No, Destroying Property is not a “Protest”
June 1st, 2011
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Lets get something straight: No matter how much I disagree with a group or person I’ll support their right to protest. By protest I mean hold rallies, demonstrate, wave banners, hand out leaflets, run advertisements, arrange boycotts and run petition drives. Even groups I completely hate have the right to do these things.
Going onto property that does not belong to you and blatantly destroying it is not protest. It’s vandalism, trespassing and theft. Except in rare circumstances where a group is denied the right to express themselves otherwise and is actively oppressed, such measures are simply not justified and intolerable.
It is even more intolerable when the action comes as a result of the fact that the group is sore about the fact that they tried to stop something legitimate from happening and failed.
This is what happened in England, Belgium and elsewhere by groups which still thinks they are persecuted and can’t seem to wrap their mind around the fact that it’s the job of the police to stop them from doing this. Perhaps I should show them how this works if the tables are turned. Since I disagree with these people maybe I should assert my right to burn down their houses in “protest” of their view?
It’s amazing how tolerant society is of these bastards. They actually stand there and hold a press conference after breaking the law. I wonder if a bank robber could get away with setting up a podium after an armed robbery and then taking questions from the press on what he intends to spend the loot on.
This is also a classic example of fear and ignorance driven action. These people can’t understand what these crops are even all about and only know that their leaders told them to be afraid of them and destroy them before it’s too late. The developers of these crops must be evil and the crops themselves are horrible entities which must be destroyed. It’s sad but even as religion fades in much of Europe, the exact same kind of demonic thinking seems to have been applied elsewhere.
The potatoes in question are a variety that is now being tested after years of research and development. They are modified to make them resistant to damage by fungus, commonly known as blight. This is the fungus that decimated potato crops in the 1800s and lead to the Great Irish Potato Famine. Today blight no longer threatens populations with starvation but is still a major problem for potatoes, especially in Europe. Selective breeding has given potatoes some resistance to the fungus and every year huge amounts of fungicide are used to keep it in check. Still many tens of millions of Euros are lost annually.
French anti-science vandals invade a Belgium farm and destroy crops
Phytophthora infestans causes ‘late blight’ in potatoes. In regions of potato cultivation with a temperate climate, like Belgium, this is the single most dangerous disease. The disease costs farmers in Belgium about 55 million euros annually, and controlling it causes significant environmental pressure. However, in the last few years a number of resistant varieties based on conventional plant breeding techniques were introduced to the market, and work is being done on developing genetically modified Phytophthora-resistant lines.
These GM plant are environmentally much more friendly than some existing methods of treating fungus attack on plants such as the commonly used toxic copper sulphate.
But the GM potatoes will not be used if the anti-GM fanatics have their way.
A research field trial of these blight-resistant potatoes has just been destroyed in Belgium.Jo Bury, the director of the VIB science research institute that planted the potatoes, said around 100 scientists had tried to talk the actists out of vandalism.
“We are deeply shocked about the violent actions by the activists of the Field Liberation Movement. The field trial with blight resistant potatoes was almost entirely destroyed. Our hearts are with the scientists whose hard work was destroyed today.â€
“Althought his is a dark day for science as a whole, we want to thank all 350 scientists and farmers who came out and supported Save Our Science. It was a strong message to the world that we believe that science has an important role to play in the development of environmental friendly agriculture†Geert Angenon, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Geert De Jaeger, UGent, Rony Swennen, K.U.Leuven, Jeroen Crappé.
Thought I doubt they will be, I hope these people are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. More importantly, I hope that eventually populations will wake up to the fact that these stunts are not honorable or admirable in any way. They’re criminal acts of ignorant, frightened fools and their greedy leaders.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 1st, 2011 at 11:38 pm and is filed under Agriculture, Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Enviornment, Misc. 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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June 2nd, 2011 at 12:03 am
Malcontents will always be with us. They will find each other, form groups, and reinforce whatever ridiculous notions they have, and whip themselves into a frenzy over some imaginary wrong. The real issue is that they are given a platform by the media, rather than being summarily dealt with by the law.
The media is guilty of trying to turn these idiots into martyrs, and giving weight to their silly ideas, because this gets the attention of an audience that has grown indifferent to anything but the most shocking ‘news.’ It is this pandering to bored viewers that is at the root of the problem.
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June 2nd, 2011 at 3:53 am
I am seriously concerned about the state of the world, especially western society. Just… the sheer arrogance and fear of some people. When their arguments or beliefs are fundamentally flawed…
I dunno. I really hope we, as a species, can pull the collective twig out of our ass. Preferably within my our lifetimes.
