Food Irradiation Video: This one deserves its own post
September 14th, 2008
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In my last post I looked at the issue of food irradiation and the general oposition it tends to get from both the ignorant and the general scarmongers of the whole “green” movement. One of the videos I cited was this one, from the American Counsil on Science and Health which explains the process of food irridiation and its benefits.
The video got one video response which I felt was telling enough of the general oposition to this that it deserved its own post. Here’s the video response to the ASCH video:
From the description:
In 1991 it looked like the country’s first food irradiation plant was coming to Mulberry, Florida. So, in January 1992 in Tampa, with several other activists, I started Citizens For Safe Food, the world’s first anti-irradiation organization.
xxxxThe plant opened anyway. The food is exposed to dangerous levels of radiation that kill good & bad microorganisms, destroy nutrients and damage DNA in the food. What’s wrong with food irradiation?! Use your head!FOOD IRRADIATION-Norman B-Deviations from the Norm
And the video:
My initial thoughts on this video:
1. I’d be willing to bet this guy does not support fluoride either, or for that matter, any modern dental practices.
2. I would really not want to run into this guy in a dark alley, or for that matter anywhere, but especially a dark alley.
3. Is this the standard bearer for the opposition to modern hygiene and technology movement?
Also, it’s absolutely amazing to me how the “greens” manage to connect everything which is unrelated. Food irradiation has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with greenhouse gases. It has nothing to do with food packaging (other than it works through the packaging) and nothing whatsoever to do with petroleum, crude oil, chemicals or anything of the sort. The only way it is related to preservatives is that it generally permits the use of LESS of them or even NO chemical preservatives.
This is so damn typical of the whole movement. They act as if they say the same thing over and over it will eventually become true and that somehow things are part and parcel of the same thing. “We need to stop supporting dirty forms of energy that produce greenhouse gases and move away from coal and oil and nuclear because these are the problem.” NO. Simply saying them together does not make them the same thing. I saw an article not long ago that had the title “Coal and nuclear: Problem or solution?” It went on to talk about how coal energy can’t be clean and how large Co2 sequestering is not feasible (which i agree with) and then continued to say that nuclear companies are also trying to get in on the action and promote their energy as clean, as if it were the same thing. No, saying them in the same breath does not make them the same thing or even related.
I could say “We really cannot continue to support policies that are not effectively dealing with gang violence and policies which lead to an increased use of VOIP services like Skype and Vontage.” Okay… gang violence is a bad thing and we should not support ineffective policies in addressing that, but it has absolutely nothing to do with an internet protocol nor the government’s regulations thereof. And no matter how many times I say the two things togeather they are totally unrelated. The same is true for the poaching of endangered species and the sale of bubblegum. They are not in any way related. Neither are chemical additives, greenhouse gases and food irradiation. The only thing they have in common is that greenscum likes to paint them as being one monolythic issue of “Technology bad! Science bad! Modern things bad!”
Also, all food contains chemicals. That’s what it’s freakin made of. Table salt (sodium chloride), water (dihydrogen monoxide), cane sugar (sucrose), simple sugar (glucose), starches (a polysaccharides of glucose monosaccharides). Hell, EVERY form of matter, with the possible exception of individual elementary particles is by definition a chemical. DEAL WITH IT.
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Agriculture, Bad Science, Enviornment, Just LAME, Not Even Wrong, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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September 14th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
A very scary dude. I’m sure I could take him if I met him in a dark alley, because for one thing that beard would be a good place to hold onto while punching him in the face repeatedly so he could not try to get loose and into a better position to hit back. my fear would be that he’d have something that could be dangerous – not a gun because that would be too normal, but maybe something like bomb (unibomber anyone?) or a bag of his feces. People like that always cary stuff like that, bags of feces, dead squirrels, other possible biological weapons.
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September 14th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Well, this guy looks a bit crazy (scary) and he’s not really not all about the personal hygene, I guess. His teeth don’t look good and he doesn’t shave or even bother keeping his beard neat or trim and the hair that sticks out from his hat makes it look like he hasn’t bothered having it cut or combing it in a long long time.
I bet he smells really bad.
Okay, that’s ad hom and all, but how could you possibly not observe this guy’s apperance? he looks like the next Ted Kezinski. (sp?)
