With Trump’s position in the polls continuing its downward slide, The Donald winkingly suggested to his “second amendment people” at a rally today that they could, you know, assassinate her if (when?) he loses the race.
This is probably not news to anyone reading this, but if you haven’t watched the video itself yet, it’s even creepier than a mere transcript. He and his apologists have tried to spin this one away but there is no credible way to “explain” this as anything other than a call for the literal assassination of a political rival.
We need to do everything possible to keep this man from being elected. Do we also need to prepare for what might happen if (when?) he loses? How exactly, I’m not sure. Obviously the solution to Trump supporters with guns is not Hillary supporters with guns.
Discuss. No MRAs/Trump apologists/calls for revolution, etc.
@catalpa
The rich whites are pretty much the problem world wide, despite those such as Bill Gates, Bob Geldof and Bono who purport to be ‘helping’.
We live in a world of class struggle, not religious struggle, not race struggle. When 1% of people own 90% of the worlds wealth, you’re going to get that. And the planet struggles under the weight of it, the pollution, the CO2 just to create more stuff for people who do not need it.
We might have 7 billion people on this planet, but there is no shortage of food. We have a crisis of overproduction. Why do you think there are still meat mountains and wine lakes?! Even you local supermarket is evidence of this, of all the food they stock, only one third is ever sold, and of that maybe half will be consumed. Everything else gets thrown away. So depopulation is not the answer, the answer is redistribution. We don’t need to be told garbage about how Monsanto and their GMO foods are going to solve world hunger, because they are not. There is no food shortage. It’s just that the corporations withhold their produce to drive up the prices and therefore profits. They do not care that their produce will spoil and be thrown away. In fact, a lot of produce they will actively destroy themselves, plough it back into the ground or burn it.
Sad to say, it was happening later than that. North Carolina’s eugenics program didn’t end until the 1970s.
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/10/31/360355784/payments-start-for-n-c-eugenics-victims-but-many-wont-qualify
Monday, I was bitten on the hand by a cat. The finger swelled up like a sausage and my husband, who had driven me to work, accidentally left his phone in the car and so didn’t come get me until well after our doctor’s office closed, necessitating an ER visit. During this waiting time my coworkers remorselessly made fun of my finger. The ER doctor prescribed pills that were almost as big as the finger, which probably contributed to the incident of vomiting early the next morning, which resulted in me calling my mother at two in the morning while holding a puke bowl to let her know that I was not getting on a plane at seven that morning to visit her (she managed to get our flight changed to today).
Donald Trump was still the worst thing about the week. Thanks, Trump!
P.S.: The finger is much better.
@Mary the distribution problem isn’t distinct from the production problem. Which solution sounds better: grow all the food in one place and ship it out – distribution – or grow the food where it’s needed – production. The former we’re capable of doing now, but the carbon footprint of doing so is large. Better to have a combination of the two approaches – this leads to gmo crops still being necessary. That’s before we even get in to the politics of the distribution model which… Well, it’s not good, not as we are now. I’m willing to admit there are problems with gmo CORPORATIONS, but there are with all corporations – the gmo itself isn’t the problem and until we’re all on side with that the conversation is going to move glacially slowly :-/
I disagree with the sentiment that overpopulation isn’t an environmental problem. It may not be the root cause of any one problem in particular, but it exacerbates every single problem that we currently have, from to food and water wastage, loss of habitat, waste production, CO emissions to energy production. While it is true that industrial causes have much more impact than residential ones, the problem is proportional to our population. Reducing the population (I’m talking in terms of reducing people coming into this world, not removing those already here, for the record) will reduce the environmental impacts.
And yes technically if humanity went back to a nomadic hunter gatherer lifestyle we’d significantly reduce our impact, more than incremental population reduction would, but that is even less likely (at least voluntarily) than people slowing down breeding.
Damn straight! If we eat more of ’em, they won’t use so many resources!
People are slowing down breeding. What’s more, they’ve been doing so for nearly half a century. It never ceases to amaze me how willing many people are to pontificate about demography while knowing FA about it – in fact, while “knowing” a lot of things that aren’t so.
The global population growth rate peaked in the late 1960s at around 2.2% per year, and has almost halved since then. Fertility rates (number of children per woman) have fallen and are falling in almost every country – and in quite a few are now well below replacement level. Since the 1990s, even the absolute annual global population growth (the number of births minus the number of deaths) has fallen (it’s ticked up in the last few years, as a result of a bulge in the number of women of peak child-bearing age, but the fall is expected to resume shortly). The main causes are improvements in the status and education of women, improvements in the availability of contraception, and urbanisation. Urbanisation we can’t stop even if we wanted to – so push for the continuation of the first two – and for reducing economic inequality, as it acts to reduce women’s status and education. Meanwhile, read Danny Dorling’s Population 10 Billion: The Coming Demographic Crisis and How to Survive it. Oh, and think about how to replace or radically transform capitalism – irrespective of what happens to population, it demands endless “economic growth”, which in turn has always meant, up until now, increased resource use and waste production. Fantasies about reducing global population to 100 million, or returning to a forager lifestyle, are at best a waste of time and effort, and often justifications for racism and even genocide.
