Flat Earthers who returned to sanity

I don't know if the couple in the first photo are flat-earthers or just t-shirt models, they're not the subject of this post, only the claim on their shirts is.
 
You frequently see things on forums like "once you go flat, you never go back" ...

.. so even one counterexample refutes that.  One often sees responses to these counterexamples (for example, in a comment to this post), that these people were never really flat Earthers, but they never post any evidence other than their having left flat Earth, see the No true Scotsman fallacy.  

To save having to look for the details each time someone claims this never happens, I'm putting them here.  

The first two former flat Earthers (FFEs) appeared on the SciManDan Podcast but they also show up again in the FTFE playlist at the bottom of this article.

The first is Craig Bryan Pennock, Seek Truth Speak Truth (STST)

I had previously written that his name was  Frank DiLeonardi, but Craig corrected me in a Facebook comment.  Now I'm wondering who Frank is and where I got his name and whether he has anything to do with this at all.

And this is Ranty (Flerfspective, this channel isn't available now, I don't know what's going on) who describes himself as a recovering flat Earther.  

Here is a video about a FFE who goes by the name "Johnny Orbital"

Here's an article, Ex-Flat Earthers share the moment they realised the world is actually round, based on a thread at Reddit.

Here's a playlist, Interviews with Ex Flat Earthers, (currently 7 videos, although the last one is numbered 8) by FTFE (Fight The Flat Earth).  In addition to the previously mentioned STST and Ranty, it also has discussions with four more FFEs, Clear Cognition (Adam Doughty), Sean G, Blu, Jose G Gonzalez, and Promethean Kitchen.  Update: since I last looked at this playlist, added several short clips Rachie 00000 (see next paragraph)

YouTuber Rachie 00000 is another former flat-earther.  Here's a sample.  

This is an interview between Will Duffy from The Final Experiment and Amorel Lerner who used to support Eric Dubay on Patreon and got a tattoo of the Gleason map, but later left FE.

In contrast to people who used to really be flat-earthers, Noah Fox Burley (FOXX) was never a flat-earther, but used to pretend to be one.

Here's the Ex-flerfs category at Flerf Wiki.  I suppose I'll have to keep that list in sync with this one.

Why and How I Post Gibberish on Debate Forums

Another post in my series of "I am tired of answering this question and wrote this so I can just paste a link to it. 

The why is, I am mocking something.  Very often I will have taken some @*#$*@ nonsense and transformed it into worse nonsense.  To put it another way, if you say something willfully ignorant, I assume that your native language is gibberish am trying to talk to you so you'll understand.

Now to the how.

The simplest method is just to hit keys at random. 

A method that generates texts that almost look meaningful is to use my phone's predictive text and just accept one of the suggested words or emojis at random.  If a phrase emerges from the randomness it may be because my phone has learned to recognize frequent word-pairs, e.g. personal incredulity.

Sometimes I'll copy the text to which I'm responding, paste it, and mangle the words.  I will sometimes free-associate into song lyrics, pick similar-sounding words, any meaning you think you detect is probably apophenia.

And then there are gibberish generators.  Lorem Ipsum generators. general gibberish generators, scientific nonsense generators.  The disassociated-text command in Emacs or websites that do something similar.(these also take the text I'm mocking as input).  Sometimes, if what I'm satirizing is in a language other than English. I'll see if I can find a nonsense generator in that language, here's a recent French one that I used. 

And for when what I'm replying to made overuse of emojis, a Random Emoji Generator

Some new ones: Jabberwocky produces nonsense that looks like isaþsai ve nnåenesoho ytæetuþn wåheau ebalà and The Cut-Up Machine that re-orders words.

Reactions tend to be

• are you drunk/stoned?  (Maybe, but that's not why)
• are you OK? (I'm possibly in better mental health than the person I'm mocking, but feel free to decide for yourself)
• are you schizophrenic? (No, but see the link for apophenia, the term first appeared in a study of early stages of the disorder)
• the shock/wow reaction emoji (I don't know if you're scared or impressed)
• attempting to interpret the gibberish as meaning something (ok ...)
• religious screeds or quotes from scripture (I'm sure you won't be offended if I apply the same procedure to your latest comment)
• Why bother?  (I enjoy it)