| ▲ | graemep 7 hours ago |
| Its a Chinese equivalent of the phantom time theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory Its just as silly as phantom time and covers almost exactly the same period. The motive is possibly racist which makes it more sinister. |
|
| ▲ | doginasuit 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Maybe it is healthy for society in the long run to have pockets of divergent belief. Most of the time it is groundless and fades away. Every so often it gains traction. If it is based in reality, we gain a better understanding. If it is misleading, it vitalizes a competing and more correct understanding. The more interesting phenomenon is that we are able to agree on anything at all, it's not exactly our strongest instinct. Reading through HN, for example, the longest comment chains are a series of disagreements. But we build resources like Wikipedia and science journals, which also use disagreement as an engine for generating a more correct understanding. Its a strange and hopeful aspect of human societies. |
| |
| ▲ | MBCook 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How could it be healthy to not even agree on the most basic facts of history like whether hundreds of years actually happened or the shape of the earth? | | |
| ▲ | macintux 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That’s why I’ve lost much of my optimism regarding U.S. politics. It’s fine, and healthy, to disagree on how best to deal with the world as it exists, but if we can’t agree on reality itself, compromise and progress are so much more challenging. | |
| ▲ | edgyquant 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Does this stuff really matter when you get down to it? How much does it being true or false change the average persons daily life? |
| |
| ▲ | gmerc 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | One look at what’s happening with vaccines and you’re disabused of healthy. It’s not. it’s insanity | | |
| ▲ | mc32 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's a shame people are drifting from vaccines but the unwillingness of the WHO, etc., to backtrack on claims that turned out false with respect to Covid, does not help the cause. The sausage-making history that's coming out from Covid is also making people suspicious and one cannot blame them. Additionally, they've redefined that a pandemic is (removing severity from the definition), additionally it's expanding way from its traditional geopolitical framework and also what were recommendations are now becoming legally binding mandates that supersede sovereignty. So, yes, people are overreacting but the WHO and people who suppressed truthful but contrarian claims during the pandemic, share some of the blame. | | |
| ▲ | AlexCoventry 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Additionally, they've redefined that a pandemic is (removing severity from the definition) Over a million Americans died, but OK, that's not a severe problem... |
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | guyzero 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Back in the early 2000's, well before most social media sites existed, I had a coworker who shared with me a number of questionable theories, one of which was basically this. He also believed very passionately that plate tectonics was wrong. Unfortunately social media didn't invent brain worms. |
| |
| ▲ | NotThatFast 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Was he reading Neal Adams? I have to admit - Expanding Earth is hard to debunk! I think because like Flat Earth many of the observations and elements therein are accurate - they just get the overall picture wrong. Like stealing the ball with 4 sec left running down the court no defense in sight for the winning layup and missing - comically bouncing off the backboard. Alas, I believe most crackpots mean well, they just aren’t very good at the sport | | |
| ▲ | ecshafer 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Many of the more esoteric conspiracy theories are hard to debunk. Lets take the earth if round, prove it. You can bring up many cases, sails disappearing behind the horizon, goemetry, etc. but actually doing these measurements and calculations cold is pretty hard. And whenever you bring up a fact, they will dismiss it out of hand. Tectonic plates, I believe they exist, I have seen the evidence in books. But I doubt I could prove it, I've never really studied geology or anything like that. And if I were to debate someone who believes they weren't real, I would probably lose as they would bring up obscure papers, incidents, etc. which I wouldn't be able to refute well. | | |
| ▲ | jurip 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Conspiracy theorists can also be really into their stuff. Someone who believes the moon landings never happened and who is enthusiastic about that can probably recall a huge number of facts, whereas I can't even recall the years the flights happened, or the names of more than two of the astronauts. That stuff is just pretty irrelevant to a random member of the general public. | |
| ▲ | jonhohle 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I was recently in Hawaii on Kauai. I wondered if I could see any of the other Hawaiian islands (besides the small local ones). Can you see Oahu from Kauai (70 miles away)? Rarely, and only if you get to a high enough elevation and even then you can only see the highest peaks. On the other hand, Maui is easily visible from Hawaii from sea level. Simple, practice, repeatable. Likewise, flying in a plane for any distance and seeing the course is identical to if you pulled a string tight against a globe (give or take). I suppose pilots could choose to fly in an arch to keep the secret, but eventually some capitalist has got to spill the beans to cut costs, right? Also: the southern hemisphere. | |
| ▲ | colechristensen 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You don't particularly need calculations, just have friends around the world or even a couple hundred miles away, get on a video call to prove the world is round. Whatever your pet theory of how the sun moves across the "flat" earth can be contradicted with a couple of facetime calls. | | |
