Fixed Flat Earth?

[zangtang]

I see the Santiago - Perth direct flight is causing some venting of spleen........

google image should encapsulate

[Wombaticus Rex]

I'm on a couple of wild-@ssed conspiracy forums and there has been a deluge of flat-earth conversations as of late.

That's an interesting data point.

I, too, have had a number of friends and fellow travelers send me execrable Youtube videos about polar cover-ups in recent months.

Someone is doing good work.

"Expectation calibration and expectation management is essential at home and internationally."

-- Harvard Professor and Barack Obama Foreign Policy Advisor Samantha Power, February 21, 2008

[zangtang]

a timeline of youtube proliferation could be interesting.......
I have no doubt the related wikipages are experiencing an increase in er....revisionism

edit : i have seen a couple with unmistakeable Christian fundamentalist origins
(complete with signature slow draaawl audio - no,really!)

wonder if a motive - if motive there be - reveals isself.......

[divideandconquer]

I think there are really interesting conversations to be had around FE - not just psyops-related but around evidence, engagement, argumentation, theory-making, when to dispose of models etc.

That's why I started the thread. Not so much to prove "flat earth"--I'm certainly not convinced --but to raise questions about the theoretical and computational models that highly regulated mainstream science uses to prove whatever it is they want us to believe...tweaking it or creating something new, every so often, to make it work.

The fact that mainstream science appeals to the authority of convention and consensus should be a major red flag for anyone who knows anything about scientific method

And as far as psyops go, let's face it, even if something doesn't begin as a psyop, the powers that shouldn't be turn it into one in order to misdirect, distract, divide, further their agenda, etc... Unless you completely tune out, disconnect, disengage--getting harder and harder to do these days--"reality" is one big psyop.

[stefano]

The fact that mainstream science appeals to the authority of convention and consensus should be a major red flag for anyone who knows anything about scientific method

In theory, and more often in practice than you'd think, it appeals to the authority of repeated experiment. No alternative theory has ever stood up to any kind of repeated experiment - to the contrary, it's almost always the 'alternative' theory that essentially rests on an appeal to the false authority of one holy text or another. The Flat Earth movement was started by an English Bible-basher in the 19th century, for instance.

The Flat Earth thing has an appeal precisely because the globe Earth is such an old and universally accepted truth. I think the essence of the appeal comes through in this 1977 headline of the Flat Earth News: Whole World Deceived... Except the Very Elect. Isn't that an ego stroke! If it's true that there are more of these videos popping up it might be an op. Any links, perhaps, to YouTube channels that look like they've been pushing the idea more recently?

I also reckon the whole Christian and Muslim thing of 'belief' as something you affirm, rather than something you've concluded after giving it a bit of thought, has been intellectually destructive. It took a while for Christian societies to get out of that bind (the Americans really moved backwards on it in the past 100 years); I think Muslim societies (or the ones I'm familiar with) are struggling with it at the moment as the Islamists have got more vocal and passionate.

[jingofever]

If it's true that there are more of these videos popping up it might be an op. Any links, perhaps, to YouTube channels that look like they've been pushing the idea more recently?

A YouTube search for "flat earth" returns about 134,000 results, 121,000 are from this year, 7,400 are from this month. A Google search of "flat earth" returns about 951,000 results, 189,000 are from this year, 70,000 are from this month. Google sometimes has a hard time knowing when a website was published.

The most viewed video (more than seven million views) is from ten months ago from a user who creates science themed videos. Also ten months ago there was a documentary uploaded that has about 330,000 views from a user called Eric Dubay. He has released several other videos in the following months, his latest is from last week. Most of his videos were about kung-fu or yoga until about a year ago when he started uploading videos about conspiracies, his first flat earth video coming eleven months ago. He uploaded a few conspiracy videos in the years previous, but it is mostly kung-fu. He might believe in the flat earth because of some sort of Hindu beliefs.

[stefano]

Thanks for doing the looking up, jingo.

