this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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Interesting in this context is completely divorced from morally good/bad. Could be any group from any area at any time in history. I'll start with a few, followers of the cult of pythagoras, contemporary black Hebrew Israelites, antiracist skinheads and the Amish (neo-luddites in general). Don't be racist or a prick to other people discussing.

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[–] setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 17 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Space deniers.

They are a sub-set of flat earthers. Not all flat earthers are space deniers, but every space denier I've seen is a flat earther.

Some of the more prominent ones like Level Earth Observer spend innumerable hours picking apart International Space Station live footage as "fake". Things like space rocket launches need to be picked apart to absurd degrees as well. Every camera glitch, every stutter, every little movement is hyper-analyzed and declared to be a fraud.

I find it all fascinating. Some of these deniers put forth their own lay theories, which are usually very Biblical in bent, but many of them like LEO will twist themselves into incoherent knots refusing to admit they have a viewpoint and that they are "just asking questions" despite pushing back in a very particular way to all the answers they get.

Some of them like "CC from New York, Westchester County" are just totally off the deep end, not even playing word games, just conspiratorially ranting without even internal consistency.

I've only ever interacted with a space denier directly once and it was as equally interesting as it was frustrating.

There's a big flat earth/space denier overlap with other fringe ideas like young earth creationism which gets you into Kent Hovind territory. That's interesting in its own way but also full of slime.

[–] ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 7 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I once did some research on flat earthers for a project. I was trying to assemble the most consistent interpretation I could in order to play the devil's advocate in a fun debate. It turns out that space denial is quite helpful at preserving coherent physics if you assume the Earth is flat. The Earth can be accelerating upwards to create gravity, which violates special relativity but that's nbd at this scale. Other planets can also be flat, which makes things easy too. The sun can't set, but there's no way around that one.

In my experience, the most irrefutably evidence that the Earth is round is the simple stuff like astronomy. Simple things like the path the sun and stars take from two points on the globe basically ends all debate. Flat Earthers always have crackpot ideas for things you can't easily observe yourself, but you can really catch them with proof they can see with their naked eyes.

[–] setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Of course, the easiest simplest killshot on flat earth is the sun setting below the horizon. Flat earth and space deniers tend to say the sun is well, something that's not a star, but more importantly that it stays in the sky and circles further away from a given location on earth until we can't see it from a given location anymore while it stays overhead. To think that is to deny easily observed reality of it setting below the horizon. They just wordsalad about perspective until the conversation ends.

One aspect of flat earth/space denial that keeps me engaged is learning from the responses that educated people give to their questions. Details of space programs and astronomy that wouldn't come up often except to answer flat earth/space denial.