Submitted 2 weeks ago by DistinctBall@lemmy.today to [deleted]
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/00b6405f-21fb-477f-b492-88de12a2952d.jpeg
Unfortunately, it’s way dumber than that
The north pole is the middle of the map and the moon goes in circles like the sun. The incredible brightness of the sun is not visible after it’s passed visibly over the horizon round in a flat circle and neither is the moon. It is not explained how the sun goes definitively down over the horizon from one geographical perspective and up into the sky from another based on this flat disk.
I saw an animation once where the sun sort of dipped and peaked above and below the world disc horizon. Total mental gymnastics
Ah yes the sun the thing which famously isn’t always shining on some part of the globe
Oh it is explained, though, but not consistently. I have heard explanations of that the light refraction makes the sun look lower when it moves away, to a point where its visibility is hidden by the horizon, like a mirrage of the sky. Another explanation is that the surface of the earth isn’t flat, but bulges slightly, like a dome, making the sun disappear behind the dome every day. I’m sure there are more explanations as well.
The thing about flat earth theories is that they always have an answer for whatever you throw at them. They are so committed to their idea, that they will invent reasonings on the spot which become more and more convoluted - often in conflict with other parts of their theory.
My favorite part about their map is that, among the many other ways to test the Earth is round, they could just fly from Joburg to Perth or Sydney on a private charter plane, and when the flight time isn’t 37 hours, it would only be possible on a globe.
It’s called perspective and the vanishing point /s
I’ve also heard a fucking flat rectangle theory.
The world is one big ikea table.
The explanation is that light is affected by gravity to a much greater degree than in conventional physics.
Until you see a 24 hour sun in Antarctica.
AWWWW SHIT !
CHECKMATE PLANEBRAINS!
And eclipses are fake news
Just to point out that, despite what a lot of people strongly believe, the Moon does not move in the sky at the same speed of the Sun. So they both can be visible at once, or neither.
Well that solar eclipse I just saw would be very hard to explain if they did 🤣
Guess that could be just the government 🤣
How do they explain airplanes taking the same time to go around a northern fixed-latitude ring and a southern fixed-latitude ring?
They have two excuses.
Wind is pushing the planes/boats faster on the south side so they can cover more distance faster.
They (IE: NASA or the jews or whoever “they” are today) are lying to you on how long it takes to travel on the south side. It’s a cover up, man.
Was going to say… It’s not rocket science
Flat Earth Society has members from all around the globe.
The moon is a lie.
The moon is a transparent light source.
You might be asking yourself how does a transparent object generate it’s own light? Well let me explain: trust me bro.
Well let me explain: trust me bro.
You sold me!
Not sure if you were aware of the meme, but I was making a portal reference, as in “the cake is a lie.” The image looks the same as the portals in the video game “portal.” The original context of “The cake is a lie” was to convey the message that a reward is being used to motivate Chell, the player character of Portal, without any intent of delivering. It was my attempt at making fun of flat earthers. I do believe the earth is round, that we orbit the sun, that the moon orbits earth, and that the moon landing was real.
But then how do we get delicious cheese ?
Can’t land on a lie.
I wonder are there flat earthers who are also simultaneously NOT moon landing deniers? Or is that like a prerequisite.
Not sure if you were aware of the meme, but I was making a portal reference, as in “the cake is a lie.” The image looks the same as the portals in the video game “portal.” The original context of “The cake is a lie” was to convey the message that a reward is being used to motivate Chell, the player character of Portal, without any intent of delivering. It was my attempt at making fun of flat earthers. I do believe the earth is round, that we orbit the sun, that the moon orbits earth, and that the moon landing was real.
that’s amore
When the moon is a lie and the flat earthers cry, that’s amore.
When the sun really shines, flat earthers ask why, that’s amore.
They are ding, ding-a-ling-a-lings
ding-a-ling-a-lings and you’ll sing, “stupid fella”
Brains are dead, flippy-flippy-fled, flippy-flippy-fled
contracted rubella.
Birbs aren’t real.
I still refuse to believe that any of them actually believe the earth is flat. It’s either a grift in the case of social media accounts that push the rhetoric, or a big joke in the case of everyone else. Even if some of them do actually believe it, I still choose to believe this theory, because it makes me hate humanity a little less.
