black farmers were sold fake crop seeds to drive them into bankruptcy

Anyone who jumps on this outrage train based upon the filing of the complaint is an idiot. At least wait until discovery is done.

What fun would that be? Shit, most of us comment without even reading the articles. Let alone sitting around waiting for government to run its course. :D


That actually doesn't make logical sense. If you just hate specific actions then your contempt is for the individuals who engage in those actions. If you're assigning the hated actions to the entire "culture" then you're assigning the hated actions to the people who comprise the culture and your hate has to include them as a group.

If you're truly separating the actions from the group people then you wouldn't be hating a "culture", unless you can be sure that no other culture has numerous people currently engaged in the same actions that you hate.

Makes sense to me. You're married. You should be able to understand hating an action without hating the person. Maybe you're the one guy whose wife has no annoying habits? Mine sure does. lol.

As for culture, it's not that it has to be the only culture with a specific trait, but if it's going to be singled out then it should exhibit it to a greater extent than most.
 
Thread needs some Bad Seeds. This one goes out to the accusers.





Here's one for the scummy scammers.


 
Makes sense to me. You're married. You should be able to understand hating an action without hating the person. Maybe you're the one guy whose wife has no annoying habits? Mine sure does. lol.

As for culture, it's not that it has to be the only culture with a specific trait, but if it's going to be singled out then it should exhibit it to a greater extent than most.

It doesn't make sense. I might hate an action of my wife without hating my wife. But I don't extend that to saying "I hate this aspect of Indian culture because I hate an action that my wife has undertaken." Not unless that action is unique to Indian culture.

So, I hate that my wife is frequently late to things. That's an action. I can hate that without hating her. But surely you can see the flaw with saying that I hate that aspect of Indian culture. Being late is something that's not unique to Indian culture. As any Hispanic will tell you, it's normal in Hispanic communities. As any one who has ever dated a woman will tell you, it's normal with plenty of women to be late. So, it's problematic to take this singular action and categorize it as an aspect of a single culture when it's prevalent in lots of culture.

Now, if I hated when she wears sari's then maybe that's something I could extrapolate to Indian culture because it's only prevalent in few cultures, India being one of them.

But there are very few actions in black American culture that are not also representative of overall American culture, not unless people start drawing arbitrary delineations on when an action transforms from okay to problematic.
 
not unless people start drawing arbitrary delineations on when an action transforms from okay to problematic.

Ask yourself this, "Did a black person engage in said behavior?".

If so, it's endemic in the culture. If they are white, we're talking about a lone wolf here. Pretty simple.
 
It's not the seed company; it's 2 guys running a scheme on the side that did this.

The suit is pulling in the seed company because they still owe money for the real seeds that they bought on credit plus the seed company is probably the only 1 with any real money.

Most of us understood this..

It’s the non-believers who think a “legit” distributor won’t pull a fast one and scam one or a set of customers...

In the game of litigation you sue any and everyone feasibly related to the crime; especially if it is a bigger company loaded with money.
 
It's not the seed company; it's 2 guys running a scheme on the side that did this.

The suit is pulling in the seed company because they still owe money for the real seeds that they bought on credit plus the seed company is probably the only 1 with any real money.

Also, the distributor is probably an agent of the seed company (in a explicit or implicit principal/agent relationship) and so they might have liability for the distributor's actions.
 
Also, the distributor is probably an agent of the seed company (in a explicit or implicit principal/agent relationship) and so they might have liability for the distributor's actions.
Please stop actually knowing about legal stuff, it makes their shitty arguments tougher to defend.


Thanks.
 
When I was a teenager I went to a concert in the city and two black guys sold my buddy and me some fake Thai stick in a bus shelter. (True story.)

So I consider this seed thing PAY BACK, motherfuckers.
 
Ask yourself this, "Did a black person engage in said behavior?".

If so, it's endemic in the culture. If they are white, we're talking about a lone wolf here. Pretty simple.
Or the White guy's actions are explained as mental illness .
The same kind of rationalization is a feature of Saudis. When a Saudi does something horrid, the locals say it was mental illness . When a foreigner does it, it is indicative of their race.
 
Are these allegations? Shouldn't the title reflect that?

I hope it's not true.
 
Is there an ounce of evidence yet that actually points to racism?

Because they came out swinging the bat with that instead of fraud. After this many days if there isn't a hint of evidence discovered towards that claim it speaks volumes.
 
Is there an ounce of evidence yet that actually points to racism?

Because they came out swinging the bat with that instead of fraud. After this many days if there isn't a hint of evidence discovered towards that claim it speaks volumes.

I don't think anything is happening that would lead to more information in a matter of days. Maybe once the trial starts or the investigation concludes, but not now.

I did find this, which has new information on the seed testing:

https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/art...-suit-alleging-that-they-were-sold-fake-seeds

Soybeans are the most valuable agricultural product in the state of Tennessee, bringing in over $800 million a year—twice the industry value of the state's second most profitable crop, hay. Soy is big business in the state, and experienced farmers know when a batch of seeds is bad.

