I hope reasoning with terrorists attacking research plants will give some results, but I'm afraid it still wont stop them - they are the same kind of people who blow up infidels or try to get rid of "lesser race". Still, it's a peaceful step and may reduce the amount of such attacks.
What I think is needed here is to actually make security tighter - but it's a dance between putting lots of money into security or losing some experiments. Unfortunately both are what those guerrillas want.
It's not an attempt to reason with terrorists. It's way smarter than that. It's an attempt to undercut the entire reason they are doing this. The terrorists are looking to build public awareness, sympathy, and support for their actions against the evil nasty scientists playing with the Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. This is an attempt to humanize the scientists, put their work in context, and reframe the narrative from Heroic Radicals Save Humanity From Cackling Evil Scientists to Idiotic Bookburning Knowledge-Hating Radicals Shoot Selves In Foot and Kill Poor People. It's attacking the foundation of the terrorism instead of getting distracted with the building on top.
I'm not sure you are representing the views of the "terrorists" correctly.
1. Terrorist is not an accurate title.
2. From what I've read the metaphysical argument that "Things Man Was Not Meant To Know" is not the reasoning behind these actions. The argument used tends to be the same as the anti-nuclear argument. Given the facts, the danger is too great.
3. Plenty of people in the scientific community have serious objections to the way GM crops are used and promoted. It's not an anti-science movement anymore than the anti-nuclear movement was an anti-physics movement.
4. I agree with your assessment that this is a PR maneuver aimed at the general public.
5. The campaign is being managed by the PR firm 'Sense About Science' which is funded by a number of private firms. The claim that this is purely about public scientific research is PR.
"I'm not sure you are representing the views of the "terrorists" correctly."
Since I didn't try, nor do I particularly care, probably not. I was talking about what this document does, not endorsing it or analyzing it beyond that. Personally I'm not a big fan of narrative-based warfare regardless of who is doing it, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize it when I see it.
This is a gross distortion of the argument that Take The Flour Back is making. TTFB cites legitimate and real scientific concerns; they don't caricature scientists as evil by nature. Their claim, in fact, is that the people doing these experiments are not acting as scientists, in the sense that they are ignoring serious environmental dangers and running these tests purely for grant money. And I think that's a legitimate concern, for what it's worth. It's very hard to do legitimate science right now because of the money. We see this in medicine, and we certainly see it in agriculture.
So this video might be effective if the only think you know about TTFB is that they're "environmentalists," and if you extrapolate from this that they're crazy spiritist loons who hate science and knowledge. But you would be flat wrong if you did that.
> We are particularly concerned about ensuring the protection of what is probably the world’s oldest classical grassland experiment. We are appalled that you are jeopardizing the integrity of this scientific inheritance by planting GM wheat metres away from it. We believe your recklessness in planting GM in the adjacent field seriously undermines your institution’s scientific credibility.
Ouch. I have to back up "Take the flour back" on this one. Now the Poor Bullied Scientist looks more like an Incompetent Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Greenpeace destroyed a GM wheat crop study by CSIRO, a government research department. It's a shame because it would have found evidence whether such GM crops had problems.
"Greenpeace says it has taken action because of concerns over health, cross-contamination and the secrecy surrounding the experiments." facepalms
"A main element in their paranoia is that they are concerned that the release of GM material outside the containment area is going to do all sorts of awful things to "the environment," They don't seem to realise that by breaking into the controlled area and damaging the plants they are actually spreading the material themselves."
So what? The current, non-genetically modified plants are not holy in any sense. They evolved and the during the evolution, their genes were altered countless times.
Every day, an unique, genetically modified plant is born, because a gamma ray from the outer space hit its DNA and altered it in a non-predictable fashion. 99.99999% and maybe more of these mutants are harmless and probably simply die.
The alteration of genes can happen on your very own garden and without any safety measures. Some of these natural mutants may even be dangerous and nobody cares.
Is this randomness and total lack of safety better than a scientist armed with knowledge and a place to conduct experiments?
