Gay penguins: Proof that conservatives need to be alarmed about what’s happening in the animal kingdom.
Roy Edroso found Roger Scruton whining that conservatives deserve to be the real environmentalists, because liberals are whiners who don’t deserve the cool label. Of course, his is a version of environmentalism that doesn’t require actual solutions, but otherwise, his proposal is fitting a long tradition of conservatives co-opting popular liberal causes in hopes that by taking on the label and confusing everyone, they can defeat the cause. Think of Feminists For Life (anti-feminist group) or morons that latch onto one dependent clause in a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. to justify their belief that the best way to defeat racism is to refuse to do anything about it. In one sense, there is a bit of truth to the idea that conservatives could be the “real” environmentalists—after all, continuing environmental policies under American capitalism could eventually kill off humanity altogether and there’s a possibility that without us, the planet might recover over time. We can hope.
But there’s at least one giant obstacle between conservatives and embracing their calling as true environmentalists—the shit-for-brains issue. Witness, for instance, WorldNetDaily suddenly going tree-hugger during a long process of clutching at any straws they can find to attack women who have sex. Yes, they’ve discovered that estrogen mimickers in the environment are causing damage, creating intersexed fish, a problem that could have severe consequences for population replacement. Since they hear the word “estrogen” and immediately think of craven slut-beasts, suggesting that the only culprit worth fingering must be women taking birth control pills.
While environmentalists are usually vocal about perceived threats ranging from pesticides to global warming, there is a silence when it comes to one threat already harming the water supply: hormones from birth-control pills.
Notice the word “perceived”. Ordinary human logic would dictate that relatively small amounts of synthetic estrogen being pissed out by the Sluts of America wouldn’t really be on the same level of a threat as the huge amounts of pesticides that are sprayed directly on crops and aren’t being absorbed on any level at all before the rain dumps them directly into the ground and into streams. Luckily, the WND article completely ignores the face that many pesticides are estrogen-mimickers. Unless the Sluts of America are practicing birth control by showering in DDT, then contraceptives are not really the problem.
But human logic is not like wingnut logic. In wingnut logic, human females who control when they give birth are emasculating the men of our species, ergo non-human emasculation must somehow be related to it. Every time you don’t run a high risk of “consequences” for having sex, a fish loses his testicles. It’s probably just a matter of time before WND argues that humans using condoms are the cause of the gay penguins in the Central Park Zoo. Actually, that sentence I wrote may end up being the scientific (even liberals say it!) justification behind the argument.
50 Responses to “Deforestation is caused by women drawing paychecks, as well”
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I could be wrong, but isn’t the amount of estrogen produced by a woman on the pill about the same as the amount produced by a pregnant woman?
That chemistry stuff is the work of the debil Amanda! Yet another strike against you when the glorious conservative christian revolution happens!
It’s funny how the wingnuts are happy to blame someone when they think they can point the finger at teh ebil sluts. Yet they will piss and moan about how the environmentalists are strangling the free market when the EPA finally gets around to imposing limits on endocrine disruptors. If only I could live in a universe where I could alter the facts to fit policy like they do.
Hmmmphhh!!! Well, let me thumb this at the conservative control-it-alls…THIS single, professional, THINKING, VOTING, WOMAN had sex with her ex-boyfriend 4 times this weekend and as much as she ENJOYED it and was the INITIATOR…she knows she is NOT going to have a BABY because of it (ex is ‘fixed’) and quite HAPPY about that…AND she is not fretting over if he loves her or not…because she isn’t sure herself. It happened, it was GREAT and MUTUAL and non-reproductive. Take that rethugliconservatives!!!
Neener, neener! ;^) Happy Monday All!!!
Elspeth
The middle-sized penguin to the far right is like any teenager. “Dads! Do you guys have to do that in public? Ew!”
I don’t even know where to begin. I read it, shake my head, read it again and think, wtf? I’m sure you are right about the gay penguins. But consider this, maybe the penguins are gay because they didn’t have adequate male role models in their lives. I hear the rate of penguin divorce has skyrocketed since female penguins got the right to vote.
