The Messiahs' War On Humans, In Scientific American

Even if there is no discernable Victimhood Class for a particular Messianic war, the self-righteous Messiahs still war on their designated Oppressor Class. A major case in point is identified in Scientific American, where the cost to the real-life victims of the Messiahs is quantified in "life-years":

"Their study, published in the journal Environment and Development Economics, estimates that the delayed application of Golden Rice in India alone has cost 1,424,000 life years since 2002. That odd sounding metric – not just lives but ‘life years’ – accounts not only for those who died, but also for the blindness and other health disabilities that Vitamin A deficiency causes. The majority of those who went blind or died because they did not have access to Golden Rice were children."

Golden rice is a GMO which merely added vitamin A to rice. The opposition is opposed to any GMO, in the same sense that it is opposed to DDT: just because of the Precautionary Principle, which is the Luddite thesis that technology could, possibly harm someone; so don't do it, despite no evidence to support that position. So despite the obvious benefits to malnourished peoples, they are protected from being nourished.

The Messiah Luddites should be shamed by the bright light of numerical deaths and suffering that they have aided and abetted. But they cannot be shamed, because their morals do not include shame. They are always more moral than any moral facts to the contrary. That is the definition of evil.

"The opponents of Golden Rice who have caused this harm should be held accountable.

That includes Greenpeace, which in its values statement promises, “we are committed to nonviolence.” Only their non-violent opposition to Golden Rice contributes directly to real human death and suffering. It includes the European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility, which claims the credibility of scientific expertise, and then denies or distorts scientific evidence in order to oppose GMOs. It includes the U.S. Center for Food Safety and the Sierra Club and several environmental groups who deny and distort the scientific evidence on GM foods every bit as much as they complain the deniers of climate change science do. It includes the Non-GMO Project, started by natural food retailers who oppose a technology that just happens to threaten their profits."

The perversion of "risk" for the benefit of a set of egos:

"The whole GMO issue is really just one example of a far more profound threat to your health and mine. The perception of risk is inescapably subjective, a matter of not just the facts, but how we feel about those facts. As pioneering risk perception psychologist Paul Slovic has said, “risk is a feeling.” So societal arguments over risk issues like Golden Rice and GMOs, or guns or climate change or vaccines, are not mostly about the evidence, though we wield the facts as our weapons. They are mostly about how we feel, and our values, and which group’s values win, not what will objectively do the most people the most good. That’s a dumb and dangerous way to make public risk management decisions.

And yet: the author goes wildly off message as he leaves technology and veers straight into Leftist swamp of dogma and cant:

"When advocates get so passionate in the fight for their values that they potentially impose harm on others, it puts us all at risk, and we have the right to call attention to those potential harms and hold those advocates accountable. And this is much broader than just GMOs:

-Delay on dealing with climate change exposes us all to much greater risk. We should hold responsible those whose ideology-driven denial of climate change is responsible for some of that risk.

-Resistance to anything to make it harder for bad guys to get guns puts us all at risk. Society should hold responsible the paranoid arch-conservatism that has created resistance to any prudent gun control and contributed to that risk.

-Parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids put others in their communities at risk. They certainly should be held accountable for this, and in some places, that’s beginning. Several states are trying to pass laws making it harder for parents to opt out of vaccinating their kids."

There are significant differences between these issues and the GMO food issues at the beginning of the article. Here the author flips to the other side, becoming the advocate of the Precautionary Principle himself. There are, within each of these three non-GMO situations, significant contrary facts to consider, facts which the author now suddenly presumes not to exist. So he commits the EXACT error which he started out to condemn: denial of rights (to nutrition) by asserting a "risk" principle which is not provable and is arguable by contrary fact, and further, to assume that the solution (denial of rights) is better than personal choice.

What started as an objective article on nutrition turned out to be a Trojan Horse type vehicle for Leftist suppression.

Does Scientific American have no editors? Or is it so AtheoLeftist that it needs no editing for dogma? As always, the tautologically-moral cannot be shamed.