Yes, people have been reducing the amount of kids they have. This is why I view it as something to focus on, because it has started to work. I don’t think it’s happening enough, though, especially in developed countries which gobble up the most resources. Most developed countries are losing their sit over the less-than-replacement birth taste and are trying to provide incentives for (white) people to reproduce. I want this to change.
Capitalism and our current society are essentially a pyramid scam that require ever larger population and consumption to prop up the system. It’s something that has to change, and it will have to eventually, because as you’ve pointed out, educated and liberated women tend to not reproduce at rates sustainable for this scheme. I’d like it to happen sooner rather than later.
Yeah, the cause of many of these problems is capitalism and its need for the economy to keep growing forever. You need high population growth for that. Also the assumption that you can always have full employment because workers will accept lower wages since their standard of living will always increase anyway as the economy grows.
@keated
GMO is a problem, because once the genie’s out the bottle, there’s no way to put it back in. Playing Frankensein with food is dangerous because we don’t know how genetically altering food will effect people who eat it, for example those with food allergies, and we don’t know if GMO crops will remain viable when they hybridise with natural varieties. There is no way to guarantee this will not happen. If it does, it could create sterile hybrids which will not be able to reproduce after one generation. This will leave farmers no option but to buy seed of GMO varieties, and that looks like blackmail. GMO crops aren’t designed to ‘feed the world’, they are designed to sell Monsanto’s ‘Roundup’ AKA ‘Agent Orange’.
Fortunately GMO is banned in my country, and products containing them have to be labelled by law.
@Virgin Mary
I’m no expert on the matter, but I’m not going to be persuaded by an unsourced graphic full of really vague and/or non-falsifiable claims.
The scientific consensus is that, while new crops should be tested before introduction to the market, the currently available GMO crops do not pose a significant health risk. Also I’m not sure how it can claim GMO crops don’t increase yield potential, when from what I’ve read it’s pretty demonstrable that they do.
It’s one thing to be skeptical (especially of the motives of large corporations), but I don’t think that it’s helpful to conflate the whole idea of GMO crops with Monsanto, nor is it helpful to suggest we abandon GMO crops entirely because it has the potential to go wrong. Life is full of calculated risks; nothing is 100% safe or predictable.
@dlouwe
Fair comment, but like I said, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We have no idea about the long term risks of GMO, and it’s rather like playing God. We might end up with nothing left worth eating, and vast prairies and infertile land. It’s asking farmers to invest in a science fair experiment.
http://www.marxist.com/gmo-human-need-corporate-greed.htm
@Virgin Mary
Yeah I guess that’s true, but I think an important question is do we have any good reason to suspect that there will be long term risks? And how “long term” are we talking? There’s been GM tobacco for almost 30 years now, and there have been GM tomatoes and potatoes on the shelves in the USA for about 20. So I don’t think it’s fair to say we have “no idea” about it. What circumstances will prove that it’s safe enough? Either as a crop in general, or for human consumption?
@dlouwe
The product has to be both safe and edible. And by edible, I mean nice to eat. Most supermarket produce these days is substandard, no wonder so much of it gets thrown away. (or donated to the local zoo) I would rather buy from a local producer than the supermarket these days. I am pretty picky. I read somewhere that most apples on the shelf are over a year old because they have been stored cold to prevent them from ripening. Then there is the ‘baby carrots’ made from pared down misshapen carrots. It beggars belief. If the quality falls any lower, and people start getting prosecuted for keeping allotments who knows where it will lead? There is no pride in growing good quality crops now, it’s all about ‘cash crops’, I’d rather buy from somebody who won first prise at the agricultural show than from Lidl. (And Lidl are one of the better ones) I hope that the UK resists GMO. I haven’t seen any evidence that GMO improves quality or flavour.
@Virgin Mary:
Monsanto’s GMO crops may be designed to sell that, but Monsanto is not the only producer of GMO foods. Not to mention that Monsanto had a horrible environmental track record long before they got into that. Being anti-Monsanto but pro-GMO is not a contradictory position.
As for feeding the world, there’s always Golden rice, rice engineered to generate vitamin A precursors in its husk to help deal with vitamin A deficiencies in many poorer communities. One of the original developers literally gives it away for free to subsistence farmers, and no royalties are charged if you’re making less than $10,000 growing the rice.
Unfortunately, some of the tests of growing this in the Philippines got destroyed by activists. It’s one thing to say that things should be safely tested, but it’s another thing to then prevent any of the tests from possibly happening.
