don't try to make sense of it, seriously, I've tried. I have loved ones that buy into crazy **** like this. I was raised on several conspiracy theories and grew up believing absurd things and think it crippled my development a little so I have a special sore spot for stuff like this.

They never think very deeply about the issues/theories/conspiracies they supposedly wanna discuss - because they can't. Their opinion has been formed very quickly on almost no evidence or sparse evidence and deeper digging will cause their comfortable little feeling of "I am really in the know and all you poor sheeple don't understand how fooled you are" to just go poof because honestly taking a flat earth position is hard enough to defend on its own without throwing geocentrism, gravity being fake, the moon being a spaceship, etc. etc. into the equation.

if they were able to gather their beliefs all at once in their own head I think they'd be amazed at how little they make sense together.

In OP's case, just watching him post over the years I think it's genuine mental illness. The flat earthers on the forum they gather on are far better at arguing these points so I expected a little fun but they traditionally avoid topics like trigonometry, retrograde planet motion (although I've seen some pretty elaborate funny theories on why this happens in a FE model) like the plague or laugh at them like they have no relevance to the discussion whatsoever.

Just finished reading most of the thread. I didn't realize that there were people who legit believed this.

So the FE people claim that there is some ice wall around the earth. So couldn't someone take a ship, helicopter, plane, etc. and film this ice wall? There are plenty of people who have been to the south pole... but i've never seen this giant ice wall that the FE people claim exists.

Sorry I misspelled your name.

I did a little search on OP's search history and found this gem: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/13...tions-1115717/

holy lord I tried to watch that yootoobz and I could only make it 7 seconds in before I spit beer all over my screen.

to sum up the first minute for those that will never watch it, basically some bad graphics say with creepy music in the background - "How can the plane land perfectly straight every time if the surface it's landing on is moving?"

How the **** can you throw a ball in the air in a moving car and have it NOT FLY BACK INTO THE REAR WINDOW??? OMG!!!!!!

http://www.vice.com/read/flat-earth-...-interview-876

OP, any plans to travel to the ice wall? You could maybe do a kickstarter to fund your expedition.

? It's pretty easy to take the black brah, though definitely not the best time to travel there given the current situation with Mance etc.

I've never seen this happen though and my bedroom as a child had a direct view of the North Sea with oil tankers and everything. At least in Europe you don't get the kind of visibility at sea to test it out ever, but it is repeated by everyone as an article of faith that it happens.

I am a round-earther though. The strongest argument I have heard is flying times and routes between places in the southern hemisphere are consistent with a round earth. If you fly Sydney to Cape Town you don't need to stop to refuel in London.

There was an article about this on bbc, apparently the explanation for gravity is the disc is constantly accelerating upwards due to an as yet unidentified force.

This thread would be so much better if RF's arguments weren't copy pasta'd from flatearthsociety.org

I invite anyone, not just OP, to join respond to me, because even if he's wrong its an interesting topic.

I know more about the conspindustry (conspiracy industry) than almost anyone else. I spent a lot of time a few years ago following the alternative media (mostly radio and podcasts). It was a phase that I passed through, and I haven't spent any time or energy following or thinking about it for the past 2 years, because I was busy living life, I didn't have any time at all to devote to it.

That being said, people are just getting emotionally riled up and not discussing things rationally. Think of it as a thought experiment.

The conspindustry, and the alternative media in general, the Alex Jones types started small as soon as the internet started seeing traffic. It is a huge thing nowadays. William Occum, one of the smartest men to ever live, said the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. What is the most reasonable explanation?

What makes sense to me is the media and the alternative media are two sides of the same coin. What might have started as a grassroots thing clearly became a huge money thing as whoever controls these outlets realized they could profit from this new type of media.

Ok, so we have our hypothesis for the alternative media, and things like this flat earth theory that may or may not be disinformation.

What's a rational way of looking at this?

OP could be someone who is just really passionate and dumb. He could easily be completely wrong about it, but at least he made me THINK. He made me actually sit and say hey I never looked at the stars closely and kept track of their position. I never actually proved to myself the earth is round or not. Forget if it is or isn't, that doesn't matter. The fact that he made me think critically about something and question what I'd been told, is at least something most OPs can't say.

