One of the oldest questions of philosophy is knowledge. How do we know things? How can we demonstrate true knowledge? Socrates was famous for asking questions until people admitted they had no answer. Plato developed the concept of forms to give structure to the world. Aristotle created the first versions of physics, geology, zoology, and more to understand how the world worked. This is a massive oversimplification, of course, but the challenge people have been facing for literally thousands of years is knowledge versus ignorance.
Despite countless missteps along the way, the result of this process is a deeply nuanced web of theories and methodologies including the scientific method. This means everything is still built on a foundation of assumptions which may be wrong, or at least incorrect in significant aspects. Ideally, everything is open to testing and verification. Good science admits margins of error and areas of uncertainty. The internet seems filled with loudmouths demonstrating exactly the opposite of such rigor.
Grid created in Canva and curves added poorly in Paint3D
This chart is my slapdash attempt at illustrating my point: the red bell curve approximates my categorization of all the stuff masquerading as information, while the inverted blue bell curve approximates the apparent confidence of those spewing that stuff.
Examples:
- THE EARTH IS FLAT!
- ANCIENT ALIENS BUILT THE PYRAMIDS!
- DONALD TRUMP IS GUILTY OF ALL THE THINGS!
- DONALD TRUMP IS INNOCENT OF EVERYTHING!
- PUTIN DID NOTHING WRONG!
- PUTIN IS THE NEW STALIN!
- COVID IS FAKE AND VIRUSES AREN'T REAL!
- COVID IS AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS!
- THE WINNER OF EVERY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IS THE CANDIDATE MOST CLOSELY RELATED TO THE BRITISH ROYAL FAMILY!
- JEWS/CATHOLICS/ILLUMINATI/MASONIC SECRET SOCIETIES RULE THE WORLD!
- THERE ARE ABSOLUTELY NO ELITE SCHEMES TO RULE THE WORLD!
- PEDOPHILES RUN CHILD TRAFFICKING RINGS IN PIZZA SHOP BASEMENTS AND ONLINE FURNITURE WEBSITES!
- JEFFREY EPSTEIN DID NOT KILL HIMSELF! (OK, I sorta-kinda buy this one...)
Maybe this says more about the parts of the internet I explore than it does about the world of news and social media as a whole, but I suspect you can think of many less egregious examples. People prefer to be adamant on matters instead of finding comfort in the unstable uncertainty that I am (paradoxically?) certain surrounds most of what we consider "knowledge." Our facts are only as reliable as the source and our capability to independently verify them. Our personal prejudices and biases skew our perceptions.
I invite you to become more comfortable in that bell curve bubble of uncertainty where you are most free to shift your perception as circumstances change and new information becomes available. People locked into an unsupported belief regarding truth or falsehood have a hard time admitting they could be wrong. As I have written before, I try to keep these lyrics in mind.
Well, I would like to say,
That everything works just one way,
And I'm sorry, but I can't,
'Cause all the answers are not at my command,
So I'll fly with what I know, but I'll step lightly where I land.
—"Something, Somewhere," Invention, by Phil Keaggy, Wes King, and Scott Denté
But, of course, I could be wrong! Am I barking up the wrong tree, harping on and on about something pointless, and generally saying nothing of substance? How much have you really examined your beliefs and the evidence supporting them? Should I just ask a chatbot to write this sort of thing in the future for your votebot to support? Chime in with a comment!
Well, that's certainly one possible response. Turned into a bit of a mess for everyone when it was attempted 230 years ago though. And then the world got Napoleon and massive continent-spanning wars.
I've also seen suggestions that congresscritters be hung from lampposts throughout DC.
I'd rather see them melt into impotent rage when a critical mass of people just refuse to obey.
Would you turn back that clock? Return humanity to monarchical divine right to subjugate humanity as serfs, mere possessions of deified masters? I would not. It is true that change inevitably incurs chaotic discontinuity with order, but when order is the imposition of divinity and subjugation, it is unjust, cruel, and intolerable to good people. Certainly deified overlords would keep that cruelty and injustice that favored them with sybaritic luxury while peasants had no recourse to necessities to heat their hovels beyond heaps of composting dung.
