? If you mean let it control you, than yes, that's certainty a problem. If you mean taking interests as a part of yourself, as one of the things that you enjoy and makes you unique, then no. Everyone is defined by the sum of themselves, their life experiences, their interests, their hopes, their hobbies, ect. That's the nature of individuality. And if a name and a gesture are all it takes to have serious issues, then maybe the whole world's a bit nuts.
And the main character is a "nerd" portrayed in very positive light
The creator if the show did state that she wanted the main characters to have a wide variety of traits (the hard working one, the nurturing one, ect) as a kind of 'you can be who you want no matter what it is' message to the target audience of young girls. The nerdy one being the lead was a nice touch.
Also, a fun bit of trivia /. readers will probably appreciate, an episode once had a that character working with time dilation equations here.