The United States of the Flat Earth
How the U.S. is devolving into flerfdom
The United States of the Flat Earth
How the U.S. is devolving into flerfdom
I remember being young and naïve, believing that there was a high-tech futuristic utopian world ahead for possibly myself, but certainly for mankind.
Sure we’re finally getting electric cars, and other technology is advancing just fine. But on the opposite side, many things are slipping off into the abyss. This is likely due to the ever-increasing wealth disparity in society, as well as failing institutions.
Up until fairly recently though I still had fairly high hopes for humankind.
Unfortunately becoming disillusioned with all that ill-conceived hope was inevitable. I remember vividly my first personal interaction with someone I knew who didn’t believe the world was round. Prior to this, I thought it was just some very fringe belief amongst nut-jobs online, but this interaction slapped me in the face and woke me up to reality.
Truthfully there are flat earth believers all around the globe, but this moronic belief seems to have taken a special hold in the U.S., with a story in Forbes from 2018 mentioning that among millennials only 66% have always thought the world was round.
Imagine that 1 out of 3 people you know may actually believe the world is flat. Soak that thought in a minute, you could be working with these people, hanging out at a bar with them… I mean I had known this person for years before realizing they were a flerf (flat earther).
Why are we seeing such a high rate of these flerfs in the U.S.? It’s a mixture of factors, but the biggest culprit is Christian Evangelicals. Now, true not all flerfs are Christians, but it turns out this particular population is very good at ignoring all facts, reason, logic, and sane thought and replacing that with a faith in something completely imaginary.
So they also look to what the Bible says about the earth and interpret that as it saying that we live in a giant snow globe on what they most often describe as something frisbee-shaped.
This frisbee has an “ice wall” all along the outer edge, aka Antarctica for those of us still living in reality, and the sun and moon are very small and “local” just buzzing around above our heads. They also believe that we are encased in a glass-like dome called the firmament, and that the stars are just up in there for decoration I guess? They also believe that falling stars are actually stars falling just FYI, since they don’t believe anything can penetrate said “firmament” such as asteroids or meteorites, in fact, those don’t exist.
Beware, these flerfs will often try to show you pictures of the horizon and claim they don’t see a curve, and will also claim that the moon landing was faked and that any image from outer space is “CGI”. This includes really old photos from the early days of the space missions of various countries, somehow all of them were “CGI”. I mean I grew up in the 90s and remember shows like “Reboot” from 1994, and that CGI was rather lacking, but somehow they had incredibly advanced CGI I guess back in the 50s and 60s.
When confronted with facts that they can’t refute, such as the southern hemisphere seeing different constellations than the north, or the fact that they can’t predict anything at all accurately on a flat earth model, like eclipses for instance, they just normally shut down the conversation or change subjects.
Another insane thought to wrap your mind around is that these flerfs don’t just believe we’re on a floating frisbee in space, they don’t even believe that space is even real. Some believe in a super-sized earth as pictured above.
That’s right, they believe that the earth is the center of the universe, or whatever they believe we exist in. That the sun and moon as I mentioned are floating around above us in some sort of swirl pattern that doesn’t actually make any fucking sense, since the sun would be illuminating everything all at once, I guess maybe it’s a cone/flashlight type device?
Didn’t the Greeks figure all of this out in the 5th century BCE? Do we really have to go back and reinvent the wheel as well?
Some believe that the sun is lower than the clouds but can’t seem to figure out why there aren’t any pictures from above it since planes fly above the clouds, then again many of these people have likely never been on a plane before, or outside of the town they were born in.
They also seem to have more faith in governments and in international relationships than I do, even though they all claim not to trust the government. How would all the nations of the world who have space programs keep up this rouse?