Talk:Seeds of Death

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What do the effects of pesticides and herbicides have to do with GMOs?

So many irrelevant points blaming GMOs/biotech for pesticide and herbicide effects ex. on bees, tolerant weeds, thicker weeds... how are these people scientists? Didn't they take first year science in uni and learn about dependent vs. independent variables, correlations vs. cause and effect? These effects/causes can occur independent from GMOs; they have in the past. What's even more incredible is the claims are made with no specific cases, for ex. we see a direct correlation between when GMOs consisted of over 50% of American crops and an increase in the rate of tolerant weeds, causing faster and more frequent transfers in insufficiently tested chems being used. Are these "scientists" part of the generations that were able to pull their careers and credentials out of a hat? Vested interests? I think only the USA has opportunities for almost anyone to make money on almost anything. What a shame.

45:59

45:59

What Bt corn does, and Bt soy does, and what roundup ready does, is it decreases labor. It's labor saving. As if we need less farmers in this country. And we have a limited planet. So more people farming is the key to higher yields, not chemicals.

Labor intensive is good? Let's burn all of the computers! More people using typewriters will result in better content. Or something. Innovation is bad, right guys? ...I mean seriously. You can't take these claims seriously. You just can't. It's insane! Reducing labor inputs and increasing yields is good! More farmers producing less food? How is that good for anyone? How about less farmers producing more and cheaper food, allowing more people to spend their time in other professions?

I'm not supporting the anti-roundup point, because as I already stated, it's irrelevant to the GMO debate. My comment is that I agree that the topic of labor saving should NOT be a pro-GMO point. Considering one family can own 50 tractors that do 50 different things and rape the hell out of 10,000 acres every year, at the touch of a few buttons and levers by one farmer, I don't think we need to be worrying about saving labor. This is a weak point. Machine tech has helped labor enough. Human, animal, plant and overall environmental health should be the main priorities of pro-GMO scientists.

In my opinion, Poverty relief IS a valid advantage of GMOs, though health and safety for the World is my priority over being the "bread basket" for a fraction of the world still in desperate need. Many would also argue the fear of a forced dependence that might grow, on 'generous' nations like the US. Thus, the same people would also argue that, in conclusion, as with many other topics, priority should be given to economic aid through for ex., investing in the country's biotech industry, helping to assist with better trade agreements etc. so as to help countries develop and become more self-sufficient versus dependent upon another country's rations, generosity etc. If a country doesn't have economic stability, suitable climate etc., cultivating isn't the only shortfall... importing food isn't free. Nothing is free unless you're making it for yourself. We have major problems if we start putting our "responsibility to feed poor people" ahead of our responsibility for ethics -human, animal, plant and overall environmental health. These are the most relevant topics to me in the debate. Feeding in to other topics can find a pro-GMOer in stinky water.

As someone who believes in balance and sustainable living, "more people farming" is a very strong point, though it doesn't do much for abominating GMOs because of chemicals. Chemicals are always going to be needed, and as cited in the review, some or most? organic farming requires harsher chemicals.

72:53

I think it would have been better if she said it's pro-democracy to have labels. That seems to be what she meant. When the majority of us (consumers) want it, a true democratic government will listen. I'm not fully supporting the "GMO Product" label, but I do support democracy, I do support more transparency of regulatory bodies, as well as a greater onus on regulatory bodies to better educate consumers using OUR TAX DOLLARS. As I said in my previous comment, GMO products should maybe have a comparison ratio for consumers to know how many GMO apples they have to buy/eat to obtain the traditional nutritional equivalent. BETTER EDUCATED consumers wouldn't stop buying GMOs altogether, rather, they would buy (more or less) depending on the nutritional comparison between GMO and ancestor products. This is not about anything other than our right to know how our food composition has been changed, our right to watch our health, the FDA's/Health Canada's obligation and responsibility to our health, and fair/honest business.

Most GMOs may be 1:1... though you can't tell me that a GMO mushroom or tomato packs the same vitamins as their unmodified predecessors. I get tricked in to buying GMO oranges that taste like paper all the time. That's not only a rip-off, it's misleading consumers to an unhealthy diet. Misleading us in to a crappy cell phone is one thing. Health and safety are another.

