#pseudoscience genetics

[monkeyandelf]

The Great Genetic Engineering Deception: A Global Monopoly Disguised as Science

On https://www.monkeyandelf.com/the-great-genetic-engineering-deception-a-global-monopoly-disguised-as-science/

The Great Genetic Engineering Deception: A Global Monopoly Disguised as Science

In today’s world, a quiet revolution is unfolding—one that promises innovation but delivers control. Under the glossy label of “genetic engineering,” powerful corporations are reshaping the very foundation of life on Earth.

What appears to be scientific advancement is, in truth, a legal mechanism of unprecedented expropriation. A silent Trojan horse. And contrary to the marketed narrative, it doesn’t work—not in the way people are led to believe. It doesn’t benefit life, nature, or humanity. Instead, it benefits monopoly.

A remarkable exposé written by scientist Jordan Grant, originally published in the Dutch scientific journal Next Level, sheds light on this deception. Though only fragments have circulated widely, the message they carry is explosive, urgent, and deeply unsettling.

Genetic Engineering: A Sleight of Hand Disguised as Progress

Genetic engineering has been portrayed as the pinnacle of modern science—precise, safe, and revolutionary. But dig deeper, and the truth reveals itself: this technology is not about improving life. It’s about owning it.

Imagine waking up one day to discover that the food grown in your backyard, the seeds passed down through generations, or the plants naturally sprouting in your region are no longer yours. Why? Because someone somewhere claimed intellectual property rights over a piece of genetic code. A tomato, once part of the commons, is now a patented commodity. And so is your food sovereignty.

This is not an exaggeration. It is already happening.

The Myth of Scientific Precision

Genetic engineering is often sold as a “precision” technology—like editing text in a word processor. But real science tells a very different story. The human genome project and decades of molecular biology have revealed a chaotic landscape: genes are not fixed “blueprints,” but dynamic entities that change over time, even within the same organism.

Tools like CRISPR, celebrated as miracle scalpels of DNA, are in reality nothing more than crude chemical mechanisms based on probabilities. They are not precise; they are unpredictable. They can cause off-target effects, unintended mutations, and disruptions whose consequences are poorly understood.

This isn’t innovation—it’s biotechnological roulette.

Patents on Life: The True Goal

At the heart of genetic engineering lies one true objective: profit through ownership. By reclassifying life as a product of intellectual labor, corporations have begun patenting not only seeds and plants but microorganisms, animals, and even human genetic sequences.

This system doesn’t empower farmers. It enslaves them. Once farmers use patented seeds, they cannot reuse or share them. They must buy new seeds each season, often bundled with mandatory chemical treatments. Independence is replaced by dependency, and biodiversity gives way to uniform, fragile monocultures.

The real “engineering” here is not genetic. It is economic.

The Collapse of the Gene Theory

One of the most overlooked truths in biology today is that the concept of “genes” as discrete units of heredity is increasingly unscientific. Despite decades of research, no one has isolated a gene in the way textbooks describe. DNA itself is not a rigid instruction manual but a reactive molecule influenced by the environment, biochemistry, and unknown forces.

The gene theory, once revolutionary, is now deeply flawed and contradicted by evidence. It persists only because it supports a lucrative narrative—one that legitimizes the genetic patenting of all life forms under the guise of science.

Biochemistry and the Illusion of Control

Modern biochemistry is built on reductionist assumptions. Its explanatory models are often metaphysical rather than empirical—chemical tales dressed as truth. While chemical manipulation can certainly produce observable effects, the theoretical framework underpinning much of what is claimed about “how life works” is shaky at best.

Much like the alchemists and magicians of old, today’s bio-scientists mix molecules and tell grand stories. But now, the stakes are global. These stories are used to justify monopolistic laws, manipulate public perception, and suppress dissent.

It is no longer just about science. It is about shaping reality itself.

GMO and the Myth of Genetic Modification

Let’s get something straight: so-called genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are not miracles of genetic insight. They are products of accelerated breeding—achieved through aggressive chemical treatments, radiation exposure, and brute-force manipulation. This is not elegant science. It is industrial interference.