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September 14th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
“A lie told often enough becomes truth” – Vladimir Lenin.
There is no question that they strive to do this given the Greens are a Left wing movement and draw on the radical Left’s traditional strategies and tactics.
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September 14th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Dude can’t carry a tune in a bucket, either.
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September 15th, 2008 at 3:25 am
I think I just lost 5 IQ points watching that video. Oy.
The guy reminds me (in appearance and demeanor) of a regular substitute teacher I had in high school–long story short, the man was the neighborhood character: he built an extension to his house out of plywood (which the oppressive evil capitalist building department frowned on), the front bumper on his not terribly new car was a 2×4, he didn’t believe in leashing his three German Shepherds, etc.
DV82XL said:
Bingo. The question, I suppose, is whether it would be a better idea to attack this type of non-thought head-on or to try to cut their support out from under them–the latter would require staying away from liberals’ central assumptions. “Everything is connected” is a big liberal assumption; they pride themselves on finding connections. If we attack liberals’ thought processes and conservatives’ religion at the same time, our only allies will be libertarians, and without youth support I really don’t think that’s a side with any chance of getting its proposals adopted.
Sorry for the tactics talk–I’m just curious what skeptics’ general approach is: side with the liberals because most of us share common goals with them and try to change the means toward those goals from within, side with the conservatives because most of the woo comes from the left and ignore the religion issue because both sides are mostly religious, or side with the libertarians in order to attempt to build a libertarian coalition of single-issue groups that have stakes in each other’s success and attack both major sides.
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September 15th, 2008 at 3:42 am
There are people who identify themselves as skeptics who are of all political persuasions up to and including communists, although the one political area you generally won’t see is the traditional christian conservative side. In general most of the skeptical mindset do not like the whole traditional oldline religious but also are very much against the whole new-agey kind of thing.
I myself do not align myself with a given party or definition to any great degree. I’m more libertarian than anything else, I suppose, but I’m not always in agreement with that either. For example, I think it’s legitimate for the government to do certain things that are for the better good of the economy that a libertarian purist might not like. I generally think it is the job of the government to provide an enviornment conclusive to doing business and in some circumstances that may mean intervention beyond what the pure libertarian would want. For example, I think it’s a good thing for the government to take a leadership role in energy policy, because it is of high stratigic importance and has too many conflicting interests and too much instability in the private sector alone.
There’s definitely something of a libertarian faction of the whole skeptical movement, but that’s not necessarily all of it. I don’t know that there is a “side” with any big political movements.
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September 15th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
If you take health advice from this guy, I hate to say it, but you probably deserve what you get for it.
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September 15th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Did you HAVE to inbed that video? I’ve just spent the last five minutes cleaning coffee from my monitor screen.
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September 15th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Stewart Peterson said:
So, the part where this gets frustrating is that finding connections is an important part of how research gets done. What guys like Mr. Scraggly Beard don’t understand is the notion of validity.
As a simple example, consider Hidden Markov Models, which came out of the field of probability theory. They quickly became widely used in speech recognition, because they gave good results. Later, they also became popular in computational biology for much the same reason. Recently, researchers have begun to explore using other computational-linguistics tools in computational biology, and some of the results have been quite valuable (i.e., they were borne out by empirical evidence). Others haven’t, and thus those researchers have turned their efforts in other directions.
Get liberals to understand the concepts of falsifiability, repeatability and validity, and you will have won a major victory in the war against ignorance and oppression. Unfortunately, many liberals cling to the beliefs of postmodernism, and claim that the notion of “validity” is itself invalid. How they can even express a statement like that, I don’t know. (Other than that Goedel’s incompleteness theorem allows them to.)
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September 15th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
mlp said:
In all fairness Meredith, we also have to include the religious conservatives and their refusal to accept evidence-based science. Their insistence in placing mythology ahead of science makes them no better.
Oh, and just for the record, I’m probably more conservative than liberal in my thinking and voting.
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September 15th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
You’re absolutely right, DV82XL. Certainly, many fundamentalists don’t understand validity or falsifiability either.
