Focused Scientific Questions on GMOs

[chadn737]

You're arguments are based on unsupported speculation and stereotypical anti-corporatism. Not once have you provided any evidence for any claim, despite many papers showing the exact opposite.

 

Support your claims or retract.

I already posted that summary, right here: "I'm a bit baffled by the demand for sources to support that claim, (sometimes even phrased as a demand for peer reviewed studies detecting and demonstrating harms from "GMOs"!?). It indicates, at best, a failure to follow the argument. The inability of GMO proponents to follow that simple, plain, many times repeated and numerously exampled (such as by every GMO-proponent posted list of sources that proves empty upon inspection) argument; - - - - - - - - is one more solid piece of evidence that GMOs as currently promulgated carry great risk ".

 

You simply claim that they are "empty upon inspection"....that is an unsupported claim. Having provided the sources and shown that they support the conclusion that GMOs are not dangerous, you have an intellectual obligation to either explain why the sources provided do not support the conclusion that GMOs are safe or you could be honest that you have not bothered to read them and are just making stuff up.

And you don't get to tell me what my claims and assertions are. You can deal with the actual content of my actual posts, or quit responding to them - I recommend door 2, considering your track record of incomprehension. Look at this from you, for example:

 

I can tell you that your claims are completely unsupported because you have not provide one damn piece of evidence to support anything. You just throw out speculations and demand everyone accept you at your word. What expertise do you have that we should believe you? I will gladly pit mine against yours, so at the end of the day, the only real basis we have for any claim is the actual research. I have provided countless papers, you have provided none. That makes your claims unsupported and unacceptable by scientific standards. Maybe that sort of nonsense carries traction with the type of people who buy magnet therapy bracelets, but in science it is unacceptable.

I don't know how you get away with that shit here, but given your manner of addressing me from the beginning in these threads there's no reason for me to respond to it with anything other than contempt.

 

Kettle meet pot. Only difference is that I actually support my claims with verifiable research and at the end of the day, that is all that matters.

The fact that you think those papers and studies contradict any of my claims here, if you really do think that, is a piece of evidence - and one I have posted several times - in support of my contention that obliviousness to the risks of GMO promulgation among GMO promulgators is an important factor increasing those risks.

 

They do contradict your claims. Take the claim that we don't know the effects of GMOs on honey bees. I posted papers from the 2000s, from the 1990s, and papers on the effects of BT from the 80s. That completely proves you wrong. If you disagree, then you have an intellectual obligation to explain yourself, to explain why the data is wrong and provide data to the contrary. You can't just wave your hands and say they mean nothing. Your magical powers to make published research disappear on a whim doesn't work here overtone.

I posted a list of parallels between the GMO risk deniers and the climate change risk deniers earlier, on another thread, and I know you read it.

 

One of the differences between my list and yours is that I drew direct parallels, as advertised, rather than oblique oppositions - consistent logical structure in argument.

 

Another is that I did not assert falsehoods or impossibilities of physical fact, such as points 1 and 2 in your list; or arrange slippery deceptions, such as points 3, 6, 7, and 8; or compare incommensurables, such as 4.

 

So my parallels made much more sense as well as better aligning with factual reality. Granted this was much easier for me to arrange since I was aligning two specific denials of risk (current CO₂ promulgation risk and current GMO promulgation risk) rather than a specific denial and a general affirmation - the far more difficult task you attempt. But since you can't tell the difference in rhetorical task anyway, the comparison is a fair one.

 

But the more important issue, aside from the implications of the incompetence of your attempt to imitate my earlier posting (and all efforts to draw that particular set of parallels, afaik, not just yours) is the focus on politics: one of the seriously deceptive aspects of the current GMO propaganda campaign is the attempt to dismiss the objections to their current promulgations on the grounds that the people making the objections are politically aligned or ideologically grounded.

 

And that is not a focused scientific question on GMOs.

 

 

I don't know what post you are talking about and thus have no idea if I have read it or not.

 

We can see the aspects of climate change denial that I listed above in your own posts:

 

1) Denial/rejection of data and research....check

2) Rejection of scientific consensus.....check

3) Rejection of position of major scientific bodies and organizations.....check

4) Making it a political issue....just see some of your comments regarding GMOs in South Africa...check

5) Is a consequence, so we'll skip it

6) Conspiracy theories.....see all your comments on Monsanto and politics....check

7) Profiting off of your position....I have no idea, so no

8) Fear/ideology driven positions....check

 

Thats 6 out of 8....

Edited May 30, 2014 by chadn737

[overtone]

 

 

You simply claim that they are "empty upon inspection"....that is an unsupported claim.

No, it isn't. The links and studies are right there, even if they are usually just keyword search results you haven't read carefully, and your failure to connect them with any of my claims, or show how a single one of them contradicts anything I've posted, has run for several threads and months now. You say such and so link contradicts my claims? Show, don't tell - match the claim with the contradiction. Put up or shut up.

