Like a lot of people, I was a bit gobsmacked a couple of months ago when rapper B.O.B. came out as a literal Flat Earther, as in, someone who literally believes that the earth is a disk, not a sphere.
Having something of a professional interest in bad ideas and the people who hold them, I’ve been poking around in the FlatEarthosphere ever since. Turns out they have a lot in common with the bad-idea-believers that I’ve been writing about daily since I started this blog.
Like the internet’s innumerable antifeminists, the Flat Earthers love making interminably long videos in which they ramble incoherently about their beliefs.
Happily for those of us with shorter attention spans, they also like making memes, many of which are strikingly similar to antifeminist memes not only in their often inept design but in the fundamental dishonesty of many of their “arguments.”
Consider, for example, the way that Flat Earth mememakers have given science dude Neil deGrasse Tyson the Anita Sarkeesian treatment.
The Flat Earthers hate Tyson, who took down B.O.B. and his Flat Earth beliefs on Twitter in a literal mic-dropping moment on the Larry Wilmore show and even by making a cameo in a diss track aimed at the rapper.
While not inundating Tyson with death and rape threats, as far as I know, the Flatties have pored over his past writings and public appearances looking for things they can go after him about — much as Gamergaters did with Sarkeesian.
And, as Gamergaters have done many times with Sarkeesian, the Flatties have taken innocuous remarks from Tyson and misrepresented them so thoroughly that, to them at least, they look like a “gotcha!”
You may recall how Gamergaters seized upon Sarkeesian’s statement that “everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic.” The comment, taken out of context from a talk she once gave, became the subject of endless jokes and indignant blog posts and even a music video.
And there were of course memes:
Sarkeesian was pretty clearly just pointing out that sexism (and racism, and homophobia) permeate almost every nook and cranny of our culture. Which is true. But Gamergaters assumed (or pretended) that she thought plants and birds and rocks and things were all sexist somehow.
The Flatties have done the same thing with some comments from Tyson on the not-quite-perfectly-spherical shape of the earth.
Earth is not only oblate — wider at the equator than pole-to-pole, but pear shaped — slightly wider just south of the equator
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) September 19, 2014
He gave a slightly longer explanation of this at an event in 2007. It’s not something that he made up; it’s true. The centrifugal force from the rotation of the earth has made the earth ever so slightly chubby. (Why it’s chubbiest slightly south of the equator I don’t quite know.)
Obviously, Tyson isn’t saying that the earth is literally the shape of a pear. He’s saying that it deviates an eensy teensy weensy bit from a perfectly spherical shape. Indeed, in the 2007 event he made clear that the earth is only very very slightly pear-shaped; that “cosmically speaking, we’re a practically a perfect sphere.”
None of this is really very hard to grasp. I’m utterly baffled by dark matter and string theory and most other things that astrophysicists spend their lives pondering, but I understand centrifugal force. Everyone who’s ever been on a merry-go-round understands centrifugal force.
But Tyson said “pear-shaped,” and the Flat Earth mememakers aren’t going to ever let him forget that.
Other Flat Earth mememakers find the word “oblate” funnier than “pear.”
There are more Neil deGrasse Tyson pear-shaped-earth memes out there — many many many more.
But I’m not sure anyone will ever be able to top this one.
Such is the state of Flat Earth memery today.
And after all this, the Flatties have so little self-awareness that they attack him for making jokes about them.
Jeez, Flat Earthers, so sensitive about a joke? Grow a pear.
@hugseverycat
Well all right then, kiddies, sign me up! Flat Earth… ing(?) is my new thing.
Did you know that gravity don’t real? We’ve all simply caved to social pressure to behave as if gravity were a real thing, but if we forgot about it, it wouldn’t affect us anymore. Evidence of this phenomenon can be found in Road Runner cartoons.
NASA is a fraud organization set up to trick us all into believing the Earth is a different shape than it actually is. At first glance, this deception seems pointless, but if you look deeper you’ll see that NASA pension funds are all wrapped up in Big Gravity. Nobody wants to stop the gravy train.
I’m not sure how I feel about this being compared to the treatment GGers dish out. I don’t see any threats of violence, especially not the kind of actionable threats Anita got. There is some racism, though, but it’s not as strong as what I would expect from GG. I dunno, it just feels toothless by comparison.
Don’t forget shoe makers. Without gravity we wouldn’t need shoes because we could just float everywhere.
Question: what do flat earthers think will happen if you dig a really, really deep hole?
If believing in a flat Earth will bring Sir Terry Pratchett back to us, then I’ll convert on the spot.
Do these Flaties ever give a reason why there’s a coverup in the first place, or is that simply taken as a given?
^ I went to the flat earth societies website and interestingly they don’t claim that scientists or the government are covering up the shape of the earth, but that they are just honestly wrong.
@Makroth
I know what they *are*, and I swear that more than one of those pics is of a cat who is seriously contemplating how best to murder humankind. Just look at them! The furrowed brows! The obstinate jutting little chins!
Wrinkly, naked, cat-versions of all the world’s military leaders from the “war room” they are! The only one missing requires black gloves and a very naughty paw it can’t control.
Now I’m going to have trouble falling asleep for fear there’s an evil naked cat-gremlin under my bed waiting to strike, and the beast’s possible resemblance to Churchill.
As if the furred cat variety wasn’t sharp, pointy, murderous and scary enough!
@Kupo I take your point, but the Maury image was certainly pretty racist.
I never understood the Flat Earther ideal, it seems completely pointless. It was actually upsetting for me that my own father, who helped me in my studies and who I see as an intelligent guy, has fallen for this nonsense.
