Certainty, but genetic engineering isn't like other things, say drugs for instance, where you much go through research to see how this particular chemical affects this that and the other thing. With GMOs, the issue actually much simpler: does the crop have anything different than it ordinarily would? If they can find it, that's enough cause for concern. Actually, it did happen once. I recall once an Australian fodder bean was found to do just that, but they isolated the agent that caused the harm, and they found the pathway that caused it to be produced. They corrected the problem and moved on. What about the soybeans with Brazil nut genes in them that became allergenic? Problem discovered, reason found. I hear a lot about how GMOs supposedly have potential harm, and certainty there's no harm in testing them before moving them to market, but if they do cause harm, finding the problem shouldn't be that hard, yet, aside from that one minor experimental case, no one has ever found one. One can make an argument that, say, the Bt toxin produced by many GMOs has whatever side effects whenever it is found in crops yet somehow not applied as part of an organic agriculture regimen (although I've never heard compelling evidence for this) However, that's not what's being claimed. What is being claimed is that, based on some scant information, the food that has been in trillions of meals is highly dangerous, and no one cares to specify why, even though it shouldn't be that difficult of a matter.
You're right, determining what causes a problem out of a list of possible suspects is hard, but when you can't actually provide exceptionally good evidence that there is a problem, nor can you provide any suspects to examine, well, then the position starts to look awfully darned weak.
Got any GMO crops that damage the kidneys of cowtippers? >:-[
Want a toxic crop? Try cultivating mayapple. It's not GMO (like that matters), it tastes fantastic, smells wonderful, was once considered a delicacy by Native Americans, and a pure milligram of the toxin found in everything except the ripe fruit, including the seeds, is enough to kill you, but I love it anyway (got seeds going through cold stratification right now). It's like the fugu of the plant world. Also used in chemotherapy drugs.
I did say "not all". Obviously there are some crazies. That doesn't mean everybody is.
Not crazy necessarily, just wrong. There is no evidence to indicate any conspiracy. None. Zip. They're not half right because there's a lot of them and they try to seem factual. They have no facts.
On what basis do you say it wasn't peer reviewed? It was published in a prestigious journal (in the area of Agricultural and Biological Sciences, International Journal of Biological Sciences is ranked among the top 2.1% of journals ([29/1380] according to SCImago in year 2007), and involved 3 different universities. If you want to claim it "wasn't peer reviewed", please provide some evidence.
I don't think you know what peer-review means. It doesn't mean it was worked on by people from different universities. It means other scientists have looked at and evaluated your work.
And your statement that "They cherry picked a few studies out of hundreds" is ridiculous, since the data they used was from Monsanto's own feeding trials they performed in order to get approval of their products. So there were not "hundreds of studies", and they could not have been "cherry picked". It's Monsanto's own data, dude. This paper merely illustrates that the approval process is not sufficient to weed out potentially very harmful effects (and does it well).
It pleases me to see this comment. When you do hundreds of trials, some will be outliers. When you pick the outliers and present them as a representative sample, you can make it look like, say, GMO corn causes organ damage. There were hundreds of trials, most of which were conveniently ignored of which they conducted their study, in fact, there were conventional corn trials that showed the same thing. Call me back when it's in Nature and the WHO is talking about it.
And as far as "unable to pin down a causative agent"... your remarks are exactly like those of the tobacco industry when presented with the correlation between tobacco use and health problems: "correlation does not imply causation".
No even close. Tobacco was a unique input to the human body, with plenty of various additives. If a GE crop is found different than a regular one in one unintended way, than you have an agent. That would be easy enough to find, but no one has ever found it.
Hm. Not just for those in question here? You want ALL that information, not just whether it is harmful? (After all, it is often much easier to prove that something is harmful, than to puzzle out why!) Would it be okay for me to feed you chemicals, maybe for years, that were correlated with extremely serious health problems, until somebody not only proved the causative connection, but also understood WHY it could make you sick? Somehow I doubt it, even though that would make you a hypocrite.