The inherited traits produced through such methods are not new—they are simply the result of environmental stressors forcing rapid adaptation. What’s more, the controversy surrounding GMO “safety” has been amplified deliberately to divert public focus from the deeper deception: the myth of genetic engineering as a precise and reliable science.

Stories of cloning and genome editing—such as Dolly the sheep or the edited Chinese twins—are media spectacles, carefully crafted to uphold the illusion of genetic control. They serve the same narrative function as past tales of moon landings: symbols of technological triumph masking geopolitical motives.

The Real Endgame: Patenting People and Nature

Jordan Grant’s insight cuts deeper than most. This deception is not limited to crops or livestock. It extends to people. The idea of a “patented human genome” is no longer the realm of science fiction—it is a legal possibility.

If a human genome is patented, the individual encoded by that genome becomes, by legal definition, intellectual property. And this framework is already being constructed, under the radar. Every DNA test, every genome sequence stored by biotech firms, contributes to a growing database of claimable life.

This is not theoretical. It is happening now.

The Hidden Agenda Behind Genetic Testing

DNA tests, PCR diagnostics, and other biotech “tools” are revered as miracles of modern medicine. But what if they are nothing more than legitimizing instruments for a deeper agenda?

Despite their scientific aura, these tests are built on questionable foundations. The assumptions behind what DNA even is are unsettled, and the alleged “discovery” of genes remains unverified. These tests are not neutral. They are gateways—designed to gather data, establish legal frameworks, and normalize the commodification of life.

A Call to Question and Resist

It is time to stop blindly accepting the genetic narrative. To question the epistemology of molecular biology. To recognize that what we’re dealing with is not harmless science—but a global model of resource domination disguised as innovation.

The vocabulary may be modern, but the agenda is ancient: control.

Food is not a commodity. Life is not intellectual property. And nature does not belong to corporations.

Only a deeply informed public can resist this new form of tyranny—one that doesn’t arrive with tanks, but patents.

[arkipelagic]

a too-common misconception about the origins of filipinos is that we are all descended from the aeta. we are not. “aeta” refers to a specific ethnic group native to certain places in luzon such as zambales and pampanga, but is also commonly used as an umbrella term for several related ethnic groups across the philippine archipelago. they are identified by physical characteristics such as dark skin and very curly hair (leading to a false belief that they are descendants of black africans) as opposed to those of majority of the country who have lighter skin and hair that is either straight or of looser curl patterns (also falsely believed to be markers of the so-called malay race.)

the aeta are an ethnic minority; as of 2010, there were a documented <100,000 out of millions of filipino citizens identifying as such. it is clear majority of filipinos are not of aeta descent. so where does this myth that all filipinos “descend” from the aeta come from?

generations of miseducation has led the average filipino to believe that, out of the hundreds of ethnic groups native to the philippines, it is the aeta in particular who are the original people who came to the philippines prior to the advent of the austronesian expansion. in other words, filipinos view the aeta as a pure people who are remnants of the old world.

this is not true because:

DNA evidence from the luzon aeta, mamanwa ata, batak, & other similar peoples indicate ancestry from BOTH the earliest settlers of what is now the philippines (commonly referred to colloquially and in the literature as negritos but also sometimes as basal australasians and first sundaland peoples) and later migrants associated with the austronesian expansion.

all other native populations in the philippines save for igorot peoples also show admixture from both negrito/basal australasian/first sundaland peoples and later migrants, most significantly the austronesian speakers. what’s notable is the varying degrees of admixture among aetas and non-aetas.

two graphic charts showing the peopling of the philippines and genetic admixture in modern populations. taken from the study, “Multiple migrations to the Philippines during the last 50,000 years” (2021) by Maximillian Larena et al.

i think what has happened is that “aeta” has become synonymous with the earliest inhabitants of the philippines, the real name for these ancient peoples being unknown to us moderns. it is only the flawed tendency to view indigenous peoples as unchanging relics of the past that has led to the biggest mistake filipinos make when discussing our origins: that is, the constant misuse of the term “aeta” to mean “pureblooded original people” when in reality aeta peoples are also descended from later migrants. when people say filipinos are descended from the aeta, they really mean to say filipinos are descended from the first settlers.

aeta peoples are our contemporaries; they are not our living progenitors but their own people with their own languages, ancestral lands, cultures, and histories.

