I don't even know anymore

[Derived Absurdity]

Is this guy for real? Like, I'm seriously having a hard time wrapping my head around this. I think I'm getting a headache.

https://twitter.com/bobatl?ref_src=twsrc" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;^tfw

This guy has over two million followers and he's arguing for... I mean...

https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/69141 ... _src=twsrc" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;^tfw

https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/69143 ... _src=twsrc" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;^tfw

https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/69149 ... _src=twsrc" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;^tfw

https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/69141 ... _src=twsrc" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;^tfw

https://twitter.com/bobatl/status/69141 ... 58016?s=09" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I can't even think straight anymore. I've never seen anything like this. I seriously... what.

[aels]

It's like he's been bitten by Jaden Smith or something.

[Boomer]

He makes some valid points.

I mean, how do we know the Earth is round if we've never been to the edge?

[CashRules]

Well we definitely need to shut down human cloning centers. And those human-animal hybrids, what the fuck is up with that?

[Monk]

NDT got involved!

http://www.vulture.com/2016/01/neil-deg ... earth.html

[CashRules]

I'm betting on Bob.

[CashRules]

He doesn't have over two million followers because of the crazy shit about a flat earth. It's because he's a successful rap artist.

[thesalmonofdoubt]

Is that really significantly dumber than believing in a literal take on Noah's ark? and there's millions of people who eat that shit up

[Derived Absurdity]

LMAO

https://soundcloud.com/bobatl/bob-flatl ... neil-tyson" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

This is the most beautiful thing ever. Seriously... I have no words.

[Gendo]

Is that really significantly dumber than believing in a literal take on Noah's ark? and there's millions of people who eat that shit up

To quote South Park, yes, yes it is. Way dumber.

The difference is that one requires trust in various fields of study... if Noah's Arc were literally true, then it would mean that all sorts of various people had made mistakes or errors in their fields of study.

But you can verify a round earth without any study whatsoever. You can right now physically get on a plane and fly around the world. You can talk to all sorts of people who have actually done it. If the earth were flat, it wouldn't mean that there has been an error in some research somewhere. It would mean that an insane amount of people are purposefully lying about things they have done; with no good reason to do so.

[Derived Absurdity]

There is literally nothing dumber than believing in a flat earth. The idea that everyone is secretly lizards and the moon is fake is less dumb than that.

Flat earth is the absolute bottom tier of stupid-shit-some-people-apparently-actually-believe. Nothing else surpasses it; nothing else even comes close to meeting it.

[CashRules]

Flat earth is the absolute bottom tier of stupid-shit-some-people-apparently-actually-believe. Nothing else surpasses it; nothing else even comes close to meeting it.

I knew a girl in St. Petersburg, Florida one time who thought it got dark at night because the sun went out when it dropped into the ocean and the water put out the flames. It got daylight again because the sun is made out of the same material as those trick matches magicians use. Yeah, she was a stripper.

[Derived Absurdity]

... I have to admit, that's got this beat.

[thesalmonofdoubt]

Is that really significantly dumber than believing in a literal take on Noah's ark? and there's millions of people who eat that shit up

To quote South Park, yes, yes it is. Way dumber.

The difference is that one requires trust in various fields of study... if Noah's Arc were literally true, then it would mean that all sorts of various people had made mistakes or errors in their fields of study.

But you can verify a round earth without any study whatsoever. You can right now physically get on a plane and fly around the world. You can talk to all sorts of people who have actually done it. If the earth were flat, it wouldn't mean that there has been an error in some research somewhere. It would mean that an insane amount of people are purposefully lying about things they have done; with no good reason to do so.

Yep - but my point wasn't is it exactly the same amount of dumb - but is it really significantly dumber.

