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I'll never forget the weird fucking sub of literal Monsanto apologists on reddit who'd keyword search for anything negative and descend with gish-gallop and brigading.
Bunch of weirdos, some of whom openly admitted to working for and depending on Bayer/Monsanto for a living.
They'll be here if we start popping up in Google searches. I always assumed they were paid professionals, working entry-level jobs for reputation management consultants.
More than likely it's a bot farm hired by a public relations firm. Bot farms create bots every day and then assign them tasks to repost popular content and then reply using popular comments under different bots all so they can build up credibility and look like a real user. So then when they are put to a task you can have a single user welding the influence of hundreds or thousands to control the narrative.
Reddit is famously saturated in those bots and this place is likely no different but on a smaller scale made even easier by the instance system.
It was proven in court docs if I recall that they did have a troll farm not unlike the Russian IRA with the sole purpose of defending Monsanto's products with vigor. The only type of person who would engage in that degree of fundamentalist day in and day out is either an AI bot or on a payroll to do exactly that.
As a mod on a few garden and science subs at that time, they were pernacious and ethically inept. They would associate anything anti-pesticide or GMO with being an anti science quack. And they would dog pile on poor individuals expressing concern.
I had several debates with them, often reported them for brigading, and ultimately had to ban them.
Being anti-GMO is almost always anti-science quack. (Except if your complaint is about the patenting of the DNA) Pesticides are a bit more complicated because they are necessary for modern agriculture, but of course making a poison that only kills the things you want to kill has the risk if them killing more things.
Being blanket pro GMO is kinda nuts and can only come from a kneejerk against anti-science nuts.
There are some great GMO examples but also a lot of really bad ones, do you realise that the vast majority of GMO seeds have been modified not to use less pesticide but to make the crops resilient to the pesticides and allow them to use more? It allows them to absolutely flood the area with Monsanto products that all wash into the waterways and destroy ecosystems - and they don't care because if people are forced to farm dead wasteland they'll need loads of the chemical fertilisers they also sell....
Capitalism had a whole load of choices for how to use these new technologies, they could have chosen to help the environment, but the other option is fuck everyone and grab the money so of course they took that.
Bunch of weirdos, some of whom openly admitted to working for and depending on Bayer/Monsanto for a living.
Society relies on products they've developed, the world would be a very different place without gramoxone, 2,4-D and glyphosate. Considering glyphosate is the safest of the widely used herbicides it's probably not a great thing to brand everyone who is against banning it a shill.
So, when's the EPA finally going to ban it?
When we stop restricting them from doing anything to protect the environment
Hopefully soon, at least force them to reformulate without the extreme cancer chemicals.
They can't. The cancer causing chemical (NNG) isn't something they added, it's inherent to producing glyphosate.
Well that’s unfortunate
~~$1.5b is barely a slap on the wrists, but hopefully the first in an avalanche of lawsuits for them. This is like one fiscal quarter's revenue for RoundUp, but hopefully the signal of the beginning of the end.~~ Bayer gotta be really regretting that big Monsanto purchase.
Now do insecticides.
ETA: I retract a bit of my previous statement, looks like they were up to $11b in payouts as of last year, and looking to surpass the $16b they set aside for these lawsuits. Keep slapping that wrist!
Yeah, I was thinking 1.5b sounded like nothing. But this is two people. So, I'm okay with this.
I'd like to point out, Alex Jones was sued for $1b for being a dick on the internet.
Split between about twenty people. So $50 million each vs $750 million each.
And I would also like to point out that Alex's being a dick on the Internet was directly linked to threats of violence made against Sandy Hook families. So his words were far from harmless and far more damaging than your average dick on the Internet.
A Monsanto shill claimed he would drink the stuff on TV in an interview to prove how safe it was, but the interviewer called him out on his bluff and he refused to do it LMAO. Guy's name was Patrick Moore, ex-greenpeace founder turned paid shill for whatever company is paying him, usually it's climate change denial.
True story: When I was in grade school another kid bragged that a 2-4-D salesman told a bunch of loggers that it was so safe that you could drink it. Afterwards one of the loggers put a $50 bill next to a small cup of the herbicide and dared anyone to drink it for the money. The kids dad drank it and snatched the money. He died of cancer within 10 years.
How can you be an ex-founder of something? That's like being an ex-inventor or ex-murderer.
He's also the one who called out Greenpeace for their anti-nuclear stance. Which was correct on his part, but it's sad to see that stance comes with so much other baggage.
In high school in the 80s our science teacher repeatedly showed RoundUp promotional materials over a period of about 6 months. It was super creepy, almost Leni Riefenstahl in production.