I know some MAGAs. I promise you they believe it 100%. They often talk of ice walls and one asked me if the Artemis mission would "break through the firmament"?
There is a huge side of TikTok and Reels that most of us here would never find on our feeds which is dedicated to insane conspiracy theories and constitutes a large amount of the media that MAGAs etc consume.
Maybe I'm just a dumb optimist, but I've always assumed that the flat earthers started out as an enteraining debate club intentionally trying to prove something impossible just for the challenge, which got overtaken by a tiny number of vocal idiots. I have heard they largely have moved on to Qanon, which tracks.
The initial modern flat earth movement was absolutely trolling, no doubt about it. But as the myth grew, enough grifters and actual idiots glomed onto the idea that it became what it originally mocked. Poe's law and all that.
Similar to the "I fell in love with an AI!" folks, it's largely undercover salesmen hawking their goods to the gullible.
This photo could be easily faked. I don't believe the Earth is flat, but I also don't think everybody on the planet should be 100% on one side of a discussion. Even if flat-earthers are kinda dumb, I think it's worse to force everyone into intellectual submission just because you're "right".
>I think it's worse to force everyone into intellectual submission just because you're "right".
I think it's worse to consider the acceptance of reality as being "forced into intellectual submission" and to use scare quotes around "right."
There are discussions that everyone on the planet should be 100% on one side of and this is one of them. It is literally just wasting everyone's time to entertain the premise that opinions to the contrary hold any value.
Even if clearly one side is correct without any doubt whatsoever, beyond any question? Such as 2+2=4 -- we should accept a situation where some people insist this is not true? It seems irrational.
What does scale, unfortunately, is arrant nonsense.