Not kidding folks here is a link http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/ ciety.org"] I ran across one of these wackos several years ago and had a most interesting chat with him. The new site has a library and correspondence from its founder, I found a booklet that explains the view of flat earthers but cant make heads or tales of it, anyone want to try and explain this
http://www.earthnotaglobe.com/library/Truth%20-%20The%20Earth%20Is%20Flat.pdf
In your heart you know it’s flat.
Yes of course I do, and Corporate made Global Warming is a myth
Take the second link and try to plow through it, mad mad mad:p
Back? Why, we – um, I mean “They” – never went away!
It doesn’t take a lot of sophistication to see beyond the obvious, but it does take a little. One can easily forgive a subsistence farmer, who never gets ten miles from his home, and who doesn’t study the stars at night because he’s fast asleep, with twelve hours of backbreaking labor ahead of him tomorrow, for not understanding.
It’s a little harder to excuse highly educated persons, who use all the nasty rhetorical tricks in hell’s nine-volume encyclopedia, to lie about such things. (Creationists, ahem.)
But even in a very well-educated society, such as ours (?) the belief that the world is round is almost entirely based on authority. It’s what we’re taught in school. Most of us have a world globe in our homes. But how many of us have actually measured the angle to, say, the moon, from two different places in the U.S. at the same time? (You need to have a partner for this…) How many of us have actually taken a telescope and observed the “hull-down” image of ships at distances over still water?
I practice a kind of “creative anachronisms” variety of Flat Earthism. I pretend the world is flat (the way Dorothy Sayers pretended that Sherlock Holmes was real) and try to “explain away” the evidence. At first, it’s easy, but as one makes more and more detailed observations, the reality becomes very hard to deny.
In any case…no turtles!
Why do you say that the Flat Earth Society is back when that is clearly an ancient text? (Ancient in the sense of many decades, possibly more than a century.)
Is there even a GQ here?
What I mean is there was no website for them just a discussion board, it seemed they fell off the Earth(ha ha). So I was joyful on finding them back on the web
My one evening discussion has given me many years of joy and I want everyone else to experience it
And the GQ is can anyone parse what this guy is saying? I know its nuts But with the bit about claws and the constant references to 34 deg I cant make head or tails of it
The 34 degree south is just where he happens to be, or the place he is using as a reference. I’m in San Diego, California, so I might use “33 degrees north” as my reference. This bit, at least, isn’t important.
The rest of his ranting is the usual lack of comprehension regarding the direction of “down.” He thinks that, if you were standing on a globe, and were at 34 degrees south, there is “…literal gaseous space below your feet level.”
i.e., this is the variety of Flat-Earther who thinks that, in Australia, on a globe, you would be “walking around on your head.” (Marjorie Johnson, wife of Charles Johnson, the more recent Flat-Earther, visited Australia, and came back with a signed and notarized document, attesting that never, not even once, had she been upside down! You can’t get more convincing than a notarized affidavit!)
The idea that “down” is always the direction toward the center of the globe is rather sophisticated. It violates our naive idea that “down is down.”
Charles Johnson also couldn’t cope with the idea of the curvature of the earth, and insisted that, if it existed, water would “run off downhill.” Again, he couldn’t cope with the relativity of “down.”
Side issue: I couldn’t get my browser to save a copy of the pamphlet – the second link you provided. I tried printing it, but the result was horribly distorted. Can someone help me figure out how to save a copy for my personal flat earth archives?
they are silly, so much laughs are to be had at their expense.
I save them as jpg’s. I use a free program called Snipping Tool but I’m sure there are multitudes. Personal use allowed only, of course, same as making a photocopy, which sounds like what you want to do.
Aye! (For some odd reason, I don’t see a booming market for this variety of literature!) Thank you! Snipping Tool snipped!
