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The Fluoride Stare: The conspiracy theory catchphrase taking the flat earth by storm!

My contribution to the Flat Earth meme pool.
My contribution to the Flat Earth meme pool.

So last night, courtesy of Twitterer extraordinaire @SuperSpacedad, I learned of a new catchphrase that’s apparently catching on (or maybe not) amongst the internet’s conspiracy theorists: the Fluoride Stare, which is the blank-faced, glazed-eye look conspiracy theorists apparently encounter quite regularly when they start explaining their favorite conspiracy theories at great length.

Or, as @SuperSpacedad put it.

fluoride Staredad ‏@SuperSpacedad My new catchphrase is 'fluoride stare.' It's conspiracy crank jargon for 'person spacing out on my mad bloviating'

Obviously, that’s not quite how the conspiracy theorists would explain the look. Here’s one definition that @SuperSpacedad ran across:

stare1

Naturally, “fluoride stare” has become a meme. Here’s one that @SuperSpacedad found on Facebook:

fluormeme

I’m not sure where the original picture came from, but as someone pointed out to me on Twitter, that looks a lot like Thom Yorke there on the right.

But what a perfect illustration of crank magnetism: Of course the Flat Earth “Truthers” also believe that water fluoridation is part of a global flat-earth-wide conspiracy to “sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids,” as one famous fictional conspiracy theorist once put it.

The meme has made inroads amongst other sorts of conspiracy theorists as well:

Anyway, as soon as I saw this meme I realized that the mememaker had missed the obvious opportunity to combine it with this popular meme:

look1

look2

So I whipped up the meme at the top of the page and introduced it into the wilds of Twitter. Then I drank a nice cool glass of fluoridated water. No, I actually did.

Flat Earthers — you’re welcome!

Longtime readers of We Hunted the Mammoth — from the time when it was still known by the rather silly name Man Boobz — will no doubt recall the legendary MRA troll NWOslave and his obsession with the alleged evils of fluoride. Which he invariably referred to as “flouride.”

As Shaneon Garrity paraphrased his version of the theory in her legendary NWOslave Book of Learnin, which you can find in my post here:

Children are lined up and injected with a dangerous chemical called flouride to make them stupid.

NWOslave, a veritable magnetic pole of crank magnetism, had many other unique thoughts on medicine and science:

Mammograms cause breast cancer. Doctors advise women to get mammograms at least once a week until they develop cancer from it.

Evolution is impossible, because otherwise we’d be able to watch dogs evolve into super-dogs. Unless anyone can produce evidence of dogs with super-powers, evolution is a myth.

To be fair, he had unique perspectives on any number of topics:

The University of Cincinnati and all University of California schools have gotten rid of their engineering and computer science departments and replaced them with women’s studies and gender studies.

There are twice as many teachers and half as many students in U.S. schools as there were 20 years ago. These teachers spend class time walking around in their underwear to arouse elementary-school boys.

Spanish and Russian use the same alphabet. The Russians just have a funny kind of handwriting called cryillic script.

The musical Chicago is a polemic about how men should be shot to death. It was written by a female college student last year.

Women become sexually aroused by wearing clothes.

There are no poor women. Whenever a woman needs anything, she sits in the middle of the street and cries, and passerby throw food and money at her for free.

Without government, homosexuality would not exist.

Someday a straight white man will beat up a lesbian for molesting a five-year-old. Everyone in the world will sympathize with the lesbian and immediately legalize child molestation.

There are many more of these lovely “facts” to be found in the Book of Learnin.

I wonder if NWO slave has become a flat earther?

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Sir Bodsworth Rugglesby III
Sir Bodsworth Rugglesby III
8 years ago

What you are about to see is the truth, and by truth we mean lies. But they’re entertaining lies, and isn’t that the real truth? The answer is ‘no’.

Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Buttercup Q. Skullpants
8 years ago

True fact: one of the early promoters of fluoridated water was Frederick Stare.

I imagine the non-fluoride stare features a lot of dental work.

A. Noyd
A. Noyd
8 years ago

Why does the lady on the right have so much tapioca in her bubble tea?

Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
8 years ago

Any doctor tells me to get mammograms every week, I’m getting a new doctor. Ouch!

Fabe
Fabe
8 years ago

Flat earth and now fluoridation? Real life follows now the Steve Jackson card game.

I think a Illuminati plot web laid out by a blind monkey would make more sense then what real world flat earthers are trying to sell

Catherwood
Catherwood
8 years ago

As for me, that’s my “He’s not serious. OH MY GOD HE’S SERIOUS” look. I’ve been dealing with creationists for just about my entire life, and I’ve gotten that look down pat (my sister calls it my “fish face”, because fish have no expression, according to her).

Creationism is great preparation for dealing with MRA folks, by the way: one rapidly learns that they are impossible to parody because it’s quite literally true that they can out-stupid you even if you’re TRYING to be stupid. It’s almost impressive: breath-taking idiocy.

Msexceptiontotherule
Msexceptiontotherule
8 years ago

Yes, doctors make women get weekly (why not daily – accomplish desired result faster?) mammograms because they want women to get cancer! Treating the sick so that they will get better? Nooooo! Doctors actually want to make people die!

GeoffR
GeoffR
8 years ago

FWIW, the original seems to be by an artist called Alex Gross. It’s one of his paintings shown here:

http://alexgross.com/paintings/

kale
kale
8 years ago

Its a lot easier to not be angry at a hater whose mind is so fucked up (I hope that doesnt sound ableist, Im not saying he has an illness, Im saying… well, idk whats wrong with his thinking but it aint exactly realistic, right?)

katz
8 years ago

if only those were direct quotes from NWOslave, I think I’d kind of love him.
Since I’m sure his actual words were far more offensive, gross, and tedious, and far LESS concise and entertaining… well I’m sure I love him about as much as any MRA (which is to say, not at all).

Those happen to be paraphrases. “Eat a fish, eat a fetus” is a direct quote, though.

eli
eli
8 years ago

Slavey was one of kind. Remember when he crashed Captain Awkward’s?

Good times 🙂

Kat
Kat
8 years ago

There are no poor women. Whenever a woman needs anything, she sits in the middle of the street and cries, and passerby throw food and money at her for free.

I’m having trouble believing that this guy is for real. Because the above is demonstrably untrue. He’s never seen it happen. No one–okay, practically no one–has ever seen it happen. (It’s a big world. The human race has a long history. It’s probably happened and maybe more than once.)

I wonder if NWOSlave just wants attention really, really badly and will say anything to get it.

Kinda sad. Kinda pathetic.

Definitely not this:

Kinda young, kinda now

Kinda free, kinda wow!

Charlie!

Dan Germouse
8 years ago

The “fluoride stare” is a silly idea and I wish people wouldn’t use it. However, that doesn’t change the fact that using public water supplies to deliver any medication is ridiculous, let alone a highly toxic cumulative poison such as fluoride. I have asked many forced-fluoridation fanatics to tell me how much accumulated fluoride in the body they think is safe. So far not a single one of them has been able to answer the question.
http://forcedfluoridationfreedomfighters.com/a-preliminary-investigation-into-fluoride-accumulation-in-bone/

Sporkey
Sporkey
8 years ago

Didn’t NWO say that he actually saw a woman crying in the street and someone gave her stuff? He was totally adamant that this happened.

Shaenon
8 years ago

And once more, with feeling: Holy cow, is HE full of shit. I’ve learned Spanish and am now learning Russian, and I think they may have all of five letters in common. Same as Russian has with English, for those keeping score.

I can’t remember which thread this happened in, but it was an amazingly long, contentious argument. People tried in vain for days to convince him that the Russian alphabet is not the same as the English alphabet, even though some of the characters look similar. Nope. Dude flat-out would not accept that he was wrong about something, no matter how minor or unrelated to his main argument (re: women, suckiness of).

It was classic NWO. Darned if I don’t miss the little bugger.

Claire
Claire
8 years ago

My three dogs have super-powers:

* Can take up an entire king-sized bed with medium-sized bodies.
* Ability to extract biscuit out of me with one look.
* Astounding hearing (must be why they’re barking at what I perceive as nothing; I mean, it can’t be that it’s just a wall).
* Ability to create life-sized copies of themselves in the form of fur they’ve shed.
* Etc.

