"Flat Earth makes perfect sense !" Topic

I just bumped into this nugget of wisdom :

"Earth can't be round because of the rotation of the earth which would knock people down. And without rotation there is no gravity, that's why the earth moves."

There are flat earthers who at least try to come up with "plausible" explanations for why everyone who thinks earth is a spheroid is dead wrong. But this is a case of somebody who discovered something that shook their tiny minds and they absorbed a few facts, but can't string them cogently together.

I suspect they have seen different examples and don't quite know how to express them or don't understand them fully.

My guess is that they have picked up on the objection that if earth rotates, it would cause storms that would knock people out of their socks.

They probably also saw the answer to the rebuttal that if earth was a disc, that gravity would still pull towards the center, meaning that people near the edge would feel a distinct sideways pull as if standing on a slope. The classic answer being that earth simply accelerates at a speed of 1G, creating the illusion of gravity.

What I find funniest is that our believer thinks they have an airtight case, but forget that if they object to earth rotating on account that it would generate 1000 mph storms then accelerating at 1G means you keep going faster and faster. In a little less than a year you hit lightspeed and if earth has been around for at least 6000 years we'd be in the higher warp numbers and our planet would not simply be blasted clean by storms, but any particle we hit would explode with massive force, releasing deadly radation. So our disc speeding along at 1G would be a white hot radioactive moonscape …

As for the rotation/gravity link, I assume they have heard about simulating gravity by spinning space habitats and have come to believe that earth's gravity is therefore caused by the rotation of the planet.

Sure you can invoke some kind of celestial dome and that evil scientists lie about the speed of G (despite all objects in a vacuum all consistently falling at the same 9.8 m/s)

I guess that somewhere in some state of mind it all makes perfect sense and anyone who says otherwise is a pitiable fool …

I like the guy who took a level onto a jet. Presto…….flat Earth

youtu.be/QTZT6V8-aa4

Face palm, then bangs head against wall…

Terry

The Flat-Earthers are just plain wrong.

The earth isn't flat, it's a bowl, 'cause I can see mountains all around me from my house.

Case proved.

From Stephen Novella's blog post on Flat Eartehrs:

The modern flat-earth movement is one manifestation of the rejection of established knowledge as a tool of power. The idea is that those in power use knowledge to maintain and increase their power. "They" control the institutions, therefore any knowledge coming from those institutions is not legitimate and cannot be trusted. The result is a conspiratorial heuristic in which official knowledge is rejected out-of-hand in favor of "doing your own research" (i.e. watching YouTube videos).

There are other manifestations of this knowledge-power heuristic as well. Some well-meaning people in historically oppressed regions reject "Western" science as colonialism. Science is just part of the culture that the colonizers use to control the natives and suppress their culture. Your beliefs are wrong, our science tells a different story. This was the justification for South Africa's rejection of the science of HIV and AIDS, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Other heads of this hydra include the overall rejection of experts and expertise as a result of the democratization of information in the internet age. Everyone now can be their own expert, can do their own research, and is not dependent on experts to know what to believe.[…]

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It is not flat but it is not actually round either.

Just another incident of delusional behavior.

It's not nice making fun of special people. And flat earthers are a special kind of special. In fact. Special kind of special people think flat earthers are special. So they are in fact third degree special.

The Earth has to be round otherwise it could never be Hollow. So there.

It could be cube-shaped and still be hollow.

It is not flat but it is not actually round either.

The Relativity of Wrong.

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The equatorial diameter is only 27 miles greater than the polar diameter. So the Earth is round, it's just not perfectly spherical. I think that's what you meant.

Hey Martin,

Novella's comments bring to mind recent articles in Skeptic Magazine and in the Skeptical Inquirer. This anti-science attitude is also found in the halls of Academia, with post Modernist thought, mostly residing in the Humanities departments. To them, Science is just one more myth, and just as valid as any other myth.

Of course when these same post-modernist academics and philosophers get sick and go to the hospital, then I'm sure all that relativistic post-modernism gets thrown out the window.

Further indisputable, undeniable, irrefutable proof that the Earth is round:

The word "Flat" contains 4 letters that have flat, smooth surfaces.

The word "Round" is made up of 5 letters, ALL of which have rounded surfaces.

