Oh, sure. Controversy generates engagement, engagement improves algorithmic visibility, views on YouTube and Tiktok videos and shorts generate money. And in the last couple of years LLMs have made it much easier to generate nutty new material with scripts, images and now video. Plus you can get extra screen time just reacting to someone else's content. With luck, you'll get people subscribing to your Patreon and paying you to generate woo.
The Final Experiment
- Thread starter Z.W. Wolf
- Start date
John J.
Senior Member.
Oh, absolutely. I guess my post demonstrates the shortcomings re. posting links that might not be accessible to most readers.
The radio program discussed the much more recent coverage of a planned release of water from the Fukushima plant.
The residual radioactivity was far below what the WHO thinks is acceptable for drinking water, and experts on the show agreed any risk was minimal (one saying that people who take their children on flights are exposing them to far more radiation).
But scare stories about the water release proliferated, some claiming seafood from Japan was dangerous, some that monsters might result! They were traced back to Chinese state media resources, although attempts had been made to hide their origins. The PRC embassy in London denied any use of misinformation (as PRC official sources always do, same with hacking).
Nye's Razor?
FatPhil
Senior Member.
WFM. However, it didn't really conain any great insights for someone who lives 200km from Russia's border and who has both a Hitler Party and a Putin Party with significant levels of representation in the national government. I need longer waders.
captancourgette
Active Member
related, I'm sure we all saw this reported, seems like all the history books I've been reading my who life have been wrong /s
https://newrepublic.com/post/190065/elon-musk-german-far-right-afd-hitler-lies
https://newrepublic.com/post/190065/elon-musk-german-far-right-afd-hitler-lies
The world is going wackoExternal Quote:
FatPhil
Senior Member.
Wrong thread?
But yes, Elon's definitely right, this was a classic left wing move: https://hmd.org.uk/resource/2-may-1933-dissolution-of-german-trade-unions/ - (no quote needed, the URL says it all) that took him all of 3 months.
Maybe he's confusing "Socialism" with "National Socialism"? Quite likely, as he also seems to not realise that "socialism" and "communism" are completely different and incompatible economic systems. They are often mentioned in the same breath simply because someone whose writings have almost no relevance to the modern day insisted that you need to go through the powergrab state in order to reach the untenable sci-fi eutopia state, and whose adherents accidentally keep stopping at the powergrab stage.
Mendel
Senior Member.
Populists (like the AfD) lying is business as usual
Musk supporting a party that hates EVs is wacko
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Mendel
Senior Member.
I'm not defending literalism, but Kings is somewhat like a history book, so while some numbers may have been tweaked for mystic significance, it wouldn't be wrong to read it literally.
Now a circle of 30 units circumference has a diameter of 9.55, so if I was writing a history book and not a maths textbook, and aiming to give my readers an impression of its size, I could write it was 30 cubits around and 10 cubits across, and would have rounded the values in a way that no modern mathematician would object to.
The less likely interpretation is
source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=plot+an+ellipse+with+axes+10+and+9.088
10 across at the widest, 30 around, "round all about" because it is an ellipse. Though it stands to reason that Solomon would've preferred a circle.
What podcast? I thought "Tales from the Rabbit Hole" was on hiatus.
Does Mick have another podcast that I don't know about?
I don't know. Flat Earth seems more like the bottom conspiracy than the gateway. If I had to pick a conspiracy as a potential gateway to more insidious conspiracies, I would say chemtrails or perhaps one of the drinking water conspiracies. Another "entry-level" conspiracy would be TWA 800, because of the supposedly CIA involvement. Oh, and the JFK assassination.
I think that to take Flat Earth seriously, a person has to be already gone to such a high degree that anything, absolutely anything, coming from official or mainstream sources is rejected on the spot.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
My impression is that Mr. Musk is only tangentially in the EV business -- his wealth comes from keeping stock prices in his companies high, and he has been very successful in this -- share prices for Tesla, his EV company, are completely out of touch with how many cars they sell. My impression is that stock prices there are supported more by interest in Mr. Musk than in how well the company does. And to stay interesting, you have to be in the headlines! There is an old saying that I ported over from show biz into politics, "The only bad publicity is an obituary." A distant cousin of "I don't care what you write about me as long as you spell my name right!" That is not absolutely true, but it is enough truth in it to be worth bearing in mind, for stock billionaires, politicians and Flat Earth profiteers.
