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Has it come to a point where we can’t rationalize beyond our senses. Is imagination and/or abstract thinking dying because of marketing? How do you explain this?

http://thebiglead.com/2017/03/20/shaq-i ... h-truther/

Maybe I am making the same mistake? I am generalizing about a population based on 2 points of data. Is this our natural tendency?

The opinions of famous people outside their fields are often worthless or just no better than that of a random person.

People erroneously equate fame, which is the twin false god of happiness with consumerism, with "worth listening to," and personal fame often induces Dunning-Kruger or "Emperor has no clothes" effects.

From his height, he should know.

I'm still not convinced it isn't just a cheap way to get attention. Flat earth talk is kindof a fad lately.

@ Dragline - Totally agree, this just means random people believe the Earth is flat. I guess when my friend told me this at work the idea anyone thought that was true kind of blew my mind. Then I spoke with my brother who told me a guy at his work believes cell phone towers are all designed to function as microwave bombs (no idea what this is) to cull the population for a post-human future. I guess I just haven't met enough people who are vocal about these things. Unfortunately, I also sometimes incorrectly make celebrities a point of reference for a general population if am not mindful of the fact that makes no sense...shit.

Now if we had some statistics on large % of the population believing this, that might be worth a conversation.

not THE large % of the population..buh-dun-dun tish

Truthers....

How do these NBA guys that fly constantly explain travelling to to one edge of the "flat" world through known points in one direction and popping up on the other edge of the map? I am calling bullshit. This is some kind of joke to glorify stupidity and perpetuate yet another conspiracy theory. Or at least I hope we are not that stupid. Perhaps Shaq is functionally illiterate and gets his theories from a fake news site through videos.

Tyler9000 wrote:I'm still not convinced it isn't just a cheap way to get attention. Flat earth talk is kindof a fad lately.

I tend to agree. I've seen it several times within the NBA ranks now. Plus Shaq is a showman on top of his athletic abilities.

SustainableHappiness wrote: Then I spoke with my brother who told me a guy at his work believes cell phone towers are all designed to function as microwave bombs (no idea what this is) to cull the population for a post-human future.

I need to learn more about that theory, especially since there aren't any cell towers near where I live.

The conspiracy world is vast and has developed an alt-conspiracy community in response to the moonbat conspiracies. The flat earth thing isn't even that weird. Other popular ones include ... most famous people are reptiles, pedophilia rings aren't for sex but to suck the lifeblood out of young people for transfusions for the rich, and (my fav) most famous idiots like Katy Perry are possessed/controlled by smart/less charismatic people, mostly from the tech arena. Search youtube for videos, although I don't suggest ever searching for anything related to pedophilia.

edit: Here's a video showing Miley Cyrus's reptilian eyes. Note +2 million views. (turn your sound off first) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHjbK1cGyGs&t=116s Look at all of the videos in the righthand column. There's some weird shit out there. Flat earth is kids stuff.

It sounds like Shaq is laying the groundwork for a run for president in 2020.

@ Jennypenny - You just blew my mind. Interesting how deep the conspiracy rabbit-hole is, but I guess that makes sense considering the most deep you get the weirder connections you can make. I've only heard the no-holocaust, no-moon landing, no-9/11 stuff, maybe these ones are too weird to hit the mainstream media, or maybe they just don't make people upset enough?

@jacob--That thread is for the real conspiracy theories. This thread is for the crazy ones.

@SH -- Some are just weird, like the reptile thing. Others are borne out of only a couple of facts that don't seem to fit . There's a big contingent that thinks Sandy Hook either didn't happen or was an inside job of some sort. That started because there were a couple of facts that came to light (like the video of two men in the woods fleeing the scene) that seemed to contradict the official story and then people created an alternative narrative out of them. Same with 9/11. People have now admitted that WTC 7 was brought down (mostly because a group of engineers and architects put pressure on them to stop saying that the building came down because of a simple fire), but admitting that casts doubt on everything else and fuels the alternative theories.

To be fair, it seems acceptable to question the lone gunman theory wrt Kennedy's assassination but not stuff like 9/11. I'm not sure why that is?

Where the reptile thing came from, I have no idea. I can't imagine anyone young enough to hang around youtube remembers V.

I was on a date with a girl in Phoenix and discovered that she thinks the earth is flat. I was able not to burst out laughing at her

She thinks that she is especially smart... She did know that I'd studied engineering and know much more physics than her... the funniest part of the date was when she asked if I could explain string theory to her.... I was already thinking she should study the most basic principles of physics (like gravity), geometry and geography. Relating to geography, while she thought she knew enough about the earth to know it's flat, she remembered Alaska as being an island and not connected to Canada

@C40, exactly what criteria did you use when swiping right on that one? And please tell us how you explained string theory.

This thread is so horrifying, I feel compelled to note that I recently had a conversation with 3 second-graders who laughed at my ignorance in the realm of the composition of the moons of Saturn, and were able to answer my question to them about why they would bounce around on the moon with demonstration of full understanding of the words gravity and mass. Apparently the best hope for the future of America may be young immigrants from Bangladesh and Bosnia who are huge fans of PBS educational programming.

@7W5--Why horrifying? I hope Miley Cyrus is really a reptile. It would be a relief to know that no human would twerk around stage wearing a giant foam finger.

It's so funny because, as I said, it used to be cool to talk about whether Oswald acted alone. It was also seen as kinda harmless to talk about stuff like bigfoot and aliens and the bermuda triangle. I miss when it was just a fun diversion and wasn't taken so seriously. I know a bunch of you will quickly point out that believing in one form of bullshit leads to believing another and that's how we end up with climate deniers, yada yada. I get it, but I still miss the old days. Call me a romantic.

One word comes to mind when I hear that people really believe the earth is flat: gobsmacked. I wish I could fly these ignoramuses to low earth orbit and have them circle the globe repeatedly while staring out the window until this hyper-ignorant belief is purged from their minds. Then I would boot them out the airlock with a parachute to reinforce the lesson regarding gravity, mass, and acceleration.