When I stumbled upon the FES years ago, I assumed they were affecting their views, either for satirical or entertainment purposes. I’m still not completely convinced that they really believe their claims, and personally suspect that they are in fact a secret society of sophists, debaters and rhetoricians who are basically playing a big joke on those who enjoy discrediting them. Essentially, they’ve been trolling for decades. There’s probably a couple members who actually believe, but that’s probably part of the fun - they’re so successful that they’ve managed to convince a few people it’s true.
HERE’S a thread from their forum that gives some support to my belief. The question is “How many people still believe the earth is flat?” Some of the answers (from active members of the FES forum):
“Many.”
“All the people on this forum who claim to believe in a flat earth are lying trolls. None of them believe it. […] You have to be thick or mentally unstable to believe the earth is flat.”
“What someone truly believes is flat is completely irrelevant to their argument. For example, do you honestly think that every defense attorney believes that all of their clients are innocent? Besides, what’s the point of coming to here if no one wants to argue for FET?”
They’re sort of like rhetorical war reenactors. Someone’s got to play the Nazis.
Yes, I was under the impression that the FES is basically just a joke that the members enjoy playing.
Is it true, that if you want to become a member of the Flat Earth Society you must throw away any technology that uses GPS signals?
The Amish must laugh at these buffoons. 
That may be true for a small-minded few who accept without question whatever they’re told by their teachers, but I think for most, belief is not based on an appeal to authority: it’s based on the reported results of experiments. I know the earth is round, not because Carl Sagan told me it’s round, but because of the test results he told me about which, when considered together, are most consistent with a reality in which the earth is round - even though I haven’t personally performed those tests.
And I think that’s the case for the vast majority of what we know. I’ve learned tons of stuff from textbooks and from the internet in my 40+ years, and while all of that knowledge meshes together nicely without conflict, I’ve personally tested precious little of it.
Well to believe in a flat earth you’d have to believe there had been a huge conspiracy, so how could you trust the results of such tests?
Fortunately, it’s not just appeal to authority and it’s not just hearing results of experiments:
The spherical (-ish) earth has a hell of a lot of explanatory power, and it’s not obvious how a rival theory would begin to address all these things: days, seasons, the poles (and generally the distribution of temperatures) and it’s consistent with things like plate tectonics.
Plus, more abstractly, once you’ve asked the question of why things fall, a force like gravity makes sense and obviously has huge explanatory power in itself (including why so many astronomical bodies are round).
Possible true for those with no habit of observation.
You can do an easy version of this experiment by watching a live sporting event located across the country and noting that it can be dark in NY while the sun has not yet set in LA.
A telescope may help, but this effect is readily observable with the naked eye. It’s also obvious (if the day is clear) that as you drive from plains toward mountains the summits are visible before the lower parts.
Thing is, I’m pretty sure the Flat Earth Society itself is a big put-on.
Think of it as an enormous in-joke for people with an incredibly dry sense of humor who enjoy being contrarian.
Accepting the results of someone else’s experiments, on faith, without duplicating them yourself, is a form of “appeal to authority.”
Agreed… But that, alas, probably means nearly everyone.
Heck, I still meet people who have never realized that you can sometimes see the moon in the middle of the day.
That’s probably true of this particular incarnation of the FES, but, believe me, Charles Johnson, and the “International Flat Earth Research Society,” was as serious as a broken femur. And just about as much fun. (i.e., none!) He truly believed.
(It is widely felt that a great many of his members were only joining out of perverse curiosity. I joined – still have my membership card! – for that reason.)
Two of my favorites from their FAQ section:
Q: “What is the motive behind this conspiracy?” (referring to the round earth conspiracy)
A: Although their main objective can only be speculated upon, the most favored theory is that of financial gain. In a nutshell, it would logically cost much less to fake a space program than to actually have one, so those in on the conspiracy profit from the funding NASA and other space agencies receive from the government.
Q: “No one could possibly pull off such a conspiracy successfully.”
A: Actually, they could.
I’m not sure this is a General Question, so I’ve moved it to MPSIMS.
samclem, MOderator