That seven-million-view one isn't propounding a flat Earth, it's the pretty interesting video (narrator a bit jokily enthusiastic, I found) one on relativity posted upthread. Eric Dubay is a full-on batshit anti-Semite, so I'd guess his sudden popularity has to do with the surging paranoia of right-wing American whites.

[tapitsbo]

for some reason I can't find the 7 million view one despite using filters, do you guys have a link?

[stefano]

It's this one, the one Belligerent Savant posted earlier in the week:

[Elvis]

Google Ngram of "flat earth" 1800-2015:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c ... th%3B%2Cc0

[stefano]

Possibly related. The whole thing is a cool read, from Mike Lofgren. His book Deep State drops in January - frequently bought together, Amazon tells me, with David Talbot's Dulles book discussed elsewhere on here.

Anti-knowledge is a subset of anti-intellectualism, and as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, anti-intellectualism has been a recurrent feature in American life, generally rising and receding in synchronism with fundamentalist revivalism.

The current wave, which now threatens to swamp our political culture, began in a similar fashion with the rise to prominence in the 1970s of fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. But to a far greater degree than previous outbreaks, fundamentalism has merged its personnel, its policies, its tactics and its fate with a major American political party, the Republicans.

Buttressing this merger is a vast support structure of media, foundations, pressure groups and even a thriving cottage industry of fake historians and phony scientists. From Fox News to the Discovery Institute (which exists solely to “disprove” evolution), and from the Heritage Foundation (which propagandizes that tax cuts increase revenue despite massive empirical evidence to the contrary) to bogus “historians” like David Barton (who confected a fraudulent biography of a piously devout Thomas Jefferson that had to be withdrawn by the publisher), the anti-knowledge crowd has created an immense ecosystem of political disinformation.

Thanks to publishing houses like Regnery and the conservative boutique imprints of more respectable houses like Simon & Schuster (a division of CBS), America has been flooded with cut-and-paste rants by Michelle Malkin and Mark Levin, Parson Weems-style ghosted biographies allegedly by Bill O’Reilly, and the inimitable stream of consciousness hallucinating of Glenn Beck.

Whether retail customers actually buy all these screeds, or whether foundations and rich conservative donors buy them in bulk and give them out as door prizes at right-wing clambakes, anti-knowledge infects the political bloodstream in the United States.

Thanks to these overlapping and mutually reinforcing segments of the right-wing media-entertainment-“educational” complex, it is now possible for the true believer to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and scientific disinformation without ever sighting the dry land of empirical fact. This effect is fortified by the substantial overlap between conservative Republicans and fundamentalist Christians.

The latter group begins with the core belief that truth is revealed in a subjective process involving the will to believe (“faith”) rather than discovered by objectively corroberable means. Likewise, there is a baseline opposition to the prevailing secular culture, and adherents are frequently warned by church authority figures against succumbing to the snares and temptations of “the world.” Consequently, they retreat into the echo chamber of their own counterculture: if they didn’t hear it on Fox News or from a televangelist, it never happened.

For these culture warriors, belief in demonstrably false propositions is no longer a stigma of ignorance, but a defiantly worn badge of political resistance.

[Elihu]

did we need fox news brung into this?

[Elihu]

this is a topic of people. what the tv and government believe is well known.

[Elihu]

huh what a coincidence our president dropped the topic in an offhand way in a speech a while back. huh go figure

[divideandconquer]

stefano, I'm glad you can still trust establishment science, but to me, the intensely political nature of modern day establishment science where major theories quickly develop into belief systems is not true science, therefore I question everything I've been told. Especially when it contradicts what I observe.

Anyway, these videos are interesting.





Watching the sun drop below the horizon seems to support the globe theory, but then they claim, and show, that sunlight shrinks as it follows the sun, which couldn't happen if the sun were really 93 million miles away, right? With such great distance, the sunset should fade evenly and not appear the same as city lights do on the horizon.

Supposedly, the government removed UTM zone projection to avoid complications. Complications?


Einstein's work ( Royal Society 1919 Eclipse Relativity Report Duped World for 80 years and Dayton Miller's work on ether drift)

And this not-a-flat-earth/ not-a-globe-earth video...well, the earth just looks so flat, so stationary..