An Instapundit post about Belgium “protesters” destroying genetically modified, blight-resistant potatoes. It’s not enough that they don’t eat them. Starving people shouldn’t have the option either.
Professor Reynolds calls them potential “mass murderers”. And he should know, because he has the ultimate serial killer’s name. Seriously, the first time seeing that full “Glenn…Harlan…Reynolds” moniker I thought, “ohmygosh, this guy has killed forty people”.
World's Only Rational Man 
Every single food we eat short of seaweed is “genetically modified”, just more slowly modified over a longer period of time. Today’s potatoes look nothing like the potatoes that were growing only 200 years ago. Same with corn, carrots, and just about everything else.
One alleged problem with commercial genetic modification is that it’s a scattershot approach that doesn’t do a clean job of inserting the target gene, instead resulting in a badly defined genotype with unknown implications. Another is they don’t always provide the promised cost savings. Another is that GM crops cross contaminate nearby non-GM crops, which might be viewed as eco-terrorism of a sort. I don’t have references handy for these but hope to assemble some in time.
These issues, or at least serious discussion thereof, have been largely confined to the alternative press, but interestingly a report dealing with the impact of GM cotton (among other factors) on Indian farmers was just released by the NYU School of Law’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice.
http://www.law.nyu.edu/news/CHRGJ_REPORT_EVERY_THIRTY_MINUTES_INDIA
It will be interesting to see if NYU backpedals on this after Monsanto brings out the big guns.
You know, I think we should go back to 1,000 years ago. No evil cars. No evil supermarkets, no evil big oil, no evil electricity, etc.
But the first ones to die will be the enviro-nitwits. How many of them can ride a horse? Farm? Hunt? Track? How many know what berries are edible and what mushrooms are lethal? Filter water? Heck, how many of them can build a proper fire? The vast majority of these nuts, at least from my experience, have no idea about nature. They’re usually spoiled children and city people. Without the protection modern technology gives them most of them would starve or freeze to death in nature. Or bears would eat them.
A lot of the backlash against GM is from the farmers themselves, which isn’t hard to understand given how they’re treated by Monsanto. For example in the US:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805?currentPage=all
And the NYU study in my original post attributes the incredible suicide rate of farmers in India, in part, to the failure of Bt cotton. (“In 2009 alone, the most recent year for which official figures are available, 17,638 farmers committed suicide—that’s one farmer every 30 minutes.”)
Oh, that’s terrible.