Don't do what I do and idly Google till you find the obituary of his friend and colleague Norman Borlaug which approvingly quotes Vandana Shiva (the brains behind the Sri Lankan famine) saying he was a failure, and Alexander Cockburn saying he was responsible for millions of deaths and comparing him to Kissinger. (Guardian obit of course)
In the strict sense of allowing more people to live, and people who live do tend to die, I guess so.
(In complete agreement with you. An absolutely vile things to say.)
Nice to see the Roundup Ready lobby weighing in.
I remember that, it was when I was 18. Indians were all going to die. Has anyone checked?
I am amused by this search: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=%22roundup+ready%22+site%3Atheguardian.com
6: that search page is just disturbingly obsessive. It's like the bit two thirds of the way through the film where Tom Sizemore and Matt Damon break down Willem Dafoe's door and find his room is wallpapered in pictures of Linda Fiorentino covered with crazed scribbling about whores and vengeance and spiders.
The really interesting bit is that the obsession breaks off ten years ago and since then there's been precisely one article, in the Aussie edition, complaining that the weedkiller might be banned unnecessarily.
That would correspond approximately to when Bayer bought Monsanto and discontinued the brand name, which sounds about right.
Mentions for "glyphosate", which is the generic, go to zero at about the same time, so it isn't that. And I am not sure why you think Bayer discontinued the "Roundup" brand name. It's still on sale today under that name, check Amazon.
Or indeed https://roundup.com/en-us/home
Discontinued the Monsanto name, I mean, not Roundup.
It's the Guardian so the explanation is most likely "someone's weird obsession, idiosyncratic passion, or vicious personal beef"; that's always the explanation.
They built their new office around a concert hall at ruinous expense because Martin Kettle is obsessed with boasting about how much he knows about classical music. They sold everyone on food miles because the academic who invented it knew Felicity Lawrence. Corbyn is not/is too Hitler? Jonathan Freedland and Seamus Milne going back to the early 1980s about Ken Livingstone. That time they fell out so badly about TERFs they asked Naomi Klein to mediate? It'll have been the same thing although I have absolutely no desire to learn enough lore to find out what the original beef was. Rather like Pakistan, everything about the paper is its internal conflict spilling over into its external policy.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/monsanto
I'm just saying it's not surprising that opposition to Roundup died down around the time it was no longer associated with notorious leftist bogeyman Monsanto.
I still find it hilarious that acquiring Monsanto was (accurately!) perceived as a big reputational problem for Bayer. It's not like they'd ever done any bad stuff themselves, you know.
The only thing we associate with Bayer is aspirin. But I guess even that is controversial.
18: Good PR move to take Farben out of the name
16: that does make sense. As soon as the Bad Name went away they stopped minding.
It's not like they'd ever done any bad stuff themselves, you know.
That may be a fair representation of opinion at the paper which just published a full-page opinion piece headlined "Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust".
That may be a fair representation of opinion at the paper which just published a full-page opinion piece headlined "Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust".
Apparently I'm a Zionist oppressor on twitter because I said something as anodyne as "Anne Applebaum is not a Liberal in Good Standing because she is not, in any contemporary sense of the word, a liberal."
Anyway, keeping people from starving is good.
I shouldn't ask, but I am procrastinating, so: what does Anne Applebaum not being a liberal (which I don't think she's ever been in the American sense of the word, and I thought she was a Republican pre-Trump?) have to do with Zionism?
I apparently missed the whole "Roundup Ready" thing and wikipedia isn't really helping, to the extent that I'm not sure it's worth looking into further. (See above, re: procrastination.)
Neither Borlaug nor Swimanathan seem to have anything to do with Roundup Ready and Swimanathan in particular was very critical of overuse of herbicides. The connection is that they were both in favour of keeping people alive, which is upsetting to people who find mass death politically invigorating.
Roundup Ready is bad. "Lets tinker with genetics so we can build our farming practices around drenching entire fields in pesticide" is bad.
