1. The Earth is accelerating upward at a constant 9.8 m/s²
This claim was made by The Flat Earth Society (I haven't found a source for this). Flerfs get very angry about this explanation and typically say things like "The Flat Earth Society is controlled opposition". I suppose this means that they think that the FES is trying to deliberately make flat earth look ridiculous, as if it needs help.
A typical criticism of this claim by debunkers is, if this were true, Earth would have long ago exceeded the speed of light, but this is mistaken - length contraction and time dilation would prevent an constantly accelerating body from reaching c.
2. Electromagnetism
This usually involves a large amount of handwaving and word salad, and still fails to explain why electromagnetism both attracts and repels, but gravity only attracts, and why a Faraday cage can block EM but not gravity. But flerfs don't deny gravity because they want flying cars, they deny it because gravity tends to make planetary-sized objects roughly spherical, explains why water isn't flung into space like a spinning wet tennis ball, and why the atmosphere doesn't need a dome to keep it contained. So if EM is why we aren't floating, why wouldn't it also make big masses spherical and keep water and air on them?
3. "Density and Buoyancy"
Flerfs will repeatedly mock gravity, saying that if it was real, it would cause objects to "stick" to Earth, but and post photos of oranges in water, or metal floating in liquid mercury.
They ignore that buoyancy requires gravity. Repeat these experiments in zero-gravity, and buoyancy vanishes. And one doesn't need to go into orbit or even an airplane simulating weightlessness. Just dropping something off a building will suffice. It's probably safer to try that with the two oranges than an anvil and mercury
A flerf on Facebook offered to share a video, "And whoever want a flat earth documentary i will share. We dont share it openly on YouTube is because it get deleted due to the monopoly of nasa as they dont want ppl to know truth."
So I asked, "is it better in some way then the FE videos that are available on YouTube?" and he replied "it made me a flat earther. I used to moke them. Sending you in messenger" - note, he never sent it to me. I neglected to ask him if he used to mock FE videos, make them, or smoke them.
Well that didn't answer my question, so I tried to clarify and asked him for ".. what other FE videos, et al, you previously saw but were not convinced by and what about this one you found more persuasive. His response, "this one you cannot find by search. Its a private link."
So I asked him if it was being unsearchable that made it persuasive, and he said "the facts in make it convincing". When I asked him what facts those were, he said "you should just watch it and you’ll know. I dont wanna give spoilers" which in flerf means "I don't want to defend this steaming load, I just want to increase the view count"
But he posted a screenshot somewhere else in this very long comment thread. This group rejects links in posts, I also couldn't post videos by They Might Be Giants there.
Well let's see how hard it is to find. I typed the title into the YouTube search bar, and there it was, the first result.
So let's get down to it, here's the video if that was too hard to do yourself. And remember, is BIG secret!
It opens with a clip from a Hibbeler productions video, sounds like Eric Dubay/Dubaz droning that "it is flat as far as we can tell" motionless, too. Is this Level or a different Hibblefest? He cherry-picks photos that don't show the curve, ignoring those that do. He also repeats the chestnut about the horizon rising to eye level, only this time it's the eye of the camera. No, that's just where you're looking or pointing the camera.
A different voice says that everything from NASA is fake. They like to harp on NASA, ignoring that we have known the Earth is a sphere for millennia before NASA was founded in 1958. The voice asks that NASA point the Hubble telescope at Earth, ignoring other probes that were designed to do just that, Complains that the 2002 Blue Marble has the same clouds more than once, something NASA does not attempt to hide. This is what flerfs do, this one image is photoshopped, therefore everything is.
This is all standard flerf propaganda, nothing new hear, I'm going to move faster. The crock about "eight inches per mile squared". "Longest bridge in the world" A clip from "Men in Black". Horizon is flat. Experiments (unnamed) show no rotation
You can't see Japan from California because the air is too thick. The endlessly repeated dramatic music is getting to me, enough kettle drums, I'm muting and just going to look at the subtitles from now on.
Bill Nye on watching a boat disappear over the horizon. Claim that this is due to "perspective" "Bringing back" a boat that hasn't gone over the horizon yet.
Flerfs sweem to watch much more Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson than any other sector of the viewing public, and in the next clip, sound-bites from Neil. Flerfs love to quote him saying the Earth is wider at the Equator and then show an image from space, ignoring that the widening is very small. It's 12,756 km at the Equator and 12,725 at the poles, but flerfs have stopped listening by now, because numbers are involved. The clip even quotes Neil saying "slightly". Same derp about "pear shaped".
A flerf saying "we don't know shee-it". Well yeah, they don't. A video of a camera attempting to auto-focus on a planet or star. "How the fuck did you figure out ..." I call this phenomenon "flerfsonal incredulity"
Stars should do "strange motions" but move in circles. Someone ranting about a frozen moon whose name he can't remember.