That makes about as much sense as stopping vaccines after the Wakefield study. No, I'm not going to alter anything because some crank pushed out some baloney. Were it a good study (or were I not a plant person and did not understand this issue), I might feel different.
And there, again, your biases are showing. There is plenty of objective evidence that fluoride can have harmful physical effects, in sufficient quantity.
So can water. The key here is 'in sufficient quantity.'
Even natural groundwater sometimes has enough fluoride to cause fluorosis. I saw the telltale stained teeth myself in West Texas. But more to the point, the quantities necessary for harmful effects in children simply are not known. The ethical issues arise because your second claim, that the negatives are nil, is simply false. We know that there are negatives, but we don't know what the levels are.
We don't know what levels of fluoride cause harm? Try telling that to the ADA. Color me skeptical on that one.
First, an AC nailed you spot on while I was typing, but since I've already typed it up...
For example, some (but by no means all) of the "9/11 truthers" (a very derogatory phrase) have some good evidence to cite.
That's news to me. From the 'steel doesn't melt' to the 'No, thousands of tonnes of falling debris couldn't have made the WTC7 collapse' to the 'Aluminum powder can only be produced in labs, not by the destruction of thousands of electronics,' I've never seen anything from the truthers that didn't amount to baloney, or as the case may be, bias over evidence. Truther should be a derogatory label.
That wasn't peer-reviewed, and I doubt it ever will be, because it was garbage. It was playing with statistics. They cherry picked a few studies out of hundreds to get variations in organ size. It would be a miracle if they couldn't have gotten those results. Yet, I see it being drug all over the internet as the elusive 'proof' that genetic engineering is dangerous (nevermind that even the authors of that study themselves admitted that they were unable to pin down a causative agent for the alleged damage). Another case of bias over evidence.
Again, something that probably does not belong in your list. To compare these people with the moon-landing-deniers and astrologers is a mistake, since they are on a much more solid stance, evidence-wise.
They're able to make themselves sound more evidence based, but they're really not. Go look at a moon landing conspiracy site; I'll bet they've got plenty of half-truths and misinterpretations supporting their claim, much of which might even sound good, but just like everything else, it's bunk when you really examine it. You see this everywhere. Go look at Age of Autism or Vaclib and tell me they don't have loads of evidence backing their claims that vaccines cause autism, or go look at the Mercola site or whatever and see the evidence they've got proving homeopathy is an effective form of treating everything. They all have evidence, but when you really look at it, it's all either nonsense or a real stretch of the truth. Same with the truthers and anti-GMO guys. It's like Bigfoot vs Santa Claus.
Further, while flouride may not be a communist plot, there are some very serious ethical issues involved with putting it in drinking water.
Since the positives are stronger teeth, and the negatives are nil, I hardly see how is an ethical issue if a few people complain about imagined fears.
Which is precisely the point, and even the point you make: people let biases influence them. Including you. (I say that based on the evidence that you lumped a whole bunch of things into your list of "bullshit", even though from the scientific evidence, some of them probably do not belong in the list.)
Certainty I have biases, but what I like about being an ex-young earth creationist is that I'm fairly confident that I can change my mind if I have good reason to. I'll do a 180, because I can tell you I don't like any of those ideas as much as I did creationism. But first I must be shown the evidence, and that's why I hold those opinions. I didn't pick them based on the notion that the government is out to get me or that deviating from what is deemed natural is harmful. I base them on evidence, not anecdotes, not logical fallacies, not what-ifs, not possible conspiracies. You think the 9/11 truth movement and the anti-GMO movement aren't based on bias? I know those issues very well, and until they show, say, real proof of GMO harm from a reputable health organization, and a causative agent, and a genetic reaso
It is obvious that people let biases influence them. I think a better question to answer is how many people will still hold on to their belief in the face of information. There are a lot of weird beliefs out there that are simply untrue, yet have very devoted followings (anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers, the moon landing conspiracy crowd, the anti-GMO guys, homeopaths, astrologers, fluoride is a communist plot, ect. ad nauseum). How many people will still believe in falsehoods when presented with all the correct information they care to look at? Something like this would require a good bit of time as rejection of incorrect yet dearly held ideas is not fun and will not happen overnight. As an ex-young earther, I'd know; you can check out my early/. comments to see it in action (please don't). Heck, I still have a hard time listing creationism in the list of wrong ideas, and I know the facts. Reevaluating and adjusting yourself to fit how things really are instead of how you think they are is difficult. It would be telling to see what percent of people will put a belief over evidence. I'd bet that a lot more would rather hang on to their belief and think themselves some sort of intellectual martyr that go through the effort of empirically evaluating their beliefs.
