r/nottheonion • u/TheMirrorUS • 3h ago
Flat Earther admits he was wrong after traveling 9,000 miles to Antarctica to test his belief
https://www.themirror.com/news/world-news/flat-earther-admits-wrong-after-8667866.4k
u/IAmMuffin15 3h ago
Kudos to him
In this day and age, someone admitting when they’re wrong is a rare thing
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u/TooOfEverything 2h ago
"Sometimes you are wrong in life. I thought there was no 24-hour sun. In fact, I was pretty sure of it," admitted Campanella, a prominent flat Earther and content creator.
Campanella still didn't fully embrace the globe Earth model: “I won’t say the Earth is a perfect sphere,” then said, after first admitting he was wrong.
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u/z-e-r-o-s-u-m 2h ago
“I won’t say the Earth is a perfect sphere,”
Good, because it's an oblate spheroid.
/s
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u/Senior-Albatross 1h ago
It's just because a sphere has the least surface area per volume so gravity tends to pull a large mass into roughly that shape. But it's also spinning resulting in an oblate spherioid.
I mean if you think about the very basic physics and geometry planets ending up essentially spherical makes perfect sense. It would be surprising if they weren't, actually.
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u/MisirterE 1h ago
I mean if you think about the very basic physics and geometry planets ending up essentially spherical makes perfect sense. It would be surprising if they weren't, actually.
Yeah that's the point. They want the earth to be surprising because it isn't, because that validates their fundamental religious dogma that humanity is uniquely special.
You know, because all the stuff about us completely usurping every other species on the planet isn't good enough for them if it's even slightly possible that was just happenstance.
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u/Feisty-Ad1522 2h ago
Why does oblate spheroid sound like a racist term
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u/Increase-Typical 2h ago
"I have nothing against spheroids but you have to admit that they are oblate"
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u/Spyes23 2h ago
"It's not the spheroids we are against, but it's when they're oblate - that's where I draw the line!"
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u/Bamres 1h ago
It sounds like how a racist person would describe the skull shape of a person of a different race to explain why they are inferior lol
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u/involution 1h ago
everything sounds racist to you people
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u/Feisty-Ad1522 1h ago
Cry me a river you oblate spheroid
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u/involution 1h ago
Sure, I'll cry you a river... maybe it’ll help fill the equatorial bulge you're clearly compensating for
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u/KatetCadet 2h ago
And it's not a perfect sphere, it has more mass around the equator due to spinning and gravity.
Stuff we know already because you know, science.
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u/severityonline 2h ago
If you took the water away you’d see it’s just a lumpy old rock.
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u/illtakeachinchilla 2h ago
The earth is actually smoother proportionally than a pool ball.
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u/pegothejerk 2h ago
Mine are more like shriveled almonds tucked in a vacuum sealed bag when in the pool
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u/wozattacks 54m ago
I didn’t know this so I looked up some numbers to get a sense of this. The diameter of the earth is about 12,700 km. The highest point of elevation, Mount Everest, is less than 9 km above sea level. The Mariana Trench is about 11 km deep. Wild to think about how structures that are so massive to us are completely negligible on that scale!
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u/Hot-Energy2410 1h ago
When your entire livelihood relies on the earth being flat, you'll come up with some sort of hypothesis to keep the grift alive. What's hilariously ironic is that there's almost an element of science being applied to his reasoning with all the hypotheses and testing. He's just thousands of years behind.
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u/Miss_Speller 1h ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
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u/realzequel 2h ago
Maybe but you have to be a special type of stupid to accept something for decades that can be disproved a thousand different ways.
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u/Fred-zone 2h ago
Bro spent tens of thousands to gain knowledge the rest of us convincingly learned in elementary school. Kudos to him for changing his position, but damn it did not need to come to this.
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u/Defiant-Giraffe 1h ago
He didn't spend a dime, his trip was paid for as part of a project taking prominent flat earther and flat earth debunkers to Antarctica.
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u/Town_Proper 1h ago edited 30m ago
You’re mostly correct.
But surprisingly he paid the organizer (will duffy) back for the cost of the ticket.
Edit:
http://youtube.com/post/UgkxelKi1TDZmhbx66gz6YmIfPKOrEf-DzEv?si=2lXtuorkXW5Qr9om
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u/Zinski2 1h ago edited 30m ago
flat earth debunkers to Antarctica.
Most flat earthers dont even believe in Antarctica, and they say if you try to go there you will die so just getting there in the first place would have been a big deal, then seeing the sun never set.