You have the order wrong. Gene alteration + reproduction -> evolution, rather than evolution causing gene alteration.
You're right about the rate and general harmlessness of plant evolution, but the gamma ray from outer space is a bit far-fetched. Wikipedia has a nice overview of genetic alteration in plant developmental biology here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_evolutionary_developmenta..., with a more academic discussion of the effect of polyploidy here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22540042
That being said, I think the fear is that scientists potentially have the motive to create dangerous/unhealthy strains of plants - a motive which miRNA and transposons (god-willing) do not have.
I agree with this and generally I am not against GM crops in theory. I think that:
1. Monocultures are bad. GM crops don't have to be monocultures but they generally are for a number of business reasons that have nothing to do with food production.
2. GM crops cross-pollenate thereby spreading patented genes to non-GM fields. The owners of these non-GM fields are then sued and forced to switch to GM crops.
3. GM crops business models are often built around vendor lock-in. Historically vendor lock-in has been bad for software development and I think we can extrapolate these results to farming.
4. Cross pollination to wild-type is generally disruptive to the environment short term (for example consider what happens when wild plants produce pesticides from a GM gene). The effects are probably no different than introducing an invasive species. Generally people see this as a bad thing (snakes in Hawaii for example) and create laws to prevent it from happening. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species
I think GM crops can be developed, used in a safe manner and provide a great benefit to humanity, but that is not the current state-of-affairs. There are good reasons the EU regulates GM crops as much as they do.
Well, I agree that there may be dangers. Eco-activist groups should focus on forcing and helping the scientists and corporations to do more thorough testing. They should not destroy crops or attempt to stop the research. Thinking that they can stop it is naive. If it does not happen in US or EU, it will happen elsewhere (and possibly with less effective safety precautions).
The patent thing is a separate problem. Patent law in many areas is pretty bad.
If it is in fact a real risk, spreading the material around the environment while destroying things doesn't sound like a good way to address that risk.
If scientists fill the seas with GM whales that are modified to withstand the rigours of the modern sea environment that would put Greenpeace in a real pickle, wouldn't it?
The letter wavers between being a heart-felt plea for academic research and verbal abuse against activists. I don't particularly mind the latter, as I feel the actions of these activists are inexcusable, but from a PR perspective it's usually not very smart to call people idiots if you want to win them over to your perspective.
"If you destroy publicly funded research, you leave us in a situation where only the big corporations can afford the drastic security precautions needed to
continue biotechnology research - and you therefore further promote a situation you say you are
trying to avoid."
Considering the scary amount of money and power Monsanto has, and the terrifying things they do with their GM patents, this is probably be best argument if you are convinced GM plants are evil.
Well, that and the fact that it's /research/ and not the industrial growing of GM foods.
The environmental protection movement is slowly acquiring a mob mentality where new ideas that modify nature in any way are scorned upon without any scientific evaluation. All this GM backlash while millions starve across the world and food prices are increasing.
Why should scientists have to plead with their yahoo enemies?
This is organized political violence, and organized political violence only exists where it's passively tolerated by the government. Suppose the NAACP learned that a bunch of yahoo skinheads were planning an attack on the National Museum of African Art. Do you think for a minute that the museum curators would be writing a cringing, please-don't-attack us letter about the important artistic contributions of African Americans? Naah - a bunch of yahoo skinheads would be preparing for a 15-year staycation at Pelican Bay.
Treat left-wing extremists the same way you treat right-wing extremists - problem solved. Not that the problem's going to be solved. But it's worth thinking about why.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 63.6 ms ] threadWhat I think is needed here is to actually make security tighter - but it's a dance between putting lots of money into security or losing some experiments. Unfortunately both are what those guerrillas want.
1. Terrorist is not an accurate title.
2. From what I've read the metaphysical argument that "Things Man Was Not Meant To Know" is not the reasoning behind these actions. The argument used tends to be the same as the anti-nuclear argument. Given the facts, the danger is too great.
