My stepfather has lost his shit and gone from accountant to flat earther. This has evolved from glass dome above the earth that caused the Challenger explosion to some new shit. Enter the ２０４０ Ｐｈｏｅｎｉｘ Ｅｖｅｎｔ. Every 140 years there's a cataclysmic event which changes the fundamental nature of the planet. This cycle is so powerful that it actually destroyed the Mayan civilisation. In 2040 it's due to happen again and the ONLY place on earth that will be safe is Egypt.
But what was the last thing that happened in 1900, you might ask.
The 1908 Tunguska Event in which an asteroid air burst above Siberia and killed a few reindeer herders.
But 1908 is 8 years after the 140 year cycle and 1900 was pretty uneventful, you might say.
The part that sticks out for me is Egypt being the only safe place. Like, why is this cataclysmic event stopping at their borders? Why are the neighboring countries with similar climates, elevations, latitudes or longitudes not safe? Not sure if this is some sort of fetishizing ancient society mysticism, or some sort of ancient aliens-adjacent thing, or if it’s coming out of Egypt itself as a sort of apocalyptic nationalism.
There are so many questions I'd ask about it if I could stand speaking to him. If the last time was just an asteroid strike killing a few Siberians, was Egypt still the only safe place or was it everywhere except Siberia? How did they repair the glass dome that exists over the flat earth and where did that asteroid come from if everything in space is a hologram projected onto the dome?
140 years before 1900, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1760. Or before 1908, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1768. Both are completely banal years without anything noteworthy. Was Egypt still the only safe place to avoid the volcanic eruption in Ecuador that didn't kill anyone? It seems like this conspiracy would fall apart if you just tried to find the events for each previous year. Given the whole of the 1900s, the best he and the only video I watched on it have come up with is Tunguska or some completely undefined ash rain people experienced somewhere.
How did they repair the glass dome that exists over the flat earth?
And if an asteroid broke through the glass dome over the earth in 1908 then how come all the gravity didn't leak out?
I'd probably start believing in some ridiculous stuff too if I had to work as an accountant for decades
The brain does what is necessary to stimulate itself in a vacuum
why invent fake cyclical apocalypses when we already have perfectly good real ones every 100k years?
When CO2 levels rose from 200ppm to 300ppm starting ~20k years ago, sea levels rose by 120m (~1200 stacked hamburgers for Americans).
And were up more than 100ppm since then with CO2.
As a plus, we get to write the next flood myth. So send me your best pitches.
Every reactionary fear is just whatever is actually happening, but with a different culprit, stranger details, and more insanity.
What makes someone believe something so silly with literally no proof or evidence? Like show me a single map that explains the day night cycle and seasons at the same time or a single prediction of weather events that comes true and is contrary to the scientific consensus.
It's part of a pipeline of ur-fascist syncretism. He started out believing in the Wall Street Journal and Tea Party during the 2000/2008 crashes and could only prove his conservative politics through libertarian fantasies. Confirming the bullshit from those could only come from conspiracy theories. The proof of each of those within the wider ecosystem of right-wing conspiracy theorists could only come from confirming every other conspiracy theory. The relief from alienation and intellectual validation he got from chasing one could only be matched by following the more extreme ones that the algorithm and facebook groups were already feeding him. Flat earth shit gives him the same kind of contrarianism and scooby doo mystery that 1990s neoconservativism gave him, and if it's true then everything as/less extreme than it is true.
Yeah, it's true because it has to be true to avoid a painful cognitive dissonance
Like the epistemological walls of one's hole in Amigara fault, ridged so as to only allow progress one way
If we bribe an Egyptian government official like $4000, they'll probably give us a sizeable chunk of desert to build Communism City in.
Well, if the Libertarians are going to create special economic zones in countries with already weak capital controls, maybe you doing the opposite isn't a bad idea. Set up shot opposite
https://free-cities.org/
and try to mooch off the inevitable flakes who can't deal with no roads + frequent bear attacks. It would be a shame if you released additional bears to expedite the process. It would be a shame.
Where is this theory coming from? Surely he's not on tiktok and this video says it's a 138 year cycle which was last experienced in 1902 as ash rain: https://www.tiktok.com/@therabbithole99/video/7192714824281902342?lang=en
Bit idea:
Guy who believes in all sorts of boutique conspiracy shit but thinks JFK and 9/11 and the big ones were totally above board
Guy who believes the Epstein logs are real but all the pedophile shit is just a smoke screen to cover for the alien infiltration
That's literally like half the tech bros I've talked to. The worst example being one guy who is convinced Palestine secretly has nukes
I knew a similar individual a a former workplace. Aside from flat earth stuff he believed that cancer is caused by bad generational karma, that any sexuality apart from straight is the result of childhood abuse, that females want to steal his vital essence via sex, that modern medicine is a scam and the best way to heal is through fasting and meditation, that the Bronze Age Collapse was caused by the fall of Atlantis, and a whole bunch of other stuff I can't remember right now.
If nothing else flat earth shows how completely pointless it is to argue with conspiracy theorists.
You can fairly easily do tests yourself that prove the earth isn't flat, under the right conditions you can even see it with your own eyes. You don't have to take anyone else's word for it, or need any sort of specialized knowledge or understanding, and somehow they still claim it's a lie.
He could launch a sturdy balloon with a gopro and a gps to disprove thousands of wasted hours in an afternoon. It's such a lazy conspiracy theory. Absolute teletubbies shit.
Arguing is the worst thing you could do, they don't believe this stuff because it makes sense, they believe it because it makes them feel special. If you attack it, you're attacking them.
The trick is to get them into healthier hobbies, slowly but surely move their sense of self-worth away from conspiracies and into something that makes them feel genuinely validated in their lives. Conspiracy theories are a symptom, not a cause.
oh fuck yeah gotta hide in an ancient egyptian temple cuz The Event is coming
I'm trying to reserve one on airbnb so I can store barrels of unvaxxed sperm. Come 2040, I'll get rich quick.
Ben Carson was right. The pyramids are for storage but not that kind
Dood this sound like some David Icke shit that he would talk about when he was on Coast to Coast AM radio.
Your step-father may be smoking meth. Trust me I’m an expert.
Not smoking it, but he has been a heavy adderall user for decades and mixed that with similarly chronic alcoholism. He barely leaves his bed so his life revolves around binge drinking with facebook on his laptop and Fox News on his television. Some mixture of that has made him confidently deranged.
