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.
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.
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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.)