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The World Is Flat! Are You Kidding? 13

Why The Flat-Earth landing” – is counterfeit, make-believe anesthetic effects and wake up to the flat reality.
testimony to hoodwink the masses. Flat-earth talk is both superior and defensive.
Movement Is The Best “Facts” themselves are highly suspect, And the rhetoric suggests a sort of proud
naturally. Science is a long con. Do some alienation: Flat-Earthers are alone, but only
Symbol Of The research. The truth is out there. because they’re the only ones courageous
Increasingly Diminished Ahem. enough to see the world as it really is.
This drivel isn’t the product of my Flat-earth memes – of which there seem
Value Of Truth And imaginative fancy. These are the convictions – to be tens of thousands – tend to be equal parts
the firm, unrelenting beliefs – of the Flat- condescending, thin-skinned, hostile and flighty.
Intelligence Earthers, a group which – as its sobriquet would They are, as a general rule, ineptly designed,
suggest – insists that the earth is not round, that conspicuously ugly, repetitive, illogical and
The rhetoric suggests a sort of proud it is protected by a glass dome and that the painfully unfunny. They are one Minion away
prevailing mistruths about its shape represent a from resembling the kind of low-res gag pics
alienation – Flat-Earthers are alone,
global conspiracy of indoctrination and control. your Aunt posts on Facebook. And yet these
but only because they’re the only ones
Or not “global,” I suppose, but in any case crude campaigns to proselytize seem to be
courageous enough to see the world as pernicious and worldwide. working.
it really is. This lunatic fringe is inflexible, tireless Kyrie Irving, point guard for the
and cannot be persuaded by evidence or reason. Cleveland Cavaliers, has declared repeatedly

Calum Marsh Their dogma has long infected social media and that the world is flat – no doubt about it; indeed,
contaminates the bored and gullible every day. it’s “not even a conspiracy theory.” Shaquille
Part trend, part cult, and part virus, the flat-earth O’Neal recently outed himself as a believer too
We live on a miles-deep disc of rock and soil, a
movement is as good a symbol as any of the before backtracking and saying he was only
flat circle fixed in place and quite immobile.
diminished value of truth and intelligence in kidding. Professional celebrity Tila Tequila is a
Right in the centre, like the spindle of a
2017 — and its constituency continues to grow militant Flat-Earther. The rapper B.o.B. tweets
turntable, stands what we call the North Pole,
at an alarming rate. his opinions on the subject with tenacious
around which the continents are variously
As any enterprising schoolboy will tell regularity. Pro-wrestlers and star athletes have
organized. Around those continents stretch the
you, misconceptions about the shape of the pledged allegiance to their faith in a flat earth.
ocean: vast tracts of water spanning away from
Earth were convincingly rectified some time in The movement has claimed luminaries of stage
the land in every direction as far as the eye can
6th century BC; that the planet is a sphere had and screen.
see.
been postulated by Pythagoras, corroborated by Always their reasoning is the same: have
At the ocean’s end towers Antarctica – or
Aristotle and further authenticated – with greater you actually considered the idea seriously? A
rather, the Antarctic Ice Wall, an insurmountable
and greater accuracy – by mathematicians and flat earth just makes sense.
200-foot glacial rampart that surrounds the
astronomers thereafter, until it was demonstrated The sense it makes to believers is worth
world on all sides. And above everything looms
outright by circumnavigation in early 16th scrutinizing, ludicrous as it may be. It’s not so
a dome made of an adamantine glass. It’s called
century AD. Belief in a flat earth has always much that the flat-earth movement offers
The Firmament. It protects us from harm and
been, in essence, a pre-scientific – or anti- compelling evidence or data inconsistent with
keeps the sun and the moon and the air inside.
scientific – delusion. the usual models. It’s not so much that the
The sun and the moon, of course, are
And yet despite this the belief endures — movement trades in facts at all. What the
very small and very close together. Both hang in
and in strange places. Today the flat-earth gospel revelation of their belief is founded on, instead,
the air not far from the ground. They loop
thrives on Facebook and YouTube, shared by is instinct, feeling and the facts of what we can
around us, heating and lighting different areas
way of memes and image macros, and on plainly perceive.
locally, and seem to disappear from view
websites that look like they were designed in the
periodically – not because they’re dropping
mid-1990s. Like other popular conspiracy (Continued on Page 15)
beneath the horizon, but because they’re moving
theories, it beckons outsiders with a language of
too far away to see.
fraternity, suggesting that those who accept the
It goes without saying that nobody has
truth become at once a part of an intimate,
ever left the surface of the earth and bypassed
enlightened group; a fellowship of those in the
the dome: every nation’s space program is a
know.
hoax, every soi-disant astronaut is a liar and all
You’re exhorted to submit, to surrender,
photographic evidence to the contrary – the
to accede to some higher wisdom. The facts as
pictures of our planet from outer space, the
ordinary people understand them are a mere
many images of the solar system, and especially
narcotic, and you’re urged to shake off the
every snapshot of the preposterous “moon