Paul Elam, head misogynist at A Voice for Men, is mad at the ladies again, his wrath provoked this time by an overheard conversation in a local coffeeshop between two women talking about recycling, and how the world would be a greener place if women were in charge.
Elam seems to take deep personal offense at any suggestion that men aren’t the absolute best at every single fucking thing, so he quickly scurried off to his computer to bash out a 1500-word screed that began with him insulting the women as bobbleheaded “latte lappers who were more likely than not completely clueless about how a single thing on the planet with a moving part works,” moved into high gear with some not altogether wrong (if rather trite and woman-blamey) critiques of the diamond and fur industries, and wound up with a stern warning that WOMEN ARE DESTROY9ING THE EARTH WITH ALL THEIR SPENDY SPENDING!!1!!!
So let’s just skip ahead to that part, shall we?
Take it away, Paul:
The thing that drives the bulk of pollution, wars, white collar criminality, cruelty to animals, human slavery and the like is consumerism. Consumerism, especially the market of unnecessary, embarrassingly vain and useless goods, is a woman’s world. It is primarily the consumption of fashion, via cosmetics, plastic surgery, excessive clothing, jewelry and other vanity items. Women drive a world of pain and damage to the planet. And men, to their shame, do the heavy lifting to get it done.
Ah, damn you ladies! God damn you all to hell!
The so-called Planet of the Apes was Earth all along!
Oh, wait. Sorry. SPOILER ALERT.
But Paul, don’t men buy a lot of expensive useless crap, too?
I mean, I just did about a minute of Googling and found a goddamn fishing rod that’ll set you back $4600.
I cannot think of a single item consumed by men en masse, with high social acceptance, that does not also have utilitarian value. e.g. leather items come from food source animals.
Oh, I see. You can use a $4600 fishing rod to catch $4600 fish. My bad.
Essentially it is not that much different from Native Americans using buffalo hide as well as the meat.
Yeah, he really did just say that.
And many of the things men do consume that might appear on the surface to be excessive are things that women size up and measure them by in the process of sexual selection.
Ah, and these men are utterly helpless before these greedy, earth-destroying women and their evil feminine allure.
Most money is still earned by men.
This is true. In part because of that whole wage gap thing you MRAs don’t believe in.
Most money is actually spent by and on women, mostly on consequence-ridden products whose only use is to bolster their egos. That is about as green as a fucking oil spill.
The sex driving the world’s ridiculous over consumption, and therefore decimation of everything, is not men. In fact, women’s level of over consumption is so outrageous that they cannot even maintain it with their own resources. It takes both sexes to feed the excessive appetite of the one.
Ah, but that’s not quite true. Or really true at all. For one thing, while women may spend more than men, that’s in part because women still tend to do more of the shopping for things like, you know, groceries. They’re not spending all this money on themselves.
And women may not really be spending as much as you think. It’s often said that women are responsible for about 80% of consumer spending. But if you ever start trying to track down the source of that oft-quoted statistic, as I did while writing this post, you’ll discover that … there really doesn’t seem to be one. It’s one of these things that’s assumed to be true simply because it’s repeated so often – especially by people claiming to know how to market to women. The Wall Street Journal’s Carl Bialik looked into this 80% claim last year and found that
In addition to having murky origins, the number appears to be wrong. Several recent surveys suggest that men have nearly equal say on spending, and that when men and women live together, both participate in spending decisions. In a survey conducted last year of nearly 4,000 Americans 16 and older by Futures Co., a London consulting firm, just 37% of women said they have primary responsibility for shopping decisions in their household, while 85% said they have primary or shared responsibility. The respective figures for men were similar: 31% and 84%.
Let’s return from the land of reality to plunge again into the tempestuous torrent of Paul Elam’s testosterone tantrum. (See! I can write as crappily as Paul Elam if I really try!)
If we wanted to save the environment, be less cruel to animals, have less wars, less slavery and less forced labor of children then the best first step we can take is to start raising girls to get over their vanity and their entitlement. We would also do well to teach our boys to assist in the process.
Elam followed up this soul-stirring call to SAVE TEH PLANET with a post castigating male truck drivers for being too nice to lady truck drivers. No, really.
If you’re interested in learning more about saving our green planet, and even if you’re not, I suggest you take a look at the trailer for the excellent if unclassifiable Korean film called, naturally, Save the Green Planet.
Hey, off-topic is the norm here! And that was interesting, about placebo. 😀
Hedgehog guy! I remember when that video first appeared. And yes, the effect works with any sort of nurturing behavior, but we’re not supposed to talk about it because it interferes with the woe is me women love assholes narrative.
