INSIDE THE GROWING FLAT EARTH MOVEMENT || Alan Burdick | The New Yorker

via Daringfireball

A map from 1893 portrays Earth as square and stationary and warns of Biblical interdiction against the notion of a round Earth flying through space.Illustration Courtesy Orlando Ferguson / L.H. Everts & Co. / Library of Congress



What a burgeoning movement says about science, solace, and how a theory becomes truth | Alan Burdick

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The unsettling thing about spending two days at a convention of people who believe that Earth is flat isn’t the possibility that you, too, might come to accept their world view, although I did worry a little about that. Rather, it’s the very real likelihood that, after sitting through hours of presentations on “scientism,” lightning angels, and nasa’s many conspiracies — the moon-landing hoax, the International Fake Station, so-called satellites — and in chatting with I.T. specialists, cops, college students, and fashionably dressed families with young children, all of them unfailingly earnest and lovely, you will come to actually understand why a growing number of people are dead certain that Earth is flat. Because that truth is unnerving.


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Stupidity is a choice, not an accident. People chose to believe in what gives them solace, cowardice branded as rightfulness.