State Your Unpopular Opinions

the biggest problem is not food production. americans waste enough food to feed our own population twice over. the issue is getting it to where it'll do good. when you have warlords nabbing food shipments, no amount of crop, GMO or otherwise, is going to solve that problem. you're just going to get better fed warlords, with better fed gangs, which get to push around more farmers that can't afford gmo crops anyway, and instead they have to plant poppies for opium production, or plant coffee or cacao for pennies on the dollars we americans pay for it.

No. It's not production that's the issue, currently. it's that governments sit on stockpiles and reserves, a third of american food is destroyed before it even goes to market to support short production for subsidies or because it's blemished or otherwise 'ugly', the products that do make it to market are neither nutritious nor flavorful in the slightest. and much of it goes into garbage bins while the stores are required to dump lye or other caustic chemicals on it to prevent anyone from salvaging it, instead of donating it to a soup kitchen or a food pantry where someone could actually make use of it.

The problem isn't GMO or not, it isn't production or not.. it's US. WE are the problem.

 

Except that, GMOs have already solved that problem...

Villify GMOs all you want. Can you really deny that they produce more food than non-GMO crops? Science says you can't.

Again, not trying to be an ass, but, as I've already said, GMOs are the best thing to happen to mankind.

It is "unpopular" opinions afterall. Why this opinion is unpopular, however, is beyond me. Billions of people are alive today because of GMOs. Why is that a bad thing?

 

I think both were really you. And I don't have difficulty dealing with either
But yes, I remain having the opinion they're exaggerated facets of yourself. Which make you come across a bit caricatural to me

 

You need a gangsta caricicture

 

Sigh....

Breeding the best traits out of a crop is not the controversy. It’s the unnatural splicing of genes that have poor environmental and public health consequences

 

Such as?

 

GMO (or molecular DNA altered) crops are killing pollinating insects like honeybees GMOs Are Killing the Bees, Butterflies, Birds and . . . ?

GMO companies like Monsanto and Dow are suing family farmers after their crops become pollinated with the patented genetically modified crops Monsanto Sues Farmers for 16 Yrs over GMOs, NEVER Loses

Lab rats that are fed GMO feed pellets grow more tumors than the control group https://www.motherearthnews.com/natural-health/nutrition/gmo-safety-zmgz13amzsto

 

reading comprehension fail, neo. at NO point did I vilify GMOs. and you /are/ being an ass(all due respect. I happen to like you alright, but this is one subject you have NO idea what your'e actually talking about.. and it shows), because you're cherry picking statements and ignoring the entire context of the message, which is 'we produce too much and throw more of it away than we need to anyway, we should start there.'

If i haven't offended you enough to tell me to get stuffed - my supporting arguments are below.

If you /want/ me to go into vilifying GMO, I can, and by the time I'm done, you really won't like me. The question was not 'how much' was produced (which I never addressed, and I never mentioned anything one way or the other for or against GMO. only that we currently both produce enough and discard way too much of it, and the rest that IS sent to humanitarian aid gets hijacked, and never reaches the people that need it in the first place.)

arguments against GMO - fine, here we go -

GMO crops are patented, meaning our food production is in the hands of a consortium of monolithic corporations that have a vested interest in selling their other products (namely roundup/glyphosate based herbicides, which kill off other plants and wind up in the waterways due to runoff, which as they kill indiscriminately, affect aquatic plant life.) also various pesticide based plant alterations, which not only kill pest species (which have other food web implications) but also build up in the tissues (in some cases) of higher order animals, which poisons them for their own predators.

GMO crops are often created to self-kill seeds, which means farmers, which're suffering to begin with, have to invest heavily in the next year's crop of seed directly from the company. If it does cross pollinate, these monolithic corporations have no qualms against shutting down and suing farms who dared grow anything near to these frankenfields, because their crops wound up polluted by cross pollination, opening them to lawsuits for trying to 'steal' patented materials.

Cross pollination created herbicide resistant superweeds, in the same way that overuse of antibiotics create superbugs that're resistant or outright immune to the antibiotics.

Inserting brazil nut DNA into soybeans (for example) can create situations where someone with a tree nut allergy has a reaction to the soybeans (potentially life-threatening, at that) The repercussions of direct genetic editing and cross plant dna recombination is poorly understood at best. Previous cross pollenation practices, while slow, posed very little risk in that regard.

GMO production favors monoculture and agritech factories over small mixed culture farms, which monoculture leads to epic disease outbreaks (see irish potato famine, and the current banana blight) and rewards those who can afford to buy seeds from the GMO lab, every single year. (see above - self-terminating seeds and so-called theft of patented materials because of wind borne cross pollination to similar crops)

GMO production promotes monoculture, which over time will strip the nutrient balance of the soil and come to rely on chemical fertilizers, which further damage soil, leading to desertification and the death of soil microbial and invertebrate balance, as well as broadband pesticide spraying to take care of the insects that've developed immunity to the inserted pesticides in the plants. This leads to even more insect deaths. (and earthworms! won't someone think of the earthworms!!)

