81

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Does history support the Flat Earth Theory?

« on: January 18, 2024, 12:57:36 AM »

2. If this is the case, we can then reasonably ask: why have none of these nations ever revealed to the world this conspiracy as a tactic in the game of great power relations?

Why are you claiming that no nation thought there was a conspiracy when this thread just explained that Hitler and the Nazis did, who said that it was Jewish science. Hitler was one of the few leaders who have tried to expose an alternative version of the world.

82

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Terrible Political Memes

« on: January 16, 2024, 11:02:03 PM »

83

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Does history support the Flat Earth Theory?

« on: January 14, 2024, 07:09:07 AM »

Based on how Hitler is described in the OP I suspect the poster has been watching some of those alt-Hitler documentaries which allege Hitler and the Nazis were really christian nationalist good guys who broke free of the Jewish Banking Cabal. The Jewish empire allegedly struck back and started World War II to contain them, and proceeded to demonize them with lies. Ever since then, according to this theory, the Jews basically controlled the world with near total control. Occasionally a country would try to break free of the Rothschild system and would be put in its place, such as with the fate of Lybian leader Muammar Gaddafi who denounced the bankers and spoke against a Zionist Agenda.

It's an interesting theory, and probably a little more realistic than the other grand conspiracy that the YouTube FE'ers like where the world is controlled by Satan, and RE and NASA are a Satanic Conspiracy. At least it doesn't invoke the paranormal directly.

However, pinning down the exact details of a possible conspiracy is ultimately inconsequential to a determination of whether there is a possible conspiracy. In many ways philosophy asks us to assume the possibility that we are controlled by a conspiracy, such as the theory that we are a computer simulation, that we live under the rule of a god or gods of some kind, that reality exists as the dream of a butterfly, and so on. Even the idea that "life has a purpose for you", which is an incredibly common belief, invokes a conspiracy influencung your life. If philosophy is at the point where we have to consider that we are in a computer simulation designed by unknown programmers, then trying to rule out a conspiracy based on the logic of what a country would or would not do is a futile effort.

84

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Does history support the Flat Earth Theory?

« on: January 12, 2024, 07:31:33 PM »

I was reading up on other books about the Nazi hollow earth and the chapter Hitler and the 'Phantom Universe' in the book The Hollow Earth Enigma was an entertaining read and gives some more details.

In this version of the events the Nazi military was interested in funding inverted Hollow Earth research for a military advantage. Some of the earlier American inverse Hollow Earth researchers were claiming infrared experiments that could see much further than possible and hypothesized that infrared rays were less curved than normal light rays. We know from the latest FE developments that people like JTolan claim to see hundreds of miles further than should be possible with infrared from airplanes, and it sounds like similar experiments were conducted by Hollow Earthers in the early 1900's at the advent of infrared photography. The Nazis postulated that if they could use infrared technology to see an eighth of the earth it would provide a great tactical advantage.

Unfortunately it seems that they were assuming that we were living on the inside of a Hollow Earth and were pointing the telescopic IR cameras up too high at the sky, and also made the mistake of conducting the experiment at sea level near water, which we know isn't ideal for infrared long distance observations since too much atmosphere still interferes.

This version of the events seems to imply that the inverted Hollow Earth theory was popular among the top Nazis but Hitler didn't know about Hollow Earth until shortly before approving the experiments, which I somewhat doubt. It also doesn't mention the quote attributed to Hitler defending hollow earth previously mentioned. A lot of the other details are the same, however.

85

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Should universities employ persons who have committed acts of plagiarism?

« on: January 12, 2024, 12:13:11 PM »

Never heard of him before this incident. The Politico article I provided links to an interview with him, and he credits billionaire Democrat Harvard donor Bill Ackman for leading the financial pressure and suggests that they're all allies who had a shared goal of toppling the president of Harvard University.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/03/christopher-rufo-claudine-gay-harvard-resignation-00133618

I’ve learned that it never hurts to take the credit because sometimes people don’t give it to you. But this really was a team effort that involved three primary points of leverage. First was the narrative leverage, and this was done primarily by me, Christopher Brunet and Aaron Sibarium. Second was the financial leverage, which was led by Bill Ackman and other Harvard donors. And finally, there was the political leverage which was really led by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s masterful performance with Claudine Gay at her hearings.

