@RickiTarr GMOs. All the things people think they hate about GMOs are things they actually hate about capitalism and monopoly power. GMOs in the hands of small communities and collectives would be an unbridled good that would help preserve diverse and heritage crop strains, reduce dependence on pesticides and herbicides, reduce water use, and feed more people in the face of climate change.
@mentallyalex@MisuseCase@RickiTarr bananas are a particularly good example, given that the only breed we are eating isn't capable of sexual reproduction anymore given that we breed away all the seeds and as such all our bananas are clones. Genetical modification really is our only chance to adapt bananas.
@mxk@mentallyalex@RickiTarr And because of extreme weather last year much of the world’s banana crop was damaged/lost! We are going to have to get used to heavily modified bananas and/or very different bananas.
@MisuseCase@mentallyalex@RickiTarr jup. Additionally the current banana breed (Cavendish) is vulnerable to a fungal infection and we already lost the previous breed Gros Michel the same way.
@mentallyalex@MisuseCase@RickiTarr It doesn't do much good to point out that WE are GMOs, our genome contains chunks of viral DNA - & don't get me started on mitochondria.
@MisuseCase Yes, when I really started learning about this, I was surprised by how much unnecessary fear has been placed into it, and I do understand why, but we've been manipulating crops for better yields for most of human history. With any technological leap, there will be people who will use it in a bad way and people who will use it in a good one, technology in and of itself is neutral.
@RickiTarr One example of how reactionary fear of GMOs really harms people is the fight against Golden Rice, which was developed not by some megacorp like Monsanto or what have you but a group of scientists trying to address vitamin A deficiency and malnutrition in the poorest parts of the world which kills hundreds of thousands of people (mostly children) every year.
@MisuseCase I think we have lived long enough in a "modern" society that we've lost how things used to be, so we convince ourselves we don't need things like Modern Agriculture or Modern Medicine. If you do any research on how things used to be, you'll get thankful very quickly.
@RickiTarr There’s leftist/environmentalist people who think it would be a great idea to return to small low-tech agrarian living and I’m like, do you know what rates of malnutrition and child mortality would be if you did that? Do you know how much you depend on steady and abundant energy supplies for clean water and sanitation? What’s your plan for insulin-dependent people in all of this, etc.
@MisuseCase Yeah that gets Eugenicsy really fast! If everyone is fine with a 50% infant mortality rate, and anyone who needs modern medical care dying horribly, then I don't want to live here.
@MisuseCase@RickiTarr
As an insulin dependent wheelchair user with Breast Cancer I'd be in trouble without a car, insulin, my other medicines, power wheelchair and online shopping & everything that requires. And as a result so would my disabled young adult kids who can't live independently.
GMOs are a great example. Literally billions of lives owe their existence to them. Yes that's powerful, yes there's big potential for mistakes, but that's true of all powerful stuff.
@MisuseCase@RickiTarr
The anti-GMO lies go hand in hand with the anti-vaccine lies; there's a zillion housewives out there convinced they need to protect their kids fome "frankenfoods."
@RickiTarr The need for abortion in so many nuanced circumstances, that it should never be anyone's business except for the pregnant person, their doctor and any support person they choose.
For me personally, learning what partial birth abortion was actually for, really changed my thoughts. This isn't some lazy woman who waited too long, this is a family having the worst day of their life.
No actually, it infers that is why other women get abortions later. You know not “families.” All those loose, lazy women. . . And all the other stupid abortion tropes women should not perpetuate
@LALegault@cainmark@aethervision If you had asked before you overreacted, then I would have explained that this was the reason I was given as a child as to why women would get a partial birth abortion, I would never assume why a woman would get an abortion, it's not my fucking business, because it's not my body. I used families because the people I've talked to that have gotten them were families trying to desperately have a child, obviously it could be a different case.
@RickiTarr The name gives a certain impression if you don't think beyond that. I can't imagine any woman carrying a child to term and then doing a 360˚ because she just changed her mind, but that seems to be the narrative that's pushed by and to the anti-choice crowd. The women who believe that are worse than the men, imo.
