What are you talking about?
Ray Squirrel is talking about THE CORPORATION, a Canadian rock-video-style documentary. But Ray didn’t frame the discussion, and launched right into the critique without referencing the film until 4th paragraph. It is understandably confusing. And his critique is more based on the arguments in the film about land/water allocation than the film itself. So he’s arguing for a method of resource allocation earnestly or trolling for Monsanto. I can’t tell. I predict this thread will die rather quickly, unless a good deal of film freaks are also into enivronmental science and law.
Yes. I am not quite used to the forums on this site. I thought it worked in the same way as IMDB. But yes I am talking about ‘The Corporation’ and no I am not trolling for Monsanto.
Glad to know. Welcome, Ray.
I stopped watching “The Corporation” after 30 minutes. It was a decent concept, but I found the film rather didactic (“The corporation as a person would be insane! Corporations = Insane! X 1000”). Also, the use of old corporate stock footage was intriguing at first, but it quickly became campy and distracting. I eventually stopped waiting for the narrator to say something else in an over-edited fashion.
As for resource allocation, I wish I could intelligently debate that, but I know next to nothing on the subject.
Raysquirrel, I’m sure you’re long gone, but you do indeed sound like either a) a troll for Monsanto or b) a credulous Libertarian. The tactic of starting an ideological critique of an idea with a claim to have once been an adherent until some other critic with an agenda opened your eyes is a tired and dishonest one, I suggest. Unless you can explain why you really did once think this film was “great.” I’ll give you another two years to come back and tell us.
RaySquirrel
…until I discovered that many of it’s arguments were pretty weak. I saw this during my four years at the University of Colorado, Boulder (that is the college referenced in the South Park episode ‘Die Hippies, Die’). And I accepted its arguments as true to their word. Until I began to broaden my horizons by further studying science, skepticism and other economic theories. What became clear to me was that many Leftists are not Progressives, but more like Calvinists or Luddites.
One scene in this film that is particularly telling is scene where it is said by someone (I don’t remember whom) that in the centuries previous to the industrial revolution people people did not abuse or pollute the land because they considered the land to be property of God. Back in the middle ages, in the centuries previous to the industrial revolution, it was not that ‘people did not think of the land as property’ it was that ‘people were property OF the land’. The people back then were serfs, slaves of the land, and whomever controlled the land controlled the surfs. This is a display of a mode of thinking that implies the further you move away from industrial society the more you see a reverence for ‘Mother Nature’.
Micheal Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, explores this attitude in his book ‘The Science of Good and Evil’. He sites a study from the University of Michigan where anthropologists studied pre-industrial societies of the past and the present and discovered massive amounts of environmental degradation and economic exploitation. The only things that minimized these things were low population density and inefficient technology, not because of conscience act of conservation. As an example native American tribes were accustom to over hunting.
Our advanced technology driven industrial societies are actually very efficient when it comes to allocating, preserving and managing land. Using agriculture as a model a corporation would be extremely responsible in this instance if they were motivated purely on growing a product and bringing it to market. In this instance the corporation will research and develop new means of growing more crop on less land. For example back in the 1940’s, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in a joint venture with the Mexican government contracted a young geneticist by the name of Norman Bourlaug to genetically engineer a strain of wheat that was disease resistant. That ended up feeding millions people in Mexico. Bourlaug then took his work to Pakistan, India, China and to parts of Africa. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1970 it was estimated that Bourlaug fed over one billion people.
Though if you watch movies like ‘The Corporation’ they would have you believe that genetically modified food is poisonous and creates poverty. Even worse is that “organic” food which is the only alternative to GMF takes far more land to cultivate. If we were to switch all existing farmland to growing “organic” food we would only be able to feed one third of the worlds population. And what is most ironic is that multi-national corporations like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s have latched onto the “organic” food fad, because it is a way to sell less product for more money.
YouTube user Advocate1234 has made a series of videos critiquing the movie ‘The Corporation’. I don’t agree with the guy on everything though I find his critique of the movie to be very good. The first of which I have posted a link to below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dD2mBr7O-Q&feature=channel_page