When you put those three elements together — narrative, financial and political pressure — and you squeeze hard enough, you see the results that we got today, which was the resignation of America’s most powerful academic leader. I think that this result speaks for itself.

How closely have you been coordinating with the other people in those three camps?

I know all the players, I have varying degrees of coordination and communication, but —

What does that mean, “various degrees of communication and coordination?” Have you been actively working together?

Some people I speak to a little more frequently, some people a little less frequently. But my job as a journalist and even more so as an activist is to know the political conditions, to understand and develop relationships with all of the political actors, and then to work as hard as I can so that they’re successful in achieving their individual goals — but also to accomplish the shared goal, which was to topple the president of Harvard University.

MSNBC credited Bill Ackman for leading Gay's ouster, and the Guardian credits him as well -

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/jan/03/bill-ackman-billionaire-attacks-claudine-gay-harvard-twitter-x

Chief among the campaigners celebrating the resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University was a man who arguably did the most to push Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, out the door: Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager and Harvard alumnus.

From the earlier MSNBC video posted it said after the five minute mark that Bill Ackman "called on the university to release the names of students who signed a pro-Palestinian statement in order to get them blacklisted from future jobs, stating none of the companies which he controls will hire a student who had signed the statement and nor should others."

Should Harvard be releasing the names of students who signed a pro-Palestinian statement?

86

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Should universities employ persons who have committed acts of plagiarism?

« on: January 11, 2024, 12:20:12 AM »

The Right didn't get Claudine Gay fired. The Right piled on because they assumed that she was a leftist. But it was really the Left that did her in. Bill Ackman mentioned from the MSNBC segment, for example, is a Democrat. She was too conservative for their liking and they didn't like her politics. This is the primary reason she was targeted.

Politico admits that it was the Left that did her in -

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/05/claudine-gay-resignation-battle-column-00133820 - "The Right Is Dancing on Claudine Gay’s Grave. But It Was the Center-Left That Did Her In. -- Her fate was decided by folks on the center-left and the left. The only things conservatives had to do was fan the flames."

Read her bio and the criticisms about her carefully - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudine_Gay

She fired a Harvard dean for joining Harvy Winstein's defense team as a political statement and she was criticized for failing to condemn the attacks after the recent Hamas-Israel incident. She was also widely criticized because she said antisemitism is only bad if it crosses into bullying.

She simply wasn't far enough on the left. Liberals targeted her because she was too conservative for them.

From her Wikipedia page:

"In 2019, Harvard Law School professor and Winthrop House faculty dean Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. faced student protests after joining the legal defense team for Harvey Weinstein, who was on trial for rape.[26] Gay called Sullivan's response to the controversy "insufficient," citing his "special responsibility" for the well-being of Winthrop residents.[27] Administrators including Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana and Gay ultimately decided not to renew Sullivan's contract as Winthrop dean"

"After the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, Gay faced criticism, including from former Harvard President Lawrence Summers,[7][8] for failing to adequately condemn the attacks."

"When asked if a hypothetical call for the genocide of Jewish people would qualify as a violation of Harvard's code of conduct, Gay responded, "It can be, depending on the context." She later clarified, "Antisemitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation — that is actionable conduct and we do take action."[46] Gay's remarks were broadly criticized in the media."

87

Flat Earth Theory / Re: An honest assessment of the evidence and the Flat Earth model...

« on: January 10, 2024, 12:28:15 AM »

Getting the celestial model to work was one of the first things we looked at when we started looking into FE with our group. Not sure why someone would choose to consult a video game on Steam instead of the Flat Earth Society.

We are far beyond these base questions, have gone on to complete a survey of astronomy under a FE mindset, and are now on the stage of wondering why there are so many geometric and physical anomalies in the supposedly truer RE that seem to favor the FE conception of the cosmos.

88

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: January 09, 2024, 04:27:07 AM »

It's fairly clear that in the full clip Trump is talking about electromagnets. Trump is shortening 'electromagnet' to 'magnet', as it is a type of magnet which is already explicitly defined in the full speech to be the type in question.

At the 1:30 minute mark of the below fuller video of the clip he even launches into a story about how an engineer named Bill Jones from the NAVY was talking to him and comparing the older and more reliable steam systems with the electromagnetic systems on ships. One of the problems mentioned is that when the electromagnetic systems were exposed to water they would shut down. This is where the concern about water comes from.