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June 2nd, 2011 at 6:14 am
Ah … so the ignorant peasants come out with their torches and pitchforks. They’ll be back to burning witches soon, mark my words.
Although, I would love to see them try to pull that stunt in Texas. Europeans are wimps.
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June 2nd, 2011 at 6:28 am
Whenever I think that Americans are the biggest fools in the world, I’m always heartened when some Europeans prove me wrong. Between these frankenfood nitwits and the antinukes in Germany, in 20 years they are going to be sitting hungry in the dark.
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June 2nd, 2011 at 10:39 am
I don’t want to make this a European versus American issue, but every time I hear of these groups I am struck by the contrast. It seems to me like this has been made a bigger issue in the European continent than elsewhere in the world. In the Americas (not just the US but also Canada and to the extent it is used Latin America) there’s a lot of genetically modified crops in use for years and there are not nearly as many protests. Maybe there are a few, but not like this and not nearly as wide or big.
I just wonder why this is. It seems like a strange thing that it would be so much different. Most of the stuff in the US is people who want to eat non-genetic modified food, but don’t seem to go so far as to think others should not and it should be banned in general.
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June 2nd, 2011 at 10:50 am
Dave G said:
It’s actually fairly simple: Genetically engineered foods started being grown in the US in the late 1980’s and made it into the mainstream before these groups organized and rallied to try to stop them. Once the genie is out of the bottle it’s impossible to get people scared of it. People have been eating these crops for years with no ill effects. They realize that they look the same and taste the same and don’t cause health problems.
The reason that North America came before Europe in terms of growing these crops has a number of reasons: the US is larger single market than any European country (this was before there were unified EU standards) so it was more important to get approved in the US. It’s also the home of some major crops that were early examples of GMO – “King Corn” being the big money maker was perfectly suited. Also soybeans, canola, cotton.
Years later the sky is not falling. Fields are healthy, people are fine. The food supply is fine. No baby-eating super insects have come into being. Farmers are generally happy with the results.
How can you convince an anyone that the food they have been eating for years is deadly? You really can’t.
These groups didn’t take notice until the late 1990’s/early 2000’s. By that time it was too late to spook North Americans, but it was considerably easier in places where these products had not been introduced so long ago.
That’s all there is to it: You can’t scare people over something they have experience with being harmless. You have to scare them before it becomes commonplace or you lose your chance.
This is the same reason why people in Australia, which has no nuclear power plants, are much more easily scared over nuclear power than those who live near nuclear power plants in countries where they are well established.
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June 2nd, 2011 at 12:07 pm
drbuzz0 said:
The fact that the Monarch butterfly didn’t go extinct from farmers growing Bt corn, contrary to the fearmongering, was huge in my opinion. The Luddites miscalculated and lost a lot of credibility as a result.
As for Australia and public acceptance, it isn’t so much a matter of proximity as money. If your community gets all of the property taxes coming off a reactor such that the schools can afford new band uniforms and the local fire department doesn’t have to put on bakesales to purchase a new ladder truck, it is amazing how accepting people can be of nuclear power. But if your community gets no cut of the taxes but is still in the emergency planning zone, attitudes can change dramatically.
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June 2nd, 2011 at 12:45 pm
Destroying property is protest.
It’s just not peaceful, lawful protest protected by the traditions of Western culture and various governments (eg. the Constitution, in the United States).
Protests can be riots, in fact – we just, quite rightly, don’t tolerate that kind, generally.
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June 2nd, 2011 at 2:43 pm
So how many seeds did they spread around?
After all, most cases of GMOs spreading where they shouldn’t have been due to stupid activists getting them on their clothes.
drbuzz0 said:
I would also wonder how much the fact that they were being used by farmers who wanted to keep using them and sold by big companies who wanted to keep selling them (and thus both groups have been willing to pressure the government into making sure they remain legal) had to do with it as well?
drbuzz0 said:
I think they have spooked quite a lot of people even in North America, just not enough to get their way.
Blubba said:
The Luddites do that a lot, we haven’t really exploited the opportunities they’ve given us as much as we should have.
Blubba said:
I wouldn’t say it’s only a matter of money (though that probably helps a lot) because it doesn’t seem to me that communities nuclear reactors outside the US necessarily get such a windfall (and the US does seem to fund a lot of things at a very low level which in practice means that the quality of services given to poor neighbourhoods tend to differ a lot more than what rich neighbourhoods get).
Sigivald said:
Now all that needs to happen is that those who react in that manner when they don’t get what they want pay for it.
