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Even in that case it's not the modified plant itself that's harmful but the remains of roundup left in it after being sprayed.

Yep, exactly. I'm against Monsanto suing farmers for cross-pollination when the wind blows.

Seed patents are dumb. Once something has been planted it belongs to the ground now, if it spreads that's too bad for giant corpo.

EDIT: the link above is the the wrong case. I found this link which breaks things down better.. I'm still of the opinion that seed patents are dumb, and that if farmers harvest seeds from crops on their fields they should be allowed to replant them.

There are very valid arguments against GMOs

All “valid arguments against GMOs” are ultimately arguments against capitalistic profit-at-all-costs practises.

When you take the profit margin out of the process, there end up being no valid arguments against GMOs, as all such profit-free GMOs that end up moving to production are there purely to benefit humanity as a whole, and not to restrict said benefit to a rarefied group of obscenely wealthy people. It’s the GMOs with capitalistic roots which are problematic for capitalistic, Parasite-Class-greed related reasons.

Your 'argument against GMOs' is an argument against seed patents, not GMOs. That's the same as saying there's an 'argument against insulin' because big companies own the patents and charge lots of money. The product is absolutely irrelevant to the conversation.

I'd like to point out that Greenpeace or the local population doesn't have to prove that GM rice is bad. It's the other way around:

Big corps have to prove that GM rice is good and has no adversarial long-term effects, which is impossible to prove.

If gene flow from golden rice managed to successfully hybridize the four gene complex providing the iron, zinc, and beta-carotene nutrients into other rice crops, that would be incredible. It's so unlikely to happen and the scientists involved have to work so incredibly hard to get it to happen, because it would be a tremendous good for the world if it did.

We could only hope that such gene flow would occur naturally from the golden rice.

Furthermore, cross-contamination of traits like RoundUp resistance could spread under selection pressure. What's the selective pressure for beta-carotene production in wild rice?

It's interesting about native species. Think about apple trees in the UK. They grow very well here, the climate is suited perfectly, they don't seem to be invasive (talking as a layperson here). Yet they were introduced about 2000 years ago by the Romans. Does that mean they're old enough to now count as native? I mean, if you go back far enough, everything came from somewhere else. Unless you're looking at a deep-sea vent where life very first evolved, then it has spread from somewhere else.

Maybe if I was a botanist or ecologist, I would know the actual answer. But I'm just a person who loves thinking about things in a philosophical way, without necessarily wanting to research in-depth answers for every little puzzle

I mean with nuclear power there are atleast some things objectively problematic like the high costs of the energy produced and the garbage that is left off. I would not have a beef with thrm protesting GMO's either, where they are used to essentially make the farmers dependent on the seller of the crops. It is this black and white aproach thats really got me grinding my gears because at this point its more of a well known cult than a group for the environment.