Should Corn sold into shops be labelled as Genetically Modified Teosinte?

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Unfortunately, we've seen this with vaccines, and we'd see it with GMOs.  If you do a massive public campaign asserting something is safe, or doesn't cause cancer/autism/whatever, it makes people who were previously skeptical about it more paranoid.  Considering that this information is both useless to the consumer, and apparently counterproductive from a public education perspective, I don't think there's a good argument for labeling GMOs.  And "what's wrong with more information?" is a really weak one.  The problem is that, even if it was totally neutral, non-damaging information, requiring the information creates legal liability and demands on the supply chain...plus, like Аverroës Nix is saying, there's nearly an infinite number of permutations of information.  Why cherry-pick and disclose the one piece of information that is going to play into irrational fears?

This issue just drives me crazy.  Democrats can be so insane about it.

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GMO companies don't have to prove to you or me - people who have actively sought information; and they certainty don't have to prove anything to rabid anti-GMO'ers who seek out absurd "facts" about transgenics. They need to prove to Joe Public what they are peddling is safe.

Your example of vaccines is a good one to prove my point actually. When vaccination programmes are announced without education or transparency - just a bunch of didactic men in white coats, they are fertile breeding ground for anti-vax conspironuts and shyster spivs. The public as a whole is not stupid, but it is susceptible to misinformation especially when Big Companies or Big Government is one of the parties. Public education and transparency about vaccines, yes, does not convince the fruitloops among us. They will always return to echo chambers to whine. But it has convinced the public as a whole that vaccines are good. That is the only escape for GMO's to escape the self-imposed mire they find themselves in.

I'm prepared to predict food companies will soon start providing the GM labels of their own volition.

That doesn't really address my point, though.  The number of Westerners who errantly believe GMOs are either unsafe, or that the evidence is unclear, vastly outweighs the number who know it's safe.  Simply labeling a food as "GMO" is not going to increase confidence, because it's not going to change the rate of those opinions.  If anything, having something commonly regarded as suspect labeled -- even voluntarily -- will probably make people assume it is, in fact, suspect.

You point out that increasing awareness about vaccines has helped decrease vaccine skepticism.  Mostly agreed.  The problem is that this is because vaccines have special, positive messaging -- "vaccinate your children and they won't die of diseases."  It's this, not telling people that vaccines are safe, that has helped push people toward belief in vaccines.  In fact, if you tell people that evidence shows vaccines aren't unsafe, they become more suspicious of vaccines, because you remind them that vaccine risk claims exist.  This isn't my intuition.  We have research that substantiates this.

There simply is no positive messaging analogue with GMOs.  When it comes to irrationally risk-averse people, there's no countervailing risk we can freak them out with.  "It's safe" doesn't work with vaccines, so I doubt it will work with GMOs.  I might be wrong, but I see no reason to believe I am.

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To what purpose besides feeding into people's hysteria about 'frankenfood' that we probably eat every day?  

There is such a thing as too much information.....      

Most (if not all) commercial GMO plants (animals is a different matter) are made with the purpose of increase their resistance toward pesticides (meaning more pesticides can be used, when usiong these crops), I personal think that people should be able to choose to limit the effect of their food on the environment.

That seems like a pretty contested claim to me.  Unfortunately, herbicide/pesticide tracking was terminated under the Bush presidency, so we just have some estimates, which vary from a slight decrease in use to a marked increase.  On top of that, there seems to be some debate about whether the chemicals we're using are less harsh than before.  I don't really know much here, although I sense on-balance, I'd guess there's an increase in the use of harsh chemicals, but it seems almost entirely fueled by the use of a subset of GMOs (Round-up Ready).

But how do you want to handle this?  You want to label all GMOs because a subset of them correlate with higher environmental use of herbicide/pesticide?  You don't want to limit the labeling to those GMOs, or label in a way that doesn't imply that genetic modification is intrinsically an issue, as opposed to herbicide/pesticide use?  Especially considering we already have a label regimen (organic certification) explicitly to guarantee non-use of pesticide/herbicide, and voluntary labeling is always an option, this seems both unnecessary and unnecessarily sloppy.

