[SlowRobotAhead]

I like that the thing people make fun of Alex Jones for the most is that "chemicals were turning the frogs gay!" ... and then that turned out to be effectively true.

EDIT: Sorry if you don't like this, but it's true. This isn't a defense of Jones's tactics or character, just that people make fun of him for an outlandish claim he was more or less right about.

[cwkoss]

The paper is interesting, though I think "turned the frogs gay" is probably less clear than "common pesticide causes male frogs to develop female morphology and reproductive function".

https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/03/01/frogs/

Seems like atrazine should probably be taken off the market. Scary for both humans and animals that we are dumping so much endocrine disruptor into our water table.

"[m]aternal exposure to atrazine in drinking water has been associated with low fetal weight and heart, urinary, and limb defects in humans". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrazine

[bm1362]

The context is important, Alex Jones was using that study to say that the government was turning people gay intentionally.

[scottlocklin]

Probably so, but nobody else with his reach was covering this. Seems kind of important to me!

[ceejayoz]

That's simply false.

NYT in 2003: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/19/us/popular-pesticide-faul...

BBC in 2007: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1930658.stm

[scottlocklin]

Humor me for a minute here:

1) Google Atrazine (I get 1.7m hits)

2) Google "making frogs gay" (I get 4.9m hits)

I'm pretty sure this means Alex Jones did a better job of informing humanity that atrazine might be a problem than the NYT or any other news organization. I'm assuming Alex Jones is the source, or at least the main popularizer of the meme "making frogs gay." I could be wrong about that, and maybe it was someone else! Or maybe everything Alex Jones does is bad. But it looks like he raised an important issue and effectively put it into people's brains.

[ceejayoz]

That's a major goalpost move.

Let's evaluate it for a moment, though. You posit Jones helped inform humanity about atrazine... but your tallies indicate that at least 3.2M of the 4.9M (65%) "making frogs gay" search results don't mention the chemical (as they'd show up in both queries if they did).

edit: https://www.google.com/search?"making+frogs+gay"+atrazine

[Nasrudith]

Quality matters a lot in raising awareness of facts. You can't just say comicbooks are better at raising for showing everyone the dangers of radiation when basement levels of radon is depicted as causing people to melt into goo because lung cancer is also dangerous.

[scottlocklin]

You have to communicate with Alex Jones fans somehow if you believe in Democracy. I mean, what are the other options? Not telling them anything? Sending them LaTeX formatted papers?

[minkzilla]

source ?