There are a lot of Poes, especially on reddit, but you can usually tell after a few posts. They don't quite manage the same level of smug insanity.
Surely that’s readily verifiable by, y’know, visiting an airfield?
He does. And guesstimates the size of the planes in the distance... it's all very Father Ted.
Here is his channel if you want to lose a few braincells:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpuu81O9AtZvD_tr56xVr7Q/videos
And here is his mate (and/or alter-ego / other personality) "Enslaved By No Media":
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNeK1QwoHHj5TC1tTWyVkaQ/videos
Here is sensible person SciManDan tackling one of his videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwF26HOmw-A
Put them all on a big ship and ask them to present the facts once they've sailed to the edge and back.
I am genuinely interested that in the face of overwhelming evidence, people actually believe the earth is flat,
it perhaps quite thrilling - you are casting yourself as the person in history who discovered that everything we knew about 'x' was wrong. You can paint yourself as a maverick who gets results - like Einstein or Wilf Lunn.
Flat earth stuff is more of a conspiracy theory than a (faux) scientific one. It think it has little to do with understanding the properties of nature (which are depressingly random of meaningless) and more to do with wishing there to motivation from some source for things being as they are - to believe the earth is flat, what you really need to believe is that the rest of the world is conspiring together to hide the truth of the worlds flatness from you and that 'they' have reason to do so and that you are worth the effort of being tricked. Its more comforting to think that you are being conned because it proves that you matter enough to someone to be worth the effort - its far more uncomfortable to accept you're a very small part of a grubby smear of life on the surface of a rock in a countlessly big universe that neither knows or cares you exist.
The thing I live about most of these conspiracys is to what ends are the people conspiring against you doing their dirty work?
One thing that I read about recently, and which had honestly never occurred to me, is that if you go to, say, Australia or New Zealand, or anywhere well south of the equator, and look at the moon, it looks completely different, as do certain constellations*.
Because they’re upside down!
*Particularly Orion, because it’s one of the only major constellations that can be seen in full in both hemispheres, it’s a winter constellation here, it disappears in the summer. I wonder how a flerther might explain that if the world were flat, because otherwise it would always look the same.
A lot of them seem to be a bit religious, too
I suppose they are both things that are pretty far fetched and based on highly dubious facts so the 2 things go hand in hand really!
The moon is a good one CZ. Flerfers say that when you go to the South you are just looking at it from the other direction, like a sticker stuck to the ceiling above the equator.
Of course this doesn’t actually match reality where the moon doesn’t suddenly flip over, it rotates based on your latitude.
For the Southern Hemisphere stars they have all kinds of handwaving involving “perspective” and mirages. Some reckon they are just a reflection of the northern stars, despite looking completely different. Others excuse it by saying things like “you can’t tell the shape of the ground by looking at the sky” or “the stars are not what we are told, so observations are meaningless”
Flerfers say that when you go to the South you are just looking at it from the other direction, like a sticker stuck to the ceiling above the equator.
Arrgh!! I’m staring at the lampshade trying to work out how that works. (In their minds.)
Funnily, the moon thing occurred to me while watching the Dakar rally coverage last night. They showed a clip of the crescent moon over the landscape. It was upside-down compared to here, of course. I wonder how many people know which way up the moon should be..
Anyone fancy starting a different shaped earth society to really mess with them? We can vote on the shape and then make up some mad random reasons as to why it must be so. I’m voting hendecagon just because it sounds cool.
I'm aware that they are totally misguided but I'm reassured that there are always people who refuse to submit to commonly held assumptions.
Without these crazy people we would still be in the dark ages. Copernicus and Galileo didn't get an easy ride.
Without these crazy people we would still be in the dark ages
I sort of get where you're coming from (that it takes left field thinking to advance knowledge sometimes) but these lot are the equivalent of the peasants in witch drowning scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail..."if she weighs the same as a duck, she'll float on water, therefore she's a witch..."
They are not advancing knowledge, otherwise they wouldn't be on youtube, they'd be at MIT.
I’d agree if it was a commonly held assumption, but unfortunately for the flerfers they’re arguing with fact based evidence. A bit different from accepted norms.