I’m part of some flat earth debate groups because I like physics… they’re real
Mostly it’s a religious thing. These people you have to just ignore because you can take them to space and push them out into the void of space with no helmet so they could see the round spinning earth with their own eyes and the last thought that would go through their brain before they froze in the vacuum of space would be, “the devil has taken control of my vision”
I’d guess the 2nd most popular group of flat-earth supporters are just weird-o conspiracy people. The government lies about everything and since NASA is a government agency it too must be lying.
Then you got the people who are dumb and know they’re dumb but after a lifetime of being called dumb have convinced themselves that they’re actually the smartest person in the room and the only reason everyone thinks they’re dumb is because everyone else is too dumb to understand their genius. These people think they know everything about physics but the shit they say just showcases their complete inability to understand even the most simple concepts
And then you just have people who just don’t know any better. Like maybe it’ll be a guy who’s profile picture is him with some goats in a small village in Africa. He’s well meaning but he knows nothing about relativity or gravity because he never really went to school and the education he did get was just from some other person in his village doing their best. You don’t really need to understand relativity to survive in the deserts of Africa and so it’s not well understood out there. This man walks 50 miles a day and has never seen a mountain in his entire life. All he’s ever known is flat lands and dirt. Then one day he travels to a near-by village with electricity and gets on the internet only to see a bunch of crazy white people talking about how water sticks to a spinning dirt ball in space and he laughs. Silly city-people, they don’t know shit.
And then you just have people who just don’t know any better.
This is an interesting perspective that I hadn’t considered. Can’t really blame folks in that situation.
Probably for some of them (e.g. the one making videos). Definitely not all of them.
Believing something wrong is not really a reason to hate someone though. We all have varying degrees of wrong beliefs - if anyone thinks they don’t, well … that’s an excellent example.
Do not underestimate a human’s ability to delude themselves or, more importantly in this case (in my opinion) buy into being part of a social group. Flat earthers have a pretty active social community going online and some people will absolutely buy into the things they say just to be a part of it. And this isn’t some ‘I’ll just pretend to so they’ll talk to me’ thing, they will convince themselves they’re true believers. The belief in a flat earth is often downwind from the belief in other conspiracies, things that may be pretty benign or just outright true (Tuskegee experiment, MKultra etc), putting Flat Earth on a path from the benign to the deeply harmful, like Pizzagate or raging antisemitism.
In all this, community is extremely important. If a person loses this access to the community, their beliefs may turn somewhat more mainstream. We see this with cults too, though I’m not saying Flat Earthers are a cult by any means.
Anyway, there are Flat Earth books, podcasts, YouTube channels, conferences, you name it. There’s a real dedication to showing everyone in the community just how much you bought into the thing. I think approaching this from the standpoint of ‘this is a personal failure for the one believer’ doesn’t provide us with any answers about the ‘why’ of it all, nor will it necessarily help anyone with leaving such a worldview.
Anyway. My two cents. The best way to make sure someone leaves a cult or a toxic worldview is to allow them to be part of communities that aren’t that cult or that worldview. The more insular you force them to be, the more insular they will become. Within reason of course and especially with cults, within what’s safe for everyone.
One thing that gave me a different perspective on this is that conspiracy theorists tend to believe a whole load of conspiracy theories. And the conspiracy theories that people believe follow certain patterns: they can be falsifiable, but not so easily falsifiable you can’t come up with some arguments that take real work to debunk. And while they obviously contradict mainstream beliefs, this combination alone is not enough. Basically, someone needs to plant the idea for it to spread: most people aren’t deciding for themselves that everyone is lying about the Earth being round, they get it from someone else.
I think all this tells us that it’s not really about the facts. There’s a cognitive bias at play here which engenders belief in things which enable the believer to feel like they’re in on a secret and are therefore one above the common person.
Absolutely. The followers do actually believe the earth is flat. The ones propagating the misinformation are absolutely grifting and they know it.
There are of course moon landing deniers who legit believe that. Where would you put them on the spectrum of stupid belief systems when compared to say flat earthers or sovereign citizens?
Moon landing denial predates the internet, whereas the others I don’t think so. (Unless in the case of flat earth you go back far enough and count the illiterate and uneducated masses.)
You can also add JFK and 9/11 conspiracies to that spectrum. Though I’d say those are much more “mainstream” as conspiracy theories go.
If engagement farming is diverting profits from a big tech corporation, is that actually a grift or is it based?