Great line. *chuckling into a bowl of estrogen, I mean raisin bran*
Amanda wrote: “In one sense, there is a bit of truth to the idea that conservatives could be the “realâ€? environmentalists—after all, continuing environmental policies under American capitalism could eventually kill off humanity altogether and there’s a possibility that without us, the planet might recover over time. We can hope.”
Oh, it will recover. It’s big and we’re small. We can scratch at the Earth, but we can’t kill it. And as it recovers, evolution will produce wonderful pink winged critters. It’s just that, since we won’t be here, there will nobody to name ‘em.
As far as slutty women bringing about the end of fish, it’s overpopulation that’ll soon hurt us…and not just those faraway Africans in dusty Sudan, but more and more and more of us. I’m 50. I reckon I’ll escape most of the reckoning, but I think today’s children will suffer.
Why not? We may as well take the blame for absolutely everything.
Balding? Blame feminists.
Not get a raise? Blame feminists.
Not getting laid? You guessed it.
I took a course with one of the leading green chemists in the country during my undergrad. During the unit on synthetic estrogens, he said that yes, women on birth control pills probably are contributing to the amount of xenoestrogens in the water, but that the population increase that would result if women didn’t have access to the pill would create far, far more pollution, especially in high per-capita consumption countries like the US. He then spent the rest of the xenoestrogen unit lecturing on the real problems, i.e. plastics, pesticides, beauty products(!).
Birth control pills in the water is absolutely an important issue, and it is causing transgendered fish. That said, we need to build a better mousetrap and find a way to combat that without taking away my NuvaRing. I believe that the enviroment I save by no adding another child makes up for the hormones I pee out.
This kind of logic kind of reminds me of a paper one of my friends had to grade.
The assignment was to write about global warming causes in a group. Pretty straightforward, but we still get some troglodyte that copies and pastes everything from the Cato Institute website. Anyway… this couple of male business majors really put their heads together, and came up with some novel concepts!
Global warming is caused by women in the workplace.
Of course! So simple! I mean, if you double the amount of people in the workforce, you double the number of cars on the road to commute, and you double the pollution! Hallelugiah, a solution to climate change- stop hiring women!
Needless to say, she didn’t give them a very high grade…
OMG. Women on birthcontrol is making teh fish gay and transgendered? Someone set up ex-gay fish therapy, stat!
See, that’s really why they care. It’s not about the environment, it’s about fags and fag-enablers. All the oceans and the rivers and the lakes are going to the devil because they are being taken over the feminazi gay agenda. And then what will the conservatives drink? We can’t possibly having them drink that gay water…that’d be fag-enabling by promoting water with gay fish in it.
Sazai: Yeah, and besides, the gay fish f*ck in it, too.
I love all the “OMG Estrogen mimickers!” articles that finger soy and birth control pills and yet somehow manage to overlook the BGH pumped into dairy cattle to make them produce more milk.
If craven slut-beasts are evil and of de debbil, why are so many ultra-conservative men dying to “convert” as many as thy can by fucking them in every non-conventional way imaginable? Just on the down-low, of course.
Dorothy, big agra is, like, totally manly business and therefore the hormones pumped into cattle are perfectly safe. Sheesh.
Tina H says:
Well, I don’t think I can blame feminists directly but I believe the baldness gene does pass down through the maternal line. And I look quite a bit like one of my maternal great-grandfathers who was bald. Except his mustache was a walrus while mine’s a handlebar (think John L Sullivan rather than Snidely Whiplash). :})
It’s the new version of blaming the Jews.
And it really is about not getting laid, or the fear of not being able to get laid if the woman in your life realizes that there are better options available.
Perhaps we need to look at water treatment options that would remove estrogenic (and androgenic as wee - not to mention the antibiotics, diuretics, antidepressants, Viagra, etc. etc) from our treated water? And, if health of fish and their habitat is a concern, we need to do much more to prevent/treat runoff (urban and agricultural), since non-point pollution like runoff of oil and combustion-related compounds is the most insidious pollution problem we face here in the developed economies?
