Just to see whether he'd block this comment, I posted it to his blog:
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Glyphosate has generated misunderstanding because individual reactions are so different. People don't want to believe that one chemical triggers a mild allergy in one test subject, a drastic autoimmune reaction in another, and no obvious reaction in another; if glyphosate is "really" causing one symptom in A then it can't "really" be involved in completely different symptoms in B and C. Well, it is. Confusion is understandable.
However, for someone who's defended a product that has made people seriously ill, "kindness" would sound like "I am so sorry, please forgive me, of course this product must be banned immediately and I'm so grateful if you'll let me live to support the campaign for a total ban."
We are talking about a product that triggers an autoimmune reaction that has literally torn bleeding strips as long as my fingers off me. It has similar, but never quite the same, effects on my mother and some of her other relatives. For someone else, who didn't have that kind of reaction, it produced paralysis for 39 days. I've seen active, healthy, employed people swallow "healthy" foods (like V8) that contained glyphosate residues (I passed), and run out to the porch and vomit. Fresh on the road yesterday morning was the unmistakable evidence that some other poor soul had uncontrollably spewed glyphosate-laced food--up or down is hard to say. I know people who stay at home and discourage visits because they want to clean up their own messes, privately. I know people who have other types of reactions that have made various diseases "chronic" and turned formerly healthy people into recluses, because this one loses control of his feet and falls down, that one develops vertigo and falls down, etc. etc. etc. Two friends' sons have this mysterious new kind of "chronic mononucleosis" though one's not even old enough to have had mono (he had measles). A little girl who likes school is having to miss school because she's "draggy," and her mother's thyroid fails, on certain days--the days after these spray poisoning episodes. I've seen many animals die, some quickly and some horribly. One of my relatives survived many of his glyphosate reactions for years, then finally died in one of them.
You have to have tracked these things through years of "Bad Times" when everyone in the neighborhood was ill at once, and the one thing those times had in common was a spray poisoning episode followed by several days without rain--and then read the scientific literature that documents the diversity of "minority reactions" across all species studied, humans, animals, birds, fish, or insects--to be able to wrap your mind around this bizarre new set of data. It's so different from the way we learned in school that poisons can be traced by a single effect they produce on all victims. Skepticism I can understand, but the evidence is just piling up--a really scientific consideration of the evidence does not leave people skeptical.
I think you, Kevin Folta, can honestly claim that you've been civil. I think "kindness" is going too far.
To be fair, I don't claim that I've always felt or tried to sound "kind" to those who cling to glyphosate, either.
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The question is whether "kindness" to those who are actively harming others is really kindness. What we want is of course a ban on any use of glyphosate, and on any spraying of any poison on land, to make it impossible for people whose brains have probably been damaged by glyphosate vapors to go on killing themselves and others. How long are people going to wait, when they see people continue to make them and their children sick because some people are too lazy to cut back or dig up a weed? If Congress fail to ban glyphosate right away, will we read of chemical "farmers" being drowned in their own spray tanks? The position of this web site is that, if we simply cut off their access to sprayable poisons, we may have the delightful experience of seeing some spray-poison addicts recover their sanity, see how much better they feel too, and kiss the ground at our feet with gratitude for having helped them break their addictive cycles. This web site reminds people that the not-very-long-term effects of a total ban will be more pleasant than any violent corrective action would be.
However, since I've been notified that I'm past due for jury duty this summer, I'll say this. If I were to be on the jury hearing a case of the drowning of a spray-poison "farmer" in a vat of his own poison, it'd be the same as if I'd been on the jury in the Bobbitt case. People who use excessive force to defend themselves from poisoning, rape, or other violent crimes, should definitely have to sit through at least two hours of counselling about better ways to defend themselves in the future.
You can't really see it but that pale irregular mass is a solid lump of eggshell my last Jenny Wren passed, just before she died, during a glyphosate spraying episode. Kindness? I don't really think there's any need to feed Kevin Folta something that would cause a proportionate chunk of calcium to tear itself out through any part of him...but I'm not sure how much of that's kindness, and how much is frugality. My point is that arguing in favor of doing that to other songbirds is not kindness.
On the other hand? Can the spray-poison "farmers" whine, "This Priscilla King ought to have to dig up kudzu roots by hand!"? Hah. I'll do that. I'll even give them a discount on my usual fee for a day's work. (Yes, it can take a day to dig up a kudzu root without bruising it, but think how much "clearer" a field is after you've removed just one monster kudzu vine.) And I'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
Those "weeds" the poisons aren't even killing any more? They're less valuable than they used to be because they've been poisoned...but some of them are food, and some of them are medicine. Spray-poison "farmers" have been spending their money to destroy what they could have made into cash crops.
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