That is because they are not good people. That is why Marie Antionette is excoriated for saying 'Let them eat cake' when people had no bread. That is the cruelty we see being imposed today by a financial uberkorps of banksters that are acting in every jurisdiction to deracinate, dedollarize, and disempower populations, to strip from humanity all they own, take from them their homes, their meat and bread, their very humanity, and reduce us to 'hacked animals' inexorably surveilled by mandated injection of nanotechnological monitors that enable even our thoughts to be imposed on us, our homes to be supplanted by pods, and our diets to be comprised of vermin and chemical swill excreted by deified overlords who own every title, possess every property, and subjugate humanity as property, slaves over which they hold the power of life and death at their whim.
Because the vile overlords seizing power over the world today are not good people, and their legacy will be hell itself.
I will risk, even raise on my shoulders, any Napolean, any rebellion against the coming dehumanization and eradication of good people.
And I will.
I have an example of JT's point:
Violent revolution created the Soviet Union, peaceful resistance in the form of a parallel economy (otherwise known as the black market) ended it. By 1985, it was an open secret that the 2% of privately-owned farmland produced 30% of the food. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that, on average, private farmland was twenty-one times as productive as public farmland.
Simply abandoning tyrannical society and living on the fringes works a lot better to undermine it than active measures, though you will never get a statist to admit that the USSR destroyed itself; capitalism certainly helped, but it wasn't the military-industrial complex (not actually capitalist, but hey, details), it was Pizza Hut.
No, I'm completely serious: Pizza Hut is what brought down the Soviet Union... well, that and a 2600% inflation rate from the well-intentioned disaster called Perestroika.
BTW, this is the exact reason that statists want to mandate participation in their sick little social experiment they call "society." They need people like us, because we're the ones who can actually do stuff, but we don't need them. Of course, they like to flip this narrative on its head; I actually had one of these people tell me "good riddance, we don't need you" when I expressed my desire to simply live and let live...
...and Bill Astore wonders why I have an axe to grind with him.
Perhaps if you refer to my last reply to @jacobtothe above, you'll find us more in agreement than not. However, I am not a fan of abandoning society. I acknowledge that some folks are not able to sort the ongoing transition, and society is not going to manage this transition unscathed, but society is what will and that is what I intend to devote my work to.
There are too many examples of intolerable violent genocidal oppression than can permit pacifistic solutions alone to be potential. You can't sit on the sidelines while Vlad the Impaler rules. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do the right things to transcend centralization, but it does mean we need to be prepared to do all the right things, not just the easily palatable things.
Decentralization of the means of production is the ultimate economic force that will force societal evolution, and revolution will not create that paradigm shift. There will have to be people in a society that can seize those independent means for that evolution to succeed, and that may require defending them against genocide. We won't be able to just ignore psychopaths until we have the means to be secure from force projected by them, and that's the sad fact. There will be all manner of faults and flaws that come to light after the fog of war lifts, and that's what it is.
Violent revolution created the USSR, and violent revolution created republics. I cannot predict the evolution from centralization to decentralization won't be occasioned by violence, and it is silly to try, IMHO.
Abandoning the state's counterfeit society is not abandoning society, it is embracing the aspects that actually work. Gray and black markets, circumventing the lapdog media, and mocking them are tools that bring good results in the long run.
The government will likely respond to such activism through violence, and we may need to defend ourselves, but that does not mean initiation of violence by us will build a better world. Check out @badquakerdotcom's posts and books on sedition, subversion, and sabotage though.
You'll find no greater fan of @badquakerdotcom than I.
I actually did read that, and I am indeed aware of the flip side, i.e. that many societies have become tyrannical slowly and by degree over the course of years or even decades. Call it the ratchet effect, boiling the frog, or even weaponised pacifism, it's all the same Machiavellian trick. We need to weigh our options when choosing how to fight it.
Is that not a false dichotomy?
Is it?
While I am not persuaded entirely by his arguments, Hans-Hermann Hoppe makes the case in Democracy: The God That Failed that the incentives of monarchy and the de facto oligarchy arising in support of de jure absolute rule did not tend to match your despotic caricature. Taxes tended to be lower, wars were less total, and both technology and philosophy objectively did progress. The present depredations by our modern political class suffer from a high time preference imposed in large part by terms of office and the need to pandering toward various voting blocs.
I do not disagree here.
I do disagree here. The same kind of revolutionary methods will likely bring the same kind of repressive despotism. Revolution merely for the sake of revolution perversely seems to reinforces the political class, even if that class is replaced with a new one.
It is a lot less glamorous, but I argue we are better served by undermining the powers-that-should-not-be than we are by trying to overthrow them. After all, why do you think violent revolution is the alternative they portray throughout their educational systems and media productions?
