I’m sorry my mind is stuck on
If gravity is not strong enough to stop a small stream from flowing to its lowest point
I mean… what…
Same. My brain literally made dial up noises until I figured out it was pure stupid.
It all started as a joke. The purpose was to fool people to believe in this dumb shit. Then people did, and there was much rejoicing. Then more people did, and it got old. Then even more people did, and it got worrying. Then even more people did and now we have a whole industry of dumbfucks basing their lives and identities around something that started out as a joke at their expense.
Who’s laughing now?
Well, that’s MAGA for ya.
I still can’t tell if most instances of them are a) genuine, b) trolling stupid people into believing dumb shit, c) trolling smart people into believing they believe something stupid and enjoying the frustration as they fail to convince them otherwise, or d) conning true believers like that guy who just wanted to fund his private rocket launch did.
Like it started with group B, but it’s impossible to tell group A and C/D apart, if they are really dedicated to the bit. Like those youtubers who did various expreiments that would show which way it was, got results consistent with ball earth, then dismissed those results as something being wrong with their experiment could be strong denial but also just sounds like trolling and if I had to bet, I’d probably bet on it being a troll (or someone knowing their video will get way more hits like that because it’s a hilarious result that did get a lot of round earthers to watch to mock it).
Tldr, I think we might all be getting played, though none as much as the poor fools that really do believe and donate to “flat earth science”.
I was late to the Flat Earth thing, I assumed it started as satire for a couple of years after hearing about it, but didn’t pay it any attention. I was disappointed to learn that it was not satire, and too many (more than zero) believed it was true.
On the upside, I suppose, I now am more aware of just how fucking stupid people can be, and that’s good. Gotta keep your guard up when meeting new people, ya never know, ya know?
It’s like I tell people, if you know you know you know?
I’m reasonably convinced that the flat earther explosion was at least encouraged by nefarious actors to see what dumb shit people will actually believe. I feel like the flat earth videos on YouTube are directly related to the recent rise of the extreme right, it primed so many of these people to reject reality so completely.
When I say this was meant as a joke, it picked up steam in the /r/flatearth sub, which I saw back early, and it was kind of an inside reddit joke much like /r/birdsarentreal is today. Mark my words, that shit will be the next flat earth.
People work like this. A sub with 50K subscribers? Maybe there’s something to it!
I had subs once. Big ones. They were taken from me. I know. Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you about it.
Edit: And I swear unto god- I told’em. I TOLD’EM this would happen.
How can birds not be real when we choose the owl that is most superb every year
Who’s laughing now?
@tomiant@piefed.social who started selling t-shirts and slowly had to hire more employees as the demand steadily outgrew supply.
At the end they retired to their vineyard villa, now worth substantially more after the devaluation of half the planet. They appear to the public every now and then for million € speaking engagements, and mostly ignore their controversy section on Wikipedia.
I wish I could ignore the controversy section on my Wikipedia
We are not evolved for being capable of seeing the thoughts, reactions and feelings of so many people, especially in the form of text written on a screen that your brain reads in its own voice. We have not adapted to nor even begun to study and understand how vulnerable our minds are to outside influence.
But it’s okay because we’re building giant artificial neural systems in data centers that take the power of small cities to run, with the express purpose of predicting and exploiting those vulnerabilities with superhuman effectiveness.
This literally sums up Americas current situation
Same with Birds aren’t Real, and it’s going the way of this dumb shit.
smoke more weed, you’ll laugh too
I cry while I roll
They ser me cryin, they cryin too
Hahahh check out this idiot believing in “north” and an “upright” earth.
Explain Australians walking on their hands. You’re not walking, you’re hanging on.
If water flows down then why do I get it up my nose? Explain that Big Sciece!
By now you should know that if it does’nt work it’s your fault!!
