Hmmm.
I always thought it was the Illuminasties. 
What about the Illuminati?
That doesn’t answer any real answer though. As the saying goes, the answer to every question is money. The world obviously works. Trillions of dollars are spent every year on projects that go into making the world work, including the internet that the idiots post on. Their position has to be that a second load of trillions of dollars is being spent to fake all the evidence that the earth is flat. Everything is GCI or photoshopped, or plane routes have to be faked with fake passengers making fake trip reports, or Antarctic bases aren’t real, or all space exploration is reocreations, or the million other ways that the truth must be hidden. Who is paying twice for the same efforts? Why not pay once for the same results? Where are all these trillions of dollars of fakery being made in secret? How are they hiding the payments in their balance sheets? Are all the governments of the world colluding to not notice or regulate or tax these enormous expenditures? Why not tell the truth and Make More Money?
Forget science. Science is a belief. Money is real. Explain where the money goes and I’ll start paying attention.
I’ve never heard Jews mentioned by Flerfs, but Masons get mentioned all the time. Anyhow, if we Jews own the world what happened to my dividend check?
And my wife hasn’t gotten penny one from Big Pharma for her two pro-vaccine books. It ain’t fair, I tell ya.
Jeran is the one who quit flat-eartherdom due to actual facts. But before he went he said he would follow the evidence, and he did.
Well, NASA paid penguins with weapons keep anyone from exploring Antarctica. And there is an ice wall. Which no one can photograph.
One of the amusing things about the Final Experiment is how lots of flerfs all of a sudden stopped talking about how impossible it was to go when the people there went.
Another disproof of the flat earth map - it makes Antarctica way big. But there is a boat race around it, and the time it takes to circumnavigate Antarctica is much shorter than it could be if the flat earthers were correct.
It’s largely, and openly, the TikTok/Rumble Flerfs.
Also, Eric Dubay (one of the biggest ‘papa Flerfs’) has repeatedly uploaded a multi-hour long defense of Hitler.
Dubay has written the following on his Atlantean Conspiracy website:
They say “the winner’s write history,” it is absolutely true, and the most egregious example in modern times has to be the mainstream (mis)understanding of Adolf Hitler and pre-WWII Germany. Adolf Hitler was actually a vegetarian, animal-lover, an author, an artist, a political activist, economic reformer and nominated for a Nobel Peace prize. He enacted the world’s first anti-animal cruelty, anti-pollution, and anti-smoking laws. Unlike the demonic portrait that the “allies” painted of him, Hitler was beloved by his people, he wanted nothing but peace, and never ordered the extermination of a single Jew. The largely Jewish-controlled mainstream media has ever since painted an evil picture of Hitler and the Jew World Order has even enacted laws in 16 European countries prohibiting free-speech on the issues of Judaism, Hitler and the Holocaust.
The Modern Flat-Earth Movement and Anti-Semitism | Answers in Genesis
In my experience, all conspiracy theorists are ultimately antisemites. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I haven’t encountered any (other than Jewish conspiracy theorists, of course).
Concur. Or if they really insist, tell them that you want to show them something interesting; Step 1 of which is to walk 500 metres in a straight line, away from you.
There is no step 2.
Yeah, Dubay is a fascist, but other flerfs seem to ignore it, while Masons show up all over the place. I also don’t recall saying NASA is a Jewish cabal - but I do try to avoid him. I try to look at this stuff on other channels to not support flerfs.
Real science can be really frustrating. It appears both really hard to learn but also almost impossible for the layman to contribute to*.
Then along comes something that’s understandable, and makes some “common sense” arguments that you can’t immediately refute, and yeah it’s appealing. Plus of course you’re now special: you belong to the elite few seeing through the globe hoax.
* of course there are plenty of ways that those of us unable or unwilling to go through a decade of advanced tensor topology (or whatever language the brainiacs are using these days) can do to still contribute to science. The issue is that frontier science, and making some groundbreaking discovery, is the thing that gets people excited, and then disheartened when they find they can’t understand a word of it.
Yeah, apparently this is one of the big psychological ‘draws’ of conspiracy theories and related BS.