We are not actually in disagreement, believe it or not. Even a cursory examination of my back catalog will reveal that I constantly beat the drum of adoption of nascent technological advances that decentralize the means of production, and predict that eventually we can just ignore wannabe overlords.
However, despite that confidence and the economic fact that centralization cannot compete with decentralization, and that decentralization is a clinal boundary of extraordinary significance, and not just advance of technology that will continue to benefit parasitic overlords, I cannot vouchsafe that this ongoing transcendence should - or can - simply be purely economic. The potential of overlords to undertake violent genocide cannot be discounted. The necessity to counter that violence cannot either.
I do not believe differently from you that violent revolution could not result in our finally gaining benevolent overlords. However, I suspect, and am preceded by many that have predicted that this transition will occur with intolerable violence, and will needs must be met with the will to defend and protect good people. That is not something I reckon will result in a new set of overlords, but will protect the transcendence of centralization and maturation of decentralized means of production, distribution of those means, and the diaspora of humanity across the universe to where illimitable resources are available to develop.
In that interest, then, of blunting the savagery of psychopathic predators that are obviously willing, perhaps demonstrably bent, on genocidal eradication of the folks able to adopt and develop decentralized means of creating the blessings of civilization and rendering overlords obsolete, I am fully willing to fight and die, on that hill.
Me: why do you believe what you believe?
Every internet ideologue: DO. NOT. QUESTION. Bigot!
There is no debate to be had, save with people whose ideological camp is so small (e.g. young Earthers, flat Earthers, anarchists) that they need to engage with people. People with mainstream opinions don't do this ever. Besides, a lot of them are paid shills, otherwise known as propagandists. I'm sure everyone is already familiar with the likes of Brooklyn Dad Defiant and Politics Girl, but I would also add Wales Nematollahi, Scott Heil, and Bill Astore to that list of people who are obviously paid to be unreasonable. Paid by whom, I cannot say, though.
Yes, I have a list. Fight me.
The bandwagon is comfortable, I suppose.
I'm not. But I have started to tune out a lot of propagandist blowhards. I only have so much time and attention to spare.
The first two names I mentioned are fairly prolific, you're lucky to not have run into them when you were still on Twitter. The other three have much smaller platforms, but I have personally interacted with them; Colonel Shit Heel is the guy who got me banned from LinkedIn after I (and several others) called him out for promoting censorship and throwing a temper-tantrum in response to his detractors. I agree, they are not worth engaging with, propagandists are best debunked from a distance.
I was never very active on Twitter even when I had an account I could log into. Aside from following a few personalities I found entertaining, like Michael Malice, I always found the whole ephemeral experience of tweets off-putting.
Wasn’t it seen as weak or feeble minded or something if you were happy to cross along without a strong opinion of things? Apparently it was good character or some nonsense to defend your point to death? Maybe that’s why everyone is right at all costs even when they’re demonstrably and irrefutably wrong? 🤣
No idea. Seems like a lot of foolish pride is going around, and it's apparently a basic human trait. Can't say I'm immune.
Yeh mood. I'm quite well aware that it'll probably be pride that kills me x_x
It might be a pride that kills me. If I ever visit Africa, and I see the lions, my last words will be, here, kitty, kitty!
LoL! Relatable XD
My problem stems from having disproven everything, and now, having nothing to hold onto.
The earth is not a ball, that has been proven. But what shape is it?
It does have a lot of attributes that seem to be flat... but not all of them...
It wouldn't surprise me if we live on the inside of a ball, four time the size they say the globe is.
But, i just do not know.
Of course ancient aliens didn't build the pyramids,
they created human slaves to build the pyramids for them! yeeeeaaaahh.
You forgot the old tunnels under the pizza shop that go to Hitlery's house!
Putin is trying to free the world from crony-capitalism!
And we both went to the moon AND showed the moon landing filmed on a set by Kubrick.
Einstein, Hawkings and Newton are wrong about gravity... but what is correct?
All i can say is that we have been lied to by people we trusted for so long that we now believe up is down, and dogs and cats are sleeping together and having puppy-kittens
Its a mad, mad world
How do you know, and how has it been proven? All "proofs" I have seen thus far rely on poor initial presumptions about both models and misapplication of mathematics. It seems to me people are often mistakenly confident in alleged disproof just as they are in flawed proofs.