[as-the-stars-foretold]

a plant’s life is a sigmoid curve. To Me

[creature-wizard]

these anons proving they have no actual clue what dna is huh. taking ochem soon and my mind was going in circles trying to understand.

Besides, dna is the code for life, how wtf would one "unlock it". we can't even "unlock" genes for a better sense of smell, not to mention epigenetics.

I mean, they understand epigenetics something something turn genes on and off, and think that because epigenetics, they can actually turn their bodies into crystal or light. 'Cause as we all know, crystal and light are totally conducive to the processes of organic life. /s

[proton-wobbler]

This is maybe not going to be a popular contribution to this post, but I just saw a talk on how gut microbiomes in a hybrid species of bird may actually limit their success and is a driver of speciation between the two subspecies. In a case like the pizzly bear, I would really rather see studies showing they can surviving in the Arctic before they're brought into any sort of species-level decision making, because polar bears are specialists designed to live in an ice-dominated landscape. Grizzlies aren't. Grizzlies are still omnivores while polar bear are hyler-carnivores. If those genes can't contribute to species survival then there is a big reason not to let hybrids into the mix.

I understand the Red Wolf situation is much more complicated, though, and I agree with the issue that we should be treating coyotes with a lot more respect. And you're right, animals aren't concerned about a species, they're concerned about their kids.

look at this incredibly haunting coyote from Ohio I saw on inaturalist

[monkeyssalad-blog]

History 209 - Eugenics 2 - Poster by Johnny El-Rady Via Flickr: A Eugenics Society poster (1930s) from the Wellcome Library Eugenics Society Archive.

[recursive360]

Do Women Retain DNA from Every Man They Have Intercourse With?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The true, tactical significance of Project 2025

TODAY (July 14), I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! NEXT SATURDAY (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

Like you, I have heard a lot about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's roadmap for the actions that Trump should take if he wins the presidency. Given the Heritage Foundation's centrality to the American authoritarian project, it's about as awful and frightening as you might expect:

https://www.project2025.org/

But (nearly) all the reporting and commentary on Project 2025 badly misses the point. I've only read a single writer who immediately grasped the true significance of Project 2025: The American Prospect's Rick Perlstein, which is unsurprising, given Perlstein's stature as one of the left's most important historians of right wing movements:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/

As Perlstein points out, Project 2025 isn't new. The Heritage Foundation and its allies have prepared documents like this, with many identical policy prescriptions, in the run-up to many presidential elections. Perlstein argues that Warren G Harding's 1921 inaugural address captures much of its spirit, as did the Nixon campaign's 1973 vow to "move the country so far to the right 'you won’t even recognize it.'"

The threats to democracy and its institutions aren't new. The right has been bent on their destruction for more than a century. As Perlstein says, the point of taking note of this isn't to minimize the danger, rather, it's to contextualize it. The American right has, since the founding of the Republic, been bent on creating a system of hereditary aristocrats, who govern without "interference" from democratic institutions, so that their power to extract wealth from First Nations, working people, and the land itself is checked only by rivalries with other aristocrats. The project of the right is grounded in a belief in Providence: that God's favor shines on His best creations and elevates them to wealth and power. Elite status is proof of merit, and merit is "that which leads to elite status."

When a wealthy person founds an intergenerational dynasty of wealth and power, this is merely a hereditary meritocracy: a bloodline infused with God's favor. Sometimes, this belief is dressed up in caliper-wielding pseudoscience, with the "good bloodline" reflecting superior genetics and not the favor of the Almighty. Of course, a true American aristocrat gussies up his "race realism" with mystical nonsense: "God favored me with superior genes." The corollary, of course, is that you are poor because God doesn't favor you, or because your genes are bad, or because God punished you with bad genes.