I remember being told by him that I was being brainwashed, and we blew up into a fight over that. He’s been increasingly looking at conspiracy video nonsense over the last few years, such as one related to how the U.K birth register system is appreantly based on navel code which means you’re not actually a citizen or something. It’s weird.
Anyway rant over, that mic dropping video is great. 🙂
Temascos: Holy crap, are you saying that Sovereign Citizen/Freeman on the Land movement has landed to UK as well?
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Freeman_on_the_land
@Buttercup
No way, really? I really don’t understand how they can rationalize air travel, then. “Pilots are a bunch of stinking liars” is the only explanation that could be consistent with their vision of reality, afaict.
Alan Robertshaw:
Yep. There are two problems though.
1: you need ridiculously powerful engines. It isn’t actually possible to build a rocket powerful enough to fly even to alpha centauri using a continuous 1g acceleration; you need magical warp-drives (because of the Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation, which I won’t go in to here). Even just to go to the moon this way you’d need a nuclear rocket.
2: as you get faster and faster, stuff starts hitting you with unreasonable force. Hydrogen atoms start looking like someone firing some sort of ion cannon at you. Dust grains pack kinetic energy to rival nuclear weapons, and ultimately the cosmic microwave background gets blueshifted into gamma rays, and there’s not much you can do to shield against that.
@ viscaria
Hey, if they’re willing to deliver chemtrails then lying about the true shape of the Earth is small beer.
@ pie
Is that the one where you need 100 to 1 fuel/cargo ration, but then fuel becomes cargo and all of a sudden it’s exponential?
It’s a pity about the engineering problems (let alone the physics ones) make interstellar travel so difficult. I do like these proposed micro-craft they’ve been developing though. I was a bit sceptical but then a guy from the company that’s making them pointed out how much smaller commsats have got in 30 years, so I think a 30 year transit to alpha centauri is now pretty plausible.
That “no gravity, just constant acceleration” thing might be the weirdest aspect of it all. If you’re going to reject physics’s explanation of gravity, why then appeal to physics for an alternate one? Why not just take downward motion as a given?
I guess once you switch to a paradigm where facts are a matter of politics rather than a matter of, you know, facts, there’s no reason to believe the truth even when it doesn’t threaten your religion or political interests or whatever. You might believe in a flat earth because a friend does, or because it’s aesthetically pleasing to you, or just to be contrarian, or whatever — there’s just no particular reason you should believe the truth once “it’s true” is no longer a factor.
@Jo
I acknowledged the racism. It’s still nothing compared to what GG would dish out.
What kills me about the review of Homer Badman is that, to me, Homer is presented as pretty reprehensible even before he peels the gummi Venus from Ashley Grant’s butt. The gummi Venus, of course, Homer stole from the convention, seriously injuring (in the exaggerated Simpsons fashion, of course) lots of people.
The irony is that Homer’s subsequent harassment from the protesters and the media is because of something that’s, well, inconsequential to him. Unlike the convention incident, Homer touching Ashley’s butt is a unintentional result of his own ignorance. But it could be karmic balance for Homer’s actions in the first act of the episode, too.
And at the end of the episode, Homer is readily taken in by the very same show that painted him as a violent pervert and even says he didn’t learn a thing. He’s just as bad as he was before his flaying by the media.
If there’s one thing that the episode is condemning, is the yellow journalism that Rock Bottom is such a vicious parody of, and how the media can be made to follow along the narrative of one source that may or may not be wholly on the level.
And also, how many of those links are to right-wing or right leaning sites? I definitely recognise reason.com in there.
It kind of seems like Mr. Enter has been taken in by the real life Godfrey Joneses of the internet to me.
@ Skybison
*Looks around suspiciously and whispers* Hey! Hey Skybison! The turtle moves!
@kupo I agree, but I think it’s valid to say MRA’s are at least pretty similar to Young Earth Creationists.
For instance, Warren Farrell did all his graduate work in political science (yes, his Ph.D. dissertation was about feminism as a political movement and getting men to support it, not the sociology or psychology of gender relations). Then he apparently quit political science and got into sexology and the infamous child abuse apologia reseatch. He probably realized the sexology angle wasn’t the best way to defend abusive men and got into “men’s rights” and later the family court abuse denialism stuff (again, despite not being a psychologist or sociologist).
Well, its not the flatness that makes the Disc cool.
Better than almost anything else, perhaps. IIRC, some 19th century intellectuals invoked flat earth as a strawman for what people supposedly believed in the so called dark ages. Then it became a popular joke, with whole clubs of people ironically professing to believe it.
Then those clubs probably were taken over by hardcore contrarian types wanting to truly believe something really unfashionable. The ironic types moved on to newer jokes.
Flat earthism is, unlike most of the more socially exclusive pseudoscience, fairly well known and ridiculed by the mainstream. I figure this ridicule perpetuates a sense of persecution, which perpetuates the belief.
Question: Is the Earth the only flat planet? What about Venus and Mars? Are THEY flat? How does a constantly moving Earth stay within the same solar system or even galaxy? Does everything move all together? How does everything keep moving if their no gravity to pull the planets toward each other? Infact what is keeping the Sun and Moon around the Earth if there’s no gravity to keep them in place? If everything is constantly moving, what about dark matter? Wouldn’t we run into dark matter?
This raises a lot more questions than answers, flat Earthers.
@Jackie
Look, it’s easy. I’ve copied the relevant parts from the Flat Earth wiki:
Case closed.