Jokodo
Veteran Member
I only recently stumbled upon what seems to be a real segment of the "truther" movement, at least on youtube (yeah, don't tell me, youtube): The "Flat Earth Conspiracy".
It seems to be a rather recent phenomenon - most or all of the videos are from the last couple of years, and a lot of the people commenting approvingly say something like "I used to be a globe-believer myself half a year ago". I know a "Flat Earth Society" has been in existence for the better part of a 100 years, but I always thought this was a marginal phenomenon even among the circus that is the US Christian Right. But by the looks of it the idea is spreading within that biome.
Now I'm a genuine fan of Hanlon's razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"), but I find it hard to fathom that much stupidity. So I'd be very thankful about any evidence, ever so incidental, that the Flat Earth Movement is something other than 1000s of voting age adults in industrialised societies with internet access thinking that triangulation was made up by the masons/Jesuits/NASA. Some suggestions:
Please, someone... anyone? Give me one argument not to believe that actual adults in their thousands believe the Earth is flat and NASA invented trigonometry! This one time, I'll take a very flimsy one.
It seems to be a rather recent phenomenon - most or all of the videos are from the last couple of years, and a lot of the people commenting approvingly say something like "I used to be a globe-believer myself half a year ago". I know a "Flat Earth Society" has been in existence for the better part of a 100 years, but I always thought this was a marginal phenomenon even among the circus that is the US Christian Right. But by the looks of it the idea is spreading within that biome.
Now I'm a genuine fan of Hanlon's razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"), but I find it hard to fathom that much stupidity. So I'd be very thankful about any evidence, ever so incidental, that the Flat Earth Movement is something other than 1000s of voting age adults in industrialised societies with internet access thinking that triangulation was made up by the masons/Jesuits/NASA. Some suggestions:
- The Flat Earth Movement is a mission to divert rationalists from the real battles, to take there time away from arguing against the conspiracy theories/anti-science beliefs that really matter (along the lines of "Fuck it, let'em 'teach the controversy' when it comes to evolution or climate change, as long as we don't have to teach the controversy about the shape of the Earth*
- A meta-conspiracy against conspiracy theorists: Along the lines of "let's make the people who've seen through our machinations look stupid by creating a ton of puppet accounts that make-believe spread the truth about the Rockefellers/9-11/the evolution hoax while also prominently professing a believe in the flat earth, so we can always say 'but anyone who claims to have evidence for this probably also believes the earth is flat', so the regular joe will turn away from those other ideas" (this one has actually been proposed by some right wing conspiracy theorists: "the man" created Flat Earth to distract us from population engineering (aka chemtrails) etc.)
- I large scale high-school project: High school science teachers have created those Flat Earth channels to test their students understanding of the subject by letting them argue against those ludicrous arguments.
- Whatever else you can think of...
Please, someone... anyone? Give me one argument not to believe that actual adults in their thousands believe the Earth is flat and NASA invented trigonometry! This one time, I'll take a very flimsy one.