The electromagnetic systems the engineer worked on on those NAVY ships was assuredly "waterproofed", but the doors to the systems had to be opened for work and maintenance. The engineer suggests he is concerned about giant waves hitting the ship during maintenance and the water making its way inside and damaging the components, when this was not an issue with previous designs.

https://twitter.com/MostlyPeacefull/status/1744402395826737602

89

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: January 08, 2024, 10:37:35 PM »

It depends on the kind of magnet. It is also my understanding that if you expose the type of magnets to water in the referenced maglev elevator project that it will stop working.

90

Flat Earth Theory / Re: An honest assessment of the evidence and the Flat Earth model...

« on: January 08, 2024, 08:20:56 PM »

No flat earth model, that claims to demonstrate the relationship between the sun and the Earth, has ever shown how the sun can appear to be rising from beneath the horizon in the morning, then setting below the horizon in the evening - from any vantage point on the Earth.

Did you look at the tfes.org models before you posted a complaint on the tfes.org website?  - https://wiki.tfes.org/Sunrise_and_Sunset

91

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Should universities employ persons who have committed acts of plagiarism?

« on: January 07, 2024, 08:25:42 PM »

The historical information she is plagiarizing in her work is generally text referencing or citing a third work where the information originally comes from. She credits the original source of the information, but not the verbiage of the intermediary source. The person who originally came up with the information is indeed being cited, which is what matters most.

MSNBC looked into this controversy and appears to be saying that Claudine Gay was really targeted because people didn't like her refusal to engage in radical politics. Harvard looked into her plagiarism and considered it to be relatively minor and didn't amount to misconduct, but radicalists escalated the matter -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rbIVkM7MJ8

@4:59

Harvard itself never accused Gay of plagiarism but it did investigate the allegations and found that they are, at worst, instances of inadequate citation.

They are not what the word "plagiarism" might make you think. Claudine Gay was not stealing anyone’s ideas nor was she presenting other people’s ideas as her own. Harvard didn’t conclude that any issues in her academic citations amounted to misconduct.

That would normally be the end of it. Here is possibly the ugliest part of this whole chapter. At America's universities, academics and speech and learning are not primary, money is. Bill Ackman is an academic billionaire hedge fund manager and a harvard alum. Ackman called for Claudine Gay’s resignation and threatened to pull his donations from the university over her response to the October 7th attack.

He called on the university to release the names of students who signed a pro palestinian statement in order to get them blacklisted from future jobs, stating none of the companies which he controls will hire a student who had signed the statement and nor should others.

Ackman is active on X, formerly Twitter. According to the guardian, in the past month alone, he’s Tweeted about gay, harvard, or both more than 100 times to his 1.3 million followers.

92

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: January 07, 2024, 04:40:40 AM »

Looks like it was not noticed that the 14th Amendment insurrection clause was repealed by Congress over a hundred years ago -

https://publicinterestlegal.org/press/pilf-to-scotus-president-trump-must-be-kept-on-the-ballot/

"Congress in 1872 and 1898 extended an amnesty by repealing the provisions against office holding arising from the Civil War. The 14th Amendment gave Congress the power to terminate the prohibition against those who engaged in “insurrection.” Congress terminated the effectiveness of the provisions, twice. Therefore, they cannot be used in 2024 to ban candidates from the ballot.

Further reason Section 3 does not apply to President Trump is there has been no finding of insurrection or rebellion committed by the former President. In fact, the Senate acquitted President Trump of insurrection charges.

Finally, the Constitution lays out specific qualifications for who is eligible to be President. States cannot add additional qualifications according to the Supreme Court’s decision in the challenge to Congressional term limits."

93

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Does history support the Flat Earth Theory?

« on: January 06, 2024, 07:25:44 PM »

The only quote I could find from Hitler on the shape of the earth comes from what appears to be an excerpt from a version of the Nazi-research history book "The Morning of the Magicians" by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, which describes that the Nazis encouraged their factions to promote different contradicting theories on various subjects in spirited competition. In the case of the earth, some promoted a version of the Round Earth theory and others promoted the inverse Hollow Earth where we are living on the inside.

