On 2/7/2015 1:56 PM, Mayayana wrote:
| This organic chemist has been following the thread.
| I get miffed at the misuse of the term and chemophobia in the general
| public.

I can't tell whether that was tongue in cheek.
Are you unaware that "organic" is also a legal
term when applied to food?

http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx...05_main_02.tpl

Of course nearly all food is composed of organic
matter, but the word organic also has very specific
meaning when applied to food sold in the US. It's
shorthand for "organically grown", which is very
precisely defined.

I'd agree that there is some "chemophobia", which
might also be called "naturophilia" -- the simplistic
notion that everything untouched by humans is
inherently good and pure. But there's also "chemophilia".
For instance, the people who thought Rachel Carson
was a nut. She actually turned out to be one of the
first people to pop the starry-eyed, Edenic fantasy
that science was all-good and could be depended upon
to always improve our lives into the future. A half century
later we're slowly learning to be more circumspect about
new technological developments. But there's still a lot
of silly, blind devotion to anything that claims to be
"scientific".

What the two "philias" have in common is that they
represent intellectually lazy, black-and-white views that
are not based on information or reasoning. The organic
foods law is meant to be reasonable: Don't put poison
on food that you intend to eat; research and understand
the best, safest ways to grow food. There's nothing
unscientific or chemophobic about the organic foods
regulations.



The government also says that marriage can be between two of the same sex.