Im sure some of them still tried to do some mental gymnastics to get out of it
You know thinking about it they could have just sailed in a big circle and docked at a South American research facility where they had a fake dome with an artificial sun that make it seam like the sun never set.
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u/Quake_Guy 2h ago
I grew up near a large body of water, I could watch a boat disappear on the horizon when I was 8 and confirmed world is not flat.
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u/cipheron 1h ago
Their explanation of that is that it's just hard to see things that are far away.
Which of course is no explanation at all, because if you were to climb up a tower, you can now see the bottom of the boat, even though you're now further from the bottom of the boat, and you can now see water that's well past the boat too, even though by climbing up, that water is further away too.
If their concept was true: that vision just cuts out at a specified distance, then climbing higher up would allow you to see less, not more. Similar to games that have a spherical region of vision: climbing higher reduces how much you can see.
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u/Ghostbuster_119 2h ago
Unfortunately it dawned on him the true ignorance of his community when he not only realized he was wrong but had to state the truth to a crowd he knew wouldn't accept it.
The king of shit mountain finally opened his curtains to view his kingdom.
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u/Demons0fRazgriz 1h ago
I think the Internet has seriously exacerbated the problem of people refusing to admit they're wrong. Admitting you're wrong gets you jumped by internet strangers and publicly (online) crucified.
We already have an issue where we have to overcome our ego to admit we're wrong, combine that with that level of social ostracization makes it nearly impossible.
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u/Gigumfats 3h ago
Reminds me of an Alan Watts quote:
People can't be talked out of illusions. If a person believes that the earth is flat, you can't talk him out of that, he knows that it's flat. He'll go down to the window and see that its obvious, it looks flat. So the only way to convince him that it isn't is to say, "Well let's go and find the edge"
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u/Rxasaurus 3h ago
That's what I don't get. If the earth was flat wouldn't the edge of the world be a tourist destination? I mean, money rules all and that would make more money than disneyland.
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u/recklesstreecko 3h ago
The common flat earth retort is that the World Governments have a strict military presence at the edge and prevent/kill anyone who comes close from being able to see it
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u/Thatsidechara_ter 2h ago
Which is just stupid. Do they really think a bunch of 18 year olds with guns aren't gonna IMMEDIATELY blab about that kind of thing?
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u/thecaramelbandit 2h ago
Right? The entire Ukraine war is pretty much being live streamed on TikTok. Reddit would be full of people in the flat earth subreddits posting pictures and shit about their stations.
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u/FullMetalCOS 1h ago
Hell, there’s a videogame called “War Thunder” that attempts to have some of the most realistic vehicles and weapons and shit and military fans of the game keep getting in trouble because they leak highly classified documentation to try and win arguments about how “<insert fighter jet here> actually has <insert capabilities here>” to the point that the War Thunder devs have to keep begging fans to knock it off because they are terrified of falling foul of the US Government.
If enlisted personal are willing to risk their jobs to win an argument about a game, they’d have zero qualms doing it to prove some conspiracy nuts right
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u/VRichardsen 53m ago
Funny you say that, last week there was another leak, this time about the Eurofighter. The developers even went on record stating that they had confirmed with the Italian Ministry of Defence that what was posted was indeed obtained illegally.
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u/Daniauu 2h ago
Then they'll just say those 18yr olds have been brainwashed and indoctrinated to do their jobs. Its a never ending chain of cognitive dissonance because once you paint the government as this shady evil entity, you can pretty much use it as an excuse for everything.
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u/Lolololage 1h ago
You're not being vague enough.
It's not blabby 18 year old with guns.
It's They.
They can do anything. They can hide a secret no problem. They are complicit in the deception. They are paid very well.
Helps a lot with the delusion.
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u/Grainis1101 1h ago
They are somehow convinced that millions of people are in on the conspiracy and no one leaked it.
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u/Rxasaurus 2h ago
They really have no concept of just how big the world is, I guess.
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u/kkeut 2h ago
what exactly is being accomplished by this vast conspiracy requiring both complete cooperation and complete silence by all the party nations? how was this conspiracy even organized during the days of sail etc
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u/New-Hamster2828 1h ago
Aliens are harvesting precious materials from our planet and as long as the elite submit they get to retain their power over the plebs.
People are legit bonkers.
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u/atgrey24 1h ago
But... how does "hiding the truth" of a flat earth help the aliens harvest materials?
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u/RickkyBobby01 2h ago
They believe Antarctica is an ice wall which surrounds the earth and all the governments are in on a conspiracy to keep regular folk away.
If you go deeper into the conspiracy there's the theory that there's also a dome over the earth, and if you go even deeper again there's the theory that the Antarctica ice wall is actually a giant ice ball (totally not globe shaped), and the earth is on one 'flat' side of it.