Violence tends to be used by protesters when they don’t get what they want through peaceful protest, in some cases it is justified (violence against the apartheid regime comes to mind) but in most it isn’t.
This also goes to show why the locations of fields used to grow GM crops shouldn’t necessarily be published (I suspect a lot of the demands by those on the pseudoleft (opposing new technology for bad reasons automatically makes you right wing IMNSHO) that people have a right to know are more attempts to make it easier to rip them up).
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June 2nd, 2011 at 7:40 pm
Anon said:
No, I don’t think that matters. That might have something to do with the crops being adopted and kept legal, but not with the fact that there has been less backlash and public protest against it. A big company can, to some extent, buy legislation by lobbying and making campaign contributions. Avoiding protest and backlash is harder. Yes, they can advertise, but in this case there has not been much direct to consumer advertising and PR.
If anything, big companies make for a good target for groups like Greenpeace and the various other anti-gmo organizations. A company like Montesero everyone just loves to hate. So it’s perfect and the more the companies get the more the activist groups can make a stink.
Remember, these groups don’t really want to stop genetic modified crops so much as they want to make money. Making money is based on looking like the little guy fighting for the good of the earth against the big bad companies. They craft an image that is like a cross between freedom fighters, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and the Biblical David.
These groups love to go after big organizations and make it look like they are getting oppressed. The “big nuclear” companies. The wireless phone companies. The airlines and their chemtrail spraying etc.
Every time they make a big stink and get in a fight with a big company that’s publicity, even if they don’t actually accomplish their stated goal.
So no I don’t think that’s it. It’s just that you can’t get people as panicked over something they’ve been eating for nearly 20 years with no ill effects.
Anon said:
To some extent, but it has not become mainstream as it has elsewhere and it’s not to nearly the extent.
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June 2nd, 2011 at 8:22 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Though those who think the protest won’t accomplish anything would be less likely to show up (and individual donors less likely to contribute) if they think it a lost cause.
drbuzz0 said:
They make a good target for pretty much everyone.
drbuzz0 said:
Kind of reminds me of the ‘organic’ farming publicity whore from Canada who deliberately grew Roundup Ready canola without a licence and then played victim.
Blubba said:
This caused me to have an interesting idea on why the Luddites are so damn outrageous in their fearmongering.
For I don’t think they really suffer the costs of being proven wrong since to be proven wrong they’d already have to lose and to win they must at all costs prevent whatever it is they are opposing being being used at all because once the genie is out of the bottle it isn’t going back in.
The rational thing to do under those circumstances is to be as negative as possible without regard for whether or not it is realistic.
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June 3rd, 2011 at 5:16 pm
Protesting at blight resistant potatoes? Really? REALLY? This is just evil and I can think of no other word for it.
Station some “peaceful” guards to make them “rest in peace” the next time they stage a “peaceful” protest by wantonly destroying research.
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June 3rd, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Maybe rational people could stage a peaceful protest by going around to an ‘organic’ farm and ripping everything up.
Or better yet, spraying organic pesticide that they don’t think is organic around.
Now how could a mass movement that tolerates that kind of thing come about, maybe what is needed are genetically modified foods the public can easily understand (as opposed to getting into more technical areas like disease resistance or crop yields).
Maybe low fat potato chips or hypo-allergenic peanuts would do the job (though on the first one someone could just use conventional breeding or even all natural colours to make a potato appear lighter and then put “potato chip lite” on the packaging and have all the idiots buy it, just as they do with lite cooking oil).
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June 3rd, 2011 at 7:30 pm
Anon said:
Well potato chips are not fatty from the potato but from the oil it’s cooked in. Making fat free oil presents problems. They have actually created a cooking oil that will pass through the body without being absorbed as fat and that caused other problems.
As for the hypoallergenic peanut – there is active research on that one. I think they’ll probably have one in a few years, but it will be more time before it’s approved for human consumption and more time still before it becomes commonplace.
The proteins responsible for triggering allergies are now known and the genes that produce them are largely understood. There’s no theoretical reason this won’t be solved.
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June 3rd, 2011 at 8:13 pm
drbuzz0 said:
I heard that they created a potato that won’t absorb as much fat from the oil it’s cooked in.
drbuzz0 said:
There was an attempt to transfer genes from the Brazil Nut to something else which resulted in allergy problems (of course they didn’t end up introducing it, something about actually caring about safety).
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June 3rd, 2011 at 8:16 pm
Anon said:
Yeah, and probably wouldn’t have the satisfying crsip greasiness either.
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June 3rd, 2011 at 9:11 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Probably, though they said it wasn’t distinguishable from the natural stuff (or at least I think they did).
