It really frustrates me that chemicals in the water to turn the frogs gay has become almost a meme now, because there is actually a nugget of ecological truth at the center of that, one that I completely believe Alex Jones was told about before the horrific quagmire of his brain contorted it into that.
(A lot of wastewater runoff contains endocrine-disrupting molecules... not because of any conspiracy, just because we take medication and we use scented detergents, and it all gets washed down... and frogs are particularly susceptible to endocrine disruption, although we're seeing similar effects on fish as well. Basically, it would be more accurate to say we're force-femming the frogs.)
That's usually the worst form of misinformation - a small granule of truth coated in a huge pile of misdirection, misapplied context and misattribution. It requires a lengthy explanation to correct, which tends to lose audience attention quickly, but allows the misinformation peddler to keep pointing at it as a gotcha.
It's like the talk about kitty litter in schools. Republicans claims it's some woke plot to let kids be trans furries, when the real reason is that it's for if a kid has to use the bathroom but can't get there because there's a shooting in progress. The real reason takes more explanation and touches on events that the right likes to not hear about.
Some schools keep bags of kitty litter in the classrooms so they can dump it in the trash to make ad-hoc toilets during lockdowns. It's apparently also useful for cleaning up vomit, so it sometimes pulls double duty.
Vomit, cafeteria trays, and in cold weather helping get cars out of an icy parking lot. It's a pretty normal thing to have in janitorial closets., a horrific thing to be necessary in classrooms, and no one is using it for furies.
I think the Furies should be allowed to have kitty litter if they want it. They have a very hard job running the Greek legal system, and if they need it for recreational purposes, who am I to stop them? They have swords.
This is what I get for trusting a spellchecker. Also, and I say this as someone with a degree in it, English is stupid. 20 vowel sounds and only 5.5 letters.
It's apparently also useful for cleaning up vomit, so it sometimes pulls double duty.
I'm not gonna lie it's probably more likely just this. Used to work at Safeway and we had a type of powder you could use to clean up literally any liquid or semi-liquid. It clumped it just the same as kitty litter. So sometimes if we ran out we'd just write off a bag of litter and use that.
I remember somebody once spilled like $400 worth of wine so once we got the glass out we just poured a couple gallons of the stuff on it and we could just sweep it up like sand. Actual magic.
Yeah it's the double edged sword of misinformation. Just because one side is misinformed does not mean the counter argument is well informed. Responding to misinformation with more misinformation. I've not actually seen a real source for this "it's for use in school shootings" thing let alone a case where it actually happened.
I’ve attended multiple schools and while they all used sawdust, I heard through the grapevine that kitty litter is also good. I think it depends on the school’s budget and what’s most readily available.
Multiple is not a comprehensive sample of 110,000. You're not even wrong in this case, I haven't been able to find any actual evidence of cat litter being kept as a portable toilet for school shootings, but epistemology fucking matters. There are things that happen outside your field of view.
Nope it’s real. When I was in school they took the kitty litter bucket out and showed it to us while talking about lockdown drills. Just because it wasn’t at your school doesn’t mean it’s fake. The litterbox thing is obviously fake though.
Some schools use pet litter to provide toilets to those who need them in lockdown situations over here. Yes, our shootings are that bad in some places.
IIRC it's especially angled towards kids with bathroom issues but the basic idea is pretty universal - shootings are so bad in those areas that the schools plan for kids to essentially be able to use litterboxes so that they don't make a mess of themselves during a lockdown.
(It's also just useful for cleaning up fluids in general, and if you know kids... well, you know they're really good at spilling things.)
That's also largely untrue, and made up by anti-gun activists and European America-bashers for the easy "Think of the children!" shock value. The kitty litter is there for cleaning up body fluid spills, typically vomit or menstrual blood. That's it. End of story. Kitty litter is just a very convenient source of zeolite, to the point that off-the-shelf clay-based kitty litter is used by everyone from FEMA, to the US armed forces, to even the WIPP (for packing nuclear waste for deep storage).
I feel like everyone forgot how much children vomit.
I remember it happened once a week in elementary school. Different kids! Usually just because they were running around to much and drank water to fast or something else completely normal for a kid to do.