So we should be alarmed by the right's agenda. We should be alarmed at how much ground it has gained, and how the right has stolen elections and Supreme Court seats to enshrine antimajoritarianism as a seemingly permanent fact of life, giving extremist minorities the power to impose their will on the rest of us, dooming us to a roasting planet, forced births, racist immiseration, and most expensive, worst-performing health industry in the world.

But for all that the right has bombed so many of the roads to a prosperous, humane future, it's a huge mistake to think of the right as a stable, unified force, marching to victory after inevitable victory. The American right is a brittle coalition led by a handful of plutocrats who have convinced a large number of turkeys to vote for Christmas.

The right wing coalition needs to pander to forced-birth extremists, racist extremist, Christian Dominionist extremists (of several types), frothing anti-Communist cranks, vicious homophobes and transphobes, etc, etc. Pandering to all these groups isn't easy: for one thing, they often want opposite things – the post-Roe forced birth policies that followed the Dobbs decision are wildly unpopular among conservatives, with the exception of a clutch of totally unhinged maniacs that the party relies on as part of a much larger coalition. Even more unpopular are policies banning birth control, like the ones laid out in Project 2025. Less popular still: the proposed ban on no-fault divorce. Each of these policies have different constituencies to whom they are very popular, but when you put them together, you get Dan Savage's "Husbands you can't leave, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, politicians you can't vote out of office":

https://twitter.com/fakedansavage/status/1805680183065854083

The constituency for "husbands you can't leave, pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate, politicians you can't vote out of office" is very small. Almost no one in the GOP coalition is voting for all of this, they're voting for one or two of these things and holding their noses when it comes to the rest.

Take the "libertarian" wing of the GOP: its members do favor personal liberty…it's just that they favor low taxes for them more than personal liberty for you. The kind of lunatic who'd vote for a dead gopher if it would knock a quarter off his tax bill will happily allow his coalition partners to rape pregnant women with unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds and force them to carry unwanted fetuses to term if that's the price he has to pay to save a nickel in taxes:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

And, of course, the religious maniacs who profess a total commitment to Biblical virtue but worship Trump, Gaetz, Limbaugh, Gingrich, Reagan, and the whole panoply of cheating, lying, kid-fiddling, dope-addled refugees from a Jack Chick tract know that these men never gave a shit about Jesus, the Apostles or the Ten Commandments – but they'll vote for 'em because it will get them school prayer, total abortion bans, and unregulated "home schooling" so they can brainwash a generation of Biblical literalists who think the Earth is 5,000 years old and that Jesus was white and super into rich people.

Time and again, the leaders of the conservative movement prove themselves capable of acts of breathtaking cruelty, and undoubtedly many of them are depraved sadists who genuinely enjoy the suffering of their enemies (think of Trump lickspittle Steven Miller's undisguised glee at the thought of parents who would never be reunited with children after being separated at the border). But it's a mistake to think that "the cruelty is the point." The point of the cruelty is to assemble and maintain the coalition. Cruelty is the tactic. Power is the point:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

The right has assembled a lot of power. They did so by maintaining unity among people who have irreconcilable ethics and goals. Think of the pro-genocide coalition that includes far-right Jewish ethno-nationalists, antisemitic apocalyptic Christians who believe they are hastening the end-times, and Islamophobes of every description, from War On Terror relics to Hindu nationalists.

This is quite an improbable coalition, and while I deplore its goals, I can't help but be impressed by its cohesion. Can you imagine the kind of behind-the-scenes work it takes to get antisemites who think Jews secretly control the world to lobby with Zionists? Or to get Zionists to work alongside of Holocaust-denying pencilneck Hitler wannabes whose biggest regret is not bringing their armbands to Charlottesville?

Which brings me back to Project 2025 and its true significance. As Perlstein writes, Project 2025 is a mess. Clocking in an 900 pages, large sections of Project 2025 flatly contradict each other, while other sections contain subtle contradictions that you wouldn't notice unless you were schooled in the specialized argot of the far right's jargon and history.

