Who The Bleep Do You Think You Are?

If you read the comments here, you may have noticed a lot of pro-pesticide trolls showing up, the sort of people who think Michelle Obama's organic garden is an affront to Western Civilization.

You may have read comments from them on the order of, 'well, if you really cared about the (hungry/poor), you'd love pesticide,' or 'who are (any of you/these people) to raise these questions?' I'll get to the suitable response in a moment, but these questions are good at preying on the kinds of doubts and self-doubts that people can have coming up against all sorts of large, corporate lobbies who clearly don't mean well by us in spite of the Cheshire Cat grins.

Even Mark Bittman falls prey to these doubts, but as Ezra Klein said:

... If amateurs leave teaching physics to the experts, then physics gets taught by the experts. That's a good thing. And in the perfect world, we'd leave farm policy to the experts too, and the experts would make our farm policy. But we don't live in the perfect world. And so when we leave farm policy to the experts, we actually leave it to the lobbyists. And this is true for a lot of second or third-tier issues. The only people who spend their days bugging Washington to implement their policy preferences are the people who are paid to do so. Most people don't care about those issues. Others care a bit but spend their time elsewhere. And others care a lot but don't feel they possess the technical expertise.

That's true, they don't. They shouldn't be policy czar. But no one is offering them that position. And providing expertise to policymakers is just one of many roles. Another is to provide a non-industry perspective. Another is to provide evidence of a grassroots constituency for proper action. Another is to communicate basic ideas clearly (Congressmen are not always experts themselves). ...

And I think what people owe these smiling defenders of the status quo isn't more doubt and self-effacement, it's their own question right back at them.

Because who the bleep are they besides the very people who gave us the the unredressed Union Carbide pesticide plant disaster in Bhopal and Agent Orange. That's their credential, their expertise, their experience. Don't let them suggest otherwise and play the big altruists when they say that they just want to help.

They're in business to sell poison. They hire PR people to discredit those who raise questions about how poisonous their products actually are. They even come up with ingenious strategies to enlist national governments in marketing their poisons to farmers and getting them hooked.

A drunk driver has more moral credibility than CropLife America, Monsanto and Dow Chemical at this point, though they'll try to intimidate you into thinking otherwise.

(Photo credit: Laenulfean on Flickr.)