Apploes to most bonkerz-science
Because in australia down is up, so their gravity pull all the water back up north
The stupidest possible way to say the truth. Now that’s a .ml comment
Bro, stop trying to other people
That would make all water bulge at the equator.
I mean you joke, but the earth does bulge in the center a little
so do I
OwO
What’s this?
Ah, but the equator also pulls the water sideways because nobody wants a sea where they live.
Technically…
This is not a joke. This is genuinely what a significant number of flat earthers believe.
Flat earthers don’t believe in a flat earth. What they actually believe is that Satan is fighting a war for the minds of people, and education is a tool of satan to lead you away from god. All other nonsense they spew stems from that— they don’t believe the earth is flat because evidence shows it, they find evidence to support the earth being flat because the education system, which they believe to be from Satan, tells you it’s spherical.
And most (but not all) flat earthers have moved on to the next conspiracy that supports their central belief (Satan is fighting a war for your mind) and don’t care much about flat earth anymore. Flat earth was never the point, not being swayed by Satan is always the center.
After a few years of marriage, it came to light that my wife thought the earth was flat. It wasn’t some religious thing or cult thing, she had no affiliations. She just came to that conclusion based on visual cues in the world (like ground looks flat) and believed it without it ever being challenged in it.
It came up when she mentioned that a plane fkying near the sun must be getting hot, and I’m like Whaa? I explained the sun is so far outside the earth that that plane isn’t feeling much different than us. She revealed she though the sun was inside the earth (like we lived in a snow globe on a flat planar surface) and the sun just went down behind the mountains at night like half hour away.
I was stunned. We had a 4hour talk about the earth as a planet and the solar system and how gravity works.
She curled up in a fetal position and had an existental crisis for the rest of the day.
Somehow she missed school for the gravity, solar system etc. And I’d destroyed her entire core belief system; that she had developed herself.
This is really fascinating to me. Do you mind my asking, with no intended disrespect, how intelligent your wife is? And did she have any kind of unusually isolated situation for much of her life?
😀 I haven’t IQ tested her. As a note I’m what she considers a smart engineery computer guy, but she can beat me at almost every game of Scrabble (like 400 vs 250). She can beat me at Tetris every time. She has played this 1010! android game for 3 years straight and not died once. Which is incredible to me. So she has reasoning skills and planning, and some abstract shape solving ability that is very tuned.
But she has zero science background, grew up Catholic, where god did everything, so she never thought critically about the humans on a planet situation.
But she doesn’t pay a whole lot of attention to things outside of her realm. So maybe it is an attention issue not an intelligence issue. i.e. she saw this red car go by and said thats nice and a bit different looking. I said yeah it’s our neighbours down the street She said I’ve never noticed it, how do you know its the same car? So I said: it’s had the front emblem taken off and re painted. Suspension is lowered, there is a performance parts logo on driver rear quarter window, it has smooth rims without a lot of cutouts, and a black subtle wing added on the tail. When she asked how I knew all that I said because we see it everyday on our evening walk together. For her she’s walked by it 100s of times without remembering it ever being parked on our street.
Ha! I am no different than she wrt things like my neighbors cars!
It frequently amazes me what people don’t absorb or remember, like whole sentences of a 4 sentence email or text message. I’m not under any illusion that I am exempt from this, but what we see and others miss is of course more apparent to us.
Well now that I’m aging, I do have moments of blanking out. I used to be always in “recording” mode of my daily activities, which is probably why I need quiet down time. But lately I’ll take out the recycling, to empty into our condo bins, and when I get back my wife says “where’s the tote?”. And I’m like, " Ah, probably down by the condo bin where I left it". Lol
But hey, she listened. Thats something most never do.
Good job lad
What were your core talking points and structure that you managed to teach gravitational theory and heliocentrism in 4 hrs?
Well I had to explain it as if it were a kids class. We didn’t get into deep theory , constants, equations type stuff. Just overall concepts.