For example, Project 2025 calls for defunding government agencies and repurposing the same agencies to carry out various spectacular atrocities. Both actions are deplorable, but they're also mutually exclusive. Project 2025 demands four different, completely irreconcilable versions of US trade policy. But at least that's better than Project 2025's chapter on monetary policy, which simply lays out every right wing theory of money and then throws up its hands and recommends none of them.

Perlstein says that these conflicts, blank spots and contradictions are the most important parts of Project 2025. They are the fracture lines in the coalition: the conflicting ideas that have enough support that neither side can triumph over the other. These are the conflicts that are so central to the priorities of blocs that are so important to the coalition that they must be included, even though that inclusion constitutes a blinking "LOOK AT ME" sign telling us where the right is ready to split apart.

The right is really good at this. Perlstein points to Nixon's expansion of affirmative action, undertaken to sow division between Black and white workers. We need to get better at it.

So far, we've lavished attention on the clearest and most emphatic proposals in Project 2025 – for understandable reasons. These are the things they say they want to do. It would be reckless to ignore them. But they've been saying things like this for a century. These demands constitute a compelling argument for fighting them as a matter of urgency, with the intention of winning. And to win, we need to split apart their coalition.

Perlstein calls on us to dissect Project 2025, to cleave it at its joints. To do so, he says we need to understand its antecedents, like Nixon's "Malek Manual," a roadmap for destroying the lives of civil servants who failed to show sufficient loyalty to Nixon. For example, the Malek Manual lays out a "Traveling Salesman Technique" whereby a government employee would be given duties "criss-crossing him across the country to towns (hopefully with the worst accommodations possible) of a population of 20,000 or under. Until his wife threatens him with divorce unless he quits, you have him out of town and out of the way":

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Final_Report_on_Violations_and_Abuses_of/0dRLO9vzQF0C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22organization+of+a+political+personnel+office+and+program%22&pg=PA161&printsec=frontcover

It's no coincidence that leftist historians of the right are getting a lot of attention. Trumpism didn't come out of nowhere – Trump is way too stupid and undisciplined to be a cause – he's an effect. In his excellent, bestselling new history of the right in the early 1990s, When the Clock Broke, Josh Ganz shows us the swamp that bred Trump, with such main characters as the fascist eugenicist Sam Francis:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374605445/whentheclockbroke

Ganz joins the likes of the Know Your Enemy podcast, an indispensable history of reactionary movements that does excellent work in tracing the fracture lines in the right coalition:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/when-clock-broke-106803105

Progressives are also an uneasy coalition that is easily splintered. As Naomi Klein argues in her essential Doppelganger, the liberal-left coalition is inherently unstable and contains the seeds of its own destruction:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Liberals have been the senior partner in that coalition, and their commitment to preserving institutions for their own sake (rather than because of what they can do to advance human thriving) has produced generations of weak and ineffectual responses to the crises of terminal-stage capitalism, like the idea that student-debt cancellation should be means-tested:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/03/utopia-of-rules/#in-triplicate

The last bid for an American aristocracy was repelled by rejecting institutions, not preserving them. When the Supreme Court thwarted the New Deal, FDR announced his intention to pack the court, and then began the process of doing so (which included no-holds-barred attacks on foot-draggers in his own party). Not for nothing, this is more-or-less what Lincoln did when SCOTUS blocked Reconstruction:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

But the liberals who lead the progressive movement dismiss packing the court as unserious and impractical – notwithstanding the fact that they have no plan for rescuing America from the bribe-taking extremists, the credibly accused rapist, and the three who stole their robes. Ultimately, liberals defend SCOTUS because it is the Supreme Court. I defended SCOTUS, too – while it was still a vestigial organ of the rights revolution, which improved the lives of millions of Americans. Human rights are worth defending, SCOTUS isn't. If SCOTUS gets in the way of human rights, then screw SCOTUS. Sideline it. Pack it. Make it a joke.

