The CODOH Revisionist Forum

Wetzelrad wrote: ↑Mon May 26, 2025 5:38 am

ConfusedJew wrote: ↑Wed May 21, 2025 5:04 amTo be honest, it does feel like I am debating with people who think the world is flat. I don't know how you could persuade those people that the world is in fact round, but I'd be curious to explore the flaws and contradictions in their arguments.

How would you go about doing that exactly?

Proving that the Earth is not flat is trivially easy. We can watch rockets go up on live broadcasts with onboard cameras. Landings also. The footage is often uninterrupted or nearly so. This is impossible to fake....

...So on the whole Flat Earth is deeply irrational. However, all this is merely proving them wrong. Persuading them that they are wrong may be a separate matter. When it comes to controversial or deeply-held beliefs many people do not want their minds to be changed, and this forum obviously does not hold the secret to overcoming that. If I were to venture a guess I should think the most persuasive thing you could do is answer their questions. There is no end to the questions you could put to Flat Earthers, but I would hesitate to ask those because I think it is more likely to put them on the defensive. I can tell you what would not convince them; that is ruthless censorship and reputational destruction.

Answering Flat Earthers' questions and engaging in no other stratagem, may well be the most likely way to have some impact.

I have talked with a sample of them at length. The sample, n=3, is large considering the length of the debates and the energy involved. The ones that have the energy to debate at this length are really recalcitrant. It always leads to a huge whack-a-mole melee. It is a huge effort to keep their attention on the fact that their latest mole is whacked; they immediately confront you with another tangental and obscure mole.

I cannot prescribe a better strategy, but I can diagnose a problem with all the Flat Earther's I have engaged with. They have a very poor ability to hold an alternative model in their mind. It is not, then, very useful to agree, for the sake of argument, that the Earth is flat, but ask them to imagine constructing a huge Earth size ball and have it spin on a pole miles and miles above the flat Earth. You might want to do this to illustrate the differences in apparent rotation of objects "in the ball's sky" from the point of view from the ball's surface.

They cannot engage in this type of thinking. They derail at the merest problem. "But how could we possibly stand on the ball's surface in order to look up? There would not be enough static electricity to hold us there...".

People who understand that we live on a globular planet can easily imagine living on a plane planet and can use this to infer what the consequent observations would be (e.g., the stars' apparent rotation being the same in Cape Town and in Tromsø). Instead, Flat earthers feel much safer in using the standard jargon of higher ranking Flat Earthers in order to filibuster or change subjects.

When vlogging Flat Earthers heedlessly wander out onto a minefield of a live, online debate with Globe Earthers, they are, sooner or later, required to engage in this hypothetical reasoning under the assumption of their opponent's hypothesis being correct. They perform woefully but feel compelled to not embarrass themselves, but it becomes clear that they have next to no understanding of the relevant issues.

On a personal level, it is bizarre to me that they even feel like they live on a flat Earth. It is like they have only ever lived in mountain ranges. Every time I am on a flat area of land, or out at sea, the Earth seems like it is a globe that is much smaller than it is claimed to be, i.e., it feels too curved. Why can't I see the Alps from North Germany? That's a little goofy, and just a normal miscalculation for fairly obvious reasons. There is, though, also the commonplace observation of very curved up water, like on dew drops and tears - I can't, therefore, understand their categorical imperative that water "always finds its own level".

I better link this to Holocaust Revisionism (I just saw the tread, and could not resist piping up on the whole Flat Earth question). I am not very, very well read on the whole Holocaust Question, but I am by now getting a feel. Anyone who has invested in any side of a debate can succumb to an unhelpful commitment to certain conclusions. Therefore, engaging in the assumptions of opponents' theories to look for insights, either way, can be helpful, of course. As far as this thread goes, it seems that even when it is acknowledged that the orthodox view is taken from the vanquishers' point of view, there is not necessarily any moral reassessment made for those giving History a more complete picture by attempting to add the perspective from the points of view of those vanquished. This hardly seems reasonable, and is unlikely to lead to a fair appraisal.

Of course there is a huge emotional dimension to this whole question, but that should not allow a reasonable exploration of all evidence to be avoided. It is perhaps easier to think of this on smaller scale examples of cases involving death and violence.

There was huge emotional motivation to have Amanda Knox convicted, this included the understandable motivation that a murderer of Meredith Kercher not escape justice. Indeed, it felt like special pleading that Knox's defence argued that the molecular evidence that placed Knox at the crime scene was unsound. At first I was, myself, outraged, but hearing patient explanation I became convinced that Knox was innocent.

Even more "understandable" was the beating of the heavily pregnant wife of David Smith, an innocent man who brought about the end of a series of child murders known as the Moors Murders, which occurred in 1960s England. David Smith turned Queen's evidence on his sister-in-law and her lover (the actual child murderers). Smith had walked in on their last crime scene and was appalled. Under duress he helped clean the crime scene but once outside he went straight to the Police with his wife to report the killers. Given the fact that David Smith had turned Queen's Evidence, there was some degree of suspicion on him. David Smith and his wife were, then, later visited by Ann West, who is the mother of Lesley Ann Downey (the fourth victim of the murderers). Ann West came with her husband and her brother-in-law, to the flat of the Smiths, where their attack involved the heavily pregnant Mrs Smith. David Smith and his wife were wholly innocent, despite the horrible state of grief and anger of the bereaved mother who had understandably descended on his flat out of a powerful sense of injustice and vengeance.

The lesson is, that whilst emotions can be understandable and unavoidable, they will often get in the way of evaluating the truth and have to be removed from a careful analysis that seeks the truth.

Despite the schoolboy understanding I was brought up to have, I now see that what should be the framework of what happened in first-half of 20th Century Europe is not what the German's did to the Jews, and not even what the German's did, but what happened to bring about both World Wars and what happened following from that. Lots of people now seem to be taking as neutral a position as they can on it all, and starting from scratch. Looking directly at the behaviour of a recent UK Prime Minister and his scuppering of a decent shot at a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, it is quite easy to imagine the alternative hypothesis that our own cherished Churchill was more sinning than the UK was sinned against.

We have a very pro-war establishment in the UK, the lead up to the Iraq invasion by us actually shows a nadir in establishment belligerence, yet we still aggressed. Quite easy, then, to entertain the notion that the lead up to World War II was not despite a hiatus in our state-level aggressiveness. In any event, it hardly seems reasonable to blame it all on Hitler, as Steven Pinker recently echoed in his recentish book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. It is very refreshing to be able to set much of this aside, of course.