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The problem with this is when the idea gets taken over by people who aren't in on the joke. . . Remember how flat earth used to be a gag?
by Loughla 2y ago
The problem with this is when the idea gets taken over by people who aren't in on the joke. . . Remember how flat earth used to be a gag?
- BrianGragg 2y agoWait! You're saying the earth isn't flat?! /s ;)
- pvaldes 2y agoIs ant's fault, they keep making all those little bumps around. The real problem is that we are spending a bazillion of hours on dubious philosophical amusements, while the planet is being slowly cooked with us on board.
- Quarrelsome 2y agomad people don't need reasons to be mad; but rather excuses. If not flat earthism then something else like aliens or smth.
- left-struck 2y agoMaybe we should sow the seeds for conspiracy theories that would benefit humanity if the mad-anyway people were to believe them.
- smolder 2y agoWhat will this religion be called?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- whstl 2y agoI remember UFO sightings being super common before smartphones. Celebrities always talking about every once in a while, a maid when I was a kid swearing she could see lights in the sky, etc. I even remember some people in my small town getting together to talk about it. (It seems aliens have wised up to the ubiquity of cameras, though!)
- freeduck 2y agoPeople need to stop looking at their screen all the time
- kjkjadksj 2y agoTry filming an airplane at night and be amazed at how shitty the footage of that is from your modern smartphone. Even during the day its a tall order without actual optical zoom and stabilization.
- whstl 2y agoThat's not really the point: point is those claims pretty much disappeared compared to the 90s and early 2000s. Maybe there's other factors at play, such as X-Files ending, or people getting more interested in flat earth.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoThere are claims all the time made, you just don’t rove over the parts of the internet where they would be posted.
- omoikane 2y ago> sightings being super common before smartphones https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/ > It seems aliens have wised up to the ubiquity of cameras, though https://xkcd.com/2572/ https://xkcd.com/2572/
- perching_aix 2y agoI don't think these are a problem in the sense that they'd be something necessary or possible to solve.
- moi2388 2y agoThe earth is flat. If you travel fast enough, that is.
- SenHeng 2y agoIf you travel fast enough, you'll discover the earth isn't flat.
- pvaldes 2y agoIf you can travel really, really fast, the earth is not a plane, is a point. A pale blue dot.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoThis discovery was made by people who weren't traveling at all.
- ungamedplayer 2y agoEverything is moving relative to something.
- plasticchris 2y agoDepends on the direction you are going ;)
- dev1ycan 2y agoI refuse to accept that we must tone down irony/sarcasm because of dumb people, we as humanity have had this problem for a long time, see: Lucian and his trip to the moon. Yet we've never had to do this. People will actively choose to believe any sort of nonesense (will avoid naming stuff but we all know what written nonesense people believe in) regardless if it is written or done in irony/sarcasm or not.
- SoftTalker 2y agoIt's worth keeping in mind that very smart people in the past believed things that we now know are nonsense. And most likely, smart people today believe things that will be considered nonsense in the future.
- operator-name 2y agoThat, or they were skeptical in dangerous ways. I'm thinking of the example of Richard Feynman questioning if you should brush your teeth, which although is valid to scientifically challenge. There's other examples of "smart people", especially in their own domains openly applying their technique to other fields for the detriment of observers.
- BizarroLand 2y ago“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company.” — René Descartes
- IncreasePosts 2y agoWhen was flat earth only a gag? People were adamantly trying to prove a flat earth at least 150 years ago, and even got the co-discoverer of evolution via natural selection(Wallace) roped into the controversy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Level_experiment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Level_experiment
- mewpmewp2 2y agoI remember there being this satire forum where people were trying to prove that earth is flat as an intellectual exercise. I think it was 15 or more years ago or something like that. At that point there was no serious, popular and well known flat earth movement. This came later. It may have been theflatearthsociety dot org. But maybe I remember wrong. It was that they were pretending to believe and trolling, but now as it is more serious they stopped trolling in such a way.
- binary132 2y agoNot a flat earther myself, but I will say they are right about one thing: fisheye lenses are really popular in photography of the Earth from space or near-space. It’s one of those things you don’t notice until someone points it out to you, and then you see it everywhere.
- samatman 2y agoI'm sure they're right about a lot of things! Water is wet, for instance. The moon waxes and wanes. That sort of thing. If you want to photograph a wide field of view, you use a fisheye lens. Humanity hasn't spent a lot of time far enough from Earth that it doesn't fill a wide field of view, although we do have some rather nice photographs from both humans and machines which have made it out that far.
- binary132 2y agoIt has the added benefit of making something round which sometimes looks surprisingly not all that curvy look curvier.
- krapp 2y agoQAnon started as a gag on 4chan and then ate the Republican Party because it was too on the nose. 4chan itself is a great example - it used to be "ironically" racist, now it's just racist racist, and that's the joke. And I was listening to a Behind the Bastards podcast about the history of the Illuminati and how a lot of the modern conspiracy beliefs about the Illuminati come from the Discordian movement parodying conspiracy beliefs. On the one hand you have to appreciate when people game so hard they manifest a zeitgeist entirely out of their own irony-poisoned fart clouds, but on the other hand we no longer have the level of education or degree of critical thinking to offset the nonsense, nor any kind of consensus reality to tether ourselves to, and the people who believe in the flat earth and Jewish space lasers are everywhere now, and that just kind of sucks.
- _yb2s 2y agoHaving also watched all of this happen, I still can’t believe it’s real. Freeway overpasses now have angry mobs waving signs about joke conspiracy theories made up by teenage edgelords shitposting from their parents basement.
- VoodooJuJu 2y agoThere is no problem. People believing in a flat earth or birds not being real has no impact on you and how you live your life, unless you allow these people to live in your head.