Wednesday 23 March 2022

Okja - bacon sarnies, anyone?

I finally caught up with Bong Joon Ho's 2017 Okja, a film superior IMHO to the over-lauded Parasite.  There.  Nothing like getting the controversy in early.

As you can probably tell from that gambit, there's a lot I liked about the movie - from Jake Gyllenhaal's bonkers (and virtually unrecognisable) TV naturalist to the loveable (but not loveable enough to put me off bacon) Okja.  And credit to the effects people for remembering that post-violence physiology is as much about swelling as bleeding. 

There was, however, one element that grated.  It's how the film portrays our view of genetically modified organisms (GMO).  The story relies on Tilda Swinton's Lucy Mirando, CEO of the Monsanto-in-disguise corporate villains, hiding Okja's genetically modified roots under a smokescreen of a bucolic miracle, mother nature handing us this uber-porker through her munificence and benevolence.  It plays to - and worse, reinforces - all the misunderstanding about GMOs.

What is it about humanity's sudden mistrust of genetically modified plants and animals?  We've been genetically modifying them for millennia, just by guesswork.  It's called cross-breeding: putting the tastiest animal in with the biggest and picking out the ones that have both traits from the litter, or grafting a heavy-cropping stem on to a hardy rootstock.

Genetically modifying flora and fauna in the modern sense is no different, it's just doing it with the lights on and the boxing gloves off.  We can see the mechanism under the bonnet, pick out the gene combinations for colour, flavour, yield and disease resistance.  We no longer have to guess.

How we use GMOs may be problematic, of course.  Making a grain resistant to pesticides allows you Agent Orange the farm at the expense of every living thing other than your cash crop.  For clarity, I think that is a BAD THING.  But it doesn't make GMOs a bad thing.  It does, however, mean that GMOs open up a whole new world of bad things.  It's like saying that the invention of the internal combustion engine was a huge evil because it allowed the development of tanks and warplanes, forgetting that it also gets food into our shops and people to hospitals.

But a cursory search of the internet shows that many, many people have swallowed the whole Frankenfood scare story, more so amongst the young which, to me, demonstrates that the power of the social media echo chamber outguns the classroom's ability to teach people to think rationally.  GM foods cause cancer?  Well, let me name a couple of really quite natural consumables that do that just as well - tobacco and alcohol.  QED: being GMO or non-GMO has nothing to do with it.

Given this, and the resistance we've seen to Covid-19 vaccines, I wonder whether it's possible to produce something akin to Asimov's three laws of robotics, but for humanity's stance towards innovation?  How about:

  • If I can see how it works, I'll trust it (e.g. the wheel)
  • If I can't see how it works, but it brings me entertainment or pleasure, I'll trust it (e.g. the Internet, street drugs)
  • If I can't see how it works, but it predates me, I'll trust it (e.g. fire)
  • Everything else is witchcraft
As a species, we're fucked, aren't we?

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2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.

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