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It reads like a parody of flat Earthers to me - riffing on the fact that the flat Earth model relies on a super-distorted version of the Southern Hemisphere that clearly doesn’t match reality, as well as the massive scale of the conspiracies they claim. But flat Earthers always seem like people making fun of flat Earthers to me, so…
Which is what makes it seem like a parody of flat Earthers to me. On the other hand, inconsistently acknowledging certain facts (which are problems for their delusion) is par for the course.
So the real question is whether actual flat Earthers have adopted this as an actual belief. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve uncritically accepted something that originated as a mockery of their delusions… and it’s no more absurd than what they definitely believe.
Probably you’re part of the conspiracy if you’ve traveled in an airplane…
Pretty sure there is no belief too stupid for people to believe in it. In fact I’m pretty sure the number of flat Earthers is increasing, as they are very much an extreme manifestation of the “do your own research!” people. People think looking something up on Google (and getting back nonsense) counts as research, and makes them “knowledgeable” or even “experts.” Plus, there’s always been heavy overlap with creationists in their rejection of modern science (in particular the creationist fringe who dismiss physics and astronomy as hoaxes).
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I’d just like to point out that the cover image is from Lake Ballard, in Western Australia. The art installation is called “Inside Australia”.
I went there in 2006. You need to find your way to Kalgoorlie (a gold-mining town that has a frontier-to-the-northern-desert feeling), and travel 130 km north to Menzies. At Menzies (population 235), you turn left onto a dirt road and travel another 50 km.
Lake Ballard is an ephemeral salt lake - sometimes it’s a shallow lake, sometimes it’s a salt bed. I got there on a salt bed day.
The humanoid sculptures on the lake are about chest-height on me, and scattered around the lakebed. You’ll need to walk for a few hours to see them all, and it’s well worth it.
This was the first time I really understood the difference between “sculpture” and “installation”. These sculptures would’ve been intriguing in a gallery. But after a long bumpy drive followed by abrupt silence as you stop and switch off the engine, then a walk for several miles over silent empty salt flats, encountering them in small groups, or one-by-one, it’s the kind of art that changed me a little.
[edited for grammar and flow]
Some pics from the time:
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And the convicts were transported there as part of the effort to wipe out the indigenous population and replace them with white Europeans. They were the involuntary conscripts of an ever-expanding empire.
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My first thought too. Where’s my fat NASA payout?
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These nutjobs have members all around the globe.
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A marsupial is just a reptoid attempting to impersonate a mammal. They never get it quite right.
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A thousand years ago, when I was in high school, my Earth Science teacher said that he believed the earth was flat, as a THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, to get us to think about the scientific method, and skepticism, and logic, and the ABUSE of science, to attempt to prove unscientific nonsense. I honestly think that some of the people at the center of today’s Flat Earth movement are actually just scammers who are insanely committed to “the bit”.
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You do not exist. If you are reading this, you are a hoax, made to think you are a person who exists. In reality, you are me. Blah, prove me wrong.
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That smooth shot at 10:12 showing shoreline details disappearing over the horizon is a thing of beauty.
ETA: at 25:10, talking about how flat Earth beliefs are often tied to “end times” thinking: “It is difficult to overstate the impact on long-term planning, the support for polices and politicians that comes from the belief that at some point in the next generation or two, God will personally show up and just wrap up humanity…”
Substitute “God” with “nuclear war”, “generation” with “year”, and you have my cold-war teenage years.
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For that matter, why do Flat Earthers arbitrarily seem to think it’s a Northern/Southern hemisphere thing? Why not claim the Western Hemisphere is real and the Eastern Hemisphere is made up?
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90% of the worlds population is in the northern hemisphere.
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I’ve heard of a conspiracy theory that Australia is really small (as in, Sydney and Perth are only a few hundred kilometers apart), but never that it doesn’t exist. That’s a new one.
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No, they were sent there to get them out of the country after the US revolted and was not a viable penal colony any longer.
The destruction of indigenious population and culture was just a positive and intriguing side effect for them.
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Considering how big the Pacific is, I wouldn’t be surprised if a carefully chosen east-west divide had that number beat.
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Underlying racism.
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This is such a fantastic video; I always look forward to each new Dan Olson upload. They are few are far between, but worth the wait.
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