kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

Peter Turchin explains the social-economic roots of UK and US crisis by violation of the existing social contract by rise of neoliberalism. This is pretty much what happened... but it's only half of the picture.

http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-structural-demographic-roots-of-the-uk-crisis/

"Backsliding:Democratic Regress in theContemporary World", Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman

https://www.cambridge.org/files/4616/1281/1201/backsliding_appendix_corrected_feb2021-1.pdf

The reason why Homo sapiens chooses to believe random influencers and celebrities rather than scientists are wired in our brains but with a bit of training this can be fixed.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180709-our-ability-to-stand-up-to-authority-comes-down-to-the-brain

@vfrmedia

I guess that was just regular crowdsourced OSINT - in such case there's a massive wave of proud shares on social media in the origin country and someone eventually recognizes the hero.

"In our world, instead of helping, people make videos of everything. I don't understand it"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56045561

@copyme @cjd

Patents are a popular Monsanto scare, which ignores the fact that patents 1) aren't global, 2) GMO-related patentes applied to very specific techniques used in producing new breeds, 3) most of Monsanto patents expired back in 2000, 4) traditional breeds are protected by IP laws too, 5) nothing prevents you from releasing your GMO seeds into public domain, just as Golden Rice did

@cjd

This "slow and safe" is just another fallacy. Modern plant breeds, from foods to decorative flowers, are not made by decades of slow Mendel-like selection. They are produced by mutation breeding:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_breeding

Most cannabis varieties in sale today were also produced using radiation or chemical mutagenesis.

You can't imagine a more aggressive method of breeding than radiation or chemical mutagens, yet it's been around for almost a century now.

@cjd

This is precisely why I recommended "Whole Earth Discipline" in the very beginning, as it discusses all these misconceptions and fallacies in great detail, with solid scientific base, as anything else in the book. Any further discussion can be more efficiently replacing by you just scanning through chapters 5-6 of the book.

@cjd

> Now problem with GMO crops

No, the problem with GMO crops is people's lack of understanding how genetics works. All this "viral growth" bullshit was completely invented by the likes of Greenpeace and has zero scientific base.

Any domesticated crops, including transgenic, are extremely sensitive and don't survive without cultivation, specifically because they are modified for specific traits *we* need, but not the plants.

It's the weeds who are evolution survivors.

@cjd

And people have done that *forever,* literally since the beginning of domestication of animals and crops.

All of them were genetically modified using various techniques. None of the fruits or vegetables you buy in store today or plant yourself are actually found in the wild.

Without thousands of years of genetic modification, we'd be still eating worms and leaves, with infant mortality of 30% and life expectancy of 30 years, rather than writing code.

@cjd

> we need a centrally planned top-down

Your personal straw-man? Who said anything about "centrally planned"?

Farmers in India have 60% of their crops eaten by pest and have to flood it with pesticides to even collect something.

They ask smart guy on local uni to come up with a pest-resistant crop.

The university does it, everyone is happy.

Oh, apart from Greenpeace who prefers (sitting in their A/C office in NY) to starve, as "there's generally too many people".

@cjd Prefer a bioRxiv preprint? Here you go, it's even linked from the blog:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.10.430488v1.full.pdf

@cjd

If you would like to actually learn something new, with solid scientific base, rather than just repeating FUD cliches invented at Greenpeace 30 years ago I recommend "Whole Earth Discipline" (2010) by Stewart Brand

https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=3816FB871D4DF90AC879E582BAEE07AF

@cjd

1) There's no Monsanto anymore

2) There's dozens of transgenic plants in farming, developed by public universities, for example in India

https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/agri-business/after-htbt-cotton-maharashtra-farmers-plan-to-plant-genetically-modified-brinjal-soyabean/article32093717.ece

3) There's tons of research that transgenic plants have much higher yield and *reduce* pesticide usage by 90%

4) Therefore reductio ad monsantum in 2021 is just childish 🤷