[jammies]

Originally Posted by Azure

Wasn't the original point of this thread GMO crops? Perhaps I missed the part where we talked about non-GMO crops and how the chemicals used on them are harmful as well..

So if I understand you correctly, if non-GMO crops require different, more toxic chemicals in greater quantities, and GMO crops require less toxic chemicals in lesser quantities, this means GMO crops are bad?

I lost track of all the times you've moved the goalposts, put up and then knocked down straw men, and asked other people to do their research when you're the one making all kinds of claims that turn out to be (at best) misleading or false.

Let's see:

Originally Posted by Azure

The amazing Roundup Ready is causing the same problem that the blanket use of antibiotics in the livestock industry is causing. Resistant forms of weeds, or as farmers will call them, superweeds. This is a major problem, especially with GMO crops like Canola, where as soon as they finish off one bug with the new and improved pesticide, a new superbug comes along, which costs the farmer even more to spray.

Misleading. Regardless of whether or not a crop is GMO, farmers spray their crops and thus pests and weeds evolve to resist those pesticides and herbicides. So, straw man #1 "GMO crops evolve superweeds!"

Originally Posted by Azure

In the end, it costs the farmer more because they constantly have to pay more for the newest and latest chemical to kill off the superbugs, and it costs the consumer more because the cost of farming is constantly going up. This much is pretty evident today.

Wrong, because GMO crops are designed so that you can use less herbicide, not more. The whole point of roundup-ready crops is that you can use one, cheap herbicide on all such crops instead of targeted, expensive herbicides tailored to your particular crop. Also, the cost of food is not going up any more than other goods, so that claim is also wrong.

Not only are you wrong, you've argued this point several times - this is just one example, which is still wrong no matter how many times you repeat it.

Originally Posted by Azure

Problem is, Soybeans are becoming genetically altered as well, and as such more and more farmers will use them as the financial benefit is higher. The use of herbicides is also higher, which brings us back to the reason why companies alter the seed in the first place. Read any study done on the financial benefits of using GMO seeds. The biggest benefactor financially is almost always the seed company.

The bolded sentence says the opposite of what you usually claim, like in the example directly preceding this, and is actually correct, for once. However, right after that you back to claiming the use of herbicide is higher, which is, again, wrong. Then you bring up the straw man (#2) of "financial benefits" accruing to the seed company most, as if this has anything to do with whether or not GMO crops are safe and sustainable.

Originally Posted by Azure

Have enough tests been done to show that humans are not in harms way from the chemicals being applied to the food we eat, or are we going to trust those evil capitalists that their chemicals are safe?

Another straw man, because - yet again - you ignore that GMO foods and non-GMO foods both have "chemicals" applied to them. Also, the rhetorical-question-as-argument-against has some technical name which I might remember if I wasn't drunk, but it's nevertheless a tactic of bad journalists and other hacks.

Originally Posted by Azure

You seem to be missing the point. The issue isn't that GMOs are evil, bad or cancerous, but that they require an extreme high use of chemicals to be sustainable, which in itself is not sustainable at all.

Misleading and wrong. GMO requires less chemicals, as previously noted, and also you are moving the goalposts because you indeed have implied that GMOs are evil, bad and possibly cancerous. You know, with that "rhetorical question" we just discussed, among other claims.

Originally Posted by Azure

The science behind GMOs might be solid, and quite frankly I have never done enough research on the subject to know whether or not eating GMO wheat will give me cancer 20 years faster than normal

You claim you don't know, yet you imply in quite a few posts that since we "don't know", this could be happening. Well, here's my theory - maybe GMO wheat will give me super-powers! Nice! If I repeat this completely unsubstantiated theory enough times, being careful to state it's "just a theory, I dunno! LOL!", that will prove.... nothing. Just like your continual asides prove - absolutely nothing.

Originally Posted by Azure

The cost of the chemical has gone down, but as I have indicated in this thread the amount of chemical needed to control the ever increasing resistant weeds has gone up, therefore the cost of spraying is going up.

Here we have, just for a change, a non sequitur.

If I used to spray 100 litres/acre of chemicals that cost me 40 cents/litre, and now I spray 200 litres/acre of chemical that costs me 10 cents/litre, my costs are halved. Therefore, your "logic" fails, and does not follow. It's *possible* that the cost of spraying is going up, but only if the increased usage is great enough to overcome the reduced cost.

Originally Posted by Azure

I just think people are far to willing to accept GMO because they have a very limited understanding as to how the complete farming process works.

This is rich coming from someone who continually mistakes GMO as a method of farming. It's not, it's a way of adding positive and reducing negative features of a crop. That's it. It can enable certain methods of farming, but that's not at all the same thing as being a method of such in itself.

Not only that, but I've pointed this out before, and you just went merrily along with your irrelevant studies, analogies, and arguments, building your straw man bigger and bigger. Until you grasp the fact that "How GMO crops are generally being used now" is not the same as "GMO's uses", you will continue to blather on uselessly on the subject.