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Swiss Mired in Poisonous Row Over Pesticides

posted by mrpg on Monday June 07 2021, @04:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the poisonous-pesticides-plague-the-pasture dept.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Swiss mired in poisonous row over pesticides:

[...] The Swiss will vote on Jun 13 on a proposal which, if it passes, would make Switzerland the first country in the world to ban synthetic pesticides.

Proponents seek to ban pesticides with non-naturally occurring chemicals - and not only for agriculture but also for public green spaces, private gardens, and even for killing the weeds on railway tracks.

The initiative, entitled "For a Switzerland free from synthetic pesticides", would also ban the import of foodstuffs produced with synthetic pesticides, so as not to put Swiss farmers at a disadvantage.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by esperto123 on Monday June 07 2021, @01:48PM (18 children)

    by esperto123 (4303) on Monday June 07 2021, @01:48PM (#1142729)

    That's the fallacy of natural, pesticides are a hot topic for people who still think (by innocence or malice) that anything synthetic is by itself worse than natural compounds, and this is very misleading, there are bad stuff on both sides of the fence but usually the synthetic stuff, as you said, were developed to be more targeted and to have less side effects to the environment.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:40PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:40PM (#1142747)

    We have people who are ignorant of the world they depend on and a press that functions relentlessly to increase their ignorance. When is the last time you learned anything from the mainstream press? Common people exist to be manipulated.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @04:03PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @04:03PM (#1142777)

      The enlightened former president warned us all about teh fake news. Don't listen to them, listen to him. /bleach

      • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @04:16PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @04:16PM (#1142786)

        You're proving his point... This [statesman.com] includes the quotation of Trump's comments regarding "bleach":

        "A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposedly we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. (To Bryan) And I think you said you’re going to test that, too. Sounds interesting, right?

        And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful."

        Media: "Trump said drink bleach. He literally killed people. Vote Biden or you're voting for a murderer!"

        • (Score: 0, Troll) by js290 on Monday June 07 2021, @09:00PM

          by js290 (14148) on Monday June 07 2021, @09:00PM (#1142901)

          Offtopic: between Fauci funding GOF and Birx not knowing about the history of UV irradiation, Orange Man was only sane & reasonable person up there re:'rona...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @04:15PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @04:15PM (#1142785)

    Remember talking to a major potsmoker who was insisting that it was totally harmless because it's "natural, man!".

    So I told him that if natural things are harmless, he should load up on totally natural cobra venom. Harmless, because it's natural!

    I haven't seen a pothead so angry ever before.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 07 2021, @06:24PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 07 2021, @06:24PM (#1142839) Journal

      Socrates last statement: "I drank what? . . ."

      --
      Scissors come in consumer packaging that cannot be opened without scissors.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 08 2021, @04:31AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 08 2021, @04:31AM (#1143022) Journal
      Nonsense. Cobras buy their venom wholesale from Dow Chemical!

  • (Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Monday June 07 2021, @04:23PM (4 children)

    by Socrastotle (13446) on Monday June 07 2021, @04:23PM (#1142788) Journal

    I think most people who espouse for natural things don't even really understand why it is that natural is often preferable.

    The reason is because natural things are things that have been used in many cases for thousands of years, and so unforeseen consequences can be mostly discounted. By contrast today even things as benign as paracetomol/tylenol continue to have a multitude of new micro-level effects discovered and it's effectively impossible to determine whether there are any macro-level effects simply because they've become so ubiquitous that there's really no such thing as a control sample anymore.

    Of course the bastardization of this is when we are able to classify various new compounds as "natural" owing to the inability to create accurate legal definitions for such things that often have a rather hand-wavey yet still well understood connotation.

    • (Score: 1) by js290 on Monday June 07 2021, @04:46PM (1 child)

      by js290 (14148) on Monday June 07 2021, @04:46PM (#1142800)

      Naturalistic fallacy applies to ethics, not risk. The Precautionary Principle... within the statistical and probabilistic structure of “ruin” problems. [fooledbyrandomness.com]

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 08 2021, @04:33AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 08 2021, @04:33AM (#1143023) Journal
        I don't see a PP (Precautionary Principle) analysis of PP at that link. But then again, if they did, they wouldn't be doing PP.

        Eat your own dogfood - and choke on it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @05:49PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @05:49PM (#1142822)

      > things as benign as paracetomol/tylenol

      Poor example. That stuff _is_ poison. Even using the recommended daily dose for too long a consecutive period can cause liver damage. The LD50 (median lethal dose) and effective dose are way too similar. Amazing it is sold over-the-counter nearly everywhere in the world.

      • (Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Monday June 07 2021, @06:17PM

        by Socrastotle (13446) on Monday June 07 2021, @06:17PM (#1142834) Journal

        Yeah, very fair point. Terrible word choice on my part. I suppose by benign, I should say 'normalized' or something. Because it definitely is not benign.

  • (Score: 1) by js290 on Monday June 07 2021, @04:48PM (5 children)

    by js290 (14148) on Monday June 07 2021, @04:48PM (#1142801)

    "Name one ecosystem that is better off for having [monocrop] agriculture moved into it?" Toby Hemenway [bit.ly]
    Mark Shepard on Restoration Agriculture - Abundance of Ohio River Valley during Jefferson administration [bit.ly]