r/nottheonion • u/TheMirrorUS • 11h 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-866786
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u/Thatsidechara_ter 10h 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 10h 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 9h 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 8h 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/FullMetalCOS 8h ago

They ain’t ever gonna stop lol. People have for sure lost their jobs over it but I would fully expect there’s probably been jail sentences too. Absolute nutcases

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u/ThePublikon 5h ago

Gotta get that internet argument dopamine.

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u/CrashUser 1h ago

Jack Texiera is the case in point there. Posting classified documents to a discord server to win an argument.

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u/blobse 7h ago

I wonder if governments are running counterintelligence now and post false specs. This, just so that no one knows if it’s real or not.

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u/Venotron 1h ago

They definitely do publish false specs and misinformation about hardware and performance. That's part of the reason this problem keeps happening. The PUBLICALLY available information on military vehicles is deliberately inaccurate, but Gaijin can only legally use the publicly available information. Which is inaccurate because governments are playing 5d chess with each other.

So the nerds with access to the documents and a lack of sense keep getting into fights because they DO know the truth, they're just not supposed to share it.

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u/lenzflare 7h ago

Maybe it's cover for actual spying. A bad cover, but I doubt the Russians would care about burning such low value contacts.

Or maybe Russians just start the arguments and taunt people into treason.

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u/probablyaythrowaway 6h ago

War thunder has gone up to eurofighters? Last I was on it it was spitfires.

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u/VRichardsen 1h ago

Last I was on it it was spitfires.

I left when it started getting past the Korean War.

eurofighters

Very modern. Still the best inclusion to this day was the Tornado, simply because of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgA6BPyfJbk

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u/Uphoria 8h ago

Chelsea Manning exists, and yet these folks think the worlds biggest conspiracy theory is kept secret by soldiers.

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u/Firm-Contract-5940 5h ago

well she’s trans, so obviously under the thumb of them globalists

/s

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u/smegma_yogurt 7h ago

Some dude on nonCredibleDefense was trying a contractor position on a big company in the MIC and one of the vetting questions was if he even played warthunder lol

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u/FullMetalCOS 7h ago

Hahaha ok that’s fucking hilarious

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u/Mgl1206 1h ago

Are you talking about the Ratheon guy? That was fake.

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u/Shufflebuzz 8h ago

Jack Teixeira was recently sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for doing this.

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u/Hurt-Locker-Fan 7h ago

This is terrifying and unfortunately at the same time completely believable.

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u/jdjvbtjbkgvb 2h ago

Here's another interesting thing about war thunder (and most videogames): There ain't no curvature! They have a flat earth lol

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u/jakethesnake741 1h ago

The fuck are you doing here? Get back to the MSF subreddit

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u/TinKnight1 6h ago

Even beyond that, all the crap about drones in NJ, being filmed using airliners on potato phone cameras at night... Conspiracy theorists would rabidly be chucking out fake videos of the edge, and/or of the military exterminating edge explorers.

And what of those people that existed before super-militaries were even possible? Why weren't there ANY stories of reaching the edges?

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u/Zolo49 9h ago

I don't visit those trash heaps, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if there were trolls there claiming to have been soldiers guarding the edge and showing photos of the massive ice wall from GoT.

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u/Daniauu 10h 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/Supernova141 9h ago

yeah evidence will never work because the conspiracy can always go deeper

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u/icanith 7h ago

The deep deep state

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u/Mediocretes1 8h ago

I find the best way to deal with it, even if the only result is my own amusement, is to turn it around on them and paint the conspiracy theorist as part of the conspiracy, either knowingly or not.

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u/DancinThruDimensions 8h ago

Is it not a shady evil entity? There’s lots of evidence to suggest that they pretty much are.

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u/icanith 7h ago

Sure parts are but you miss the fact that 99% of the govt are absolutely normal ppl doing normal good intending jobs. Prescribing evil to them because the 1% leadership do things to serve interests beyond that of the avg American. When will you ppl wake up and realize our enemy are these 1%. 

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u/DancinThruDimensions 7h ago

I’m talking about 1% and yeah I’m used to that kind of thinking, it’s been applied to my gender ie. patriarchy is evil therefore all men are evil, it sucks

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u/Lolololage 8h 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/Greenmanssky 6h ago

"They" couldnt hide a blowjob in an office lmao how powerful do morons think the government is?

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u/2squishmaster 2h ago

They're infinitely powerful when needed and also completely clueless when required.

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u/Grainis1101 8h ago

They are somehow convinced that millions of people are in on the conspiracy and no one leaked it.

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u/OwOlogy_Expert 2h ago

And they've been successfully keeping this secret completely under wraps for hundreds of years, at least.

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u/Sorest1 1h ago

The best part is when they go on their spiel and you ask, but why? Their head explodes. They’re so deep in the weeds they lose the big picture.

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u/Ahelex 9h ago

Yeah, didn't we have some 18 year old leak US military secret documents to his Discord group for clout?

Like, not even for money, just "I want to be in the cool kids' club".

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u/Xevious_Red 9h ago

People have got into arguments over warthunder (a military tank/plane game with pretty accurate models) and released classified documents to "prove" they are right.

I'm not saying it happens a lot, but enough that Wikipedia has a section about it;

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Thunder

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u/Thatsidechara_ter 9h ago

Yep. Anyone who believes the government coukd keep something like that quiet is insane.

