There are only a few hundred genuine flat earthers. They aren't a problem. It's more of a problem to tag anyone raising questions that threaten the status quo as 'like those flat earthers'.
> There are only a few hundred genuine flat earthers.
How true is this? To me this has the same feeling as people dismissing Trump as a joke candidate back in 2016. People dismissing opinions that can't get behind as 'trolling".
I don't doubt some just trolling but I have the sinking feeling that if we could metric it we'd be pretty dismayed at how many are not.
I went looking for genuine flat earthers in the late 90s. There were far more people complaining about flat earthers than there were actual flat earthers. I could count the number of them I found on the fingers of one hand, and they seemed like they were probably mentally ill. Back then I would say they were mainly an urban legend: "did you know that some people still believe the earth is flat!" "in this day and age? How shocking!". Its mainly just an outrage-bait meme.
I'm convinced that almost all flat earthers, even the few "true believers" got their belief through reaction to the mainstream. Its not really a belief about the shape of the earth, its more a belief about how you can't trust the status quo. If everyone just stopped complaining about flat earthers, they'd all be gone within 20 years.
We probably can't agree on a number. But I think it's obvious that they'll never be large enough in modern times to affect anything besides a niche message board in some corner of the Internet.
It sounds like gate-keeping too me; like JRE saying there are only 250 real comics in the world or @LPNH deciding who is Libertarian enough on Twitter.
I daresay even the "debunkers" are profiting off the misinformation. It doesn't need to be debunked anymore. I think the demand for this material is created by mid-low intelligence level people who want to feel smarter than (those who they perceive to be) "believers", of whom nearly all are, for various reasons, trolls.
Just by repeating the words "flat earth" the debunkers are giving it a platform, and thereby profiting off it.
There are a lot of people who basically believe in a conspiracy of stupid people while at the same time believing anyone who believes in a conspiracy is stupid.
It is an amazing trick of modern propaganda. These people are so manipulated they can't even see the completely contradictory double think they are engaged in.
It just always happens to be the "dangerous" ideas are those that they don't believe in lol. How can anyone be so fucking dumb.
Flat earther, conspiracy theory, good/bad faith, etc...simple memes like this are very effective in controlling both dumb and normatively "smart" people with simple rhetoric.
It's an ad hominem attack a lot of times. Calling RFK an anti vaxxer for example. He's much different than a person that flat out refuses all vaccines. But it's very effective to call him that and shut off all engagement with any aspects of his critique.
