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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   6132 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 21, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Here's an inverse conspiracy theory that's also technically a conspiracy: Flat Earthers don't exist.

It's held up as the archetypical example of conspiracy theory believers, but I'm convinced that pretty much everyone who expresses support for Flat Earth theories - well over 99% - is knowingly playing along in a giant hoax, for a sense of community and the amusement of getting ridiculous stories published in serious newspapers. (Some of them don't actually realise this and think that only they themselves are roleplayers while the rest of their group are serious).

A good friend of mine's mother is a flat earther, they do exist. They are crazy for several other reasons though.

The Flat Earther thing looks superficially like 20th century science crackpottery, but it's socially more like a fandom. The old-school crackpot theorists were individual deranged people pursuing their theories about free energy generators or the value of pi being wrong. Flat Earth is a worldview stance more than a complex scientific theory, and all that's expected of a follower is to assert that they believe this to be a fact. "Pi is actually 3.1446..." or "nuclear power isn't real" don't have quite the same immediate worldview shifting juice for someone reading about them and then professing to believe them as "the Earth is flat" has. The people making the Flat Earth materials might be mostly insincere, but the follower fandom seems quite real, and before social media crackpot theories didn't really have fandoms like this.

I've talked to earnest flat earthers, they definitely exist

Anecdotal but I know a genuine believer. He is very into other conspiracy theories as well.

Here is inverse inverse conspiracy theory: modern flat earthism, when it suddenly appeared about 2012 - if you remember, you would remember deluge of slick, professionally made Youtube videos - was not product of believers, was not a joke, but experiment how could disinformation and fake news spread on then new social media (it turned out it can spread like wildfire).

Anyway, if the Earth is not flat, it should be. See you on Kek island.

I think it's just hardcore in-group testing. "We wanted to create a group where just getting into it meant demonstrating extreme commitment ... but in a purely "I BELIEVE" way." My main evidence for this is the Behind The Curve documentary which shows that the main Flat Earth dude was just looking for a girlfriend and the main Flat Earth lady was just looking for a boyfriend (I think after a divorce or death?) and so they pre-tested the hell out of each other with the Flat Earth community and now have super hard to break enforced bonding via shared delusional belief.

If the world were as big as that chart it would be so much more interesting.

Crazy how much lower res the continents get as you go out. Hopefully some day cartography will advance enough that we can see the truth.

I believe this one. “The Flat Earth Society” used to be a fictional group cited to mock people, like calling someone “president of the The Narcissists’ Fan Club”.

I remember someone once telling me it was a skeptic’s group dedicated to promoting scientific thinking, by providing challenges such as defeating the view cited in its name. However, I did a few Google searches a few years ago and found no evidence of such a group ever having existed.

I remember joining the flat earth society on a lark, and it seemed like most of the people in their forum had joined on a lark. There were a few zetetic schizoposters ranting about mass graves for former guards of the antarctic ice wall but I was never that sure they weren't trolls.

I remember being in school during geography and actually signing up for this. I signed up on a school email, which is now lost to time, but I specifically remember them being a legit web site.

I choose to believe it's a psy op.

I suspect that the flat earth society is a lot like many so-called "right wing militias", nine hundreds feds rationalists and one sincere autist who will be used by said feds/rationalists to justify why normies suck and ought to be disenfranchised.

As the joke goes, 14/88 stands for 1 FBI agent, 4 state troopers and 8 8th-graders, a typical composition of a right-wing extremist cell.

And it breaks up when the State troopers lose patience with the FBI agent's increasingly violent rhetoric and decide he needs to be taken out before he blows up a building.

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