See The Shape of the Cosm section -

https://web.archive.org/web/20101219081839/http://www.justintimeadventures.com/pipermail/torg/1998-March/012724.html

"When a delegation of Hörbiger supporters tried to enlist his aid in suppressing the [inverse] Hollow Earth theory, Hitler responded, 'Our conception of the world need not be coherent. They may both be right'."

There are other suggestions on that page that inverse Hollow Earth could exist in higher dimensional space, so maybe this is what Hitler was alluding to with that incoherent earth theory. In any case, this text which describes Nazi factions promoting contradicting theories and Hitler being seemingly wishy-washy on the earth's shape seems to support the notion that Hitler and the Nazis in general didn't necessarily firmly believe in a specific earth shape or really the alt-science and occult things they were studying, but were interested in keeping an open mind and exploring the ideas for the purpose of truth.

94

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Should universities employ persons who have committed acts of plagiarism?

« on: January 05, 2024, 06:26:08 AM »

The President of Harvard isn't going to be doing any teaching or research or interacting much with students in any way. It is an administrative position, to which financial crimes should have far more bearing than her plagiarism as a student.

As a executive officer of a corporation you are expected to do everything necessary to keep the corporation afloat, which includes to lying short of fraud to the tolerance of legality, suppressing wages, tricking consumers into giving you more money, cheaping out on your offerings, etc. It's not a position for an honest goodie two shoes like you all believe.

Looking at the plagiarism itself in the link in the OP, it doesn't look like she was plagiarizing someone's original opinions and passing them off as her own - which would be a far more heinous matter and what I would consider the equivalent of fraud. Instead, she was plagiarizing paragraphs containing background factual information about the history of laws, bills and legal subjects. She didn't even directly plagiarize either, but was rewording and adding onto sentences, although you can tell from the side by side comparisons in the link in the OP that the informational paragraphs are morphed versions of another work.

For those reasons I am going to go against the grain and say that this isn't too concerning.

95

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Does history support the Flat Earth Theory?

« on: January 05, 2024, 02:41:53 AM »

I think this topic is interesting. When Hitler and the Nazis came to power they began exploring a lot of odd alternative science and occult stuff. They didn't put too much faith in standard western science. Many people say this means that they therefore believed in those things they were studying, possibly as an effort to characterize them as insane, but I think it's more likely that they were just exploring the concepts with their science freedom and had a distrust of westen institutions to properly research it.

At this point it all exists as hard to verify claims in various books, but in their efforts it is said that the Nazis did question the Round Earth Theory. In that alt-science effort it is said that they generally stuck their feather in Koreshanity: the idea that the earth was concave and we were living on the inside surface of a hollow earth. In their literature Koreshans published the same type of experiments as Rowbotham that we could see too far (and even repeatedly reference Earth Not a Globe), and also parroted various shared anti-globe evidence for stationary earth that previous Flat Earthers were using.

In regards to Nazi belief in Flat Earth Theory, I think the answer is probably that the Nazis and Hitler never came to a firm conclusion on the shape of the earth but were keeping an open mind on it. This video touches on their exploration of alt-earth theories:

96

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Terrible Political Memes

« on: January 04, 2024, 04:49:37 AM »

97

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: President Joe Biden

« on: January 01, 2024, 04:01:07 AM »

It seems that Biden is closing out the year on C-SPAN with some high energy support.

https://twitter.com/liz_churchill10/status/1741576898608607272?t=rIfHIx9mIYnHu6Ln7yt7hg&s=19

98

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: December 30, 2023, 10:56:38 PM »

Well maybe at least wait until he is sentenced to jail before declaring that you guys are right about this. It could be that you guys are wrong, so it is best to keep to yourselves until the time comes.

99

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Trump

« on: December 30, 2023, 08:40:24 PM »

Maybe you guys should just patiently wait a few months to when Trump is in jail instead of continuously doubling down that he is in for it this time.

100

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Seasonal Daylight Patterns: using magnifying glass dome is an inaccurate model

« on: December 30, 2023, 07:28:57 PM »

our Earth's atmosphere is not 'solid' glass and so the model setup is inaccurate.

You're right. The number of accumulated atoms between the Sun and the observer are probably greater than the number of atoms between points in the glass of a magnifying dome.