I'm not even anti-Roundup, per se. But the way it gets used makes a difference.
I know that's what everyone says, but I'm still not injecting that shit. How good could it possibly feel?
In a few generations, everyone will be Roundup Ready.
27: I was kind of surprised to learn that using glyphosate is considered a current best practice in ecological restoration. (Guy working in our yard, "This is gonna sound weird; I know a lot of people don't like chemicals." Me, "We're both chemists. We're pretty comfortable with chemicals.")
26: You forgot the part where you have to buy the resistant seeds every year rather than recovering them from current crops. In addition to drenching everything with herbicide.
22: It was something along the lines of "Applebaum, by not endorsing Hamas, is practically a Zionist genocidaire and yet remains a Liberal In Good Standing." (I exaggerate only a little.)
I know I'm a weirdo for going after the narrow point that Applebaum is not a liberal, Actually. But she's not, and I care about that distinction. Apparently that's enough to make me an oppressor, too. People are strange.
Wait, we aren't supposed to be using Roundup? I'm pretty sure I use bunches of it.
Because I, too, sing America am procrastinating, here's the set of tweets --
OP: Worth noting that Atlantic columnist and Serious Liberal in Good Standing Anne Applebaum explicitly advocated killing Palestinian journalists in 2002. Would love to know if she still thinks it's okay [Screenshots from Slate in which she says Palestinian radio and TV studios are fair targets.]
Me: Writing for The Economist, editing at The Spectator, and being an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute are not hallmarks of a liberal career, unless your definition of "liberal" dates to about 1850. She's an anti-authoritarian conservative. Rare these days, I know.
OP: She routinely calls herself a "liberal". Not sure what to tell you
Me: Trump I'm sure routinely calls himself a genius; self-labeling is not always the best measure.
Though in Applebaum's case she probably is using an 1850s definition of "liberal," much as The Economist is prone to doing. So.
OP [in separate thread]: Incidentally supporting the killing of journalists, backing Bush's Iraq war, and supporting apartheid are not "anti authoritarian" actions, I think you mean she's anti Trump. These are not the same thing
Me: Yeah, ok, fair enough on Bush's war. She's anti-Putin, and anti-Orbán iirc in addition to being anti-Trump. None of that translates into "liberal of good standing" except with a very constrained definition of "liberal."
There may have been more contention; some users deleted tweets, and I'm not sure I found all the threads unraveling from the original.
At some point, The Nation's correspondent in Jerusalem weighed in with "bloodthirsty hag" as the whole of his tweet. When I said that was nothing but a misogynistic slur, a bystander added "What a first world concern. Don't think we don't know about how you zionists try to dehumanised these people. I'm a woman... she's a disgusting HAG. A murderous witch like this deserves as much defence as hitler. May she get what she deserves." Bystander (with 12 followers, no screen name and a handle that starts with "baath") thought to add "Sick genocidal white man, I'm way better than you". Which I only just read since I muted the account after the previous round.
Anyway! The thread seems to have moved on, so I don't feel bad about this total derail.
I used roundup to kill a fuckton of poison ivy in my backyard a long time ago when I owned a backyard.
The Iraq War, terrible idea though it was, was very definitely anti-authoritarian. Iraq went from having one of the most authoritarian governments on the planet to having very little functioning government at all.
Although I answer to it, in a way that I do not answer to Leftist, I don't think the word Liberal has much value in contemporary discourse. In current usage, it doesn't describe a fixable point on the continuum, with identifiable attributes, but has a place and content completely dependent on the speaker's place and attributes. Specialists disagree, I'm sure, but I think this battle has been lost.
Engaging with a fool proves that there are two.