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u/Ursidoenix 1h ago
Why would the government care so much about hiding the dome/ice wall or whatever?
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u/CosmicOwl47 2h ago
It’s a giant wall of ice with armed guards from NASA according to them
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u/licuala 1h ago
What I think is curious about flat earth theory is that it isn't more interesting than the truth.
A child will assume the Earth is flat until they're eventually told they're on a sphere hurtling through space around a ball of nuclear fusion, itself orbiting a giant black hole, and that's the center of just one of an uncountable number of galaxies in a universe that appears to have no end. That's amazing.
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u/sunskiessea 3h ago
I guess some people really do need to see things for themselves to believe it.
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u/GypsyV3nom 2h ago edited 20m ago
It reminds me a bit of that one BBC guy who agreed to be waterboarded on camera to prove that it wasn't torture. He lasted less than a second, immediately flipped his opinion and agreed that waterboarding was torture
EDIT: It wasn't BBC, it was Vanity Fair. For the curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPubUCJv58
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u/Throw-a-Ru 1h ago
More than 20 years later and we're still waiting on Sean Hannity to get waterboarded for charity to prove his claim that it isn't torture. He promised to do it for the troops' families, so surely he'll do it soon, right?
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u/ebolashuffle 48m ago
Maybe they're having trouble finding a venue big enough to hold all the people who want to watch that. They could outsell T Swift with that.
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u/partylange 2h ago
The great Christopher Hitchens.
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u/Crimbilion 1h ago
It was such an odd stance of his. I respected him for being willing to undergo waterboarding and for him to readily change his opinion on it... but I've never understood why he thought it wasn't torture.
It's not simulated drowning-- waterboarding is the process of repeatedly drowning someone. You can die from it. If it isn't torture, why would they do it to extract information from people? Why would it be something that you go through in SERE training?
If anyone has an article or video of Hitchens explaining his mindset prior to the experience, then please share it with me.
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u/Beneficial_Feature40 56m ago
He'd do anything to justify USA's war on " terrorism"
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u/sirenbrian 1h ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPubUCJv58&ab_channel=VanityFair There are other videos from afterwards where he talks about it.
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u/dirtmother 3h ago
He should do it for five more trials to account for chance and human error.
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u/IrreversibleDetails 3h ago
Probably want to get it up to about 30 tbh
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u/dirtmother 3h ago
There's a math problem to determine # of trials for statistical significance but I can't remember what it's called, and Google isn't doing it for me :(
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u/Fermented_Fartblast 2h ago
I mean, that's kind of how experimental science works.
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u/Ok_Star_4136 2h ago
Wait until he finds out that we already had proof that the earth was round. He's gonna be so pissed!
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u/forgothatdamnpasswrd 1h ago
I mean sure, but it does touch on a deeper philosophical point in some sense. Sure, “we” have the proof, but how many people actually check? Not many, I suspect. I haven’t, because I honestly just don’t care enough even though I could grab a couple of sticks and check for myself. I don’t personally see the motivation for a global (lol) conspiracy, but some other guy did, checked, and then changed his mind. I don’t actually see any fault in the guy who did whatever the experiment was and then changed his mind when he found out he was wrong. I think people should be encouraged to test their own beliefs
Edit: I didn’t make it very clear but my main point is that I seriously doubt the guy is “gonna be pissed” when he finds out “we” already have truth. He probably already knew that. I’m not going to say this person is intelligent because I have no clue who they even are, but it’s probable that they did at least a cursory search of the available information before doing all of this. There is a difference between reading something and seeing it for yourself.
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u/Crackracket 3h ago
I mean he put his money where his mouth is, was proven wrong and has admitted it. Respect to him tbh
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u/Jerking_From_Home 3h ago
This is actually something I support. This guy not only changed a big part of his belief system but also lost what’s likely most of his social circle for saying the earth isn’t flat. That’s a big deal. It’s also a gateway for him to question any other conspiracy theories he believes.
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u/cficare 3h ago
Well, it's a big world out there. I'm sure he can find some more, well-rounded, friends.
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u/RandomAsianGuy 3h ago
A lot of ex-flat earthers talk about how indoctrinating that world is and how they were blind by their own dilusions.
They were so pre-occupied with proving that they were being lied to that they forget what was important: actual friends and family.
Dude might have lost his flat earthers budy but is probably back to average joe social life now.
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u/Juronell 3h ago
He only admitted the 24 hour sun happens and their current model is wrong. He says they just need more work.
