Europe about to embrace GM?

According to this link, there is now New European Union rules that could put a stop to Europe's idiotic holdout on GM and which “could, in theory, lead to widespread cultivation of GM foods” but I am not so sure of this at all.

The link says:

“...EU environment ministers last month approved new rules that would permit individual countries to make their own decisions on GM—allowing them to use "ethical" or "public order" rationales to ban crops even when scientific advisors have ruled that these strains are safe.
...”

In other words, even if perfectly rational science consistently says a GM crop is safe, irrational politicians that don't understand science, let alone GM, and don't know what the hell they are talking about are still allowed to both say GM is unsafe and ban it!
How totally stupid is that!
They allow stupidity to triumph over reason when all they SHOULD allow is just reason!
I am not impressed.

And, just as the link says, ;

"...In fact, GM is actually safer than most forms of breeding because we know exactly which properties are being implanted—it's much less random," ..."

Why do you need reason when you can wallow in technophobia?

I wonder where technophobia generally comes from? -or perhaps we should call it sciencephobia?

either way, perhaps it is just fear due to the unknown because many people just don't understand it and, because of their primeval instincts, what they don't understand, they fear (and often want to destroy ) ?

Or perhaps they got this irrational idea in there heads that 'unnatural' always means 'bad' and 'natural' always means 'good' despite rabies being natural and a life-saving designer drug being unnatural?

Or perhaps they have just watched too many Frankenstein movies and silly science fiction and, out of their total ignorance, think THAT is what science is all about i.e. , despite science saving millions of lives, it is really just all about creating nightmares?

Or perhaps they hate anything new because they want to go back to the stone age for a simpler way of life?

For the real religious nuts, I guess it could be because they want the whole of science to be totally wrong because the science facts conflict with their religion.

I think surely it generally has to be for at least one of the 5 above reasons.

I say push for labeling, and let the people decide, through fair market practices.

Monsanto has been derailing almost all efforts here in the US to promote labeling of GMO foods. What are they afraid of?

I would not ever buy anything with has the lable GM on it.
If I feel that I'm tricked into buying thing that is GM but not said so on the product, I wouldn't buy anything eatable from the US.
In this way I use my power as a consumer.

Originally posted by Suzianne
I say push for labeling, and let the people decide, through fair market practices.

Monsanto has been derailing almost all efforts here in the US to promote labeling of GMO foods. What are they afraid of?

Would you favour labeling products that were produced by black people?

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
Would you favour labeling products that were produced by black people?

I think that this comes under the heading of informal logical fallacy.

Originally posted by DeepThought
I think that this comes under the heading of informal logical fallacy.

It would be more accurately described as a reductio ad absurdum.

There is no intrinsic health hazard to GM produce, so there is no reason to label the products even if there is a consumer demand for it. In fact, it is misleading advertising to do so, since it suggests that non-GM products are somehow better than GM products.

Originally posted by Suzianne
I say push for labeling, and let the people decide, through fair market practices.

Monsanto has been derailing almost all efforts here in the US to promote labeling of GMO foods. What are they afraid of?

and let the people decide,

even if many decide on the bases of lies or misinformation or irrational paranoia or total ignorance?

What are they afraid of?

that people would react irrationally by simply rejecting all GM products despite their potential benefits and despite the fact that ALL food is genetically modified anyway by evolution and most of our food by selective breading so there is absolutely no rational reason to reject GM.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
It would be more accurately described as a reductio ad absurdum.

There is no intrinsic health hazard to GM produce, so there is no reason to label the products even if there is a consumer demand for it. In fact, it is misleading advertising to do so, since it suggests that non-GM products are somehow better than GM products.

No, it's the genetic fallacy, entertainingly enough, although it could be argued it's also a reductio ad Hitlerium. For reductio ad absurdum you need to force a contradiction, which you can't since there are more reasons to be wary of GM than hypothetical health concerns. Relevant concerns would be to do with patents and use or non-use of terminator genes as well as possible contamination of related wild species.

Originally posted by DeepThought
No, it's the genetic fallacy, entertainingly enough, although it could be argued it's also a reductio ad Hitlerium. For reductio ad absurdum you need to force a contradiction, which you can't since there are more reasons to be wary of GM than hypothetical health concerns. Relevant concerns would be to do with patents and use or non-use of terminator genes as well as possible contamination of related wild species.

well as possible contamination of related wild species.

why cannot the genes in crops not defined to be GM produce “contamination of related wild species” and, if no reason, using the same logic, why should we not reject ALL food crops on that bases?

Originally posted by humy

well as possible contamination of related wild species.

why cannot the genes in crops not defined to be GM produce “contamination of related wild species” and, if no reason, using the same logic, why should we not reject ALL food crops on that bases?

Because we don't know what the potential gene interaction will do in a wild species. In any case I was trying to demonstrate that asking the question Kazet did was a piece of rhetoric rather than a fair argument. If people are unhappy about the prospect of eating GM food then it is up to the industry to address their concerns, not to hide the presence of their products in the food supply.

Originally posted by DeepThought
No, it's the genetic fallacy, entertainingly enough, although it could be argued it's also a reductio ad Hitlerium. For reductio ad absurdum you need to force a contradiction, which you can't since there are more reasons to be wary of GM than hypothetical health concerns. Relevant concerns would be to do with patents and use or non-use of terminator genes as well as possible contamination of related wild species.

There is no reason to be wary of GM products in general (there might be reasons to question some of them, as with any agricultural product). All of the relevant concerns also apply to other means of artificial selection, so that would be an argument against agriculture in general. There is also no rational reason to be wary of products produced by black people, even though convinced racists might feel otherwise.

The (ab)use of patents in general needs a legislative response. I would say that since technological advancement is so much swifter than it used to be, patents should also expire more quickly. But that is a different issue.

Originally posted by DeepThought
Because we don't know what the potential gene interaction will do in a wild species. In any case I was trying to demonstrate that asking the question Kazet did was a piece of rhetoric rather than a fair argument. If people are unhappy about the prospect of eating GM food then it is up to the industry to address their concerns, not to hide the presence of their products in the food supply.

For the record, I don't oppose labeling GM food as long as it comes with a clear warning that there is no intrinsic health or environmental hazard associated with GMO's.

Originally posted by DeepThought
Because we don't know what the potential gene interaction will do in a wild species. In any case I was trying to demonstrate that asking the question Kazet did was a piece of rhetoric rather than a fair argument. If people are unhappy about the prospect of eating GM food then it is up to the industry to address their concerns, not to hide the presence of their products in the food supply.

Because we don't know what the potential gene interaction will do in a wild species.

1, This is not only not necessarily true. WHY can we not know of such potential gene interaction? I see no reason why not! What BARRIER would make it impossible for science to rationally and reliably predict what that interaction would be.

2, even if or when we cannot predict the interaction, why should we think the interaction from a GM gene would likely and generally be any more harmful than a non-GM gene? does merely making it GM somehow manically curse it to make it mysteriously insidious just because it is GM? How exactly does that work?

Even if or when we cannot predict the interaction, this would be true for genes whether they where created naturally by random mutation in the plant or whether they where put there artificially in the plant by us by means other than selective breading (i.e. put there by 'G.M.' ) so we would not know what the potential gene interaction will do in a wild species whether the genes is from GM crop or not! Therefore, your reasoning still makes absolutely no sense whatsoever because, using that same weird 'logic' of yours, we should reject ALL crops, whether they are GM or not! (and probably starve in the process! )