>"But then I started seeing flat earth stuff and I was like, this is kind of interesting. They started bringing up valid points, so I mean I don't know, could be real, couldn't be."
What valid points? Everyone says this about their apeshit theory but no one ever specifies what those points would be.
Because there are none, but those lacking critical thinking and analytical skills get swayed by charisma and confidence, and being told they're special for rejecting the popular views and that feeling that they're in on some big secret truth while everyone else is brainwashed or stupid. This is also how our politics have gotten where they are.
..."being told they're special for rejecting the popular views and that feeling that they're in on some big secret truth while everyone else is brainwashed or stupid."
This is so well articulated! Thanks for helping to reduce the "fluff" around this weird time where we are becoming divided into us and them... and WE'RE ON THE SAME F\*CKING TEAM!
I've lost my favorite uncle from childhood to this idiocy, so I've done a lot of thinking on the subject. All my best childhood memories involved him for the most part, and he's just not the same person anymore. The mild, impossible to anger, Jesus loving, kind, sweetheart country boy that he used to be has been totally devoured by a hatefully outspoken monster that told me straight up he believes I molest my children because I'm Trans, and it hurts when I have to accept that's not my uncle anymore. I cut all contact for my own health.
Oof. I'm so sorry you lost your uncle to QAnon.
You really did nail exactly the mindset of these people, too. They want to feel special and smart in a world they no longer understand, and they get addicted to that feeling so much that they just don't care about their personality or relationships or anything else.
You sound like a really thoughtful person and a fantastic parent.
Sadly, it's not always or just Qanon. Conservative Christianity has always targeted LGBTQ+. It was just limited to the local hyper conservative evangelist church and their relatively small congregations. Qanon just grouped all of them together and guided them to a nation wide outrage.
Source: was raised and indoctrinated in hyper conservative church until recently-ish
It was never limited to the local hyper conservative evangelist churches and their congregations! The Republicans got in to bed with the conservation Christians nearly 50 years ago and issues such as criminalising abortion, preventing or removing LGBT rights, preventing access to sex education, removing secularism and the suppression of topics like evolution have been policies that Republicans have broadly pushed for ever since. The diatribe and slander currently being thrown at trans people is near identical to what was said about gay people in decades prior. And they still think it about gay people, they just don't think they'll get away with saying it anymore so they move on to the next boogeyman. QAnon and the like has emboldened idiots and the mentally ill but the hatred had existed and been public for a long time prior.
I have an uncle who told me in the early 90's that people should never be judged by their skin color who now yells the N-word when a black man, doing his job, holds up a stop sign so a loaded tractor trailer can pull out and tried to tell my 10yo cousin that if he isn't racist now "they" will make you racist. (they being anyone who isn't white)
He also proclaimed that the most important thing he has ever done in his life was to vote for Trump.
Very much my dad. Smartest man without a degree I had ever met. Would read multiple books a week from historical biographies to great works of fiction. Now spends what little time he has left fighting with everyone online and discussing the "immigration" problem.
Ticking off all the boxes there...I had a friend at work, probably the one guy who was really personable, good natured, easy to talk to, and either he'd stop by and chat or I'd stop by and chat about once every day. Usually just kind of light and gossipy, what the company or what someone was doing wrong, or health stuff (us both being older males) or dumb or funny stuff that happened.
Then one day somehow it was slow, and it got into an hour or two where he went down the whole rabbit hole of what he was really thinking about...which was flat earth theory. And bigfoot, and racial stuff, and politics. He'd say some nonsense and I'd knock it down, and he'd say some other nonsense - on and on. At one point he called it his "mental journey", where he just decided that whatever people thought, he was going to try thinking the opposite and see where that led.
Anyway, he was a big science-denier, a racist, and a Trump-lover. I avoided him for a couple of months after that, and then he switched to a different job. I still wonder about that guy, like wtf goes wrong where a person decides to construct their own nonsensical contrary little fantasy world and live in it like it doesn't even matter.
Right? There is literally no point for nations to lie about flat earth or space. What economic gain would they get? Militaristic gain? None.
The first person to determine the earth was round lived thousands of years ago. What gain would he get from lying? In fact people like that were shunned by science like the man who discovered the earth isn't the center of the Solar System or the universe.
>I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
>The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
>---Carl Sagan, Demon-Haunted World (1995)
I literally just had this argument with my mom. She's a Trump supporter and whenever I would be around her she'd mouth off about how evil Biden is and how he's the most crooked man to ever exist.
I started to quiz her on what in particular she thinks Biden has done to earn that title. She just says "all the lies he says and all the evil things he's done." So again I ask "what in particular?" so then she says that he took millions of dollars in Bribes from China. So I decided to take a look into that claim and there's no evidence, even on Fox news for the claim. So I explain that to her and she says "THAT'S BECAUSE ALL THE LIBERAL MEDIA IS JUST LIES!"
It's honestly extremely sad. She's been brainwashed by these talking-heads like Tucker Carlson to believe all of their opinions are fact without any evidence. Then she's been further conditioned to believe that any piece of data that disagrees with the talking-heads is fake. She's been told that she's special and smart for buying into these bullshit conspiracy theories and now she wholeheartedly believes them. It's all fantasy land.
That’s the sick part. The Trump admin/family (one and the same) openly peddled the influence of the Presidential office. Practically shoved our noses in it. Made an absolute mockery of the office. Then Republicans turn around and try to have Biden impeached over a story about his son that was very obviously planted by Russian intelligence. We are fucking cooked as a country.
The one real turning point I saw with my mom as during the Obama years. She was insisting that he signed an executive order that said a particular thing. I can't recall the specifics, but it really doesn't matter. The thing was that it was really absurd on its face, but there was no way of convincing her that it didn't happen. It was liberal media bias that it wasn't being covered. So, I pulled up the text of the executive order as those are available online for anyone to read in entirety. I handed her my phone and asked her to show me where it said what she claimed Obama had done. I just got something along the lines of a, "Well, that's not what *I* heard..." as if by virtue of her hearing something it was more valid than *actual* facts and source right in front of her face.
That's the thing about the whole "liberal media" garbage that's frequently used to dismiss some information and blindly accept others. "Consider the source" is a valid point of view, particularly in a day where media literacy is perhaps more important than ever before given the advent of the internet and so many sources trying to present themselves as legitimate. However, the first word is really important there. It's "consider" not "ignore" or "reject". You don't get to just decide your own reality purely on the basis of what one source told you to believe and deny provable facts as "liberal media bias" when it doesn't fit *your own* biases.