@RickiTarr Yep. I went to Catholic school and they told us all abortion is murder even before we knew how babies were made. But they told us a lot of things that didn't seem plausible so I was a silent skeptic even then. It seems even worse now though.
@RickiTarr thank you Ricki for sparking this marvelous thread. I went away and asked Pi about partial birth abortion, causality versus correlation and the key features of critical thinking. Followed a number of interesting commentators and all before breakfast.
In my near-fundamentalist days at a conservative Christian university, I wrote a paper "proving" (🙄) that abortion was unethical and evil unless the mother's life was at stake. I am now so utterly mortified over having written that.
As of a few years ago, my dad was still using it in sermons. ☹️🫣
@RickiTarr WWI was not fought because some aristocrat got killed but because anarchists were winning hearts and minds worldwide, thus rendering nation-states and capitalism obsolete, they culled a whole generation and expunged our history.
@samanthagroves@RickiTarr People think Spain in the 1930s was some weird haven of unusual unique anarchism. In reality it was just an example of a regular southern European syndicalist and anarchist movement that hadn't been destroyed by the slaughter of ww1.
If people truly understood the prevalence of fake accts & their activity on major soc. media platforms, they'd understand a couple of important things:
-The numbers mean nothing (follower counts, engagement, etc.). MSM really needs to understand this.
-This is the grift. The grotesquely false & inflated #'s are the drug major platforms used to addict people & dupe advertisers.
FWIW: I spent years--up to 100 hrs/wk--tracking fake networks & how platforms respond--or not--to them
@VirginiaMurr Just from my limited personal experience that is true. I have a quarter of the followers here, but probably double or triple the engagement. The numbers don't actually mean what people think they do.
@RickiTarr I think if folks dug into their genealogical history (submit their DNA, build their tree, do the research) They might find things out about their family and heritage that completely changes what they thought they knew about themselves and where they are from. The tech and records collections are getting better and we can search further back to determine more than people realize.
@RickiTarr@mina It certainly changed my perspective learning about the history of my family learning one part was colonised and the other colonisers. Some both sides of the witch trials. Learning from whence the generational trauma came. We are complicated people. All of us.
I also think, history and personal history matters, but I still fail to see, what a DNA analysis can do to change one's own perspective onto it.
I am already a member of the people which has caused the most terrible crimes in recent history. Would it change my perspective if I knew that I had also, say Jewish or Romani, ancestors? I don't think so.
@mina@RickiTarr To further add I found a genetic history of specific skeletal and muscle disease on a specific line of my family tree which helps future generations understand and note for their health histories.
@mina@pooblemoo@RickiTarr Not the guy you asked, but a lot of people are very hung up on blood purity, and doing this they'd quickly find out how much that does not exist.
On the other hand there's a reason I didn't do the tests, though it bugs me and I want to, and it's that the data goes straight to every company ever to do whatever they want with it and it is unlikely to be good.
@statsguy@RickiTarr Came here to say this. I was so angry when I found out about Long COVID, which my gov't actively hid from us, and seeing mass death and disability normalized over the past couple years has been soul-destroying.
I think there are people who believe "tapping out" of a situation to improve yourself, even if momentarily, is a weakness or failure.
Men (not all) are taught to keep their emotions in check, stay away from nail salons and therapy, and if you express your wants, desires and needs you are probably just not as awesome as everyone else.
Women (not all) are taught to minimize their own experience and needs to put others ahead of them always. It's damaging and harmful to them and society.
@mentallyalex@LaurenIpsum@RickiTarr Holy moly, that sounds fantastic. I cook, bake, and also handle a lot of old, gross glassware (for which I wear tattooist’s disposable gloves) and my hands are a sight.
@mentallyalex@RickiTarr Okay, I definitely want to try this. Even though I have soft toddler hands. And a manicurist once asked if I had a job because they were so soft. (My MIL told them that "Daddy won't let her.")
@mentallyalex@LaurenIpsum@RickiTarr
As a once dating female, I appreciated a man with clean trimmed finger nails because let's face it ... he's going to put the fingers where?!!