The way someone could get caught up in this with it actually being just a false thing is strange, because where does the money come in? From what I can tell, OP is making no money from this, and risking being banned from the forum because this thread is probably going to end up getting locked after the regulars come in and just rip him apart. However, as I said earlier nobody is actually arguing rationally with him, just emotionally.

It is unbearable to be beaten down like this in the cold hard rational world of arguing and he is already clearly overwhelmed, and hasn't in my opinion done anything to disprove any of the arguments in favor of a round earth the other side has made. They haven't disproven any of the things he has claimed, though, either.

I stopped paying attention in school in 11th grade, literally, but before that I was a 4.0 GPA student who retained every bit of information he read or was "taught" up until that time. I don't feel I'm smart, because clearly booksmarts doesn't get you far in the real world, but I was good at memorizing things and taking tests, so I have the requisite education to understand a conclusive proof showing that what OP is saying is complete BS. However, as an outside observer, the other side has not done this.

I would like to address his math that he mentioned in the first post, because the OP did seem a bit on the disinformation side the way he said "I will continue answering questions and keep posting more information." That seems kinda like a shill to me, as the best way to convince people of something; known well by the ancient Greek philosophers, is of course not to TRY hard to convince them. It is, rather, to explain logically why your viewpoint is correct and let them come to the same conclusion on their own.

I don't see where the ^2 comes in? I was with him when he said every 8 miles viewing distance or whatever, the surface of a round earth should drop 3 ft from the horizon(the actual numbers don't really matter for my question). He then went on in the next sentence to say basically if something was 16 miles away, it should drop 3^2 ft (so 9 ft) or whatever. Why is it squared? It should just a geometric progression at that point, so something 16 miles away should be 6 ft drop, not more? That is screwing up the math for everything from that point forward, for me at least.

If you guys are having trouble understanding why I'm taking this crackpot idea even a little seriously, the old sayings always prove so true. "A picture speaks a thousand words." I wouldn't even have written this today if I hadn't looked at that picture of the Antarctica meeting, and seen plain as day what the OP is describing. Its a god damn green, tree filled "terrarium" in the middle, surrounded by white "ice walls" and then on the outside, the tall bushes "the elites". There is something very fishy going on there, its almost like they are rubbing our faces in it. That right there is what gives me that gut check, that intuition that as a poker player I trust so well, it has steered me right so many times. Something is off here with this picture.

There is a word wise men have conned fools into believing to disprove what their senses are telling them. That word is "coincidence". If you think the setup of that Antarctica meeting room design is just a coincidence, then maybe you might want to take a look in the mirror and ask yourself if you truly believe that.

Finally someone who thinks clearly on here. OP don't listen to the gullible round-earthers.

You should read the very intriguing historyseries of our earth by Terry Pratchett. It's called the Disc-World series, and it's dropping more truthbombs than your average Christian rapper.

This will also answer the pretty dumb question what's beneath the disc.

Seems like thinly-veiled creationism to me.

This line right here from the OP is where I knew this was going to be amazing.

I found proof of this ice wall around the earth:

The point here is that under conventional science the equator is a greater distance from the centre of the earth than the poles, so in a sense is "higher" and rivers flowing south in the northern hemisphere in that sense flow uphill. This is caused by the rotation of the earth however. If you get a wet football and hold it between two hands, then spin it, some of the water will go "up" into your face. The same effect happens slower on earth with water and other material having a tendency to form a bulge at the equator due to rotation - that's why altitude is most practically measured relative to sea level and not from some lower point like the centre of the earth.

The flat earth debate is interesting though, not because of the flat earthers, but because of what it reveals about ourselves. It shows us to what extent our belief in science is handed down and believed as an article of faith and not directly observed, the extent to which we are selective about evidence, explaining some away as atmospheric refraction (see the original Bedford level experiment with a telescope over a flat canal), yet at the same time repeating things we have never directly observed like the ships going over the horizon. As someone who sees myself as scientifically oriented it is frightening the parallels with religions, which are also faith and messaging based.