By all accounts, Hamas does locate munitions and facilities in places with a lot of civilians. Maybe not to the extent claimed by the IDF, but I think there's been plenty of credible journalism on this. Civilian deaths are, imo, an important element in Hamas strategizing. (And, I suppose, in IDF strategizing.) I'm a citizen of a country that has engaged in massive bombings of civilians, from Hamburg* and Dresden to 'shock and awe' in Baghdad and drone strikes everywhere. There's a fig leaf -- one of the guys at that wedding was a bad one we're justified in shooting -- but everyone knows that the play is strategic as well. How can we get people who are getting married, who run villages, who run provinces, to tell the bad guys not to come around? It doesn't work, just as Hamburg and Dresden didn't work, but there's always some asshole claiming that if we just kill a few more of them, the survivors will give in.
* Operation Gomorrah? GMAFB. OK, the raids had very significant military consequences down the road. But they killed a lot of civilians to get there.
Yeah, I spend a lot of time organizing people to remove invasive plants from public parks through non-chemical means. There are places where our methods are appropriate, and there are places where someone needs to bring in the Roundup.
37: well, the same is true of most political descriptors. "Conservative" if you're talking about 1970s Britain means someone who wants tougher negotiating with unions. In 1980s Iran it means someone who thinks thr morality police are too soft on headscarves. "Leftist" on Fox News means Bernie Sanders. Tony Blair called himself a socialist and so did Stalin. A republican in England is probably a mildly annoying centre leftist who is angry about the coronation. In Ireland it's someone who blinds people with a Stanley knife.
32: genocideuse, I should think.
Mathew Perry's death reminded me of how life is short. So I opened the Halloween candy. Now I'm back to focused on inflation, because some asshole invented a Reese's cup that is smaller than fun-sized, but not those little bit-sized ones.
38: Posh, artsy-granola faux rural town one to two towns closer to Boston organizes mustard pulls in the spring. But yeah, Roundup has its uses and the use described in 26 ain't it.
I've pulled out something called "garlic mustard". This was back before, when I felt comfortable using free time to improve the community instead of scream into the void.
Yeah, I organized the garlic mustard challenge for a couple years until the easy spots for running public garlic mustard pulls in my neighborhood were picked out. But Japanese knotweed is the big ticket item around here and were never going to run out of that, along with bittersweet vines and glossy buckthorn.
One time, I went into a park with a bunch of cub scouts and orders to get litter and garlic mustard. They kids started bring back tires and car parts, because Pittsburgh has some real assholes.
One concern with these things is when kids bring back needles.
We have overdoses, I read, but I've never seen a needle as litter here.
There is a very occasional one to be found in the bushes, but not nearly as many as you would think based on how much people get worked up about about it. Yes, if you go into a homeless encampment way out in the woods, you will see needles on the ground. That's awful, but those locations are generally pretty far removed from anyplace small children would be. I wouldn't send cub scouts to clean those places up, tho.
Yeah, neighborhood litter cleanup is not an activity to send kids on with minimal adult supervision around here. I've found needles in the park across the street, condoms in the alley behind my house, and all kinds of broken glass and otherwise sharp stuff. (Not all in one session, but still.) I like a lot of things about living in a city but this is not one of them.
There was adult supervision, if you count me and one other guy.
I mean, the other guy was pretty responsible. I was there because the rules required a second adult to prevent child molestation.
First world problems. The most dangerous thing I ever saw was rusted up pliers for electric cable theft.
We don't have pliers with such specific roles.
One time they stumbled on a guy who was wanted on suspicion of crushing another guy's skull with a rock. But I wasn't there that time.
Pliers are like method actors. They shape themselves to the roles they're given.
People mostly steal copper pipe here. Safer than electric wiring.
You got your pliers for electric cable theft, your pliers for cracking hazelnuts, your pliers for mundane household tasks, your pliers for tooth removal....
Obviously, we don't have people who crush other people's heads with rocks. Even the poorest can get a gun somehow. Behind the seat of a parked $70,000 truck is a good bet.
And how are you going to break the window to get into the truck? With a rock. You could just use the goddamn rock, but no, this is America, so the gun industry the truck industry and truck and gun insurance industries have to take their cut. It's like healthcare: ten times more money for the exact same amount of murder.
Yeah. Like you said, first world problems.