They better be damned clean and trimmed!!
@mentallyalex@RickiTarr I just hate that a lot of “self-care” is a tool of consumerism. I don’t want to go sit in a salon for an hour and spend $20-$50 on fake fingernails and call it self-care.
Most self-care suggested to women involves spending ridiculous amount of money on temporary enhancements for beauty standards.
@RickiTarr IMHO most ppl today take democracy & their freedoms for granted. Too many are obsessed w/identity, anti-imperialism, decolonization, etc..in a misguided pursuit of justice, yet lack critical thinking skills & perspective.
Changing minds probably requires vast systemic reforms of influences & incentives across the board… ie educational, media & govt institutions, by going back to basics of teaching #civics#history#CriticalThinking & tackling dark & foreign money ie #corruption.
Specifically, I want people to realize that social norms have a lot more power than we give them credit for. We claim to have free will, but we can (and often do!) go through an entire day where every action we take is guided or demanded by a social norm.
@TeacherGriff@RickiTarr that's why I think autistic people are of such great value to society. They're existence questions social norms. We can help liberate ND world from that corset.
@RickiTarr@TeacherGriff
yes. social norms create masks. That's how they work. But there sure are a ton of people that adhere to them to a far far greater extent than I do and from whom they require less masking than what I would have to do.
@RickiTarr student loan forgiveness. None of us have to pay in to make up for student loan forgiveness. None of us would be paying for other peoples education. Most of those loans have been paid in full multiple times over, but not really because of capitalized interest every time a forbearance or deferment was used.
Wood burning stoves and the harmful particulates those that use them bring into not just their own homes, but the entire surrounding area.
This is particularly bad In affluent urban areas, where homes are tightly packed together but also frustratingly completely avoidable because most users have another primary source of heat, they just like the ‘ambiance’ of a stove.
@RickiTarr How much ‘luck’ influences any outcome, specifically how it changes trajectories of people’s lives. Maybe people know it, but afraid to admit it all the time, because otherwise it’s bleak and depressing
I went through one, as a result of an inoperable brain tumor diagnosed in utero for one of my sons. The whole process is fucking horrific. And that was also before Obamacare, so any attempt to go full term and save his life would have been futile (inoperable probably still would have been inoperable) while potentially killing me (at the time leaving two little kids without a mom) and bankrupting the family.
Even as it was we had to travel out of state for a multiple day procedure with two kids under 5. My heart goes out to the women whose lives are being ended or ruined for the sake of political wedge issues.
@RickiTarr Autism, as it is always pathologised as a deficit and a tragedy, and autistic people are perceived as incapable and lacking no matter how much evidence points to the contrary. So I suppose the question rather depends on someone's commitment to the truth value of a claim. Receiving information isn't enough, and it goes beyond misunderstanding, so perhaps this isn't a terrific example.
@samueljohnson@RickiTarr Reading this, trackers use a lot of small stuff to identify somebody, and over time this adds up. And most blockers try to block the trackers completely, but stuff gets through, and that stuff will be correct. Why aren't there blockers that allow everything through, but mess with the data? Over time these could make whole databases unusable?
Personally, I believe regulation is a better idea. We're in a conflict between society and billionaire oligarchs who can too often buy the legislation (or lack of legislation) and the media they want. In the EU we have made some progress with GDPR in terms of privacy rights but enforcement is lagging still.
@samueljohnson@RickiTarr But until regulation is worldwide, it will be very hard to get rid of data that might be stored who knows where. Messing with it on the other hand should not be illegal if the collection of it already is. I remember there was some addon probably for Firefox that would make it look like you clicked every ad on a page? Stuff like that. Throw random browsing data. Throw random searches. Possibly mess with the data that is collected by lying about stuff? Enough people do this and they can no longer know what's real and what is not, and the database will lose value.
@sahqon@RickiTarr Regulation doesn't need to be completely global. Within geopolitical blocks companies will have to abide by the rules, if they exist and, more importantly, are enforced.
As you've seen, someone anticipated your suggestion. We could play these games forever. Like most in the EU, I prefer establishment of and enforcement of rights.
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