Fuck it.

This isn't to argue for left seccession from the progressive coalition. As we just saw in France, splitting at this moment is an invitation to literal fascist takeover:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/melenchon-macron-france-left-winner

But if there's one thing that the rise of Trumpism has proven, it's that parties are not immune to being wrestled away from their establishment leaderships by radical groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

What's more, there's a much stronger natural coalition that the left can mobilize: workers. Being a worker – that is, paying your bills from wages, instead of profits – isn't an ideology you can change, it's a fact. A Christian nationalist can change their beliefs and then they will no longer be a Christian nationalist. But no matter what a worker believes, they are still a worker – they still have a irreconcilable conflict with people whose money comes from profits, speculation, or rents. There is no objectively fair way to divide the profits a worker's labor generates – your boss will always pay you as little of that surplus as he can. The more wages you take home, the less profit there is for your boss, the fewer dividends there are for his shareholders, and the less there is to pay to rentiers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

Reviving the role of workers in their unions, and of unions in the Democratic party, is the key to building the in-party power we need to drag the party to real solutions – strong antimonopoly action, urgent climate action, protections for gender, racial and sexual minorities, and decent housing, education and health care.

The alternative to a worker-led Democratic Party is a Democratic Party run by its elites, whose dictates and policies are inescapably illegitimate. As Hamilton Nolan writes, the completely reasonable (and extremely urgent) discussion about Biden's capacity to defeat Trump has been derailed by the Democrats' undemocratic structure. Ultimately, the decision to have an open convention or to double down on a candidate whose campaign has been marred by significant deficits is down to a clutch of party officials who operate without any formal limits or authority:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-hole-at-the-heart-of-the-democratic

Jettisoning Biden because George Clooney (or Nancy Pelosi) told us to is never going to feel legitimate to his supporters in the party. But if the movement for an open convention came from grassroots-dominated unions who themselves dominated the party – as was the case, until the Reagan revolution – then there'd be a sense that the party had constituents, and it was acting on its behalf.

Reviving the labor movement after 40 years of Reaganomic war on workers may sound like a tall order, but we are living through a labor renaissance, and the long-banked embers of labor radicalism are reigniting. What's more, repelling fascism is what workers' movements do. The business community will always sell you out to the Nazis in exchange for low taxes, cheap labor and loose regulation.

But workers, organized around their class interests, stand strong. Last week, we lost one of labor's brightest flames. Jane McAlevey, a virtuoso labor organizer and trainer of labor organizers, died of cancer at 57:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/jane-mcalevey-strategy-organizing-obituary

McAlevey fought to win. She was skeptical of platitudes like "speaking truth to power," always demanding an explanation for how the speech would become action. In her classic book A Collective Bargain, she describes how she built worker power:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

McAlevey helped organize a string of successful strikes, including the 2019 LA teachers' strike. Her method was straightforward: all you have to do to win a strike or a union drive is figure out how to convince every single worker in the shop to back the union. That's all.

Of course, it's harder than it sounds. All the problems that plague every coalition – especially the progressive liberal/left coalition – are present on the shop floor. Some workers don't like each other. Some don't see their interests aligned with others. Some are ornery. Some are convinced that victory is impossible.

McAlevey laid out a program for organizing that involved figuring out how to reach every single worker, to converse with them, listen to them, understand them, and win them over. I've never read or heard anyone speak more clearly, practically and inspirationally about coalition building.

Biden was never my candidate. I supported three other candidates ahead of him in 2020. When he got into office and started doing a small number of things I really liked, it didn't make me like him. I knew who he was: the Senator from MBNA, whose long political career was full of bills, votes and speeches that proved that while we might have some common goals, we didn't want the same America or the same world.

My interest in Biden over the past four years has had two areas of focus: how can I get him to do more of the things that will make us all better off, and do less of the things that make the world worse. When I think about the next four years, I'm thinking about the same things. A Trump presidency will contain far more bad things and far fewer good ones.