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NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
I thought this was interesting, but to stay on topic of Flat Earth here, I figured I'd discuss whether JMart should or should not buy Tesla stock
, over in our chitchat thread: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/the-metabunk-community.13387/Interesting, because TWA 800 and the JFK assassination require relatively "small" conspiracies -- the actual incidents wouldn't require a lot of participants, not much ongoing cover-up.
Whereas when you get to Flat Earth and modern UFO "disclosure" belief you kind of have to embrace an ongoing conspiracy that touches the very structure of modern life -- for the broader denied thing to be real not only does it have to be real, but governments and other institutions across the world can't just be mistaken or ignorant, they must be actively working to conceal reality from the public.
Willie
Member
Austin would be an interesting guest but I don't think he'd do it. Jeran on the other hand, I think he might. As I write this, he is declaring publicly that he's leaving the FE community.
Mendel
Senior Member.
Do you have a source wherd Jeran himself declares it?
@MonkeeSage had a secondhand source in https://www.metabunk.org/threads/the-final-experiment.13849/post-332835 , and it sounded like Jeran was still looking for the truth, but had become convinced the FE community would never find it.
MyMatesBrainwashed
Senior Member
Reading that transcript, what jeran seems most upset about is that flat earth is only really about attacking the globe now rather than trying to work out how the flat earth works.
Which is correct.
So there's the opportunity for "flat earth is dead, long live flat earth" in there.
Which is correct.
So there's the opportunity for "flat earth is dead, long live flat earth" in there.
MonkeeSage
Senior Member.
Jeran says he wrote the telegram post and discusses it starting around 10 minutes into his new live stream show. Around 13 minutes he says he is not a flat earther because he showed himself evidence it can't be true. It's a long stream (almost 6 hours!) and I only caught the first 30 minutes so I am not sure how far he went towards accepting reality, but he was roasting Dean Odle and how religious folks like him have embedded themselves in flat earth, talking about how the AE map cannot work, and basically reiterating points from the telegram post. I plan on listening to the rest later (but not all at once haha).
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4iCnL7U4Po
MonkeeSage
Senior Member.
I put Jeran's video on in the background while I was doing stuff around the house and I ended up listening to a good chunk of it. He's pretty far towards accepting the globe. He spends quite a while debunking various FE claims about how TFE was allegedly faked, and showing how a 24 hour Antarctic Sun can't work on FE, and defending how it works on the globe using an actual 3d model.
At 3:48:40 he says
He still thinks the Moon landings were faked and NASA spends too much money does shady / fake stuff but he says those are also things he will need to reconsider now that he has seen something was real that he absolutely thought could not be (the 24 hour Antarctic Sun).
Edit: At 4:22:43 he says
Edit: At 5:40:08 (at the end of the stream) he says
At 3:48:40 he says
External Quote:
He still thinks the Moon landings were faked and NASA spends too much money does shady / fake stuff but he says those are also things he will need to reconsider now that he has seen something was real that he absolutely thought could not be (the 24 hour Antarctic Sun).
Edit: At 4:22:43 he says
I think it's great he's been able to even start on his way out of the rabbit hole, wishing him best of luck to continue on that path.External Quote:
Edit: At 5:40:08 (at the end of the stream) he says
External Quote:
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Moon landings were faked, but NASA's budget documents are somehow real?
JMartJr
Senior Member.
If you wanna say a major government expense was faked in those years, to skim money being the usual reason I hear cited for Apollo as a particular thing, it would make more sense to believe the Vietnam War was faked -- a LOT more money was spent on the war than on the moon landings. And continuing NASA as a fake money laundering scheme makes even less sense now, when the percentage of the budget going to space is so much smaller -- if you wanna steal money, there are much bigger pies to take a slice out of!
Citations:
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/vietnam-war-facts-definition-costs-and-timeline-4154921External Quote:
https://taxfoundation.org/blog/apollo-moon-space-race-industrial-policy-cost/External Quote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NASA-Budget-Federal.svg
NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
1 bit of evidence and 1 conspiracy at a time.
