Uruguay is the Economist's Country of the Year

111–112 of 112 posts

Re: Uruguay is the Economist's Country of the Year

#111

Post by Brakenshire » Sat, Dec 28, 2013, 12:23 AM UTC

patrickaljord wrote: post #105

Brakenshire wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's important to let people make their own decisions about them You must be strongly opposed to the system of regulation in the US, where GMO products are not fully labelled, so individuals do not have a choice. This is also (to be blunt) a nonsense, because many of the potential threats that people are worried about are social, and not individual. For instance, they are worried about farmers losing their ability…

> You must be strongly opposed to the system of regulation in the US, where GMO products are not fully labelled, so individuals do not have a choice. Of course they have a choice. They could only buy products that are fully labelled and guarantied to be 100% GMO free. Problem is for you, most people don't care about GMO so they buy GMO products anyway. This is why you want to ban GMO, to force people to care about th…

> This is why you want to ban GMO, to force people to care about the same stuff as you do...Leftists are just like conservatives, always want to tell people what they can or cannot do with their own body.

Ah, I see. What else can you tell me about myself, generalizing from a selection of opinions? You should extend your logic to education policy, you could provide me with a devastating refutation of all of my new-found ideas.

I'm afraid you're not even wrong. Firstly, I don't want to ban GMO's, secondly, I'm not a 'leftist', thirdly, if you're going to widen the debate to drugs, leftists are overwhelmingly the driving force behind legalization and decriminalization.

Re: Uruguay is the Economist's Country of the Year

#112

Post by duairc » Sun, Dec 29, 2013, 4:42 AM UTC

iterative wrote: post #109

duairc wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, good troll. GMOs = science. Anti-GMOs = anti-science.

Haha, good troll. Pretending that Anti-GMO != Anti-science.

Could you explain to my why being “anti-GMO” necessarily implies being “anti-science”? What definitions of “GMO” and “science” are you using to make that proposition true?

I actually am anti-science, in the sense of “science-as-religion”. The comment I originally replied to is a good example of what I'm talking about: being anti-science is blasphemous, it's heretical. I'm against this kind of nonsense. Not that I think it necessarily is, but so what if being anti-GMOs is anti-science? What's the problem with that? We should be able to have a frank discussion about the merits of GMOs and indeed of science, but we can't, because science is a religion, and you get denounced as a heretic if you criticise its underlying assumptions.

My own position on genetic engineering is that I'm not inherently against it in an abstract way, but I'm against almost all of “actually existing” genetic engineering. Most of the debates about genetic engineering focus on whether or not genetically engineered crops are safe, or whether they provide better nutrition, but I think these are distractions from the real issue. The issue is about control: whether farmers save and choose their own seeds, or whether they must get them every year from a corporation.

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