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Comment by ktosiek | Hacker News Reader

I hope reasoning with terrorists attacking research plants will give some results, but I'm afraid it still wont stop them - they are the same kind of people who blow up infidels or try to get rid of "lesser race". Still, it's a peaceful step and may reduce the amount of such attacks.

What I think is needed here is to actually make security tighter - but it's a dance between putting lots of money into security or losing some experiments. Unfortunately both are what those guerrillas want.

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It's not an attempt to reason with terrorists. It's way smarter than that. It's an attempt to undercut the entire reason they are doing this. The terrorists are looking to build public awareness, sympathy, and support for their actions against the evil nasty scientists playing with the Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. This is an attempt to humanize the scientists, put their work in context, and reframe the narrative from Heroic Radicals Save Humanity From Cackling Evil Scientists to Idiotic Bookburning Knowledge-Hating Radicals Shoot Selves In Foot and Kill Poor People. It's attacking the foundation of the terrorism instead of getting distracted with the building on top.

Very well put. It may not affect those that carry out such actions but may change the view of less radicalised individuals.

I'm not sure you are representing the views of the "terrorists" correctly.

1. Terrorist is not an accurate title.

2. From what I've read the metaphysical argument that "Things Man Was Not Meant To Know" is not the reasoning behind these actions. The argument used tends to be the same as the anti-nuclear argument. Given the facts, the danger is too great.

3. Plenty of people in the scientific community have serious objections to the way GM crops are used and promoted. It's not an anti-science movement anymore than the anti-nuclear movement was an anti-physics movement.

4. I agree with your assessment that this is a PR maneuver aimed at the general public.

5. The campaign is being managed by the PR firm 'Sense About Science' which is funded by a number of private firms. The claim that this is purely about public scientific research is PR.

Sense about science has done some good work in the past with regard to fighting science libel laws. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_About_Science

"I'm not sure you are representing the views of the "terrorists" correctly."

Since I didn't try, nor do I particularly care, probably not. I was talking about what this document does, not endorsing it or analyzing it beyond that. Personally I'm not a big fan of narrative-based warfare regardless of who is doing it, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize it when I see it.

This is a gross distortion of the argument that Take The Flour Back is making. TTFB cites legitimate and real scientific concerns; they don't caricature scientists as evil by nature. Their claim, in fact, is that the people doing these experiments are not acting as scientists, in the sense that they are ignoring serious environmental dangers and running these tests purely for grant money. And I think that's a legitimate concern, for what it's worth. It's very hard to do legitimate science right now because of the money. We see this in medicine, and we certainly see it in agriculture.

So this video might be effective if the only think you know about TTFB is that they're "environmentalists," and if you extrapolate from this that they're crazy spiritist loons who hate science and knowledge. But you would be flat wrong if you did that.

Here is the open-letter response from these so-called "terrorists" (or might they be communists? Perhaps even secret muslim conspiracists?): (http://taketheflourback.org/open-letter-to-rothamsted/)

For terrorists who probably can't be reasoned with, they sure are fond of using footnotes.

From your link:

> We are particularly concerned about ensuring the protection of what is probably the world’s oldest classical grassland experiment. We are appalled that you are jeopardizing the integrity of this scientific inheritance by planting GM wheat metres away from it. We believe your recklessness in planting GM in the adjacent field seriously undermines your institution’s scientific credibility.

Ouch. I have to back up "Take the flour back" on this one. Now the Poor Bullied Scientist looks more like an Incompetent Sorcerer's Apprentice.

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