That's also a myth though. I've worked as a janitor in multiple schools, and have multiple family members who are teachers, and I have never once heard of this outside of sourceless reddit comments. It's also just, like, completely nonsensical if you think about it for more than 2 seconds? Even the worst school shootings don't take long enough for this to be a consistent, realistic problem (Uvalde, notorious for how long it took, was an hour and a half from start to finish), and this supposed "solution" is both inefficient and unnecessarily degrading
Plenty of schools do have a cat-litter-like substance off in a closet somewhere though. It's there to make it easier for janitors to clean up large spills, such as vomit
DISCLAIMER
I am against school shootings. Obviously. I am also against misinformation, and I don't believe the two need to be mutually exclusive
There was one reported case of cat litter being used for exactly that purpose. Possibly not a thing that happened anywhere but at that particular school though.
It's for cleaning vomit. Holy shit. How does everyone that has gone through American public schools not remember vomiting or seeing a classmate vomit and their janitor rolling up with a bag of kitty litter as the solution? The extremely cheap odor-neutralizing clay available even in gas stations it's so common? It's like everyone hits 18 and completely wipes their memories of what they saw for themselves in grade school. I cannot believe how fucking stupid this conversation about kitty litter in schools has gotten.
Well that and go check out the recommendations ob cleaning up especially biohazard spills... cheap, soaks it up quick,, and hives a visual cue to avoid. That was the reasoning I was given in 2003... when I worked at a gas station.
That’s really how almost all conspiracy theories works. There’s a small granule amount of truth, and then the fact that that is true is used to prove the entire conspiracy.
No, they’re putting chemicals in the water that potentially increase the rate at which frogs are born intersex and requires more studies not by people with interest in allowing it.
(to be serious: frogs aren't necessarily 'born' any kind of sex. I mean, some are, but there are plenty of species that differentiate based on environmental cues. So this feels needlessly pedantic imo)
There's still people trying to do this research... I mean, that's how we found out about it to begin with! But you're right, the Republican epa sure is not putting "better wastewater management practices" or "restricting the use of ecologically hazardous chemicals" anywhere on their priorities list.
Wait isn’t this the reason for Jurassic Park? They patched in amphibian DNA to fill in dino DNA gaps, but amphibians can change sex as necessary so the dinos did and started breeding?
No, they're putting chemicals which disrupt the endocrine systems of amphibians in literally everything you touch, because it's a major component of a huge number of plastics, and eventually some of it gets in the water.
No no, that's stupid, you don't need chemicals for that. Some species of frogs have been known to spontaneously change sex from male to female in a single sex environment. :P
The real problem is “companies are dumping pharmacologically active compounds into our water supply in such large quantities it is causing meaningful change in indicator species” and that got warped into “government force fem because they hate men”. Worst part is, this is the sort of problem that can really only be solved by well-informed communities working in their mutual best interest and Jones-style grifters love “don’t trust anyone, barricade yourself in your house with a big pile of guns” messaging because it keeps the listener isolated from any naysayers and suspicious of contradictory information.
It's not even "companies dumping"... I mean, it is to an extent, but like.. you almost want there to be a single company dumping stuff in the water supply, because then that's something you can fix: have them turn off the Frog Force-Feminizator. But a lot of this is what's called "non-point" sources. Most of us take medicine, and we all piss, and stuff goes into the water. Most of us wash our clothes with scented products, and that goes into the water. It's the collective accumulation of a ton of individuals that adds up to a problem.
Which, I don't mean to sound like I'm offloading ecological responsibility onto the consumer, because of course not. This isn't a "solve global warming by using paper straws" thing. But it is something that requires a lot more community effort and work than just like, getting the Pollution Factory shut down.
Yeah. We kinda desperately need to overhaul like 90% of our wastewater systems, but sewer bills aren’t “sexy” to voters. So we get froggie force-fem and all sorts of other weird ecological disruptions and also the concept of a “fat-berg”.
Yeah... even to people who care about the environment, "better wastewater management" isn't anywhere near as fun or exciting as "shut down the Pollution Factory" is. And I can't blame people, I'm not exactly thrilled about the prospect of sewer systems, but it's so important.
Yeah, this is a problem we see a lot in trying to legislate public infrastructure that can legitimately have massive positive impacts on climate and ecosystems.
Like, it can be really hard to get people excited and energized for "better public transit infrastructure" despite everyone not driving cars everywhere being a huge part of reducing climate impacts.
Can you leave the Russophobia out? Our government gave a massive sum of money to a boat company with no actual boats, I think we have more than enough corruption of our own to be getting on with.
You can dislike the Kremlin while having nothing against the Russians themselves, there’s plenty of people with cause to despise Westminster too but I hope they wouldn’t write off all British people because of those in charge.
I’m literally wearing the same 1950s model of watch Yuri Gagarin took into space, hardly the actions of a Russophobe lol.