Amen. The possibility of extraterrestrial life is easily the most interesting thing there is. We might get more energy from nuclear engineering or more food from genetic engineering or longer life from medical sciences, but this is like the gold of the scientific world: it is intrinsically valuable. Even if nothing useful comes out of it, answering the question of whether or not there is anything on those moons would be worth it. The simplest of life living on another world would be phenomenal (even if it turns out that life originated on Earth, although native would be much more fascinating), or even just fossil evidence that there once was something, and even if we come up with nothing, just knowing more about the surfaces of other worlds is simply wonderful. Why we're not funding projects to prepare for trips to Enceladus or Titan or Europa is beyond me.
I thought the Arabic kafir meant nonbeliever (atheist), whereas the English term infidel (in the context that it is being referred to) would mean one who is not a Muslim. Wouldn't there be separate terms for those two different concepts?
A pity about their children suffering from their parent's stupidity, but maybe they'll wise up once they grow up.
Alas, not just their own unfortunate kids. Ever read about Dana McCaffery? She was too young to be vaccinated, and she died of pertussis that the anti-vaxxers brought back. Then one of the local pro-disease dumbasses went and said that no one ever died of pertussis.
Yeah, I guess that is also true; the same thing applies to Hindi, but still, that won't help you any if you want to read something on paper or without a site without getting 'my hovercraft is full of eels,' or if you want to stray off into the more native places in Germany/Austria/German Switzerland. I'm not saying that there aren't considerable reasons to choose another, like Arabic or Portuguese, just that I think it balances out enough to make German also a very good choice. I admit I'm a bit biased here though, since I'm a one of the people who likes languages and cultures and that stuff and would prefer get into the nitty gritty of the places where the more important languages are spoken rather than expect anyone else to speak English for me, even for things like German or Hindi. I'm in my third level of German class now and have taken a number of others.
I disagree; I'm in my third semester of German, which admittedly isn't much (right now I'm planning on building my vocab by reading Max und Moritz), but even though I can pick out bits of what they're saying I still think some of them are pretty funny. This one is my favorite.
There's a heck of a lot more to the use of a language than the raw number of native speakers. Example, honestly, which of these would you rather learn? Italian or Tamil? Korean or Marlathi? German or Bengali? I'm not trying to diminish the importance of those languages, they're important too, but you've got to consider economic, scientific, cultural, ect. significance a language has as well as how many people speak it, and in those terms German ranks very high. In other words, you're wrong. German is very important, no matter who you are or where you live, especially on the internet.
Heck, not just that (although the vaccine thing is one of your more important ones), but the general irrational CAVE people, denialist, and magical thinking mentalities displayed by a lot of people. I mean, there's the anti-nuke guys, the anti-GMO guys, the alternative medicine guys, moon landing guys, the people who think they're allergic to radio waves and every single chemical, astrologists, all flavors of paranormal believer...truthers, birthers, and creationists, oh my! The GMO thing really get me down since I plan on going into that field when I graduate, and there is just so much misinformation and fear mongering in that field, and even good ol'/. posts baloney on that one. I guess we just do what we can though.
