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[Frumple]

But average joe-shmo on the street doesn't think in those terms, and all they hear is "Monsanto is evil! GMO is tampering with nature! We're all going to die!" and they think GMO is all evil with no good reason to use it at all. Think it's fucking poison or something, like we're fucking sticking cyanide-producing genes into wheat for the lulz or something.

And still eat it. Would still eat it, if the price was sufficiently lower than non-GMO alternatives (and it is ) and it was easier to identify the stuff. Oh, some stick to the guns and there's folks that avoid it for jonesing purposes, but most? Heh.

Seriously, there's a lot more bark than bite in that arena, and even when there is bite it's usually not much of one, 'least so far as I'm aware. There's just not enough bad news directly on the subject (i.e. catastrophic failures in regards to the actual crops, never mind peripheral stuff like devilsanto's business practices and bee genocide.) to really turn public action away from it (and opinion's closer to split than strongly against). Not when it feeds so many for so cheap.

[Helgoland]

What are the bad things Monsanto does, anyway? For most issues I've found that they're dickish, but far from novel. The "You cannot use some of your harvest as seeds for the next spring" bit for example is normal practise even without GM, because most (or at least many) crops out there are F1 hybrids which are infertile.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

That may be true, but for non-infertile GM Monsanto are practically Gestapo-like in their suppression of seed-saving and seed-collection organizations. Even worse is the potential of purposely infertile GM crops. Monsanto is doing their best to consolidate the farmers under them and make them beholden to them forever. It's modern sharecropping without the racial element.

[Helgoland]

That's what I said - non-'reusable' seeds are standard right now, even without GM. Why is it worse when Monsanto does it?

[Pnx]

There's actually a lot of farmers who's economic model revolves around being able to reuse their seeds, the higher yields of GM seeds mean that growing non-GM crops is less cost efficient for them, and the fact that paying for the GM seeds planting after planting means these antics are driving them out of business.

[Frumple]

Well, there's that whole potential continent-wide ecological devastation thing... Relatively minor link, there, but still. S'the kinda' stuff 'santo's name is attached to, when it comes up. Beyond the article, they're apparently involved with using and pushing for the continued use of the pesticides that are (were? It's been a few months now) causing the bee die back.

Damn, was that really back in May? Anyone know how things have been going for the bees?

[Helgoland]

Pnx: That's not an argument against GM crops, that's an argument against high-yield infertile crops - and it once again applies to F! hybrids just as well. Also, since when is increased efficiency a bad thing? Where there's competition, there's losers, but it's a net benefit to society as a whole.

Frumple: That's Roundup, which is used with conventional crops as well (and other companies sell similar products).

Any arguments specifically against the way Monsanto is doing GM? Maybe I was not specific enough before...

[LordSlowpoke]

the anti-gmo stuff is spread mostly be people who have no idea how gmo works, or know very well how gmo works and don't want to be slaves to monsanto more or less

helgo, searching for "monsanto controversy" will lead you to this

basically absolutely gigantic levels of ip-fuckery over things that they cannot prevent or took no effort towards preventing (crossbreeding of their and natural seeds on other farmers land for instance)

[Arx]

AFAIK the deal with Monsanto is that uncontrolled GM plants cross pollinate with some poor sucker's non-GM plants, and then Monsanto rock up and and force them to either pay them royalties or be sued for using Monsanto crops without permission (when they had no control over it). This is hardly ethical, but it's gained Monsanto control of an incredibly large slice of the world food supply, so they don't care.

[smirk]

Frumple: That's Roundup, which is used with conventional crops as well (and other companies sell similar products).

Roundup is specifically for use with specially-designed herbicide-resistant crops, as far as I know. Dunno about other people, but that's the main reason I hate Monsanto - agri-business enforcement of monoculture, Monsanto being the biggest culprit. Roundup (and other similar herbicides) kills everything that's not specially designed to withstand it, and entire habitats disappear. Like how the Monarch butterfly is most likely going to go extinct in the near future. Or, of course, the bee problem. So GMOs are problematic in a way, but only incidentally.

[Xantalos]

AFAIK the deal with Monsanto is that uncontrolled GM plants cross pollinate with some poor sucker's non-GM plants, and then Monsanto rock up and and force them to either pay them royalties or be sued for using Monsanto crops without permission (when they had no control over it). This is hardly ethical, but it's gained Monsanto control of an incredibly large slice of the world food supply, so they don't care.

This was it.

[Sinistar]

Yeah, my problem with GMOs being introduced in our glorious liberal-muslimextremist-communistsuperstate that is EU* is all the ip douchbag-ery that surrounds it. AND there are those horror stories of people in certain parts of the world being forced to buy GM seeds because no other are on the market but due to environment/said gm seeds being untested/some other silliness are also forced to buy and use some specific and rather dangerous herbi-/insecticide or suffer massive crop failure.
However, I have absolutely no proof of the second part of my argument. So I might be as well be talking out of my ass.

Other thing that pisses me off is politicians using GMO as a "HUNGRY CHILDREN IN AFRICA!!1" trigger. All the while few years ago I was cleaning not-even-half-eaten burgers out of bushes/trash bins and these days shelves in every local store are STILL nearly cracking under the amount of all the food we could never eat.
But that's just me. I fully realize I'm probably still living in a time when the idea of "there's enough food for everyone in the world, only lack of will to distribute it is the problem" was still going around. Do I really know how much food is needed and how much is actually produced. Nope. Feel free to mock that.

*according to various non-EU conservative views

[scrdest]

There's also the fact that a number of objections to GMO are legitimately valid concerns that get bastardized into absurdity by people not bothering to understand the idea. For example the harmfulness thing - the original idea was that introducing a protein from, let's say, a peanut, into another vegetable, may cause allergic reactions to people allergic to peanuts.

That actually happened, but the frequency of those were few and far between, on par with allergic reactions to analogous mutant proteins, so it's not big a deal, but it was a valid concern.

[Sinistar]

SEE, I TOLD YOU!! I TOLD YOU ALL! GMO ARE OF THE DEVIL!! REPENT FOR YOUR SINS AND BURN, TECHNO-HERETICS!!

But seriously now, you make a good point, scrdest.
It's not that, for example, I would strictly object GMO because it's not yet universally approved technology. It's because people forget it's not yet universally approved technology and just wish to go crazy with it, not asking if what they are doing is the smart thing to do. 

[flame99]

On a non-GM topic, I watched Salad Fingers today for the first time due to a friend's urging.