Saying earth surface was round and each country gets different day and night sequences etc, she immediate went to why aren’t Australians dangling off if they are at the bottom. So we had to go over center of gravity and gravity itself.
Which led to the Sun and moon being outside the earth. And I had to talk about the immense distances and speed of light concepts. (Since she thought she could get to the sun in about 45 minutes)
Then the questions came about why, if the earth rotates for day and night, aren’t people flying off. So I had to go over gravity and inertial laws. Referencing something she knew like being in a car and dropping something, it drops relative to you and doesn’t fly back at 100km/h ( inertial frame of reference stuff).
She was obviously skeptical still, especially about stars being distant suns.
And then she came to the conclusion of: how did we get here, if we are tiny spec in the universe on a planet. So we touched on evolution theory.
We eventually got her kids solar system books, and watched some good documentaries on netlix about these subjects and the one about the stages the earth has gone through.
She eventually understood the concepts, but still though we were trying to trick her. Until she went skydiving and realized “the air is 3D” ( her words ). All along she saw the sky as a background 2d backdrop on the INSIDE of the snow globe earth.
I don’t know how she missed this concept most of her life, I guess her circle just didn’t include people that talked about science stuff, and she took her cues from what she could see…flat ground, sky seems far away, sun is tiny but looks like it hits the mountains and water.
Thanks. All I got was to toss all the flat earthers from a really high place.
I think your wife’s case was actually significantly different from “flat earthers”, as a community. There’s ignorance, which can be corrected with knowledge and information and reasoning, and there’s willful defiance, which cannot. The very fact that she was freaked out and had a crisis, which enabled facts to enter her head, demonstrates that.
Agree, and if earth was indeed flat, these people would claim it was a sphere.
Yes, the true flatearthers deny what they are hearing and dig in deeper
Whenever someone curls up in a fetal position and has an existential crisis, I KNOW that they are doing something right.
did you tell her if the sun was so small it can fit inside the earth, everything wouldve been vaporized near its vicinity, let alone the gravitational effects being to a object that small and that close to it.
She wasn’t initially at that level to comprehend the sun as an object with intense heat and super mass. She saw the sun as a lightbulb inside the earth dome.
Naw, there are atheist flat earthers
Also, they believe the earth is flat because the Bible says so; and the earth is young because the Bible says so, and that science is the devil’s work because it contradicts a book written by Bronze Age goat herders retconned by a guy in the Iron Age that got killed for telling the Roman’s he was king of the Jews.
This is one of my favorite summaries of just how ridiculous religion can become. Only thing I want to find a way to add would be a condemnation of monotheism. Seems that had a whole lot to do with how the concept of religion has become so corruptible. Instead of the point being the betterment of your own tribe it becomes about how every other tribe is less than you.
yeah. its ridiculous. Rather than accept that there’s some inaccuracies and that parts of the bible contain mistakes and say something like “but most of it is true” … they double down, triple and quadruple down. They have to get increasingly improbable theories to explain how all this evidence isn’t really real. Fossils are planted by satan, to lead people astray; there’s a massive World Order whose sole job is to keep this secret for some strange reason.
like. they could just build a rocket and launch it into space and see for themselves. Or some really simple experiments involving sticks and shadows. that allowed them to determine the distance of the sun from the earth, it’s circumference, and can be replicated with some lumber and fifty bucks in the gastank.
Technically, this isn’t even a case of religion going crazy. The flat Earth conspiracy actually started out in the German Nazi party and were eventually pushed out because even the Nazis thought they were too crazy.
Notice how many of them mention a vague “they” as the ones maintaining the conspiracy. That’s them referring to Jewish people. While this is notmal for most conspiracy theories, few directly originated from the Nazis.
If you want more detail, there’s a couple episodes of Behind the Bastards explaining it. I recommend giving them a listen
they don’t believe the earth is flat because evidence shows it, they find evidence to support the earth being flat
Similar with the anarcho capitalist types
exactly like cult beliefs. dont believe with your eyes and ears.
