For anyone that really wants to risk the IQ points,
Because it’s guarded by NASA, who won’t let you pass.
A flerfer would respond thusly: “Oh, so you have records that show that ancient 16th century mariners claim to have sailed beyond the horizon? I demand proof! [And will deny the veracity of it if provided.] Also, all of those sailors were bankrolled by the Vatican, and they’re all in on it!”
My major point of contact is simply following the NASA Facebook feed.
Seems like one of them did the spurious reading of the treaty and the others are just uncritically repeating the misinformation.
Yes, this.
A person that formed conclusions based on an objective assessment of the evidence and/or by evaluating testable claims wouldn’t be a flat earther in the first place. Something necessarily has to be missing or broken in that process.
Also, when discussing FE with a flerfer, it’s basically never a “debate” in any real sense.
They are engaging with you only to try to convert you, not to listen. Or, more frequently even than that, because they are aware that people find their views ridiculous so they have some psychological need to defend themselves.
Either way, it’s not a conversation where you are going to change minds. It doesn’t matter that they are not trolling.
Of course this is true of a lot of debates, particularly political ones. It’s just at an extreme here.
Yes, it’s also similar with Galilean relativity / invariance.
A lot of FE belief rests on being incredulous that we could be living on a spinning ball moving at “millions of miles an hour”.
So then you patiently explain about relativity of motion, with examples like being on a plane or a train and throwing and catching an object. They’ll say they’ve got it. They may even say they’ve “heard it all before”.
It doesn’t stop them posting another thread an hour later about how absurd it is that we are whizzing through space “faster than a bullet”.
As someone who has lived in the Southern “hemisphere” I strenuously object that Antarctica has the Ice Wall.
It is clearly the Arctic Ice Walls that border our earth, all you Northerners are biased and incorrect.
The world starts near Amundsen–Scott Station and ends near Ny-Ålesund International Research Station
Q.E.D.
.
I personally know someone who will believe anything, as long as it is an outlandish conspiracy theory. I am sometimes tempted to make something up and tell it to him, and watch it spread (Internet obviously facilitates that…)
I have called them the Underpants Gnomes of CTers.
- Convince the world they live on a globe
- ???
- Profit!
I have heard some claim it’s so NASA can collect all those sweet billons in federal taxes leaving unexplained what was going on before 1958.
Whoa! In olden times, even going too fast would cause a woman’s uterus to fall out. Perhaps the FEs “evolved” from that era.
I was re-reading Carrying the Fire ; and Collins notes that upon their successful landing the Flat Earth Society headquarters in London adjusted their stance only slightly. The photographs of the earth as a sphere didn’t change anything really, it just shows that the earth is a round flat disc. I guess.
Birds aren’t real!
While that very clearly started as a troll, I can think of at least five Flat Earthers that totally believe it.
There is actually a person who believes that. Plus elephants aren’t real either.
What! Next you’ll be telling me Santa doesn’t live at the North Pole. Though perhaps all the lands beyond the North Pole (similar to the ones supposedly beyond the south pole, which include Atlantis and Lemuria) are where Santa keeps his toy manufacturing plants.
The Flat Earth map handles this. Now, the travel times would be all wrong, but I’m sure they’d just say Magellan’s fleet was propelled by fast ocean currents.
BTW I learned just the other day there is a boat race around Antarctica. Besides the boats having to travel like 32 mph to finish it if the flat earth model is correct, they have steering records. These show they turn their ships in a way that would smash into the land if the flat earth model were correct.
I mentioned the one I know personally upthread. She believes in just about every CT out there. She couldn’t logic herself out of a paper bag. Nice person, but dumb and clueless.
At least two on YouTube.
There are Hollow Earth believers.
But are there Hollow Flat Earth believers?
The most infamous one was, the late, The Lord Steven Christ,
There is likely some correlation there, albeit of a rather mundane sort, having to do with the optimal apparent size of a sun which could support life in its habitability zone vs. the optimal apparent size of a satellite which would reduce any wild swings in the axial tilt of its primary. No guarantee that they’ll be almost exactly the same of course, but these two factors working in combination with each other make it quite a bit more likely.
[back to main topic] It just amazes me that there are people who do NOT have an open-ended mindset which could lead them to discover/confirm various awesome authentic phenomena, but come in with unshakable prior beliefs that no evidence can dissolve. I simply cannot even begin to imagine being one of these beings. Isn’t the former mindset simply a lot more FUN?
Annnd as I’ve argued here before until I am blue in the face, it doesn’t matter if they are actually “trolls” doing it for the lulz or are True Believers. In the end there ultimately isn’t any real distinction there worth splitting hairs over and/or as if the two groups cannot ever have any overlap.
I have never seen a Flat Earther present an “awesome authentic phenomena” that was not both a misrepresentation of reality and fully explained by the Globe/Heliocentric model.