Its just as silly as phantom time and covers almost exactly the same period. The motive is possibly racist which makes it more sinister.
I have to admit - Expanding Earth is hard to debunk!
I think because like Flat Earth many of the observations and elements therein are accurate - they just get the overall picture wrong.
Like stealing the ball with 4 sec left running down the court no defense in sight for the winning layup and missing - comically bouncing off the backboard.
Alas, I believe most crackpots mean well, they just aren’t very good at the sport
It doesn’t really matter if the earth is flat or not, for them it’s about being part of a community of people who believe in something that society tells them is wrong. There is no changing minds besides the 1 in a million you hear about and so all the calculations you could do would never work, sadly.
My daughter did the shadow stick experiment when she was 14 (for GCSE astronomy), we have lived in different countries so have observed the differences in constellations for ourselves, and we speak to people around the world anyway.
Likewise, flying in a plane for any distance and seeing the course is identical to if you pulled a string tight against a globe (give or take). I suppose pilots could choose to fly in an arch to keep the secret, but eventually some capitalist has got to spill the beans to cut costs, right?
Also: the southern hemisphere.
The routes planes take make absolutely no sense if the earth was flat. They actually use great circle routes which are the shortest distance on a globe and these routes look curved on a flat projection.
The more interesting phenomenon is that we are able to agree on anything at all, it's not exactly our strongest instinct. Reading through HN, for example, the longest comment chains are a series of disagreements. But we build resources like Wikipedia and science journals, which also use disagreement as an engine for generating a more correct understanding. Its a strange and hopeful aspect of human societies.
It’s fine, and healthy, to disagree on how best to deal with the world as it exists, but if we can’t agree on reality itself, compromise and progress are so much more challenging.
But to help you understand, rewriting the past to sustain power is the type of thing that degenerates into genocide for example.
In the short term it might look innocuous, but if corrupting truth and suspend basic moral and ethic values on something as basic as History, what other basic human values are you willing to suspend because you don't like how something feels?
This is the breeding ground for racial supremacists, ethnophobia, etc. Terrible stuff.
And you don't need to go into the past to see the consequences, Ukraine is fighting for their existence because a group of people in Russia don't want to acknowledge that a ethnic group they deem inferior can have better chances at thriving than them, to the point of denying Ukrainians existence all together.
But they belong to a bigger trend which questions the value of experts and institutional knowledge. This could either send us into a dark age, or challenge a better class of experts and institutional knowledge. My money is on the latter. Few things improve without some kind of challenge.
Additionally, they've redefined that a pandemic is (removing severity from the definition), additionally it's expanding way from its traditional geopolitical framework and also what were recommendations are now becoming legally binding mandates that supersede sovereignty.
So, yes, people are overreacting but the WHO and people who suppressed truthful but contrarian claims during the pandemic, share some of the blame.
Over a million Americans died, but OK, that's not a severe problem...
2009 pandemic H1N1 was not severe, and was called a pandemic.
What jurisdiction and enforcement mechanism?
Spread flat earth theories, get influencers to question if sunscreen is actually harmful, etc. Spread enough contradictory information so that gradually, people don't have any idea what to believe, and then they become susceptible to political misinformation, or just become completely politically disengaged.
It is not a sign of a healthy society at all, it is a disease.
The context was weird, the person pushing it was very passionate about the subject, and since I certainly don't know all that much about Chinese history from the period, I just smiled and nodded. Apparently this is a bigger thing?
> In September 2020, major Russian politician and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Glazyev publicly proposed Fomenko's New Chronology as a "reliable support for the formation of modern ideology that consolidates Russian society"
And related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartarian_Empire
I mean it's a nationalist ideology - any connection with reality is coincidental.
its amazing, and one of the most thorough and clever conspiracy theories and it has no lack of scope and ambition. Jesus was made up based on a 12th century Byzantine Emperor is almost as good as Suleiman being Solomon, and lots of otherwise reasonable seem very ready to believe conspiracy theories about Jesus (Dan Brown made a lot of money out of people who thought the Da Vinci Code theories were plausible).
Kasparov was a proponent!
It’s only 1729! Let’s goo, I mean:
Come on ye lads!
This feels more plausible if you've only ever encountered pigeons and at some distance. If you've owned a parrot or some chickens, it is very apparent that this is not a spy camera. In fact the word I'd use for chickens is "saurian". They're clearly just lizards with feathers, if I didn't know their evolutionary story it would still scream at me when I see one laying on a rock in the sun that this is a lizard.
If you actually read the article, you'd be directing your vitriol at the Nanjing Daily and "The Paper, a media outlet affiliated with the Shanghai government."
https://www.perkins.org/qa-a-factual-look-at-helen-kellers-a...
I was fairly put off by this, so I pressed her to explain. After much back and forth, she finally got down to what had convinced her of this: "Helen Keller flew a plane. Clearly she was a fraud"
Oh wow, Helen Keller once flew a plane? You definitely cannot fly a plane while blind and deaf, at least not ethically and safely! That's so weird, whether it's true or false, better look it up!
In fact, Helen Keller at one point, for activism, was brought up in an airplane in the second seat, handed the controls, and allowed to "Fly" for a while. By this metric, I have also flown a plane. It was a PR stunt.
But importantly, this one odd fact, presented purposely stupidly, was all it took to seed doubt of a known person.
All of social media is someone taking a singular fact, pulling it out of context, and framing it to make a huge narrative unsupported by the basic facts of the original story, spoon fed to morons who will then adopt the full narrative rather than just taking this new information as new information to investigate and update your understanding with.
I don't know why people are so bad at spotting the "Wait, but you didn't dig deeper?" problem with all this shitty content though. It's normal on TikTok to just kind of say words and people believe them for some reason.