Many people I like and trust have pointed out that they don't like Biden and think he will be a bad president, but they think Trump will be much worse. To limit Biden's harms, leftists have to take over the Democratic Party and the progressive movement, so that he's hemmed in by his power base. To limit Trump's harms, leftists have to identify the fracture lines in the right coalition and drive deep wedges into them, shattering his power base.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

[hero-israel]

This is pseudoscience where it isn’t actively anti-science.

The pines planted in Israel are Aleppo pines, which are indigenous and have been recorded by observers for literally millennia.  Far from “devastating” native oaks and carobs and whatever, Israel planted tons of those varieties too.  And there can be no discussion of the well-being of Israeli forests without noting that Palestinian militants are highly proficient at arson and have practically made mountainous tire-fires their trademark.

As for the idea that the Zionists were “trying to create European-style forests” - the implication that the local environment was “normal” before they “changed” it is entirely a social construct reeking of unexamined privilege.  The Roman Empire massively deforested Israel along with the rest of the Mediterranean.  Our popular concept of the Middle East as a land of desert and scrubland is  artificial, but comes naturally to people who think the world began in like 1700.  

The Palestinian mountain gazelle is indeed endangered in Israel, and some of their populations are jeopardized by habitat and genetic fragmentation caused by the West Bank barriers.  However, the largest and most stable population of the species is found in the Golan Heights, where they roam freely without such barriers and have enjoyed a significant rebound in numbers now that they are no longer subject to hunting from Syria.  More importantly, the Palestinian mountain gazelle has already been wiped out in Egypt, and also in Syria and Jordan - perhaps some invisible Mossad agents went on safari?  The species was on the brink of extinction in Turkey, until it was quite accidentally saved when the Turkish military set up a no-man’s-land on the border with Syria in response to its civil war.    

It’s also worth noting that the first post in that Twitter thread (not screencapped onto the Tumblr post, hmm...) was Heron calling for BDS.  When Israel really is the only country in that region where forest cover is growing and where the mountain gazelles have any chance at survival, uh, why should we overthrow the government, again?  That would help the environment how, precisely?  The Kai Herons of the world would call that “greenwashing,” because they don’t actually give a shit about the environment, they just misappropriate journal-jargon to mask how ridiculous and unprincipled their accusations are.   

Last and least, the concept that “Palestinian liberation is a climate issue” is just a perfect crystallization, French waiter palm-kiss, of how lefty activists try to run in every direction at once and get nowhere.  Climate protection has failed because it requires the entire world to unfuck foundational problems in our economic, technological, and political lives - but Palestinian liberation is still a matter of a signature and a handshake, two parties looking at made-up lines on a very small map.  For white European activists to insist that Palestinians may only make progress if we first make progress on climate change just shows how they only see Palestinians as tools and symbols and not as people.  

CODA:

This is a case of me being ABSOLUTELY fucking petty enough to reconstruct and restart a post after someone blocked me and prevented reblogs of the original.

For more on the pseudoscience and anti-environmentalism of Palestine activists see lots of links here. For more on the actual environmental history and diversity of the region, see the tags.

[elmushterri]

Hi! I’m currently outlining a potential Fanfic/Fanart comic for the pj mask rewrite, and I was wondering if Magic is still a thing? Because in the show, An Yu and Night Ninja both have ties to magic, but I don’t know if they’d still have those ties in the Au? It seems a bit more grounded overall, but I thought I’d ask.

Thank you!

oOOH, excited to see what you do. And, no, I don’t think magic exists here, it’s all pseudoscience genetics stuff. Yknow how She Ra first one’s tech is and whatnot? (I know that is technically magic, I just mean, pretend it isn’t, same-ish aesthetic but more sci fi)

[creature-wizard]

Friendly reminder that:

The concept of starseeds promotes ableism by minimizing or denying ADHD and autism.

The ancient astronaut hypothesis promotes spiritual colonialism and destruction of other cultures by twisting other people's mythologies and sacred texts to fit their narratives.

The reptilian alien mythology is based on conspiracy theories historically used to justify oppressing and murdering real people. Loosh/blood/adrenochrome harvesting is just repackaged blood libel.