3. Plenty of people in the scientific community have serious objections to the way GM crops are used and promoted. It's not an anti-science movement anymore than the anti-nuclear movement was an anti-physics movement.
4. I agree with your assessment that this is a PR maneuver aimed at the general public.
5. The campaign is being managed by the PR firm 'Sense About Science' which is funded by a number of private firms. The claim that this is purely about public scientific research is PR.
Sense about science has done some good work in the past with regard to fighting science libel laws. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_About_Science
Since I didn't try, nor do I particularly care, probably not. I was talking about what this document does, not endorsing it or analyzing it beyond that. Personally I'm not a big fan of narrative-based warfare regardless of who is doing it, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize it when I see it.
So this video might be effective if the only think you know about TTFB is that they're "environmentalists," and if you extrapolate from this that they're crazy spiritist loons who hate science and knowledge. But you would be flat wrong if you did that.
For terrorists who probably can't be reasoned with, they sure are fond of using footnotes.
> We are particularly concerned about ensuring the protection of what is probably the world’s oldest classical grassland experiment. We are appalled that you are jeopardizing the integrity of this scientific inheritance by planting GM wheat metres away from it. We believe your recklessness in planting GM in the adjacent field seriously undermines your institution’s scientific credibility.
Ouch. I have to back up "Take the flour back" on this one. Now the Poor Bullied Scientist looks more like an Incompetent Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Greenpeace destroyed a GM wheat crop study by CSIRO, a government research department. It's a shame because it would have found evidence whether such GM crops had problems.
"Greenpeace says it has taken action because of concerns over health, cross-contamination and the secrecy surrounding the experiments." facepalms
Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=genetically...
Every day, an unique, genetically modified plant is born, because a gamma ray from the outer space hit its DNA and altered it in a non-predictable fashion. 99.99999% and maybe more of these mutants are harmless and probably simply die.
The alteration of genes can happen on your very own garden and without any safety measures. Some of these natural mutants may even be dangerous and nobody cares.
Is this randomness and total lack of safety better than a scientist armed with knowledge and a place to conduct experiments?
That being said, I think the fear is that scientists potentially have the motive to create dangerous/unhealthy strains of plants - a motive which miRNA and transposons (god-willing) do not have.
1. Monocultures are bad. GM crops don't have to be monocultures but they generally are for a number of business reasons that have nothing to do with food production.
2. GM crops cross-pollenate thereby spreading patented genes to non-GM fields. The owners of these non-GM fields are then sued and forced to switch to GM crops.
3. GM crops business models are often built around vendor lock-in. Historically vendor lock-in has been bad for software development and I think we can extrapolate these results to farming.
4. Cross pollination to wild-type is generally disruptive to the environment short term (for example consider what happens when wild plants produce pesticides from a GM gene). The effects are probably no different than introducing an invasive species. Generally people see this as a bad thing (snakes in Hawaii for example) and create laws to prevent it from happening. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species
5. There is a big difference between point mutations and transgenic plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgene
I think GM crops can be developed, used in a safe manner and provide a great benefit to humanity, but that is not the current state-of-affairs. There are good reasons the EU regulates GM crops as much as they do.
The patent thing is a separate problem. Patent law in many areas is pretty bad.
Considering the scary amount of money and power Monsanto has, and the terrifying things they do with their GM patents, this is probably be best argument if you are convinced GM plants are evil.
Well, that and the fact that it's /research/ and not the industrial growing of GM foods.
http://taketheflourback.org/open-letter-to-rothamsted/
This is organized political violence, and organized political violence only exists where it's passively tolerated by the government. Suppose the NAACP learned that a bunch of yahoo skinheads were planning an attack on the National Museum of African Art. Do you think for a minute that the museum curators would be writing a cringing, please-don't-attack us letter about the important artistic contributions of African Americans? Naah - a bunch of yahoo skinheads would be preparing for a 15-year staycation at Pelican Bay.
Treat left-wing extremists the same way you treat right-wing extremists - problem solved. Not that the problem's going to be solved. But it's worth thinking about why.