Just better educating consumers alone would minimize the impact of labeling. One lesson to Americans on the irrelevance of herbicides and pesticides to GMO health would significantly skew the average perception. A lesson on correlation vs. causation may also have a massive impact. But I don't know why she's trying to appeal to corporations/gmo companies by saying "capitalism." Capitalism is about making CAPITAL, it allows a lot of choice (or freedom) for businesses, but they would obv choose NOT to label their products... so I wouldn't say it's pro-capitalist. And Capitalism is NOT about choice or quality or rights or entitlements of consumers or workers. Our health and safety doesn't need to appeal to the pursuit of capital; rather, in a "democratic society," the pursuit of capital needs to appeal to our health and safety as consumers -yet I haven't seen any votes or government surveys on labelling... not too sure our vote counts on this topic. This has nothing to do with capitalism. The kind of appeal being proposed by the labeling campaign (right to know) would only become possible in a true Democracy.

My big question to this labeling issue is: do biotech seniors eat all their products on a daily basis? Do they eat it alongside supplements or multi-vitamins???? If so, why is it fair that they know to do this when the average consumer does not.

The table of contents is pretty long

Just saying. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 00:48, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

TOC-limited it. Better? Herr FuzzyKatzenPotato (talk/stalk) 01:03, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Now it's too short. :/ 141.134.75.236 (talk) 01:04, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Now? FrothyCatPotato (talk/stalk) 01:31, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Ah, almost. Lemme try something. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 01:47, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Should be okay now. ;) 141.134.75.236 (talk) 02:05, 12 June 2015 (UTC)

Misused references and unsupported/debatable statements all over the page.

I checked a few statements (see my edits) and I think that this page has serious issues. The majority of the claims are not referenced, and the few references are often misused. Many of the claims are therefore possibly (if not likely) wrong. I would advice deleting the entire page and starting from scratch. Cheers, 18.62.30.62 (talk) 01:34, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

The film is one giant Gish Gallop. When dealing with those, it's up to the person doing the galloping to cite everything, otherwise the tactic "works" in that the other side has to waste their time refuting a bunch of PRATTs. YOU do the sourcing. CorruptUser (talk) 04:38, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

I disagree with 18.62.30.62. I think I have referenced in full every important claim, and many less-important ones. It is true that some less-important or minor claims were not referenced, but they are all ones that should not be difficult to verify and are minor enough to justify omitting the reference. This is not Wikipedia, this site is more laid-back, and I believe that I have supported this article with far more quality references than the typical rationalwiki article.

I drew upon both a comprehensive personal collection of evidence and the results of countless hours of research when writing this article, so I'm pretty confident that as of Summer/Fall 2013 (when I wrote the original version of article -- it took me about 2.5 months from start to finish), the article was well-supported and the evidence was as current as possible. There are numerous sources used during my research that I could have included, but I didn't want to spend the incredible amount of time required to reference every little detail in the article with the maximum level of citations when said details were easily verifiable and should not be contested. Do I really need to reference that the LD50 of roundup is typically ~5000 mg/kg?

Do I need to individually cite every little claim in the section on Schmeiser? That section, by the way, required a LOT of research, which is not obvious at all in the resulting text. I linked 2002 FCA 309, which alone covers most of the section, and gives you a huge amount of details on the case, many of which I omitted to provide a less-bloated summary of the case. And before you make the obvious argument -- no, those omissions did not bias the case, don't even fucking try that argument, if I had decided to include more of those details it would have just made Schmeiser look even worse. Related court documents, which can be easily be procured, were helpful in clarifying some details, but were not cited directly. Yes, I probably should have cited that, and the other more general sources used to confirm and clarify, but I was wading through literally dozens of sources, many of them inaccurate and biased to the point of outright propaganda, and citing every one of them irregardless of how much it duplicated other sources or how minor the evidence in it was did not seem justified in this situation. The Star Phoenix source is one of the most important citations used, and so I cited it directly. The explanations and claims are all verifiable either directly via the cited sources, via associated court documents, or via a broad number of more general sources.