I saw a bloke with his little boy on the bus today (during a two-hour trip that takes thirty minutes on the train … groan). Now, I have no interest in men I see, and I don’t like children at all, but it was really nice to see a father being affectionate with his child, talking to him, laughing with him, making him behave and giving him a kiss on top of his head.
And all in public, too. MRAs would die of horror at the unmanliness of it all.
If you’re interested in learning more, a good author is the British doctor Ben Goldacre, and his ‘Bad Science’ from a few years back. He’s known for his demand in honesty in research, and it’s not just altmed that gets criticism; he just put out a second book, ‘Bad Medicine’, which focuses on the flaws of pharma industry and how it could be improved. I only just started reading, and I’m hoping there’s a chapter on placebo use in research. Because placebo can have an effect in itself there should be a second control group, the “no treatment” group along with placebo group and the studied medicine group to get sense of the real effects and of the so called natural curve of progression of the illness. Many ailments go away on their own, after all, even without any intervention.
And talking of housedads… my brother-in-law started his own health care company a while ago and he’s now a part-time housedad as he can run business from home just as well as the office. Mommy has a job that requires her to be out of the house. He’s very happy filling both roles. My partner and I don’t plan on having kids, but he’s becoming a primary school teacher which means he spends his days with kids. And loves the new job. The funny thing is that he’s a highly competitive “alpha” type personality, and his background is teaching in tertiary education so he’s had to adjust to the new “students”. Oh the Horror! say the MRAs… such lack of manliness all around!
Ah not ‘Bad Medicine’ but ‘Bad Pharma’ is the new book called!
Oh, and there’s also something called “nocebo” effect, from the placebo effect. It’s when you get negative side effects from a sugar pill, and the example above of alternative allergy medicine giving side effects reminded me of it. It has a lot to do with expectations as does placebo, and even things like physician attitudes, behaviour and words chosen. Placebo is also present in every proven-to-work medical intervention, it’s an important part of every cure and treatment. Just how much exactly we don’t know yet.
And of course, the placebo effect isn’t just present in humans. Animals are also suspect to it. It’s been shown in many ways, for example first giving a real medicine via injection to dogs and measuring results, then swapped to placebo and got the same results in the dogs (can’t recall the specifics of this, but the unexpected effect stuck in my mind). A kind of a Pavlovian conditioning there. It’s all really fascinating and there’s a lot still to be studied.
Now let’s see if I get stuck in the spam filter… should be an edit button!
On the other hand, if you take pills or put creams on your body that are made of actual plants, you might very well have an actual allergy to the stuff.
Still, nocebo is an interesting phenomenon.
Btw, regarding fathers, and jumping back to something someone wrote way earlier in the thread about wanting to control who’s the father of a child as a motivation for oppressing women…
In Sweden, if a woman married to a man has a baby, her husband is automatically registered as the baby’s father. However, if a woman without a husband has a baby, and the father wants to be registered as such, he has to go through this stupid procedure with the woman where they must answer all sorts of questions about whether she really only had sex with him and no one else nine months before the baby was born etc. Several of my male colleagues has gone through this more or less recently (and this also explains, I think, why the average Swede gets married between zir first and second child – everyone is like “I’m not going through this stupid procedure again, we’re gonna get married before we have another child!”). And they all think it’s profoundly stupid. Like one of them put it:
– Suppose for the sake of argument that I wasn’t the biological father, but wanted to raise the child as mine together with my girlfriend. Why on Earth would that be a problem? Shouldn’t the authorities be like “yay, someone wants to take responsibility for a child!” rather than acting all suspicious?
And yeah… it IS weird. I can’t think of any legitimate reason why the guy can’t just sign a paper stating “I’m the father of [insert name and personal number of baby]” and that’s it. But there’s probably some old and terribly patriarchal and sexist reason for this crap.
Oh yes, a real allergic reaction is a possibility from herbals. And whilst they go largely unregulated as natural medicine it’s really hard to predict who is at risk and what kind of side effects they can cause… because there’s not even rudimentary studies done on some of the herbal remedies and they are sold based on tradition, or based on bad, flawed research only.
I noticed, btw, I miswrote “allergy medications” for some reason. But I guess what I meant is understandable!
Wow, that’s ridiculous. I wonder why they came up with that system? Also, what if the woman had had multiple sexual partners but used a condom with everyone except the one wanting to register as the father?
Oh my god that hedgehog video…
And I don’t usually find tattoos attractive… But nice hands and arms are a killer for me, and nice dark eyelashes.
