Apple didn't use chemical weapons against both Viet Cong troops and US troops alike. Apple never gave anyone cancer. Apple didn't cause waves of birth defects for generations.
The first one probably not. The latter two, actually quite likely. Somehow I feel pretty confident that working in the factory that makes iPhones is a pretty dangerous cancer causing kind of situation. Not to mention where all the materials are sourced from. Lots of rare earth elements are obtained by kids digging around in electronics junk heaps around the world. Pretty much every company that produces electronics is guilty of these crimes.
Also, I think it's in general a fallacy to blame a corporation that exists today of crimes committed by a corporation of the same name in the past. Microsoft did some Monopoly level shit as recently as the 90s. In just this short time, the Microsoft of today can't reasonably be blamed for any of that. Things change quickly.
Humans commit crimes, not brands. If one person commits a crime under a flag/brand, I can't reasonably put blame for that crime on others who happen to fly under the same brand/flag. Can you seriously hold anyone who presently works at Union Carbide/Dow Chemical today responsible for the Bhopal Gas Disaster? I don't think so.
Also, if you're so upset about Monsanto, how come you aren't super upset with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Colt, Sikorsky, or any other military contractors? We're not even talking about the past. These companies are producing the implements of destruction TODAY. As you would say, they are making the equivalent of gas chambers.
Monsanto today makes food. It may not be the #1 most environmentally friendly methods. It may not be the most pleasant methods for hippies to hear about. But without the kind of food science and big agriculture methods they employ, we would not enjoy such an abundant food supply. Food would be far more expensive, and people would be hungry. They aren't any more or less evil than any other major corporation. They just receive relatively more hate relative to the others.
Apple didn't use chemical weapons against both Viet Cong troops and US troops alike. Apple never gave anyone cancer. Apple didn't cause waves of birth defects for generations.
Well, except for terrible working conditions in Chinese factories and their continued use of minerals mined under inhuman conditions. We don't know the full ramifications of such things on human health just yet.
Monsanto for me comes down more to abuse of IP law than anything else, but I admit my understanding is in constant flux as I read conflicting sources and try to figure out how much is deliberate propaganda and from who.
Apple also abuses IP law like fucking crazy, but I'm more worried about IP law as applied to genetics and staple foods than I am about smartphones and fancy bevels.
Apple didn't use chemical weapons against both Viet Cong troops and US troops alike. Apple never gave anyone cancer. Apple didn't cause waves of birth defects for generations.
Neither did Monsanto. That would be the US and S. Vietnamese governments.
Apple didn't use chemical weapons against both Viet Cong troops and US troops alike. Apple never gave anyone cancer. Apple didn't cause waves of birth defects for generations.
Neither did Monsanto. That would be the US and S. Vietnamese governments.
Monsanto withheld information about the chemicals from the US and S. Vietnamese governments. They discovered its carcinogenic properties in the 50s, but word never reached the President who was in charge of such decisions.
Apple didn't use chemical weapons against both Viet Cong troops and US troops alike. Apple never gave anyone cancer. Apple didn't cause waves of birth defects for generations.
Neither did Monsanto. That would be the US and S. Vietnamese governments.
Monsanto withheld information about the chemicals from the US and S. Vietnamese governments. They discovered its carcinogenic properties in the 50s, but word never reached the President who was in charge of such decisions.
No worse than Tobacco companies, who are STILL poisoning the world.
Dr. James Clary, a scientist at the Chemical Weapons Branch, Eglin Air Force Base, who designed the herbicide spray tank and wrote a 1979 report on Operation Ranch Hand (the name of the spraying program), told Senator Daschle in 1988,
"When we (military scientists) initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s, we were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware that the 'military' formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the 'civilian' version due to the lower cost and speed of manufacture. However, because the material was to be used on the 'enemy,' none of us were overly concerned. We never considered a scenario in which our own personnel would become contaminated with the herbicide."
quoted by Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, 1990
Monsanto certainly did what they could to play down or cover up speculation that dioxins were dangerous to humans, but to believe that the US Military high command didn't know it was toxic is nuts. I know from talking to Vietnam vets that the average grunt didn't know the dangers they were exposed to, but the high command certainly did, much like many things our military and government has done (anthrax vaccine, depleted uranium rounds, etc etc)
I'm not saying Monsanto is innocent, I'm saying the people who ordered the use of Dioxin's are the truly guilty ones.