"Local sun". "Do you really think the sun is going down?" Salt flats
Chicago seen from "across the Great Lakes" (they couldn't be bothered to look at a map and see which one Chicago is on?) ignoring how the bottom is hidden by the curve of the Earth.
Clip from TV news saying it's a mirage, their intelligent response is a big red button labeled "BULLSHIT". Great refutation, as always.
Back to the repeated clouds in photos of the Earth. And someone saw "sex" in the clouds. And the continents are different sizes! Tens of thousands of satellites, animation that makes them look much larger than they are, just like Manhattan is completely covered in Starbucks, so much so that they have apparently merged.
There are no close-ups of Earth (and I suppose they want to see the whole thing at once, too) or upside-down buildings in Australia.
OK, 18 minutes into an hour and 6 minutes, I give up, this is the same old same old.
Someone at a bar last night asked me what flat earthers think the Earth looks like. It took me a while to find examples, so I am collecting them here for the next time. I also hope no one who overheard the conversation thought we were serious.
Let's start with these two. Here's one without a dome, and one with. They usually have a dome over the pizza, because they both believe that if there was no dome, the vacuum of space would suck all the air away, and also that there's no space, there's just the "upper waters" above the dome. It's hard to tell if this is a disagreement ('It is difficult with these evil folk to know when they are in league, and when they are cheating one another.') or cognitive dissonance. Can you have that without cognition?
Those images didn't line up, but I don't care. Now here are two from the 19th century. This one by Orlando Ferguson in 1893 is from the Wikipedia entry on Flat Earth.
They may claim that the logo of The United Nations is a flat-earth map, when it's just a polar projection
Now there are some versions with more seas and land. There's the supposed map found in a temple in Japan. Click on the link for more information about this hoax (TODO mention some of it here)
There are a few more recent versions showing concentric rings. Sometimes the features are given names and there may be extra suns and moons shown. The first image below is of course constantly circulated by flat-earthers but comes from DeviantArt, where the creator (not a flerf) wrote that he based it on the second (probably by one). Here's a link to that. Nothing is known about who drew the other ones, but they don't look like the one supposedly found in Japan.
Flerfs will sometimes say that Admiral Byrd reported that when he got to the South Pole, he saw "an area as big as the United States, that’s never been seen by a human being. And that’s beyond the pole, on the other side of the south pole" but that's just the other side of Antarctica, the area of the outer rings of these maps are many times larger than the area of the USA.
TODO Mention the scene in Beyond the Curve, maybe a screenshot with the physical model.
A parody version:
Does each ring have its own dome, or is there just one covering the outermost ring?
And there's a old map (1623), a combination of lands known by exploration, but also showing guesswork, that puts more land near the North Pole. Flerfs will sometimes claim that just like the Antarctica Treaty forbids people from visiting Antarctica (it doesn't) there is also an unspecified reason people can't visit the Arctic
Finally, there's the idea of a very large Earth covered mostly in ice, with puddles, one of which is our Earth. Sometimes it's a large ball, other times it's flat. Where any of this comes from is also unknown. TODO see if it's possible to find out who invented this and write something about domes.
A variation on the huge sphere, but just an ice ring, says (according to Google Translate) "The planet Gaia is bigger than we all think. The topsoil is an area protected with a pom (it probably misread 'Dom', meaning dome) and an ice wall. (please see the area in the North Pole of Gaia in the picture)... See more" but we can't see more as it was posted without a link.
Searching for the German text, I found a post on Telegram where I was able to see the rest (and I was right about Dom) "The sun and moon are located within this 3D created artificial matrix. The Darkness has separated Mother Earth from all other areas of Gaia for over 320,000 years. Since then, we have lived together and separated in this area. We were explicitly separated and isolated from all other areas and their residents. The coming ascension will bring Mother Earth out of this isolation. The protective dome and the ice wall will collapse. Thousands of areas of Gaia will be accessible. A new era will totally change the future of all humanity."
A French version adds some labels and measurements and says (Google Translate, again) "we live on the continent Earth, on the summit of Gaia. Like it or not, the truth will come out. Only a matter of time." and "The great Gaia, With our earth hovering above The continents of great Gaia are fictitious."
And then there's this. It seems to be an attempt to claim that the features on the Moon reflect (poorly) the continents, including some made-up ones. It gets distributed with word-soup like "The moon is a focused electromagnetic phenomenon, called plasma. Cosmic electromagnetic energy comes below from the flat and stationary plane, going above. The inner reflection of this electromagnetic energy on
this field's ceiling, turns it back down, creating a focus spot point in a semi aetherial environment.