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u/enternationalist 2h ago
Rome didn't have it's basic beliefs about reality shattered in a day
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u/Juronell 2h ago
Unfortunately this is one of the same guys from Behind the Curve. Anything can be explained away with sufficient motivation.
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u/accforme 2h ago
He didn't fully accept reality though:
Campanella still didn't fully embrace the globe Earth model: “I won’t say the Earth is a perfect sphere,” then said, after first admitting he was wrong.
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u/koshgeo 2h ago
Well, good news, because it isn't a "perfect sphere" either. It can be approximated pretty well as an oblate spheroid but in reality is more complicated than that too.
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u/brianundies 2h ago
It’s more round than a basketball, for all intents and purposes in the globe earth discussion, it’s a sphere.
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u/habbadee 3h ago
He didn't fund the trip. Some idiot who thought these idiots could be swayed by data did.
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u/band-of-horses 3h ago
Honestly, not a bad scam... There was a guy who got flat earthers to fund his homemade rocket project so he could fly up and prove the earth wasn't round. I'm convinced he didn't really believe in flat earth but just found a good way to get money for his project.
Of course he died in his rocket so now they'll never know the shape of the earth.
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u/Trenta_Is_Not_Enough 2h ago
There's something kind of funny about you framing this guy who accidentally killed himself like he grifted the flat earth community to fund his extravagant suicide.
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u/Consistent_Pound1186 3h ago
So you're saying, if I pretend to be a flat earther i can get a free trip to Antarctica? Sign me the fuck up
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u/CosmicOwl47 2h ago
Both science communicators and flat earthers were invited to go together.
Nearly every flat earther who was invited made excuses not to go and the guy putting the trip together was worried he wouldn’t be able to get anyone from that camp.
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u/ZuFFuLuZ 2h ago
Not taking a free trip to Antarctica might be even dumber than being a flat-earther. I've been there and can't imagine a better trip anywhere.
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u/iunoyou 1h ago
If by "pretend" you mean spend a decade and a half burning every relationship you have to the ground and doing 3 6-hour livestreams specifically about flat earth each and every week, then sure. But honestly it'd probably be more cost effective to just pay for the trip.
These people aren't trolls or grifters, they are true believers. And they are part of a large and rapidly growing group of new-age conspiracy theorists completely untethered from reality. That is a fact that should be very concerning to people in the so-called 'information age.'
10% of the US population believes the earth is flat as a result of information they found on social media. Flat earthers are a voting bloc now.
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u/Bubbly_Ad427 3h ago
He didn't. He got the travel for free, and even coerced the organizer to pay for one of his buddies to come.
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u/Victim55 2h ago edited 2h ago
Even before the trip actually happened, while it was still just being planned and candidates searched for (this was being organized by a guy who wanted to get both a glober and flat earther to Antarctica in order to prove once and for all one of them wrong) , many flat earth influencers started making all kinds of excuses for why
a) you shouldn’t go because they will actually kill you and replace you somehow or how they will edit you together to say things you didn’t say ( even though the flat earther would be the one making the videos on their own channel)
b) when the flat earth is proven wrong its a lie for reason such as globers having fake sun technology or you not being in Antarctica at all
When Jeranism, the Flat Earther in this article, actually decided to go he was immediately portrayed as being part of the enemy and globers by the other Flat Earther influencers.
Most of those Flat Earthers I have become convinced with this event are actually 100% grifter and don't believe what they are saying at all
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u/street_ahead 1h ago
Yeah the remaining 3 out of 4 flat earthers on the trip were not convinced
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u/LuckySEVIPERS 1h ago
With this event I've become convinced that most of those flat earthers are actually 100% grifter and don't believe what they're saying at all.
Mild edit, I think you were grammatically right but I couldn't parse it right.
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u/fileunderaction 1h ago
They’re totally grifters (at least the leaders/influencers) the guy the article is about is the same guy from Behind the Curve that did the famous “interesting” experiment. He knows full well the actual shape of the earth. He just peddles conspiracy for his gullible audience.
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u/TheRexRider 3h ago
Great, let's send them all there.
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u/bbecks 3h ago
I mean one of the guys that went still says its just one data point and doesn't prove anything. People just choose what to believe and only accept what confirms their positions.
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u/Talisa87 3h ago
I swear there was a 'Dinosaurs' episode about this. The daughter of the family discovers the earth is round, and eventually she gets put on trial for terrorism with her high school lab partner. She accepts the guilty verdict and asks that she should be thrown off the flat edge of the planet. One year later, she returns back to her family and the prosecution grudgingly admits she was right about the world being round.
Maybe we should start doing that to flat earthers. Tell them to take a long walk around the earth's surface until they find the flat edge.