Supporters of the US’s Agent Orange Campaign prefer to call it an “herbicide program” rather than chemical warfare. But official documents reveal that the US Senate knew its real name. In US Senate Congressional Records dated August 11, 1969, a table presented to senators showed that congress clearly classified 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T (main components of Agent Orange) in the Chemical and Biological Warfare category. The table also includes Cacodylic Acid, a main component of Agent Blue, another chemical sprayed on Vietnam to kill plants, in the official Chemical and Biological Warfare category. The table describes it as “an arsenic-base compound... heavy concentrations will cause arsenical poisoning in humans. Widely used in Vietnam. It is composed of 54.29 percent arsenic.” As Vietnam War Scholar and US Veteran W.D. Ehrhart put it concisely in a Thanh Nien Daily interview last week : “It would be hard to describe Agent Orange as anything other than a chemical weapon. Dioxin is a chemical.” So is arsenic.
And again, shit happened in the fifties and sixties. You gonna pull everyone sewing Hugo Boss in front of the Hague? Should we have Mitsubishi executives on the hook for the Zero? All the old white men responsible for those decisions are dead!
(Also prolly the old Japanese dudes.)
By no means should we trust the old white men in charge of the company now, but we also shouldn't spurn them out of spite when they have useful things like, you know, food, which they can offer us.
At least until the revolution, when all the capitalists can pay the same price.
If you want justice, you need to go after the corporate fucks which are making the world a worse place now, instead of going after the dead ones from a half-century ago. You need to push for systems that would deal with incidents like the rainbow herbicides in the future, because it's too late for the past. You can't un-spray the defoilent and you can't punish the dead, but you can plant trees over their graves or some equally poetic metaphor shit, you know?
By no means should we trust the old white men in charge of the company now, but we also shouldn't spurn them out of spite when they have useful things like, you know, food, which they can offer us.
At least until the revolution, when all the capitalists can pay the same price.
omg, that is the best laugh I've had all day. Thank you.
As the resident patrilineal descendant of Tsarist nobility, I'd like to say that revolutions suck but sometimes are necessary. I'm not sure where on that the US is going.
The belief that we don't punish Hugo Boss (the company) for something that happened 70+ years ago I agree with. The idea that it's ok that Ford Motor Company sold stuff to the Nazi's, but I don't associate that company with Ford today is a good one and O_S and I can agree on that. There is a line that some companies cross however, when they do lasting damage. I do think it's fair to hold mining companies responsible for 'abandoned' sites.
The idea that a anti-capitalist revolution would result in anything other than famine and misery, I find that laughable.
I try to keep an open mind though, so if you can point out to me a good example of an anti-capitalist state that also is able to provide for it's people I'm all ears.
The idea that it's ok to take Monsanto's food that they grow, at least until we take care of them (code for what, kill them?), that I find hypocritical.
There is no way an anti-capitalist revolution will be done without massive amounts of violence.
As the resident patrilineal descendant of Tsarist nobility, I'd like to say that revolutions suck but sometimes are necessary. I'm not sure where on that the US is going.
Who had it worse, the average Russian peasant or the the Soviet 'citizen'?
Depends on what you consider worse.
The NKVD killed way more people than the Okhrana and Stalin's forces had repression down to a science.
The Tsar's government had massive pograms, but nothing I'm aware of matches the organized scale of the Ukrainian Famine. Only under a repressive system like Communism could that have happened.
"Aggressive external interference has doomed most earnest socialist states in their infancy, therefore anything but Capitalism is impossible." Sure thing bro.
Also the USSR was socialist/communist in name only. They concentrated wealth like a mofo and were far more fascist than anything else. They polluted the terminology much to the delight of every college Randian.
I don't believe anything I've said warrants your less than passive aggressive bro comment. Then again, it's possible my thank you to O_S was also out of line since it wasn't intended as sincere.
I didn't say anything but capitalism was impossible, I just don't think it would be better. Not until we reach a post scarcity economy.
I'm well aware the USSR was not a communist government the way Marx intended or even Lenin said it would be. I'm not aware of a modern state since 1917 that has successfully implemented communism because it doesn't work as a form of government.
We really wouldn't know, since the US and its allies have gone to great lengths to make sure it's never implemented anywhere and give the workers ideas.