Here's my process - you read this post and see all the people flocking to both diss and support the idea of a flat earth and I think - well fuck me, I thought the world was well past this. Then you see all the "supporting evidence" and the crazy math talking about vanishing horizons, throw in a few doses of HUGE NASA conspiracy and you get your flat earther's and then you note that the exact same disregard for obvious provable crap happens with YEC's ..and I figure, we live in a world were significant numbers of people believe that every single "type" of animal on earth all gathered in one spot at one time and were kept alive for an age in a wooden boat some 5 thousand years ago - then dispersed to all the continents of the world to repopulate in very specific ways enjoying a kinda hyper evolution that is clearly not observable right now.

^ there are almost as many ground level observations that do not require any sort of appeal to authority that makes the Noah's ark argument pretty fucking obviously incorrect - its not about understanding the science behind the age of the earth - its about having some sort of basic idea of the diversity of life and trying to imagine all of that both fitting in and being maintained in a boat thousands of years ago .. I don't even need the resources to get on an actual plane and fly around the world to get to the point where it seems immediately ridiculous, I can pretty much work out the ark story is bogus without even leaving my couch.

So - once again, my point isn't that flat earther's aren't ridiculous, but that the reaction "I Can't believe people believe this shit" .. needs to be made in context where we live in a world where millions and millions of people believe in things like Noah's ark - the Tower of Babel, a literal Adam and Eve. Noah's ark is just the low hanging fruit-cake. Its an immediately ridiculous premise even at an unstudied obvious level - to believe in it you would have to be just about as ignorant of a whole heap of obvious observavble crap as one would to maintain the earth is flat.
And yet - because its more common (in certain places at least) .. it seems to be on a different level of stupid.

So, while I agree that you probably have to suffer thru a few more intellectual failings to maintain that the earth is flat in this day and age - I don't think flat earthers and people who believe in Noah's ark are really all that materially different

[Derived Absurdity]

I get that, but I do think there are even more ground-level observations and extremely basic inferences that quite immediately prove the world is not flat. I mean, we've known the world is not flat for about two thousand years (not five hundred years, which a dumb myth even Neil DeGrasse Tyson apparently buys into), because it's completely fucking obvious. You can prove it beyond a doubt in about twenty minutes, especially with what we know about physics. You can also work out that the earth is not flat without leaving your couch, pretty easily. And considering that this was well-known two thousand years ago... yeah, I sort of think it's far worse.

Noah's Ark... I'm willing to give that a pass since people who believe in Noah's Ark by definition literally believe in fucking magic, so...

[thesalmonofdoubt]

^ I get that as well - Its pretty near impossible to quantify what I am saying given I don't think there is an actual metric for "This is some stupid shit" I can appeal to.

To me - believing in magic doesn't reduce the actual amount of stupid thrown at an argument, it kinda augments it.

The broader point I was trying to make here is - we live in a world where there crazy ideas supported by a vanishingly small percentage of the worlds population that adds up to an impressive figure because there is an impressive number of people in the world. You get chemtrails and holocaust deniers and, apparently, flat earthers etc .. and that's pretty messed up.. But then you have, literally, hundreds of millions of people who actually not only believe in the earth being 7,000 years old and that man was made whole cloth as is - but also that language comes from a hissy fit God had with men building a tower to reach the heavens - that all of lifes incalculable diversity comes from one arks worth of animals a few thousand years ago and suddenly - chemtrails and flat earthers don't seem all that uniquely stupid, their processes don't seem all that different from these other people.

And so really the point here is that both sets of beliefs are really pretty obviously wrong and it doesn't require any special knowledge or education to arrive at that. None of this is string theory. The only material difference I can point to is that there are a whole lot of people that believe in Noah's ark that lends it an undeserved legitimacy that other people may draw from. But I'd argue that the exact same processes are in play to believe either one..

My experience with all this guff may be informing how I see this and that may be the point of difference here. Growing up, I literally had never ever met a single person who believed in any YEC guff .. no one actually believed Adam and Eve were actual people, no one thought that tower of Babel was anything more than allegory - no one seriously thought Noah's ark was a true story - and I was raised Christian surrounded by Christians.
So - when I moved to the States and first started hearing that people actually seriously believed this stuff was the literal truth - my reaction was much like someone standing up in a room declaring that the earth was flat. I seriously could not believe that anyone actually thought that noah's ark literally happened because no one I know would/could believe that.

