Profiles of flat earthers: report from the front lines of weaponized media literacy

Is it OK to trolley the trollies?

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Surely you’re not suggesting we drink someone ELSE’s urine??

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Serious question: how do they explain time zones? If the earth was flat then wouldn’t sunrise and sunset happen at about the same time for everyone?

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Unfortunately not. I do use an account, also use adblockers and cookieblockers, and still, Youtube’s recommendations are “Flat Earth!1!” and “Nibiru!1!” all the livelong day. I never click on any of them, but there they are, claiming to be specially recommended for me by an algorithm based on things I do watch (kittens, new wave music, livecams of Tokyo).

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Well you can imagine how those conversations went when those American kids called home from the conference.

Attendee: Hi Mom! The flat earth conference is going great. This sunny weather in the UK is gorgeous.

Mom: Its 3 in the morning!

Attendee: OMG! They’ve gotten to you too!

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Sounds legit. The amount of money these elites get because they say the world is round is astronomical.

Just add up the money they get by selling globes instead of what they would get from selling dioramas.

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There’s a “Pac-man effect” hypothesis that these troglodytes have whipped up to explain why no one falls off.

Stick a fork in humanity; we’re done.

I mentioned this in my reply to @GiantRobotPilot but…

We’re doomed.

I rather like flat earthers - some of the mental agility needed to maintain that ‘belief’ is excellent. How many people could actually prove the earth is round and how many just know it.
Ah, I recall the dawn of the internet when we (or at least I) thought that access to the biggest library ever would knock down conspiracy theories and pseudo-science once and for all.

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“I got into the theory around when Trump came out,” explained Steve, who was wearing a snazzy flat Earth T-shirt. “I started looking into Hillary, then [the debunked conspiracy theory] Pizzagate, around March 2017. [Trump] was the catalyst to seeing that maybe there was a mass indoctrination going on—he kicked off my research into the Illuminati and the deep state. It took me about three months to get my head around it, and six months to accept it, and now I really know we’re not on a spinning ball.”

Youtube is great for so many reasons, but it’s suggestion algorithm has been weaponized. This predictive aI can send people too deep down the rabbit hole.

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http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/02/28/ridiculously-awesome-pic-of-discovery-and-the-iss-taken-from-the-ground/#.WvoNNZ-YVrk

This remarkable picture was taken by Rob Bullen on Saturday February 26 from the UK, using an 8.5″ telescope.

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Makes sense.

image

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Sadly also the biggest library to perpetuate it as well.

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The sun travels in a circle around the flat disk of the earth. This accounts for the time zones, but not for the fact that the sun rises from the horizon and sinks into the other horizon. It also doesn’t account for the fact that the sun is the same size all day-if it just travelled out of sight, it would look larger overhead and smaller until it disappeared, like an airplane. Such lack of logic doesn’t dissuade them.

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Who would have guessed that the Terry Pratchett version actually makes infinitely more sense.

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Meh, the numbers check out. World population is around 7.4B right now, there’s got to be a few idiots in a crowd that size. :smirk:

We live in a world where whoever amasses the most attention wins at life. What better way is there to gather attention than to deny the obvious?

If you don’t believe me, then BUY MY BOOK! It is very light reading. It posits the idea that books do not exist and contains 0 pages. You should be able to get through it in a night :-).

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This. Flat earthers are the original internet trollies, before the internet was even born. It’s bullshit, and they know it’s bullshit. But that’s not the point. The point is to wind up otherwise very smart people and make them angry.

(Yes, there are surely some who believe the bullshit. But mostly it’s just an exercise in making people angry for sport.)

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I’m listening to that podcast and uhhh… yeah, this lot aren’t great followers of occam’s razor huh? Domes with projections, giant tide magnets, railguns shooting asteroids, the sun tracking the earth like a record needle… dude, a globe solves all your problems. I don’t think we should be asking them what evidence it would take to convince them because that ship has already sailed over the horizon but we should be asking them why their own methodology fucking sucks.

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Watching someone I know watch wrestling on TV, it occurred to me that there are really smart people who have signed off on this shit. From the money men, to the technicians who handle the electronics, to the producers of the programming-it’s clearly a complicated bit of showmanship all the way from the top-to just before any of the talent is seen by the cameras. If there is any amount of collective IQ among the on screen talent, it’s not on display.

Why can’t smart people find better things to do, than empower stupid people?

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