The End of the World Is Flat

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He studies the speed of the moon across the night sky. (Flat-Earthers believe the moon and sun orbit around Earth's North Pole.) "My research destroys big bang cosmology," he said, according to Physics-Astronomy.org. "It supports the idea that gravity doesn't exist and the only true force in nature is electromagnetism." For instance, what’s the tallest supposed mountain on Earth? Everest. Except it isn’t. The name is a giveaway; it’s clearly a morphing of “never rest”, because if you wanted to go to the biggest mountain you’d literally never rest, because it isn’t actually there. What about all those people who have climbed it, you say? Well, consider all the people who have died supposedly doing so. How do you die climbing something that isn’t there? You can’t. They were obviously killed to protect the conspiracy, whereas those who “survived” were willing to play ball. The story opens with Columbus. The story we were taught at school. Yet towards the end of the novel we start to learn the relevance of these passages within the story. Although this connection between the main story of the novel and the Columbus passages isn’t explicitly made, it is subtly suggested towards the end of the book. For those that still didn’t get it, Edge makes it crystal clear in his afterword! Peter Begley (2006). "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century". Accessed November 6, 2006. Informing: Google and other search engines and Wikipedia are the prime examples. "Never before in the history of the planet have so many people – on their own – had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people", writes Friedman. He states that the growth of search engines is tremendous; for example, Friedman states, Google is "now processing roughly one billion searches per day, up from 150 million just three years ago".

I was going to write, “it’s an enjoyable read,” but it’s not really. This is why I am giving it four stars not five. The novel is a satire on the current culture war around gender, and my fear is that there will be four camps on that issue, only some of whom will get as much out of the book as has undoubtedly been put in.Don’t worry, these hallucinogenic compounds aren’t provided by evil “Big Pharma”; they’re actually secreted by the shape-shifting lizards that rule society. Why do you think lizards are in charge in the first place? They provide the secretions that keep the population in line, believing in things like the Earth is round and buildings exist. The few times people have actually tried to make a tall building like the World Trade Centre, it is destroyed by the government. So I think there was a limiting factor going on and that's why when I first came across the flat earth movement, it was probably still pretty small, pretty unknown. I've been given talks about pseudoscience for the last kind of five, six plus years. And I've mentioned that I came across the flat earth movement and people would always say to me, there's nobody who actually believes that nobody actually, they don't really exist, that people are having fun. So it stayed quite small. And then in 2015 and 2016 a couple of things happened that really ignited a movement. And it was the publishing of two videos on YouTube or two video series on YouTube. Um, one I believe was, uh, Eric Dubay, 200 proofs. The earth is not spending globe. Uh, and the other was Mark Sargent's, uh, uh, 14 videos in his flat earth clues series. I’m going to start by saying this book gave me a sleepless night. I read the first chapter, wasn’t sure, but read the second & after that I couldn’t stop… I finished it at 4am. An opposing viewpoint was found in a 2007 Foreign Policy magazine article in which Professor Pankaj Ghemawat argued that 90% of the world's phone calls, Web traffic, and investments are local, suggesting that Friedman has grossly exaggerated the significance of the trends he describes: "Despite talk of a new, wired world where information, ideas, money, and people can move around the planet faster than ever before, just a fraction of what we consider globalization actually exists." [7] [8]

This is Scientific American’s Science Talk, posted on March 27, 2020. I’m Steve Mirsky. I’m going to let my guest introduce himself in a moment, because he does a better job than I could.

He said, well, sunlight, obviously warms you. He said, yeah, that wasn't a bit undisputed. Uh, he said, Moonlight. He said, if you go out in the night with a thermometer and you put that in shadow and take a temperature reading, and then you move it away from the shadow into the open clearing and then take a temperature reading, the temperature drops. And that's because the Moonlight is cooling the thermometer down. Well, what's actually happening is your first temperature reading is in shadow and therefore in a shaded area. And then to get into Moonlight, you have to move it out of a shaded area and expose it to whatever, whatever other winds and things you have. And that's a, that's the reason for it. Um, and so when, my favorite things about Mark Sargent's theory actually is that like many flat earthers, he was a conspiracy theorist who believed in all sorts of conspiracies beforehand. Friedman believes that to fight the quiet crisis of a flattening world, the US workforce should keep updating its work skills. Making the workforce more adaptable, Friedman argues, will keep it more employable. He also suggests that the government make it easier for people to switch jobs by making retirement benefits and health insurance less dependent on one's employer and by providing insurance that would partly cover a possible drop in income when changing jobs. Friedman also believes there should be more inspiration for youth to become scientists, engineers, and mathematicians because of a decrease in the percentage of those professionals who are American. And it was quite a schism really. And so they had the, the flat earth society at the time, it was largely a forum where they would bring forth their proofs of one version of this theory or another. And I also think there's another schism going on in the movement at the time, which is between one side, which are people who genuinely really believed the world was flat. And the other side, which absolutely did not believe it, but enjoy the intellectual pursuit of arguing a position they need to be false. And so they would find quite esoteric and off the wall proofs that most people wouldn't think of. And so when I first came across it in 2013 there were people waiting into these arguments who believed the world was round but had never thought about it before, but just assumed in a sort quite an arrogant way that they must know better than anybody who's ever thought about it and come to a different conclusion. When you follow this train of logic, it becomes clear that the only feasible conclusion is that Earth is indeed flat. Flatter than anyone has ever expected.