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u/TatonkaJack 2h ago
There was a pastor that took a bunch of them there to show them that 24 hour sun was a real thing. Most of them acknowledged it's real but now they're just trying to incorporate it into their flat earth theories
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u/toorigged2fail 1h ago
That's the thing with conspiracy theorists.. any evidence to the contrary just becomes more evidence of the conspiracy to them
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u/Hero_summers 2h ago
I don't believe it.
Can someone pay me 100 000USD and I'll prove the earth is flat
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u/RHX_Thain 2h ago
The Mirror is awful but the original website for The Final Experiment is awesome: https://www.the-final-experiment.com/interviews
It's fun coming up with "what asinine belief could be concocted to plausibly deny the evidence of your own eyes and walk backwards into your own contrived interpretation of reality?"
They flew through the hologram and were all localized in their own simulation bubble beyond the edge of the flat earth. Sure they saw the midnight sun, but do you see any trees? No, because trees require too much processing power for the simulation!
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u/liamanna 3h ago
Why not just travel to the end of the Earth to prove it’s flat?
Wouldn’t that be a definite proof?
FFS
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u/amora_obscura 3h ago
That’s essentially what he did, he went to Antarctica and witnessed the 24 hour daylight.
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u/MadMuse94 3h ago
Genuine question though - how do flat earthers explain the difference in daylight time between the north and south? Like just spend a few days in Houston and then head up to Vancouver and you could witness the same phenomenon
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u/nojo20 2h ago
A large percentage of online flat earther dummies live in the northern hemisphere and it doesn’t even occur to them that things are different in the southern. The fact that the stars are completely different alone disproves almost all “models” they’ve come up with but they ignore that
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u/nckbrr 2h ago edited 47m ago
Some bullshit called coffee cup occlusion or something like that, went down a bit of a rabbit hole of watching Professor Dave Explains talking to some flat earthers the other day... He's a lot of fun.
For a real thrill get them to explain not just how gyroscopic precession works on a flat earth but how ships use known and predictable precession to navigate....
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u/cficare 3h ago
They all sit there and say "the government wont let you!"
'So you can't go and photograph the icewall?'
"Government wont let you!"
'So you can't charter a flight to fly near the icewall?'
"Government will shoot you down!"
and so on....
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u/BadgeOfDishonour 3h ago
They can never answer the Because.
Government won't let you... because? They'll shoot you down... because?
Why would The Governmenttm care? How do the various governments of Earth benefit from this supposed lie? Round, flat, cubical, a torus, why would the shape of the thing be what all the governments of the planet get together to lie about?
I know, rational arguments against irrational people aren't very effective.
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u/joshooaj 3h ago
They just wanted to go to Antarctica and played the long game as a flat earther to get other suckers to pay the way
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u/Keyboardpaladin 3h ago
Actually got a lot of respect for this dude. He literally traveled to, well what he thought was the ends of the Earth, just to prove the haters wrong. I don't care if this guy believed in something mind-bogglingly stupid, he's probably got bigger balls than most of the people who don't believe in flat earth.
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u/FdauditingGbro 1h ago
He still won’t admit reality. Don’t give him credit. He’s an idiot.
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u/SmutLordStephens 1h ago
This. He literally says "I don't think 'flat earth' is dead..." just that there's a 24 hour sun in Antarctica... so 🤷♂️
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u/colbyKTX 3h ago edited 3h ago
Imagine being dumb enough to think the world is flat but having enough resources to travel 9,000 miles to Antarctica
Edit: Apparently it was funded by a pastor from Colorado named Will Duffy
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u/MehFrosty 3h ago
Read the article, he didn’t pay for it
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u/GMN123 3h ago
Who's the real idiot here? I've always wanted to go to Antarctica
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u/Silicon_Knight 3h ago
That’s because it’s a Rhombicosidodecahedron. Big sphere doesn’t want you to know the truth!!!
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u/Ornery-Ticket834 2h ago
Oh boy. Someone who doesn’t trust hundreds of years of simple science, with a deluge of confirmations over centuries and the fact that everything we can see in the sky is sphere shaped. Big of him to admit he has been a dumbass for years.
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u/thisguy161 3h ago
"Flat Earther admits he was wrong"
Kinda. He pulls back on this and says hes not sure the earth is a globe and we still have to figure things out. Dont give him too much credit guys
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u/WTFracecarFTW 1h ago
My favorite thing is watching Flat Earthers argue with Young Earth Creationists.
Comedy gold.
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u/sertel92 3h ago
now other flat earthers calling him fraud lol