GMO crop leavings, because of their chemical mixtures, are often hard to compost, as they wind up killing the very insects and other biota that're needed to break down the wastes, so they wind up scraped off the fields and landfilled, striping away soil fertility with them. (all the carbon, nitrogen, etc, that's tied up the plant tissues that would otherwise return to the soil)

More desertification. Desertification soil holds less water, requiring /more/ water to be expended for use in watering, which carries more runoff downstream, and requires more water to be pulled in from upstream, which, without the binding properties of soil humus, the webs of mucusoal activity by invertebrates, (which are now dead) just accelerates further desertification, which is only slowed, as far as production is concerned, by the repeated application of higher and higher amounts of chemical fertilizers, which tend to wind up forming salt in the desertified soil, which means yet /more/ water is needed.

Now, I want you to note something - while I am personally sketchy about the science of GMO (which the numbers of expanded yield and safety are cherry picked using the same techniques big tobacco used 30 years ago to prove cigs were perfectly safe in moderation) and nervous, as someone with a mind towards science, of tampering with something we actually do not understand. I am not AGAINST GMO. I am against the way it's being recklessly and freely deployed by industries that have only profit to gain from it, and at whose expense? ours.

I can give you a concrete example of people not knowing what they're doing - In the mid 70's, US wheat was crossed with several varieties of goatgrass. to increase yield, to dwarf the height for uniformity and ease of mechanized harvesting. This wheat quickly becomes the dominant form grown in the US, both in winter and spring wheat varieties.

cut to 2003. I nearly die, because of the internal walls of my intestines being scoured nearly flat by my immune system attacking my intestinal villi, in response to gods only know what.

2006, after setting up a lab and testing on myself, I find I have the markers for celiac disease. I go get it checked, endoscope and immune assays - yep, I have antigliadin antibodies.

start digging through old research, in late 2007, I find the protein folding profile for gliadin, with a change in the mid 70's from the vastly less tolerated gamma folding pattern found in sear's goatgrass. and the highly reactive omega gliadin found in tausch's goatgrass. on analysis, celiac levels in italy have steadily risen since the late 70's, when america started exporting its high yield durum wheat to italy (most italian pasta you buy today is american wheat, typically origin : iowa)

forward to late 2008 - I've spent the last year researching various forms of wheat, and I've found einkorn - a ten thousand year old proto-wheat with 14 chromosomes (rather than modern wheat's 42) and the minimally toxic gliadin folding forms.

being the fool I am, I do some testing on myself, and find it non-reactive.

No one guessed that the introduction of the badly tolerated forms of gliadin from the goatgrass cross would affect otherwise healthy individuals.

But people playing with plants that had no business being crossed, and forcing it in a laboratory environment without considering the repercussions other than 'we can make more money' almost killed me.

So I'm going to ask a hard question. If it had killed me. If you knew, without a shadow of a doubt that it was the reason I was laying in a hole in the ground.. would you still be for it? Tell me outright that my life was worth some lab-boy's lack of caution in the name of profit.

That is what I'm railing against.

If GMO can be used responsibly, I see no issue with it. But it's literally a jurassic park situation out there currently, in the quote of 'Your scientists were so concerned with whether they COULD, they didn't stop to question whether they SHOULD.'

 

I guess if you value the life of insects over the life of humans, you have a point.

Meanwhile, isn't posting links fun?

How Genetically Modified Food (GMOs) Can Feed the World

Will gmos save the world? | GMO Answers

GMO scientists could save the world from hunger, if we let them

How GMOs can save civilization (and probably already have)

Feeding the World One Genetically Modified Tomato at a Time: A Scientific Perspective - Science in the News

GMOs: The Solution to World Hunger - The Independent

GMOs Help Combat World Hunger | The Borgen Project

Can GMOs be used to stop world hunger?

Scientists: Genetically modified foods save lives | ShareAmerica

 

Without insects, we die. Kill the pollinators, and we lose all those crops anyway. any stone fruit, watermelons, cantaloupes and other melons, etc. the wind-pollinated grasses will do just fine, but everything else is gonna be kaput. oh. things like clover, hay, etc, that we feed our cattle - that'll go bye bye. no pollinators mean no hops for beer. no agave for tequila.. but you know.. that's ok.. what do we need those damn bugs for anyway?

 

Fair enough. I guess you didn't. But you're not exactly championing them despite the fact that they feed billions of people.

If supporting a practice that feeds BILLIONS of people makes me an ass, you can eat the fattest part of said ass.

Prove it.

I've heard this argument. And it has dick to do with GMOs.

I don't dislike people for disagreeing with me. That's not who I am. I know this is the internet and people lose their shit over mundane things, but that's not me. I welcome your debate and welcome your opposing view.

My stance is this: GMOs have fed billions of people who may have starved otherwise. If anyone can convince me of why that is horrible, I'm all ears.

 

I'd rather not eat a slice of any human's ass. I know the garbage they eat.

aside from turning the world into a desert that loses the ability to support life wherever it's passed? yeah, fine, I got nothin.

