Save the Dude Planet! Or, Paul Elam Yells at the Ladies for Buying Lady Crap
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.
Posted on November 29, 2012, in a voice for men, antifeminism, armageddon, evil women, grandiosity, men who should not ever be with women ever, misogyny, MRA, oppressed men, paul elam, playing the victim, princesses and tagged a voice for men, antifeminism, consumerism, environmentalism, men's rights, misogyny, MRA. Bookmark the permalink. 324 Comments.
Sorry, not that far down, Sweden and many other European countries seem to be a bit smaller… whatever, considering how much they must import to Iceland it still shows the impact of where your electricity comes from.
Ditto. And the other skills involved in homemaking are pretty attractive, too. I have yet to encounter a woman who has ever, ever had the thought, “Ew, this guy can cook tasty meals and clean up his own shit? Ugh, I HATE delicious food and a clean living space!”
I’ve had some really good results from homeopathic remedies. But, yanno, YMMV.
I can get codeine OTC in Canada (I think, it’s been years), but I have a bugger of a time getting kava kava, which is an herb that is a muscle relaxant and stops an anxiety attack cold. It’s been used in Indonesia for thousands of years. It’s not available from retail outlets in Canada because some freaking herbaceutical corporations (in France, I think) started buying up the dregs of the crop, putting it into pills, and causing liver damage about ten years ago. Yeah, you have to PEEL the root before you ingest it, because the PEEL is bad for your liver. Which they would have known if they had done their research and hadn’t just gone on a money run.
So mystery solved, but it’s still not legal to import it for retail (you can import it for your individual use, but you can’t sell it in your health food store). Ten years later. Because, according to the rep from Health Canada that I saw at the time (ten years ago), they want to have a level playing field for pharmaceutical corporations, and not have them have to compete with health food stores. (I’m paraphrasing only slightly.)
Out of curiosity, do you actually mean homeopathic remedies as in the “water has magical memories” stuff, or do you mean herbal/traditional medicine? People sometimes use the term to mean both, but I’m pretty sure the only one that was being scoffed at here is the former.
1,28 earths. And that’s ’cause I eat meat every day. But there was no ticky box for “pigs my boyfriend’s mom raises in her back yard”.
But my most important question is — 50-100 square meters is considered a studio/small apartment? In what magnificent country is that?! DO THEY TAKE IMMIGRANTS?!?!
Boyfriend and I currently live in a 2 room (1 bedroom?) apartment of remarkably huge 35 square meters, and we can pretty much barely afford it, but everything smaller seems to be on a far too high demand and was already rented. And that’s our first non-studio apartment. Everything before that was in the 15 sq m area and that’s being generous.
… how does one heat up 50 sq m?
Well, no one’s said that you can’t get a nice placebo effect.
Yeah, some herbal remedies are potent and can seriously interfere with other medication. Not all of them work as advertised, but I strongly think they should not be classified as altmed because they have demonstratable effects on the body. The ones demonstrated to be useful should simply be called medicine.
Homeopathy on the other hand has not one molecule of active ingredients in it, due to how the remedies are made. It’s a faith medice and a classic example of placebo. Placebo can indeed be very useful, because the placebo effect is also a real and most often beneficial phenomenom. But homeopathy is almost always claimed to be something else than it is, with very wild and out of this reality “theories” presented to explain how it “works” (quantum mechanics and vague “energy” being just a few; the explanations seem to follow the latest discoveries of real science, usually misinterpreting and twisting the science to fit homeopathy’s marketing needs).
It can and will work as well as placebo would. I would fully support it as a complementary therapy if it wasn’t for the lies, be they intentional or simple misunderstandings about how it works.
And talking of herbal remedies… if you’re into experimenting with a huge variety of herbals and ever happen to travel to Amsterdam, try the “smart shops”. That’s different from the coffee shops; smart shops specialise in stuff like kava kava and hundreds other traditional herbs for various uses.
Additional anecdata: I don’t even like children and am attracted to men “nurturing” them. Of course men adoring cats just slay me. Data: http://hotguyswithcats.com/ (Most of these men have body types that don’t typically do anything for me… but kitties!)
Also, I’m pretty sure that this video didn’t get 1.5 million views solely because of the hedgepeeg.
Yeah, I think all of Elam’s stuff has the same rythm: “Females have cooties, females have cooties, females have cooties.”
I think I got it. You don’t have to write anything else for the rest of your life, boss.
Errr, chucky boy, afirmative action isn’t a law. There’s Equal Oppurtunity Employment, but that’s different….ah, never mind. You’re one of our more boring trolls.