There's a lot of other stuff that I'm sure you would argue needs citations, but I doubt the vast majority of them truly need citations. Once again, this is not Wikipedia, I have exceeded the level of evidence typical for rationalwiki, I have used high-quality and inline citations... This is immensely better than most anti-GMO content out there, and even more so compared to the film being refuted, which rarely gives you even a hint of a citation. Much of my refutation is composed of arguments that should not require supporting citations. I don't need to prove that people aren't growing beaks after eating corn. I don't need to prove that the argument demonstrates a severe lack of understanding of how evolution or digestion works. I don't need to support my claim that there are no records of people in history developing permanent gene changes from consuming GMOs. The same goes for claiming that "superweed" and "superbug" are misleading. The rBST section does not really need more references than it already has, but I probably should have cited the primary AcademicsReview article used for that -- it's hard to keep track of everything at this scale, I had to go through 136 claims, there are 185+ references cited (some multiple times), I probably left out a few others. Still, I am making claims that for the most part do not need references. If I had written this article on Wikipedia (which I would not do because this isn't the kind of content that Wikipedia is intended for), I would have followed their guidelines, written it less casually/informally, etc. But I didn't write it on Wikipedia. I've skimmed most of the refutation to look for anything that obviously needs a reference, and none of it deserves an immediate citation (even the AcademicsReview part), and pretty much all of it doesn't really deserve a citation at all given the context. Is much of it stuff that I would have cited if this was Wikipedia? Yes. Does it deserve the immense additional time investment if you're considering the context, sheer number of sources, scale of the article, and incredibly-pathetic level of referencing in the source? No. It took me 2.5 months to get the article into good enough shape to make it public. I spent far more time researching than I did on writing refutations or transcribing the video. I'm confident in the quality of this article. It's not perfect, but it's very very good. It has also been edited to some extent by a number of additional users (myself included) after being moved to the main namespace, which has improved it even more in a variety of ways.

Now, onto your next claim. The few references are often misused? First off, I cited one hundred and eighty-fucking-seven unique references. It's not "few" at all, especially considering how many references and even entire sections apply to multiple individual claims. Additionally, much of my commentary did not need references, as explained above. Some of my commentary is entirely based on arguments and explanations that nobody would claim needs references -- common sense does not need a citation. Well, a large number of people may well be too stupid to comprehend even the somewhat-dumbed-down content I've written, but that's just sad, because you really don't need much knowledge or intelligence at all to comprehend this. I even went and summarized some of the references I used in a high level of detail to precisely explain the situation, with the claim at 30:41 being one good example of this.

Again, much of the research I did is not reflected in the final result. I'm sure that I could add a huge number of additional citations to satisfy you, but it's not justifiable, at least not to the extent needed to make adding them important.

And misused references? Where? Sure, I've used broad references, and did not cite every single little claim, but which ones were misused? Your edits don't seem justified to me, maybe in part, but certainly not as-is. I see a lot of points where I could expand the refutations and cite some newer references, and a lot of points where I could add unimportant additional citations, but I haven't seen any obvious examples of misuse, maybe some rough stuff and semi-outdated stuff, but none of that is bad enough to bother fixing at the moment, and I doubt many of those fixes would result in a weaker argument or fewer sources, especially after adding newer references and improving/expanding my arguments. I wrote this in 2013, it's 2015 now, I'm even better at doing this stuff now, I have much more experience, I have access to a ton of really high quality scientific journals that I did not have back then, and more. But I can't justify the amount of time revising and expanding the entire article would take when it's already quite good and I have many other more urgent things to do. I quite certainly do not support deleting this page and starting from scratch, that's utterly insane to suggest, you're just trying to wipe out the inconvenient evidence, throw it down the memory hole... Gotta suppress the truth, I'd bet you'd love to do the same to the scientific literature, or to Biofortified...

But hey, point out issues here, I'll try to keep track of this page and respond to you. I'd rather not waste the time on revising and expanding the article, but if I have to I will throw away countless hours on citing things, rewriting stuff, and expanding the article. The reason I spent 2.5 months and countless hours on this in the first place is because I got pissed enough enough at the idiocy in the film and decided to prove my point in excruciating detail. I'm already tempted to repeat history, but don't want to waste that much time right now. It'd be better for both of us if we just discuss specific examples. Firemylasers (talk) 05:50, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

Here's some commentary on your diffs:

The first and most obvious problem with this claim is that every single independent study did not show those effects. Biofortified maintains a list of many independent studies, and a few examples from this list that do not support these claims include a study on transgenic papaya, a study on RR soybeans, and a two-year study on RR soybeans. Since the producers of this video have not cited any scientific studies or even attempted to vaguely mention anything that even sounds like a study, it is difficult to address the claims directly. And since the video did not mention what type of plant these claims apply to, we will have to assume they are referring to the transgenic process as a whole, in which case the above three studies directly refute their claims.