It’s hard to say which is worse, though — people who simply refuse to entertain the notion that any hypothesis can be falsified or tested (and who yet insist that their crackpot “theories” be given equal weight to theories which have gained that status through the process of repeated testing), or people who understand how the scientific method works but are only willing to employ it in certain areas. (The “old earth” creationists, for example.)
The saddest part is that everyone employs the scientific method, every day. When a person uses a recipe from a cookbook (and especially if they modify it!), when they try a new shampoo and decide it does a better job than their old shampoo … that’s the scientific method in process.
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September 16th, 2008 at 12:26 am
mlp said:
Which is worse? Unfortunately that’s easy to answer: which ever one is in a state of political ascendancy and power. While both can be annoying, their yammering doesn’t make much of a real difference. However the instant ether gains power they become a threat.
We suspect government is really run by big money interests, pulling the strings from behind: often I find myself thinking that this is probably not such a bad thing – I’d hate to see what would happen if the idiots we elect were running things by themselves.
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September 16th, 2008 at 10:14 am
mlp said:
DV82XL said:
Stupidity is a bipartisan policy.
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September 16th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
DV82XL said:
I personally feel that “Old earth creationists” and others who chose not to apply the scientific method in certain areas have done a lot less damage and most of them are a lot less dangerous than those who try to shape our industrial, educational and scientific policies based upon fear mongering and extreme environmentalism.
The Christian right has accomplished some worrying, but relatively minor changes to educational curriculum at lower levels of the educational establishment. But they’re not crusading against nuclear power (giving us coal), railing against advanced research or trying to cut funding for GM crops. Let me put it this way. I think the damage of a “Greenpeace’s policies realized” would be a lot greater than “Focus on the Family’s policies realized.”
That said, extremists of any political persuasion can be dangerous (pro-lifers who bomb abortion clinics, eco-terrorists that are willing to kill people to get their point across). But if I HAVE to ally myself to someone to win elections, then I’d rather stand with the Christian right than the environmental left.
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September 16th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Rob Farrington said:
Was it 100% organic non-irradiated, naturally-grown, fairtrade, positive-energy-filled coffee?
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September 16th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
drbuzz0 said:
I personally prefer 100% organic non-rradiated, naturally-grown, fairtrade decaffinated coffee. I don’t like to put chemicals in my body, and caffein is a chemical.
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September 16th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Andrew said:
Oh ok. You make sure to keep the dihydrogen monoxide out of it too, right?
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September 17th, 2008 at 2:20 am
What is the big deal for food irradiation? Don’t they have bigger fish to catch?
If people really are so concerned then food providers can put “This food is not irradiated” on their stuff and make a killing. Let people decide for themselves. And also, why have these activists alwasy trying to make the decisions when clearly they’re not experts.
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September 17th, 2008 at 4:08 am
Andrew said:
The thought patterns of the christian right and the environmental left (which I both despise) are very similar. The christian right is against the advanced research of stem cells and of other biological stuff – at least if it uses “evilution” (evolution), so they would be a clear danger for science.
It is also a little bit disingenuous to compare the policies of Greenpeace – which center themselves on economical issues – with “focus on the family” policies, which focus on social issues. It’s their stance on evolution and such that has to be scrutinized in the first place when comparing them with Greenpeace’s scientific stances. The christian right is less dangerous in the short termin than Greenpeace, but give it a little more time (and assuming that they don’t get brains) and they’ll be as disastrous.
The choice between the christian right and the environmental left is, in fact, equivalent to having a choice between being poisoned by lead and being poisoned by mercury.
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September 17th, 2008 at 4:43 am
“damage DNA in the food”
Nice try, but a fundamental misconception. DNA damage is bad (for the organism) when it’s alive, but once you kill and eat it its DNA is destroyed in your stomach, or by cooking. You don’t somehow inherit that damaged DNA.
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September 17th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
September 17th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
KLA said:
A carrot is more intelligent: it doesn’t spout such stupidity about scientific things.
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September 17th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Try again:
@ #20 Tom Evans:
“Nice try, but a fundamental misconception. DNA damage is bad (for the organism) when it’s alive, but once you kill and eat it its DNA is destroyed in your stomach, or by cooking. You don’t somehow inherit that damaged DNA.”
Apparently not true, as this guy is living evidence. He has the brain of a carrot, presumably in herited from its DNA.
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