14-year-girl stands up to Monsanto shill

boing
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I think I get what you’re saying. If you wanted to study the effects of GMO foods, wouldn’t you have precise amounts given to people in a controlled study? Wouldn’t you get the GMO corn, or what ever, directly from the source, so there is no real need for a public label? You can also eliminate placebo effects by not telling people if they are eating GMO foods or not (that is some people have side effects because they expect to.)

A public label doesn’t seem that useful to me. While people could respond to surveys stating they did or did not consume GMOs, the specific foods, quality, and quantity wouldn’t be measured.

I guess what I’m asking is couldn’t science be done as long as you can get the GMOs at the source, instead of off the shelf? Then again, I don’t do these studies for a living, and if doing them means grabbing them off the shelf then you have a valid point.

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As long as they don’t GMO Twinkies and Mt Dew, I shouldn’t be effected by any of this anyway.

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Make mine Pop-Tarts and Fresca.

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Actually we could be skipping generations of conventional breeding by using GMO technologies just in one species, but in many cases they do the traditional breeding (which is less precise) so the products can be sold in the EU.

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Take for example the recent study that used Centrum vitamins taken over a period of many years. If everyone in the world was getting an unknown amount of Centrum in their food, I don’t think the experiment would have been scientifically valid.

Some scientific research relies on regular people filling out surveys every year for decades, and statistically reducing the data to try to determine reliability of the inputs. You can’t do that kind of survey on GMOs because nobody can answer the questions. So you drive the cost of research up so high that it can’t be performed, since you have to create a non-GMO food supply for thousands of people for decades.

Personally, I’m also concerned about informed consumerism and freedom of choice, but the issue of sabotaging cost-effective science is probably more important.

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possible

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  1. I said the debate is brute force, not the technique itself. One GM crop may be safe, and the other, not. You don’t see that understanding from either side. In the case of cotton, for example, I can probably live with less rigorous testing, since it’s not going to be ingested. For corn (or our current GM fascination with brinjal/eggplant in India), I want testing that’s actually comprehensive and independent. In both cases, I would want independent validation of the yields and returns on investment for farmers. Just because it’s GMO doesn’t mean it’s worse, but just because it’s GMO doesn’t mean it’s better either.
  2. The same should apply to conventional cross-breeding and other agricultural techniques. Especially the yields and ROI tests. Safety to a similar extent too.
  3. Unrelated to the other point, I think the golden-rice-vitamin-A argument is bullshit. Like she says, you’d need 30 bowls of rice per day to get enough vitamin A from golden rice. I’d rather expend efforts in giving them a balanced diet than looking for a silver bullet.

In fact, that third is my biggest cause of skepticism about the pro-GMO side of the debate. The proponents tend to act as though GMO and only GMO, will save all of agriculture. This, I think, is humbug.

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Smoke and mirrors. “There’s some site that proves that I’m right” doesn’t really cut it. You have to copy the link and say what you refer to if you want to participate in a serious discussion. We now know that you’re a pro-GMO diehard, you don’t want the facts and ideas from scientists who don’t get paid by big bio get in the way.

You probably haven’t read any of this, including the sources. Neither have I read it all, it takes months if not years to work through and I’m only a few weeks into it. But while staying ignorant yourself (and accusing others of being ignorant) you dismiss it all as bullshit. More smoke and mirrors.

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Call the waaahmbulance!

Find one thing that is true and own that. Stop throwing stuff against the wall and hoping something sticks, because nothing’s sticking.

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The sourcewatch site was just trash, maybe there’s some good bits in there, but it’s not my job to sift it from the hoaxes and conspiracy theories

Why should anyone take your word on it when you readily admit you haven’t analyzed it? You won’t even mention any parts of it that you disagree with (and why) after making the very bold statement the the entire website is “trash”.

I don’t think it’s being abusive to ask for standards comparable to those that would apply to a term paper …
If someone tried that on an undergraduate term paper, what grade would they get?

For your biased conjecture without analysis on sourcewatch.org? An F. You’d fail miserably.

For your missed assignment on natureinstitute.org? A zero. You didn’t turn anything in.

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Take ANYTHING from the 2 websites and PROVE that it’s false - that is if you’re willing to read it. You seem to dislike reading stuff that goes against your settled opinion. If you continue to throw around rethorics without content, what’s the point of replying to your posts?

Connecticut and Vermont are still too scared of Monsanto’s power to act on their own state senate’s decision for mandatory GMO food labeling. Just shows what the anti-GMO crowd is up against : the sheer unlimited power of big bio

As drafted, the Connecticut bill would not take effect until at least three other states adopted similar labeling laws for GMO foods.

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While it’s easy to point at this and say “haha how wrong being against progress”, at the same time consumption of mummia had been a commonplace remedy for centuries and only years later it would become popular to make solutions of radium to drink and shove up your ass to cure diseases.

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Again how does that work in the term paper scenario, the student should just go to the teacher and screech that it’s their job to “PROVE that it’s false” for every statement without a source? If that happened, what conclusions would we draw about the student?

And in a world that ran according to that rule, wouldn’t the people running the show be the ones that are demagogues or propagandists or just hallucinating while everyone else mops up after them? By that standard The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion must be true and only a bad mean nasty person would question it. The idea that people who know stuff must grovel to those that don’t has a sort of Cultural Revolution/Khmer Rogue odor.

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Wikipedia is hardly a gold standard for scholarly research (although it’s much better than its harshest critics would like to admit), but if your stuff can’t even get a wikipedia page, that ought to tell you something (besides concluding that the editors are part of the “conspiracy”).

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Well, I’m late to the party again and I guess I don’t have anything to add to the discussion, such as it is but I would like to add a hearty ‘har har har’.

Noticing that your debate/argument opponent has resorted to trying to distract or upset you, rather than deal with anything you are saying or the underlying points of the argument, hell, when they give up even trying to make a point of their own that isn’t ‘Your attitude whilst arguing hasn’t remained totally unflinching and perfectly calm’, it really is only a matter of time before you get to the juiciest part of the experience.

Instead of just remaining perspicacious and forthright, calm and considered, when they try for the millionth time to upset you; smile calmly as if at a misbehaving child and gently swipe your hand, palm down, laterally between your bodies as you quietly say “no”. Then continue to make your point.

The realisation has already struck them, they might even have been specifically planning on using the technique but no amount of preparation can condition a human mind to that level of awakened self-perception.

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Let’s take a step back. Lutz just posted resources to support his/her point of view. You’ve taken it upon yourself to say it’s wrong but resent the idea you should explain why, because you know things, and making demands on such people is reminiscent of communist tyranny. After hammering on anti-GMO people for God-like conceit of supporting claims with “because we say so”.

Do you really not see the irony in that, or understand why it mostly serves to alienate people from your viewpoint?

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he made a concise point, you just responding with something very close to an ad hominem and ignoring what he said about the cost of a Prop38 style law.

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Absolutely, or we can cite the French Revolution if you prefer (it went badly for scientists). Homeopathy, astrology, bigfoot, religious cults, and the hallucinations of schizophrenics do not automatically become true just because they aren’t being debunked continuously by a volunteer army, nor are you somehow entitled to armies of slaves to factcheck your homework.

This a radically anti-intellectual attitude that has little to do with GMOs.

Here, let’s have O’Brien explain it to Winston in the part of 1984 where Winston is being tortured on the rack

‘We are the priests of power,’ …We control matter because we
control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by
degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility,
levitation–anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble
if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it.
You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of
Nature. We make the laws of Nature.’

‘But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What
aboutEurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.’

‘Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did
not, what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence.
Oceania is the world.’

‘But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is
tiny–helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of
years the earth was uninhabited.’

‘Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be
older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.’

‘But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals–mammoths and
mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was
ever heard of.’

‘Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not.
Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was
nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be
nothing. Outside man there is nothing.’

‘But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them
are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.’

‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits of
fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we
could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun
and the stars go round it.’

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Wait, what?

Who let Mike Godwin in here? He was happily playing chess with Jim Parry when I checked the cage this morning!

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I didn’t care for her “should we be messing with mother nature?” argument (@4m37).

What’s that supposed to mean ? Everything we do is “messing with nature”.

She’s anti-gmos in general.

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