I'm also guessing that you have no background in agriculture at all, and have never seen, firsthand, the damage it does.

but I'm going to ask you again.

If it had killed me. If you knew, without a shadow of a doubt that it was the reason I was laying in a hole in the ground.. would you still be for it? Tell me outright that my life was worth some lab-boy's lack of caution in the name of profit. Let's put a face on it. How many lives is it worth for the irresponsible way it's being thrown around?

 

Literally grew up on a farm.

If what had killed you? A corn plant yielding more ears of corn than a non-genetically modified corn plant? Um...well, if that killed you, I'd be astonished.

 

make the decision. Tell me that I don't have the right to live because it might have saved people at the cost of lining a monolithic company's pockets with profit, making the farmers dependant on them, screwing the environment sideways and ruining soil fertility for decades to come. It's alright, better people than you hate me for lesser reasons, but I want you to put a face on it. Tell me, directly, that I deserve to die for that little bit of progress, for the sake of convenience of an ONLY 10% greater yield over the period of 10 years and easier mechanized harvesting.

Tell me I deserve to die for that, neo.

It's forcing the earth to produce overcapacity. it's like taking a cow, and forcing it through an industrial milking program, to discard it at the end of the year when it dries up and dies.

only we've only got the one planet, and we don't know what we're doing, and damn sure can't get to another one to screw up.

 

Whoa there, cowboy.

Is your beef with GMOs or corporations?

Science and capitalism are two different things.

 

If you 'welcomed my opposing view' you'd have read about my dealing with celiac, and the changes to american wheat that triggered it (for me, at least)

that your'e asking what I'm talking about proves that you didn't read anything. Again - reading comprehension fail. And again, reading comprehension fail where you wrongly assumed that I'm actually AGAINST gmo.

I have stated, time and again, I am against the irresponsible use of them. In fact against any advancement or technology that has the potential to turn the planet into an uninhabitable dust bowl.

 

Neo, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you just stopped reading, because you're smarter than to have missed the stated point a half dozen times. You want to know what I'm mad about? read. reread. rereread. If you welcome opposing points of view, then you lose nothing.

But it seems obvious to me, that if you didnt' simply stop reading, then your'e just defending the position for the sheer sake of it, and I'm wasting my time trying to talk sense.

 

my 'beef' is with the irresponsible use of technology, the waste of forcing barely researched and possibly toxic (to humans, and guaranteed to the food web at whole) frankencrops when we already produce enough food, and just need to get it distributed, against the interception of humanitarian efforts which 'would' feed everyone, my beef is with the apologists who defend monsanto's greenwashing by claiming 'billions' of people saved from starvation while profiting off the backs of people who have the least, which, if that was true, my question is this.

If GMO has accomplished so much in /the real world/ (which you can toss out all the statistics you want, the reality of the situation is the proof) - why is anyone, anywhere, hungry? Why are children starving? why are 1 out of every 6 people in the united states facing food insecurity at best and starvation at worst, despite THIS country throwing away 150,000 TONS of food a day? (for a caloric breakdown, that's a full third of the recommend calories for every man, woman and child in this country. per. day.)

Surely GMO cures that, right? it couldn't be a problem that we're a society of wasteful pigs that think nothing of conserving and wise resource management of what we have.

how about we stop forcing the earth to produce more and do more with what we have?

 

You haven't even made a half dozen posts.

Again, I'll restate my stance: GMOs are good because they have saved billions of lives. If anyone can convince me that saving billions of lives is bad, again, I'm all ears. I keep waiting for the rebuttal, but it's not happening.

And, yes, when I was 13 my father quit being a cop and realized his life long dream of becoming a dairy farmer. I spend more summers pulling teat than you have. In my high school and college summers, I was in charge of the herd of cattle. I milked them. The object was to get the most milk out of them as possible. Why? Because yielding the most food out of an agricultural assent is the point of agriculture. I used to milk cows while blasting punk rock. My father hated it, but he couldn't argue with the results.

And the extra milk I squeezed out of those cows fed people. So, yeah, I actually do understand agriculture and will debate you all day long on the raising of dairy cattle.

 

and if you can read - I don't have beef with the idea of gmo itself. but with how it's applied.

and I stated it multiple times in my posts. did I use a bit of hyperbole? sure, so are you with your 'billions' of people saved, and your 'pulling more teat than I have' - you don't know how I spent my youth, and honestly your completely full of yourself attitude is one of the things that I'm beginning to take offense at. You ask questions, and then ignore or don't even bother to read the answers.

god damn, since you've gotten married, you've become such an insufferable pain in the ass for anyone to talk to.

alright, fine, I'll put it in these terms - yes, saving billions of people (to use your vastly over-scaled example) can be a good thing.

yes, it may save a billion lives tomorrow. at the cost of being unsustainable (with the way it's currently being used, which is an exclusively profit driven framework) and killing ten billion next week. but they're not our problem, huh?

what happens when you have one cow, and you force it to produce the milk of 6?
how long will that keep up before the cow dies?