I supposed you could prove me wrong: Try to find a HN thread about glyphosate where no one gaslights, deflects, toxifies or baits.
Any time, in the whole history of HN. One single story, where no one tries to pretend or insinuate that Roundup / glyphosate is perfectly safe, or attack people / studies / lawsuits that suggest otherwise.
The only rule is that it must have at least a dozen comments - there's no need to FUD on stories with no traction. Bonne chance!
> Try to find a HN thread about glyphosate where no one gaslights, deflects, toxifies or baits.
That's an impossible barrier. Not only are those complete subjective traits, that stuff is going to appear in nearly every online discussion, especially one with any sort of controversy attached.
It seems fairly clear to me that the harmfulness of glyphosate (when used as directed) is somewhere between none and inconclusive. Even in cases where it's been grossly misused, any "link" has come significantly short of a causal link since it's usually just a guy who got cancer and also used to work on a farm. Given the prevalence and duration of glyphosate use, compelling evidence should be readily available, just like it was with lead or asbestos. Absence of evidence is very much not evidence of absence but glyphosate has to be the number two most studied chemical behind aspartame, another chemical that's been routinely attacked and routinely proven to be safe.
Given that most of the assertions of glyphosate's harm is coming from the lawyers of people filing lawsuits, I'm not too swayed by their unsupported arguments.
> > Try to find a HN thread about glyphosate where no one gaslights, deflects, toxifies or baits.
> That's an impossible barrier.
I know, right?
The notion Monsanto and Bayer would never stoop so low as to employ propagandists to protect their profits is literally unbelievably naive. As in, I don't believe that you believe that.
> Given the prevalence and duration of glyphosate use, compelling evidence should be readily available, just like it was with lead or asbestos.
You'll never guess what people who sold lead and asbestos used to say about lead and asbestos. Also see the denials of PFAS dangers. And fracking. And lobotomies, thalidomide, tobacco, mercury, etc etc.
> You'll never guess what people who sold lead and asbestos used to say about lead and asbestos. Also see the denials of PFAS dangers. And fracking. And lobotomies, thalidomide, tobacco, mercury, etc etc.
It's not about who said it was safe. It's about who proved it wasn't.
It fucks up ecosystems. It lingers on our food. It bonds with abundant minerals like calcium and magnesium and does unexpected shit. It comes in Roundup with a cocktail of chemicals that increase bioavailability and toxicity. It has links to chronic kidney disease and cancer.
That's scientists saying all this; not just me, and not just "greedy lawyers" as you claimed elsewhere.
If this fits your definition of safe, you have a very unusual one imo.
You're the one who claims to have seen the evidence. If you've seen it, but won't show it to anyone, I'm not going to be convinced of anything other than being suspicious it doesn't exist.
You made several assertions a post ago and I'm skeptical about all but one of them and the one I'm not skeptical about has an implication I am skeptical about.
> It fucks up ecosystems.
In what way?
> It lingers on our food.
Agree but I've not seen this shown to be an issue.
> It bonds with abundant minerals like calcium and magnesium and does unexpected shit.
For example?
> It comes in Roundup with a cocktail of chemicals that increase bioavailability and toxicity.
So glyphosate is not harmful without this cocktail? I don't understand the implication here. It sounds like _Roundup_ is the issue, not glyphosate.
> It has links to chronic kidney disease and cancer.
Cookies have links to chocolate chips. It doesn't mean cookies cause chocolate chips.
"Links" are just that, links. What you want to prove are _Causal Links_. Links require further research and don't prove anything.
If you think that people saying that glyphosate is safe are arguing in bad faith I can see why you'd think there's a lot of disingenuousness around here. I can't speak for other people but I've defended glyphosate in plenty of threads simply because I've seen no compelling evidence of any significant danger from it in general and the specific stories we're discussing are often even weaker, with the comments sections drawing massive conclusions from equivocal evidence.
Take this article as an example, people are drawing some quite radical conclusions from it when if you read the original paper, the data isn't strong and the stats are incredibly weak. The authors are hypothesising a quite long pathway from glyphosate in a country with a ban to water contamination to glyphosate-metal complex to kidney disease. Given the lack of existing compelling literature for this chain (and kidney disease in Sri Lanka has seen a lot of study), I'd want to see some compelling evidence, but this paper isn't it. I'm sure you don't want to argue over one specific case but it does bother me how they brush off the far more significant fluorine so easily, treat glyphosate differently in the analysis to all other contaminants, and didn't consider a dose response calculation over all wells between glyphosate and kidney disease.
This isn't me deflecting or gaslighting. Just disagreeing and trying to do it as intellectually honestly as I can on a subject which is massively important to the modern world.
> If you think that people saying that glyphosate is safe are arguing in bad faith I can see why you'd think there's a lot of disingenuousness around here.
Some people can’t detect astroturf - that’s why it works. Consider that you may be one of them.
> I've defended glyphosate in plenty of threads
Can I see an example? Google couldn't find your name + glyphosate, or + roundup together anywhere.
> I've seen no compelling evidence of any significant danger from it in general
Respectfully, I don't have any idea who you are. I’ve seen compelling evidence. So have many judges, and respected scientists, and health groups.
> This isn't me deflecting or gaslighting.