Vaccines can cause harm, so one denies that. Vaccines aren't about magically making the chance you get hurt go away, they are about reducing the risk. People got hurt, and some probably died, during the smallpox vaccination period, but guess what, the end result saved way more than it hurt. Also, there are studies out there 'proving' homeopathy or 'disproving' evolution. A study in and of itself means nothing. On that's been put through the ringer or peer review, and duplicated, those are what you want. How many of your studies have been thoroughly reviewed and came up saying that the risks of vaccines outweigh the benefits? I'm betting none.
Yeah, whenever the courts ruled that the autism-vaccine link wasn't even plausible last year, you know what the anti-vaxxers said? Not 'Maybe we're wrong,' they said that it was more proof that Big Pharma paid off the judges. Maybe this will shake some of them (people do change sometimes, as an ex-young earther I can attest to this), but many view any evidence that they're wrong as another part of the conspiracy. There is this weird community build upon the supposed danger of vaccines, and the people who make it up will, for one reason or another, spout off all manners of nonsense to keep the community afloat.
The anti-vaxxers are here to stay, and they're bringing diseases like measles and whooping cough along for the ride.
I can see where you're coming from a bit, but the flaw in that though is that they're not mutually exclusive actions. Of all the money the government spends, aid to disaster victims ranks among the worthwhile expenditures. Don't complain about this taking money from natives who need it; complain about the billions pissed away on much stupider things (bailouts, wars, drug prohibition, ect.) sucking up all the money.
You're not seriously comparing asbestos to nuclear energy, are you? Can you name one person who has been hurt by a properly running nuclear plant that was a result of the plant being nuclear (as opposed to coal, ect.)? Some statistics: here in the US, you have a greater chance of being Barack Obama (1/3 million) than you have of having been hurt by a US nuclear plant (0/3 million)
Ugh, playing God, that has got to be one of the most annoying overused phrases out there. I'm about as Christian as they come, and once I get out of college I want to go into genetic engineering, so that phrase pisses me off twice over. From a theological point of view, it's presumptive, arrogant, and illogical. From a scientific point of view, obviously it holds no weight, but usually it makes even less sense when evidence is considered. I was talking to someone about the Rainbow papaya (the genetically engineered strain that saved the Hawaiian papaya industry by having papaya ringspot virus genes inserted into it), and the reaction I was getting was, 'Oh, that's dangerous, it has virus DNA in it.' My response was most things do have foreign viral DNA in them, including heirloom seeds and humans (after a few million years of evolution, that stuff starts to accumulate). The response to that fact? Goddidit, so that's totally different. Facepalm.
Toying with life? Do you mean like what we do with vaccines that stop disease, medicines that cure, or plant breeding that feeds the world? Even brewing beer and baking bread could be considered 'toying with life.' No one's saying to be reckless, but you've got to admit toying with life has brought a hell of a lot more benefit than harm.
Jurassic Park was a good movie, but a parable? My arse! Why is it that so many movies have some mad scientists killing people with their crazed experiments, but you never see the movie about people starving to death or succumbing to preventable/curable diseases because the scientists didn't do the research?
What if people like Norman Borlaug or Edward Jenner didn't 'toy with nature?' It wouldn't be a very pretty sight, would it? I for one like it when we toy with life.
Why is it that every time something neat in biology comes up, the first thing everyone says is 'What could possibly go wrong' implying, of course, that something exceptionally negative will come about as a result of it? Jeepers, this thing only died out four centuries ago. They're not going to hunt you down in trained squads.
Asteroid impacts, genetically engineered plants or the eventual supernovae that will happen when Eta Carinae self-destructs are all threats as well.
