animist wrote: And simply adding a "context" or explanation does not make this comparison apt.
If you genuinely cannot see that to use something that most reasonable people would recognise as being an unreasonable prejudice is an apt comparison/analogy to something that they might not (yet) recognise as being an unreasonable prejudice, then I cannot help you.
It is not just foolish but highly insulting to ordinary people, and thus undemocratic; fortunately we are not yet in a society where men in white coats tell us, not just that something is safe, but that because it is safe we need not be told when it is present in what we buy.
To my mind, this is at best inconsistent and at worst utterly hypocritical:
* Do you insist on having your food labelled to enable you to distinguish whether its contents are the product of artificial selection or natural selection?
* Do you demand that it is labelled to enable you to know which of its genes are transgenic and have been introduced by a virus?
* Do you not think it might be more fruitful (ghastly pun intended) to have cherries labelled with the warning that, if you bite the stone open, you might release dangerous amounts of cyanogens?
And to answer your later point, who are you to decide what is someone else's "legitimate" concern?
Yet again you choose to misrepresent what I wrote. At no point did I decide anything for anyone; I merely expressed an opinion (Clue: "I suggest...").
Again, you come over as elitist and undemocratic
PSSSTZZZST!
Bugger! There goes another irony meter! (Clue: It is you, not I, that repeatedly objects to the other person stating his opinion - and who repeatedly misrepresents the other's opinions as decisions or demands.)
animist wrote:Tetenterre wrote:the message from the Greenpeace video was that there are indigenous plants, notably moringa, which might be able to solve the problem (in this case, vitamin A deficiency) without recourse to GM.
"might be able" - yet they haven't actually shown this, have they?
I think I posted the Wiki article on this plant, which states that it is a source of vitamin A
That moringa is a source of vit A is not in dispute: "they" refers to Greenpeace; "this" refers to moringa's ability to solve the problem.
But back to the point that is the crux of this:
still nobody has shown any reason that altering an organism's genetics by laboratory-based, intentional, targeted genetic splicing should carry any more risk than altering its genetics by (say) selective breeding; neitehr has anyone produced any evidence to show that it is. Logically (because more genes are involved), it must be selective breeding that is potentially riskier than targeted gene splicing, yet it is the latter that is being demonised. Can someone please explain to me how this is logically, ethically or morally reasonable or responsible?