Seed sharing is fundamental to human civilization. It is a human right. Companies like Monsanto that belligerently interfere with this by claiming “ownership” of seeds are nothing less than evil.
Their point is doing a thing for a long time doesn't enshrine it as a right.
The comment before could have said "should be a human right".
imo it's very frustrating having people say "thing I want is a right". What gives them that right? Are all laws not violation of rights if you extend that
They are completely ignoring the context of this whole thread, which exists because the highest court in the land (Kenyan land, that is) has affirmed that right.
Ggp's is as absurd as a North Korean commenting on a SCOTUS ruling on the right to a fair trial by saying "This is a new human right I didn't even know I had."
The rights of particular countries' citizens aren't usually construed with 'human rights.' I believe 'human rights' is of UN origin.
The rights of US citizens, for instance, don't currently apply to the folks getting deported. It's a big controversial point, but of course the rights of the constitution aren't guaranteed to some guy in France.
Human rights aren't those.
In this case, Kenyan citizens gained a right, not humans.
What are they, then? If you can name one, I'll find you a jurisdiction where that right is not respected.
Your (incorrect, IMO) definition of human rights based on the lowest common denominator whittles them down to nothing. Fundamentally I suspect what you and I are calling "human rights" is not the same thing at all.
And before they were rights encoded in law were they rights?
I feel it makes your claim weaker to go from "should have" to "is a right" if there's any doubt in it.
There's strong "we have a right to ancillary thing" arguments you can make that rely on a right, but those rely on that right being a given, not the premise
When somebody says "X is a right", that does not necessarily mean they think the case is closed and the discussion is over. It can also mean that they are making an assertion, which frames the discussion for the follow-up questions that you are now making.
I'm likely more connected to agriculture than you think. And I think seed-sharing should be enshrined legally.
That's not the same as human rights. I think it's a silly practice lately to start proclaiming all these things are human rights. Particularly (not this case) when those things have to be given to them by other humans.
I don't know what exactly "seed sharing" means (and the article doesn't describe it fully) but merely owning anything communally, or owning property - which includes the right to transfer it - seems like obvious human rights.
What's actually a human right and what isn't will depend on who you ask, but just "Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others." seems to be applicable (UN Charter §17)? It doesn't feel like "random thing I think is important is a human right" at all?
The commercial GMO seed developers require that you buy seed from them every year. You're not allowed to collect the seed and re-plant it next year. Or share it, I guess.
That's in the US, not sure how it plays out around the world.
They just want to lock in the farmers, in an situation where they can't do it technologically. So they're doing it via the law. It's...basically what you'd expect of the world today. Sad, but I suppose they argue that they should have IP rights just like any industry.
And you'd think they'd just boycott on principle, but it puts them at a big disadvantage in many cases, as their yields go down while national harvest goes up, making sale prices lower. So it's not easy to see what to do about it from the farmer's perspective.
Unironically, rights get clarified by new attempts at overreach to violate them whether through new depths of depravity or technological innovations making the previously fantastic possible.
That's fair, and I think it's a reasonable take. I agree with you.
I just find it annoying when people declare [thing] is a right. Often they don't even understand what a right is, and haven't thought about where their rights are derived.
If they mean it should be a right, I probably agree in many cases.
How do you feel about companies developing GMOs and then saying farmers can't keep the seed? If we don't protect their products legally, will we continue to have GMO advances? Is enough of the research happening at a non-profit level? I don't know the answers, so I haven't decided myself.
"Unable to read or write, he taught himself to form these sculptures using wooden structures at their core wrapped in mink or barbed wire, covered in layers of cement..."
I want to understand how in the world did this man come to the decision process of using either mink or barbed wire? Seems like concrete must adhere to them both quite well?
fe3+ definitely exists in non-animal matter too. We can talk about quantity, whatever, but my commentary is intended to criticize the baiting and conclusion-drawing.
Fe(III) ions exist in all the cells of all aerobic living beings, for instance in the molecules of the so-called cytochromes, which are used in the cellular respiration.
Nevertheless, the amount of Fe(III) that exists in almost all cells is extremely small in comparison with the amount of Fe(III) that exists in the blood of any vertebrate, where it is used to transport dioxygen in the entire body. The "red" muscles also contain a similar protein to that of the red blood cells, which is used to store dioxygen.
Therefore any kind of food that contains either blood or muscles rich in myoglobin will contain much more Fe(III) than anything else.
It exists at MUCH SMALLER amounts. Their conclusion drawing should be based on an amount should it not? Lead from shooting my gun is not going to damage me the same as eating a bunch of handfulls of pure lead because of the AMOUNT that my body will end up processing. Quantity is so key its absurd to overlook it.
This idea really disgusts me. If an animal is “accidentally” killed then the first action should be to punish the people who did this and then take steps to ensure it does not happen again. Just allowing capitalism to continue to wreak havoc on our planet is so obviously not moral thing to do.