| ▲ | ericmay 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’ll do you one better, you shouldn’t even spend any time engaging in a debate with people who believe the earth is flat because they don’t want to change their mind. It doesn’t really matter if the earth is flat or not, for them it’s about being part of a community of people who believe in something that society tells them is wrong. There is no changing minds besides the 1 in a million you hear about and so all the calculations you could do would never work, sadly. | | |
| ▲ | colechristensen 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you're so disinterested why are you talking about it now? Better to focus your attention on something you're not going to be so dismissive and negative about unless your hobby is being an asshole. | | |
| ▲ | ericmay 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I was just browsing comments and read yours and thought it prudent for others to realize what they were dealing with when it came to flat earth theorists so that they protect their time. I’ve probably at this point already saved dozens of seconds for someone. |
|
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | emmelaich 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There were plenty of conspiracy sites pre-2000. I think a lot of them shared mindspace with USA late night talk radio. Also, usenet. | |
| ▲ | rsynnott 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Plate tectonics was super controversial at one point. Would be a common one for conspiracy theorists of a certain vintage. | |
| ▲ | EA-3167 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Social media gave a geographically distributed population of the “quirky” and their natural predators the grifters a chance to mingle on a global scale. It didn’t invent anything, but it’s a vector for the pathogen. | |
| ▲ | NoMoreNicksLeft 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Depending on how much older he was than you at the time, he might genuinely have been taught in high school that this was wrong. Only in the early 1970s did that even start to gain traction. If he was taught by one of the hold-outs that esteemed a pre-tectonics geologist, it'd be pretty natural to think like that I imagine. | | |
| ▲ | guyzero 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | oh he understood what plate tectonics was proposing very well, he just completely rejected it in favour of many distributed prehistoric oceans and a lot (a LOT) of erosion. It was weirdly congruent to phantom time theory. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | Tuna-Fish 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The version I've had argued to me didn't change any chronology, they just insisted that the Song dynasty started earlier so the Tang shouldn't be counted. The context was weird, the person pushing it was very passionate about the subject, and since I certainly don't know all that much about Chinese history from the period, I just smiled and nodded. Apparently this is a bigger thing? |
|
| ▲ | 1-more 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko) which I thought was the same as this but actually compresses a whole lot more time into less than 1000 years and does word magic to imply that King Solomon = Suleiman the Magnificent. |
| |
| ▲ | nl 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes I was going to point to the Fomenko chonology too. I believe that has adherents in some minor Russian nationalist circles: > In September 2020, major Russian politician and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergey Glazyev publicly proposed Fomenko's New Chronology as a "reliable support for the formation of modern ideology that consolidates Russian society" And related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartarian_Empire | | |
| ▲ | AnimalMuppet 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | "A reliable support for the formation of modern ideology"? That pretty much screams that any connection with the truth is... optional. It's not being considered on grounds of truth, but on grounds of being good for ideology. | | |
| ▲ | nl 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well... yes. I mean it's a nationalist ideology - any connection with reality is coincidental. |
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | riffraff 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I was going to say that it seems the equivalent of the "Belgium does not exist" meme (ante litteram) from a few decades ago. |
|
| ▲ | NotThatFast 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I just read the theory and I’m now a believer. It’s only 1729! Let’s goo, I mean: Come on ye lads! |
|
| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [deleted] |
|
| ▲ | wongarsu 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That wikipedia page lists four points speaking against the phantom time conspiracy, and in those four points relies on the Tang dynasty twice. Which doesn't exist. Checkmate /s |
|
| ▲ | culi 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| And it's taken about as seriously as "birds don't exist" or "the earth is flat". CNN is just doing straight up orientalism. Exoticizing a normal aspect of a culture that if you think hard enough happens in western cultures just as often if not more |
| |
| ▲ | tialaramex 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | AIUI the Conspiracy Theory isn't that birds don't exist, but that they are not real. All the birds you've seen were actually government spy cameras. This feels more plausible if you've only ever encountered pigeons and at some distance. If you've owned a parrot or some chickens, it is very apparent that this is not a spy camera. In fact the word I'd use for chickens is "saurian". They're clearly just lizards with feathers, if I didn't know their evolutionary story it would still scream at me when I see one laying on a rock in the sun that this is a lizard. | |
| ▲ | reaperducer 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | CNN is just doing straight up orientalism If you actually read the article, you'd be directing your vitriol at the Nanjing Daily and "The Paper, a media outlet affiliated with the Shanghai government." | |
| ▲ | Apocryphon 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Since it's popular among youth on social media, maybe this is like Helen Keller skepticism? https://www.perkins.org/qa-a-factual-look-at-helen-kellers-a... | | |
| ▲ | edgyquant 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The video of the girl crying about Hellen Keller being fake was hilarious regardless of how true or not any of it is |
|
|
