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I’m pretty sure we have no flat earthers here

But if we do, let’s smoke them out.

For those unfamiliar with the region, Mt Rainier (correct spelling) is about 80 miles (130 km) north-north-east of Mt St Helens. That photo is a good visual aid for refuting flerfs.

Argue away! Or can I expect dead silence because no one is stupid enough to fall for that flat earth nonsense here?

« People I’d never heard of

Comments

  2. says

    I’ve got a morbid curiosity about how they rationalize a conspiracy dating back to ancient mathematicians who calculated the circumference of the earth in olden days. If everyone’s been lying about the earth being round, why?

    Of course, I imagine most flerfs haven’t thought that far. Most probably just want their gut impressions to be more authoritative than the combined hard work and diligent calculations of humanity. They want their pride and laziness to be virtues.

  3. robro says

    Mt. Rainier just seems smaller than Mt. St. Helens because it’s further away.

    How’s that for flerf logic?

    I learned a new word today which seems appropriate: slang-wrangler, “someone who uses abusive slang or is a ranting partisan.”

    I learned the word from this Washington Irving quote:

    “In this country every man adopts some slang-wanger as the standard of his judgement, and reads everything he writes, if he reads nothing else: which is doubtless the reason why people of this logocracy are so marvelously enlightened.”

    “Logocracy” was Irving’s label for the US.

  5. Dan Phelps says

    Obviously that explosion in 1980 was a controlled demolition by the government to conceal the TRUTH!

  8. ealloc says

    It does seem perspective plays a big role. And I think the post has the wrong distance:

    Mt Rainier to Mt St Helens – 82 km
    Portland to Rainier – 165 km
    Portland to Helens – 83 km
    Helens height – 2.54 km
    Rainier height – 4.4 km

    On a flat earth from Portland, Mt Rainier should look lower:
    Mt.St Helens should be atan(2.54/83) = 11.0 degrees above horizon:
    Mt Rainer should be atan(4.4/165) = 9.6 degrees above horizon (lower).

    On a curved earth radius 6371 km, by pythagoras Mt. Rainier will appear 2.1 km shorter and Helens 0.54 km shorter, working out to angles 5.0 degrees for Rainier and 8.67 for Helens above horizontal. That is indeed a larger difference (3.65 degrees) than on a flat earth (1.4 degrees).

    I wonder if the ancient greeks could have figured out the radius of the earth from looking mountains like these somehow, instead of Eratosthenes method.

    (This math provided “as is” with no warranty of correctness).

  10. dschultz says

    I see three categories of flat earthers (moon landing deniers, etc.)

    1) It is goof to see if they can get a rise out of people.
    2) it is a con. Trying to get some of that sweet YouTube monetization.
    3) They really are that stupid.

    I suspect that the third category is the smallest.

  12. astringer says

    about to post a link, then noticed Erlend Meyer is a ref to the same video. I use as “go to” in a continuing attempt to fathom this and other madness. Warning: contains QAnon rabbit hole…

  13. stevewatson says

    There’s a Netflix documentary Behind the Curve about flerfers. They (or at least the American ones it concentrates on) seem to be a mix of extreme Christian fundies and New Age loons, who make pretty odd bedfellows. For some reason, Facebook shows me a lot of flerf posts, many of which are at the “not even wrong” level, nonetheless the authors are quite derisive towards round-earthers. I think a lot of them really are that stupid. (This is one reason I limit my FB activity to no more than once per week).

  15. springa73 says

    If the earth is actually totally flat, shouldn’t you be able to see Mount Fuji in Japan from the California coast, all the way across the Pacific Ocean? Perhaps not with the naked eye, since the distance is so great, but surely with a telescope?

  16. WhiteHatLurker says

    My first thought about the photo is the same as previous posters – it doesn’t show earth’s curvature in any visible way, and it can be argued as perspective.

    Why not a photo from an airplane or even a hot air balloon? It is easy to show incontrovertible proof.

    And it’s (almost) impossible to convince those with deep seated beliefs in absolute nonsense of the truth of the matter.

  17. WhiteHatLurker says

    The video looks cool. The lake bit anyway. The second part on criminal conspiracy cults less so. That would be depressing I suspect.

  18. beholder says

    You want a Flat Earther diagnosis? I’ll put on that hat and give it a shot:

    The framing is deceptive. The taller mountain is farther away and already looks smaller on the True Earth. On a globie ball the mountains would be tilted away from you. Does that look like a mountain that is tilted away from you? No. If you zoom in real close you can see that the picture was constructed by a computer and we all know the people in charge of tech are trying to fool us into thinking the Earth is a globie fucking impossibility to make us stray away from the teachings of the Bible.

  20. Pierce R. Butler says

    Oops @ my # 19 – a premature posting. The remainder:

    Everybody knows that Portland, Oregon, was utterly destroyed by Communist Democrat rioting years ago, and nothing remains of it but a smoking crater!

  21. Reginald Selkirk says

    Mt. St. Helens only looks taller because light rays are bent by Bigfoot and UFOs.

  22. bravus says

    An extremely common issue with flerf arguments and claims that I don’t think has been mentioned in the discussion here is a failure to understand scale. They seem to assume the radius of Earth is a few dozen or a few hundred miles, not thousands. This then means that the fact that a large enough sphere (all right, oblate spheroid for the pedants) can be approximated as a plan at the scale of our everyday life experience is not available to them.

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