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.
I’d probably start believing in some ridiculous stuff too if I had to work as an accountant for decades
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.
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
I’ll meet you comrades at the pyramid of giza
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
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.