Heh. Sorry, male fishies.
IIRC, a good amount of the phytoestrogens put into water comes from paper mills. So when women get paychecks, they’re not only causing deforestation, they’re instituting industrial-strength lesbianism in fish populations.
“Needless to say, she didn’t give them a very high grade…”
Wait , What?!? … “She”?!?!?! … so those morons wrote a paper about how women in the work place are the cause of global warming then gave that paper in to their female teacher? … … uh … man, that’s stupid on a special level … … kinda stunning in it’s stupidity actually
DeadMan
See, if I think about this real hard when thinking about conservatives, I think about my maternal grandparents, who were farmers.
They believed that waste was sinful. So they recycled most everything they could. They turned off lights when they were not in use, even to the point of using flashlights to get them from the bathroom on the main floor to their bed on the second floor. Their furnance, I don’t believe, was ever more than at 62 degrees (if even that high) and if you were cold you were told to put on a sweater - and you slept under many many blankets and thick heavy comforters at night.
My grandparents understood also that you could poison your own drinking water (they had a well) with whatever chemicals you put on your crops, so they were careful.
They were amazing in their “green” understanding. I look at them (and they were conservatives) and I look at the “conservatives” today and I can’t reconcile the two.
These people never seem to realize that the degradation of the environment in former Communist countries is precisely because the people in charge of economic development were the same people in charge of “protecting” the environment. You can’t serve two masters. If anything, wingnuts are moving us closer to the Communist model of environmental non-protection through their habit of stuffing the EPA and other agencies with industry hacks.
See, the mistake you’re making, clytemnestra, is that you’re trying to connect today’s “conservatives” with “conservation.” It’s a common enough misconception, one they even, dare I say it, encourage.
It’s also more closely related to the fertilizer your grandparents used than anything else…
Being a “conservative” today kind of like being “Christian” or a “wicca” or a “progressive” or … It’s not a licensable term, there are no board certifications or anything, so anyone at all can call themselves one without actually even having a clue what the word MEANS, let alone trying to live up to it.
Try not to laugh at them when they explain… it’s not kind and it just makes them go kill off another dozen species just to prove their little willies work.
Interesting, since I actually take a BC pill primarily for the purpose of raising my low progesterone to control my high estrogen imbalance (and have been taking it off and on for decades regardless of sexual activity).
Where’d my estrogen dominance come from? Couldn’t possibly be environmental factors like soy, one of the top cheap food fillers the US just can’t farm enough of? Oh, gosh, no - it makes us money, so it can’t be hurting folks!
I often read posts on this (and other) blogs without looking at the byline first, and try to guess who wrote them. With Amanda’s posts, I usually figure it out when I do a spit-take
The shit-for-brains issue. Pretty much the defining issue of our age.
clytemnestra, you are also confusing family farmers with big agra. Small scale farmers, such as my cousins, know to a centimeter how far their water table has fallen over the last decade, they know their soil composition and the likelihood of loss through erosion or overuse. Large scale operations are more interested in profit margin because they have the financial power to influence political decisions and to put in deeper wells or irrigation systems. Small-scale farmers tend to be politically conservative because political changes are often the reason that they go under but they are conservationist because they are so close to the edge environmentally.
Having just come back from a ’standing dead forest National Park’ tour (Mt. Ste. Helens and Yellowstone), I am reminded that what we DON’T know is more likely to kick us in the butt than what we do.
DeadMan: Yeah, those two were speshul little snowflakes right there…
DeadMan says:
Unfortunately, I can see a wingnut doing something like this purposefully just to attempt to show the bias by the dreaded “librul femin*zi perfessor” out to keep the man down and em*sculated.
But on the other hand, it could just be incredible stupidity as well.
Richard wrote:
Unfortunately, I can see a wingnut doing something like this purposefully just to attempt to show the bias by the dreaded “librul femin*zi perfessor� out to keep the man down and em*sculated.
But on the other hand, it could just be incredible stupidity as well.
This is a “both/and” blog, isn’t it? There’s your answer.
