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comment by neshura
neshura  ·  3178 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Misleading War on GMOs: The Food Is Safe. The Rhetoric Is Dangerous.

People will always find a scapegoat for why their loved ones get sick. Today, GMOs, yesterday, impure thoughts and moral decay, and before that, the evil eye. It's hard to make sense of an unfair and inequitable world with science; science qualifies everything with "some evidence" and "probably" and "we can't say for certain".

The only requirement for a scapegoat is that its invisible hand should be hard to prove or disprove. What makes GMOs so weird as a scapegoat is that it is so easy to disprove short- and medium-term harm. It's also easy enough to understand that normal agriculture and gardening, as practiced for several millennia, is a process of trying to create wildly uncontrolled large mutants. MUTANTS, people. Then, pick the most mutant-tastic one, and if you can reproduce it reliably, you've got "New Varieties BC 3,207: Improved, Larger Phooeyacia barbaziqux, with bigger seeds that malt at lower temperatures for beer-in-a-jiffy like you've never beered before!" in the plant catalog. Meanwhile, you have no idea what the health implications of that new DNA sequence are.

THAT is why people use the "ticking time bomb" argument with GMOs. As long as you take a halting problem stance on GMOs, you can _never_ be proven wrong.

Most people drive everywhere and work desk or retail jobs and watch tv and comment on the Internet and basically do everything BUT work up a 45 minute solid sweat 3x a week -- study after study has shown short-, medium-, and long term harm from not exercising. You'll die of something, but you'll die of heart disease from not exercising infinitely more often than you will die of Franken-fruit that suddenly GROWS TEETH. INSIDE you. And gives you AUTISM of the small intestine over forty years. Or something. Hasn't happened yet, but you know. Ticking time bomb!