I mean, look, I get it. Some of you dudes were calling Obama a n----r as recently as 2011 and now in your recent post-woke enlightenment your understanding of racism isn't about its marriage with capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism but rather, simply, Don't Say The Bad Words, so it's understandable to have such a pavlovian kneejerk from seeing The Bad Words. And in general it's a solid stance, but in the specific it can yield ridiculous results when you're not even a little curious about why a member of the African Peoples Socialist Party would be holding those signs.

Lawsuit from black farmers in Tennessee and Mississippi claims they were deliberately sold defective seeds

They took the seeds to get tested at Mississippi State University, and got a pretty good idea of why:

As the article notes, there is a long history of discrimination and predation on black farmers in the South.

This was Deray’s story on Pod Save the People this week. Just another tactic to get people to believe black farmers just aren’t as capable as white farmers.

Yeah I dunno, I think we gotta find out if the Stine Seed people said the N Word or not before we rush to judgment.

That is an important pillar of their defense! WaPo:

TLDR cliffs: This doesn't add up at all



I'm all on board with the thread, but I don't know about this one, and with a bit of knowledge related to ag, I feel like I have to comment. When I read this story, it just didn't seem to add up. Perhaps it's just the journalist not having a clue about ag and the vernacular etc and not being able to convey.

It is hard to make judgments because the facts are very unclear...how many farmers are involved, how many fields are involved, how much yield damage, etc.

Generally, or at least in my experience, seed quality would be related to 1. germination (the seeds grow into plants) 2. genetics (the plants grow and yield well) 3. technologies (the seeds are genetically modified, usually to have a herbicide resistance to herbicides useful to kill weeds (roundup, liberty, dicamba, or 2-4,d).

They start by saying the seeds germinated and grew into plants. But the plants were weird and didn't yield well. Then at the end, they switch and say the seeds tested had 0 germination.

If the seeds truly had 0% germination, there would be 0 plants growing in the the field to notice height, leaf shape, low yield etc.

Second, plant height has very little correlation to yield, and is often just a variety characteristic. Some varieties are taller, some shorter. Usually the best varieties are not the tallest.

Different varieties can also have different leaf shapes. Really odd leaf size/shape would most likely be the result of herbicide damage. Either their own doing (usually accidentally) or drifting from a neighbor (also usually accidentally) these things happen quite frequently. Shorter stunted plants would also be consistent with herbicide damage.

These 2 paragraphs back to back are kind of nonsense.

It's not a satisfying answer, but there really are a ton of factors in play here, and bad seed seems unlikely to be the cause to me. And bad seed deliberately given to sabotage specific black farmers seems really unlikely, just because of the logistics of how the seed companies and dealers work.

But like I said there are a ton of factors in play, and fields right next to each can definitely yield quite differently based on timing of planting, variety, drainage, fertility, weather, disease, inputs... etc.

Having fields yield half of other fields in the area would be unlikely but not extraordinarily so. Having fields yielding 50, right next to theirs yielding 5 (this isn't really clear from the 2 nonsense paragraphs I quoted above), would be very rare.

It really sounds like herbicide damage to me, but there's just not enough info to be decisive. The dicamba drift the company suggests could certainly be to fault. It's a hot button issue right now, because of a new seed technology released in the last 2 years, that has resulted in a lot more dicamba being sprayed, especially later in the season. It is a very volatile chemical and can volatize and move through the air days after being sprayed. Many farmers want it banned, because it has caused so much off target damage.

If they were sabotaging with bad seed, the only plausible way I see of it happening is the dealer/salesmen selling them years old seed that has very bad germination.

Thanks for the info. I imagine ~none of the journalists have any kind of clue about the science of this stuff and that uncertainty makes its way into reporting.

I would also guess that this lawsuit is a bit of a fishing expedition, and that by filing it they can hope to find more evidence to support their claims via the discovery process.

Although, this paragraph seems somewhat ominous:

That is a very specific claim to make and would seem to indicate they're confident about what's going on.

Question about the Trump tariffs:

Trump trade tariffs are about the Chinese violating intellectual property rights (like pirating movies and software) so Trump is for putting a tariff on the goods we import from them to punish them for this. Is this correct or is there more to it?

Thanks

Yea I guess. But again, if they sabotage them and switch out their seed for old bad germ seed, it's just not going to germinate. There are going to be few (or none if 0 germ like they claim) in the field, which contradicts the whole rest of their story.

Just guessing, because so much info lacking, but some scenarios I can dream up from most likely to least.

1. Some combo of things, could be bad luck, weather, bugs, disease, bad timing, late planting, wet planting... cause bad yield and looking to blame someone. Basically frivolous lawsuit.