I'm not sure Earth's current political/economic structure would make a proper socialist state viable, and even if it does socialism can still develop problems with concentrations of power (if you want an interesting thought experiment of a functioning socialist state, try out the first half of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed). Basically humans suck and make me sad. But I want socialism to be viable so bad.
Addenda: socialism per se doesn't necessarily imply that markets don't exist at all. The thrust of Marx's argument was that capitalist control of the means of production, particularly the idea that the products of your labor can be owned by your employer rather than yourself, creates systematic exploitation of laborers and unfair concentrations of wealth. For example, a system where you can control the goods you produce and sell them yourself has markets but is still compatible with socialism.
If you want socialism, you need a lot of resources. This is why partial socialism works in places like Norway where the state owns some big oil they can sell.
The problem is that even if every country is socialist, they are still competing against each other. In the space between countries the natural law of the universe is competition. And a capitalist country is going to beat a socialist country. The socialist country will end up not having enough wealth to be successfully socialist. The big companies and the big companies will live in the capitalist country.
You need one world government to have socialism. And even then, that one world government would need such an advanced computer simulation to allocate resources effectively and efficiently.
Apple didn't use chemical weapons against both Viet Cong troops and US troops alike. Apple never gave anyone cancer. Apple didn't cause waves of birth defects for generations.
Neither did Monsanto. That would be the US and S. Vietnamese governments.
Monsanto withheld information about the chemicals from the US and S. Vietnamese governments. They discovered its carcinogenic properties in the 50s, but word never reached the President who was in charge of such decisions.
I'd be more pissed at Colt and the US government over the clusterfuck that was the M-16 in 'nam if you want out and out lying.
Monsanto has done much, much more as well other than all the work with Agent Orange. The biggest is how they basically bully farmers into signing contracts to plant Monsanto's seeds and continue to use them even if they fail and they will be sued if they brake any infraction of the contract.
I'm not sure Earth's current political/economic structure would make a proper socialist state viable, and even if it does socialism can still develop problems with concentrations of power (if you want an interesting thought experiment of a functioning socialist state, try out the first half of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed). Basically humans suck and make me sad. But I want socialism to be viable so bad.
Addenda: socialism per se doesn't necessarily imply that markets don't exist at all. The thrust of Marx's argument was that capitalist control of the means of production, particularly the idea that the products of your labor can be owned by your employer rather than yourself, creates systematic exploitation of laborers and unfair concentrations of wealth. For example, a system where you can control the goods you produce and sell them yourself has markets but is still compatible with socialism.
I think there's also a big difference in what happens when there's revolutions... and what happens when the lefties get voted in. Like... I joke about revolutions and whatever but honestly that's like 9/10ths of the problem every communist state has suffered; you don't tend to get viable egalitarian states born of warfare and whatever.
Communism is a utopian philosophy and end-of-history gambit. Your perfect equal society is not going to be born in a single generation of violence and fire; shooting all the capitalists doesn't eliminate capitalism, it just eliminates people. You can't fix a systematic problem by shooting people because you'd have to shoot everyone. Not to mention nothing makes people reactionary and stupid quite like a lack of stability in their lives. You can't threaten people into feeling empathy for one another.
If there ever is a successful state without inequality, it will prolly have to be born slowly over many many years of boring bureaucratic and cultural adjustments and technological advances until the world reaches an equilibrium point of relative bliss. If you extrapolate out the trends worldwide about life expectancy, equality, etc, for the most part we're kind of heading in that direction. Technology and automation makes reform more palatable for the capitalist. The big test is when the majority of human labour itself becomes obsolete; we'll see how that goes soon enough.
From a point of view of where a revolution could work, this is super unacceptable cuz people are suffering right now. But the fact is revolutions really don't seem to work at creating more equal societies; at best you change where you draw some of the lines, and at worse the breakdown of social stability causes widespread suffering and a regression of ideals. The slow, meandering path towards social improvement through a progressive driving narrative in your society isn't dramatic and lacks a strong and directional narrative to argue from, but all things considered it's producing results...
Monsanto's making headlines again. I'd like to take a minute to remind everyone that they found the toxic properties in their most famous herbicide, Agent Orange, in the mid 50s, but continued to manufacture it and sell it to the USAF for as long as the President would allow them.
