Bonus Rant: Compensation for Glyphosate-Addicted Farmers

A corporate shill on Twitter was asking for this rant. It needs to be out there, and it's too long for Twitter...

The shill asked how people calling for a glyphosate ban plan to "compensate" glyphosate-dependent farmers who can already predict exactly how much money they expect to lose, when we get that ban on the violent crime of recklessly endangering human lives by spraying poison on food crops, which there's no excuse for our not having had a hundred years ago.

Let's see. Compensation for the poisoners? They should be on their knees praying that outraged humankind do not start thinking about compensation. There's not that much gold in California, not that many diamonds in South Africa, and not that much oil under the Arab Peninsula. Compensation for all this Reckless Endangerment just might, reasonably, be taken out of these farmers' shabby carcasses.

Start, of course, with compensation for the celiacs of this world. Cancer patients deserve to collect first because most of them have less time to live, but celiacs have been suffering longer. And how exactly do you compensate people for celiac reactions? For truly amazing amounts of time, celiac reactions are surface wounds, only on internal surfaces. Irritations. Gross-outs. Strips torn off your body, repeatedly. The fact that the body is "resilient" and can become strong and healthy, when it stops being continually shredded, doesn't make the shredding process pleasant. Poisoners have been shredding my body for the past ten years. For that compensation might be possible, I suppose, except that I don't particularly want to have to go out and tear a strip off Werner Bauman every day; I have no reason to imagine that other celiacs do, either.

But although glyphosate has a unique, unmistakable, predictable effect on celiacs, its effects are by no means limited to celiac reactions, or the pseudo-celiac reactions glyphosate has produced on literally thousands of non-celiac people. When you mess with the "internal flora" of anything in the whole kingdom of fauna, there's no way of knowing what kind of harm you're not doing. Glyphosate does not predictably "cause cancer" but it does, for sure and certain, aggravate cancer. And arthritis. And multiple sclerosis. And asthma. And sickle-cell anemia. And Lyme Disease. And mononucleosis. And flu, like the Norwalk-type virus that's been ruining this Advent season for my neighborhood. And measles, as in that last news item I retweeted a few minutes ago: 24 deaths and 20 critical-case hospitalizations is not a reaction you'd find to un-aggravated measles in a population the size of Samoa's. And every other ill the flesh is heir to, including mood disorders and thus, arguably, including the misery people feel if they happen to have broken legs while exposed to glyphosate.

https://sustainablepulse.com/2019/12/11/glyphosate-and-roundup-proven-to-disrupt-gut-microbiome-by-inhibiting-shikimate-pathway/

It's a funny thing about me, personally. I'm a lot easier to negotiate with when damages have been limited to me, personally, and not to people who might no longer be in a position to negotiate for themselves. My definition of "people" is not species-specific, either, just as glyphosate's damage has never been species-specific. I'm a lot more likely to stay angry, less likely to forgive, on someone else's behalf than on my own.

So we're talking about animals who've suffered and died, some horribly--or didn't. Regular readers remember more cases (yes, Mogwai's "cat mono" developed overnight into "cat polio" during a glyphosate episode), but I'll limit this discussion to Jenny Wren, who'd built a nest near enough the house that I could look in and see one tiny healthy wren egg before the poisoning episode, and then, the next day, no new egg, and then, the next day, a little irregular lump of calcium in the nest below which Jenny Wren lay dead. That lump was not as big as the end of my finger but, for something that had had to pass through the back end of a wren, it was monstrous. When she fell out of her nest Jenny would have fainted from loss of blood; no cat had touched her body. We are talking about passing a cinderblock through the back end of a man.

I said nothing about either "possible" or "desirable." The idjit asked about compensation.

Then we have to consider the land. The idjit seemed to be tweeting from, spare us all, Australia. The country where glyphosate spraying has been added to other ecological abuses, on top of a naturally warmish and dryish climate, with results reportedly including "flame tornados" sucking fire hoses out of men's hands and burning them. Many people believe that those who've used glyphosate since 2018 are heading for something like a "flame tornado" in the next world, but is it even possible to "compensate" for having contributed to one in this world? Personally I don't even want to think about a "flame tornado," much less about any way those who've contributed to one might compensate.

So let's just say that I don't want to think too much about compensation for those who've sprayed glyphosate on anything. Let's just say that a lot of them are, like that former school groundskeeper in California, already dying, and Bayer should pay whatever their nurses and survivors agree to settle for and shut up, now.

Because I am a Christian, I'll consider--although if this were to have to be negotiated in court I'd think long and think hard--the following gesture of superhuman generosity: If I were the judge, I would consider...letting the glyphosate-addicted farmers live.

I want them to abandon all claims on any land. I want them to have to pay decent, ethical, sustainable farmers a fee per acre to reclaim their land. I want them to be packed into "efficiency apartments" in cities, fed on the poisoned rubbish with which they're clogging food banks across America until it's used up, and forced to do the jobs "U.S. citizens won't" do, for a dollar an hour, to pay for that. I want them to be treated like violent criminals for the rest of their lives, because if people have continued spraying glyphosate since 2018, violent criminals is exactly what they are.


But I would consider giving up the claim to proper compensation, just because the only compensation these fools deserve would be too horrible to think about. Punitive damages should of course be imposed, but don't let any glyphosate farmers get any ideas about any number of millions of dollars amounting to real compensation.

Never in this world or the next will you really have any hope of compensating for the harm you have already done, poisoners. You can hope for pardon, but anything in the way of compensation will be payable from you, to us your victims.