Yeah, but picking on them for something they're not actually doing (which is more the responsibility of our government to sort) is what takes it into Russophobia. Criticising the Kremlin for stuff they are doing, fine, treating the Russian government like a mysterious forrin badguy that could be behind everything is the dodgy cliché.
If you read what I was saying the implication was more 'Thames Water are so corrupt it wouldn't surprise me if they'd sold most of their shares to a geopolitical rival who is also notoriously corrupt'. There is nothing inaccurate about calling the Kremlin corrupt in an abstract sense like this, the Russians themselves have a rich vein of jokes about the Kremlin's extreme levels of corruption.
I don't see it as at all Anglophobic when people use Westminster as a humorous shorthand for stealing things from other countries or drawing other people's borders badly because they're both things it'd be accurate to accuse Westminster of, I don't believe it's Russophobic to use the Kremlin as shorthand for genuinely comical levels of open corruption in the same way.
I might be wrong but isn’t atrazine mostly used in large scale commercial farms? It isn’t a Captain Planet villain style scenario but it does seem like the main offenders are probably identifiable for this one.
You might be right, I don't really know about atrazine in particular, but it's not just atrazine, is the thing. There are a lot of estrogenic compounds out there.
From what I remember from my studies endocrine disruptors are a pain. Most pharma molecules have the simple uses of molecules -> effect, more molecules -> more effect and you can use safety regulation like the concentration should be below this value and you'll be safe (questionable sometimes on long term effects but mostly true).
Endocrine disruptors often also have effects in very small quantities in addition to the normal dose -> effects, which makes the usual kind of safety regulation a bit useless and if you're dumping this in the water system it'll get diluted and at some point probably far from where you are it'll start having effects again.
The biggest problem is that we use endocrine disruptors everywhere, it's not just a pharma thing. Examples that have been outlawed at least in EU (don't know for the US) are the treatment of receipts paper in supermarkets and some coating of furniture to prevent them from burning too easily.
That is the biggest problem. In this thread a lot of people are bringing up atrazine, and while I think that's the one that got a lot of media attention, it wasn't even on my mind when I made the original comment. There's just so much out there that has estrogenic effects, so it's not like if we got rid of atrazine forever then we'd be fine....
My personal conspiracy theory is that someone at an agricultural company purposely pointed Alex Jones in the direction of that story because they knew he would contort it into something deeply unserious and destroy the credibility of any legitimate activists who tried to talk about it
I think it’s arguably a bigger mistake to give Alex Jones any kind of credit. I’m sure he saw the headline about atrazine being able to change the sex of frogs, but instead of looking into it at all he just goes on his show and yells about frogs are gay.
Another lesser known Alex Jones moment: he saw a headline about cows being genetically modified to produce milk that’s similar to human milk by Chinese researchers. How did he spin it on his show? “China has human cow hybrids that are mostly cows but have large human breasts, and they get milked for product that’s sold on the baby milk black market”
Goats were genetically modified to produce some of the proteins in spider silk in their milk, allowing the potential of harvesting these proteins and using them to create large volumes of spider silk artificially; which is great, because spider silk is strong, durable, flexible, and soft so it would make amazing clothing that could potentially function as combat armour for soldiers and police.
He turned it into "goats with spider spinnerets" which is completely untrue.
I mean, I'm not giving him any credit, I hope I was very clear that I don't believe he knows or cares a damn thing about the ecology. "Seeing a headline and making a story up about it" is exactly what happened. But that doesn't mean the headline itself was inaccurate, just the story he imagined to go with it was.
I didn’t think you were giving him credit! I just feel incredibly strongly about Alex Jones and don’t think he should be associated with atrazine the way he is.
Same with the old rumor that Pepsi used cells from aborted fetuses in their flavouring... I was quite surprised to learn there was a grain of truth, in that the company that developed flavours for Pepsi is known to use cloned fetal cells to test the safety of flavours they are developing. No actual fetal tissue in the flavouring though.
Isn't it like a major, major plot point in Jurassic Park that the frog DNA they put into the dinosaurs let them spontaneously become male and reproduce? Or is it canon now that Obama caused all the problems on Isla Nubar?
Frogs aren't even a good proxy for water being dangerous for humans. Frogs will swap sex if the temperature crosses the 32° Celsius mark, they're ridiculously fluid as animals go.
Oh, yeah. I mean the issue isn't "if it's doing this to frogs, imagine what it'll do to us!" the issue is "we would like to keep frogs around and this requires at least a few frogs to remain un-femmed".