Basically, GMO is a tool, just like actively breeding plants for specific traits. (And no GMO yet has done the massive amount of change done by millenia of selective breeding on maize to produce modern corn.) It can be used for good or bad. And as far as I’m concerned, a purely anti-GMO stance is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
@Virgin Mary
I’m not sure what you’re getting at? We were talking about the long term risks of GM crops; quality and flavour is a whole other bucket of worms, and not a specific consequence of GM. Like sure, maybe GM crops won’t improve quality or flavour, but resisting GM crops won’t force anyone to grow better quality produce.
Prior to recombinant DNA technology, humans were breeding and cross-breeding new crops, physically grafting/splicing hybrid trees, and bringing plants from their homelands to far-off continents. All of these activities have occasionally lead to unforeseen disasters, but mostly it works out pretty well, so we keep doing it.
So, it’s true that it may be difficult to re-bottle a GMO plant if it becomes a problem — but that’s also true of plants developed with old-fashioned techniques.
If you have access to a source that fit in your budget, more power to you! You absolutely should keep supporting your local community. [quote]I read somewhere that most apples on the shelf are over a year old because they have been stored cold to prevent them from ripening.[/quote] Pics or it didn’t happen. We grow new apples every year, and throw a lot away uneaten. Sure, a lot of apples sold in America come in by container ship from New Zealand, but that can’t take more than a couple weeks. I can’t imagine any reason to try to sell year-old apples. [quote]Then there is the ‘baby carrots’ made from pared down misshapen carrots.[/quote]What’s wrong with that? They’re delicious and convenient.
If you have access to a source that fit in your budget, more power to you! You absolutely should keep supporting your local community. [quote]I read somewhere that most apples on the shelf are over a year old because they have been stored cold to prevent them from ripening.[/quote] Pics or it didn’t happen. We grow new apples every year, and throw a lot away uneaten. Sure, a lot of apples sold in America come in by container ship from New Zealand, but that can’t take more than a couple weeks. I can’t imagine any reason to try to sell year-old apples. [quote]Then there is the ‘baby carrots’ made from pared down misshapen carrots.[/quote]What’s wrong with that? They’re delicious and convenient.
@Orion
^This
Invasive, impossible to get rid of, ecologically harmful species aren’t a new thing. I live in an area just full of kudzu. There’s actually a… grove(?) of the stuff a few hundred feet from my house and another one next to my old middle school. And I’m in a suburb of a major city. Way worse out in the boonies. Strangling the local trees, fucking up power lines and roads, generally being a noxious, zombie weed. No ‘frankenfood’ required
@Orion
It sounds like the “year old apples” is a real thing, but my big question is: why does it matter?
Also, while baby carrots started off as a way to reuse malformed carrots, that’s not much done any more – they grow different carrots that are sweeter and crunchier to cut into baby carrots. (Though again, why does it matter either way?)
Fun fact, kudzu is edible. What you’re living in and by is an almost infinite supply of food. I think the only part that isn’t edible is the vine, but you can eat the leaves, flowers and roots. The flowers are suppose to be sweet, the leaves are similar to collard greens and I think the roots are described as potato-like? I suggest more research but, like, enough people eating candy kudzu flowers and omelets with kudzu would really cut down the growth.
It seems most invasive species are edible, lucky us.
It shouldn’t matter. As long as they aren’t rotten, they should still retain all their vitamins and stuff. They might not taste as good but, honestly, do you just, like, throw it away? That’s a huge waste of food. We (aka US) already throw away hundreds of thousands of pound of food a year, making it last longer isn’t gonna hurt.
Re: trump’s speech style, my son talks like that before his ADHD medication kicks in (and probably I do too… suddenly my husband’s frustration makes sense), half-formed sentences that trail off into something completely unrelated. Given what the guy who wrote his book said, that doesn’t seem far-fetched to me at all.
I see his need for attention and validation, as well as his vindictiveness, as something else completely, but the two things dovetail in a way that’s very destructive.
(I’ve thought about this more than is healthy, probably, but I’m indirectly dealing with someone offline who embodies his most loathsome traits, so.)
@Jack
Yeah, I know. Still annoying
Oooh! I’m all about that idea. Feed the needy, save some trees, clear some weeds, open up business opportunities. I hate eggs tho, so I’ll pass on the omelettes 🙂
Precise! We have enough to feed everyone on the planet, but, until we stop throwing a lot of it away (guilty as charged BTW), we hafta increase yields somehow. Genetic modification can, and has, done that
Tell that to the poisonous, creeping buttercup in my front garden. If only!
There is some research that says that maybe the apples lose their antioxidants over such long periods of storage, though I don’t consider “maybe loses antioxidants” to be a particularly compelling reason to stop using an effective method of long-term food storage.