Genetically engineered plants, along with other improvements in agricultural science, are the counterweight to overpopulation. Not sure how that puts them up there with a supernova.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainty, but genetic engineering isn't like other things, say drugs for instance, where you much go through research to see how this particular chemical affects this that and the other thing. With GMOs, the issue actually much simpler: does the crop have anything different than it ordinarily would? If they can find it, that's enough cause for concern. Actually, it did happen once. I recall once an Australian fodder bean was found to do just that, but they isolated the agent that caused the harm, and they found the pathway that caused it to be produced. They corrected the problem and moved on. What about the soybeans with Brazil nut genes in them that became allergenic? Problem discovered, reason found. I hear a lot about how GMOs supposedly have potential harm, and certainty there's no harm in testing them before moving them to market, but if they do cause harm, finding the problem shouldn't be that hard, yet, aside from that one minor experimental case, no one has ever found one. One can make an argument that, say, the Bt toxin produced by many GMOs has whatever side effects whenever it is found in crops yet somehow not applied as part of an organic agriculture regimen (although I've never heard compelling evidence for this) However, that's not what's being claimed. What is being claimed is that, based on some scant information, the food that has been in trillions of meals is highly dangerous, and no one cares to specify why, even though it shouldn't be that difficult of a matter.
You're right, determining what causes a problem out of a list of possible suspects is hard, but when you can't actually provide exceptionally good evidence that there is a problem, nor can you provide any suspects to examine, well, then the position starts to look awfully darned weak.
Got any GMO crops that damage the kidneys of cowtippers? >:-[
Want a toxic crop? Try cultivating mayapple. It's not GMO (like that matters), it tastes fantastic, smells wonderful, was once considered a delicacy by Native Americans, and a pure milligram of the toxin found in everything except the ripe fruit, including the seeds, is enough to kill you, but I love it anyway (got seeds going through cold stratification right now). It's like the fugu of the plant world. Also used in chemotherapy drugs.
I did say "not all". Obviously there are some crazies. That doesn't mean everybody is.
Not crazy necessarily, just wrong. There is no evidence to indicate any conspiracy. None. Zip. They're not half right because there's a lot of them and they try to seem factual. They have no facts.
On what basis do you say it wasn't peer reviewed? It was published in a prestigious journal (in the area of Agricultural and Biological Sciences, International Journal of Biological Sciences is ranked among the top 2.1% of journals ([29/1380] according to SCImago in year 2007), and involved 3 different universities. If you want to claim it "wasn't peer reviewed", please provide some evidence.
I don't think you know what peer-review means. It doesn't mean it was worked on by people from different universities. It means other scientists have looked at and evaluated your work.
And your statement that "They cherry picked a few studies out of hundreds" is ridiculous, since the data they used was from Monsanto's own feeding trials they performed in order to get approval of their products. So there were not "hundreds of studies", and they could not have been "cherry picked". It's Monsanto's own data, dude. This paper merely illustrates that the approval process is not sufficient to weed out potentially very harmful effects (and does it well).
It pleases me to see this comment. When you do hundreds of trials, some will be outliers. When you pick the outliers and present them as a representative sample, you can make it look like, say, GMO corn causes organ damage. There were hundreds of trials, most of which were conveniently ignored of which they conducted their study, in fact, there were conventional corn trials that showed the same thing. Call me back when it's in Nature and the WHO is talking about it.
And as far as "unable to pin down a causative agent"... your remarks are exactly like those of the tobacco industry when presented with the correlation between tobacco use and health problems: "correlation does not imply causation".
No even close. Tobacco was a unique input to the human body, with plenty of various additives. If a GE crop is found different than a regular one in one unintended way, than you have an agent. That would be easy enough to find, but no one has ever found it.
Hm. Not just for those in question here? You want ALL that information, not just whether it is harmful? (After all, it is often much easier to prove that something is harmful, than to puzzle out why!) Would it be okay for me to feed you chemicals, maybe for years, that were correlated with extremely serious health problems, until somebody not only proved the causative connection, but also understood WHY it could make you sick? Somehow I doubt it, even though that would make you a hypocrite.
That makes about as much sense as stopping vaccines after the Wakefield study. No, I'm not going to alter anything because some crank pushed out some baloney. Were it a good study (or were I not a plant person and did not understand this issue), I might feel different.