That's bullshit. Agent Orange was a DOD invention, and Monsanto Chemical was one of multiple companies who manufactured it, the most productive of which was Dow Chemical. They were kept in the dark about the effects as much as anyone. On top of that, the monsanto of then is not the Monsanto now - the Division of monsanto that made Agent orange, amongst other chemicals, split off in the 90s.
Nor did Monsanto ever, at any point, use chemical weapons on anyone. That was 100% the US government. If someone asks you to make a knife, you do, and then they use that knife to go on a murder spree, you don't blame the blacksmith.
I find it especially doubtful that Monsanto hid the effects of Agent orange since the 50s - Considering it was the DOD who manufactured and tested it in the 50s, and Monsanto didn't get their hands on it till the Mid-60s, for manufacture during the Vietnam war.
And before I forget, there's two reasons It's making headlines - Actual headlines with that Fucking nonsense report the IARC released, and internet headlines due to a clip of a lobbyist being offered a cup of roundup to drink, and refusing.
Which, of course, has been carefully edited so that you don't know he's talking about Glyphosate, an ingredient in roundup rather than Roundup itself, and Glyphosates acute oral LD50(about 5,600 mg/kg) puts it in a category that my pharmacology mates call the BTD category - which stands for Beat To Death, as in it would be faster and easier to beat someone to death with a jug of the stuff, rather than poisoning them by ingestion. It's orders of magnitude less toxic than caffeine or alcohol.
Drinking Roundup will still kill you, though, which is why he turned it down. The other stuff in Roundup makes it rather less than good for you. In fact, lethally so. The interviewer pull a pretty fucking dirty bait and switch, and then some other asshole edited the context out.
Monsanto tips the evil scales all over the place. Defending them is dangerously ignorant at best.
I'm not convinced, considering that basically every story I hear about them supposedly being evil turns out to be bullshit. They're a big corporation, so they're not exactly angels, but from the evidence they're generally more saints than sinners, at least as corporations go.
Monsanto for me comes down more to abuse of IP law than anything else, but I admit my understanding is in constant flux as I read conflicting sources and try to figure out how much is deliberate propaganda and from who.
And how's that? They've only excercised their IP rights a handful of times, and against large businesses. There's a lot of FUD about them taking farmers to court, but those are basically always breach of contract regarding IP, rather than abusing IP law.
Monsanto has done much, much more as well other than all the work with Agent Orange. The biggest is how they basically bully farmers into signing contracts to plant Monsanto's seeds and continue to use them even if they fail and they will be sued if they brake any infraction of the contract.
Utter horseshit. Seed Contracts are standard practice in large scale agriculture, and they don't force anybody to sign anything. Nor are they forcing them to use Monsanto seed even if they fail, that's a straight up lie. Nor is there a shred of evidence that they're bullying any farmers with lawsuits - they've taken (last I remember) a total of about nine farmers to court, total, and every single time they won basically without contest, because the farmers broke a contract they willingly signed.
The video I spoke of that's making the rounds right now as "Monsanto Lobbyist refuses to drink roundup after saying it's safe"? There's more problems than just the fact he was talking about Glyphosate, rather than Roundup.
Turns out he's not actually from Monsanto. He had nothing to do with Monsanto whatsoever at the time of the interview - he worked for them briefly as a consultant. And as someone who has done some consulting work, let me tell you, that does not breed a lasting fondness for or allegiance to your employer. His name is Dr. Patrick Moore, and he's actually a crank scientist, Climate change Denier, and used to work for Greenpeace - in fact, he was one of the founders. But in Greenpeace's favor, he's been using their name for years after he stopped working with them, to give his views an air of legitimacy.
It also turns out, the interviewer isn't a journalist. He's actually a documentary maker, and the whole thing is based on - drumroll please - that bullshit WHO/IARC report I mentioned earlier, and in the Fail of your day thread.
Finally - the interview is meant to be about the viability of GM crops. Instead, the interviewer gish-galloped Moore with irrelevant questions which were basically built entirely to get good soundbites to use to promote the documentary. That clip being one of them.
The Robocop remake just hit Netflix, so I just saw it. Some spoilers below.
They replaced the ED-209 "Machines are inferior because they kill remorselessly" drama with "Humans are inferior because they hesitate, but there's that pesky ethical stuff, so what do we do?" drama which was a little deeper and more fully explored than in the original, so in my opinion the remake actually did add a bit. The doc hacked Murphy's brain so that when he's in "combat mode" he's a killer. Although they did get a little weak on that concept after about 10 minutes...
