I agree, but these people seek to destroy us progressives.
A million people (as per the comic) is a lot of people.
I am both afraid & tuned for a fight.
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On second thought…
Something a flat earther has never had… nor a first one.
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I think more people need to start running for office. Especially in republican strongholds.
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This xkcd highlights but also frankly underplays the problem. Irrational and conspiratorial belief systems absolutely do hurt all of us even if those people are not US senators. These people vote for Trump. They support alternative medicine. They give money to antivax organizations. They argue for creationism in school board meetings. They are everywhere, exerting their influence, trying to drag the world back into some sort of dark age.
There are no harmless irrational beliefs. Only degrees of harm.
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Marjorie Taylor Greene
Kandiss Taylor
Ok, I have to ask, are they related? Maybe there’s some genetics involved…
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The baby, however, does look appropriately disturbed. The rest of them are just disturbing.
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Except it’s toxic as shit. That’s the problem. Give it a try some time, and be prepared to have your entire life, and your family, dragged through the mud. Be prepared to have your spouse and children called all sorts of horrible things and be subjected to all sorts of abuse. Be prepared for local message boards to say the most vile untrue things about people you love, and to have those things become part of private discourse.*
*Speaking from experience here. There’s nothing someone could offer me to put my family through that again.
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You know, my operative assumption when I run into flat Earthers online is that they are trollies. I may have to rethink that assumption and downgrade my estimate of average intelligence.
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A common belief, but no no no. These people are serious and need to be taken seriously. I think people think it’s all a joke because, well, they can’t be serious, right?
This is a dangerous underestimation of the human capacity for irrationality
We have to take the problem of irrationality and conspiratorial thinking seriously in our society because it is the seeds from which fascism grows.
Listen to Oh No Ross And Carrie and watch Behind The Curve if you still have any doubt these people are serious about these beliefs.
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What I don’t understand about flat earthism is what is the attraction?
What is the point of the earth being flat instead of globular? Is it to get cheaper air fares or something?
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it’s part of the conspiracy of “secret knowledge” that is being kept from the people, and so it makes them feel special to believe they know “the truth”. i think it also confirms a belief that they are in a struggle with a group of people from which all the bad things in the world flow.
having known one or two, i strongly believe they are not dumb – not any more so than anybody else. instead they are invested. and i think it works similar to any cult: once they’re in – it’s very hard to back down. their self worth gets entangled in being right. and so they spend more and more time reading and “researching”, which digs the hole even deeper, and makes it harder and harder for them to get back out.
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If people have some time to spare, Hbomberguy’s Flat Earth: A Measured Response is a very funny takedown and debunking of Flat Earth and some of the notable people in the movement
and Dan Olson’s more recent In Search of a Flat Earth is a bit more sobering in terms of where the movement has gone
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Same as all conspiracies- people prefer to believe that an all powerful evil overlord is in charge rather than living with the uncomfortable truth that nobody is really in charge and we’re all fumbling our way through as a society. That combined with the thrill of feeling smart and having secret knowledge that @gatto described.
Research shows that people who believe in one conspiracy or pseudoscience tend to believe in all of them. The actual topic turns out to matter very little. It’s a feeling and a way of thinking that some people like.
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Because that truth is much scarier! If there is a big bad, at least you can work to take them down… And of course there are bad things in our world that we should fight against (nazis, for example)… But rarely are the people in power (good or bad) as hyper-competent and able to cover up actual conspiracies for very long. Look at things like COINTELPRO or Watergate or other conspiracies that people have been unable to research and uncover…
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