this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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[–] digredior@lemmynsfw.com 43 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Kinda…

It showed them as social outcasts with a drive to have a community but also a drive to have some sort of secret knowledge… the overall message I took away was that if you run into a flat earther, to treat them with some empathy and compassion while not validating their worldview. The dismissal of their ideas and belittling of their arguments further entrenched them in their beliefs.

And for what it’s worth, not everyone in that group is a complete idiot… just vulnerable to wacky ideas. Some of these smart people actually designed legit experiments that would actually prove if the earth was round or flat. At the end of the documentary, one group performed one of them with the film crew… conclusively showing the earth was round. The last word in the documentary was spoken by the guy running the experiment, where he said, “interesting…”. He was one of the ones who seemed to have a little intellectual honesty, and he may have gotten out.

In another part of the documentary, some of the more prominent voices in the movement pooled their money to get a $10k laser gyroscope that had the precision to detect the rotation of the earth…. It detected the rotation of the earth, so they were going out of their way to cover up the findings. It was all caught on film and presented in the documentary… The guy in the post is absolutely correct… these vulnerable are being deceived by con men.

[–] ByteJunk@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This is 100% the reason for the documentary in the first place. Quote from the director:

My dream would be that when people watch it, they take flat Eartherism as an analogy to something they believe in, because it's so easy to demonize another group or another person for something they think but you're kind of just as guilty if you do that.

These are humans, people that are missing something in their lives, and this community and their "secret knowledge" grants them that.

I see the SovCit movement as exactly the same thing, but when one digs deep enough, maybe one finds the same in the fanatical MAGA crowds, and in the most fervent religious people, and it's not a coincidence that there's an overlap in membership between these groups...

[–] fizzle@quokk.au 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah. I dont remember the documentary but maybe I watched it, or read another similar comment.

People in general just dont get this dynamic though.

Its too easy to just conclude that theyre idiots.