At this spot, there is fluorescence of the aether because of the focused cosmic electromagnetic energy. The spot that is created is the moon.(4th state of matter as specified publicly by the american
astrophysical professor Among R Foster in 1965) In this way, the Moon reveals to us the large part of the terrestrial and oceanic surface and with these natural characteristics serves as a natural map of Earth."
I recently found this, which was claimed to be from a higher resolution copy. It's at the bottom of the map, in the part outside the actual map of the continents.
And here is a higher resolution version. The area to the north the supposed Nazi UFO base is called New Schwabenland and has a second swastika on it. There is an actual region of Antarctica the Nazis claimed and gave this name to. The text still isn't clear enough for Google Lens to decode, or maybe the handwriting confuses it, but there seems to be a quote from the Book of Enoch, a diagram of the solar system, and an attempt to explain phases of the Moon.
I found screenshots of what may be an even clearer copy that someone was able to get a OCR/translator to almost understand.
Here's a version I found in a number of Facebook flat-earth groups. Aside from the added circles and arrows (without expiations) it was also cropped to remove the swastikas.
Then there's this one, where it looks like we Jews have defeated the Nazis in the hidden lands, and, I think, conquered both (?) suns. Hold on, there's one moon that reflects the continents, and two more that move around?
Here's a video about the map. The narrator thinks it dates from World War II. Throughout, he blocks out the swastikas, afraid that showing or even naming them will cause YouTube to remove the video.
He also found a mousepad version of the map that someone sells, on which he managed to make out the name "Asgard" on one of the fictitious continents. Asgard also is labeled on some of the other multi-ring maps above.
He also found a higher resolution image of part of the map which has one region named Terra de Vista. It also shows Princess Elizabeth Land and Queen Maud Land, which in reality are in Antarctica.
And he also found an entirely new version. This one is in Portuguese, and as Brazil is marked with its flag, it probably comes from there. It has less places named than the German map, but those that are are legible. I found a copy of that elsewhere. Some of the swastikas have changed location, there's also a black sun, another Nazi symbol near Atlantis. A landmass between South Africa and New Zealand is named Mu, several Zodiac signs appear over concentric circles, I can't read it, but he says that the blurry red label over Russia says "Gog and Magog". At the bottom-right is the Prague astronomical clock, a flat-earth favorite because it predates Copernicus.
This channel also has a number of videos about the Nos Confunden map (in two paragraphs) and the maps showing lands beyond the ice wall (above). I suppose I'll have to eventually watch them ...
Here's a version I've just seen. I don't know how the Moon got larger in this one.
And then there's this, from a YouTube and Instagram channel that goes by the name Nos Confunden ("they confus us" in Spanish according to Google Translate). It is reportedly the work of Claudio Nocelli, the author of "TERRA-INFINITA, Extraterrestrial Worlds and Their Civilizations: The Story told by the Woman Who Was Born in the Lands Behind the Ice Walls" (May 2022, link to Goodreads) where he seems to have based it on Helen Morris and her father William Morris, who got the info from an unnamed "giant". There seems to be something on this channel claiming they, too, are from beyond the "ice wall", or perhaps Helen was born while her father was exploring. I don't know when this is alleged to have taken place, or how they got past the ice wall, or whether it was before or after the penguins began to guard it.
A flat-earther, looking at any of these, will probably insist "that's not what we believe" but when asked what they (singular or flat-earthers in general) will not respond with a map.
Once in a while, these models are even too much for flat-earthers. I found these comments in a private group called firmament trackers in response to one of the multiple-ring maps.
I found this meme in two groups yesterday, by the same poster. I didn't check to see if he posted it in more places. Below is my response.
How to tell someone else has learned all their science from YouTube (even though that if they looked, they would also find videos explaining this there, too.
* They can't predict what the effects of Earth's rotation would be but they repeat "1000 MPH" instead of plugging that into the the formula for centripetal acceleration together with the radius of the Earth.
* They refuse not only to believe other's measurements of curvature, but refuse to try to measure it themselves. They will probably use an incorrect formula for how far an observer can see which does not take into account the height of the observer or observee. They may ignore that they cannot see the bottom of the observee. Or claim that a telescope can "bring it back".
* They use "perspective" as an all-purpose answer without knowing what it means.
* They don't understand aviation
* They don't understand how the distance to the Sun was measured. They certainly haven't tried to do it themselves. When asked how far it is, they will either refuse to commit to anything other than "local". They may show photos of crepuscular rays through clouds or ones that they claim show the Sun lower than clouds.
* They dismiss all photos from space are fake, whether from NASA or another source without explanation. They don't understand photography.
* The proofs have gone over their head, instead of asking for help to understand them (which they don't want, because their minds are already made up) they just say "no proof"
And one more:
* They respond with claims that anyone who disagrees with them is "indoctrinated", insults, meme dumps, laugh emojis, or simply don't respond.