(I suppose it stirs up distrust in anyone who sees it - dumb people stop trusting their education and smart people stop trusting other people)
They actually think it moves around the plane in a circle, they look at maps where the artic is in the centre, they also think that Antarctica is a wall of ice around the edge of the disc keeping the water in or something like that
I’ll stop you at ‘they actually think’.
They do not think, at least not as we know it.
Rocks don’t think. I’m getting sick of these “anything less intelligent than the average human doesn’t think” hyperbolies.
How do they explain the polar night at the North Pole then?
That’s the best part. They dont!
They don’t explain much outside their talking points as far as I know
The sun is more like a spotlight idk
And the Wall of course blocking us sheeple from all the great lands beyond. How would they know? Easy, pulled it right out of their unwashed (because washing your behind is so gay) arses.
You believe in the moon? 😭🙏
now you’re thinking with portals!
I think the moon is man made in flat earth lore. I can’t recall exactly. I know the sun is like a big spot light and they just shine it on different parts of the earth throughout the day. I think the moon is similar, but it’s been years since my flat earth research. Not researching as in I believe it, but researching because I find these kinds of beliefs fascinating.
The sad thing is that that’s still more sane than what they actually believe.
I was about to say that. Isn’t it something like “it just randomly travels from left to right in mid-air, but due to optical illusions it’s not visible 100% of the time”?
Something about dark energoe bending the light in a way that everything looks like the earth is round or something I don’t really know or understand it and frankly I don’t want to.
How do they explain the moon
“The Moon was created by Islamo-Communists to make Hot Blooded Americans go to sleep!!”
The moon is a sticker on the sky which is a big glass dome with holes in it. Or something like that, honestly they’re not really very consistent.
So, they aren’t exactly a monolith, different folks have different ideas. But generally speaking, they beleive all celestial bodies are basically spinning above us. I know they consider the sun to be actually really small and shockingly close to the surface. Generally the idea is the antarctic is the rim of the disk, with a giant ice wall that keeps the oceans in. Gravity is an illusion caused by the Earth constantly accelerating upwards.
What I gather from these types of conspiracy theories is a kind of logic like “what if reality is exactly as simple as it seems prima facie,” and then from that they make all kinds of pseudo-empirical conjectures based on a anecdotal reasoning.
There’s nothing wrong with going out into the weeds with your thinking and doubting everything, for a bit (as a treat). But they seem to fail to realise when their hypotheses are actually far clunkier than the established science, so they just stay out there on the fringes of reason getting wilder and more unhinged.
PS and probably there’s some racism or antisemitism driving the whole thing, even if they don’t see it.
How do they explain seasons, solar eclipses, lunar eclipses, lunar phases, tides, polar nights, polar days, etc?
When you are stupid about one thing on purpose, you can be stupid about everything.
The moon is just a round disk like earth that is tidally locked so you only ever see one flat side, duh
There’s a guy in my town that has a massive “THE EARTH IS FLAT” sticker on the back of his car. Every time I see him I keep hoping it’s a troll, but I live in Missouri so it wouldn’t surprise me if he actually believes it.
the moon is a man made satellite base for robot pigeons, D’uh.
Wrong.
It’s a different one every time.
Sheep.
Well hold on. I may have just woken up, but, if earth were a disc, couldn’t the disc just be rotating and or flipping?
The more flat earthers talk the dumber it gets
I’ve always wanted to ask a flat earther why I only ever see full moons in the eastern sky at night and never the western sky. I don’t suppose they’d have a canned answer, so I’m curious the to the response.
or two identical moons 180° apart
Moon can’t orbit since ain’t no orb 'cause planet.
What do you think happens during a new moon?🌚
Finally, something that makes sense. Maybe they’re right after all. /s
Diehard Discworld fans I see…
Flat earth theory is that earth is a pancake (must sit on turtles all the way down) where north pole is at center and antartica on the edge.
They say that sun and moon just make circular patterns above the pancake, but that is still impossible as the sun and moon would still always be visible if it is just further away from your spot, and the sunrise/sunset dynamic can no longer happen. Even if you change it to a dome shaped pancake, to get some hiding of the sun, then southern hemisphere no longer has predictable daytimes.
You can just habe two moons tho
This might be also the way how the sun orbits according to them
Umm… No. There are loads of other totally flat disc shaped objects that look mostly the same except have different sized bites missing because of that giant baby in the sun, and they all drift by one at a time.
The baby can’t grab them to finish eating because it doesn’t have arms. Just that giggling face.
ummthatguy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago