I feel like it’s been memory holed, but I remember 00’s flat earth being genuinely smart people using it to illustrate the ridiculousness of teaching creation beside evolution, which was a push around that time. It was a Church of Satan style mockery, but I guess the arguments were too convincing.
I need to become an author, create a Cthulu religion, buy lots of boats, and an island with a giant Cthulu statue with no explanation to keep it a mystery. I’ll build a church and instruct everyone to stay away from the island. Inside the statue I’ll pay a person to sell merchandise…
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.
This is what happened at the Donald on reddit. It was a place to meme Trump’s idiotic presidential bid. But as soon as he got real chance at the election it was soon overran by the MAGA crowd.
I recall it being an argument in a high school debate club or someother which made it’s way onto 4chan and found supporters, who then proceeded to do what 4chan does best, and troll people/targets of their derision. Basically they assumed no one was stupid enough to believe it and were shockingly surprised.
I member… i learned of it from a vsauce video i watched when it first dropped. Was mindblown years later when ppl were touting the flat earth society seriously. Their tagline was literally, “We Have Members Around the Globe!”
Unfortunately arguments also don’t work very well. People only change their mind when their mind changes. They basically have to figure it out themselves. No amount of external arguments can ever do that.
The way to encourage people to change their minds is simply to question them until they start thinking about the topic, and then give them access to information.
My favourite ‘thought trigger’ point is from Bill Burr, it goes something like: “lets for a second say that the earth is flat, then what possible reason could there be for governments, scientists, airlines, internet warriors, etc have for convincing you that it is a sphere. What do they have to gain by you believing this?”.
This is also how people discover is some religious thing, so what a famous dude in my country did to convince flat earthers was pointing out that the bible talks about the moon. It can’t be a satanist conspiracy now.
My guess is neither of those. People don’t really base their world view on facts. Maybe his life situation improved, he found a healthier community or a hobby
It sure as hell wasn’t strangers with evidence-based arguments that did it. I’ve seen plenty of cultists on reddit before I left. They are like brick walls and each fact is a rubber ball.
Has anyone seen Behind the Curve? Most of these flat earth people seem to possess some level of critical thinking, just… not enough. That, or their pride or obstinacy get in the way. At the end of the documentary, a team of flat-earthers perform an actual, well thought out experiment. It’s… well, just watch.
Best part? Immediately after this, they discard the results of the experiment saying the premise was faulty. Somehow.
The problem doesn’t stem from their critical thinking skills, but rather, a combination of indoctrination and religious beliefs which cause a series of presuppositions to supersede the conclusions the rest of us have taken as presuppositions.
In some sense I admire their dedication to challenge established facts about reality, that should be done in general.
To clarify the statement about indoctrination and religion: many people are not aware that flat earthers are religious wackjobs. Their thought process is as follows:
“If the universe contains trillions of celestial bodies and they’re all spherical, then we are inconsequential. It must be the case that we are special, and earth is not a sphere, but is flat.”
Some flat earthers will claim space doesn’t exist, even though their bible tells them God created other planets.
Well, Columbus, Galilei, Kepler & co. challenged what was considered “established fact” about the shape and place of the earth in their times.
It is not wrong to challenge what is considered “established facts”. Problem is when you discard results that are going against your preoposition. I wouldn’t consider flat earthers to be particular religious as a crowd though. At least in my country they mostl come from the esoteric scene, where you get a mixed bowl of esoteric nonsene, conspiracy theories, and fascist ideology.
One thing to point out is that Columbus wasn’t challenging established thinking about the earth’s shape, but rather its size. The educated populace at the time was on the ball with the earth being a sphere.
My recollection is that Columbus was also wrong about its size. He thought the distance from Europe to Asia via the Atlantic was much smaller than it really is, but got lucky and found the Americas on the way
And the critics of Columbus WERE RIGHT! He was vastly underestimating the size of the earth. If North America hadn’t existed and it had just been one big ocean, he and the expedition would have perished in the middle of nowhere. Of course, the size had been calculated before his expedition (the actual values turned out be extremely close to what had been calculated), so he should have known better. There’s a reason he had trouble getting funding for his expedition…
I’m still somewhat frustrated that our history classes taught (maybe still do, I’ve been out of high school a long time) that all the naysayers thought the earth was flat.
Meh, our esoterics are basically religious anarchists or spiritual hippies. They still fall into all the trapping of religion without the “organized” part of “organized religion”.
Try being in their shoes: you set up an experiment to prove the earth is not flat and is indeed round, you run the experiment and at the end you realise your experiment fail and would prove the earth is flat. Would you changwe your point of view ? I know I wouldn’t, I would immediately assume I am an idiot and messed up the experiment, because I am so much convinced it is round, it would be much more realistic to assume I messed up.
If I do it 10 times and each time the result is ‘flat’, and 99.99% of scientists in the field say it’s flat, at that point I would do some self evaluation to see why I was so hell bent on being wrong
This. This is exactly it. Commonly referred to as cognitive dissonance where when presented with evidence differing from that of one’s beliefs, they will discard said evidence as faulty and will double down going deeper into their wrongfully held beliefs. Cognitive dissonance can be overcome but it is very difficult to do so, especially if you aren’t willing to entertain the idea that your beliefs might be wrong.
Have you ever had the change your fundamental understanding of the world? What if you found out today that our entire understanding of science and the universe was flawed due to the interference of some outside force that caused us to make all kinds of faulty observations.
Would you instantly accept it as fact when presented with evidence? Or would your lifetime of observations still carry weight?