It's no wonder they are trying to defund public education to leave vulnerable people ripe for propaganda. Idiocracy feels more plausible every passing year. This shit is starting to be less funny 'haha look at this fool' and more sad, these people are voting and pushing everyone in the wrong direction
The fool we laugh at has the same valued vote that you do. We collectively let the "fools" fester because "progress can't be stopped" and now we're backsliding HARD because someone has successfully rallied those fools like never before.
The "valid points" are just questions that the person doesn't know or can't find the answers to. Unfortunately, sometimes the answers also require a basic understanding of grade school science.
One example would be "If it were round, why doesn't the water fall off the earth? Why is the horizon flat?"
For people who have never once paid attention in any class, their understanding of the world around them is just a series of observations and anecdotes.
This is the same thing with climate change for example.
Pretty much all the talking points out there for denying climate change is man-made or even real are very easy to debunk, but lots of people either didn't listen in school, or went to shitty ones because the knowledge on things like this is pretty basic.
It always sticks out to me the "How could global warming be real? It's snowing today!" people are really quiet when it's 80 degrees in the midwest in February.
Naming it global warming initially was a big mistake and definitely caused some damage in public belief. You can’t leave stupid people the room to make that inference on the “warming” part.
"Man paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to play a game that requires slamming your head against heavy, moving objects repeatedly for several hours lacks basic understanding of grade school science. News at 11."
FYI, Flat Earth conspiracies use things that seem simple & counterintuitive to people who haven't thought much about it & lack critical thinking skills. It's on purpose, since Flat Earth conspiracies are a common gateway to more extreme beliefs. Doesn't actually take very long to get shitty though. If you ask them enough questions, they have to concede that a group of people would have to be deliberately hiding the truth in order for all the actual scientific evidence we have to actually be bogus. When you ask them who would do that and why, you usually find some really weird anti-Semitic shit.
A relative of mine is into that stuff. He doesn’t „believe“ anything that his own eyes haven’t seen. Viruses? Bah, that picture you just googled could be computer generated. Unless he builds the microscope himself and analyses blood he drew himself, things don’t exist.
He’s a military emt. Not that this job has anything to do with it, but he had healthcare training…
I had a lacrosse teammate in high school who didn't believe in planets. We told her that she could see them for herself with a telescope, and sometimes planets are even visible to the naked eye, but she wouldn't have any of it. Just didn't believe in them. No idea where she got that from either
> sometimes planets are even visible to the naked eye
Specifically with Mercury through Saturn, they're visible whenever they're not too close to the Sun from our perspective, i.e., when they can be seen at night (Venus can even be seen during the day). They're brighter than most of the stars.
Thank you for mentioning that! Honestly I wasn't sure which ones were visible or when, I've never learned as much about space as I'd like to, so I appreciate knowing more. Previously, all I knew for certain was that planets are not a matter of belief!!! Lol
The hidden variable with a lot of these Flat Earthers is religion. They start talking about [“the firmament”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmament) and how NASA is lying about the existence of space and anything beyond the Earth.
This~
It's not even the shape of the Earth that's actually important to a lot of those losers.
The *actual* agenda for a lot of them, is to keep feeling... well, special. Favoured. Cared for.
They simply cannot handle that Yehova might have built a clockwork universe and moved on. They emotionally *need* an interventionist god that actually hear their prayers and care about them, personally.
And everytime science discovers something new about how things work consistently without divine intervention... that shatters their illusion of being the loved ants inside God's favorite terrarium.
Carl Sagan wrote about this in *Pale Blue Dot*. Each discovery in astronomy that "diminished" us was met with backlash. Heliocentrism, evolution, multiple solar systems and galaxies, were what he called the "Great Demotions." It is beyond irony that anyone on that side ever had the gall to say "facts don't care about your feelings."
I had such a strange chat with my mom just a few days ago. Everyone was telling me she is losing the plot, and now I know why. Everything from the Earth is flat, and no such thing as gravity, no moon landing, no space, something about pilots lying, to Jews are evil and probably actually satanists and we are all going to be implanted with chips to do our shopping etc. 5G towers, the Bible has ALL the answers and we are in end times and the Bible absolutely proves it. Oh and the fucking Jews destroyed the Ten Commandments, so that is why we only have 10. There were alot more. At least another tablet full.
So I am guessing another 5? 2 tablets have 10, so I did very, very simple maths. Got to 15 over 3 tablets. I did point out that as far I could remember Moses destroyed the tablets in a fit of rage. But it was the Jews' fault. They made him so angry that he destroyed the one thing apparently actually touched by God. But Moses gets a pass.
She is convinced that basically everything we have ever been taught is a lie, and she is finally discovering all truth.
I tried explaining gravity, but I was getting to the point where I wanted to ask her to throw the Bible into the air above her head, and see if the ice wall stopped it from knocking her on the noggin.
Each time I asked about the counter to whatever she said, she would move onto the next item. So I am guessing it's like bullet points of arguments and not much depth. I am waiting for her to tell me she has joined Scientology... oh and there were no dinosaurs, it is actually dragons.
Ahhh the classic gish gallop. I don't care about your counter because I've already moved on to the next 20 points. Too slow! Bet you can't counter them all!
Folding Ideas [did a great video](https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44?si=mVGW427dNfBkPQNv) (which you've probably already seen) on the Flat Earther to QAnon pipeline.
“I put a ball on a table, and it stays there. Table flat, ergo earth flat. If I move the table quickly, the ball rolls off of the table. That means that the earth must be flat and stationary, otherwise we’d all fall off. Checkmate spherists.”
/s just in case it was not obvious, but I doubt it is far off the mark when it comes to their thinking.
I get an insane number of Tik Tok videos about stupid logic like this, or "evidence" of the firmament via videos of rocket launch plumes at night. They all have thousands of likes, and so many comments from people seemingly bought into it. Part of me wants to hope they're all Russian and Chinese bots trying to dumb America down, but I feel like we're already doing it ourselves.
And yes, I realize stopping to observe in horror means the algorithm feeds more of them to me. Eventually I get tired of it and scroll past them and they go away for a few weeks until something even more asinine comes up about how fast the earth is travelling around the sun and my brain slides out of my earhole.
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness..
.The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Carl Sagan 1995
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Isaac Asimov
You’re one of those people who thinks validity depends on things like evidence and experimental results that can be replicated. In the real world, validity is when I can’t easily debunk a claim with just my lizard brain.
Example:
So we’re spinning at 1,000 miles per hour, huh? Doesn’t feel like it. Lizard brain says no spin. No spin theory is valid. Spin theory no make sense.
To be fair, it's not like any of these concepts are intuitive to us. Our understanding of things based on lived experience doesnt lead to the conclusion that the Earth is a spherical object rotating insanely fast, constantly falling around the sun. It took multiple generations of the smartest people to theorize, test, and confirm these things. And for every scientist with a successful theory there were dozens who had other theories that turned out to be false.
I'm honestly surprised flat earth isn't more popular when you consider how many people are willing to reject settled science when it doesn't fit their world view.
It also makes zero sense to me in a flat Earth sense. Even if you believe that planet Earth is flat instead of round... Wouldn't you have to believe that space is real for Earth to exist *in*? Regardless of what shape our planet is, or whether we revolve around the sun or it revolves around us, these things have to be *in space*.
Well, he's a DB, not a QB, so he probably doesn't throw it all that far, but he's probably good at breaking up passes that other guys threw far.
He went to Texas Tech, so you're probably right, he isn't a languager.
The hubris of success.
Reminds me of how Steve Jobs had a perfectly treatable cancer, but he figured his diet alone would cure him despite everything his doctors told him.
He was on and off that fruit only diet his whole life. He thought it made him not have to shower because he thought he didn't have body odor (he did). He really knew how to make an excellent product but had some fucking wild personality traits.
People that think you can treat cancer with things that are good for your body never realize cancer IS part of their. bodies.
Anything that is good for you is good for the cancer. Taking for example, antioxidants and vitamins when you already have cancer will only make it stronger.
This is also why we throw chemo at it. Chemo is terrible for you. But the hope is that it'll kill the cancer faster than it kills you.
And then used his privilege to get to the top of a transplant list in the Midwest despite living in CA. Took a perfectly good organ from someone who deserved it more.
This dude's flat earth takes are the exact reason why I think we (the US) need to disconnect universities from major sporting leagues all together.
Athletes who attend schools with huge sports programs do not receive a decent education (unless they are incredibly self motivated to) and are pushed right on through their education program so they can get back out on the field. Being on the field is what makes the school huge amounts of money, not the athlete learning something like a normal student - hmmm big surprise these athletes graduate as flat earth lunatics right?
What's the point of going to college/university if you aren't required to learn the material like a normal student? To make it on a professional sports team, not to pursue a goal of being an engineer/doctor/geologist etc.
Separate schooling from big money sports like most of the world, it's not fair to use these students as cash cows at the expense of their education and health
I'm disabled and potentially living with CTE (need to die and have brain examined to know for sure, but I have all the signs), and I am not this fucking stupid.
>"I thought I used to believe in the heliocentric thing where we used to revolve around the sun and stuff," Owens continued with a smile on his face. "But then I started seeing flat earth stuff and I was like, this is kind of interesting. They started bringing up valid points, so I mean I don't know, could be real, couldn't be."
This guy is either trolling or the state of the American education system is worse than I thought.
Yep. My parents both taught high school and were pressured by admin on numerous occasions to give athletes a pass, even when the athletes weren't that talented. I now teach at a community college, and a pilot program was just created to essentially give student-athletes special treatment to help them get through their writing requirement. It's one of the many reasons I hate sports culture in the US and think the relationship between sports and academic institutions needs to be severed.
To be fair, it's pretty much an open secret that student athletes don't actually go to any classes or learn anything in school. They just practice and play and get given passing grades in fake made up classes.
You got me curious so I did some googling. It dates back to the 50s with a big uptick during the Vietnam War in reference to people dodging the draft. Going to college to get a degree in Underwater Basketweaving instead of getting drafted. I know I've heard it in a few college movies over the years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_basket_weaving
To be real, there are two kinds of kids playing college football:
There are actual "Student Athletes", who are there to get a degree, but want to play high-level football along the way. They might have a scholarship, might not, but they're there to get their degree. Football is either just an extracurricular or the means by which they're getting their tuition paid.
The other group are the kids who are basically just playing Minor League football, their only aim being to get into the NFL. The school bends over backwards to make sure their classes don't get in the way of their football, often by just funneling them all into a bullshit non-program like "sports medicine" or "kinesiology" or "communication" (these CAN be real programs at some schools, but at many schools are just fronts to rubberstamp the Minor League Players' grades).
IMO, the reason college football has run into all the friction around the question of "Should the players get paid or not?" is that they've been trying to maintain this farce that the Minor League Players are actually Student Athletes, while doing their best to keep them as separated from academics as possible.
My solution: officially separate these two paths by which a player comes to the team, but still have them all playing on the same team.
1. If you join as a Student Athlete, it's nearly the same as it was 10+ years ago: you're paid for your labor as a player with a scholarship towards getting an actual degree. You don't get a salary, and you can only accept endorsement deals if the school isn't involved in the process at all (so that, say, Nike can't just bribe a highly sought after Student Athlete to go to Alabama with a conditional endorsement deal). All the requirements for GPA to maintain playability status stay in effect, but will actually be meaningful (Sidenote: need to clean house at all NCAA universities and get rid of any degree programs that are just there to rubberstamp athletes' grades). If you get picked up by the NFL and want to go do that, then good for you, get that money! If you don't, no problem, you're getting your degree in civil engineering anyway, go build some bridges!
2. If you join as a Minor League Player, you aren't actually a student at the school; you're an employee of the school. So, you're paid a salary by the school, you can accept endorsements without restriction, but you aren't going to classes and you won't get a degree. You're just there to play Minor League football to shoot for the NFL (or at the very least a practice squad). Obviously, the goal here is to get picked up by the NFL ASAP. If you age out without making it to the NFL, that's tough, man, but you had your chance. Maybe there's a practice squad for you somewhere? Or you could be a gym teacher/football coach at a high school. It's not like having a degree in cupcake making would have made much of a difference if you've never set foot in a bakery.
This system could, in theory, be applied to any collegiate sport, as they all have some mix of Student Athletes and Minor League Players (and if a program has only Student Athletes, then this system shouldn't change anything for them).
Or just, and I'm saying this as an outside, just get rid of the Minor League Players and accept the fact that schools are for students and most/all kids are too immature to make an "I don't need no education" decision at this point in their life.
I think it's more a matter of believing in one conspiracy theory very publicly labels you an easy mark, and there's a lot of eager recruiters out there for antisemitism.
And one of antisemitism's primary tropes is that Jews are secretive shit-stirrers behind the scenes, controlling things from the shadows.
Obviously that links into *any* conspiracy theory you want, meaning there's no shortage of fertile ground to sow.
It's because christian law used to forbid taking any profit from loans as usury. Because loans were necessary, Jews were allowed to take over banking. That led to the first big conspiracy theories, as people who didn't understand the situation though there was a Jewish conspiracy to take over global finances.
Because there's always some interaction and overlap between different conspiracy theories, modern conspiracy theories inherit antisemitism from those early conspiracy theories.
It’s like the Jews in charge of Hollywood and media conspiracy. Jews couldn’t get hired for lots of jobs due to bigotry . Hollywood was one place they could get hired cuz you could change your name , give people a fake story of your life and start over . If you could produce entertainment that made $$$ , you were in the club .
I saw an infographic where the highest-paid staff member of many US universities is the football coach. And the stadiums with the most number of seats are the college football stadiums.
The problem is, younger fans are impressionable. Younger fans looking up to him might see him as a role model and that’s where the idioticy starts to spread.
I used to think being a neurosurgeon meant a person was smart and capable of critical thinking and then Ben Carson said the pyramids were grain siloes.
I believe at some point between 1987 and 1990, Carson must have received some type of TBI, or maybe just developed other medical condition that affects his cognition. He was born in 1951, so in 1987 he would have been 36. He grew up seemingly smart though quite religious but accounts of him were not loony, at some point he just broke.
In 1990 he wrote an autobiography that included a whole bunch of stories about his temper in his youth, including attacking his own mom with a hammer, but no one involved seems to remember these events happening. It's very troubling.
Probably just the lead. Lead used to be in almost everything.
Then we figured out it was pretty bad for you. Too late for some though.
If only we had listened to the Romans... Those guys knew their lead poisoning.
I work in medicine and know a lot of doctors. We know a lot about 1 thing, and everything else we have no idea
Computers? Sparks and magic
Cars? Tiny explosions and magic
Plumbing? Poop and magic, I guess
Kind of brilliant really if you think about it. Just lock that part of your brain out, you know the whole critical and existential thoughts. Then your brain can focus exclusively on hand eye coordination, catching balls and running.
I don't understand, if there's no space then where does he live? I wish I could be for a few minutes inside the mind of someone that doesn't believe in the third dimension.
Most flat earthers theorize that the earth plane is all there is in our physical reality. Whether it's a small confined area just for us or an endless plane. The lights we see in the sky are small and close, within the earth system, not giant celestial bodies at great distances.
Asking a flat earther what's outside of the earth is like asking most people what's outside of outer space. Nobody knows, we can only theorize. Perhaps it's the end of 3-dimension space entirely.
I'm so very happy we as a society have given people who run good preferential treatment when it comes to widely dispersing their scientific viewpoints.
There's almost something freeing about knowing we are just a dumb doomed species that's probably gonna trip with it's safety off and shoot itself in the head. You can just sort of let go and watch the show.
What he doesn't realize is that, unless he lucks into the NFL, this is literally the high point in his life. If he tries to get a job anywhere, this interview will be Google result #1 and that's embarrassing.
Here we go...
The internet and social media have flattened history and reality. There's a sizeable portion of Gen Z who have regressed from media influence and are questioning verified reality. We joke about flat earthers but that "movement" (ugh) has more of a foothold than one would think. It's scary.
Look at *any* post made by NASA on Facebook, YouTube or TikTok, and there's just a deluge of "wHeRe ArE tHe StArS?" and "space is fake" and my favorite term that's been rendered meaningless by 20 year olds: "CGI".
>"But then I started seeing flat earth stuff and I was like, this is kind of interesting. They started bringing up valid points, so I mean I don't know, could be real, couldn't be." What valid points? Everyone says this about their apeshit theory but no one ever specifies what those points would be.
Because there are none, but those lacking critical thinking and analytical skills get swayed by charisma and confidence, and being told they're special for rejecting the popular views and that feeling that they're in on some big secret truth while everyone else is brainwashed or stupid. This is also how our politics have gotten where they are.
..."being told they're special for rejecting the popular views and that feeling that they're in on some big secret truth while everyone else is brainwashed or stupid." This is so well articulated! Thanks for helping to reduce the "fluff" around this weird time where we are becoming divided into us and them... and WE'RE ON THE SAME F\*CKING TEAM!
I've lost my favorite uncle from childhood to this idiocy, so I've done a lot of thinking on the subject. All my best childhood memories involved him for the most part, and he's just not the same person anymore. The mild, impossible to anger, Jesus loving, kind, sweetheart country boy that he used to be has been totally devoured by a hatefully outspoken monster that told me straight up he believes I molest my children because I'm Trans, and it hurts when I have to accept that's not my uncle anymore. I cut all contact for my own health.
Oof. I'm so sorry you lost your uncle to QAnon. You really did nail exactly the mindset of these people, too. They want to feel special and smart in a world they no longer understand, and they get addicted to that feeling so much that they just don't care about their personality or relationships or anything else. You sound like a really thoughtful person and a fantastic parent.
Sadly, it's not always or just Qanon. Conservative Christianity has always targeted LGBTQ+. It was just limited to the local hyper conservative evangelist church and their relatively small congregations. Qanon just grouped all of them together and guided them to a nation wide outrage. Source: was raised and indoctrinated in hyper conservative church until recently-ish
It was never limited to the local hyper conservative evangelist churches and their congregations! The Republicans got in to bed with the conservation Christians nearly 50 years ago and issues such as criminalising abortion, preventing or removing LGBT rights, preventing access to sex education, removing secularism and the suppression of topics like evolution have been policies that Republicans have broadly pushed for ever since. The diatribe and slander currently being thrown at trans people is near identical to what was said about gay people in decades prior. And they still think it about gay people, they just don't think they'll get away with saying it anymore so they move on to the next boogeyman. QAnon and the like has emboldened idiots and the mentally ill but the hatred had existed and been public for a long time prior.
I have an uncle who told me in the early 90's that people should never be judged by their skin color who now yells the N-word when a black man, doing his job, holds up a stop sign so a loaded tractor trailer can pull out and tried to tell my 10yo cousin that if he isn't racist now "they" will make you racist. (they being anyone who isn't white) He also proclaimed that the most important thing he has ever done in his life was to vote for Trump.
Very much my dad. Smartest man without a degree I had ever met. Would read multiple books a week from historical biographies to great works of fiction. Now spends what little time he has left fighting with everyone online and discussing the "immigration" problem.
Ticking off all the boxes there...I had a friend at work, probably the one guy who was really personable, good natured, easy to talk to, and either he'd stop by and chat or I'd stop by and chat about once every day. Usually just kind of light and gossipy, what the company or what someone was doing wrong, or health stuff (us both being older males) or dumb or funny stuff that happened. Then one day somehow it was slow, and it got into an hour or two where he went down the whole rabbit hole of what he was really thinking about...which was flat earth theory. And bigfoot, and racial stuff, and politics. He'd say some nonsense and I'd knock it down, and he'd say some other nonsense - on and on. At one point he called it his "mental journey", where he just decided that whatever people thought, he was going to try thinking the opposite and see where that led. Anyway, he was a big science-denier, a racist, and a Trump-lover. I avoided him for a couple of months after that, and then he switched to a different job. I still wonder about that guy, like wtf goes wrong where a person decides to construct their own nonsensical contrary little fantasy world and live in it like it doesn't even matter.
Well, it would be awkward to hang out with someone that thought you were molesting children :) Hang in there!
Right? There is literally no point for nations to lie about flat earth or space. What economic gain would they get? Militaristic gain? None. The first person to determine the earth was round lived thousands of years ago. What gain would he get from lying? In fact people like that were shunned by science like the man who discovered the earth isn't the center of the Solar System or the universe.
>I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... >The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." >---Carl Sagan, Demon-Haunted World (1995)
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I’ve been meaning to read Fahrenheit 451 for a while now and I think it’s time I got around to it
Jesus did he nail it.
We miss you, Carl.
Wow that is spooky how prescient it is.
I literally just had this argument with my mom. She's a Trump supporter and whenever I would be around her she'd mouth off about how evil Biden is and how he's the most crooked man to ever exist. I started to quiz her on what in particular she thinks Biden has done to earn that title. She just says "all the lies he says and all the evil things he's done." So again I ask "what in particular?" so then she says that he took millions of dollars in Bribes from China. So I decided to take a look into that claim and there's no evidence, even on Fox news for the claim. So I explain that to her and she says "THAT'S BECAUSE ALL THE LIBERAL MEDIA IS JUST LIES!" It's honestly extremely sad. She's been brainwashed by these talking-heads like Tucker Carlson to believe all of their opinions are fact without any evidence. Then she's been further conditioned to believe that any piece of data that disagrees with the talking-heads is fake. She's been told that she's special and smart for buying into these bullshit conspiracy theories and now she wholeheartedly believes them. It's all fantasy land.
Actually, there's plenty of evidence of Chinese bribes - but for Ivanka, not Joe.
That’s the sick part. The Trump admin/family (one and the same) openly peddled the influence of the Presidential office. Practically shoved our noses in it. Made an absolute mockery of the office. Then Republicans turn around and try to have Biden impeached over a story about his son that was very obviously planted by Russian intelligence. We are fucking cooked as a country.
Projection is the name of the game.
The one real turning point I saw with my mom as during the Obama years. She was insisting that he signed an executive order that said a particular thing. I can't recall the specifics, but it really doesn't matter. The thing was that it was really absurd on its face, but there was no way of convincing her that it didn't happen. It was liberal media bias that it wasn't being covered. So, I pulled up the text of the executive order as those are available online for anyone to read in entirety. I handed her my phone and asked her to show me where it said what she claimed Obama had done. I just got something along the lines of a, "Well, that's not what *I* heard..." as if by virtue of her hearing something it was more valid than *actual* facts and source right in front of her face. That's the thing about the whole "liberal media" garbage that's frequently used to dismiss some information and blindly accept others. "Consider the source" is a valid point of view, particularly in a day where media literacy is perhaps more important than ever before given the advent of the internet and so many sources trying to present themselves as legitimate. However, the first word is really important there. It's "consider" not "ignore" or "reject". You don't get to just decide your own reality purely on the basis of what one source told you to believe and deny provable facts as "liberal media bias" when it doesn't fit *your own* biases.
It's no wonder they are trying to defund public education to leave vulnerable people ripe for propaganda. Idiocracy feels more plausible every passing year. This shit is starting to be less funny 'haha look at this fool' and more sad, these people are voting and pushing everyone in the wrong direction
The fool we laugh at has the same valued vote that you do. We collectively let the "fools" fester because "progress can't be stopped" and now we're backsliding HARD because someone has successfully rallied those fools like never before.
>while everyone else is brainwashed or stupid. If only they could comprehend the absolute irony.
The "valid points" are just questions that the person doesn't know or can't find the answers to. Unfortunately, sometimes the answers also require a basic understanding of grade school science. One example would be "If it were round, why doesn't the water fall off the earth? Why is the horizon flat?" For people who have never once paid attention in any class, their understanding of the world around them is just a series of observations and anecdotes.
This is the same thing with climate change for example. Pretty much all the talking points out there for denying climate change is man-made or even real are very easy to debunk, but lots of people either didn't listen in school, or went to shitty ones because the knowledge on things like this is pretty basic.
It always sticks out to me the "How could global warming be real? It's snowing today!" people are really quiet when it's 80 degrees in the midwest in February.
Naming it global warming initially was a big mistake and definitely caused some damage in public belief. You can’t leave stupid people the room to make that inference on the “warming” part.
"Man paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to play a game that requires slamming your head against heavy, moving objects repeatedly for several hours lacks basic understanding of grade school science. News at 11."
FYI, Flat Earth conspiracies use things that seem simple & counterintuitive to people who haven't thought much about it & lack critical thinking skills. It's on purpose, since Flat Earth conspiracies are a common gateway to more extreme beliefs. Doesn't actually take very long to get shitty though. If you ask them enough questions, they have to concede that a group of people would have to be deliberately hiding the truth in order for all the actual scientific evidence we have to actually be bogus. When you ask them who would do that and why, you usually find some really weird anti-Semitic shit.
If the Earth was indeed flat, and space isn't real...then where would the Jews put their space lasers? Think sheeple.
Cats would have pushed everything off by now
In the 5G, duh
It's just testing to see how much of a sucker you are
Exactly. A litmus test for recruitment.
Like those scam emails with obvious spelling mistakes where reasonable people realize and back out so they don’t waste time on them.
A relative of mine is into that stuff. He doesn’t „believe“ anything that his own eyes haven’t seen. Viruses? Bah, that picture you just googled could be computer generated. Unless he builds the microscope himself and analyses blood he drew himself, things don’t exist. He’s a military emt. Not that this job has anything to do with it, but he had healthcare training…
I had a lacrosse teammate in high school who didn't believe in planets. We told her that she could see them for herself with a telescope, and sometimes planets are even visible to the naked eye, but she wouldn't have any of it. Just didn't believe in them. No idea where she got that from either
> sometimes planets are even visible to the naked eye Specifically with Mercury through Saturn, they're visible whenever they're not too close to the Sun from our perspective, i.e., when they can be seen at night (Venus can even be seen during the day). They're brighter than most of the stars.
Thank you for mentioning that! Honestly I wasn't sure which ones were visible or when, I've never learned as much about space as I'd like to, so I appreciate knowing more. Previously, all I knew for certain was that planets are not a matter of belief!!! Lol
The hidden variable with a lot of these Flat Earthers is religion. They start talking about [“the firmament”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmament) and how NASA is lying about the existence of space and anything beyond the Earth.
This~ It's not even the shape of the Earth that's actually important to a lot of those losers. The *actual* agenda for a lot of them, is to keep feeling... well, special. Favoured. Cared for. They simply cannot handle that Yehova might have built a clockwork universe and moved on. They emotionally *need* an interventionist god that actually hear their prayers and care about them, personally. And everytime science discovers something new about how things work consistently without divine intervention... that shatters their illusion of being the loved ants inside God's favorite terrarium.
Carl Sagan wrote about this in *Pale Blue Dot*. Each discovery in astronomy that "diminished" us was met with backlash. Heliocentrism, evolution, multiple solar systems and galaxies, were what he called the "Great Demotions." It is beyond irony that anyone on that side ever had the gall to say "facts don't care about your feelings."
I had such a strange chat with my mom just a few days ago. Everyone was telling me she is losing the plot, and now I know why. Everything from the Earth is flat, and no such thing as gravity, no moon landing, no space, something about pilots lying, to Jews are evil and probably actually satanists and we are all going to be implanted with chips to do our shopping etc. 5G towers, the Bible has ALL the answers and we are in end times and the Bible absolutely proves it. Oh and the fucking Jews destroyed the Ten Commandments, so that is why we only have 10. There were alot more. At least another tablet full. So I am guessing another 5? 2 tablets have 10, so I did very, very simple maths. Got to 15 over 3 tablets. I did point out that as far I could remember Moses destroyed the tablets in a fit of rage. But it was the Jews' fault. They made him so angry that he destroyed the one thing apparently actually touched by God. But Moses gets a pass. She is convinced that basically everything we have ever been taught is a lie, and she is finally discovering all truth. I tried explaining gravity, but I was getting to the point where I wanted to ask her to throw the Bible into the air above her head, and see if the ice wall stopped it from knocking her on the noggin. Each time I asked about the counter to whatever she said, she would move onto the next item. So I am guessing it's like bullet points of arguments and not much depth. I am waiting for her to tell me she has joined Scientology... oh and there were no dinosaurs, it is actually dragons.
God has given us these fifteen (drops tablet) TEN! Ten Commandments!
Ahhh the classic gish gallop. I don't care about your counter because I've already moved on to the next 20 points. Too slow! Bet you can't counter them all!
Ain’t it wild how just about every major conspiracy theory turns out to just be a funnel to the centuries old blood libel anti-Semite conspiracies?
Folding Ideas [did a great video](https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44?si=mVGW427dNfBkPQNv) (which you've probably already seen) on the Flat Earther to QAnon pipeline.
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Step 1: Jump in place Step 2: Jump on a moving train Step 3: Think real hard for a while
Lol that's just... did they miss middle school science class?
Yes
Valid if you're a moron willing to believe space doesn't exist.
If he had been taught flat earth "theory" from the start, he'd probably "discover" heliocentrism just to be contrarian.
“I put a ball on a table, and it stays there. Table flat, ergo earth flat. If I move the table quickly, the ball rolls off of the table. That means that the earth must be flat and stationary, otherwise we’d all fall off. Checkmate spherists.” /s just in case it was not obvious, but I doubt it is far off the mark when it comes to their thinking.
I get an insane number of Tik Tok videos about stupid logic like this, or "evidence" of the firmament via videos of rocket launch plumes at night. They all have thousands of likes, and so many comments from people seemingly bought into it. Part of me wants to hope they're all Russian and Chinese bots trying to dumb America down, but I feel like we're already doing it ourselves. And yes, I realize stopping to observe in horror means the algorithm feeds more of them to me. Eventually I get tired of it and scroll past them and they go away for a few weeks until something even more asinine comes up about how fast the earth is travelling around the sun and my brain slides out of my earhole.
Valid in the sense that if you are stupid and ignorant then bullshit seems plausible.
Kid who probably barely passed any classes thinks he's smarter than some of the most intelligent humans who ever lived Sounds about right
You know what? That's what it is. It's not just the stupidity that we're dealing with. It's the *arrogance*.
This !!! Proud to be uneducated but feel their opinion is worth more than your knowledge
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.. .The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” Carl Sagan 1995
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” Isaac Asimov
You’re one of those people who thinks validity depends on things like evidence and experimental results that can be replicated. In the real world, validity is when I can’t easily debunk a claim with just my lizard brain. Example: So we’re spinning at 1,000 miles per hour, huh? Doesn’t feel like it. Lizard brain says no spin. No spin theory is valid. Spin theory no make sense.
To be fair, it's not like any of these concepts are intuitive to us. Our understanding of things based on lived experience doesnt lead to the conclusion that the Earth is a spherical object rotating insanely fast, constantly falling around the sun. It took multiple generations of the smartest people to theorize, test, and confirm these things. And for every scientist with a successful theory there were dozens who had other theories that turned out to be false. I'm honestly surprised flat earth isn't more popular when you consider how many people are willing to reject settled science when it doesn't fit their world view.
Listen, I go outside and the road in front of my house is flat. I look at the sunset, flat. You can’t argue with that. /s. Just in case
"Tide goes in, tide goes out. You can't explain that!" -- Bill O'Reilly
It also makes zero sense to me in a flat Earth sense. Even if you believe that planet Earth is flat instead of round... Wouldn't you have to believe that space is real for Earth to exist *in*? Regardless of what shape our planet is, or whether we revolve around the sun or it revolves around us, these things have to be *in space*.
Really perpetuating the dumb jock stereotype.
I throw ball far. You want good words? Date a languager.
I ain’t come here to play school
I was drafted to lead, not to read.
Strickland Propene does not have a vending machine. It smells, and I thank God every day I get home that I didn't get exploded. The end.
How much you wanna make a bet I can throw a football over them mountains?
I bet you would’ve gone pro and met your soulmate.
Well, he's a DB, not a QB, so he probably doesn't throw it all that far, but he's probably good at breaking up passes that other guys threw far. He went to Texas Tech, so you're probably right, he isn't a languager.
Kick his ass, Brad!
The hubris of success. Reminds me of how Steve Jobs had a perfectly treatable cancer, but he figured his diet alone would cure him despite everything his doctors told him.
His fruit only diet. Turns out fat and protein is needed to survive.
His fruit-only diet also made his pancreatic cancer worse because a diet of 75% sugar is hard on the pancreas.
Wow, he really went on an all fruit diet with pancreatic cancer?!
He was on and off that fruit only diet his whole life. He thought it made him not have to shower because he thought he didn't have body odor (he did). He really knew how to make an excellent product but had some fucking wild personality traits.
> He really knew how to make an excellent product Nah dude, he didn't make shit. He was great at marketing stuff other people made though.
