Is The Earth Flat?

Posted February 18, 2019

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So, Logan Paul, YouTube 'Influencer; with more than 18 million follwers, has come out of the Flat Earth Closet.

He announced that he is now a believer in the Flat Earth Theory.

That is, that we are not on some shaky ball, but rather living on a flat disc.  

Well, it seems to makes sense.

Just look out of your window. Do you see any so-called 'curvature of the earth'? Of course you don't. And why not? Because all that NASA stuff is one big lie (just like their Global Warming stuff).  The earth clearly, to any observer, is flat.

Logan Paul is not alone. (Aside from the company he gets from his 18 million followers).  

Rapper B.o.B is such a firm believer that the Earth is flat that he actually wrote a song about it, called "Flatlined". He went on an extensive Twitter rant in 2016 explaining his beliefs. "No matter how high in elevation you are... the horizon is always eye level ... sorry cadets... I didn't wanna believe it either," he tweeted. "A lot of people are turned off by the phrase "flat earth" ... but there's no way u can see all the evidence and not know... grow up."

Hall of Fame basketballer Shaquille O'Neal — who, at 7 foot 1, should technically be able to see the curvature of the Earth if he stands on the top of a tall hill — said this on a recent podcast, "It's true. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. Yes, it is. Listen, there are three ways to manipulate the mind what you read, what you see and what you hear. In school, first thing they teach us is, 'Oh, Columbus discovered America,' but when he got there, there were some fair skinned people with the long hair smoking on the peace pipes. So, what does that tell you? Columbus didn't discover America. So, listen, I drive from coast to coast, and this shit is flat to me. I'm just saying. I drive from Florida to California all the time, and it's flat to me. I do not go up and down at a 360-degree angle, and all that stuff about gravity, have you looked outside Atlanta lately and seen all these buildings? You mean to tell me that China is under us? China is under us? It's not. The world is flat."

Cleveland Cavaliers point guard Kyrie Irving is a flat Earth believer, too. During an interview he commented "This is not even a conspiracy. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. If you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel, the way we move, and the fact that can you really think of us rotating around the sun and all planets aligned, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what's going on with these planets?"

The list goes on and on....

And why?

According to The Guardian (my favorite newspaper), the growing belief in the Flat Earth is being driven by YouTube.

The Guardian attended the most recent Flat Earth Society convention in Raleigh, North Carolina and found that the vast majority of the attendees had been convinced of the Flatness of the earth by videos they had seen on YouTube, and by one video in particular: 200 Proofs Earth Is Not A Spinning Ball by Eric Dubay.

The attendees that the Guardian interviewed had all said that they had not been flat earthers until they had seen the Dubay Video, and the video convinced them that indeed, the earth is flat and that NASA (and the government, of course) had been lying to them and were all part of a vast conspiracy.

Having watched the video, it is pretty good (not that I am coming around to this point of view)! However, what I find impressive here is not so much the fact that the earth is flat but rather the astonishing power of video to warp chanage people's minds.

The Internet, of course, is filled with conspiracy theory videos from 9/11 (I know, it was the CIA) to Moon Landings (done in Hollywood) to Climate Change (the world is actually getting colder), and so on.

What is impressive here is the power of video. 

What if that power were harnessed for 'goodness' (as Maxwell Smart might have said) as opposed to nonsense?

Could the Modern Media be used to promote the Common Good (as opposed to the Common Insanity)?

Could be...

Maybe that would be a good course to offer at say, Oxford University this summer?