There will still be homophobes and other bigots but they'll keep their mouths shut and hopefully their children won't learn their bigotry.
They'll keep their mouths a little more shut in public, and maybe that will actually lead to some good (maybe), but not to their children. Strong opinions + lack of open conversation = more polarization.
And, to me, it is the point. There are issues I frankly care more about a food company's position on than whether a pasta company dude thinks that the iconic family that he wants to portray in his ads includes a woman in the kitchen. I don't speak for Minupla, and have no problem if this issue makes or brakes his pasta-buying choices over other issues that I wished more people cared more about. But against his point as stated, I think my point stands valid.
Sometimes apologies don't mean shit. It's far more important to know what people really believe.
Which is one of the reasons I did/do not support this boycott. Best I could tell, he expressed his opinion, but wasn't or isn't actively trying to suppress gay rights. If we boycott companies for honestly stating opinions, as is my read of this situation (please inform me of any more relevant details, however), then we don't change their opinions, we just change what they say. Everybody loses.
Yes.
Also, ditto on arctic sea ice volume, which is a more meaningful metric
I value my health and sometimes eat burgers => you are wrong, QED.
Really, though, burger meat can be ground on premises from whatever cut of meat you'd like (and I do this myself sometimes, a decent food processor will do the trick), so why the distinction based solely on form?
"GM rice passes unexpected benefits to weeds" is true. This does not imply that this is occurring on any particular scale at any particular location, it just states that it happens. Which it does. When GM rice cross-breeds with a wild variety, the offspring has a benefit.
To this point, the weeds were not GM'd directly with the transgenic gene, they were cross-bred with GM rice crop. So, it is reasonable to suspect this is likely to happen in the wild. I wonder how difficult it is to collect a reasonably meaningful survey of wild crops to detect this occurrence, and if anyone has attempted it.
As I have read it (in the paper itself), the authors cross-bred the rice & weedy rice, then split up the following generation of plants into those that expressed or did not express the modified gene. So the comparison was amongst hybrids. Still, it may be that this division has an inherent bias as to the presence or absence of other beneficial genes from the food crop, so it is interesting to question what the mechanism behind the reported benefits were.
The take-home point, however, is still that the hybrids containing the modified gene possessed an advantage over hybrids not containing that gene.
Likewise, assuming that anything GM is going to be more dangerous is rather shortsighted.
Perhaps, as stated, sure. In the same breath, though, I'd also call not devoting just a little more of our finite resources toward scrutiny of the effects of rapid GM (i.e. transgenic methods over cross-breeding) similarly short-sighted.
That must be some kinky pr0n you're watching...
(Hint for the slow
"A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds