Fisking "The Lost History of Flat Earth"

A flerf (flat-earther) posted this video to Official Flat Earth & Globe Discussion.  It's 5 hours (!) long, but I'm listening to it at double-speed.  The channel it's on is called Flat Earth Sun, Moon & Zodiac Clock app and was made by "a guy named Ewaranon" who used to have a channel of his own on YouTube but it's now deleted.

15 seconds of silence because dead air is cool.  Actually better than "Greensleeves" which plays behind the drone of his voice and goes on for a while.  I.  Can't.  Listen.  At.  The.  Pace.  He.  Talks. At, so I'll be listening at double-speed.

Once you are awake it's hard to fall back asleep (but watch this video, maybe you'll get bored).  Cartoon of the snow globe. Blather about satanic scientific priests (pics of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Cox, Stephen Hawking) not being reliable.  Drawing (not to scale) of Solar System.  The barbaric mining of Earth's once-majestic giant trees (pic of a geological formation, so we're going to cover all the crazy here)

If they lied about all of the above how can we trust them about anything?  (Well maybe first prove that they did?)

The first power tool was invented in 1895.  So how were ancient buildings constructed without power tools?  (I am not making this up).  Step wells (cool pics, but what's the problem?  yeah, takes longer using hand tools, but that's all, guy who most certainly could not have created the app he's selling).  Giant canal networks   So I looked up the Erie Canal, that predated 1895, but while I was doing that, he said it was allegedly built in 1825 and then he starts reading from Wikipedia about how the engineers were novices and not trained as civil engineers. (So he's claiming it was built by aliens or ancient humans and no one noticed it was already there when they went to build it?)

Same claim about castles.  Did you know most were built without plumbing or heat?  (do you even have a point?)  And the impossible pyramids, and apparently slavery never happened (scholars now believe that the pyramids were not built by slaves).  And air shafts align with stars.(so?).  And he's got some problem with bastion forts (the geometry is better than he can draw freehand?)  They couldn't see them from above, and we couldn't do this today (he couldn't).  This is as silly as the heliocentric model (oh right, didn't I start watching a flerf video?)

So on to his explanation for all the thing he can't understand.  Ancient civilizations used flat-earth (henceforth FE) to do all this, and our history is only 200 years old.  Does he sound mad?  (yes, why did you even need to ask).  So you have to swallow this load of unsupported assertions to understand FE.  We cannot waste time (which is why this goes on for FIVE HOURS) and he can't tell the truf in a linear fashion.  A lot of history is guesswork (what then would be the right label for this?  Historical dadaism?).  A quote from "a so-called Napoleon" about history being agreed-upon lies.

Oh, good, he's run out of Greensleeves.  Now he's got some chord progression in a loop.

1860 in St. Petersburg.  500,000 people lived there but where are they?  (maybe because photos took a long time to expose then so they either took the photos when the streets were empty or kept people out, to avoid blurs as people moved during the shot?).  A shadow shows it's early morning or late afternoon, and he thinks this means the streets should be full (well it's June 18, that's pretty close to the Summer Solstice, so when is sunrise there today?  3:35 AM and 22:24 PM.  I'm not often one of them, but a lot of people are asleep at those times.  Just this morning I took at taxi home at 5:30 AM, there weren't a lot of people on the streets then.)  Same thing in Moscow.  Edinburgh and Copenhagen in the 1840's.  Dresden, Rio, Toronto, Athens, 1860's.  Then street scenes with people from London and Paris.

The first photo, we are told was in 1822 (well 1826, close enough) and the art of photography uses juxtaposition, comparison and contrast but they're not in these early photos and I think he's trying to say that the contrast in the photos from Russia are that the cities are large enough to hold millions of residents (just an assertion) but only had half a million residents.  Population data shows linear increase since 1764 and many of the building in the photo were older than the photos (you don't say!).  Did the Russians build these buildings for people who didn't live here yet (we don't have any photos between 1764 and 1860, so we have no information as to the capacity of the cities over the span of a century).

Another contrast between the population and the environment. Leap of illogic to the impossibility of the architecture, no evidence of impossibility.  During indoctrination in school we rarely see old photos of cities because when we marinate (did he say that?  sounds like that and auto-caption thinks so, too) on those images and see promotive Victorian people looking tiny in comparison to the buildings we (if we are idiots) have doubts.  Amount and weight of limestone in the Arc de Triomphe.  How did they do it? 

Don't settle for less

How do we do it
How do we do it
Volume! volume!
Turn up the volume! - Tom Waits, "Step Right Up"

Photos of sculptures and the geometric patterns on the arch. And he's back to power tools again.  He doesn't believe people can do things by hand.  More features he couldn't do himself with a 3D printer let alone a chisel.  More contemporary photos from Paris, some other grand structures and some less so as he thinks should be all that exists in a horse-and-cart civilization. A photo of the arch from 40 years after it was build "suggests" that it is much older because he knows how fast limestone weathers.

In late 19th century Moscow people are shown in a photo of "the infamous Red Square".  More blather about how they couldn't have possibly built this, and why are the roads in bad shape if they had technology?   The Crystal Palace of London predates automatic glass manufacture. Why did they spend more money on buildings than on mud-free roads?

OK, I'm going to skip more of the same argument with examples from other parts of the world.  

We're up to Episode III, "Inheritors of Mud and Magnificence".  Nope, I didn't record the previous section titles. OK, they were Volume I, "Buried in Plain Sight", Episode I, "Questioning His-Story", and Episode II, "A Lens into the Past"

2011 earthquake in New Zealand.  Soil liquefaction occurred  (yes, it did).  Other examples.  So his claim is the muddy roads (but no collapsed buildings as happened in his earthquake examples) are the result of similar earthquakes which no one recorded because reasons. Bu he's mot done, there are also windows close to the ground or partially below (why?  to get light into the basement).  He has no idea why someone would install a basement before there were power tools let alone use columns.

He claims there was a global event.  Dickens opened "Bleak House" with a mention of mud in the streets, as if a flood had just ended (as if, if it actually happened why didn't he say so, and if it was suppressed by "them", why did "they" let him print that?).  Photos of soil moving shows the soil or mud had only recently arrived and "they" are hiding the truf.  Back to literature of the time, that is concerned with marriage female chastity and orphans and adoption.  It seems that the orphans weren't actually orphaned, but separated from their mothers (no evidence) because they were born outside marriage.  Lots of photos of orphanages.  Lots of pics of orphans, real information about how they were mistreated, some photos of children working in factories.

And then amusement parks (wait, what was the point of all of that about orphans?) which used to have Infantoriums where premature babies were on display in incubators.  Yeah that was a thing, it seems that they were funding infant care thru admission fees.  But he's suspicious.  Why would people pay to see babies?  Maybe they'd never seen one before.  And how could they have had the tech (glass?  warmth?  what's the problem here?)  Did the US even have a large enough population to produce all those preemies?  And Martin A. Couney who was involved with the Infantoriums seems not to have had a medical degree and a silent film star may have had a child die and/or adopted a baby through one of these amusement parks but it's not in her official biography.

So what was this all about?  Repopulation.  Chastity was justification for stealing children.  The cities looked empty because no one lived there, and thirty years later they were populated by orphans who were sent to live in them.  (I'm really confused, if you had empty cities, why not encourage families to move there instead of taking away children?  And if you had a population shortage, why insist on chastity?  If you can invent chastity out of thin air, do they opposite and convince women to have babies nonstop, married or not)

What does this have to do with FE, he asks, assures us it will make sense.  He's been yammering for an hour, good thing YouTube will play it at 2X.  Once again we don't have much time (only four hours left) and I have stuff to do, too, so I think I'll stop here. and pick it up later with Episode IV.

Update: why not watch some real physics lectures instead?  Here's a series of lectures by Richard Feynman.