This is a master class of showing how shallow the online world can be! The 'sheeple' following others if it's the latest in thing to do, in fear of being left out and thinking for yourself!! That is, as long as corporations have major supply chain operations in countries other than that corporation's home country, those countries will never engage in armed conflicts. This is because of the economic interdependence between nations that arises when a large corporation (such as Dell) has supply chain operations in multiple global locations and when developing nations (in which supply chain operations commonly take place) are reluctant to give up their newfound wealth. Finally - and this is the group that I really hope reads the book - there are those who are kind of bi-curious with regard to the culture wars. This includes a lot of policy makers. For them, this book should be enough of a warning about the tactics being used to make it a gripping & salutary read. I've got a podcast where I talk to people who have kind of fringe beliefs and instead of having a conversation that a lot of people would have, if they are a skeptic about something and they're talking to a believer where you shout at them and tell them they're wrong and point out all the evidence and tell them, and it gets into quite a volatile discussion sometimes instead of that, I try and have a civil and polite chat to try and explore the gap between us. So I say, I don't believe in this idea of yours, but I'm really interested to figure out why I don't believe it and why you do so let's have a conversation. So I have these kinds of civil discussions and that's kind of how I came across a that the flat earth theory and the idea that there are people walking around today who think the world is flat.There were arguments in there for you that would tell you that that would support the idea of the world is flat. So I think it kind of covered all its bases a little bit. If you came from a fundamentalist Christian perspective, uh, in a biblical literalism the world is 6,000 years old and created in seven days as per the Bible, uh, which a large part of, of flat earth movement is actually crash creationism in a, in another guys. Um, there were creationist arguments in there that would support, uh, the, the, the idea of the world is flat. So it really did pull together different genre of flat earth arguments into one document. And I think that's why it became quite successful because it had a little bit in for anybody who might be, uh, in any way inclined to doubt the veracity of the round earth theory. It all made sense because I thought, why did the government killed JFK? It's because they knew that we couldn't get to the moon. So the moon landing had to be faked because you can't get past the firmament because the world is flat and under a dome. So he said it was like, um, the, uh, the, the flat earth is kind of the Rosetta stone of conspiracy theories to a degree. It makes all the rest of it make sense. But he said there's one thing that no longer makes sense to me because I no longer believe that there's a face on Mars. And I want to meet the guy who came up with that cause I really want to know who's behind him. And I said, yeah, that's cause you no longer believe in Mars. That's cause you believe that the planets and the stars are just projections on the dorm. So you have a different view of the universe depending on what version of a, of the flat earth you, uh, you believe in. What are some of the, I've got a couple of things that I do, but the one in which I talk to people who, uh, who put forward ideas that I disagree with is called be reasonable with the idea being that I'm there to be reasonable to put forward a reasonable face to it. And so, um, I've talked to all manner of people from people who believe the world is flat to people who believe the world is hollow. I wish that's a really interesting interview because that goes in places in, in, in the same way that you might not associate, uh, antisemitic hoaxes with the flat earth belief. The hollow earth belief goes into some of the key risk positions too. And that's well worth the listen. Um, and I've interviewed people who believe they can talk to the dead and, and many of the things like that. But I've also interviewed people who are promoting, uh, the drinking of bleach as a cure for cancer, uh, and people who are putting forward white supremacists beliefs, uh, anti-feminist beliefs and some pretty extreme positions. The third camp consists of those who are defending women’s rights against what they see as a destructive wave of trans ideology, erasing women’s rights to define themselves as adult human females. Those in this camp might enjoy the book, but in a very dark way; it was written about a year ago, & events have moved on such that many would see reality as having skipped beyond parody. They will also envy the situation of the realists in the book, who have a central enemy who is one individual & whose motive is simple & fixable.