If taken literally, it is easy to bring examples which falsify this statement, such as a study on transgenic papaya, a study on RR soybeans, and a two-year study on RR soybeans.

Semi-justified in part, but even less justified than I initially thought due to removing a lot of important info/refs. As-is, absolute shit quality edit bordering on vandalism.

The Monsanto of PCBs and the Monsanto of agriculture are two drastically different companies. There have been a lot of fuck-ups in history, that certainly was one, but this can't be considered proof that every single thing they ever produce is tainted simply because of PCBs.

(blank)

Outright vandalism. The argument is justified.

Monsanto was given the formula by the US government. They did not claim that it was safe, and in fact in 1952 they warned the US Government that the Agent Orange they produced was contaminated by dioxin. The government's response was to ignore this data. Furthermore Monsanto was neither the inventor nor the only manufacturer of Agent Orange — the US Army created the formula, and the other companies producing Agent Orange were Diamond Shamrock, Dow, Hercules, T-H Agricultural & Nutrition Company, Thompson Chemicals, and Uniroyal.	(blank)
Claiming that GMOs are unsafe because Monsanto manufactured Agent Orange is just as inane as claiming that Ziploc bags are unsafe because Dow manufactured Agent Orange, or that Krupps coffee makers are dangerous because the company used to make tanks. There are many more examples like this of companies with dubious pasts — Volkswagen was founded by Nazis, Mitsubishi's Zero fighters were used by the Japanese military in WWII, IBM produced the tracking system that assisted the Nazis in the Holocaust, both Siemens and Kodak used Holocaust labor in production (Siemens supposedly forced prisoners to build gas chambers that were later used to kill both the prisoners and their families), Bayer manufactured Zyklon B and helped out with Josef Mengele's inhumane experiments, BMW made airplane engines for the Luftwaffe, Nintendo made playing cards and hanafuda cards for Japanese soldiers and war criminals, Nissan made engines and vehicles for the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, Mazda made rifles for the IJA, Chase bank assisted the Nazis by freezing the accounts of Jews, and last but definitely not least, Nazi Germany killed millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, LBGT people, and other "undesirables" while Imperial Japan killed millions of Chinese, Koreans, Malays, Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, and East Indians.	(blank)
None of this makes the companies' products bad. This doesn't mean that all Germans and Japanese are terrible people, nor does it mean that you should avoid using Ziploc bags. It doesn't mean that your Mitsubishi, Mazda, Volkswagen, BMW, or Nissan car is going to explode. It doesn't mean that your aspirin is secretly designed to murder you. It doesn't mean that your Wii is going to force you into sex slavery under the auspices of the Empire of Japan. Yet the people who are frothing at the mouth over Monsanto being the great Satan don't seem to even acknowledge that probably everyone who had a hand in developing and selling Agent Orange is dead -- from old age, not from Agent Orange poisoning. It's not about a genuine search for the truth in context. It's all about building a laundry list of decontextualized atrocities, so they can slur anything the company produces.	(blank)

Outright vandalism. A clear attempt to distort the facts by shoving things down a memory hole. Suppressing this section in particular is extremely infuriating to me.

Using DDT on farms was irresponsible. Using DDT to aid in malaria control efforts was not. DDT is in no way comparable to GMOs. There was little or no safety testing done on DDT, while in contrast there is an immense amount of testing done on GMOs. Once serious investigation into DDT happened, the danger was discovered, then immediately removed by banning the insecticide. As with Agent Orange, blaming solely Monsanto for this or attempting to call it equivalent isn't quite a rational comparison.

(blank)

Outright vandalism. Another attempt to distort the facts by shoving things down a memory hole.

Using this as justification for insane claims about GMOs is ridiculous. Safety testing for these plants is extremely in-depth. Several government agencies review each new variety. Monsanto and its competitors are required to conduct any studies that these agencies demand at their own expense, then turn over the results in full so that they can be evaluated. Furthermore, even if these Monsanto-financed results were somehow faked, this completely ignores how universities, other companies, and research institutes have also been performing studies on these crops, and how their results align with industry-funded studies. This would have to be a massive cover-up involving entire fields of science! Given that oil companies have spectacularly failed to shift the consensus position in climate science (a fairly small field), suggesting that a medium-large company managed to completely corrupt a much larger field is just insane.

