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Comment by fjabre | Hacker News Reader

Anytime someone brings up Monsanto they are downvoted because without pesticides humans cannot feed themselves apparently. And herbicides are for plants only so of course they have no effect on insects. /s

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Bought by Bayer, that name will be gone soon because of the well earned negative perceptions.

Well, not sure if Bayer is such a good name either. Bayer was part of conglomerate producing Zyklon B used by Germans to kill millions of people.

I mean they also were the first to market Heroine, that hasn't really stopped sales of asprin.

(Heroin.)

Yes, the marketing of heroines preceded them and is generally harmless (protests against "Wonder Woman" notwithstanding).

Pretty sure it was autocorrected.

Hugo Boss used to make Nazi uniforms and Volkswagen was literally founded by Nazis.

I think we need to reference more recent crimes if we want to write off entire companies.

What would be interesting is to determine what's within range and what isn't. I'll go out on a limb and say WW2 is beyond that horizon.

Bayer knowingly sold antihemopheliac factor contaminated with HIV.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/24785997/

That should be bigger news. But as usual, quiet settlement and marginalized victims. 20,000 victims and a 300 million payout.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bayer-admits-it-paid-millions-i...

Ignoring that Monsanto no longer exists, what particular relevance do they bring to the conversation that makes it worth singling them out? There are many companies that produce herbicides. There are companies, not including the former Monsanto company, that produce insecticides that are strongly linked to insect population decline. Wouldn't they be equally interesting, if not more interesting, to name here? It is not clear why one would bring up Monsanto, and only Monsanto, which explains why such comments would be downvoted as spam.

You're the only one who brought them up so far and you don't seem to have been downvoted.

Thats true. Reddit seems to be more infested with the pro monsanto crowd. Many of their arguments sound very legitimate as in - try feeding the human race some other way type arguments. But then we must consider this ongoing mass extinction event which seems intimately tied to the use of pesticides and herbicides that apparently, according to the experts, are not harmful to unintended insect populations.

It’s hard to know whats true and what isnt with all the misinformation being spread around.

It's not hard to know, just people being lazy to do their own research.

> herbicides are for plants only so of course they have no effect on insects

Is pretty obvious that herbicides kill insects indirectly. They are killing its sources of food (wildflowers and weeds). They have a deep impact over insects.

Hence the "/s", aka "end sarcasm"

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