“You can’t reason a person out of a belief that they didn’t use reason to hold in the first place.”
– Jonathan Swift
“But what a fool believes, he sees
No wise man has the power to reason away”
– Doobie Brothers
“Which Doobie you be?”
– Rerun - What’s Happening?
I would disagree. My ten year old son understands science. You don’t need to understand quantum mechanics. Really I think all you need is 1) a sense of curiosity about how stuff works and 2) a willingness to think about things in new ways as new evidence is presented. I think many people have trouble with both these concepts, along with a lot of social or cultural hangups. Like they can’t be seen to be wrong or don’t (or do) want to appear disagreeable or whatever.
I agree; maybe I phrased it badly.
A lot of people leave school with a poor understanding of foundational scientific concepts as well as a poor understanding of how we know what we know. This is partly from insufficient public education funding, but also the deliberate disparaging of science by some religious organizations and the wider culture.
Then, in adult life, the only time such people come across science is when there’s a misleading article about how “everything we thought we knew is wrong”. Or a physicist is asked to give some metaphorical explanation of frontier science that won’t make any sense to someone who is not familiar with the maths*.
This is the pool of people susceptible to CTs like FE.
Of course, it’s still only a tiny minority that fall down the rabbit hole. It takes a “special” kind of personality to claim you know better than all the scientists doing work 100x harder than the stuff you flunked out on and that, you know, can actually make stuff based on their understanding.
* I’ve mentioned in previous threads, that this is definitely an error I made years ago. I had dozens of pop sci books, and was something of an “expert” on the metaphors that physicists use. To this day, when I see a TV show or article, where a lay person asks a particle physicist, or astrophysicist a question, I always know what the answer will be.
But…this is a pretty useless skill. Because extrapolations made from such metaphors are almost always unsound. And every time there is some surprising observation, it feels like it came from nowhere, and they’ll just be a new metaphor to explain it to the lay audience.
The earth is ovoid. Oh, kinda like an 
. (Wow!)
Given recent voting patterns, I now think the Earth is a time cube. Or at least inhabited by time cube enthusiasts.
For those unfamiliar with the time cube concept
Time Cube - Wikipedia
Damned shame there wasn’t a way for somebody to preserve that site as a monument for all time.
My nine-year old grandson understands science better than a flat earther, but I’d dispute he knows science. Beyond your points, which I agree with, one must be able to evaluate evidence, and one must learn how to reason from the evidence.
The idea that to do science properly you must try to disprove your idea, not prove or confirm them, seems to be a big stumbling block. It is very rare among creationists and practically nonexistent among flat earthers. Jeran did say he was willing to accept evidence that falsified his belief, and he caught all kinds of crap for it. The reason most of them refused to go to Antarctica, I think, was to protect themselves from the evidence.
It’s worse than that. If you don’t have the training these days you can’t understand even non-breakthrough papers. You’d have trouble understanding papers in different areas of your field. Or if you slack off. For my column I look at the papers in the forthcoming issue of my journal. Being retired for 8 years means that there are whole sections of my field that are new, and I was an expert in it. (Luckily I’m just looking for ideas I can riff on - I never even pretend to criticize anything.)
Your average person doesn’t know what they don’t know, but often think they know more than they do.
Yeah, but we aren’t talking about questioning some deep and esoteric research study on the bleeding edge of some technical field. We are talking about people questioning fundamental shit everyone knew a thousand years ago.
True, but here’s an example of how not understanding how science works gets flerfs into trouble. One of the common pushbacks on the Final Experiment was that you can’t tell the shape of the earth from looking at the sky. Anyone who understands how science works (not just the facts) knows that flat earth predicts that there could not be a 24 hour sun in Antarctica, and finding one falsifies the flat earth “hypothesis.” So in fact you can say something about the shape of the earth while looking at the sky.
Right, I think some of the OP’s point has been rather overshadowed by discussions of flat eartherism, rather than the personal aspects.
I am of course not a mod, but this really seems like a candidate for being split into different threads?
At a very high altitude (Mt. Everest or a jet) you indeed can. Easiest way is to use a transparent container of water as a level, and look along the water’s surface and see where it “points.” It will be in line with points above the horizon.