The one thing I don't get about Flat Earthers is who benefits from promoting a globe? I haven't see a conspiracy theory that didn't have someone benefiting from the conspiracy. Who exactly benefits / profits off people believing in a globe instead of a flatland? The motivation escapes me.
I am not a flat earther. I think the strongest answer I can give for a directly, logically related possible beneficiary is those who espouse a worldview dominated by impersonal forces. They benefit from the earth being verifiably a globoid because a celestial body being in that particular shape is quite simply explainable by gravity. If the earth were verified as shaped like a flat plane floating in space, or a cube, or some other shape with very large flat surfaces its formation would be far less explainable by impersonal, natural forces.
A creator of the earth would be a foregone conclusion and atheism would be an extremely fringe position. They'd be the ones clinging to theories like "The surface is curved because gravity keeps bending our surface back on itself... But, iron asteroids impact the earth from beneath, attracted to go up and into the inner planar ridge along the lines of the great divided magnetic ring field of our fractured south pole, and the energy from these impacts keep the earth from smoothing out into a sphere! But as asteroid impacts begin to decline, it will close into a sphere shape one day, and when it is you'll all be sorry!".
That's not fair. You are taking a perfectly innocent -albeit stupid belief and tying it with an entirely unrelated reprehensible one. This is a poor method of shutting down a conversation because a)it's intellectually dishonest and b)is a sweeping generalisation.
I'm seeing a lot of it and i think it's terrible and has disastrous results. Instead of settling a debate, it ends up alienating and dividing people.
Now, i'm sure you didn't mean to do that and it was just a passing remark with no particular intent. But i feel it's a broader issue which ties in with the subject being discussed.
YouTube started recommending me Flat Earth videos a few years ago, and while it's a broad camp there's certainly plenty of religiously-driven antisemiticism there: references to "JewTube" deleting videos to hide the truth (as opposed to the more likely reason:it was 95% material copyrighted by others)
Maybe instead of dismissing it as ridiculous, you should do some research into who exactly many of these folks think are perpetuating the lies about the earth being a globe. Far too often, people who are more ignorant of the actual beliefs these conspiracy theorists spout give them the benefit of the doubt and paint them as harmless.