Comments
Also, I think it's in general a fallacy to blame a corporation that exists today of crimes committed by a corporation of the same name in the past. Microsoft did some Monopoly level shit as recently as the 90s. In just this short time, the Microsoft of today can't reasonably be blamed for any of that. Things change quickly.
Humans commit crimes, not brands. If one person commits a crime under a flag/brand, I can't reasonably put blame for that crime on others who happen to fly under the same brand/flag. Can you seriously hold anyone who presently works at Union Carbide/Dow Chemical today responsible for the Bhopal Gas Disaster? I don't think so.
Also, if you're so upset about Monsanto, how come you aren't super upset with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Colt, Sikorsky, or any other military contractors? We're not even talking about the past. These companies are producing the implements of destruction TODAY. As you would say, they are making the equivalent of gas chambers.
Monsanto today makes food. It may not be the #1 most environmentally friendly methods. It may not be the most pleasant methods for hippies to hear about. But without the kind of food science and big agriculture methods they employ, we would not enjoy such an abundant food supply. Food would be far more expensive, and people would be hungry. They aren't any more or less evil than any other major corporation. They just receive relatively more hate relative to the others.
Apple also abuses IP law like fucking crazy, but I'm more worried about IP law as applied to genetics and staple foods than I am about smartphones and fancy bevels.
I'm not saying Monsanto is innocent, I'm saying the people who ordered the use of Dioxin's are the truly guilty ones.
(Also prolly the old Japanese dudes.)
By no means should we trust the old white men in charge of the company now, but we also shouldn't spurn them out of spite when they have useful things like, you know, food, which they can offer us.
At least until the revolution, when all the capitalists can pay the same price.
If you want justice, you need to go after the corporate fucks which are making the world a worse place now, instead of going after the dead ones from a half-century ago. You need to push for systems that would deal with incidents like the rainbow herbicides in the future, because it's too late for the past. You can't un-spray the defoilent and you can't punish the dead, but you can plant trees over their graves or some equally poetic metaphor shit, you know?
The idea that a anti-capitalist revolution would result in anything other than famine and misery, I find that laughable.
I try to keep an open mind though, so if you can point out to me a good example of an anti-capitalist state that also is able to provide for it's people I'm all ears.
The idea that it's ok to take Monsanto's food that they grow, at least until we take care of them (code for what, kill them?), that I find hypocritical.
There is no way an anti-capitalist revolution will be done without massive amounts of violence.
Depends on what you consider worse.
The NKVD killed way more people than the Okhrana and Stalin's forces had repression down to a science.
The Tsar's government had massive pograms, but nothing I'm aware of matches the organized scale of the Ukrainian Famine. Only under a repressive system like Communism could that have happened.
I didn't say anything but capitalism was impossible, I just don't think it would be better. Not until we reach a post scarcity economy.
I'm well aware the USSR was not a communist government the way Marx intended or even Lenin said it would be. I'm not aware of a modern state since 1917 that has successfully implemented communism because it doesn't work as a form of government.
But I want socialism to be viable so bad.
Addenda: socialism per se doesn't necessarily imply that markets don't exist at all. The thrust of Marx's argument was that capitalist control of the means of production, particularly the idea that the products of your labor can be owned by your employer rather than yourself, creates systematic exploitation of laborers and unfair concentrations of wealth.
For example, a system where you can control the goods you produce and sell them yourself has markets but is still compatible with socialism.
The problem is that even if every country is socialist, they are still competing against each other. In the space between countries the natural law of the universe is competition. And a capitalist country is going to beat a socialist country. The socialist country will end up not having enough wealth to be successfully socialist. The big companies and the big companies will live in the capitalist country.
You need one world government to have socialism. And even then, that one world government would need such an advanced computer simulation to allocate resources effectively and efficiently.
Communism is a utopian philosophy and end-of-history gambit. Your perfect equal society is not going to be born in a single generation of violence and fire; shooting all the capitalists doesn't eliminate capitalism, it just eliminates people. You can't fix a systematic problem by shooting people because you'd have to shoot everyone. Not to mention nothing makes people reactionary and stupid quite like a lack of stability in their lives. You can't threaten people into feeling empathy for one another.