2. Farmers (or who ever sprays for them) didn't get their sprayer all the way cleaned out and sprayed with a contaminated sprayer.

3. Neighbors accidentally drifted herbicide and damaged them.


Gap


4. Someone sabotaged by adding something to their sprayer or by spraying something on or near their beans.

I would say 5 and 6 would be more likely than 4, but it just doesn't sound to me like the seed was the issue.

5. Salesman or dealer for whatever reason got stuck with some old seed and off loaded it to them. Could be racist motivations or not.

6. They were sold old seed unintentionally.






Big Gap




7. Salesman or dealer pulls more elaborate repackaging shenanigans to screw them.











Grand Canyon Sized Gap













8. Elaborate conspiracy by multi billion dollar company to repackage bad/old seed (that would normally be disposed of at the end of previous seasons) to subvert independent certifying agency to screw a few black farmers.

I'm having a hard time getting to #8 in my head, but then again, who knows what the writers have in store for the rest of this season. It will probably come out that Eric Trump worked for them, and personally swapped out the seed. And Trump's approval with R's will soar as a result.

Trump’s tariffs are because he’s a big bozo who looks at trade deficits and says “Unfair! Take this China!” The company that was specifically accused of stealing intellectual property was hit with a massive fine but Trump decided to waive that when someone paid him off. I don’t remember the finer details.

Re: Seeds, it could be as simple as the distributor knows they have a bad batch of seeds and have been switching it for good seeds and the reporting is just confusing everything.

If all the white dudes who bought seed from Gary had 2-3 times the yield as the seeds a black farmer bought from Gary, and the same was true for a bunch of other black farmers how long would it take for those black farmers to conclude it wasn't that they were bad farmers it was because Gary was screwing them somehow?

25 year-old father is shot and killed in Pennsylvania after standing up for friend who was called the n-word

Here's the shining example of white supremacy who did it

Isn’t that the guy who got off because of stand your ground? Or was that another murderer?

Is that what they're going on about in the CDH thread? I thought that story was Florida, and this one is PA (it's hard to keep track of all the murders committed by gun-owning lunatics, conceded)

Yeah, can’t keep them all straight myself, so dunno.

This is a different one.

The one in Florida the lady parked in a handicapped spot while her husband/bf went into the convenience store. Angry white guy (I think he is white, hard to tell from video) takes it upon himself to yell and berate the lady. Her significant other comes out and sees this guy yelling and pushes him to ground. He then pulls a gun and shoots him, even as he is backing away.

I'd probably rank these a little differently.

I love the old "you shouldn't have parked where you're not supposed to" argument.


No, you shouldn't, but the deserved punishment is not death.

This is way, way down the list, but also don’t assume someone isn’t disabled because you can’t tell by looking at them.

I never knew white people were so dedicated to the protection of handicap parking spots until they had some black people to harass over them.

Only if they are packing a biscuit.

1. Sterling Brown ultimately got tazed and this guy died. Your response is don't do it? First of all, that's merely a statement of the obvious regarding common sense, but it's also an implicit and callous ignoring of how the punishment doesn't even remotely fit the crime. The fact that this happened to two black people makes it arguable that your thought process is racist or at least bigoted. At least some people will see it that way. I think it offends people when others' first thought is "well don't do dumb **** and dumb **** won't happen to you" because it makes you look like you don't care about the draconian consequence suffered by someone doing something obviously dickheaded but also obviously innocuous.

2. Same as 1. Which leads into 3:

3. The unfortunate and unintended (I think and hope it's unintended) consequence of SYG is that people are bigoted, latently racist, or overtly racist, and it results in firearm deaths that are clearly not in the spirit of the law. Combine that with the clearly racist justice system and you basically have a loophole for murder, as if bad apple cops need one. Black people are now at a point where they can legitimately fear for their life in any situation, even one that starts off as a simple verbal disagreement they shouldn't have to let slide. Hell, they can't even trust the law to fall on their side at any point in any situation. It's beyond ****ed up.

The idea that cops are seemingly 99.9% justified in all shootings and people like Handicap Parking Spot Avenger Guy are seemingly untouchable just from getting pushed have racists all over the country jerking off to vids, buying more guns, and just itching call someone ****** and justifiably murder a dude just because he's scary looking. He's standing his ground after all...

I usually point out to people that racism in 1818 was worse than racism 1918 was worse than racism in 2018, but the Trump campaign and presidency seem to be the marker where there's been a significant drop in race relations from its ATH. When was the ATH anyway? Obama election?

Getting upset about the stand your ground shooting is being results oriented. How many Slansky death penalties should you get for being parked in a handicapped space?

In this situation if the gun had jammed, would the victim have been standing his ground if he realized he was about to be killed and ran over and stomped the guy to death in self defense?