“Mother nature doesn’t discriminate,” Thomas Burrell, president of the Black Farmer and Agriculturalists Association and one of the plaintiffs, told news cameras outside of the federal courthouse on Tuesday. “Why is it then that white farmers are buying Stine seed and their yield is 60, 70, 80, and 100 bushels of soybeans and black farmers who are using the exact same equipment with the exact same land, all of a sudden, your seeds are coming up five, six, and seven bushels?”

“These farmers… started to notice their soybean crops were not developing at the rate that was commensurate to what these certified seeds should have produced,” Burrell went on. The farmers had purchased over $100,000 worth of seeds, as well as another $100,000 worth of agricultural chemicals from a Stine sales representative. Burrell had the seeds vetted by Mississippi State University’s Seed Testing Laboratory. “[The lab] planted 100 of those seeds, and zero of those seeds germinated,” he said. The lab determined that the seeds sold to the black farmers were, in fact, not certified Stine seeds.

...

He referred to the dummy seeds as a “blunt weapon” being used to “annihilate, eradicate, and wipe out” black farmers. There is much evidence to suggest that black farmers have been discriminated against at many points in the American farming system, from being denied bank loans that could help keep farmland in the same family across generations to being given unequal assistance by USDA support programs and extension services. The ability of farmers to retain their farmland has become increasingly difficult over recent decades due to corporate consolidation of small farmers, among many other issues. Black farmers, who make up just 2 percent of the overall farmer population in the US, feel those difficulties exponentially more acutely.


Click the articles to see links for more information on discrimination black farmers face.
 
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Smells like bullshit. What is the motivation for the seed seller to give a paying customer garbage seeds? Makes no business sense.

To make double the money by selling fake shit to one guy and the real thing to someone else. In the long run, it’s better to never rip anybody off but this is just another way of making a quick buck.
 
Smells like bullshit. What is the motivation for the seed seller to give a paying customer garbage seeds? Makes no business sense.

I’m still on the fence whether this was racially motivated or something else....but to your point, by swapping certified seeds with lesser seeds, I now have more certified seeds to sell. You now have greed as a motivation.
 
Before this forum gets hysterical I want to point out that what we have right now is circumstantial evidence of outright sabotage (as @jefferz pointed out, even non-certified seeds should have a higher germination rate, so these yields would likely reflect active sabotage). Still, circumstantial evidence is still evidence.

This isn't a forum that emphasizes certainty of proof as a chief value. Conjecture and hypothesis rule, here.

Since such targeted sabotage seems like one of the dumbest possible crimes a corporation could commit, and all but the very dumbest Trumpets I know would understand that the new zeitgeist wouldn't extend to sympathy for anything as grossly repugnant as a crime like this, my suspicion is that poor handling or storage somehow damaged the seeds. But there are people like the Bundys out there. There are people capable of this, or who maybe are so racist they thought the black farmers wouldn't be smart enough to get suspicious, and take their seed to a university.

I honestly don't know what to think. It seems very feeble. You would expect their lawyer to have something more substantial to say at this point than to grandstand about "weaponizing" the seeds. Simultaneously, it raises my suspicions.

I haven’t finished the thread but that article did not mention “the soil was tested and had the exact same / or similar enough composition as the farms who had much higher yields”....as I would think that that information would help in solving this mystery...
 
Yes.

That's why it doesn't make sense to speculate about if the farmers were the reason the yield was poor. They know that the seeds they received were not the certified seeds. The only thing left to intelligently discuss is how the farmers ended up with fraudulent seeds and whether or not the distributor was racially motivated in how he practiced this con.

Quality of seed isn’t the only predictor of yield though....it’s the right starting point but we know poor solid quality, rain quantity and type of herbicides are all as important as seed quality.
 
Hey, welcome to the party. We were talking about the people who wrote long defenses putting the blame on the farmers.

Are they really blaming the farmers or merely pointing out that it could in fact be something else? The link you posted doesn’t do much to rule out other possibilities such as rain effect, soil quality and herbicides used. The only fact in the link that would help point to the problem is that the seeds were not the certified seeds that the low yielding farmers were sold. Also, to be fair, the article doesn’t even have an invoice to show that they in fact purchased certified seeds. I’m not saying that they don’t have any of this or other evidence...I’m merely stating that the article doesn’t.
 
To make double the money by selling fake shit to one guy and the real thing to someone else. In the long run, it’s better to never rip anybody off but this is just another way of making a quick buck.
Word would get around quick that their seeds were problematic.
 
Word would get around quick that their seeds were problematic.

Would it really get around that quick? I’m sure there’s tons of seeds that look like the seeds a farmer would be looking for. They’d probably put the seeds in the ground and wonder why they’re not growing or see something else is growing. It’s not like drugs where you get it, try it immediately, realize it’s shit n then call to let people know to not go to that person.
 
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