hi there. I hope you don't mind if I dump a metric shit-ton of text here.

"GMO crops can be extremely good things...

similar statements could be made about television, so i consider that proposition to be in the same category. television could be used for great good. but, it wasn't introduced for the purpose of doing good and has, with exceedingly few exceptions [which are themselves highly dubious], never been used for that purpose.

there are millions of people who have food because of a biologist named Norman Borlaug...

i skimmed the wikipedia page on Borlaug. i'll read more about him but in the meantime i am not anywhere close to being convinced of the benefit and certainly not of the 'safety' of GM foods. although i haven't kept up with the subject of genetically modified crops in the past 4 years, i'll briefly mention this: i work with a chef who grows all the produce he uses at his restaurant. he grows it aquaponically. in introducing the topic of aquaponics to my father he immediately tried to find fault with it, questioning how 'feasible' it is (as well as suggesting that there was a problem with not being able to utilize a salt-water system. that's my dad...). and yet, this chef supplies his own extremely busy restaurant with enough left over to sell to other restaurants, at farmers markets and donate to soup kitchens. his system does not require roundup ready plants because there are no pesticides used - pesticides would poison the water, kill the fish and thereby collapse the system. he also is somewhat in to vertical farming, about which I must learn more.

while aquaponics is not entirely self-sustaining it is very nearly so and is clearly an extremely efficient and sensible method of growing food. the only barrier i can think of offhand to the adoption of aquaponic growing methods in famine-stricken countries is, that despite the relatively low cost of setting such systems up, such countries and regions do not have the initial capital to invest and are run by utterly corrupt governments and international "aid" organizations which have no intention of helping their populations become self-sufficient. the giant agricultural corporations would not have such a profitable market either if people could produce a lot of green vegetables and edible fish almost entirely by their own resources.

anyway, i'll re-acquaint myself with the gmo issues over the next little while.

I'm against a lot of what monsanto is doing...

that is a sensible position to hold in my estimation. we have but to look at who is promoting them and stands the most to gain from their adoption versus who is promoting and stands the most to gain from small-scale organic farming methods to see the character of the issue.

when a farmer from whom i purchase produce informed me four years ago that the USDA was on the brink of de-regulating round-up ready alfalfa i went to the bother of reading the entire 400ish page environmental impact report, as well as several other relevant documents, and lodging a formal protest. you can read it if you want. it did as much good as i expected. it's a little depressing to read the rest of the comments (not that I read all 12,000-odd comments...just skimmed them) - beside from the persons who think pesticide-resistant plants are a great idea are those who are firmly against them, but are also often distressingly illiterate. I get the same when I find myself against popular 'progressive' opinion, for instance on abortion. the only people agreeing with me on the issue are people I'm embarrassed to be associated with!

It feels like unless people can be completely for or against something they can't deal. It's like you're not allowed to have a position that's taken into account the good and bad aspects of a thing.

the problem with that is while some things are clear cut and it's easy to stake out a position on, some things are extremely complex and not easy to pin down on one pole or another. I've been calling this trend "fear of nuance".

and now to address the actual point of your post (finally sheesh!!):
you are right that the adoption of uncompromising positions at the irreconcilable extreme of a polarized argument is a widespread problem. people often compensate for the shallowness of their opinions and beliefs by exaggerated vehemence. this habit is useful to the maintenance of the status quo because it ensures that people will be opponents, if not enemies, but certainly not allies. you can see it being encouraged in debates (any atheist/christian debate on youtube should serve as an example), and in popular entertainment in which sarcastic, insulting contentiousness is ever more the default mode of relation between any given characters. actually, i consider the aforementioned debates to be entertainment too; they are both meant to appeal to the same unpleasant juvenile facet of our character that jerry springer targeted, and to provide us with an opinion that we passively and for the most part unconsciously adopt via highly contrived pre-fabricated dialogue that is laced with contempt and unspoken emotionally-operative suggestion. the debate format is in a certain way more insidious because it is conducted under a veneer of legitimacy through the inclusion of logical reasoning which we are conditioned to accept because we have been programmed to idolize logic rather than practice it. logic though is of course full of pitfalls even for the sincere practitioner - how much more dangerous is it when used as a rhetorical technique by an unscrupulous or egocentric person?

the presumption of bi-polarity it is included in our set of presumptions; we talk about hearing 'both sides' of an issue; a person is either 'for' or 'against' this or that. it is the dialectical technique. opposites are necessary in order to eventually manifest the pre-formulated synthesis. and as long as we accept the premises we have no path to follow but that which was laid out for us between the two opposing barriers, and we come to the conclusion the path was laid to lead us to in full belief that it is the most logical, rational and reasonable conclusion that we, free thinkers that we are, came to by our own prodigious powers of intellect.

even when we really stretch our imaginations the best many of us can formulate is that "it's not black and white but shades of grey"_(footnote). and what of colour? what of the entire electro-magnetic spectrum, which might be analogous to all the modes of thought available to human minds?

I think positions are often taken in a backward fashion - that a person accepts a position based on emotional or conditioned reflex (ie a 'respected' authority makes it clear which opinion is the right one) and then follows the reasoning backward and convinces themself that they did it the other way around. I know that I have certainly done this, and continue to do it, because to actually have the intellectual honesty to do it the right way is hard and I'm a lazy cunt.

but, if the hard work of reasoning really has been done then the likelihood is that the conclusion won't turn out to be an extreme one, because too many points would have been taken into consideration. or if it is 'extreme' it would be extreme in terms of passion borne of deep understanding, not in regard to its inflexibility and how animatedly its professor professes it.

the 'extreme' posture is furthered by the attitude that proliferates unchecked on the internet of sarcastic, caustic, compulsively contrary viciousness - i don't merely disagree with you, you are not merely wrong on this or that point; instead, you are a goddamn fu

You have been Sporked.

What's a non-religious alternative to "Amen!"? Hurrah? Bravo?

People want to jump to the conclusion that if X was bad in Y circumstance or when Z person did it, then everything even remotely like X is automatically bad, too.

What's even worse is when people popularly condemn X thing without realizing that they've always been perfectly accepting of it under a specific circumstance. For example, isn't 'eugenics' such an evil thing? Hitler used it to oppress non-whites and try to create a master-race etc. etc. Oh wait a second, wasn't there a case when the control of which people can and can't breed with each other is considered a good thing? Oh yeah, it's called IN-BREEDING BEING ILLEGAL. That's fucking eugenics. How about a scenario where eugenics is openly celebrated? OH YEAH IT'S CALLED PEDIGREE PET BREEDING.

But naw if you talk about forbidding or penalizing people who aren't fit to be parents or carry life-ruining genetic disorders/diseases when they want to have kids, you MUST be hitler 'cause he did eugenics too.

Also see the trope "Hitler ate sugar"

A or -A

A whole issue, is reduced to that. But a whole issue, is made up of many separate A or -A.

we've been genetically modifying our food since the beginning of fucking time how is GMO even a fucking issue

Splitting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_%28psychology%29

"Splitting (also called all-or-nothing thinking) is the failure in a person's thinking to bring together both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole. It is a common defense mechanism used by many people.[1] The individual tends to think in extremes (i.e., an individual's actions and motivations are all good or all bad with no middle ground.)"

Etc