Genetic modification of plants was sold to you with the argument that it was going to save Indian kids from going blind by making rice yellow. Well, it’s 2024 now, the yellow rice is nowhere to be seen. There’s a reason for that. If you introduce the genes to make beta carotene (which turns into vitamin A) into rice, you reduce the yield of the plant. The amount of beta carotene the plant manages to produce in turn is very little.
The people with kids going blind are so poor, they don’t own any land to grow the rice anyway. So you’re forced to get people who just want to sell rice to start growing ugly yellow rice with reduced yields, in hopes that some of it is going to be bought by parents whose kid is at risk of severe vitamin A deficiency. It was a completely retarded idea, invented by nerds in labs and NGOs funded by billionaires who have no connection to the real world. They’ve been working on it for decades and it went nowhere.
It was always meant as a wedge issue, a trojan horse. Because if they could get this passed, they could say “oh these science-hating hippie moms are causing kids to go blind”. But in the end it didn’t matter, because public opposition to GMOs just died in general, as the running red line of the 21st century is a callous lack of respect for nature. So now we get this:
I FUCKING LOVE GLOW IN THE DARK PLANTS! It’s amazing how fast we went from “well this may be the only real practical option we have to stop Indian kids from going blind” to “look at what we did to this plant, cool huh”!
They’ve been experimenting with glow in the dark genes for decades now, recently they discovered a version of these genes in a mushroom that also works well in plants, unlike the other glow in the dark genes. So they introduced four of these genes into the plants, resulting in glow in the dark plants.
There are issues that have a very high soyjack density, attracting 110 IQ prematurely balding midwits who “believe in science”. Nuclear energy is one, vaccines are another. But the worst one has to be genetic manipulation of plants. Because at least with nuclear energy and vaccines, the lack of respect towards nature is motivated by legitimate fears: You don’t want to die and you don’t want the lights to go out. Fine. But genetic modification is just an undisguised desire to control nature.
I don’t know why people need to have this explained to them, but just because you desire something, doesn’t make it justified. If you see a really gorgeous woman walking by you might desire to grab her bum, but you’re supposed to respect other people’s bodily integrity. Similarly, you’re supposed to have some basic respect for the integrity of non-human entities: Animals, plants, as well as abstract categories, like ant colonies, rivers and ecosystems.
The 110 IQ prematurely balding midwits will argue that “genetic modification is just accelerated plant breeding”. This is not true, because with plant breeding you’re not introducing genes from other organisms into an organism that could never evolve the gene on its own. The other one they enjoy bringing up is “well there’s no evidence these plants are dangerous for your health”.
But these are strawman arguments. The real problem is very simple: When you engage in unprecedented experiments, on organisms capable of replicating themselves, you set yourself up for risks that are difficult if not impossible to anticipate. So far humanity just seems to insist on denying it went wrong, every time it goes wrong.
But let me give you a very simple example. You take a crop like maize, you introduce a particular gene into the maize that makes it produce an insecticidal protein, that’s safe for humans. Now you have to use less pesticides! Isn’t GMO great?
If you have a 110 IQ, that’s where the question ends and you now start rambling about “Karens” and “anti-science Facebook moms”. If you have a brain complex enough to justify the use of the two football fields of land area we have to use to feed you, you’ll think a little further and you would ask yourself: “Alright, so this plant must have a reproductive advantage over the non-genetically modified variant right, since it kills the insects that try to eat it? What are the risks of that?”
Well I’m GLAD you asked. Because the maize can reproduce itself, which means it can reproduce with its wild relatives, if humans are dumb enough to grow the modified plants near their wild relatives (spoiler: we’re dumb enough). What happens then, is that these BT genes start turning up in wild maize.
So now you have wild maize, that’s killing butterflies, because it has a gene taken from bacteria, to produce its own insecticide. So you’re killing wild insects that pose no harm to our crops. But that’s not the big problem. The big problem is that whenever some new pest emerges that eats our crop, we humans have to start looking for wild relatives of our crop that are highly genetically diverse. We look among those plants for a handful that happen to be resistant to whatever new pest we’re dealing with.
That’s what we did with wheat, to protect our crops from stemrust: We traveled the world in search of local people growing old genetically different versions of wheat that happened to be resistant to this fungus. This worked, but the stemrust didn’t go away, so now we need even more resistant genes. So what we recently did, is that we crossed tall wheatgrass with wheat, to get the resistant genes from wheatgrass.
In other words, you need biodiversity. But now tell me: What do you think happens, when a small handful of wild maize plants suddenly have a whole new gene, that makes them resistant to the other insects that eat them? They now have a huge genetic advantage over the other wild maize plants, so they start replacing them, causing you to lose the wild genetic diversity that you need in case some new pathogen shows up that kills your maize.