-Something for the OP to think about-

Don't let those flat earthers fool you. They are just shilling for round earth by providing a fake alternative that people start to think is the only alternative. They are hiding the secret that in fact the Earth is concave, as proven in the following picture:

The earth is a triangle ya'll.

Oh Yea that Antarctica meeting is definitely sketchy with so many people attending.

Maybe because it is melting into the ocean at an unprecedented rate and threatening massive disruption to global ecosystems.

Or its a conspiracy and they are discussing the need for more snipers.

the earth is a perfect square. I can't get in to everything but the most obvious proof that people like you guys and the common uneducated can understand is the simple fact that in the UK they drive on the "right" side of the road(right angle) but over here we drive on the "left." If this wasn't done UK and US drivers would crash in to each other on occasion.

The reason The US and UK government keep this from us is actually rather simple, isn't it? It's to keep people from jumping off the edge to commit suicide or "see what's out there."

The film Cube

was actually a thinly-veiled documentary that was loosely based on the science and history of square earth theory. Some things are clearly made up but the anti-hero is named "Alderson" and there is a member of the US Government with the last name "Anderson." The connections are way too obvious to ignore. Really at this point if you aren't already highly suspicious then it's pretty obvious you are a sheep who just accepts "science" from school(government supported school) and the media.

The earth is rather thick and its makeup is really nothing special and what's beneath it is the same thing that's above it, space.

It isn't the least bit surprising that custer and jmakin are so combative to a lot of this, they are so firmly set in their believes that to learn otherwise would destroy their reality. I'm sure people like PoundingTheUnder, DCifrThis, and supafey will disagree for almost the exact same reasons.


It's worth pointing out that this really shouldn't affect anyone too much and that's why it's rarely discussed. The council meeting OP posted is just a hoax though, sorry.

Can OP explain that I can get a telescope and see other planets and they all appear to be spheres? I guess Earth is special though. Or is the sky just one big hologram and the videos of us on the moon just one big joke that the government has spurned on us.

What I find interesting is that while he has dabbled in a few other threads, this is the one where jmakin decides to make his triumphant return. It's as if he feels he's the only one that can save us from the flat earth conspiracy.

They are round, but so are discs so that isn't evidence for either hypothesis. Also, the moon always showing us the same side is more consistent with it being a disc than a sphere.

Kind of this is my point about what makes it an interesting exercise - how bad we actually are at putting together watertight arguments for something we know is true.

So round that are always in the same orientation and that the typography changes in a very set manner per our viewpoint? So let's say you see that Giant storm that is on Jupiter and it moves in a very systematic and calculable way or anything on any planet (like a giant mountain) moves like it's a sphere and not a round disk.

This is all really stupid, I'm just going to read. The science involved in a non round planet just makes no sense on so many levels. There is a reason most large celestial bodies are spheres.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...planets-round/

Yea but gravity's a hoax. I mean there's a reason that no one has detected a graviton after all these years of searching.

So that's why the nights are way longer in the southern hemisphere!

Yes those are good arguments and I am a convinced round-earther. I'm just observing that we non-astronomers don't have those things first hand but we still believe them on trust - like the third-world villager who believes his neighbour saw the Virgin Mary - the only round celestial body we can see with the naked eye in the sky does not appear to rotate like a sphere but we give precedence to what scientists tell us.

I actually think it makes a difference that there is an established route by which one could gain more knowledge, become a scientist and make direct observations and calculations ourselves - whereas there is no route that enables us to make direct observations of the virgin Mary or the snipers at the south pole. Fascinating anyway.

I dont have a strong explanation for the airline route question, a reason I hesitate to embrace the theory full is because there is a nonstop flight between Santiago and Auckland that takes ~13 hours. It is a point towards a RE that I dont feel is fully explained away yet.

The reasons I have to answer the flight question is primarily different flight speeds with certain routes likely not reaching and maintaining maximum cruising speed in conjunction with starting/stopping at layovers comes down to the difference. The GPS being created by the DoD adds some obfuscation too but I'm saying that is the answer.