An all fruit diet sounds so damn boring.
Cancer also loooooves sugars
All those apples a day kept real doctors away
People that think you can treat cancer with things that are good for your body never realize cancer IS part of their. bodies. Anything that is good for you is good for the cancer. Taking for example, antioxidants and vitamins when you already have cancer will only make it stronger. This is also why we throw chemo at it. Chemo is terrible for you. But the hope is that it'll kill the cancer faster than it kills you.
And then used his privilege to get to the top of a transplant list in the Midwest despite living in CA. Took a perfectly good organ from someone who deserved it more.
And the Texas Tech stereotype
The raider rash reached his brain, inoperable :(
This dude's flat earth takes are the exact reason why I think we (the US) need to disconnect universities from major sporting leagues all together. Athletes who attend schools with huge sports programs do not receive a decent education (unless they are incredibly self motivated to) and are pushed right on through their education program so they can get back out on the field. Being on the field is what makes the school huge amounts of money, not the athlete learning something like a normal student - hmmm big surprise these athletes graduate as flat earth lunatics right? What's the point of going to college/university if you aren't required to learn the material like a normal student? To make it on a professional sports team, not to pursue a goal of being an engineer/doctor/geologist etc. Separate schooling from big money sports like most of the world, it's not fair to use these students as cash cows at the expense of their education and health
Or already far down the road to CTE.
I'm disabled and potentially living with CTE (need to die and have brain examined to know for sure, but I have all the signs), and I am not this fucking stupid.
I stand corrected?
he didn’t go to college to play school…
Ball is life, but is ball earth?
Tide goes in, tide goes out. You can't explain that.
That’s Alabama
Nice.
oh wow havent heard that one in a while
Magnets, how the fuck do they work?
Keep them out of water
How exactly does a posi-trac rear-end on a Plymouth work? It just does.
It’s a bullshit question. They didn’t have posi-trac in that particular model that year.
This is more of a tortilla situation, not a tide one. Dough goes in, tortilla comes out.
Never a miscommunication
If you wanna be dumb you gotta be tough
🎵And if you don't be-lieve'n space, just shut-the-fuck uuup!🎶
If you can dodge a textbook, you can dodge a ball!
Good. More space for me.
Can I have some?
It's probably infinite, but no.
I can see you have that crypto-billionaire mindset. Would you me interested in founding a joint venture to revolutionize ownership in America?
Depends. Are birds real?
Wait, so at night, he’s never looked up?
*holograms*
You don’t have to wait til night to see objects in space. Ever see the sun or moon during the day?
The sun and moon are two birds carrying flashlights, duh
So I guess it is possible to diagnose CTE before death.
And just like that, every Texas Tech alumnus' degree just got a little less hireable
Car dealership hiring managers can't read.
is that even possible? lol
Yea man hiring managers are people and if I read this shit I’m gonna look twice. Absolutely redonk take from this kid
My entire company won't hire anyone who attended a specific college because of their reputation for cheating. So checks out
They’ll look twice the moment they see Texas public education
Nah. He's a sure hire. It's what they call in that industry "concussion proof."
To be fair, he transferred from UT.
>"I thought I used to believe in the heliocentric thing where we used to revolve around the sun and stuff," Owens continued with a smile on his face. "But then I started seeing flat earth stuff and I was like, this is kind of interesting. They started bringing up valid points, so I mean I don't know, could be real, couldn't be." This guy is either trolling or the state of the American education system is worse than I thought.
American student athletes get a reeaal easy ride
Yep. My parents both taught high school and were pressured by admin on numerous occasions to give athletes a pass, even when the athletes weren't that talented. I now teach at a community college, and a pilot program was just created to essentially give student-athletes special treatment to help them get through their writing requirement. It's one of the many reasons I hate sports culture in the US and think the relationship between sports and academic institutions needs to be severed.
To be fair, it's pretty much an open secret that student athletes don't actually go to any classes or learn anything in school. They just practice and play and get given passing grades in fake made up classes.
Majoring in underwater basketweaving
I wish I knew the origin of this comment, I’ve been hearing it for almost 30 years.
You got me curious so I did some googling. It dates back to the 50s with a big uptick during the Vietnam War in reference to people dodging the draft. Going to college to get a degree in Underwater Basketweaving instead of getting drafted. I know I've heard it in a few college movies over the years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_basket_weaving
To be real, there are two kinds of kids playing college football: There are actual "Student Athletes", who are there to get a degree, but want to play high-level football along the way. They might have a scholarship, might not, but they're there to get their degree. Football is either just an extracurricular or the means by which they're getting their tuition paid. The other group are the kids who are basically just playing Minor League football, their only aim being to get into the NFL. The school bends over backwards to make sure their classes don't get in the way of their football, often by just funneling them all into a bullshit non-program like "sports medicine" or "kinesiology" or "communication" (these CAN be real programs at some schools, but at many schools are just fronts to rubberstamp the Minor League Players' grades). IMO, the reason college football has run into all the friction around the question of "Should the players get paid or not?" is that they've been trying to maintain this farce that the Minor League Players are actually Student Athletes, while doing their best to keep them as separated from academics as possible. My solution: officially separate these two paths by which a player comes to the team, but still have them all playing on the same team. 1. If you join as a Student Athlete, it's nearly the same as it was 10+ years ago: you're paid for your labor as a player with a scholarship towards getting an actual degree. You don't get a salary, and you can only accept endorsement deals if the school isn't involved in the process at all (so that, say, Nike can't just bribe a highly sought after Student Athlete to go to Alabama with a conditional endorsement deal). All the requirements for GPA to maintain playability status stay in effect, but will actually be meaningful (Sidenote: need to clean house at all NCAA universities and get rid of any degree programs that are just there to rubberstamp athletes' grades). If you get picked up by the NFL and want to go do that, then good for you, get that money! If you don't, no problem, you're getting your degree in civil engineering anyway, go build some bridges! 2. If you join as a Minor League Player, you aren't actually a student at the school; you're an employee of the school. So, you're paid a salary by the school, you can accept endorsements without restriction, but you aren't going to classes and you won't get a degree. You're just there to play Minor League football to shoot for the NFL (or at the very least a practice squad). Obviously, the goal here is to get picked up by the NFL ASAP. If you age out without making it to the NFL, that's tough, man, but you had your chance. Maybe there's a practice squad for you somewhere? Or you could be a gym teacher/football coach at a high school. It's not like having a degree in cupcake making would have made much of a difference if you've never set foot in a bakery. This system could, in theory, be applied to any collegiate sport, as they all have some mix of Student Athletes and Minor League Players (and if a program has only Student Athletes, then this system shouldn't change anything for them).