And there, again, your biases are showing. There is plenty of objective evidence that fluoride can have harmful physical effects, in sufficient quantity.
So can water. The key here is 'in sufficient quantity.'
Even natural groundwater sometimes has enough fluoride to cause fluorosis. I saw the telltale stained teeth myself in West Texas. But more to the point, the quantities necessary for harmful effects in children simply are not known. The ethical issues arise because your second claim, that the negatives are nil, is simply false. We know that there are negatives, but we don't know what the levels are.
We don't know what levels of fluoride cause harm? Try telling that to the ADA. Color me skeptical on that one.
First, an AC nailed you spot on while I was typing, but since I've already typed it up...
For example, some (but by no means all) of the "9/11 truthers" (a very derogatory phrase) have some good evidence to cite.
That's news to me. From the 'steel doesn't melt' to the 'No, thousands of tonnes of falling debris couldn't have made the WTC7 collapse' to the 'Aluminum powder can only be produced in labs, not by the destruction of thousands of electronics,' I've never seen anything from the truthers that didn't amount to baloney, or as the case may be, bias over evidence. Truther should be a derogatory label.
As for "anti-GMO guys", a recent peer-revieed study showed that 3 different varieties of Monsanto GMO corn caused liver and kidney damage in rats.
That wasn't peer-reviewed, and I doubt it ever will be, because it was garbage. It was playing with statistics. They cherry picked a few studies out of hundreds to get variations in organ size. It would be a miracle if they couldn't have gotten those results. Yet, I see it being drug all over the internet as the elusive 'proof' that genetic engineering is dangerous (nevermind that even the authors of that study themselves admitted that they were unable to pin down a causative agent for the alleged damage). Another case of bias over evidence.
Again, something that probably does not belong in your list. To compare these people with the moon-landing-deniers and astrologers is a mistake, since they are on a much more solid stance, evidence-wise.
They're able to make themselves sound more evidence based, but they're really not. Go look at a moon landing conspiracy site; I'll bet they've got plenty of half-truths and misinterpretations supporting their claim, much of which might even sound good, but just like everything else, it's bunk when you really examine it. You see this everywhere. Go look at Age of Autism or Vaclib and tell me they don't have loads of evidence backing their claims that vaccines cause autism, or go look at the Mercola site or whatever and see the evidence they've got proving homeopathy is an effective form of treating everything. They all have evidence, but when you really look at it, it's all either nonsense or a real stretch of the truth. Same with the truthers and anti-GMO guys. It's like Bigfoot vs Santa Claus.
Further, while flouride may not be a communist plot, there are some very serious ethical issues involved with putting it in drinking water.
Since the positives are stronger teeth, and the negatives are nil, I hardly see how is an ethical issue if a few people complain about imagined fears.
Which is precisely the point, and even the point you make: people let biases influence them. Including you. (I say that based on the evidence that you lumped a whole bunch of things into your list of "bullshit", even though from the scientific evidence, some of them probably do not belong in the list.)
Certainty I have biases, but what I like about being an ex-young earth creationist is that I'm fairly confident that I can change my mind if I have good reason to. I'll do a 180, because I can tell you I don't like any of those ideas as much as I did creationism. But first I must be shown the evidence, and that's why I hold those opinions. I didn't pick them based on the notion that the government is out to get me or that deviating from what is deemed natural is harmful. I base them on evidence, not anecdotes, not logical fallacies, not what-ifs, not possible conspiracies. You think the 9/11 truth movement and the anti-GMO movement aren't based on bias? I know those issues very well, and until they show, say, real proof of GMO harm from a reputable health organization, and a causative agent, and a genetic reaso
It is obvious that people let biases influence them. I think a better question to answer is how many people will still hold on to their belief in the face of information. There are a lot of weird beliefs out there that are simply untrue, yet have very devoted followings (anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers, the moon landing conspiracy crowd, the anti-GMO guys, homeopaths, astrologers, fluoride is a communist plot, ect. ad nauseum). How many people will still believe in falsehoods when presented with all the correct information they care to look at? Something like this would require a good bit of time as rejection of incorrect yet dearly held ideas is not fun and will not happen overnight. As an ex-young earther, I'd know; you can check out my early /. comments to see it in action (please don't). Heck, I still have a hard time listing creationism in the list of wrong ideas, and I know the facts. Reevaluating and adjusting yourself to fit how things really are instead of how you think they are is difficult. It would be telling to see what percent of people will put a belief over evidence. I'd bet that a lot more would rather hang on to their belief and think themselves some sort of intellectual martyr that go through the effort of empirically evaluating their beliefs.