From roughly 2006-2012 this site greatly influenced my taste. I visited the site multiple times a day and read pretty much everything they published. I used to always check the site at 11pm when they reliably published a new set of 5 album reviews.
At some point banner ads for big liquor companies started to show up. Then coverage for mainstream music became more frequent. This was a clear signal that they had sold out and their reputation was shot.
I view them now as the new incarnation of Rolling Stone magazine. Still feel for the writers who got fired in this latest reorg.
Orca whales off the coast of Washington (j,k,l pods) are endangered IN NO SMALL PART due to the existence of the Snake River Dam. If the salmon cannot survive then neither can the whales.
Ancient people did not see animals are beings with feeling, they were seen as useful production machines.
It's only in modern times that we have the luxury of taking the animal's feeling into account at all. I'm sure you would want even more consideration for the animals, but it's much better today than it was.
How do you know that "ancient people" never thought of animals as having feelings? Seems an extraordinarily broad claim given all the cultures and ages that encompass "ancient people"
I mean even my own currently-alive ancestors (farmers, the majority of them) don't look at livestock as living, conscious beings. They obviously care for each animal and give them a swift and as-painless-as-possible butchering when the time comes, but they're not the bleeding hearts that many people these days are, they're mostly just vehicles for vital necessities.
I don't find it difficult to imagine my great-great-great-great-(fill in the appropriate number of greats here to qualify for ancient ancestors) grandmother butchering a pig and not really giving it a second thought at all, having grown up on a farm myself. Hell, my current grandma is probably much gentler and gives the pork a much better time than my ancient ancestors did
Because I read some of their writings? The concept of a "Pet" was foreign to them. Animals - even dogs, were there to work.
The concept of how an animal was feeling simply didn't occur to them. An animal was a tool, and you took good care of the tool, but not because of the tool, but because then it was more useful.
It was the 18th century when animal rights started becoming a thing, which exactly corresponds with the industrial age when things became less scarce and people could worry about animals, and not just themselves.
"Some of", indeed. The poster above is correct that your statements are over-broad.
There are hundreds of Roman monuments, inscriptions, and poems [celebrating dogs](https://thepetrifiedmuse.blog/2015/06/20/every-dog-has-his-d...) as companions and pets. There are medieval European graves that strongly suggest sentimentality towards the animals buried in them. There's this [lovely ninth-century Irish poem](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/48267/...) about a cat. Someone with more knowledge in the area than I possess should comment on animal portraiture in ancient and early-modern China and Japan, but that was a thing as well.
I think the fairest thing to say is that people in every era - very much including today - instrumentalize some animals, and sentimentalize others.
You read some writing by some "ancient" people (post writing 'ancient it seems) and you're launching into broad sweeping generalisations about all "ancient people" ?
Wow.
Meanwhile, I've travelled a lot for work - mostly to odd corners of the world, and I've yet to meet people that didn't have stories about animals and animal behaviours.
Famously, for example, Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories are largely about animals, Tiddalick the Frog, Emu and the Jabiru, etc.
They encapsulate the place of animals in the environment, and as hunter gatherers attuned to where next years meal will come from, attention is paid to breeding and caring for the young so that there are full grown adults to breed again and to eat.
Rightly or wrongly the stories are about the imagined feelings of animals, the things that make them happy and plentiful, the bad things that cause numbers to dwindle.
Various people had various relationships with various animals, not as "pets" but as other beings in the world.
They probably misunderstood scale to mean something like “in the ways,” not more literally “by the numbers.” I’ve seen people suggest that we’re more savage and brutal towards animals these days on other websites, and I think that’s an absurd conclusion to draw because I don’t think we have sufficient evidence for it. It seems unquestionable that we’re doing it to more animals, though. There are more people eating far more animals these days. I suppose some might argue they aren’t suffering or something? That’s crazy, to me.
While it is frustrating to see entire houses used exclusively for short term rentals, I think them being converted to actual single family homes would only be a drop in the bucket in helping to balance the housing market.
Demand would still be absolutely insane if AirBnB did not exist.
From what I’ve seen of airbnbs where I grew up a contributing factor isn’t just quantity of the airbnbs but also the particular houses they choose.
A lot of them are what I think most people would call “starter houses”, relatively cheap pragmatic homes in decent areas. I would assume it has to do with people maybe upgrading houses and doing short term rentals on their first house and probably just that if you’re looking to invest in real estate they’re of course cheaper and a good fit for airbnb style short term rentals. I don’t know though I’d also assume it’s such a pain in the ass to manage that most people would rather sell and get money towards a new house.
The working environment which is conducive to a successful developer vs a successful admin are, most likely (in my experience), two completely different environments.
At the risk of sounding like an idiot, can someone please explain why I cannot use `networkQuality` when zsh is my shell? Is there an alternative for zsh?
reply