Thanks as always to The Other McCain for the Rule Five links. Also, go read the latest in my History of Lever Guns series over at Glibertarians, and if you haven’t yet, check out all my Glibs articles here.
With all that said: I should have covered this yesterday, because these are some April fools if ever there were some. Excerpts, with my comments:
Organizers of an annual conference that brings together people who believe that the Earth is flat are planning a cruise to the purported edge of the planet. They’re looking for the ice wall that holds back the oceans.
I predict they’ll be disappointed.
The journey will take place in 2020, the Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC) recently announced on its website. The goal? To test so-called flat-Earthers’ assertion that Earth is a flattened disk surrounded at its edge by a towering wall of ice.
So, if they find no such wall of ice but instead a great southern continent, will they admit that they have been mistaken all this time? Or will they come up with another bullshit conspiracy “theory?” I think we already know that answer.
Details about the event, including the dates, are forthcoming, according to the FEIC, which calls the cruise “the biggest, boldest adventure yet.” However, it’s worth noting that nautical maps and navigation technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS) work as they do because the Earth is … a globe. [7 Ways to Prove the Earth Is Round]
It won’t be a big adventure. It won’t be a bold adventure. If these people are truly serious about this, which is difficult to credit, this is the most foolish of fool’s errands. This is more ridiculous than the Green New Deal, more ridiculous than a soup sandwich.
Believers in a flat Earth argue that images showing a curved horizon are fake and that photos of a round Earth from space are part of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by NASA and other space agencies to hide Earth’s flatness. These and other flat-Earth assertions appear on the website of the Flat Earth Society (FES), allegedly the world’s oldest official flat Earth organization, dating to the early 1800s.
Back when people believed in phrenology and humours, of which nitwittery the Flat Earth belief is of a kind.
However, the ancient Greeks demonstrated that Earth was a sphere more than 2,000 years ago, and the gravity that keeps everything on the planet from flying off into space could exist only on a spherical world.
More like 2,200 years, actually. Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated the circumference of the Earth pretty accurately around 245 BC.
Honestly these screwballs are really pretty funny. While it’s hard to take them seriously, they certainly do appear to take themselves so; they’re as serious as the people who claim socialism is a workable economic system, evidence from such paradises as Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea notwithstanding.
Flat Earthers, indeed. Well, we can always use more nitwits to point and laugh at.
