| > At first I enjoyed flat earth as a mental exercise in going through "settled" science and creating experiments to prove or disprove them. I did a similar thing but with legal crackpots instead of science crackpots, as a source of material to practice legal research on in law school. Namely the Sovereign Citizen [1] and Tax Protest [2] movements. (Note that tax protestors are different from tax resistors. The latter refuse to pay tax as a protest against government policies. The former refuse to pay because they believe that it is not legal for the government to tax them. It is only the tax protestors who are crackpots). None of their material stands up long to scrutiny. When you go look up the cases or statutes they cite, they often don't even exist. If they do exist what they quote from them often isn't there. And if it is there, it isn't there for what they say it is. An example of that I've seen one quoting the Supreme Court as unanimously saying that income tax is unconstitutional, but the quote wasn't actually by the Court. It was from a brief from the side that lost, so it was actually something the Court unanimously rejected. At least with these things I can kind of understand. If you claim that people don't have to pay taxes, or register their cars, or have a driver's license to drive on public streets, people will pay for your book or to attend your seminars. That's something a con man can work with. You can even point out that you've been selling your books and running your seminars for years and have never gotten into trouble for tax evasion or driving without a license and let the rubes infer that this proves your methods work. No need to tell the rubes that the reason you don't get in trouble is that you quietly actually do pay your taxes and do carry a driver's license when you drive. Flat earth is a bit more puzzling. I would have expected that to be harder to make money on. Telling someone you are going to show them how to stop paying taxes is promising something that will make a major difference in their life. Telling them the Earth is flat doesn't seem like something that would make much difference--offhand I can't think of anything I would actually do different if I believed the Earth was flat--so I'd expect there to not be much money in it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_protester |
I would think that buying into the Flat earth theories could be a way to identify marks for the other profitable theories.