Amen. The possibility of extraterrestrial life is easily the most interesting thing there is. We might get more energy from nuclear engineering or more food from genetic engineering or longer life from medical sciences, but this is like the gold of the scientific world: it is intrinsically valuable. Even if nothing useful comes out of it, answering the question of whether or not there is anything on those moons would be worth it. The simplest of life living on another world would be phenomenal (even if it turns out that life originated on Earth, although native would be much more fascinating), or even just fossil evidence that there once was something, and even if we come up with nothing, just knowing more about the surfaces of other worlds is simply wonderful. Why we're not funding projects to prepare for trips to Enceladus or Titan or Europa is beyond me.
I thought the Arabic kafir meant nonbeliever (atheist), whereas the English term infidel (in the context that it is being referred to) would mean one who is not a Muslim. Wouldn't there be separate terms for those two different concepts?
A pity about their children suffering from their parent's stupidity, but maybe they'll wise up once they grow up.
Alas, not just their own unfortunate kids. Ever read about Dana McCaffery? She was too young to be vaccinated, and she died of pertussis that the anti-vaxxers brought back. Then one of the local pro-disease dumbasses went and said that no one ever died of pertussis.
My mistake, this one is the good one.
Yeah, I guess that is also true; the same thing applies to Hindi, but still, that won't help you any if you want to read something on paper or without a site without getting 'my hovercraft is full of eels,' or if you want to stray off into the more native places in Germany/Austria/German Switzerland. I'm not saying that there aren't considerable reasons to choose another, like Arabic or Portuguese, just that I think it balances out enough to make German also a very good choice. I admit I'm a bit biased here though, since I'm a one of the people who likes languages and cultures and that stuff and would prefer get into the nitty gritty of the places where the more important languages are spoken rather than expect anyone else to speak English for me, even for things like German or Hindi. I'm in my third level of German class now and have taken a number of others.
I disagree; I'm in my third semester of German, which admittedly isn't much (right now I'm planning on building my vocab by reading Max und Moritz), but even though I can pick out bits of what they're saying I still think some of them are pretty funny. This one is my favorite.
There's a heck of a lot more to the use of a language than the raw number of native speakers. Example, honestly, which of these would you rather learn? Italian or Tamil? Korean or Marlathi? German or Bengali? I'm not trying to diminish the importance of those languages, they're important too, but you've got to consider economic, scientific, cultural, ect. significance a language has as well as how many people speak it, and in those terms German ranks very high. In other words, you're wrong. German is very important, no matter who you are or where you live, especially on the internet.
Heck, not just that (although the vaccine thing is one of your more important ones), but the general irrational CAVE people, denialist, and magical thinking mentalities displayed by a lot of people. I mean, there's the anti-nuke guys, the anti-GMO guys, the alternative medicine guys, moon landing guys, the people who think they're allergic to radio waves and every single chemical, astrologists, all flavors of paranormal believer...truthers, birthers, and creationists, oh my! The GMO thing really get me down since I plan on going into that field when I graduate, and there is just so much misinformation and fear mongering in that field, and even good ol' /. posts baloney on that one. I guess we just do what we can though.
Out of sight, out of mind.