New Age mythology is chock full of repackaged right wing conspiracy theories, the same kind pushed by QAnon.

It's also full of repackaged racist pseudoscience about genetic superiority/inferiority and the function of evolution.

Ascension to 5D was supposed to have happened back in 2012, and the prediction failed.

New Agers are recycling their predictions over and over to catch new waves of people who don't know the movement's history.

Belief in Atlantis is strongly motivated by white supremacy.

For more info, see:

Looks like it's time to talk about starseeds and the New Age movement again.

How the mythology of starseeds, indigo children, crystal children, rainbow children, etc. harms kids

New Age YouTube channel caught recycling claims of imminent "first contact" for three years

Is the spiritual person a conspiracy theorist? A list of red flags

What is spiritual eugenics?

New Age beliefs that derive from racist pseudoscience

[professorsparklepants]

Extremely funny of the Assassin's Creed series to make up the concept of "genetic memory" for sci-fi pseudoscience exactly one year before the NIH starts a decade-long study on epigenetics.

[drdougdouglass]

Map America's Next Mass Fatality Event

Since the executive branch has ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to cease all public communications until some unspecified future notice, it is easy to believe that no effort will be made to prevent or control the spread of our next viral plague.

Eugenics is a central tenant to fascist and totalitarian ideologies. This unfounded, hate-based pseudoscience, attempts to assign blame for societal conditions like crime and poverty on biological or genetic traits of marginalized communities like the impoverished, immigrants, and religious minorities.

When COVID 19 began to spread in the United States in 2019, outbreaks were first identified in large metropolitan areas ajecent to major international airports.

H5N1 (Bird Flu) is currently spreading across USA through unpasteurized eggs, bird droppings and milk from infected cows, with outbreaks found primarily in rural and agrarian communities, known for high levels of poverty and large migrant labor populations.

California, Texas, Kansas, Louisiana, and Illinois are all currently monitoring the spread of H5N1, although only California and Kansas are communicating their findings to the public.

SPOILER ALERT/ FLASHBACK:

***History repeats itself when the majority didn't paying attention the first time.

[rokkazu]

it sucks that genuinely healthier and better for the environment things are lumped in with useless pseudoscience and trends like non gmo msg free everything is monkfruit and stevia for no reason because sugar is evil GET ME OUT OF HERE. STEVIA TASTES SO FUCKING BADDD PLEASE JUST USE CANE SUGAR. I WNAT EVERYTHING TO HAVE SO.MICH MSG IN IT. I WNAT MY FRUITS TO BE SO GENETICALLY MODIFIED THEY BECOME SOME ALIEN PLANET SHIT

[sahonithereadwolf]

There is something about genetics as a field in particular that seems to attract this sort of turn of the century pseudoscience scams in the same way that like... early fossils and cocaine were. And I know the why. It's neatly in the intersection of eugenics, fascism, and capitalism. But man... whether we're talking about designer genetic babies, or the bullshit of 23 and me (as a native man, I can say there is a lot more questionable shit than it selling your data) Or that french woman part of the alien cult that claimed to clone a human...

Somethin' about it man. Sorry every geneticist out there studying shit like glycobiology or something important like that. Sorry the fake ass dire wolf is in your shit.

[lizardsfromspace]

There are a lot of obscure truthers out there. For instance there's Lysenkoism truthers. You can find them p. easily bc they're the only people regularly discussing Lysenkoism except as a metaphor. The capitalists are hiding how evolution really works from the people

"How do they explain why every communist country either rejected Lysenkoism within a matter of years after following it wrecked local science & caused repeated mass famines, or never adopted it at all?"

Hmm?

"How do they explain why every communist country, past and present, concluded it was pseudoscience and went back to Darwinian evolution?"

Okay, so it looks like, the answer is misinterpreting some new aspect of genetics to claim that acquired genetic traits existing in any sense proves a theory claiming they're the primary way genetics works, and/or insulting you & denying the Holodomor