I think it is a joke, though not one we’re supposed to be in on.
The hint is that that is a very well made map for someone who doesn’t understand how water flow really works. They turned the ocean trenches into rivers. It’s a parody of someone who doesn’t understand gravity but still uses it properly in demonstrating how it should look incorrectly.
I’m aware. That’s not what I meant by “This is not a joke.”
Also the hint is that OP said they meant it as a joke. But, yeah, everything you said too.
I took OP’s reply as meaning they posted the meme as a joke, but assumed they got it from somewhere else.
But… but… I posted it as a joke, so it is?? Please??
Nope. It’s science now because you posted it in Science Memes. You just single handedly destroyed years of accumulated knowledge with your careless shitposting. Way to go, bud. Bravo.
DAMN YOU AND YOUR LOGIC, KOLANAKI!
The only way to solve this is to assemble an angry mob with torches and threaten to burn the heretic
It’s all fun and games tricking idiots into believing dumb shit, until they become fundamentalists.
And then vote
flat earthers=flat personality and flat brains.
Flat EEG
That evil dihydrogen monoxide is at it again.
I WANT TO PUT THIS PERFECTLY CLEAR ONCE AND FOR ALL, this goes for all of you:
People are NOT DUMB because someone comes up to them and screams “watch out, dihydrogen monoxide can kill you!” because they may not be familiar with chemical nomenclature, yet may be acutely in tune with people taking to the streets protesting some substance that may affect them and their families.
If I run up to you and scream: “WATCH OUT FOR THE QUEXALCOATL!”, you won’t go like, “hold on, let me ask ChatGPT about Quexalcoatls first so I know that this isn’t just some elaborate scam to teach me a moral lesson I didn’t need but had to accept because I was actively fooled”, you know what you do? YOU DUCK.
You DUCK!
I always hated that one.
That one and that dumb quote, “don’t attribute to malice what can equally be attributed to incompetence”- yeah cute, but uh, no, that is not how anything fucking works, it’s a funny quote in context, it’s not a rule of fucking thumb, you’d be a dumb sucka to live by that creed, but anyway, while we were clearing the air.
We need to get rid of that wicked substance.
and the annoying gaseous dioxygen.
Let’s follow on this. Water goes down to the south hemisphere (why? Gravity is a lie). Then it stays there, attached to the ground. Why? Gravity again? An invisible barrier?
I doubt this is something anybody except the fringiest of flat earthers would approve, but I’m down for further explanation
Invisibly barrier makes sense. Up in the sky. I think the Bible mentions something similar.
But if the world would wear pants, how would it wear them? 🤔
looks around at the state of the world
On its head? Seems to be the default.
Hahah…
aww now I’m sad
*lowest relative to the center of the spherical celestial body
Out of curiosity of this argument, what direction in the universe is “down” to be considered the lowest point?
this is really stupid, but have you considered that the rotational speed of the earth at the equator is like 400 meters per second? How tf are we not flying into space under those speeds?? The answer is obviously that the center of rotation is ABOVE us (that’s right baby hollow earth is back) we’re inside rotating globe OH AND BTW that’s how gravity works, thank me later physicists.
Gravity is just centrifugal force.
Where were you when South America was kill?
When halo killed all the alien and doesn’t afraid of anything
funfact: because water itself has weight, it produces gravity, therefore it pulls more water towards itself, therefore more water collects in some parts of the world than other.
for example: most of the extra water that comes from global warmings, collects at the pacific because it has a larger surface, therefore US Eastcoast and Europe see very little change in sealevel, while some pacific islands are already gone.
epistemic status: I remember reading this info a couple years ago, but the best source I can found now is that sentence from wikipedia:
Changing ice masses also affect the distribution of sea water around the globe through gravity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise
dont you mean mass.
I’m tired Boss…
The problem with the picture is, it’s upside down.
