As an aside, there actually was an incident a few years back where a flat earth preacher arranged an expedition to Antarctica to prove his theory, only to come away concluding that the Earth is round after all and his beliefs were wrong.
According to Duffy’s website, both flat Earthers and their opponents agreed that being able to observe the Sun in the sky over Antarctica for 24 hours continuously would refute the idea of a flat Earth…
After traveling from Chile to Union Glacier Camp in West Antarctica, expedition members livestreamed the midnight sun for several days. The participating flat Earthers all admitted that the midnight sun was a real phenomenon.
Jeran Campanella, an American YouTuber popular among flat Earth content creators as “Jeranism”, acknowledged that his flat Earth model was no longer valid after witnessing the midnight sun firsthand.
They would just conclude that the company used CGI outside the windows and if they’re going to such effort to fool the top flat earthers, what else must they be hiding?
Flat Eartherism isn’t primarily about the topography of the earth, it’s about how, if the government is tricking the normies about such a fundamental aspect of our existence, what else might they be hiding that only flat earthers are capable of uncovering?
I recommend this amazing video by Dan Olsen/Folding Ideas, the truth bomb they drop right in the middle of it had my jaw to the floor:
Dan is rather intelligent. He’s exploring sociological phenomena, not promoting backwards thinking.
The irony is that these conspiracy theories think real life things are all linked, when it’s actually the conspiracy nutters who are all linked together. One conspiracy theory begets another.
That’s the way the whole thing works, well a lot of it… As far as I can tell, the flat earther movement consists of three categories of people:
People who earnestly believe it, but lack any kind of understanding of simple geometry like perspective and lack any curiosity about testing things they want to believe, and want to feel empowered that they know something that most other people, including learned people, don’t
People who know it’s BS, but are using it to purposely manipulate the folks in category 1 to their own benefit.
Will Duffy is a creationist, but not a flat earther. Even before the TFE. He did pay for two flat earthers, and one normal person to go. One of them was convinced and renounced the movement, to the hatred of the flerfs.
I think there is a Flat Earth Society, but it is a parody group, not a real flat earth group. Real flat earhers just have lots of followers.
They’d probably claim that the windows of the spacecraft were gimmicked to make the earth look round. These people’s livelihoods depend on the grift, so don’t think a free flight is going to change their minds.
Flat-earthism requires such a large set of comically incorrect beliefs and evidence-ignoring that one more would make no difference. The flerfs already have to account for the concept of day and night. If I were a committed flerf, I’d simply posit that the Arctic and Antarctic were special places on the flat earth continuum that had exceptionally long days and nights due to the influence of telekinetic vortices of ectoplasm. Proof of a flat earth could be obtained by simply looking around the Antarctic itself. See? It’s flat!
The subreddit called r/flatearth is not a real flat earther (flerher) site, but one that exists to comment on and mock real flat earther comments. The people who dig up this stuff probably need to have their brains drained and refreshed every 30 views because of the cesspool of ignorance they have to wade through. Fun place to dip into, though.
Artemis hit the flerhers hard, so all they can do is ridicule NASA and its fake news. A video from SciManDan, who takes apart this nonsense, looked at two top flerhers livestreaming the Artemis launch. Beautiful example of “if you have nothing to say, say it loud.”
I couldn’t stand to watch that video for more than a few minutes, but I liked the part where the flat-earther casts doubt on the reality of the Artemis mission because “four people in a space that small would kill each other” long before 10 days had elapsed!
What a terrific example of projection! Yes, flerf, or flerher, I’m sure you and your kind definitely would kill each other in short order. But the actual astronauts were carefully evaluated for things like mental stability and high intelligence, traits in which you, flerf or flerher, are totally lacking.
Go and subscribe to Dan’s channel. Good stuff, though often he doesn’t go into enough depth.
Amusingly Dave Weiss makes his money from an app which shows you how far you are from other flerfs. The package he uses to compute the distance assumes a globe earth. His app also exposes the addresses of all those who use it.
I liked that it couldn’t be real because the toilet isn’t big enough.
Just to note that the Gemini astronauts went for longer missions with even less room.
I once found a website which computed the distance between any two cities on the Gleason (standard Flerf) map. Very useful in computing the speed at which one of the planes which fly from Santiago to Sydney would have to fly. (Well over Mach 1.)
The flerfs admit a 24 hour sun in the Arctic. There is a clip some of the debunkers play where the aforementioned flat earth Dave says “the 24 hour sun doesn’t work on a flat earth.” He refused the offer of a trip to see it.
Flerf is simply a religion. It is more important to the believers to believe than it is to believe in something sensible. The act of faith in nonsense is somehow soothing to whatever is missing inside their psyche.
You can’t fix that by debunking the facts. Only by replacing their desire to have faith with something more productive.
Yes. The vast majority of flat earthers I’ve heard believe it because they think the Bible says the earth is flat. That bit of faith makes them ignore all the evidence.
You raise a good point. Though I wasn’t suggesting that christianity itself causes flerfs to believe.
I was saying that the sort of mind that embraces conventional religion is the same sort of mind that can choose “flerfism” as their personal pet religion. They cling to their beliefs because the act of having faith itself is soothing, no matter what they choose to believe in.
IMO the fact that one line in the bible can be read in an ignorant literal isolated fashion to somehow suggest the Earth might possibly be flat is just icing on the flerfism cake. It gives the flerf promoters a leg up at recruiting fundamentalist xians to a second back-up religion: flerfism. Which religion they embrace with all the thought-free fervor they used to reserve for fundamentalist xianism.