Several government agencies review each new variety.

Pretty much just vandalism. Also really pisses me off, especially because of what was removed -- again, this is yet another blatant attempt to distort the facts by shoving things down a memory hole.

In conclusion, I drastically screwed up my initial assessment of your intent and edits, assuming that you were reasonable when it's clear now that you're just trying to vandalize the article. Firemylasers (talk) 06:10, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

Okay, hopefully this will be my last addition for now. I looked at the prior edits and your reasons given. First of all, let's throw your edits on Schmeiser's section in here:

Percy Schmeiser didn't just kill off weeds around his utility poles, after doing that he decided to spray Roundup on two 40-foot strips of his property, right next to the road. He testified in court that "by this means he sprayed a good three acres". After doing so, he discovered that 60% of the sprayed plants were still alive, growing in clumps that were thickest near the road and thinner as one moved into the field. This is all court evidence, from the mouth of Schmeiser himself. Now this small section of the field was contaminated at 60%, but as he himself admits, the contamination decreased as he moved further into the field, so total contamination was at the absolute most 60% and most likely far lower in the harvested seed. Here's where the evidence breaks down. We know that Schmeiser harvested this field in 1997, put into a truck, tarped, and stored in a building for the winter. When planting time came, he planted this seed. The absolute highest theoretical contamination this seed could have had was 60%, yet when his fields were tested, it was discovered that hundreds of acres of his farm (1030 acres according to the court document) were contaminated at the absurdly high level of 95-98%, a level of purity that could only be obtained in this situation by spraying the fields with roundup (glyphosate). Schmeiser denied this claim in court, yet it remains the only plausible explanation for this level of purity (assuming that he didn't lie about taking the entire field's seeds to plant). Wesley Niebrugge, a farmer and employee of the Esso bulk dealership in Bruno, testified that Schmeiser's farm hand Carlyle Moritz told him that Schmeiser had sprayed his (1998) crop with roundup. There is no evidence to back up Schmeiser's claim that he did not spray roundup, and Monsanto provided evidence that Schmeiser had purchased 720 liters of roundup in 1998. Schmeiser claims that the 720 liters were used solely for burn-down and to manage ditch weeds, but was unable to present any proof that he used the herbicides he claimed to use on his crop.	Percy Schmeiser decided to spray Roundup on two 40-foot strips of his property, right next to the road. He testified in court that "by this means he sprayed a good three acres". After doing so, he discovered that 60% of the sprayed plants were still alive, growing in clumps that were thickest near the road and thinner as one moved into the field. This is all court evidence, from the mouth of Schmeiser himself. Now this small section of the field was contaminated at 60%, but as he himself admits, the contamination decreased as he moved further into the field, so total contamination was at the absolute most 60% and most likely far lower in the harvested seed.
There is an alternate explanation for this level of purity - he could have only harvested seeds from the plants left standing in the sprayed areas in his 1997 field. However this seems less likely and Schmeiser claimed that he harvested seeds from the entire field. Since the court was never able to prove if he sprayed Roundup or isolated seeds, these angles of investigation were dropped. Some people cite this as proof that Schmeiser never isolated seeds or sprayed roundup, but the courts never found actual evidence confirming Schmeiser's claims, and the issue of how the concentration increased so drastically has never been resolved.	Monsanto provided evidence that Schmeiser had purchased 720 liters of roundup in 1998. Schmeiser claims that the 720 liters were used solely for burn-down and to manage ditch weeds, but was unable to present any proof that he used the herbicides he claimed to use on his crop.
Schmeiser still argues that he was innocent - but claims that he never wanted RR seed - so why did he save, plant, and spray seed that he knew was contaminated? Since the courts found that he was completely knowledgeable about the RR canola's presence, wanted it to dominate the field, and had the "standby" option of using roundup on his crop, Monsanto won the lawsuit.	(blank)