 

You can't - because they don't. You're the guy who posted a link to a one-reproductive-cycle rat feeding study evaluating a couple of possible reproductive issues - not even one half of a rat lifetime, maybe a half dozen preselected harms checked for - as a "another long term study" capable of detecting all manner of harms from human lifetime ingestion of GMOs. That was supposed to contradict my observation that no long term studies caapble of etablishing the safety of human consumption of any currently commercial GMO have ever been done. Waht it actually did was support another claim of mine - that GMO promulgators in general, with rare and partial exceptions, are oblivious to the risks of these things. Almost willfully so.

 

 

 

Take the claim that we don't know the effects of GMOs on honey bees. I posted papers from the 2000s, from the 1990s, and papers on the effects of BT from the 80s. That completely proves you wrong.

The papers from the 2000s supported my claims - Bt was distributed landscape wide by then, and as you demonstrated important basic research was and is just getting started. The papers from the 80s concerned topical Bt exposure, not GMO, and ignored synergistic issues. The papers from the 90s also ignored the synergistic issues that have turned out to be central, and were not comprehensive field studies (for starters, not long enough or broad enough to factor in weather cycles, disease/competitor irruptions and so forth).

 

The fact that you start by taking my claim as one of knowing nothing in advance of GMO distribution about the effects of Bt on honeybees, and then fail to recognize the support for my claims in your own supposed contradicting evidence, is yet another example of your continual failure to follow simple arguments no matter how often repeated and explained to you. You have problem here, at it isn't me.

 

We can see the aspects of climate change denial that I listed above in your own posts:

 

1) Denial/rejection of data and research....check

2) Rejection of scientific consensus.....check

3) Rejection of position of major scientific bodies and organizations.....check

4) Making it a political issue....just see some of your comments regarding GMOs in South Africa...check

5) Is a consequence, so we'll skip it

6) Conspiracy theories.....see all your comments on Monsanto and politics....check

7) Profiting off of your position....I have no idea, so no

8) Fear/ideology driven positions....check

 

Thats 6 out of 8....

Overall: Clearly you do not understand the concept of "parallel".

 

But specifically: 1) is false - I have never denied or rejected a single piece of scientific evidence on this issue. The problem you have in recognizing my acceptance of all evidence is that you can't follow even very simple arguments of certain kinds: You mistake your interpretation of evidence for the evidence itself, mistake lack of evidence for evidence, accept the assertions found in PR handouts from agribusiness for evidence, and so forth.

 

2) is false. No actual scientific consensus in this matter has ever been rejected by me. Your problem here is that you don't understand simple arguments of certain kinds. When handed a fairly well supported assertion, carefully worded, that most scientists agree no evidence has been found of

medical harm to humans from short term human consumption of two particular varieties of GMOs widely employed in industrial agriculture, you claimed on that basis that there is a "scientific consensus that GMOs are safe". WTF?

 

That's when I started pointing out that the sheer obliviousness of GMO promulgators to the basic aspects of the reality they are dealing with, economic and political and ecological and medical and jack-all, is one of the most disturbing as well as obvious contributions to the degree of the risks being run by current promulgations. These are the guys we are depending on to monitor and curb and manage this stuff - and they're apparently clueless. .

 

Look: there can be no such thing as a scientific consensus that GMOs are safe. It would be like a scientific consensus that arthropods are safe - it's just not possible. For pity's sake - some GMOs are designed to be dangerous, bioweapons. The rest of them are new and full of potential of all kinds. It's a new field of fundamental import in the most complex arena science has yet approached, OK?

 

 

 

3) Rejection of position of major scientific bodies and organizations.....check

see above. I don't do that. Instead, I read them carefully. Try it yourself.

 

 

 

4) Making it a political issue....just see some of your comments regarding GMOs in South Africa...check

Commenting on the political aspects of GMO risk does not create them. Obviously it isn't me making GMOs a political issue. Monsanto, for example, is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the political aspects of its promulgation of GMOs - funding propaganda campaigns, supporting "think tank" and friendly journalist opinion spread (see the opinion page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune 5/25 for an anonymous "AP" example), seeding regulatory and research agencies and philanthropic organizations with friendly faces, setting up agreements and cooperative ventures with local governments, etc.

 

 

 

6) Conspiracy theories.....see all your comments on Monsanto and politics....check

Why are you labeling Monsanto's business models, corporate strategies, international ventures, and marketing efforts, "conspiracies"? Or are you claiming they don't have any such things?

 

 

 

8) Fear/ideology driven positions....check

I don't understand why a evidence free, propaganda derived, Fox News schtick personal accusation like that is allowed here, in multiple repetitions for weeks on end, and I'm not allowed to call it stupid.