Also the little “ah” noise and face he did at the end just floored me.
And now I want a hedgehog.
Wait, I’m confused. If the fake acupuncture needles didn’t stay in the body, what kept them on the person being tested?
http://www.skepdic.com/shamacupuncture.html
There’s many ways to do it.
+1 for hot guy cuddling hedgehog
Oh man, Bad Pharma is on my reading list. As a scientist, the way we do shit, especially in the medicine makes me nauseated. And I can’t think of any good way to reform the system.
For a shorter run down, this article in this month’s SciAm was pretty great.
Lauralot: I guess either the “handles” are a tiny bit sticky, or else the acupuncture is given on the back where the patient can’t see whether the needles stay or not.
Cassandra: I can’t speak for Sweden, but this is how it works in Finland:
If the man and woman agree on paternity recognition, she must officially state that she slept with only him at the time, and he must state that he trusts her on this. Any contraception doesn’t matter. So, what if they aren’t willing to lie on this issue?
Then paternity recognition is only possible if biological paternity is confirmed with a DNA test. BUT if the test turns out negative, then there is no way to recognize paternity, unless he marries her. Then he can co-adopt the child.
Finnish feminists and other progressive people do critizise the system occasionally.
(Sorry, but I have to go away now and these threads always go past so soon. Also, no matter how I try to spell “critisize”, my browser doesn’t approve.)
I kinda suspect it’s because you can’t patent an herb (unless you do like Monsanto and GMO it, which is a whole nother parfait of worms). Manufacturers can make money packaging and selling them, but there’s no real ROI on doing research on them.
If we (humans in general) could figure out how to consistently trigger the placebo effect, health care would become so much better. For people, not necessarily for anyone in the insurance industry, the pharmacy industry, surgeons, or any industries that support and depend on western medicine as it currently exists. I’m actually having trouble imagining such a thing, because my mind is tripping over to conspiracy-theory-type movies, where the Deep Throat guy is having the placebo researchers killed off so as to protect the profits of the makers of Nyquil.
Also, you need people willing to participate in the studies and follow the rules. I had an aquaintance who was looking into participating in a study on an experimental drug, and she decided not to, because she would have had to only take the drugs they gave her, and nothing else. Because, you know, the researchers have to be able to say that this effect is related to that dosage, and more people in the control group died (proving the drug was effective), or what have you.
She said, fuck that noise, I’m doing anything and everything, up to and including eating magic beans, to beat this shit. FUCK the control group. So there’s that, too.
It’s not that simple when it comes to research. You can patent active ingredients discovered in plants and nature, in fact a good number of our pharma-made medicines have been originally done that way. And a lot if independent research has been done on natural remedies, too.
There’s also the problem that a lot of altmed research is simply bad quality. It’s even more biased than pharma companies’ research and even less transparent. There’s a lot of outright fraud and ignoring and twisting of results to get something that somewhat supports the goals of the reseachers. Statistically insignificant results of minor studies with flawed methods are advertised as major breakthroughs before publishing and peer-review, if any results ever get published anyway. There’s a number of great examples of this in the book I mentioned, ‘Bad Science’, such as the British study on fishoil Equazen improving schoolkids’ test scores… which was never a study despite being louded as such. It’s bad in Big Pharma but ten times as worse in altmed thanks to altmed getting free pass in regulation.
And don’t forget that altmed is just as big business as is pharma. All the vitamin manufacturers. Supplements. Most are made by big companies, some even owned by pharma companies. And then we have Boiron, the biggest homeopathy business in the world. They are no cottage industries, but can flex lobby muscles enough to affect the health care laws of most of western Europe.
“parfait of worms”
EWWwwwwwwww
Wow, placebo effect stuff is really interesting. I’ve been curious about that kind of shit, in part because I suspect I have a weird reaction to pain. I was given major Vicodin after a major surgery I had, and I ended up using a fraction of the dose and being in very little pain whatsoever. (That I am willing to put on blind luck.) But I’d love to be able to harness that more effectively.
As for the whole ‘women buying shit,’ guys, I am appalled, APPALLED, that nobody has mentioned Real Dolls yet. Those things are $6000!
And I’m not even TOUCHING that footprint site. I would just go nuts over it.
That’s a ‘shit buying women’ thing.
RE: Nepenthe
HEYO! Where’s that ‘instant rimshot’ site when i need it…
Sorry to necro this thread, but I just watched Save The Green Planet and I wanted to thank David for plugging it, because I wouldn’t have even heard of it if not for this post. Thanks, David!