The final decision on the biotechnology debate at the Economist

After the total votes were added up in the big GMO debate, the Economist scores it 62% against biotechnology, 38% for biotechnology. They also explain that there was a huge turnout and that there was a lot of active campaigning for particular views.

The voting has shifted dramatically during this debate, starting out heavily in favour of the motion, swinging strongly in the other direction (seemingly in response to an organised campaign by anti-GM activists), and then swinging back towards the middle. But in the end the opponents of biotechnology—or, more precisely, the opponents of genetic modification in its current form—carried the day with 62% of the votes, against 38% for supporters of the motion.

So, one strike against genetically modified organisms, one big win for pharyngulation. These online polls are a terrible way to resolve debates, since all it takes is a few big sites charging in to advocate a view to greatly skew the results. The Economist seems to fail to grasp that concept even now, unfortunately.

What about these anti-GM activists? I pointed out one example. It turns out that another bunch of them were at Crazy Mike’s Sewer Pipe of Misinformation, where Mike Adams now gloats about his ‘victory’. He’s also got some wild conspiracy theories, and fascinating descriptions of you, fellow readers of Pharyngula.

Today’s “scientism” followers (the cult worshippers who call themselves “science bloggers”) don’t value life, knowledge or truth. For some astonishing reason, they pick the most evil side of every issue. On the issue of GMOs, for example, they automatically side with Monsanto and DuPont, calling for more biotech Frankenseed interventions that threaten the very future of life on our planet.

Well, I think if you actually look at the discussions that went on here, you find a lot of opposition to corporate abuse of technology; there were many people who thought biotech was fine, but Monsanto…not so benevolent. You also found people who opposed genetically modified organisms, and the vote from this side was not monolithic at all.

On the issue of Big Pharma and the mass-drugging of world citizens with patented synthetic chemicals, the science bloggers of course side with the drug companies! Big Pharma and the FDA can do no wrong in their eyes, and the solution to health is, they say, found in prescribing more chemicals to more people!

If these people were living back in the 1950’s, they would no doubt side with Big Tobacco, because the “science” at that time said cigarettes were actually good for you! The Journal of the American Medical Association, by the way, actually used to run full-page advertisements for cigarettes. And they were endorsed by doctors and scientists, too.

Actually, no, the science in the 1950s found cigarettes to be a serious risk factor. Tobacco companies funded biased research to argue otherwise, for the purpose of confusing legal and political interests. The scientific interests weren’t fooled.

Gee, no wonder they keep losing all the legitimate polls and surveys. Does anyone still believe that modern medicine is working? Does anyone really think that the answer to the problems facing human civilization is to be found in more chemicals, more genetic alterations, more playing God with nature and more corporate control over our food, medicine, genes and ideas? (The science bloggers, by the way, also support corporate ownership of human genes, 20% of which are right now patented by corporations and universities. This is an affront to natural law and a crime against humanity…)

Science bloggers, by the way, do not actually represent science. They worship a cult called “scientism” that pushes a corporate agenda which seeks to concentrate power in the hands of the few while denying food, freedom and health to the people.

I favor corporate ownership of human genes? Wow, you learn something new and wrong every time you read Crazy Mike.

I have staggered back from Mexico

So, yay, my plane arrived safely in Minneapolis last night at 1am, and then we had to drive to Morris for three hours, in the snow. Guess how much sleep I got last night? And now I have to scurry off to teach a class about something or other, I don’t know what. I’ve spent the last few hazy hours getting ready to teach.

You don’t really expect a new post here yet, do you? I haven’t even bothered with breakfast yet.

Later.

Quickies

I must catch a plane, but here are a few short notices I didn’t want to neglect.

  • Godless folk are trying to establish an atheist discussion site, and they need votes for approval. Help ’em out if you’d like.

  • Phylointelligence is a new site organizing essays to summarize and explain the evidence for evolution. Take a look!

  • Jeff Randall is an activist for secular humanism and skepticism who has fallen on hard times — his friends are fundraising to help him through a current crisis. Help if you can.

An ethical dilemma!

It’s hard not to crack a cheerful smile at this story, but do try to take it seriously. A coven of Westboro Baptist anti-gay kooks went off to protest outside a soldier’s funeral in Oklahoma, and returned to their car to find their tires slashed. When they drove into town on the flat tires anyway, to try and get them repaired, they were refused any help at all.

There’s a grim part of me that feels a kind of satisfaction at that, I’ll admit. But I think it was wrong.

Don’t harm the WBC cretins no matter how awfully they prance. Do not vandalize their possessions. Don’t even threaten them. Even if they weren’t a lawsuit-happy group of parasites, they have a right to free speech and can protest all they want. This seems clear to me, with no ambiguity at all; and if I witnessed someone trying to slash the tires on a car with a “god hates fags” bumper-sticker, I’d try to stop them and alert the police. Somebody crossed the line in Oklahoma when they did property damage, even if it was to an odious gang of idiots.

I’m torn on the refusal to help them afterwards, though. If I were a tire salesman, and Fred Phelps came through the door and asked to buy a new pair of Firestones, what would I do? I despise the man and everything he stands for!

I think I’d sell him his damned tires. I think I’d even help him put them on his car. Oh, but it would pain me. It just seems to me that there is a principle at stake here, of an obligation to grant equal treatment to even the nastiest members of our society, and we violate it if we turn anyone into a pariah because of their beliefs.