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June 4th, 2011 at 2:00 am
A particular issue can easily wind up politicized in some countries while being regarded as apolitical in others. Dave mentions how there’s a big left-right split in Western Europe over GMOs, but this doesn’t happen in the US. But here in the US various issues like abortion are highly politicized, but they’re not big deals in Europe.
A lot of this involves demographic differences or local concerns. I’m going to speculate (this is just speculation, but I think it’s plausible) that a lot of European opposition to GMOs comes from worries that US based multinational agribusiness concerns might gain control over European agriculture. In fact, to my mind the legitimate concerns about GMOs are not ones of safety or biodiversity, but rather about the extension of intellectual-property law considerations into fields that have heretofore been free of them.
It’s well-known in organizational and social psychology that prima-facie irrational concerns are often a sign that there’s some bigger issue which is somehow treated as “undiscussable.”
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June 4th, 2011 at 2:23 am
You should be using the term patents, intellectual property doesn’t exist.
Though patents are where any problems other than over-regulation exist (but at least patents actually run out eventually and there probably does need to be the option of a monopoly for a time to recoup investment costs, if it were under copyright though…).
Fixing the over-regulation problem so that you don’t need to be a big multinational corporation to bring a GMO to market could also help by making it possible for non-profit organisations to fund the development of useful GMO strains that wouldn’t be able to make a profit.
Though it does raise the question of how do you get that bigger issue to be discussed if it’s undiscussable and also whether it would help with the irrational fear.
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June 4th, 2011 at 9:40 am
ebohlman said:
In Japan IIRC it is illegal for corporations of any kind to engage in agriculture. I believe it was one of Douglas McArthur’s reforms, designed to eliminate the class of impoverished and exploited tenant farmers (whose desire for a better life was blamed for fuelling Japanese militarism) and replace them with small farmers who owned the land on which they worked.
Incidentally, although the aristocratic samurai are most often taken to be the representative soldiers of pre-modern Japan, there were also the ashigaru, who were of peasant origin, and who were just as atrocity-prone as the Imperial Japanese Army was during World War II.
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June 4th, 2011 at 11:11 am
Anon said:
The problem is that the laws regarding IP, patents and that kind of thing are really not intended for things like genetically modified organisms and they’re not very good at regulating them. In fact, you can’t even really patent a genetic modification but have to work around it by patenting the “method” for producing it.
It’s simply shoe-horning a new concept into the old patent framework and it doesn’t fit very well.
What is needed is a completely new regulatory framework that would be able to address GMO – both the regulatory and safety aspects and the patent and copyright issues involved.
I do see a problem though: creating such legislation would be an invitation for every scaremongering group to try to influence it and force ridiculous restrictions into it.
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June 4th, 2011 at 4:38 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Being able to hold a patent on a specific modification actually doesn’t seem all that unreasonable, I suspect you’d just need a modification of pharmaceuticals patents to get something usable. Also might be worth looking at something more like a design patent.
drbuzz0 said:
Keep copyright away from GMOs, patents at least expire eventually (the US congress seems to be doing as much as they can to prevent copyright from ever expiring and Mickey Mouse from ever entering the public domain where he belongs).
drbuzz0 said:
Not just that, but a lot of those who already make GMOs are likely to get involved and help screw it up (the original proposal for GMO safety regulations in the US was actually somewhat reasonable until Monsanto came along).
Most likely what would really happen is that such a new regulatory system would end up biased towards the big companies that can spend a lot of money and hire a lot of lawyers while small companies and non-profit organisations wouldn’t be able to afford to get a product through it.
Realistically all that’d probably end up changed if you did change the regulations is adding something requiring indigenous groups get a cut if any of the genes came from a plant that grew on their traditional land. The current system is quite safe (there’s never been a public health or environmental problem caused by GMOs) so no room for improvement there (not that the activist groups would really care even if you did improve safety).
Maybe a third world country or group of third world countries could upon realising that no one is getting the full benefit from GMOs might be able to create their own sensible regulations (but I’d expect a lot of pressure from the first world against that).
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November 9th, 2011 at 2:31 pm
“Going onto property that does not belong to you and blatantly destroying it is not protest. It’s vandalism, trespassing and theft. Except in rare circumstances where a group is denied the right to express themselves otherwise and is actively oppressed, such measures are simply not justified and intolerable.”
Kind of picking a nit, I know, but if you give credence to Thoreau’s theory of civil disobedience, it’s not justified even then. You don’t protest a deprivation of rights by going and doing something you’d have no right to do even in a liberal democracy; you protest a deprivation of rights by exercising the rights anyway.
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