I have been on both sides on this. I was trapped in a Buddhist group. Considering that the teachings where flawed or wrong would basically mean that I would lose out on that community. Believe me, the sense of belonging can be euphoric in a religion.
Of course, changing your view in isolation is quite easy. It becomes harder when a big part of your life requires you to believe.
Also, when I was younger my need to “be right “ was quite strong. I had severe self confidence issues, so “being right” was the one thing I latched on to. Admitting being wrong gets really hard once your self confidence is that shaky.
I mean, I would technically still be welcome there. But no longer believing does mean I can’t really feel connected with that group. And thus losing community. Maybe “trapped” was a strong word to use here, but trying to discuss the flaws was just met with equally flawed arguments. Just look up the “five mindfulness trainings” from plum village and it should be easy to see how they can become problematic when followed to the letter.
I am crazy impressed that anyone could follow that path and not just drop off the internet in shame when they realized. I hope if anything I view in the same manner ever comes up as fabricated I’m as brave.
I used to be a 9/11 truther, convinced of ex military, windowless jets with missile pods, thermite and a global conspiracy to kill thousands just to fake the death of a few important scientists who were on the plane so they could be kidnapped and enslaved to prevent them leaking government secrets while also making bank on the insurance claims and destroying evidence of massive corruption and compromat, just like the scuttling of the titanic.
Im still not really sure when and why I changed my mind.
I’ve always felt there was some stuff on the saudi side that was left unexplored but know that a passenger plane could take out a building, and working in vfx, knowing there was no way to fake it on site. life will offer more examples of ambiguous outcomes, and they’ll be replete with government fuckery in some cases, in others, it’ll just be random tragedy. good luck!
Aliens might be real, though, I just doubt all the supposed sightings that can be chalked up to mistaking one thing for another, or just gov’t tech that we simply don’t know about.
I view flat Earthers and people that believe in aliens as polar opposites. Flat Earthers think that the Earth is special and the center of the universe, with the heavens revolving around us. Alien believers see the universe as being incredibly vast and recognize that there’s nothing inherently special about our world and that life almost certainly exists elsewhere.
Oh I didn’t realize you were talking about people that believed they’ve been abducted. I thought you just meant people that believed that aliens existed in general.
I think they were referring to alien consipracists, who much like flat earthers believe in a global hoax committed by the elite (read: Jews and Liberals) to keep us misinformed on the true nature of our reality (for some reason). In that way they are very much cut from the same cloth.
I absolutely believe that other life exists in our vast universe. This is a pretty common opinion among scientific thinkers, space enthusiasts etc. that the universe is simply too huge for us to be all alone.
I also believe that due to that vastness, we’ll never meet any aliens, unless we punch into Europa someday and there happen to be some fish down there.
UFO enthusiasts, on the other hand, have a position that is much less supported by science.
Flat earthers are easily radicalised into right wing belief like “The world is controlled by Jewish lizards” and “the election was stolen from Trump” and “the vaccine contains a bill gates microchip that makes you gay”. And right wing conspiracy theorists will willingly spend their life savings on Alex Jones dick engorgement supplements while generating culture war controversy to draw political attention away from actual issues like climate change and worker’s rights that may harm big business interests.
Think of it this way: in the mediaeval age, you armed your peasants with shields and spears and had them protect your keep. In the information age, you arm your peasants with conspiracy theories and twitter accounts and have them protect your untaxed billions.
I’m still convinced that none of these people actually believe in flat earth. It’s the kind of belief you can pretend to hold without any other that reputational damage to yourself but I doubt any of them would be willing to put their money where their mouth is.
My mother joined the Flat Earth Society when she went to college because she thought it was so absurd and would be a fun experience. Turns out none of the people in that group actually believed it either, so it was just a club to hang out and socialize.
Seems the whole flat earth thing is a lot more prevalent now so I’m guessing there are more and more people buying into the narrative.
It’s the exact same phenomenon that several other fandoms or belief groups have gone through. First, start a satirical society and laugh about the foolishness with boon companions. Enjoy the companionship. Second, expand so that the society doesn’t die when you leave college or the location. Begin recruiting folks and telling them about your society. Third, watch as people join and some don’t realize it’s satirical. Disbelief dawns on the originals. Fourth, the true believers take over as the people in on the joke slowly leave due to all sorts of reasons, including no longer finding the society funny because of the true believers.
I watched it happen with bronies (not the furry sexual folks, 4chan already had those, but just people who were really, really into the show) on 4chan, a ‘drinking’ club at my college that was a joke because they only drank water at the meetings (at first, anyway), and a local activity (can’t name it because it’s specific and would give it away) club that was truly supposed to be just a social gathering but is now populated by a gaggle of 70 year old women fervently taking part.
Some of them are really raking it in through Patreon and sales of shoddy merchandise. That’s how Alex Jones finances HIS deranged ramblings too.
Spouting bullshit while pretending that THEY are trying to stop you to get people to donate and buy your shit is unfortunately an extremely lucrative business for many.
Sometimes I wish I didn’t have morals or I’d be making shitloads off of these people.
Just pump out a bunch of AI voiced nonsense that has just enough ‘evidence’ to keep them going, tell them they’re special because they know this and other people who aren’t them are dumb because they don’t know this and that the mainstream (insert industry here) is trying to silence you so you need them to donate to the fight.
Seems like most of the older videos from the meme aren’t on the channel anymore, at least not under the same upload. Guess he didn’t want someone to stumble upon them and be misinformed
Add comment