So! This is utter bullshit. Yet another fucking memory hole. This section is one of my best, so I'm pretty mad at this blatant attempt to censor it. You neutered the intro, then deleted close to two-thirds of the original paragraph, removing an extremely important referenced sentence that took me a LOT of time to dig up. You then wiped out pretty much all of the other two paragraphs. The stuff you removed is crucial. It is a extremely clear explanation of just how fucking ridiculous Schmeiser's lies were. It is one of the only accounts out there that gives you an accurate summary of the case -- the internet is filled with biased accounts of the trial, and even the various accurate accounts are almost always unclear and overly-brief. Instead of copping out with a brief reference, I summarized crucial details from the trial itself that tells you why exactly he's lying, why his claims are so implausible, why Monsanto won the case, why the evidence against Schmeiser was so strong, etc. It's a very clear refutation. And it's pretty concise too. So why is it being removed?

I admit that I could have cited more sources, but I maintain my stance that the amount cited was more than enough for RationalWiki, that the references directly or indirectly cover the majority of my claims anyways, and I do not think that any of my claims were unjustified or unsupported.

In short, this is a disgusting attempt at censorship that further proves the conclusion above.

Now, onwards to the edit info. You claimed that entire sections were unsupported by references. I disagree strongly. Let's go line-by-line. Schmeiser is already covered, let's start with the FDA bits. Format is removed line | comments. Non-removed lines are not included.

Using this as justification for insane claims about GMOs is ridiculous.	Your removal is entirely unjustified here, especially in the context of the entire refutation.
Safety testing for these plants is extremely in-depth.	My summary is accurate, the testing for these plants is extremely in-depth, and the following lines strongly support that.
Monsanto and its competitors are required to conduct any studies that these agencies demand at their own expense, then turn over the results in full so that they can be evaluated.	This does not strictly require a citation. This is how the regulatory process works. The same is true for the most part with pharma companies. I don't think I need to prove this at all. It's just how the FDA works.
Furthermore, even if these Monsanto-financed results were somehow faked, this completely ignores how universities, other companies, and research institutes have also been performing studies on these crops, and how their results align with industry-funded studies.	I doubt I need to cite that third parties have been performing studies. I think I cited the independent studies database earlier, that's more than enough, I guess if you want to reference it here you can do that. Their results aligning isn't exactly deserving of a source, it is clearly obvious from the literature and independent studies database. The current interface to GENERA includes a number of useful features, one of which allows you to instantly produce a chart of a number of variables associated with studies in the current search results. Using this, you can easily discover that 53.6% of the 402 studies currently in the GENERA database were funded by the government to some extent (49.8% were exclusively funded by the government). 16.6% had some amount of industry funding, but only 14.4% were solely industry-funded (note: the industry: same classification is used as a benchmark, a very small number of studies (1.3%) were funded to some degree under another industry-related classification, and 20% of studies did not have a funding source listed (this was manually evaluated for every individual study by the genera team!).
This would have to be a massive cover-up involving entire fields of science!	Important part of my refutation -- removal not justified at all.
Given that oil companies have spectacularly failed to shift the consensus position in climate science (a fairly small field), suggesting that a medium-large company managed to completely corrupt a much larger field is just insane.	EXTREMELY important part of my refutation -- removal absolutely NOT justified.

Next, DDT, and I'm switching to grouping sentences to a limited extent to make this a bit shorter and more readable:

Using DDT on farms was irresponsible. Using DDT to aid in malaria control efforts was not.	First needs no ref, well supported. Second shouldn't need a ref, pretty well supported, past tense clearly indicates time period, seems like a reasonable way to summarize the issue. I'm not sure what I'd even cite here, I'm not claiming DDT is the best way to control malaria, but it was an effective tool at the time that saved many people's lives, and it was used relatively responsibility in the context of the threat of malaria, even if still not completely ideally. Again, I think this is a good way to briefly summarize this important bit of history. It was clearly irresponsible in one context, but not so much in another. I've read a lot of material on DDT, but I don't think I need to cite any of it given that these are summaries of history that should not be contestable.
DDT is in no way comparable to GMOs. There was little or no safety testing done on DDT, while in contrast there is an immense amount of testing done on GMOs.	Seems justified to me, don't see the need to cite anything, this is clear from numerous historical sources, and the whole immense amount of testing is already pretty strongly supported at various places in this article.
Once serious investigation into DDT happened, the danger was discovered, then immediately removed by banning the insecticide.	No need to cite, this should be an accurate summary of historical events.
As with Agent Orange, blaming solely Monsanto for this or attempting to call it equivalent isn't quite a rational comparison.	Cite not needed at all, it's clearly a similar case, and it clearly has the same issues...