This was always a hypothetical risk with GMO crops, something “hippies” warned about, but then it simply happened. These nerds with PhDs destroyed our genetic reservoirs. So yes, when people start spreading genetically modified Petunias for fun and ($$$), I get annoyed.
You introduce four genes into these petunias, you sell them to people and say “have fun, knock yourselves out”! But you don’t know shit. These genes come from mushrooms. What happens if these petunias cross with wild petunias? Do you know? Are these genes harmful to insects that naturally prey on petunias?
Are these genes stable? Do they continue mutating when you reproduce these plants? What positions on the fitness landscape do these genes end up in, that would be impossible for these plants to evolve towards on their own, without your experiment? You don’t know.
Petunias are pollinated by insects. Many insects are drawn at night to light. I could imagine, that if these plants grew in the wild, insects would prefer pollinating these Petunias, over normal Petunias. So that would give these Petunias a genetic advantage over wild Petunias.
You need one moron to grow these plants somewhere in South America, have the plants reproduce with wild petunias and in a few decades, you may have destroyed the wild genetic diversity of these plants, because the petunias that don’t have these genes can’t compete with the ones that do.
Heck, we might as well ask: Can other wild plant species pollinated by insects at night compete with a plant that glows in the dark thanks to a bunch of mushroom genes? Do you know? Did you test for any of these risks?
Maybe these plants don’t get preferentially pollinated by insects. But right now the whole plant glows. Give it a few years, some spontaneous mutations to promoter sequences happen and you may have plants that only have glowing flowers. Is there still no advantage?
Maybe the aphids that eat these plants begin to glow in the dark themselves, so animals that hunt these aphids can recognize them more easily. So now you have a plant that has a new way of protecting itself against insect predation. Is there a reproductive advantage?
What you did is the equivalent of going back 2000 years into the past and giving gunpowder to a random Germanic tribe. You don’t know how you changed things, how you disturbed the natural balance of power between competing forms of organization.
I’m not some sort of dude who thinks Klaus Schwab wants to kill us all. I’m a guy who looks at humans drunk on power, who use technology to cause unprecedented changes in complex systems that they don’t comprehend.
The people who are selling these plants don’t comprehend what they did. If they tell you they know what the risks are, they’re lying. We can only guess. The way to prevent disasters that “nobody could have anticipated” is by having some basic respect for nature. That means not selling glow in the dark plants to prematurely balding 110IQ Redditors.
to add insult to injury, the farmers who grow non-GMO corn next to fields of GMO corn end up sued by Monsanto because they are “infringing on patents” due to cross pollination.
ngl though, the glow in the dark petunias are pretty sweet.
“you set yourself up for risks that are difficult if not impossible to anticipate.”
Reminds me of Chesterton’s fence, thinking we can push aside eons of accumulated process with really knowing how it works to begin with and what the consequences may be, even when you can clearly see consequences!
If it is possible to make big money from something, they always turn a blind eye to the risks. If something can go wrong decades into the future, the critics don’t stand a chance.
It is like enter and tinker with an intricate Swiss watch. If you don’t know exactly what you’re doing and understand the big picture you destroy everything.
Yes, I have the upmost respect for master Swiss, German and Japanese watchmakers. And of all the various different complications found in mechanical watches, the “minute repeater” is the most difficult to assemble. Only watchmakers with decades of experience are capable of assembling such a movement. And when combined with two of the other most difficult to assemble complications (tourbillon and perpetual calendar), as is the case in this model, it makes it even more impressive:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgKy2T1erYs
(skip to 6:00, then watch until the end. Or ideally, treat yourself by watching the entire video)
To use a car analogy; if Rolex is Mercedes, Patek Philippe is Rolls Royce. It really doesn’t get any better than this. That model is priced at approximately $1 million. Interestingly, Patek Philippe is one of the very few remaining manufacturers that is still independent and family owned. Most of the other luxury brands have been taken over by the mega conglomerates (Swatch, Richemont, LVMH etc.).
What is it with prematurely balding types, especially the bald with beards type. Dealt with a real fine specimen yesterday, what a twat. Really,like its not MY fault your hair migrated.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w7ZojwwcocA
For a long time, man has lived under the illusion that his possibilities are endless and that only his imagination sets limits to what he can achieve. Most people also believe that the resources at our disposal are unlimited, as long as we do not put any barriers to the market and human innovation. The predatory exploitation of nature and its resources has been able to continue without noticeable consequences for those who do not want to see these. Humanity is facing a brutal awakening and will be forced to learn that everything has limits and that our actions have consequences. We are forced to live within the limits of the planet and to respect nature. If we do not manage this and it is not certain that we will, we will soon see what happens.
Do you still agree with everything you’ve said here? (Not just curing genetic disease, but also making humans more intelligent and beautiful, etc)
https://www.rintrah.nl/the-case-for-genetic-augmentation-of-humans/
Honestly, not really. I no longer think we should pursue life extension, because there’s no path left that doesn’t end in the collapse of civilization. If you manage to avoid dying of old age thanks to genetic enhancement, you’ll just die in the global famines.
But genetically engineering your own body to avoid dying or to become more intelligent is still different from engineering another organism, for your own amusement.
That’s the point I raised here too. They started out saying “we need to do this for the kids in India who grow blind”, but now “it’s fun and looks cool” is a sufficient argument apparently.
Honestly, I no longer believe in encouraging intelligence anymore either. There is now such massive suffering inevitably ahead that we have to discourage intelligent people from reproducing.
I’d rather see dysgenics than eugenics now.
I think the general arguments still make sense, but the world has just changed.
Today we have a neurovirulent SARS virus spreading around the world and constantly reinfecting everyone, that causes children to be born with brain damage.
We also seem to have no chance left of ending global warming and associated ecological overshoot. Beyond Meat, Impossible Burger, all this stuff was brought onto the market. People don’t want it, these companies approach bankruptcy. People know the damage associated with flying around the world, but nobody really cares. The EU suggests eating less meat and using less pesticides, farmers riot and burn shit down until they drop their plans.
So we’re going to die. It is as it is. Best thing to do now is to just avoid bringing children into the world.
Our doom will be a lesson for future generations. It’s not such a bad thing honestly. What’s bad is that we were stupid and hubristic enough to get to this point in the first-place. When everything collapses, it will be a mercy. One burst of a rifle to end the suffering of a demented eighty year old in constant pain that still has to slave away at McDonald’s.
I discussed a similar issue 1.5 years ago:
https://www.igor-chudov.com/p/genetic-lab-designed-carbon-capture
Thus, the WEF plan goes, these GM plants would grow in former pastures, grow polymer roots, and die every year, BUT THE ROOTS WILL NOT DECOMPOSE. Since the roots do not decompose, the soil will gradually become firmly permeated by a thickening tangle of never-disappearing polymer roots. Those roots would hold CO2 forever.
What if, like Sars-Cov-2, these soil-clogging, never-rotting plants escape and outcompete wild plants everywhere else? Before you dismiss that, please realize that these plants have to outcompete natural pasture plants to take root in the former pastures.
Such uncontrolled occupation of a new ecosystem happened with rabbits in Australia, for example. The rabbits were brought in without much forethought and outcompeted other wild animals and became a threat to Australia’s ecosystem. Those rabbits also ate all plants they could eat, leaving barren soil, before dying off en masse after that but never relinquishing their ecosystem dominance. Thankfully, the Australian rabbits were not designed to never decompose.
You show try looking into the Australian bio warfare against rabbits. So interesting things to find.
Yes, they released a virus which reduced the rabbit population by 95%.
>What if, like Sars-Cov-2, these soil-clogging, never-rotting plants escape and outcompete wild plants everywhere else?
Yep. It’s insanity. They’re desperate for some sort of solution. But the only thing dumber is the habit of most people to deny we even have a problem.
SARS-CoV-2 will reduce the human population by 95% or so. Famine, epidemics, radiation from exploding nuclear power plants and dried up spent nuclear fuel pools and other man-made toxins will reduce the surviving 5% by another 95% or so. Still a world population of 20 million so reduce by another 5% and we are down to 1 million. That is probably the worlds post high tech civilization carrying capacity for hunter gatherers.
Only a theoretical scenario of what to expect.
This maybe happens on all planets in the universe where intelligent life arises that manage to build a high-tech civilization and is a possible solution to the Fermi paradox.
Reincarnation is sometimes talked about on this blog and the question is which souls will be reborn in this world. Maybe the soul migration takes place interplanetary and most people have to continue on another planet. Merging souls is another possibility. Souls split when the population increase and merge when it decrease.
Maybe we are all separate entities from which gods one and only consciousness manifests itself.
“Maybe we are all separate entities from which gods one and only consciousness manifests itself.”
I think that is the core of belief by Hindus.
But god’s own conciousness would be 100% pure and perfect, and any part of it too by extension.
But we see the seperated entities are mostly impure and imperfect.
And then you have to bring in a scapegoat (satan) to blame for the numerous impurities.
>I think that is the core of belief by Hindus.
>But god’s own conciousness would be 100% pure and perfect, and any part of it too by extension.
But we see the seperated entities are mostly impure and imperfect.
“Pure and imperfect” from your limited understanding as an instantiation of God’s manifold.
But totally fine from His larger perspective, of which we only have a glimmer of.
How do you know god’s larger perspective, apart from your own imagination and wishful thinking?
Almost everything we see around us stinks to high heaven of impurity and imperfection.
Unless you are saying that everything around us is perfectly fine.