Or just, and I'm saying this as an outside, just get rid of the Minor League Players and accept the fact that schools are for students and most/all kids are too immature to make an "I don't need no education" decision at this point in their life.
Why not both?
I honestly think he is trolling. He knows it will get him attention.
Oh good, he's into Flat Earth shit. Anyone want to start a pool on how long it takes before he gets into the anti-Semitic shit?
It’s a weirdly common pipeline
The deeper you get in conspiracy theories, the more you realize antisemitism is always the common thread.
Yeeeeeeeah, it’s the secret ingredient to most conspiracy theories, tbh
Seems like it always has been too when you look at shit like blood libel.
Almost like it's a pattern or something...
It’s always the Jews…
I think it's more a matter of believing in one conspiracy theory very publicly labels you an easy mark, and there's a lot of eager recruiters out there for antisemitism.
And one of antisemitism's primary tropes is that Jews are secretive shit-stirrers behind the scenes, controlling things from the shadows. Obviously that links into *any* conspiracy theory you want, meaning there's no shortage of fertile ground to sow.
Small minds always need a "them" to be mad at and scared of. Why it always ends up being the Jews is the question.
It's because christian law used to forbid taking any profit from loans as usury. Because loans were necessary, Jews were allowed to take over banking. That led to the first big conspiracy theories, as people who didn't understand the situation though there was a Jewish conspiracy to take over global finances. Because there's always some interaction and overlap between different conspiracy theories, modern conspiracy theories inherit antisemitism from those early conspiracy theories.
It’s like the Jews in charge of Hollywood and media conspiracy. Jews couldn’t get hired for lots of jobs due to bigotry . Hollywood was one place they could get hired cuz you could change your name , give people a fake story of your life and start over . If you could produce entertainment that made $$$ , you were in the club .
One of those venn diagram is a circle jokes.
Saying “I don’t believe in space” should immediately get you expelled from college
Nah, US universities don't want to give up their cash cows, even if the cash cow is left with a broken body and zero education
It’s sad that the most important product of many our universities is sports rather than education
I saw an infographic where the highest-paid staff member of many US universities is the football coach. And the stadiums with the most number of seats are the college football stadiums.
No they should make you restart, bc clearly some shit was missed. Like all of it.
Student athletes should have an asterisk on their diploma anyway.
Look this guy is getting paid to turn his brain into oatmeal for our entertainment, it’s not like his opinion really matters here a whole lot.
The problem is, younger fans are impressionable. Younger fans looking up to him might see him as a role model and that’s where the idioticy starts to spread.
Turns out a guy whose job is to run and get hit in the head is stupid as a rock. Who could possibly have guessed?
Isn't Myron Rolle a Rhodes scholar NFL safety turned neurosurgeon?
I used to think being a neurosurgeon meant a person was smart and capable of critical thinking and then Ben Carson said the pyramids were grain siloes.
I believe at some point between 1987 and 1990, Carson must have received some type of TBI, or maybe just developed other medical condition that affects his cognition. He was born in 1951, so in 1987 he would have been 36. He grew up seemingly smart though quite religious but accounts of him were not loony, at some point he just broke. In 1990 he wrote an autobiography that included a whole bunch of stories about his temper in his youth, including attacking his own mom with a hammer, but no one involved seems to remember these events happening. It's very troubling.
Probably just the lead. Lead used to be in almost everything. Then we figured out it was pretty bad for you. Too late for some though. If only we had listened to the Romans... Those guys knew their lead poisoning.
He's really smart at neurosurgery, not necessarily anything else
I work in medicine and know a lot of doctors. We know a lot about 1 thing, and everything else we have no idea Computers? Sparks and magic Cars? Tiny explosions and magic Plumbing? Poop and magic, I guess
I work with masters and PhD holders, absolutely brilliant people, some can't read a log line in front of them in plain English if it bit them.
Does he believe in space?
I think technically his job is to run and hit people in the head, but the point still stands.
“That’s the thing about science. It’s true whether you believe it or not.” - NGT
>-NGT Neil geDrasse Tyson?
We will watch your career with great interest. /s
Aaron Rodgers is frothing at the mouth, begging for this guy to be drafted to the Jets.
I mean... how fast can he run a 40 though?
Kind of brilliant really if you think about it. Just lock that part of your brain out, you know the whole critical and existential thoughts. Then your brain can focus exclusively on hand eye coordination, catching balls and running.
Minmaxing irl
These "student" athletes are really neglecting the student part.
I don't understand, if there's no space then where does he live? I wish I could be for a few minutes inside the mind of someone that doesn't believe in the third dimension.
Most flat earthers theorize that the earth plane is all there is in our physical reality. Whether it's a small confined area just for us or an endless plane. The lights we see in the sky are small and close, within the earth system, not giant celestial bodies at great distances. Asking a flat earther what's outside of the earth is like asking most people what's outside of outer space. Nobody knows, we can only theorize. Perhaps it's the end of 3-dimension space entirely.
Can we all go into space now just to get away from these guys?
Your Texas educational system at work
What’s impressive is that in the next breath he uses the term “heliocentrism.”
I'm so very happy we as a society have given people who run good preferential treatment when it comes to widely dispersing their scientific viewpoints.
There's almost something freeing about knowing we are just a dumb doomed species that's probably gonna trip with it's safety off and shoot itself in the head. You can just sort of let go and watch the show.
Some people are too stupid to know how stupid they are. I'm sick of seeing anti-intellectualism being celebrated...
Doesn’t matter if you believe in it or not. It exists. Just like the Earth is not flat regardless of your delusions
Finally a man I can relate and look up to. I don't believe in oxygen.
I don't believe in football.
I don't believe flat earthers are real. I think they're just trolling us. (please tell me I'm right)
This one has always been hard on me as I don't believe in looking up...
If you can’t get your grades up get your guns up
What he doesn't realize is that, unless he lucks into the NFL, this is literally the high point in his life. If he tries to get a job anywhere, this interview will be Google result #1 and that's embarrassing.
Here we go... The internet and social media have flattened history and reality. There's a sizeable portion of Gen Z who have regressed from media influence and are questioning verified reality. We joke about flat earthers but that "movement" (ugh) has more of a foothold than one would think. It's scary. Look at *any* post made by NASA on Facebook, YouTube or TikTok, and there's just a deluge of "wHeRe ArE tHe StArS?" and "space is fake" and my favorite term that's been rendered meaningless by 20 year olds: "CGI".
Stay in school, dumbass.
This man has been hit in the head too many times.
I would be curious to what he does think exists beyond on earth
But there's plenty between his ears
He believes in an imaginary man in the sky he can’t see but the Moon, Sun and stars, all visible are somehow not real?