Hot Take: Flat Earthers should be banished to orbit.
Madeline: Science denial really grinds my metaphorical gears, and Flat Earthers are some of the most egregious about it. So manhandle them into strait jackets and shove them in the damn rocket already.
Madeline: I haven’t encountered any (that I know of), so cannot answer this question.
Madeline: Though I would be quite interested in what ANYONE would stand to gain from lying about the shape of the world. I’d really want to dissect those motives.
say I’m a flat earther, I say you look at the oceans and they’re flat, and you look at water and would expect it to just spill over (how can it be flat on a round earth? it makes no sense how the waters look on a round earth…)
how do we know the earth is the shape it is then if people are not honestly giving photographic evidence of its shape?
Or say with GPS, I say that could be done on the land, there is no need to rely on satellites. Then how do we need to believe in satellites orbiting the earth, when land operations are sufficient for explaining them?
Or say someone says they don’t know why people are lying about the earth being flat, when we know it is. What are they trying to hide by lying about its obvious flat shape?
and so on, to give you an idea of how a conversation might go
On the contrary, we need alternate opinions to sharpen our own arguments. Banning them leads to an echo chamber effect where nothing ever challenges our thinking… which is a big part of the problems facing the world today.
We need to allow different opinions, sure. But, do we need more morons and conspiracy theorists? They feed and exist because of the amplifying factor of social media.
I usually welcome any challenges to my opinions, but I expect a minimum requirement for self reflection and critical thought. This doesn’t pass that bar.
The other problem is that it's a slippery slope. Theoretically whoever would be in control of essentially killing these people would be the ones who make the final decision on who those people actually are.
With that level of power corruption will be unavoidable and people that are not even actually flat earthers will die as well due to their deaths being convenient in unrelated ways for the group that decides which flat earthers get jettisoned into space. I don't think anyone should have that power, humanity has more than proven by now that placing people into positions of that much power never works out squeaky clean.
I'm supporting you from another angle, not contesting you, my argument goes against OP's suggestion, and yeah I don't think OP was being literal, but it's a fun thought experiment
Ah, gotcha. As a thought experiment it falls on the same moral issues as with any capital punishment. The bigger problems I think are with how woefully unprepared society is for the incentives advertisement based social media has.
One might think, “what does advertisement have to do with this?”. It turns out that outrage is much more engaging than any intellectual discourse that discusses nuances. So, Facebook and it’s ilk amplifies all and any cancerous misinformation. Humans being malleable believe what they are exposed to, and measles outbreaks are now a thing again.
Flat earthers aren’t the problem. Neither are Maga morons, Q-anons, anti-vaxxers. They aren’t even the weakest souls. Humans aren’t all that different. Just different circumstances. And, the problems are those that encourage and facilitate those circumstances. Put those in a shuttle destined to the sun.
I feel that way about most deniers/conspiracy theorists/religious nuts etc but we’re always going to have them.
I wouldn’t be sad if these flat earthers went to find this supposed edge of the world and jumped off though. We have enough problems here on “God’s dinner plate flying through space.”
They’ll think they got strapped into a simulator and are just looking at far away TV screens or some shit. They don’t tend to let evidence sway them from their beliefs
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