Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media

I worked at Monsanto for a few years. I won't get into the ethics of the company on this forum, but as a software engineer it was a pretty great place to work. Good engineering culture, lots of very dedicated and smart people and some really fun challenges to work on.

I would imagine a huge piece of it is libel and slander laws protect you unless you’re in the public sphere.

I don’t understand the point you’re making, explain it to me like I’m a complete moron so I don’t misinterpret you.

> Compassion for your fellow humans is quite unnatural for a lot of people.

Could you please quantify? I recall reading the exact opposite conclusion in behavioral and psychological science journals. It’s the reason why the military has to break people down to teach them to kill. Our natural reaction is to have compassion for each other and not to kill each other.

We are a cooperative species that works well together and survives as a group. If we weren’t naturally compassionate, the human endeavor would have died out a long time ago. It also goes a long way to explain why things like hatred, racism, and subjugation of the other require massive amounts of propaganda and disinformation to perpetuate themselves.

I also recall reading in specific cases where compassion seems to be lacking, that there are larger cultural, religious, tribal, criminal, and social pressures at work influencing the outcome of human behavior to limit compassion. Once these forces are controlled for (often with the help of changes to the legal system) compassion tends to return to normal, average levels. Examples might include Good Samaritan laws.

It is my experience that more people want to help than hurt, more people want to promote the general welfare of the group rather than a select few, and more people desire to see others happy and prosperous, rather than unhappy and suffering.

This enduring, popular myth that everyone is out for themselves and doesn’t care about anyone else is the product of larger, psychopathic forces at work wishing to control society for its own purposes. The masses of humanity wish to live peacefully and in harmony with others. It is a very tiny few that have chosen to take power and use it against others. They are the ones that lack compassion, not the whole of humanity.

Over many decades, I’ve personally made note of and observed a strange and unusual undercurrent to popular culture that seeks to make people more aggressive, violent, and unnecessarily competitive and war-like, while attempting to denigrate, decrease, and diminish our proclivity for sharing and cooperation. This behavioral system of control is obvious and omnipresent once you start looking for it. It is not natural and it only serves to increase inequality and give power to fewer and fewer people.

Many of us would argue that providing privacy-invasion-as-a-service, at scale, to people who want to sell us shit is harmful and villainous. Even if you set aside the dangerous aspects of some of the "free online services", like YouTube serving as a massive engagement-driven platform for propaganda and radicalization, you're still left with web services designed to hoover up all your data and sell your eyeballs to businesses. That is the behavior of a hostile actor, and vast swaths of people accepting this tradeoff doesn't make its existence any less objectionable to some of us.