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.
Obviously, that’s not quite how the conspiracy theorists would explain the look. Here’s one definition that @SuperSpacedad ran across:
Naturally, “fluoride stare” has become a meme. Here’s one that @SuperSpacedad found on Facebook:
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:
The #Fluoride Stare… https://t.co/EYSgNk9epO pic.twitter.com/zDAp0D6Xua
— The Global Elite (@TheGlobalElite) January 31, 2016
This is how I feel when I tell people about my all natural products 😂😂👊 pic.twitter.com/QcncVbGx7N
— Valerie (@valeriebowlingx) February 13, 2016
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:
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?
@ GOSM (and nice to see you back)
Don’t look down if you don’t really want to know, but you’ll be reassured if you do…..
But yes there is MMA for kids, but it’s very gender neutral. Don’t forget people like Ronda Rousey and Misha Tate are massive draws in the sport so young girls have plenty of role models. It’s certainly not a boys only thing.
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1450691/thumbs/h-MIXED-MARTIAL-ARTS-CHILDREN-960×540.jpg
There are no words to express how stupid this statement is. This is something a five-year-old would think.
Wait, all the time? Most women wear clothes all the time unless they are bathing or… having sex. I am confused.
“The Flouride Stare”, that’s the strain from trying to keep your eyes from rolling hard enough to damage the optic nerve.
I remember New World Order. He used to bother us at Hatewatch.
Oh my, somebody actually thinks feminist believe patriarchy is a conspiracy?!?!? Oh dear oh dear oh dear.
That’s … that’s pretty much in not-even-wrong territory, that is.
Somebody needs to learn the difference between a conspiracy and … a paradigm. Weltanschauung. An ideology, even.
I’ve actually seen someone dismissing patriarchy (as well as rape culture) as a conspiracy theory before, even after being carefully explained why it’s not. Something something women don’t have it that bad others have it worse, first world problems, privilege doesn’t exist because white people in poverty, third wave feminism is about female supremacy blah blah.
@Alan I was thinking about something — well, a bit more violent and bloody and fight-till-the-other-guy-is-unconscious than that, not what is more like an exercise/confidence-building class. Something more like a kiddie version of our old pal War Machine.:
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/08/21/is-war-machine-the-mixed-martial-arts-fighter-accused-of-brutally-beating-his-ex-a-mens-rights-activist/
@ IAmMarauder, @Fabe
To be fair, it’s the association between the two were life seems to be imitating art, as Fluoridation fears date back at least the Sixties or something. I think it was/is? one of the John Birch Society’s bugaboos. Regardless, anything can make ‘sense’ when you start with the conclusion you want to reach and work backwards to discover your premises.
Ah! Accumulation of that poison must be why death rates have shot up and life expectancy has got so much shorter over the past few decades!
Oh, wait…
Never mind that part of the reason for water fluoridation is because in many places with well water, fluoridation occurs naturally by leaching fluorides out of the minerals; and somebody noticed at one point that the people with higher fluoride levels in their well water also tended to have better teeth. So fluoride was added to city water to replicate something that was already happening naturally in many places anyway.
I so hate that. We are all aware that women in third world countries do have it worse than us in a lot of ways, but that doesn’t preclude us from discussing how to solve the problems women face in first world countries. It doesn’t even imply that because we want to improve women’s rights in first world countries that we don’t care about the issues women elsewhere face. Skin cancer is very survivable when compared to pancreatic cancer, but you don’t hear people claiming we shouldn’t discuss cures for skin cancer because pancreatic cancer patients have it so much worse.
In continuation to my above, there is a maximum safe level of fluoridation before you start getting negative side effects. There are also places where the natural well water exceeds that.
I can’t believe nobody’s posted this yet:
The incomparable Peter Sellers demonstrates a Fluoride Stare.
Mainstream Medicine is the one patriarchal institution which is seemingly “immune” from feminist skepticism and analysis.
This… those are all actual things he said? (I understand they’re paraphrased but still.)
He must be a riot at parties.
Seriously, what do these morons even think fluoride does?
Mind control! Some folks think fluoride is a drug that keeps the citizenry docile and unlikely to rise up against the government.
I wonder how many of them embarrassed themselves by having panicked public hissy fits about dihydrogen monoxide, and have been searching for an excuse to be afraid of water ever since.
Makes you susceptible to government propaganda. Like the idea that Fluoride is safe.
Fluoride: it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping!
Never thought we’d all be waxing nostalgic over Slavey, but here we are.
Of course they’re after our bodily fluids.
If they weren’t then what else could they use to inflate our flat earth? Pears?
Get trooth!
I wonder if any of these nimnuls realize that fluoride is also present in green tea, which the ancient Chinese recommended to prevent tooth decay. And if they do — does it stop them from drinking it?
They really are the sort who would cut off their own noses to spite their faces.
All the content warnings:
Feminists talk plenty about how doctors take women’s pain less seriously. We talk about how research tends to be done on male subjects – both on the animal and human level – which means medicines and other treatment methods tend to be made for male bodies and that has a negative effect on women’s health.
That doesn’t mean we have to be anti-science. I’m not sure if you’re talking about fluoride or vaccines, but it doesn’t matter. Both do much more good than harm.
Translation: I know fuck-all about feminist critique of both research regarding and the practice of medicine.