You know flat earth is kind of a very interesting microcosm of beliefs, specifically because of how it intersects with every other conspiracy theory, but tends to be low-yield in it's implications. It's absurd enough to be kind of a foundational belief, it's absurd enough to be believed in jest, but it also doesn't, by itself, imply a kind of fully-formed worldview. It's like believing that the moon is made of cheese, or something, it doesn't really mean anything, by itself, but it's also probably one of the more insane things you could postulate. You get a lot of diversity in the flat earth movement because of that.

You get people who are dedicated to JAQing off, basically just trolls, right. Those ones usually rely on the classic arguments about camera lenses warping everything. Then you get people who believe in a kind of extreme libertarian conspiracy theory, old school style, like, the types that really hate NASA and maybe think that CERN is doing some crazy shit, and those types tend to be a step further, and think that the photos are just faked. Then, that group has some overlap with the group of extremist fundamentalist evangelicals, who basically believe in weird warped versions of what medieval peasants believed, about the firmament and shit like that. You also get a good amount of people who believe in wacky shit like an ice wall, or just a big dome or something. Lots of misunderstanding of basic physics shit, and "common sense" solutions.

It's like an alternative version of science, for the ultra-skeptical, and for the totally faithless, but then we sort of double back to the problem of not having anything to believe, and then the empty space gets filled in by pure-vibes based science shit. Probably a lot of it has to do with people just starting out disagreeing with the aesthetics of science communication and then going from there, I'd imagine.

I dunno, it always kind of reminds me of those stan accounts on twitter that end up quitting after fixing their houses' collective gas leaks. It makes me wonder if this is just a kind of, horrible social media locus where the mentally ill are confined to their kind of online mental asylums, except instead of guards and people who try to give them medication, you just have malicious bad faith actors who are trying to drag the population around, to their own benefit.

It makes me wonder if mental illness is, in some form, actually contagious, and can be transmitted like more conventional diseases. Overall, it kind of makes me think that the top-down structure of this whole internet thing doesn't really make any sense, and should probably be governed in a more sensible way, because the libertarian-anarchist free speech for all idealist approach of the early internet seems like it's just gonna lead to situations like that, where nutters hang around with each other and feed into each other's illnesses, and kinda get to the point where nobody can really talk them out of it. But then maybe that's all putting the cart before the horse, and realistically these people just need more intervention in their physical lives, and them shitposting is just kind of a side-effect. I dunno. Probably both approaches would be fine, I'd wager.