Learned about another instance of this when travelling in Japan last October. I visited Sado Island (Sadogashima) and toured the gold mines - Sado Kinzan. The exhibits show that since 1778 - around 10 years before the first ships arrived in Botany Bay to found the Australian penal colony - ‘unhoused persons’ from Osaka were being rounded up and sent to work in the gold mines on the island. They would work 24 hour shifts every 2 days, turning the handles that kept ventilation fans and archimedes screw pumps working.
The site has now been nominated for UNESCO World Heritage status, this is being opposed by South Korea who are highlighting forced labour by Korean prisoners during the Second World War. Plus ça change…
I work in Aerospace, and an engineer I used to work closely with was (is) a flat-earther, a young earth creationist, and a moon landing denier.
He’s been working at the company for about 35 years and personally knew people who worked on the Apollo program when he had just started work. No doubt he pissed them off regularly. He has no problem explaining that the outputs of the nav system are just a useful model for helping navigate more easily but bear no relationship to the true flat earth which is too complicated to navigate across apparently. Amazing.
I’ve done the opposite; in the Bristol Channel, south of Bristol, there’s a spit of land called Brean Down that sticks out about a mile or so into the Channel, the highest point of which is 97m/318ft. From there you can look across to Wales and North Devon, and watch the huge car transporter ships coming and going from Royal Portbury Dock at Avonmouth. Those ships are huge, like a floating horizontal block of flats. With a pair of binoculars, and a fair amount of time, you can watch the ships gradually decrease in height until the last part of the superstructure disappears gracefully over the horizon, and occasionally watch them gradually appear as well.
Of course, it isn’t real, it’s a vast projection onto a huge wall around the edge of the flat earth…
I’ve seen flat earthers on Reddit arguing pretty hard that I was lying about having been to Australia, because it’s not real.
Maybe they were driving trollies me so now I feel like a bit of a dick.
Anyway, the last time I was in not-Australia I went to one of their Aussie Rules Football matches at the totally-not-real MCG and those actors were really invested in their work.
Like professional athlete invested. I was impressed.
Oh you just gotta fill out a form 34B. You’ll find it in the starters pack with the Akubra hat, Speedos, thongs and tinnies. Or call the Illuminati 1300 number if you need a fresh copy but the wait times are aaaaages (you know bureaucracy…)
I know this is supposedly a joke, but for this Australian I find it EXTREMELY insulting to say my entire country doesn’t exist,
Flat Earther’s shit me, because of how simple it is to prove to them that the idea is demonstrably false. That level of cognitive dissonance is just completely foreign to me.
I watched hundreds of flat-Earth videos to learn how conspiracy theories spread – and what it could mean for fighting disinformation
Be Reasonable: Episode #002 – Michael Wilmore
Michael Wilmore is a member of the Flat Earth Society – a group whose members believe that the conventionally-accepted notion of a spherical Earth is incorrect, and that in reality the Earth is flat. Society members have a range of ideas and beliefs as to how and why the spherical Earth concept is false, with many believing that much of the conventional science is clouded by inaccuracy, conspiracy and dogma.
Marsh and Hayley spoke to Michael to find out why he believes the world is flat, how he and his fellow members reconcile their beliefs with the accepted science, and the criticisms his ideas are met with by the general public.
In this, the second of three epic special episodes of Skeptics with a K, Alice and Marsh talk about what happened when they attended the Flat Earth Convention in Birmingham, and why scientists should play more Pac-Man.
In the last of our three epic specials, Marsh and Alice talk about the Cosmic Egg, a model of the universe presented at the Flat Earth Convention in Birmingham.
Yeah, but given our human rights record with blackfellas and asylum seekers, a nation that still bows to an English monarchy, sometimes I really feel like pulling my head in.
