I would also suggest that one of the reasons this is popular is that people today simply have no connection to the natural world. They live on smartphones and TV.
If you actually spend time OUTSIDE, and spend any significant amount of time looking at the sky - something people used to do - you cannot help but realize the Earth is a globe. Especially if you get to look at it from more than once place in the world. Over the course of many nights of watching the moon and the stars and the planets, it’s just amazingly obvious.
Once upon a time, the zillions of men who sailed ships from place to place HAD to look at the stars to know where they were going, had to have a sense of direction and how to find places. They had zero doubt the world was round. There simply is no other conclusion you can come to if you have no choice but to be attentive to these things.
But if you live on Twitter and Instagram, how can you notice that stuff?
Actually, I’d like to offer a correction to this; the first observation never went in. While you are talking to flerfers, they are not paying attention to the meaning or significance of the thing you are saying; they are busy formulating the next thing to blurt out in refutation of it. Their attention is never devoted to you.
Plus, you, like, sail away from the beach, right? You’ve been on the beach when a ship sails off to, and then sinks below, the horizon, tall mast last — and now you’re on a ship, and if you look back at where you’re sailing away from, you see that land sink below the horizon while knowing what your ship would look like to them. And then you continue on, in a straight line, with no land on the horizon in front of you or behind you — and then, as if rising into view, this whole other beach eventually appears on the horizon in front of you. On a sphere, this makes sense. On flatness — ?
The standard flerf response to this is simply “atmospheric lensing and refraction”. And the thing is, they’re somewhat correct - there is a great deal of refraction taking place during such an observation, certainly enough to make this a really bad place to start your flat earth refutation.
That’s pretty much what I was saying if you read the totality of my posts.
Most flat earthers are grifters and have found excuses not to go to Antarctica or why a 24 hour sun suddenly doesn’t matter. Austin currently doesn’t belong to either group, but we’ll see.
Regardless, there are people that really believe this crap. As I say, there’s a guy on a forum I frequent who has posted about flat earth multiple times per day for years, usually citing articles from places like bitchute.com. He engages with people trying to debunk him.
I think he really believes, as he’s just not rational at all. He hasn’t heard a conspiracy theory he doesn’t believe.
Oh, absolutely. This is how the grifters earn their grift.
One can see this in the video upthread where smart people are literally concluding an experiment that shows the earth is round. They are emotionally out of their minds; it’s a tremendously difficult thing for them to witness.
I have seen one flat earther persuaded by evidence and recant the whole belief - this guy had a YouTube channel that was the usual flerf nonsense, then he abandoned it and for a while, was making anti/ex-flat earth stuff, before pivoting to more general content.
I made the mistake of clicking on Facebook comments related to a flat earth and on multiple threads one guy was prattling on about the proof for a flat earth being given by some “formula”. He wrote it out in words, and it was utter nonsense (“delta minus the fourth power of x to the logarithm of [Name’s] constant” or something (I don’t remember it exactly).
It really was a perfect example of “this is what stupid people think math is”.
But anyone calling them out were just “sheep” who were brainwashed by mainstream media.
I really need to remember not to click on comments.
A rapper by the name of “Lord Jamar” recently appeared on a Rogan-like podcast interview talking about his flat earth beliefs. For anyone interested, this is what a true believer sounds like: hopelessly ignorant of science topics most of us learned when our age was still a single digit, and yet incredibly smug and self-satisfied about it.
I guess it’s still possible he’s trolling, but from what he says you can tell that he has invested (if that’s an appropriate verb here) at least a few hours in reading FE material.
I’m linking the video where Professor Dave debunks Jamar, even though it’s an 80-minute video, because it’s quite funny.
But here’s just the interview for those that just want to hear Jamar directly:
I watched as much as I could of that Lord Jamar interview (all but the last 5-10 minutes). I don’t know where to start, so I won’t, except to say that was some of the most idiotic crap I’ve ever heard in my life. That guy has no clue how anything works.
People who think like that make me ashamed to be a human being.
It’s painful isn’t it. And he’s so sure he’s seen through the looking glass by…not doing any studying whatsoever.
I don’t get that level of self righteousness. Most of us, we use tech we couldn’t make ourselves, we go to experts: doctors, lawyers, heck, plumbers, you name it, who know things we don’t know, and it gives us a level of humility. Let alone seeing the complexity of a scientific paper.
How do you get to that level of arrogance to think “Nah, my guesses trump all that”
Wouldn’t you like to be rich and famous? We all remember Sir Edmund Hillary, Christopher Columbus, and Neil Armstrong. Just think how much money you could make if you were the FIRST person to get to the edge. If you look down, you could film something that no human has ever seen. And the bragging rights, “See, I told you so”.
There’s some video where a woman says “I’ve never seen a shooting star go up,” as a justification for a flat earth. I wonder why nobody has explained that there’s a big planet in the way…
As alluded upthread The Final Experiment is in progress right now; which was taking several flat-earthers (and a few youtubers that have youtube channels debunking flerf stuff) to the Antarctic to see the 24 hour sun.
Well, it turns out there is indeed a 24 hour sun. (sorry, should that have gone in a spoiler box?)
In terms of what the flerfs are making of this, well, it’s pretty predictable given that they already had to handwave a plethora of evidence to maintain their beliefs in the first place, basically:
The main FE channels suddenly started claiming that a 24 hour sun would prove nothing just ahead of the experiment, and are posting relatively little right now.
People in the chat threads are mostly “globers” joking around I think, but a few seem like legit flerfers…they just repeat stuff about “spinning ball with water sticking to it” and don’t really engage with the antarctic observations.
The actual FErs that went to antarctica have apparently been convinced, although, as mentioned upthread, it seems they may have been looking for an exit ramp from FE anyway.
Some shooting stars do go up. Not all that common for random meteors, but it does happen. However, if you’re watching a meteor shower and the radiant point is near the horizon, lots of them will go up.
I’ve seen a lot of “you can’t prove the shape of the earth by looking at the sky” which demonstrates they don’t understand scientific predictions and why they are important. No surprise there. There is also changing the goal posts to try to make the experiment measuring the curvature of water in a pail or something. I haven’t seen reactions from the flat earthers there, but I haven’t looked hard.
I did watch some of one of the live streams, and it was awesome to see the sun relatively high in the sky at local midnight. Dave has a video of all 24 hours accelerated - I haven’t checked that one out yet.
I didn’t think any FE doubted a 24-hour Sun near the poles in summer.
That some parts of the Earth are dark and some light is “explained” by saying that the light from the Sun is a cone only lighting up the daylit areas. The flaw of course is that this doesn’t explain sunrise, sunset, etc. So the cone became a flaring out horn-shaped thing. Which doesn’t at all being to actually solve their problem.
