Does Anyone Know The Flat-Earth "Conspiracy"?
TBLman has posted umpteen threads here asserting that the Earth is a flat disc stationary in Space, with no gravity, and the other celestial bodies (presumably) orbiting it.
He has not invented this. So don't blame him.
There are assorted videos, blogs or whatever on t'Net pushing the idea as dogma that Shall Not Be Questioned, and he's apparently gained his ideas from these. They can be nasty, the people making these, too; calling anyone who questions them, a liar or an idiot; or using a trick common in the form of domestic abuse called in law, "coercive & controlling behaviour"..
Their common theme is that only they are telling the truth and we have all been taught a gigantic lie about spherical planets and the heliocentric, Solar System... but why would we be; and by whom?
The geocentric model was pushed for centuries by the Church, for their power; but ironically it was a model devised by a pagan (in their eyes) - the pre-Christian, non-Jewish Classical Greek, Aristotle, whose own religion was of a soap-opera pantheon. Its attraction was of simple arrogance, placing Man (literally and figuratively, 'man') at the centre of the Universe. Eventually the Church of Rome conceded Galileo and his contemporaries were right, though it took it 400 years to swallow its pride and apologise to their memories. The Vatican even has it own observatory now.
In FE-ist eyes, the heliocentric and gravity model is heresy, designed as part of, or supporting a mysterious "conspiracy"; but a conspiracy of what? Not itself because that would gain nothing for the conspirators - apart from ridicule.
TBLman told me the conspiracy is extremely complicated, but not what it is, suggesting as many explanations as adherents. It would have to be complicated to have originated in centuries past, yet still be maintained around the world even today; with no evident purpose or beneficiaries.
(As guide to age, Renaissance paintings sometime show globes. These were mapped, though not ever so accurately, by the early mariners who set forth from European countries to "discover new" lands... usually so their own countries could conquer them.)
One present-day example is a certain Eric Dubay, a yoga instructor, who calls his version "The Atlantean Conspiracy". At least he is civil about it, but his long list of images and short texts to show only his basic lack of geographical or simple physics, knowledge.
A 19C example was a grocer, later hotelier, falsely pretending to be a "professor", in the Dakota spa-town of Hot Springs. I'd name him but, sorry, I have lost the reference. His very strange model depicted the known world as not itself flat, but as a toroidal dish, like a roulette wheel, in the middle of a huge, square slab of rock. He did not seem to pretend any conspiracies but claimed Biblical "proof", and made money from selling his pamphlets about it! There is a Wikipedia entry about him, with a facsimile of his cod-Renaissance drawing of Planet Roulette-wheel.
''''
So probably no single, cohesive, coherent FE model, and probably no single, coherent "conspiracy"..
Yet they go to such lengths to call all the rest of us, fools and liars!
The supreme irony of these anti-science types though, is that they use the Internet to push it.
He has not invented this. So don't blame him.
There are assorted videos, blogs or whatever on t'Net pushing the idea as dogma that Shall Not Be Questioned, and he's apparently gained his ideas from these. They can be nasty, the people making these, too; calling anyone who questions them, a liar or an idiot; or using a trick common in the form of domestic abuse called in law, "coercive & controlling behaviour"..
Their common theme is that only they are telling the truth and we have all been taught a gigantic lie about spherical planets and the heliocentric, Solar System... but why would we be; and by whom?
The geocentric model was pushed for centuries by the Church, for their power; but ironically it was a model devised by a pagan (in their eyes) - the pre-Christian, non-Jewish Classical Greek, Aristotle, whose own religion was of a soap-opera pantheon. Its attraction was of simple arrogance, placing Man (literally and figuratively, 'man') at the centre of the Universe. Eventually the Church of Rome conceded Galileo and his contemporaries were right, though it took it 400 years to swallow its pride and apologise to their memories. The Vatican even has it own observatory now.
In FE-ist eyes, the heliocentric and gravity model is heresy, designed as part of, or supporting a mysterious "conspiracy"; but a conspiracy of what? Not itself because that would gain nothing for the conspirators - apart from ridicule.
TBLman told me the conspiracy is extremely complicated, but not what it is, suggesting as many explanations as adherents. It would have to be complicated to have originated in centuries past, yet still be maintained around the world even today; with no evident purpose or beneficiaries.
(As guide to age, Renaissance paintings sometime show globes. These were mapped, though not ever so accurately, by the early mariners who set forth from European countries to "discover new" lands... usually so their own countries could conquer them.)
One present-day example is a certain Eric Dubay, a yoga instructor, who calls his version "The Atlantean Conspiracy". At least he is civil about it, but his long list of images and short texts to show only his basic lack of geographical or simple physics, knowledge.
A 19C example was a grocer, later hotelier, falsely pretending to be a "professor", in the Dakota spa-town of Hot Springs. I'd name him but, sorry, I have lost the reference. His very strange model depicted the known world as not itself flat, but as a toroidal dish, like a roulette wheel, in the middle of a huge, square slab of rock. He did not seem to pretend any conspiracies but claimed Biblical "proof", and made money from selling his pamphlets about it! There is a Wikipedia entry about him, with a facsimile of his cod-Renaissance drawing of Planet Roulette-wheel.
''''
So probably no single, cohesive, coherent FE model, and probably no single, coherent "conspiracy"..
Yet they go to such lengths to call all the rest of us, fools and liars!
The supreme irony of these anti-science types though, is that they use the Internet to push it.
