this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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While companies are bad, that doesn't automatically make things a company produces bad even if the company is trying to price-gouge or otherwise make the most profit out of it. You can oppose the latter while not pushing bullshit about the former.
In this regard, I'm referring to things that people generally try to push anti-science views on and use "company bad" as their purposefully bad argument to conflate the two things.
So, medicine and pharmaceuticals are not bad, even if the companies are bad.
Same goes with vaccines, obviously.
Biotech crops are not bad (and people really need to learn about how all crop cultivars have patents, including heirloom and organic cultivars).
Haha, if I held this stance, I would literally die. Insulin companies suck entire bags of dick, but uh... yeah, I have no choice.
Don't even get me started on the people who claim those with diabetes or asthma can get better with willpower and shouldn't be taking medicine.
Luckily, I grew out of my exercise-induced asthma, but when I was a teen, I lost count of the amount of people who asked why I didn't just power through without my inhaler. Like, bro, my lungs are on fire and I might die, you want me flirt with death just to see if my lungs can make it?
Invisible disabilities suck. People just underestimate stuff like that all the time. "It's just like a bad cough, isn't it?"
No, it flipping isn't.
I'm assuming US, is that correct? If so, wouldn't it be cheaper to move to Europe?
As long as I'm employed and insured, insulin costs me at most $35 per month. If not, yes, living in pretty much any other developed country would be cheaper, health-wise.
It's pretty well established that GMOs ultimately cause a measurable and significant loss of biodiversity...which is bad for many reasons. I think in this case the companies and the product are both bad.
I've got no complaints with your other arguments, though.
They don't inherently do so. Unless you have some biological claim to that effect?
The only reason they encourage monocropping is because the seeds are just that much better than the alternatives, so farmers are less likely to want to grow other options. A similar effect happened when F1 hybrid seeds were introduced, leading to the Green Revolution.
In that regard, having a broader variety of GMO cultivars with many kinds of crops would help diversify farmer usage.
Cultivars are clonal and biotech crops encourage monocropping, which both create problems with ecosystem health, disease and climate resilience, and soil degradation.
Good and useful crops encourage monocropping because why would farmers want to grow inferior options that will produce less overall and be less desired by consumers?
So monocropping is the natural result of consumer demand and the agricultural improvement of seeds.
That doesn't make monocropping not a problem, but it doesn't mean purposefully using worse seeds is the solution.
Purposefully using “worse” (different) seed is a solution as crop rotation, cover crops, and allowing land to go fallow helps with soil health (and reduced erosion and runoff and waterway pollution…)
Maximizing yields through subsidized monocropping and biotech seeds is unsustainable resource extraction.
A lot of consumer’s buying habits for products with inelastic demand is driven by cost. If companies weren’t driven by ever increasing profits then there might be more of an incentive to offer a wider variety of crops to consumers. Certain crops are already subsidized by the government to make it profitable for farmers. If other crops were subsidized then perhaps farmers would be more encouraged to grow them and if people see these at normal prices they might also be more interested in buying them. Of course, this would rely on multiple parts of farming being overhauled. For example, there’s a lot of cost sinks, one I can think of is the locked down maintenance of farming equipment (once again driven by the need for increasing profits via fiduciary duty). Eliminating these and other overheads would not only lead to more cost efficient farming, but also cheaper crops and increased variety offered to consumers.
Crop types are subsidized, like corn in the midwest, but that doesn't have any special connection to biotech seeds. Outside of you're more likely to get research done on and biotech seeds made for the more popular crop types than others.
But also it's so fucking dumb when people say 'some people are against GMO for bad reasons so I'll fight against them and say all GMO is great' because the theory 'make better crops' is good but better for who and in what way? Better in that they can withstand more patented Monsanto weedkiller? Most people who support GMO have no idea that the genetic changes being made are often just to allow farmers to use more pesticides which then run off into water tables and pollute everything...
There are other reasons to be against certain implementations of them too, in Africa they're making it impossible for traditional farming methods meaning the giant corporations are just taking over everything.
No one wants a nuanced opinion anymore they want to hate the other side for being dumb and to defeat them at all costs