• mechoman444@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      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.

      • Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca
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        6 hours ago

        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.

        • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          Oooo Kay.

          Not sure why you found it necessary to explain the joke.

          But like you I am also making fun of flat earthers.

          • Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca
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            6 hours ago

            I guess I misinterpreted the intent of your comment, like you might have thought I was a flat earther. My bad.

    • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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      7 hours ago

      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.

  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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    9 hours ago

    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.

    • VelvetPinkOtter123@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      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.

    • naught101@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      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.

    • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      Absolutely. The followers do actually believe the earth is flat. The ones propagating the misinformation are absolutely grifting and they know it.

    • itsjustachairmary@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      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.

      Sorry, long ass post. Tl:dr, they don’t necessarily believe the earth is flat, they believe that they believe it because that allows them to join a social group.

    • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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      7 hours ago

      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.

    • 4am@lemmy.zip
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      7 hours ago

      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)

  • ummthatguy@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    The bean counters told me we literally could not afford to buy seven dollars worth of moon rocks, much less seventy million. Bought 'em anyway. Engineers said the moon rocks were too volatile to experiment on. Tested on 'em anyway. Ground 'em up, mixed 'em into a gel. And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison. I am deathly ill. Still, it turns out they’re a great portal conductor.

    • Cave Johnson
  • rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works
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    12 hours ago

    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.

    • hansolo@lemmy.today
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      1 hour ago

      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.

    • OddMinus1@sh.itjust.works
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      3 hours ago

      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.

    • MnemonicBump@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      12 hours ago

      I saw an animation once where the sun sort of dipped and peaked above and below the world disc horizon. Total mental gymnastics

      • Kairos@lemmy.today
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        10 hours ago

        Ah yes the sun the thing which famously isn’t always shining on some part of the globe

  • dudeface@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    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

    • Diddlydee@feddit.uk
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      12 hours ago

      I’ll stop you at ‘they actually think’.

      They do not think, at least not as we know it.

      • Grail@multiverse.soulism.net
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        6 hours ago

        Rocks don’t think. I’m getting sick of these “anything less intelligent than the average human doesn’t think” hyperbolies.

        • PapaStevesy@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          Rocks don’t think.

          As far as we know…

          It’s not about intelligence, there are plenty of intelligent people who believe a lot of stupid bullshit. For most Flat Earthers, it’s more an issue with their ability and willingness to reason in combination with “objective” self-awareness. Obviously it’s impossible to be completely unbiased, but you have to at least want to be. I’d argue that if someone’s thinking consistenly leads to demonstrably false conclusions, it’s fair to say they’re not doing it right.

          • Grail@multiverse.soulism.net
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            2 hours ago

            You can’t choose not to think. Your mind is always thinking. There are subconscious parts of your brain thinking to make your heart beat and your lungs breathe. Everyone is thinking, including flat earthers, including earthworms.

        • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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          7 hours ago

          If the sun is directional, like a flashlight you hold relatively close to the flat disc, you can move it around in a circle say along the inside of the circumference of the disc, then this creates “night” for those portions of the disc outside of its range…

          Oddly enough, this might work as a sort of projection to model the actual path of sunlight across a flat projection of a map of the earth.

    • nightwatch_admin@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      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.

  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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    8 hours ago

    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_are_dust@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    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.

    • DisasterTransport@startrek.website
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      9 hours ago

      The moon is hollow, we know this because it rings like a bell when you hit it. There is no other possible explanation for this, certainly not one that’s actually more interesting than my unfounded assertion about the moon being made by aliens or whatever

  • Trump Rapes Kids@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    Umm… No. There are tons of 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.

  • AppleTea@lemmy.zip
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    12 hours ago

    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.