An argument can be challenged based on its form (formal fallacy) its relevance to its propositions (informal fallacy) or the facts supporting its propositions. Sure, the Earth looks flat. The horizon appears to be a horizontal line. But why does that really disprove the idea of the horizon as a very small circle of a sphere on a very large spheroid?
I'm not an astrophysicist, but I can draw a diagram to illustrate a concept. Polaris should be visible south of the "equator" by any flat earth model with a celestial dome, and we should be able to calculate that dome height with basic geometry, unless my model and math are fundamentally flawed.
Saying that people in power lie does not mean the inverse of their statements are true. The best lies are not complete falsehoods, but divergence from truth with enough tendrils of apparent support to get people to buy into the false aspects.
How would we model it and test it? That is how we could know, or at least have data to support or dispute a given model.
I should also state some really weird things.
You cannot sail using the flat earth map. You still need to calculate grand arcs. Or you won't get where you are going.
You ALSO cannot sail using a globe.
Best example is, you are going round the horn of Africa.
You go down, go over so far, go up and smash into the coast of Africa. (if you are taking your distances off of a globe)
Because a globe is a terrible scale for navigation purposes? Navigational charts are drawn many orders of magnitude larger.
I don't follow. Do you mean the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Agualhas at the southern tip? I suppose we could check with some South African HIVE users for direct information in the latter case.
Because the globe model is not accurate at all, south of the equator.
To illustrate this easiest, there was a group that was going to sail around Antarctica.
So, on a globe, you should easily make that journey in a month.
After a year, they gave up and turned north.
Every time they took a reading, they found that they weren't as far along as they thought.
So, if you try to sail around South Africa by going so many nautical miles, and then turning north you find that you haven't actually gone far enough, and you turn north and smack into land.
(it is not a "little" pear shaped.)
I have never been south of the equator. I can neither confirm nor disprove your claims from personal observation and experience.
Who was this group of antarctic circumnavigators? Where can their records be found?
Africa is a lot less pointy than South America on every map or globe I have seen. Are you sure the flaw is not in your conceptual model?
And this is where i fail bigly. I do not remember names, so i cannot provide search terms for these events.
It is that, when you take the globe model, and you are at a certain latitude, then the distance between longitudes should be X, but, south of the equator this doesn't hold true.
When you measure distance across land from one degree of longitude to another
When you try to sail around Antarcitica
When you try to sail around a known land mass (the bottom of Africa)
You find that it is not X distance, it is 2X or as you go further south it is 12X
The best proof of 'not a ball of the stated size' are visual. (or light doesn't travel in straight lines)
So, you take the govern-cement's website data on how far away certain light houses can be seen. Do the math, and find that they should be well over the horizon.
And, on a clear, still night, you can see these light houses from further.
Then their are the photographs you see, taken on a rare chance of clear, still days. Of cities that are so far, they should be over the horizon.
Today, there are many people taking such photos with IR cameras on the regular.
Other things, that are harder to prove, but are way more relevant is that there is too much land area below the equator. You measure points across the land mass... and they are longer than they should be measured on a globe.
One popular scientist who was confronted with this fact said "The earth is pear shaped"
It can be bent.
When I have seen people "show their math," they use the wrong formulae, usually a parabolic formula to disprove a spheroid. It doesn't add up because it literally can't.
Was it a mirage? These occasions are notable for their rarity and the wavering vertical distortion they exhibit based on what I have seen when such evidence is presented. Sometimes objects may even seems to float or look upside-down, because mirages are weird and atmospheric refraction is a thing.
[citation needed]
Slightly pear-shaped. Very slightly. A minutely lopsided oblate spheroid. Not a literal pear. I'm no fan of NdGT, but quoting him out of context is dishonest.
I have been to the Pacific Ocean, Lake Superior, and the large lakes in North Idaho. My own admittedly limited observations reflect the predictions of the sphere model. One of my vague plans involves visiting the northeast shore of Lake Pend Oreille near Owens Bay and looking SSW from the shore. What would you predict I should see?
In case you're curious about where some of these claims originally came from, it will interest you that Giovanni Cassini thought that the Earth was egg-shaped; he came into conflict with Isaac Newton, who maintained that the Earth bulged out slightly at the equator because of angular inertia. Because Cassini was a cartographer, his claim still holds some sway even now, despite observations overwhelmingly confirming Newton's hypothesis.