The way you blow off the link between glyphosate and kidney disease is concerning, tbh, but let's say you’re on the level. That does nothing, absolutely nothing, to dispel the notion that a giant corporation with a long history of evil and greed might employ PR goons to spread FUD and manipulate votes to warp a narrative and protect profits.
I think we're talking past each other a bit. In this moment I'm not trying to persuade you of anything about glyphosate though I obviously disagree with you, just saying that there are plenty of us out here who do argue in good faith and asking you to consider that what may look like astroturfing is just honestly held opinions by people who disagree with you. In this case, I read the article, the paper, skimmed a couple of citations from the paper, the Wikipedia article, and a paper cited in Wikipedia on contaminants, especially fluorine, and kidney disease in Sri Lanka. I found it all quite interesting and didn't do it out of a desire to blow off a link (blowing off work on the other hand...).
Sure, if you find a comment section spammed by new accounts with thin histories that look synthetic, call that out. I'm not even trying to persuade you that it doesn't happen (though to me it would feel like a misallocation of resources to do it to HN if you were going to do it). Maybe I'm bad at detecting it as you say.
As for examples, I've mixed up message boards a bit as well as glyphosate/Monsanto, but here's me from 2017 implicitly arguing that controversy over Monsanto suing farmers is a bit overblown (no pun intended): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14794627
From around the same time here's me saying that Monsanto's editing of a paper related to roundup safety was dumb but didn't concern me as far as glyphosate safety: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14974180
In that second link in the wider comments Dang replied to a flagged comment: 'Someone holding a different view than you do is not evidence of bad faith, and the internet trope of you-must-be-a-shill is poison'. I agree with him and it's part of why I enjoy the HN community where this isn't the typical mode of reply.
Your linked comment is a good example of something I'd perceive as either written by a shill, or someone convinced by shilling. You say:
> All of the science still says glyphosate is safe in the concentrations we encounter it in.
What makes you qualified to say that? "Skimming a few papers"?
The kindest thing I could say about that is that it's a dangerous oversimplification, on a thread where Monsanto have been caught red handed doing something "stupid" and immoral.
The interactions between chemicals in Roundup can do much worse than glyphosate on its own - synergistic effects, increased bioavailability, etc. Then there's buildup from constant exposure. Then there's unexpected interactions with minerals in the environment, as suggested in the linked study, etc. And so on.
There's WAY too much smoke to declare a total lack of fire, speaking on behalf of "all of the science", even if you were the head of the IARC (who call out a link to cancer, btw).
> Someone holding a different view than you do is not evidence of bad faith
I don't go around here accusing people with different views of acting in bad faith. But every time - every single time - the topic of glyphosate comes up, I see evidence of shenanigans. Fucky voting, misrepresentations, toxicity, distraction, FUD, outright lies, smears, etc etc. Look for it, and you might start to see it.
If you'd read any of my comments you'd see that there are scientists and institutions with very little to gain coming out against cancer links and kdney disease connections. You could even have simply read the linked OP.
There are lives at stake, and you're dismissing all the research that's a mere Google search away as name-calling - it's abhorrent.
Thanks for the handy example of bad faith sea-lioning though - I had actually forgotten to add that to the list of astroturfing strategies.
I have heard rants about Monsanto’s shill army for over a decade now, not just on HN but on every mid-sized or larger internet community I have ever been on, and not once have I actually seen a single person produce a shred of hard evidence substantiating it. I also notice right, if shills are so common every company ought to be sending their shills to influence HN, but I only ever hear Monsanto, no other big company, and no other big ag company accused of this. It’s not exactly easy to keep a massive long-term shilling operation secret when journalists would be chomping at the bit for a “Monsanto shill army proven” story and be willing to pay for proof.
At this point I’m utterly convinced that Monsanto doesn’t hire any shills and instead just does straightforwards propaganda work where they just convince people with slanted studied that they push to the top of Google search that sway people with reasonable sounding arguments (roundup makes food cheap!) and just wait for them to parrot these arguments and then for them to be accused of shilling making Monsanto’s opponents look unhinged. As evidenced by the plenty of actual evidence that they promote pro-roundup research and the plenty of actual evidence that they advertise stores that make roundup sound more safe.
Do you realize how self-sustaining contrarianism is when people consistently feed the contrarians ego by consistently, and wrongly, accusing them of being shills? Irrespective of who is right or wrong on the broader issue, the people accused of being shills are right that they aren’t shills so it’s basically a dopamine slam dunk to just side with Monsanto and have people line up to give a blatantly wrong opinion (that you are a shill). Which only causes a feedback loop because as the number of people seeking this dopamine hit grows, so does the EVIDENCE of SHILLS EVERYWHERE! Monsanto is best off just sitting back and eating popcorn and not spending a dime on shills.
Buddy, Exxon were caught astroturfing with the entire planet at stake, and suffered no real consequence. Big tobacco did it for decades, and those same companies are still marketing and selling to children in developing countries.
So why do you think "Monsanto" (it's Bayer now, keep up) would be scared of getting caught? Do you think they can't use a VPN, or subcontracting, or any of a hundred well developed ways to maintain plausible deniability? Do you really think "no other big company" gets accused of astroturfing?
You don't seem to have given any of this much thought tbh. Even if it's as you say, lol, why would you be happy with them doing "straightfowards propaganda work"? Have you followed the logical conclusions of your "contrarianism" theory more than a single step? Good luck to ye