All I can put it down to is that when there is a lot of people believing in something completely fucking devoid of intellectual merit - it seems less stupid that when there are only a handful of people believing in something completely fucking devoid of intellectual merit... but that both appeal to almost the same level of "ignorance of fact" to the point where - intellectually there is little value analysing the difference in the respective thought processes. It seems dangerous to think of these as different classes of stupid given, I suspect, popularity is the only real difference.

[Derived Absurdity]

Yeah... I agree with that. I still think flat earth is somewhat worse... but I'm hesitant now to put it into an entirely different category of stupid from chemtrails, YEC, Holocaust denial, etc. That lady who thinks the sun drops into the ocean, though, should probably be in a category all on her own (if she's not legit mentally ill or something).

There are many beliefs that are obviously wrong and dumb, yet I can sort of understand why an otherwise reasonable person would arrive at them, and sort of sympathize with the reasoning a bit, even while realizing the beliefs are clearly wrong and dumb. 9/11 conspiracists, anti-vaxxers, theists, capitalists/liberals... and so on. And there are many others which are so wildly, horrifically, amazingly, unconscionably stupid and wrong that it completely kills any ounce of respect or understanding I could ever have for someone believing them. That would completely baffle any attempt I would make to try to understand or sympathize with them. That would completely kill any hope I would have that they're capable of reaching even a baseline level of basic sanity. People who think everything was created thousands of years ago. Or people who think the Bible is literally true. Or that Donald Trump shares common interests with the working class. Or that the earth is flat, which I have recently learned is a thing. Or that black Americans are less oppressed and have more rights than white Americans, which is also apparently a thing. I mean... there is no way I can possibly sympathize with or understand people who think these things. There's no hope for them ever reaching, like, a very basic threshold of sanity I thought we all as a people basically shared.

I don't want to sound arrogant or whatever, but... it's just that, all my life, I've been under the assumption that there was a sort of basic sanity waterline that most people generally met. That there were some beliefs so unconscionably, incomprehensibly dumb that we could count on them never gaining any measurable support beyond people who have legit medical issues. And it seems that every single year, I'm forced to the conclusion that no... there really isn't. It's not that they're simply wrong... it's just that they're so wrong that it says something fundamental about their character. That they don't have the basic moral and/or intellectual foundations that I thought were part of our collective human nature. People who think the earth is a few thousand years old. People who think Donald Trump will make a good president. People who think white Americans are more oppressed than black Americans, or that men are somehow oppressed by women. People who legitimately think slavery was a good thing. People who think age of consent laws should be abolished. People who seriously think rape should be legalized. People who think Sam Harris is intelligent and interesting. People who genuinely think Pixels was a good movie. And now it's people who think the fucking planet is flat. Seriously, how much lower could we possibly go here? How are you supposed to deal with any of these people?

It's not that I think I'm some sort of genius or anything. It's just that... ugh. Can people just meet some basic standards?

Sorry for the rant.

[thesalmonofdoubt]

Yeah... I agree with that. I still think flat earth is somewhat worse... but I'm hesitant now to put it into an entirely different category of stupid from chemtrails, YEC, Holocaust denial, etc. That lady who thinks the sun drops into the ocean, though, should probably be in a category all on her own (if she's not legit mentally ill or something).

I think we can all agree that this lady is in a class all of her own - at least I hope she's on her own.

[CashRules]

^Anti-stripper bigotry.

[Boomer]

Yeah... I agree with that. I still think flat earth is somewhat worse... but I'm hesitant now to put it into an entirely different category of stupid from chemtrails, YEC, Holocaust denial, etc. That lady who thinks the sun drops into the ocean, though, should probably be in a category all on her own (if she's not legit mentally ill or something).

I think we can all agree that this lady is in a class all of her own - at least I hope she's on her own.

I think the problem is that she wasn't in any classes at all.