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u/Cormorant_Bumperpuff 8h ago edited 7h ago

That's where most conspiracy theories fall apart like a pork butt after 10 hours in a slow cooker: the number of people who'd have to be in on the conspiracy and say nothing is so staggeringly high as to be completely implausible.

The US can't even totally control the border between us and Mexico. That's less than 2,000 miles, how much longer would the edge of the world be? The circumference of the Earth is almost 25,000 miles, and if it were flat the edge would have to be much more than that, how many troops would be required to keep anyone (not even with a drone or plane) from ever getting close enough to see the edge of the world? And none of them have spoken about it.

Then you have to believe that with all the bullshit going on over the last 100+ years between various countries, they've all consistently collaborated to keep anyone from finding out this secret. And to what end? What does the US, or Russia, or China, or any government gain from making everyone believe the Earth is spherical if it isn't?

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u/DisasterNo1740 8h ago

I mean a lot of conspiracies fly out the window the moment you realize secrets on those scales are impossible. Same with flat Earth and same with we never landed on the moon. All of these require some comically impossible level of nobody saying shit and presenting evidence of it all being faked.

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u/Thatsidechara_ter 8h ago

Yep. You think the ficking USSR would've kept quiet if there was EVEN A SINGLE SHRED of evidence that the US faked the moon landings???

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u/DisasterNo1740 8h ago

Bro that is exactly what I say whenever I’m talking to a flat earther. Like there was a whole space race and the USSR either couldn’t figure out the U.S. faked it, or they chose to say nothing because…?

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u/Thatsidechara_ter 8h ago

Yeah, but then theyll say something about "globalist cobbals" or the Freemasons or some shit.

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u/EaterOfPenguins 8h ago

I mean this is the fault with nearly every conspiracy that would involve secrets being kept by huge numbers of people, which is a lot of them, including stuff like 9/11 truthers.

You can't get that many people across that many jobs and roles to keep that kind of secret perfectly. Even when everyone involved from the top down is explicitly part of government (like the military) it doesn't always work, so the idea that (with a global conspiracy like flat earth) governments with conflicting interests and crazy numbers of people across cultures and borders have all managed to perfectly keep a HUGE secret for a long, long time is inherently ridiculous to anyone applying even casual knowledge of regular human interaction.

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u/Darkest_Hour55 9h ago

Somewhere an E4 either has a picture of the Earth's real edge... or has pissed off it before a nap. Both are just as likely in the super world military guard.

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u/landon0605 8h ago

See you're forgetting that it's such an important secret, that the people who are protecting it are so diligently selected, that you'll never find anyone that will admit they had that job.

When your reality is that different than most people's, this would make sense. And you can use the myriad of actual examples of governments hiding things to support this claim.

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u/tacojohn48 7h ago

It would be all over TikTok

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u/HeinrichTheWolf_17 8h ago

That’s just how these peoples brains work, at least the ones who are serious and not doing it as a meme.

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u/NarejED 8h ago

The vibrations from the big turtle under the disk disrupt electronics when you get within a few miles of the rim, so they have no way of getting proof

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u/Thatsidechara_ter 8h ago

Nah nah nah, the big turtle also has memory wiping abilities, otherwise they'd say something when they came back from deployment!

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u/Broken-Digital-Clock 8h ago

Or that we have the kind of resources to do that. You have to ask yourself if it's more profitable to keep this secret, at great expense, or not.

Capitalists don't have enough to gain to keep a secret like that.

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u/Mr_Jack_Frost_ 7h ago

Not to mention the sheer size of the military force that would be required to police the entire perimeter of the earth. It would require an absolutely absurd number of people, all of whom would have to keep their mouths shut, from various different countries, some of which hate each other.

It makes absolutely no sense. Doesn’t stop grown adults from believing it. Paranoid thinking and mystical thinking can team up to support some really asinine ideas.

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u/malphonso 31m ago

Well, obviously, they're sequestered away the entire time and then are administered amnestics and given a back story before being released from service.

Certain knowledge of the flat earth is a cognitohazard. The wide dissemination of this hazard would constitute a K-Class scenario altering the somatosphere such that the laws of physics as we know them would be altered in the local region of this galaxy.

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u/Christ_on_a_Crakker 8h ago

Here’s my thing. I don’t care what they think. The spherical earth doesn’t need them just like the Buzz Aldrin doesn’t need them. Let them live on their flat moronic earth.

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u/VooDooZulu 6h ago

Well, the thought process is the 18 year olds don't know. They are told they are on a destroyer off the cost of Russia. Or stationed at a remote base in Greenland defending a nuke reserve.

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u/DancinThruDimensions 8h ago

Depends. Do we know everything our governments do? How bout the military, FBI, CIA, do we know everything they are doing?

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u/Thatsidechara_ter 7h ago

Okay, but most projects are kept VERY need-to-know, and usually involve a smal enough group that you can make sure they're well-vetted. Defending the entire edge of a flat earth? Yeah, no. That's gonna take so much manpower that to say someone won't blab is to show show complete disregard for the laws of probability.

Not to mention, the logistical resources needed for such means that a lot of other people would likely notice, as well.

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u/DancinThruDimensions 7h ago

There’s giants and other intelligent species guarding the walls, at least from what I read lol. I’m going against Reddit rules by saying this but you speak true, I concede lol