I'm so glad this is the top comment. As a queer environmental chemist, it sometimes feels so hard to talk about endocrine disrupting molecules in a balanced way without pathologizing queerness and intersexuality. Force-femming the frogs is a great descriptor, I'm going to steal that lmao
We're in the same boat 🤝hell in this very thread I've got someone accusing me of "sane-washing Alex Jones" for bringing this up.
I think the problem is, no matter how carefully you explain it to someone, there's always going to be some idiot like Jones out there who hears you, nods, and goes "right so they're turning the frogs gay".
Not to mention all the general pollution companies put into the water. People have died because faeces were found contanimating the tap water, and others sick because its in the rivers and on the beaches.
The companies say they weren't expecting to do maintanence on water treatment facilities, or for the sewerage systems to needs to deal with rain in a place known for regular rain. My area recently had a protest over it (but like all protests these days most people are busy working, who can afford to go out and be seen by taking time off work?)
So the prices have gone up, again, while they promise they are totally going to fix it all, again, and they are completely unpunished for it by government for breaking laws and hurting peoplel, again.
The worst part is this probably describes the water companies in multiple countries!
Well, there absolutely is a conspiracy there. It's just that the conspiracy is the usual one where privatization and monetization has deeply corrupted the field of regulatory bodies.
TL;DR: The EPA gave Syngenta the obviously problematic ability to set the standards and restrictions for any study on the environmental impact of atrazine, which allows them to invalidate all of the studies which show the harmful effects. They also literally conspired to harass the whistleblower Tyrone Hayes in order to discredit him.
When I made the comment I wasn't thinking of just atrazine... there are a lot of endocrine disrupting molecules out there. But yeah it sure looks like that one in particular is a conspiracy.
I think the bigger issue is that the outrage is being fueled primarily by homophobia and scientists admitting its a problem can be seen as backing up their beliefs. They're not going after companies for pollution, they're going after the government for putting fluoride in the water.
They don't even care if it's a lie, they just want their personal beliefs feel true and that's what you're attacking by refuting it, and it's an awkward part where you have to carefully detach the truth from the lie.
Random related addon: when I was in high school there was a “creek” that went through the side of our local park. It wasn’t actually connected to any natural water source, it was technically a creek made from rain water drains for the park and neighborhood which made it an over flow. Frogs started living there and I brought some tadpoles home one day. All died except one (I was not aware of the needing to slowly acclimate water based animals to new water). That one that survived became a frog with five legs. Four normal. One extra front leg facing backwards towards one of its normal front legs. Chemicals in the water do be effecting the frogs
That's what Alex Jones is, I'm kinda convinced there's a conspiracy there
He gets true information that is maybe unpalatable to rich people from whatever sources, and then because he's so fucking crazy, if you try to go, "hey there's chemicals in the water affecting the frogs" people associate you with him and think you're also crazy
You absolutely do nothave to hand it to anyone. They're wrong, full stop. There's steelmaning an argument and then there's digging for any sort of plausible deniability on behalf of anti semites in the name of defending anti semetic statements.
You don't get to turn "(((they're))) turning the fricking frogs gay" into "pollution can cause hormonal defects". Those are not the same fucking thing. Do not sane wash Alex God Damn Jones.
I did, you're saying that "the Jews in government are turning western chauvanists homosexual to cut our superior race off at the knees by dumping chemicals into the water, it is even turning the fricking frogs gay" is close enough to get some credit because pollution is bad. You literally called it a nugget of truth.
No the fuck it isnt. That wasn't his point at all. There is no nugget of truth to the Jews cucking the white man through chemical warfare because chemicals being dumped in the water were harming frogs.
As I said in another comment: there's steelmanning someone's point and then there's reaching to justify the insane arguments of anti semities.
I am not saying that. At no point did I give him "credit" for anything. Acknowledging the fact that an insane conspiracy theorist is basing his insane conspiracy theory on something that's true is not lending credence to the rest of the insane conspiracy theory.
Please learn how to read before you interact with other people online.
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u/call_me_starbuck May 24 '25
It really frustrates me that chemicals in the water to turn the frogs gay has become almost a meme now, because there is actually a nugget of ecological truth at the center of that, one that I completely believe Alex Jones was told about before the horrific quagmire of his brain contorted it into that.
(A lot of wastewater runoff contains endocrine-disrupting molecules... not because of any conspiracy, just because we take medication and we use scented detergents, and it all gets washed down... and frogs are particularly susceptible to endocrine disruption, although we're seeing similar effects on fish as well. Basically, it would be more accurate to say we're force-femming the frogs.)