Irene
I like the global warming argument actually because everybody knows stay at home mothers NEVER drive cars.
No sir, never. They quite literally only stay at home.
“Ordinary human logic would dictate that relatively small amounts of synthetic estrogen being pissed out by the Sluts of America wouldn’t really be on the same level of a threat as the huge amou…..”
Not to mention all the active hormonal agents [and antibiotics] being pissed out
by milk cows and cows and sheeps and cattle.
Hadn’t even thought about pig-piss, but…
Well, there — anyway.
But not to worry…
Real environmentalism requires some modest expenditure in personal sacrifice.
Sacrifice -and- the Current-Thing-called-Conservative…
Mutually exclusive…absolutely.
gee, and here i thought it was the plasticine from marketing and packaging that was mimicking human hormones and effecting all life on earth, here i find it’s all my fault…
wow, fake science is amazingly banal isn’t it?
stormkite -
lol — you got it.
and Hawise -
yes and when I try to point this out to my conservative family farming relatives - especially the aspect that the Republican party and they are involved in a shell game — and they are the ones that keep loosing (all the talk of the love and support for small business and the family farm vs all the support and corporate welfare given to corporate farms)
But they can’t seem to extricate themselves from the idea that the conservatives and republicans (that exist now) are on their side and stand for what they believe in, in all ways.
One of the guys down the hall from me is doing his MS on pharmaceuticals showing up in water- to be an effective drug, it has to be water soluble enough to disolve in the stomach, but fat-soluble enough to be absorbed by the body, and then eventually be excreted. Essentially, pharmies are so water-soluble that they just go right through conventional water-treatment plants. On the positive side, this midrange means that they tend to degrade in the environment fairly quickly- about as quickly as they are replaced- so there is just this permanant plume of pharmaceutical coming out of every sewage treatment plant and petering out a bit downstream. He’s mostly focusing on antidepressants, vicodin, tylenol and progesterone.
Caffiene, weirdly enough, is fairly persistant in the environment, but it doesn’t do much out there.
In terms of Craven Slut-Beast secretions, the progesterone spikes a lot when college is in session, but so does most everything else (having the town pop. go up by 8,000 tends to do that).
Non-pharmeceutical estrogen mimics are more of a problem, because they are much more persistant- mostly because they tend to be halogenated. All them chlorine bonds make stuff last a lot longer.
Off-the-cuff memory- sperm counts tend to be a lot lower in rural areas due to all the atriazine herbicides.
PAHs (in addition to being carcinogenic) tend to have endocrine disrupting activity as well, but they show up whenever you burn ANYTHING, like diesel fuel or wood or sear a steak.
Hard to say how big an issue these disruptions are- the statisitical loops you have to jump through to prove that one plant or area has a pollution-related increase in cancer over another are difficult enough, and that’s with cancer. Counting cancer cases isn’t that hard. Now imagine that you’re trying to statistically analyse something as difficult to detect and generally non-life threatening as a localized increase in the size of man-boobs or a shift in the amount of androgen- inducing hormones. Fucking statistical nightmare.
//did read a paper on the influence of atrazine on testicle size, hormone levels, and body mass in two aligator populations that showed SOME effect, but it wouldn’t be too hard to find confounding factors. Atrazine made the males smaller and rarer in the contaminated site.
(soon, Daddy Dobson will be insisting that craven slut beasts secrete atrazine herbicides in their urine, but it’s okay, because he’s a delusional freak)
There’s a missing step here.
Who or what gets blamed for feminists? Can’t pin that on us! Ha!
And that, Mandrake, is why I only drink rainwater and grain alcohol.
Yeah, the silence about BGH is deafening, isn’t it? In every one of these discussions about xenoestrogenic feminization of various beasties, soy gets fingered, and usually birth control pills, but the milk industry gets a free pass. What the hell?
Oh, obviously the environmentalists got to Amanda too! You all know that the real danger is soy turning us gay: http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53327
Don’t let soy happen to you!
I thought about writing something smart and intelligent as a reply, but what’s the point when you’re commenting on something at WND?