Have I just proven evolution? Please advise.

katz
8 years ago

And then there was the time he insisted X, Y, and Z were not letters of the English alphabet.

bluecat
bluecat
8 years ago

That is exactly the look I give people when my thoughts are:

– You can’t really believe that.

– Punchline comes… where?

– Uh-oh, seems like you do believe it.

– Stupid or actually dangerous?

– Can I use my peripheral vision to identify nearest escape route?

– Dang, why can I not projectile vomit at will?

I have perfected this look over decades of being around aggressively racist relatives, but generally now try to organise my life so I don’t need it.

It is the perfect alibi for never having your pet theory questioned. People don’t disagree with me because I’m not explaining well or because they can detect a flaw in the argument: they disagree with me because they are drug addled delusive sheeple and/or paid corporate shills. Anyone else would immediately be struck by the brilliance and truth that shines out of my bottom’s every utterance.

Temascos
Temascos
8 years ago

“Women become sexually aroused wearing clothes”

Guess I’ll have to let people know, they’ve been living this life in a non-aroused state while wearing clothes when this dude’s got it all figured out.

Kreator
Kreator
8 years ago

Less funny was that he thinks 9 year old girls wear bikinis to arouse men

That reminded me of the sheer creepiness of child beauty pageants 🙁

You know, I’ve actually held chunks of fluorite with my bare hands a few times in the past. Can fluoride be absorbed through the skin? Oh my goodness, I have to get my aura checked with crystals!

Patricia Kayden
Patricia Kayden
8 years ago

“Women become sexually aroused by wearing clothes.”

So many of NWOslave’s comments are hilarious but this one hit me in my funny bone. Very perceptive fellow.

Jewish Messiah
Jewish Messiah
8 years ago

Trying to climb back upon the Bad Science bandwagon, are you? Your crowd is all scientific and the MRAs are crackpots? That old shtick?
Maybe you should take a look at the International Skeptics Forum instead of the horribly biased ‘Rational’ Wiki.
I’ve been exposing Bad Science in academia and nobody has been able to counter my arguments. Bad Science like Moral Psychology upon which leeches
like you are ultimately dependent. Remove the Bad Science from academia, and leeches like you, who know absolutely nothing about science, can’t call
themselves ‘scientific’ any more.
(And Patriarchy Theory is the most ridiculous conspiracy theory of all due to how enormous that conspiracy would have to be, if it were true.
Patriarchy Theory is more implausible than Holocaust Denial Conspiracy which itself is more implausible then 9/11 Truth. The bigger the conspiracy
needs to be, the more implausible it becomes. And since Patriarchy Conspiracy, if it were true, has to be thousands of years old … spanning cultures …
even cultures that couldn’t have know about each other’s existence! Did those Patriarchs use alien communication technology or something?
Well, you get the point. Or rather, you never will. Which is why you can’t understand the Scientific Method. But that makes it very interesting for me
to know exactly why you reject Holocaust Denial and 9/11 Truth. I reject them because of the no leak argument, which makes the conspiracies implausible.
But you can’t do that since it would lead to rejecting Patriarchy Theory, as well. So why do you reject 9/11 Truth and Holocaust Denial yet accept
Patriarchy Theory? From the above it follows that you cannot have scientific reasons for this. So it must be just sentiment, prejudice, bias. The signs
of the very weakest of minds.)

kobun37
kobun37
8 years ago

I actually ran across NWOslave replying on some news story relatively recently. As in within the last couple of months. Wish I could remember what it was, but I didn’t save the link. I’m sure you’ll all be totally shocked to hear he hasn’t changed a bit.

GrumpyOldSocialJusticeMangina

That reminded me of the sheer creepiness of child beauty pageants

The JonBenet Ramsey murder led to a number of TV shows about child beauty pageants, and I thought it was just about the creepiest thing I’d ever seen. Talk about reinforcing regressive gender norms. The parallel for boys would be mixed martial arts fights. (I suppose there is probably such a thing, but I’d prefer not to know for sure.)