> How do you know god’s larger perspective, apart from your own imagination and wishful thinking?
Drugs. Lots of drugs.
>Almost everything we see around us stinks to high heaven of impurity and imperfection.
Yes, everything we can see with the orbs we call our “eyes”.
The answers are (somewhat) within our grasp if we look within, but knowing how to direct the inner attention effectively requires some education and discipline. This is based on the idea that each of us has a spark of the divine within, and that the sensation that we are separate from God is just an illusion.
“All things are unequal thus everything is in harmony”
>Unless you are saying that everything around us is perfectly fine.
Depends on which perspective you are looking out from. Your own little individual egoic persoective? Then no, things are very very bad.
But from the controller of this world who uses our little individual lives as “experiments” to see “what if?” snd “what happens?” then yes, everything is going to plan.
Think of God as a scriptwriter, and all the rest of us as his fictional characters, then it all starts to make sense and the paradoxes are resolved.
“by having some basic respect for nature.”
We are in this monumental mess because of diregard for nature.
But people were and are very much in favour of all the nature destroying “science”.
Ask any low or middle or high status person on the street of any colour and 999 out of 1000 will be in favour of cruel experiments on animals to find pharmaceutical cures for diseases caused by nature destroying lifestyles.
Radagast, what is your opinion about experiments on animals?
“The EU suggests eating less meat and using less pesticides, farmers riot and burn shit down until they drop their plans.
So we’re going to die. It is as it is. Best thing to do now is to just avoid bringing children into the world.”
FFS get a grip and snap out of it, get a wife and children.
You know it’s possible you are COMPLETELY WRONG about what the world will look like in 50 years.
Massive demographic changes are baked in and not something I’d want, but I’m not so sure about the rest of the alleged doom. Life continues and we shall see.
In an otherwise smashing post, you yet again step on your dick:
>I don’t know why people need to have this explained to them, but just because you desire something, doesn’t make it justified.
Au contraire, there is no Morality Judge to stop them.
Just as there is no Morality Judge to stop you from killing them.
The fact you desire something is all the justification you need in this world, it seems.
>You don’t know how you changed things, how you disturbed the natural balance of power between competing forms of organization […] I’m a guy who looks at humans drunk on power, who use technology to cause unprecedented changes in complex systems that they don’t comprehend.
This is the story of human evolution across time and in multiple domains.
Do you still think of humans as qualitatively different from the dirt, the microbes, the worms, the insects, the rodents, the mammals, the primates?
Lol
Just give up on the idea that everyone van go vegan and this will prevent the collapse of civilization already.
Shalom = Fuck YOU.
Not everyone will go vegan, and this is why society will collapse. Keep your bussy close to home, when things collapse, the nazi vegans are coming for you. They might just decide to dress up as their anime waifus…
Shalom
I don’t know if I believe in collapse, but something like a steady decline seems inevitable. There are too many bubbles ready to burst, there’s too much debt, and too many people have gotten too rich for this ‘growth’ to keep on going. But I’m also optimistic: when you look at how poor the majority of people have gotten under this so-called growth, it seems likely that their lot will improve or at least not fall as much once the machine is no longer as powerful.
As for the theme of the post, I don’t like wokeness. I’ve tuned out of TV, news, and even the majority of online media because it insults my intelligence to consume it. The people involved clearly have no respect for their audience.
Finally:
Shalom motherfuckers, looks like the Holy Land is about to get a lot browner. Just remember that the Persians (Iranians) are Indo-Europeans too– no wonder they’re so anti-Zionist. Spiritual allies of the Low Status White Males.
And at least the Arabs make no apologies about eating meat and, especially, LAMB! I guess the only silver-lining of huge immigrant populations is that, if they’re the right type (mountain pastoralist societies), you see some decent spices and cuts of meat in supermarkets– not just endless rows of ramen, grains, and other peasant foods.
I’m not a LSWM, either. My ancestors were– very minor– bluebloods and landowners. RETVRN (to the pre-Victorian 19th century?). I don’t think this disqualifies me from populism, though: if anything, right-wing populism seems more of an alliance between working class folks and the super-rich owner class, like Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson.
The obsession with status is also counter-productive: doing real work is something to be proud of. We have too many people who think they are too high-status to get their hands dirty and too much neglect as a result.
In another post’s comment section I criticized what you said, and you asked why I come here if I think you’re wrong about everything. I replied that you’re not wrong on everything, in fact you’re often very insightful. This post here is the exact sort of thing I was talking about. 5/5
Thanks, I appreciate that.
Honestly if this is what you appreciate I may move more in this direction.
look at this list of grantees from scott alexander at slatestarcodex (big “rationalist”/”effective altruist”): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-results-2024
this is like ifl science to the maxx. WTF IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE THAT WANT TO ADD TARDIGRADE GENES TO HUMAN STEM CELL?