IF Jaren is being confronted with evidence, that he appears to be accepting, that a 24 sun IS possible in Antartica, it's a step in the right direction. He's seen that 2 often cited bits of the evidence for FE, are wrong. The Antarctic ice wall is NOT defended by military personal, regular people can go there budget permitting, and a 24 sun IS viewable. He's even considering that a globe Earth model correctly predicts what he saw. Whitsit is having to deal with this too.
I can't speak to Jaren's beliefs or motives, but even this small admission, which appears to just be a truthful account of what he saw, has cost him standing in his community and likely will cost him followers on social media ($$). Now it could be he's just a savvy content creator that used a free trip to Antartica to provide him with the evidence he needs to move on from FE, a worn-out CT that has run its course. He can now get into Geocentricism, fake moon landing, NASA coverups and so on to keep some of his followers and replace some FEers that drop off.
Hopefully we're seeing a real person coming to grips with real evidence that may lead him out of the rabbit hole. But it seems the real driving force behind non-religious FEers, is a complete and total distrust of authority. Or at least a persona that plays that up to likeminded people on social media. We'll just have to be bystanders and watch what happens.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
That has always stuck in my craw. "Hi, I'm an independent thinker, I don't just believe everything 'Authority' tells me. I do believe everything some strangers on YouTube tell me, of course -- that's 'Doing my own research.'" Makes my head explode...
I know it is silly on my part to expect people whose world view is anti-rational to behave rationally about it. But still, I can't wrap my head around it.
Still, as you say, even one person taking even one step back out of the rabbit hole of conspiricism is a Good Thing. Yay for that.
NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
I meant to link this video the other day but got sidetracked. It's 3 FEers, along with 1 astrophysicist and 3 guys from CSI that talk amongst themselves and with each other in a mostly polite way. 1 FEer is a Biblical literalist, the lady FEer is a mix of Bibel and CT and the 3rd FEer is a complete CT guy. He's convinced anything learned in science is a lie, but weekend scientifical content creators on YouTube are telling the truth. It seems to be more of a feeling of being left behind and being disenfranchised. It's fascinating:
Source: https://youtu.be/Q7yvvq-9ytE?si=Gw9-dYBw8EFzn0yI
AmberRobot
Senior Member.
I'm curious to watch that video but I hope they got an astrophysicist who is familiar with flat earth and its claims. If one is unfamiliar it could be difficult to debunk on the fly. I once saw part of a video in which two professional flat earthers took on some physics grad students. the students did not do well and i was bothered when they "conceded" that Newton was "wrong". sigh…
JMartJr
Senior Member.
If we had a "thank you" emoji, I'd have used it!
AmberRobot
Senior Member.
I skipped past the Bible stuff in the beginning but as curious as I am on how the scientists would handle themselves I couldn't bear to watch more than a couple of minutes of this.
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NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
My bad, I should have prefaced that it's not a "great" video, just interesting to hear the logic(?) of the FEers. They do mostly just all talk pass each other, as expected. The science guys end up trying to explain "science" which, the FEers already think they understand, they've seen it on YouTube, but as nobody can really offer any evidence, it kinda goes nowhere.
I guess I saw it as a bit of a window into the "why" of FE, especially from non-content creators or FE celebrities. These 3, as far as I can tell, aren't part of the FE media scene. If anything, they're the consumers of it. I'd imagine on any giving day, most people don't think about the shape of the earth, but for these 3, it seems a defineing piece of who they are. Why? What's the point of Flat Earth?
MyMatesBrainwashed
Senior Member
One thing I'm trying to get my head around is how, on the one hand (faking stuff) we (humans) are capable of anything, but on the other hand (working things out) we aren't capable of anything.
There's an acknowledgement of expertise for certain things, but not for others.
But how also you'd probably find that the expert for what has been acknowledged would say they aren't capable of the fakery to the degree that's required.
There's an acknowledgement of expertise for certain things, but not for others.
But how also you'd probably find that the expert for what has been acknowledged would say they aren't capable of the fakery to the degree that's required.