If there ever is a successful state without inequality, it will prolly have to be born slowly over many many years of boring bureaucratic and cultural adjustments and technological advances until the world reaches an equilibrium point of relative bliss. If you extrapolate out the trends worldwide about life expectancy, equality, etc, for the most part we're kind of heading in that direction. Technology and automation makes reform more palatable for the capitalist. The big test is when the majority of human labour itself becomes obsolete; we'll see how that goes soon enough.
From a point of view of where a revolution could work, this is super unacceptable cuz people are suffering right now. But the fact is revolutions really don't seem to work at creating more equal societies; at best you change where you draw some of the lines, and at worse the breakdown of social stability causes widespread suffering and a regression of ideals. The slow, meandering path towards social improvement through a progressive driving narrative in your society isn't dramatic and lacks a strong and directional narrative to argue from, but all things considered it's producing results...
Nor did Monsanto ever, at any point, use chemical weapons on anyone. That was 100% the US government. If someone asks you to make a knife, you do, and then they use that knife to go on a murder spree, you don't blame the blacksmith.
I find it especially doubtful that Monsanto hid the effects of Agent orange since the 50s - Considering it was the DOD who manufactured and tested it in the 50s, and Monsanto didn't get their hands on it till the Mid-60s, for manufacture during the Vietnam war.
And before I forget, there's two reasons It's making headlines - Actual headlines with that Fucking nonsense report the IARC released, and internet headlines due to a clip of a lobbyist being offered a cup of roundup to drink, and refusing.
Which, of course, has been carefully edited so that you don't know he's talking about Glyphosate, an ingredient in roundup rather than Roundup itself, and Glyphosates acute oral LD50(about 5,600 mg/kg) puts it in a category that my pharmacology mates call the BTD category - which stands for Beat To Death, as in it would be faster and easier to beat someone to death with a jug of the stuff, rather than poisoning them by ingestion. It's orders of magnitude less toxic than caffeine or alcohol.
Drinking Roundup will still kill you, though, which is why he turned it down. The other stuff in Roundup makes it rather less than good for you. In fact, lethally so. The interviewer pull a pretty fucking dirty bait and switch, and then some other asshole edited the context out. I'm not convinced, considering that basically every story I hear about them supposedly being evil turns out to be bullshit. They're a big corporation, so they're not exactly angels, but from the evidence they're generally more saints than sinners, at least as corporations go. And how's that? They've only excercised their IP rights a handful of times, and against large businesses. There's a lot of FUD about them taking farmers to court, but those are basically always breach of contract regarding IP, rather than abusing IP law. Utter horseshit. Seed Contracts are standard practice in large scale agriculture, and they don't force anybody to sign anything. Nor are they forcing them to use Monsanto seed even if they fail, that's a straight up lie. Nor is there a shred of evidence that they're bullying any farmers with lawsuits - they've taken (last I remember) a total of about nine farmers to court, total, and every single time they won basically without contest, because the farmers broke a contract they willingly signed.
The video I spoke of that's making the rounds right now as "Monsanto Lobbyist refuses to drink roundup after saying it's safe"? There's more problems than just the fact he was talking about Glyphosate, rather than Roundup.
Turns out he's not actually from Monsanto. He had nothing to do with Monsanto whatsoever at the time of the interview - he worked for them briefly as a consultant. And as someone who has done some consulting work, let me tell you, that does not breed a lasting fondness for or allegiance to your employer. His name is Dr. Patrick Moore, and he's actually a crank scientist, Climate change Denier, and used to work for Greenpeace - in fact, he was one of the founders. But in Greenpeace's favor, he's been using their name for years after he stopped working with them, to give his views an air of legitimacy.
It also turns out, the interviewer isn't a journalist. He's actually a documentary maker, and the whole thing is based on - drumroll please - that bullshit WHO/IARC report I mentioned earlier, and in the Fail of your day thread.
Finally - the interview is meant to be about the viability of GM crops. Instead, the interviewer gish-galloped Moore with irrelevant questions which were basically built entirely to get good soundbites to use to promote the documentary. That clip being one of them.
They replaced the ED-209 "Machines are inferior because they kill remorselessly" drama with "Humans are inferior because they hesitate, but there's that pesky ethical stuff, so what do we do?" drama which was a little deeper and more fully explored than in the original, so in my opinion the remake actually did add a bit. The doc hacked Murphy's brain so that when he's in "combat mode" he's a killer. Although they did get a little weak on that concept after about 10 minutes...