Comment by Teever
2 hours ago
Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't it?
Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.
I had a boss at a greenhouse tell me once that his old-timey agriculture prof at a big university would swear by the safety of glyphosate and he would literally drinking a shot glass of the stuff in every first year class like he was that dude who drank H. pylori to prove ulcers were caused by an infection.
This kind of insane grandstanding where a professor openly drinks herbicides for years in university classrooms came from absurd marketing from Monsanto and neither of these things have any place in our society.
Monsanto had a financial interest to make that professor into a fervent Jonestown-esque believer of their product and the end result was that spread that fervour to thousands of students who went out into the industry and figured that if it's alright for that guy to drink it then it must be alright to spray that shit everywhere as often as they want.
The downstream effect of that is you're on HN in 2018 advocating for glyphosate and then again in 2025 when someone points out how ubiquitous confidentially incorrect opinions about glycophosate are.
> Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't it?
Speaking of motte-and-bailey fallacy, pivoting from "Dr Oz was right about glyphosate" to this run-on claim:
> Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.
Is a textbook motte-and-bailey play. The original argument wasn't that "society and the ecosystem would be better if everyone didn't use chemicals". The claim above was that anyone who said there wasn't evidence that glyphosate caused cancer was wrong and Dr. Oz was right.
And that argument was a fallacy in itself. The retraction of a single paper is not equivalent to saying that glyphosate is dangerous, that it causes cancer, or that Dr. Oz was right.
These threads are frustrating because a small number of people are trying to share real papers and talk about the subject, but it's getting overrun with people who aren't interested in discussing science at all. They've made up their minds that chemicals are bad, glyphosate causes cancer, and Dr. Oz was right and they're here to push that narrative regardless of what the content of the linked article actually says.
I don't know what you're talking about. None of my opinions about glyphosate have anything to do with some stunt where somebody drank glyphosate. I wouldn't drink glyphosate. Nothing has happened between 2018 and 2025 that has changed my (not very strongly held) beliefs that glyphosate is broadly safer than the herbicides that get used when it isn't. I also don't give a shit how Monsanto is promoting glyphosate; Monsanto's success or failure as an enterprise simply doesn't factor into my thinking at all.
I'm not saying your views came from some professor drinking glyphosate. I'm saying the social and regulatory environment around glyphosate was distorted by decades of industry driven messaging, ghostwritten research, and normalization of reckless demonstrations.
That environment shaped the baseline assumptions many of us including farmers, scientists, regulators, journalists, and yes even minor-celebrity HN commenters such as yourself.
My point is that the issue isn't whether glyphosate is 'safer than alternatives' but whether the entire ecosystem of evidence and perception surrounding it was manipulated. This paper that we're talking about is but one example of that. So the question isn't about your personal motives but how you came to believe what you believe about Monsanto products and who stands to gain from you believing those things and expressing them on social media.
That environment shaped the baseline assumptions many of us including [...] yes even minor-celebrity HN commenters such as yourself.
No it isn't.