What's really mind boggling is that some people still believe in that guy.
Vaccines can cause harm, so one denies that. Vaccines aren't about magically making the chance you get hurt go away, they are about reducing the risk. People got hurt, and some probably died, during the smallpox vaccination period, but guess what, the end result saved way more than it hurt. Also, there are studies out there 'proving' homeopathy or 'disproving' evolution. A study in and of itself means nothing. On that's been put through the ringer or peer review, and duplicated, those are what you want. How many of your studies have been thoroughly reviewed and came up saying that the risks of vaccines outweigh the benefits? I'm betting none.
And because individuals not believing in global warming never brought about a resurgence in measles.
Yeah, whenever the courts ruled that the autism-vaccine link wasn't even plausible last year, you know what the anti-vaxxers said? Not 'Maybe we're wrong,' they said that it was more proof that Big Pharma paid off the judges. Maybe this will shake some of them (people do change sometimes, as an ex-young earther I can attest to this), but many view any evidence that they're wrong as another part of the conspiracy. There is this weird community build upon the supposed danger of vaccines, and the people who make it up will, for one reason or another, spout off all manners of nonsense to keep the community afloat.
The anti-vaxxers are here to stay, and they're bringing diseases like measles and whooping cough along for the ride.
I can see where you're coming from a bit, but the flaw in that though is that they're not mutually exclusive actions. Of all the money the government spends, aid to disaster victims ranks among the worthwhile expenditures. Don't complain about this taking money from natives who need it; complain about the billions pissed away on much stupider things (bailouts, wars, drug prohibition, ect.) sucking up all the money.
Uh, rounding error.
You're not seriously comparing asbestos to nuclear energy, are you? Can you name one person who has been hurt by a properly running nuclear plant that was a result of the plant being nuclear (as opposed to coal, ect.)? Some statistics: here in the US, you have a greater chance of being Barack Obama (1/3 million) than you have of having been hurt by a US nuclear plant (0/3 million)
Ugh, playing God, that has got to be one of the most annoying overused phrases out there. I'm about as Christian as they come, and once I get out of college I want to go into genetic engineering, so that phrase pisses me off twice over. From a theological point of view, it's presumptive, arrogant, and illogical. From a scientific point of view, obviously it holds no weight, but usually it makes even less sense when evidence is considered. I was talking to someone about the Rainbow papaya (the genetically engineered strain that saved the Hawaiian papaya industry by having papaya ringspot virus genes inserted into it), and the reaction I was getting was, 'Oh, that's dangerous, it has virus DNA in it.' My response was most things do have foreign viral DNA in them, including heirloom seeds and humans (after a few million years of evolution, that stuff starts to accumulate). The response to that fact? Goddidit, so that's totally different. Facepalm.
Toying with life? Do you mean like what we do with vaccines that stop disease, medicines that cure, or plant breeding that feeds the world? Even brewing beer and baking bread could be considered 'toying with life.' No one's saying to be reckless, but you've got to admit toying with life has brought a hell of a lot more benefit than harm.
Jurassic Park was a good movie, but a parable? My arse! Why is it that so many movies have some mad scientists killing people with their crazed experiments, but you never see the movie about people starving to death or succumbing to preventable/curable diseases because the scientists didn't do the research?
What if people like Norman Borlaug or Edward Jenner didn't 'toy with nature?' It wouldn't be a very pretty sight, would it? I for one like it when we toy with life.
Why is it that every time something neat in biology comes up, the first thing everyone says is 'What could possibly go wrong' implying, of course, that something exceptionally negative will come about as a result of it? Jeepers, this thing only died out four centuries ago. They're not going to hunt you down in trained squads.
Asteroid impacts, genetically engineered plants or the eventual supernovae that will happen when Eta Carinae self-destructs are all threats as well.
Genetically engineered plants, along with other improvements in agricultural science, are the counterweight to overpopulation. Not sure how that puts them up there with a supernova.