My Parents Are Flat Earthers
jameshfisher.com
My Parents Are Flat Earthers
1–10 of 216 posts
Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers
#2You gotta admit, if you don't think too hard about it, it is pretty weird how many flights there are over the arctic when there aren't any (at all!) over the antarctic.
Have you tried explaining/performing Eristothanes experiment with them? https://astronavigationdemystified.com/eratosthenes-proved-t...
edit: didn't mean to sound like a flat-earther! please stop downvoting!
Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers
#3Increasingly with life these days, I feel like I am an actor in a play where the producer sees less and less of a role for me in the production as the curtain keeps raising on increasingly chaotic scenes - so I end up feeling disconnected and distant from something that I was immersed in and enjoying, and am now just an increasing befuddled and alienated observer.
The uptick in flat earth theories among other things is central to that. I made the mistake of clicking on an anti flat earth Youtube channel once (SciManDan for reference [0]) and now get others videos in that channel as 'suggested videos'. I try not to click on them, but... I do. And each time I do, a little more of me dies on the inside when I see what the pro F/E pundits are putting out there, AND see their followers applauding it as 'truth'. The globe earth model is now apparently just a 'belief system' and not science any more. o_O
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRtsZ5Iak9wSLsQLQ3XOAeA
Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers
#4You gotta admit, if you don't think too hard about it, it is pretty weird how many flights there are over the arctic when there aren't any (at all!) over the antarctic. Have you tried explaining/performing Eristothanes experiment with them? https://astronavigationdemystified.com/eratosthenes-proved-t... edit: didn't mean to sound like a flat-earther! please stop downvoting!
Quite simply - there is much more land mass in the Northern Hemisphere, and flights, say from Moscow to Anchorage or Reykjavik to Toronto have great circle routes that traverse the Arctic circle.
The Southern Hemisphere on the other hand, has no large land masses near it, and even the southern most points of Australia/New Zealand and South America are too far away for any great circle routes to cut through there without being a greater distance than any other routing.
Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers
#5The author, having been home schooled by Jehovah’s Witnesses, waxes somewhat unsurprised at this reflection, and takes it in stride.
To be honest, having weird family members isn’t really all that weird. Beyond a certain age, when they can no longer embarass you, and you no longer depend on them as guardians, parents transform themselves into quasi-grandparents, even if you don’t have children. Growing up, half my grandparents were cooky, debilitated by age, and not exactly inspiring or heroic.
Old age is kind of terrible, and people mostly don’t improve after 50. So, things could be worse. Abuse and turmoil at younger ages is way more traumatic.
Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers
#6Increasingly with life these days, I feel like I am an actor in a play where the producer sees less and less of a role for me in the production as the curtain keeps raising on increasingly chaotic scenes - so I end up feeling disconnected and distant from something that I was immersed in and enjoying, and am now just an increasing befuddled and alienated observer. The uptick in flat earth theories among other things…
now get others videos in that channel as 'suggested videos'.
FWIW, you can always remove that video from your history, so you won't get those recommendations anymore. Well, assuming you were logged into a Google account when you viewed it. Visit https://www.youtube.com/feed/history and use the smaller search bar to find any "questionable" videos and then you can delete them from your watch history.
Another option is to click the little 3-dot menu on the suggested video, click "not interested", then click the "tell us why" link, and there should be an option like "I'm not interested in recommendations based on (SOME VIDEO)". You can check that checkbox and submit, and you should stop seeing those recommendations.
Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers
#7You gotta admit, if you don't think too hard about it, it is pretty weird how many flights there are over the arctic when there aren't any (at all!) over the antarctic. Have you tried explaining/performing Eristothanes experiment with them? https://astronavigationdemystified.com/eratosthenes-proved-t... edit: didn't mean to sound like a flat-earther! please stop downvoting!
It would only make sense to fly over the antarctic if you were traveling from one Southern hemisphere city to another. But most of the developed world is in the Northern hemisphere.
Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers
#8While the author of this post focuses on the idea of a flat earth conspiracy leading to their conclusion that people believing in conspiracy theories don't have much influence over our everyday lives and that they're "fun", I can't help but disagree with an example that he even mentions shortly in the post: Anti-vaccination. The WHO has named anti-vaccination as a top 10 global health threat. Right now in Clark County Oregon there's an evolving problem with the spread of measles. I can understand the author's attempts to reconcile his parents' weird beliefs, but I can't agree with his conclusion that they're mostly fun and harmless. People who deny climate change enact that belief in the way they vote and in their every day consumption. That's not just a fun point to argue with. It's affecting everyone's lives.
Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers
#9How do flat earthers explain that the other planets are round and we see different sides of them all the time? Is earth flat and the rest of the planets are spheres??? Even in their bizarre world of logic this seems unassailable.
Re: My Parents Are Flat Earthers
#10You gotta admit, if you don't think too hard about it, it is pretty weird how many flights there are over the arctic when there aren't any (at all!) over the antarctic. Have you tried explaining/performing Eristothanes experiment with them? https://astronavigationdemystified.com/eratosthenes-proved-t... edit: didn't mean to sound like a flat-earther! please stop downvoting!
Quite simply - there is much more land mass in the Northern Hemisphere, and flights, say from Moscow to Anchorage or Reykjavik to Toronto have great circle routes that traverse the Arctic circle. The Southern Hemisphere on the other hand, has no large land masses near it, and even the southern most points of Australia/New Zealand and South America are too far away for any great circle routes to cut through there with…
It also has to do with a lack of options, if technical difficulties are encountered. The threshold for error and malfunction is much, much more extreme.
While planes fly over mountain ranges, Antarctica is similarly dangerous, but without good reasons to attempt overflight.