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To what purpose besides feeding into people's hysteria about 'frankenfood' that we probably eat every day?  

There is such a thing as too much information.....      

Most (if not all) commercial GMO plants (animals is a different matter) are made with the purpose of increase their resistance toward pesticides (meaning more pesticides can be used, when usiong these crops), I personal think that people should be able to choose to limit the effect of their food on the environment.

That seems like a pretty contested claim to me.  Unfortunately, herbicide/pesticide tracking was terminated under the Bush presidency, so we just have some estimates, which vary from a slight decrease in use to a marked increase.  On top of that, there seems to be some debate about whether the chemicals we're using are less harsh than before.  I don't really know much here, although I sense on-balance, I'd guess there's an increase in the use of harsh chemicals, but it seems almost entirely fueled by the use of a subset of GMOs (Round-up Ready).

But how do you want to handle this?  You want to label all GMOs because a subset of them correlate with higher environmental use of herbicide/pesticide?  You don't want to limit the labeling to those GMOs, or label in a way that doesn't imply that genetic modification is intrinsically an issue, as opposed to herbicide/pesticide use?  Especially considering we already have a label regimen (organic certification) explicitly to guarantee non-use of pesticide/herbicide, and voluntary labeling is always an option, this seems both unnecessary and unnecessarily sloppy.

I would prefer that the government handled it, but as your example with Bush administration show we can neither expect or hope that would happen, which is why I'm fine with hysterical anti-GMO activists doing their best with labelling and sabotaging it in other ways.

Here's the truth GMO can be useful, but we really don't need it to feed ourselves, no matter what techo utopians among us thinks, so if the government is unwilling or unable to regulate it, well I'm all for activists doing their best to bring it all down.

You didn't really respond to what I said, dude.  I asked you why you want to label GMOs for simply correlating with bad things, instead of focusing on the bad things themselves, and asked why you think it's a good idea to exploit irrational fears of GMOs to attack an issue (pesticides/herbicides) that's not even relevant to all GMOs.  I pointed out an optional labeling regime already exists for this purpose (organic certification), too.  You just repeated your basic opinion without addressing any of these concerns.

You're also shifting the burden for no particular reason.  So what if "we really don't need [GMOs] to feed ourselves"?  Why is the test absolute necessity?  If it has more use than it does harm, it's a good thing, even if it's not absolutely necessary.

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You asked how I would handled it and I answered.

I asked you some questions about the implications and rationale of handing it that way that you didn't answer.  I'm particularly interested in the concern that you're supporting positions that fuel blanket skepticism of GMO safety that's killed projects involving GMOs that could probably have saved lives (like Golden Rice, which contrary to the GMOWatch type hacks, clearly has a role in good).  Why is that acceptable collateral, but pesticides aren't?  And why not attack pesticides directly, avoiding that collateral?

But let me self be clearer; I think the GMO fear which is usual brought up is moronic, but at the same time I see GMO as we use it today as a net negative (at least in food production), and as the American government is unable or unable to protect its citizens from the negative effects of GMOs, I support using the anti-GMO movement as useful idiots in sabotaging the production of GMO crops, of course we will see some collateral damage in GMO meat production, but hey you can't make a omelet without breaking a few eggs.

I understand your position.  What specific GMOs do you object to beyond Roundup Ready projects?  Also, what do you think of the debate over the harshness vs. quantity issues involving herbicides/pesticides?

Of course the techno utopian tools will see that as very bad and bring up a lot of theorectical crops, which are a solution to world hunger, even if none of those crops have never brought into production, even through they have be poster children of the GMO movement from the start. Where are salt resistant tomatoes, the protein enchanced rice and all the other wonder crops, which have been brought up the last 15 years as the solution to world hunger. Their seeds are not sold because there are no money in them.

That's not quite true.  There have been attempts to fund technology like Golden Rice.  Guess who torpedoed it?  Organizations like Greenpeace, under pressure from anti-GMO people, under the basis of ambiguous safety.  That's my point/concern -- you do realize that feeding into that crap is a collateral of your position, which is meant to solely attack one specific GM product class (Roundup Ready)?