There are a lot more people who acknowledge that the Earth is spherical, yet who are also thicker than Barry White’s shit on Boxing Day. lf despising people with weird opinions is one’s “thing”, then FTMB would seem to be an odd place to express it.
Not a dig, just a confused observation.
maximus otter
I think a few billion people would disagree with that.
Floyd! Be friendly.
Hardly knee-jerk mate. Bit dramatic.
Shhhhh...
That got me thinking. If gravity pulls everything toward the centre of the Earth then the pull is nearly the same on a sphere or oblate spheroid, discounting mascons.
Four elephants and a big turtle.
Gravity absolutely doesn't work as observed on a flat earth. In the usual flerf model, the sun and moon are relatively small and circle over the top of the disk. There's no space. There's usually a dome over the earth, like a cloche, and there's little agreement on what's outside the dome. However, it's required to hold the atmosphere in. Obviously, there can't be a ball in the vacuum of space with an atmosphere on it because, as they're so fond of telling us, 'you can't have a gas pressure next to a vacuum. It would all get sucked into space.'
Aye, to the flerf the question of how the falling object knows which way is down and which is up is ridiculous. Everyone knows what down is. It's just apparent. Down is just part of the world. This, along with 'You can't have a gas pressure next to a vacuum,' and, 'water always finds a level, so it will always be flat, so can't cling to the surface of a sphere,' are good examples of two of the central, complementary mechanisms in science denial. The appeal to intuition, and the tendency to look at science and facts only as far as one needs to in order to arrive at something that seems to support one's chosen belief.
Again, the majority of flerfs are young earth creationists. So, God made the flat Earth, the sun and moon that float miraculously over it, and the dome containing everything. Scientists, and particularly NASA, are conspiring to hide the truth to take people away from God. This is another mechanism of science denial; the conspiracy theory to bridge the gap between what one's chosen to believe and what's being said by those in a position to know better.
Some real mental gymnastics are required to think like this.
I wish that were true, but I don't think it does. Thinking 'like' this seems to be the natural way people think. Thinking these specific things is unusual. Yet you need only go to young earth creationism to find not only large numbers of people believing it, but quite a few scientists, including geologists and geneticists who you'd think had no business disputing evolution and an ancient age for the earth.
At least one ex-flat earther (Seek Truth, Speak Truth, I wonder if he's still about on the tubes) has talked about the effect being part of an online community playing a large part.
I suppose so. However, for some it's the beginning of their descent down the 'rabbit hole' - if they sign on to one crazy theory, they might be inclined to accept (by extension) another, then another ... until they cannot operate in ordinary society and take up the most extreme views. By that time, they're so invested in the whole web of nonsense that to come to their senses is impossible.
Well, exactly. Who knows where Hans Wormhat started, but he's ended up believing a bunch of animals aren't real, most houses are empty and are just there to convince us there are more people around than there are, and that electricity is harvested from the air for free and we shouldn't have to pay for it, and all kinds of other things. Once you become used to assuming perfidy in those most likely to have the best information, once you habitually look for the conspiracy in everything, there's no nonsense you can't accept.