About those gay penguins…found a children’s picture book explaining their journey to parenthood…made me cry when they kept building nests and wondering why they didn’t lay an egg…thank goodness the zookeeper didn’t have some sort of moral objection to same sex penguin parents.
Okay, so I was pregnant at the time and pumping estrogen into the environment, I probably wouldn’t cry now, but I’m definitely getting the book for my kids.
I can’t keep from thinking how silly trout would look if they had external testicles.
That’s a ridiculous, frivolous comment that contributes nothing to discussion of serious environmental issues . . . but why should WND have all the fun?
Thar, that was the PERFECT spot for that quote. I’m still chuckling. I wish I’d made that the title.
Caja…
OTHER feminists are obviously to blame for Feminists.
So THERE.
(and EVE was the First Feminist; if she’d just done what Adam and God told her to do, we wouldn’t be in any of this fix today, but noooo… bitch had to go and think for herself, and look what happened…..)
Are those penguins gay? It looks like one has a piece of food on its face and the other’s trying to flick it off. I suppose it could have used its wing instead, but it’s not like they look like they want to be touching.
Those aren’t just gay penguins — they’re gay transvestite penguins!
(Seriously, are the more hidebound gender-role advocates out there baffled by species that aren’t sexually dimorphic? I’ve wondered sometimes.)
But, Amanda, surely you know that showering in DDT is the recommended method for causing abortions, the perfect contraceptive?
And, no, they’re not gay transvestite penguins, they’re Blacks’ seals in drag (you should catch their midnight show in Cannery Row)
Ironically, I think the tendency is that the more tightly the members of a given species pair-bond, the less sexual dimorphism there is.
So, the “gender role” worrywarts may live in terror that this or that species can’t tell he from she, but they should console themselves with the thought that at least they are faithful to each other once paired up.
And I think they (the animals, not the worrywarts) have discovered methods of distinguishing each other’s sex that suit them fine!
Sadly, I’ve heard this “BC pills are poisoning the sea!” stuff from my one co-worker I think of as a friend. Evidently this meme is all over right-wing radio and nets, totally ignoring the much more massive industrial pollutants.
Well, I just loaned him my copy of Bowling For Columbine, because despite the fact that he (and all my other co-workers) is a passionate gun-owner, I honestly thought he’d like it. (That’s because after I saw the movie for the first time myself, just last week(!) I was surprised, after all the angry huffing and puffing a few years ago, at how sympathetic that movie seemed to be to gun owners as such–as opposed to the specific US culture of paranoid bigotry that Moore seems to me to single out as the real culprit–”Are we a nation of gun-nuts, or just nuts?”–the latter being Moore’s implied answer.)
Be interesting to see what he thinks of it. But he’s always gonna be plugged in to the poison grapevine, is my guess. Oh well, maybe it’s good for me to know someone I think is sane and reasonable (other than pros like Amanda and Pam and so on who monitor for The Good of the Community so I don’t have to) who listens to that stuff.
It is from someone who knows a little bit about Greek and absolutely nothing about science.
The logic goes like this:
Xenoestrogens means “strange estrogens”
Xenoestrogens are damaging the environment.
Birth control pills are made of artificial estrogen.
Therefore birth control pills are damaging the environment.
This is simple. Actual science is not. This way, the average freeper can blame the liberals and feminists for pollution while letting heavy industry off the hook.
I guesstimate that out of 6 billion human beings on Earth, less than 1/3 could be women of an age to possibly be taking some kind of hormonal BC. I further guess, based on the fact that women tend to weigh less than men, that these women don’t average more than 60 kilograms mass. So the mass of women taking hormones of any kind everywhere on the planet is probably about 100-200 million metric tonnes.
That seems like an impressive number. But a “small” car masses at least a metric tonne, and there must be twice, more likely 4 times, that mass of automobiles and trucks driven daily in just the USA alone.
We used to put lead in the gasoline, for crissakes!
Then there’s the cattle, the crops, and the whole chemical industry, not to mention semi trucks, airplanes, ships, and so on.