5 is more than 4 so case closed. In your face – disgrace!

So we are not spherical, but 4 5ths round. In other words an oblate ellipse. See…..ZOC showed us the math wasn't too hard after all.

Aw, c'mon. They told me there would be no math.

Hey you brought up the 4 and the 5.

Novella's comments bring to mind recent articles in Skeptic Magazine and in the Skeptical Inquirer. This anti-science attitude is also found in the halls of Academia, with post Modernist thought, mostly residing in the Humanities departments. To them, Science is just one more myth, and just as valid as any other myth.

Of course when these same post-modernist academics and philosophers get sick and go to the hospital, then I'm sure all that relativistic post-modernism gets thrown out the window.

I'm going to have to push back here a bit on the uselessness of postmodernism. While I'll grant that some take it WAAAAAAAYYYY too far, it does have solid uses in examining our own biases in out theories of knowledge. Rather, it specializes in looking at the way in which we arrive at conclusions, and see if these conclusions are based on solid foundations. For example, take Arthurian history. For the longest time, scholars were poring over Mallory, Chrétien de Troyes and others searching for the Ur text on which the character is based, or some sort of historical figure on which to pin the legend. Post Modernists asked "Why does there have to be an Ur text or historical person? Can't the legend develop sui-generis? Granted, this is more applicable to the social sciences than particle physics.

I'm talking about the post modernist attitude about science:

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Etc. I like the part about "medicine as a form of micro-fascism". Ya, until the author needs a bypass.

I've had to take painkillers to deal with the headaches I get from reading the accusations against Post Modernism by some hip "thinker" who claims to be apolitical but is loved to the level of ecstasy by the very people who have trained their spleen to rupture whenever certain words are spoken in an ominous fashion.

Sure, there are some a-holes on a soapbox who have turned Post Modernism into the great church of deconstruction ad nihilo, but they are not the umpteenth variant of the Great Satan so beloved by those who fear tyranny and the loss of freedom more than anything, but always end up voting for names on ballots like H. Aitler, Kengis Gahn or M. Bussolini because they happen to have "Fresh new political views which I like, that stick it to the establishment*"

*That last word being said in hushed terms to more of their ilk will rupture their spleen in panic and shout that "Tyranny is coming !!! Quick, vote for the nearest hardline authoritarian you can find, they will guarantee our freedom and ward off tyranny !!!"

If you believe the earth is flat, go find the edge and then get back to me with this amazing proof, i'll wait here.

Apparently, there is an Ice Wall guarded by UN kill teams. Depends on which idiots you ask.

I been watching a bit of flatearthers on Youtube and apparently the UN has a massive (largest in history) secret navy that guards the ice wall….no idea how they pay for it, how they crew it or even how they built this fleet without anybody noticing.

All space pictures of earth are apparently fake, the international space station is apparently not in orbit but simply flying very high, NASA is an all powerful organisation that controls all access and knowledge to space, we apparently live on a disc world, or a snow globe etc…..

Apparently the 'fact' that we are living on a flat world is being hidden (for centuries) from us to control us some how, they were a little sketchy on how this works but I'm sure they will come up with something.

So basically these are the guys conspiracy theorists make fun of.

"So basically these are the guys conspiracy theorists make fun of."

Or is that just what they WANT you to think ?!?

So when Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth (in 240 BC no less) was he the first member of the conspiracy?

He was off by 15% which was pretty good, given the circumstances.

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Apparently, although since all science is controlled by the 'government' its probably all fake history, like dinosaurs. Seriously, that was another claim made by some of the same guys….how faking dinosaurs/round earth allow the 'government, or the UN or NASA to control the world I'm not sure.

Earl, you should get nervous when it starts to "make sense". Faking dinosaurs? So the conspiracy is growing leaps and bounds, multiplying more and more unnecessary components, just to keep the Earth flat. The opposite of Okham's Razor.

It doesn't really make sense unless you get into the mindset that everything is faked…..science, history, shots of earth from space, fossils, maps, moon landing, space walks, space station etc.

Honestly I've been watching a few of these guys attempting to explain their beliefs and they cannot really come up with anything coherent. It mostly seems to stem from the belief that the 'government' (and they come from multiple countries so its not even the same government) is in control of everything and somehow through the UN or NASA is faking everything.