No more GMO: Monsanto drops bid to approve new crops in Europe

[roseBudd]

19. This describes the hysterics to a T

http://randomrationality.com/2013/07/05/creationism-anti-gmo/

What do the Creationist & Anti-GMO Platform Have in Common?

Creationists and the Anti-GMO crowd (hereafter referred to as anti’s) crowd share a foundational base; one amusing to explore, no less. Creationism, or Intelligent Design (ID) as it is known in some circles where they pretend to themselves it is a scientific theory, has been notorious at setting up evolutionary straw men that they can then easily knock them down to the delight of other believers. (A straw man argument is where you intentionally misrepresent an argument so that you can take down the ‘straw man’ argument without taking on the actual argument to the benefit of your ego and ignorance of your audience.)

In all aspects of the debate on the health, benefits, and detriments of genetically modified food, they’ve exhibit the same tactics, manners, fallacies, and in the process of trying (emphasis on trying) to fortify their position use discredited studies, and almost always refuted or outdated to promulgate their belief that GMOs are bad, bad, and badder than organic produce. They resort to catchy one-liners, misleading metaphors, and outright false perceptions (similar to the crocoduck) to caricature and influence those who come across their opinionations. (It goes without saying that I’m only referring to the fundamentalists of either camp, not the rank-and-file and normal people who are calm and measured in their opposition, although even they have no evidence as such in opposition; another thing they share with believers of ancient Middle Eastern fairy tales.)
In this way, the two camps share common philosophical foundations, which are:
(1) the belief that they know more than the experts
(2) that intuitions trump evidence
(3) that reality should conform to our wishes and desires instead of the other way around.

Both camps are big fans of vivid, negative metaphors and imagery that tickle the humanoid amygdala, thus allowing the biased brain to fill in the blanks — almost always badly. Such examples include references to contamination of organic crops by GM crops, instead of the proper term: cross-pollination. Another is the name-calling of conventional farmers as chemical-farmers, as if natural chemicals are different at the molecular (they are not — anything you can see, touch, feel, and taste is a chemical made up of the same basic building blocks as everything else). Yet another is the calling of sterile seeds ‘terminator seeds,’ while on the other hand condemning and making issues out of contamination (cross-pollination); ignoring the fact that sterile seeds are a perfect way of preventing cross-pollination, yet was so heavily criticized by the anti’s that Monsanto respected the wishes of this vocal minority, who, having won that victory, then had the ammunition, hysteria, and irony to boot, to complain of potential contamination of organic farms by GM farms, which would not have occurred had Monsanto been allowed to develop their sterile seeds. (Then with that victory won, they bought out that old tripe: Monsanto doesn’t allow farmers to re-use their seeds! A practice that preceded Monsanto’s entry into the seed business.) The anti’s, or whichever few orchestrated these campaigns, are either stupid or evil. Either way, a long time ago, this became politics instead of fighting for the environment; it became a worldview predicated not on information or evidence, but defending a viewpoint that long ago ceased to pollinate with reality.