So I can feel some schadenfreude here, and think Phelps actually deserves worse…but I’m also disappointed in the people of McAlester, Oklahoma who didn’t demonstrate that they were better citizens than the mad dogs of the Westboro Baptist Church.

Antisemitism still thrives

This is a very grim video; the myth of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion still lives on Muslim television. When it starts, you might be able to laugh a bit — did you know the Jews drain the blood of young boys to make matzoh balls? — but by the end, where some evil cleric is gloating over old footage of dead and dying Jews in Nazi prison camps (“look at the corpses, Allah be praised!”) and that he hopes the followers of Allah will be the next to carry out this holy work, I give you fair warning that you might well be too sickened to continue.

New Trends in Arabic Anti-semitism from Henrik Clausen on Vimeo.

I’m not a fan of Israel’s policies — they’re becoming what they oppose — but there’s clearly no possibility that they could simply stop fighting for their existence and live in peace and tolerance with neighbors who promote the kind of hate shown above.

Mexico is a weird, weird, weird place

Yesterday, among many other wanderings around Mexico City, I made a pilgrimage to the Lady of Guadalupe, the sacred Catholic heart of Mexico. It was not what I expected.

We left the subway station to join a trudging, milling mob on a hike to the basilica, which wended its way through a narrow tunnel lined with ramshackle booths where people tried to sell us all kinds of iconographic kitsch. That, I expected.

The surprise came when a horde dressed as Aztecs, half-naked with giant elaborate feathered headdresses, painted or wearing fierce masks of skulls or leopards, came charging through, forcing everyone to move off to the side to allow them to pass. They were chanting and pounding drums and waving censers about, so the whole group was wreathed in a fog of incense.

When we finally got to the plaza in front of the three basilicas (an original one, a later, larger one, and the newest, which is a huge modern building designed to accommodate the crowds), it was filled with Aztecs dancing, and all you could hear were these loud, throbbing drums. I captured a few minutes of my struggle through the mob of pilgrims, surrounded by circular spaces taken over by whirling Aztec dancers; the sound capabilities of my recorder were overwhelmed by the noise, so the roaring you hear below is the sound of the drums. You’ll just have to imagine this rhythmic cacaophony that you could feel vibrating up through your bones.

The modern basilic itself is completely open along the sides facing the plaza, so we had the pleasure of hearing a loudly amplified Catholic mass with pagan drums pounding throughout. And yes, you could see Aztec headdresses scattered throughout the crowd.

In the smaller, oldest church, they also carry out the Mass, and here’s a mother and child in Mexican Catholic formal wear, on their knees. We saw several other people making a slow crawl across the plaza on their knees, including a couple of young children with their parents hovering about (on their feet, though), as the kids made the painful trudge. I guess it makes your prayers more potent if you do them on bleeding knees.

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The syncretism is fascinating, and so far Mexico has been a delight, rich in character and history, and I’ve got to come back and spend more time here. But that religion is so fluid and flexible and complex doesn’t make it right, and the obsessive, fanatical weirdness of this unique version of Catholicism is the product of its unfamiliarity; if you step back and look at it with eyes unfilmed by tradition, every religious ceremony looks this bizarre, and every religion thrives on hope built on despair…and some try to maximize the suffering to reinforce devotion. At least the modern Aztecs draw the line before raising obsidian knives and chopping out hearts nowadays; they seemed to be having more fun than the bloody kneed Catholics.

I’m going to be in Springfield, Missouri next weekend. The weirdness bar has been raised pretty high right now, and the Assemblies of God are looking rather drab and colorless in comparison.

Bad move, A&E

The A&E Channel has a new show coming up: Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal. Sounds awful already, doesn’t it? But it’s worse than you think: they’re looking for disturbed kids who think they’ve got magic powers, and then they’re flying in “professional psychics” to coach them in dealing with their awesome powers, i.e., indulge their delusions, get off on feeling superior to unhappy kids, and collect a paycheck for psychic child abuse.

They’re putting kids in the hands of a creepy skeevo like Chip Coffey, all for your entertainment.

This is quite possibly the most loathsome thing I’ve ever seen on TV, and my cable gives me access to the Trinity Broadcast Network, so that’s saying a lot.

Skepchicks are mobilizing the skeptic hordes. Call or write to A&E and let them know that their schlock has reached a new and despicable low.

I mentioned that I have cable…but there’s almost nothing on. The quality has been on a steady decline for years; cable stations like A&E, TLC, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel were all set up with the noble goals of providing good educational/informative programming, and they’ve all sold out to provide little more than dreck ala Psychics with Serious Mental Illnesses Hunting Hitler’s Ghost While Driving A Big Truck with Their Freakish Family. It’s cheap, it’s easy, the ‘talent’ they hire are all boring nobodies with only their disturbed personalities as a selling point — these are modern freak shows, plain and simple — and audiences eat them up.

Meanwhile, look here: somebody has a petition begging someone, anyone to pick up Richard Dawkins’ thoughtful and intelligent documentaries. They’re done, they’re just sitting there, they’re begging to be broadcast…but I guess he just doesn’t have the charisma of a hammy metaphysical child abuser.