Now, I'm not going to go over the "independent studies" edit as that requires zero explanation, and I think the first single-paragraph removal of the Monsanto/PCB stuff is clear enough to not bother with, so I'll go over the huge three-paragraph Agent Orange section. Not quite line-by-line, as I'll group it like above, maybe more so because of the length:

Monsanto was given the formula by the US government.	A simple historical fact, and I think it's in the ref I cited.
They did not claim that it was safe	No need to cite, as there is a fucking absence of evidence here.
and in fact in 1952 they warned the US Government that the Agent Orange they produced was contaminated by dioxin	Ref supports 100%... WTF?
The government's response was to ignore this data.	See ref. Also, history. No cite needed, inclusion justified.
Furthermore Monsanto was neither the inventor nor the only manufacturer of Agent Orange — the US Army created the formula, and the other companies producing Agent Orange were Diamond Shamrock, Dow, Hercules, T-H Agricultural & Nutrition Company, Thompson Chemicals, and Uniroyal.	Historical facts, should be covered in part or entirely by previously-cited source, easy to confirm otherwise, and inclusion in refuation is more than justified given the context.
Claiming that GMOs are unsafe because Monsanto manufactured Agent Orange is just as inane as claiming that Ziploc bags are unsafe because Dow manufactured Agent Orange	Valid argument, no citation needed whatsoever at all
or that Krupps coffee makers are dangerous because the company used to make tanks	Historical fact, inclusion justified, no citation needed.
There are many more examples like this of companies with dubious pasts — Volkswagen was founded by Nazis, Mitsubishi's Zero fighters were used by the Japanese military in WWII, IBM produced the tracking system that assisted the Nazis in the Holocaust, both Siemens and Kodak used Holocaust labor in production (Siemens supposedly forced prisoners to build gas chambers that were later used to kill both the prisoners and their families), Bayer manufactured Zyklon B and helped out with Josef Mengele's inhumane experiments, BMW made airplane engines for the Luftwaffe, Nintendo made playing cards and hanafuda cards for Japanese soldiers and war criminals, Nissan made engines and vehicles for the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, Mazda made rifles for the IJA, Chase bank assisted the Nazis by freezing the accounts of Jews, and last but definitely not least, Nazi Germany killed millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, LBGT people, and other "undesirables" while Imperial Japan killed millions of Chinese, Koreans, Malays, Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, and East Indians.	Historical facts, inclusion justified, no citation needed. This has been edited from the original, I don't know how well the additional examples have been verified, but my initial version was verified as carefully as I could and I excluded examples that seemed dubious.
None of this makes the companies' products bad. This doesn't mean that all Germans and Japanese are terrible people, nor does it mean that you should avoid using Ziploc bags. It doesn't mean that your Mitsubishi, Mazda, Volkswagen, BMW, or Nissan car is going to explode. It doesn't mean that your aspirin is secretly designed to murder you. It doesn't mean that your Wii is going to force you into sex slavery under the auspices of the Empire of Japan.	Simple, clearly logical argument to point out issues with the arguments. Unless you're truly paranoid enough to believe that these are valid risks, this should be pretty obvious. If you are that paranoid, you have bigger issues to deal with than this article.
Yet the people who are frothing at the mouth over Monsanto being the great Satan	Valid expression, valid claims, no cites needed. Perhaps a bit over the top, but no more so than the insanity produced by these people.
don't seem to even acknowledge that probably everyone who had a hand in developing and selling Agent Orange is dead -- from old age, not from Agent Orange poisoning.	Very simple claim, historical fact and simple logic, no cite needed.
It's not about a genuine search for the truth in context. It's all about building a laundry list of decontextualized atrocities, so they can slur anything the company produces.	No cites needed. Extremely solid argument that sums everything up.

In summary, your flimsy excuses for your attempts to censor the article shatter easily when examined closely. Pathetic. Firemylasers (talk) 07:36, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

Monkey wrenches

Do 'monkeys' (and apes) use wrenches? If they are shown how to use them/put into a situation where they can tach themselves to do so, is this not 'interfering with nature'? Anna Livia (talk) 18:51, 4 February 2022 (UTC)