Though If I could ask everyone here if you ever had someone (a co-worker with no management power) inform you that you were probably hired because you’re a minority. It happened to me- out of the blue at my last work place, and they were smiling a little bit. What is that anyway? I had great job reviews, won awards and kudos from the public, and I get told this by some co-worker who would often ask me for advice and help. Is it smugness or insecurity?
The funny part is that people often told me this oh-so-clever co-worker of mine was hired because of who his dad was (kinda well-known reporter in Washington).
Legacy hires like to assume that everyone else got their job by gaming the system one way or another. That way they absolve themselves of responsibility for cheating.
Maybe that’s it, bewilderness. Still, I would never say that to anyone.
That is where decent human being 101 comes in to play, innit?
Don’t be vain but screw you if you don’t end up as my version of attractive!
@Nepenthe awwww that made my day! And kind, nurturing men are extremely attractive, if only because those are attractive/admirable qualities in anyone, but also because it kind of precludes the possibility of that dude being a scary, violent person who will murder you.
I mean the magic water/sugar pills. They either work great or do nothing at all (unlike chemicals, whether synthetic or herbal, which kill hundreds of people every year). If it’s the placebo effect, I’m cool with that, but I’ve also used various hands-on systems (Reiki, Therapeutic Touch) and acupuncture, and there’s something going on there. I think we just haven’t figured out the physiological mechanism, and I’m okay with that. I don’t in any way consider myself a victim of fraudulent advertising or a credulous dupe.
Well, with Reiki and homeopathy, the laws of physics would have to be vastly different from our current understanding of them for them to be real. But if you’ve got the money to piss away and it makes you happy, go fer it.
Actually, there’s a study done at Linköping University showing that fake acupuncture is as efficient as real acupunture. (Fake - the needles actually don’t enter the body, they give you a tiny prick and then withdraws inside the needle’s handle, sort of like a theater knife, plus they are placed at random over the body, while real acupuncture uses needles that actually enter the body and are placed at specific spots.) So presumably it’s just placebo there as well.
The study was done because the researchers thought that it MIGHT be the case that acupuncture actually does something to the body. Like, it’s not just water, it’s needles you stick into people’s bodies at certain spots. But, alas, seems to be placebo and nothing else. However, media reporting about the study misrepresented it. The study tested the effects of acupunkture, fake acupunkture AND regular medicine against nausea after radiation treatment against cancer, and it turns out (which is in itself really interesting, of course) that acupunkture AND fake acupunkture were both way better than regular medicine at treating nausea. The media just didn’t mention the fake acupunkture part.
The study is here in Swedish (if anyone, uh, want to look it up for themselves by using Google translate or something http://www.liu.se/forskning/forskningsnyheter/1.261275?l=sv )
In Sweden we have a term which is “natural medicine”. The manufacturers are only allowed to call something “natural medicine” if it’s directly based on plants or animals (such as fish oil), if there’s a tradition of using it to cure certain ills or strengthen the body, if it’s been proven non-harmful (doesn’t mean completely free of side-effects - many people, for instance, report mild allergic symptoms from various “natural medicines”), AND if the manufacturer only recommends it for conditions that don’t normally require that you go to a doctor.
I tend to assume that “natural medicines” are largely ineffectual, since if it did have an actual effect, the manufacturers could earn more money by having it properly tested to prove it’s effect and then sell it as real medicine. At the same time, if a product isn’t too expensive I guess it could be worth a try.
That study you mentioned is a brilliant example of the power of placebo. It is a very real effect and it explains how every altmed technique works. Of course, we don’t fully understand placebo yet but it is some kind of body’s internal healing and pain relief system. And it can be triggered in many, many ways. The fact it can be triggered in so many ways shows that there is no inherently different mechanism of action in the placebo or for example homeopathy itself. All that matters is that something radical and “ritualistic” is done. A fake surgery (yes, seriously) is a stronger placebo than a sugar pill. Two sugarpills work better than one. Red sugar pill causes people to feel energetic and blue sugar pill calms them down. Acupuncture is also quite “radical” due to the needles, it’s the idea of needles entering the skin that is the trigger.
And it doesn’t matter if you know this is why it feels like it works like an active ingredient would. And it’s also not “all between your ears” and people who are “more gullible” do not benefit from placebo more than the “less gullible”. Gullibility has nothing to do with benefiting, placebo is about tricking your body and non-conscious systems, not your conscious mind (although a good number of practicioners would do both as history has proven). Of course, different triggers work differently for different people so one might feel better after acupuncture and the other not. I’ve tried it and it did make me less nauseous. That’s all good as long as there’s honesty in the science done in altmed. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with placebo, and it should probably be used a lot more in our age of unlimited odd feelings and syndromes, but it has to recognised as what it is.
I.. didn’t think my little rant on insurance would spring a little off-topic discussion but
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…