*(Actually, no it doesn’t.)
This is another in a series of posts leading up to the launch of Ship of Fools on Friday. I’ve also posted an Introduction and Table of Contents separately, to help readers stay oriented as the story progresses. The entire novel will be free to read upon release, and for eight months thereafter.
I’m tempted to put the entire first part of this post in italics, but that would make it harder to read. As you proceed, please turn on your satire meter.
And please remember, as fun as it is to laugh at ridiculous conspiracy theories, we should never forget that actual conspiracies do exist. Thanks to
for the reminder on last week’s post to always include that caveat. With all the actual conspiracies by governments and corporations, is it any wonder that people distrust institutions and fall for ever more outlandish ideas?With that out of the way, let the fun begin.
Yes, shocking but true, no one (other than UN agents) is allowed to travel to “Antarctica.” This is mainly because you can’t travel to a place that doesn’t exist (more on that in a minute). But it’s also because the Antarctic Treaty, foisted on the world by just 12 countries back in 1959, makes it impossible to travel there.
Oh sure, the treaty itself (pdf) doesn’t mention tourism or expeditions at all, and the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty mentions tourism as if you could actually go there. But then you get to the Manual of Regulations and Guidelines Relevant to Tourism and Non-Governmental Activities in the Antarctic Treaty Area (MRGRTNGAATA). It’s 279 pages long! Who has time to read all that, much less comply with it? Not to mention they can’t even come up with a good acronym for all these rules. Our freedom to travel to the Antarctic is being regulated out of existence!
What’s that you say? Tour companies handle all this paperwork for their clients? And there were 74,000 visitors in 2019? Well, sure, if you have tens of thousands, even as much as $100K per person, to plunk down for such an adventure. But if you’re that rich, you’ve got too much invested in the dominant paradigm to really question it. In fact, you’re probably one of the shills pulling the wool over the rest of our eyes.
But let’s say you manage to get on one of these tours and you have an open mind. Sure, they’ll take you somewhere, but is it to the “South Pole”? (Which again, doesn’t really exist.) No! Most visitors sail from the tip of South America, getting only as far as the Antarctic Peninsula. That doesn’t even get you past the Antarctic Circle. Nowhere near enough to see the Ice Wall and the UN troops defending it.
But what about these people with Antarctic Logistics & Expeditions, hanging out on Union Glacier?
Or these, who skied “the last degree” to the “South Pole”?
Obviously, the skiers could afford the $79,000 per person required for such a trip. That means they’re probably part of the globalist elite trying to keep the rest of us from learning the truth. And even if they think they were at the South Pole, how did they know where they were? Compasses? Those famously don’t work down there. Or GPS? Don’t make me laugh.
Think of that, paying $100K so globalist shills can convince you the South Pole really exists. That money could have been much better spent feeding the hungry!
So what would happen if you got in your own boat and sailed south? What would you find if you got beyond say, 85 degrees south? No doubt you’d be warned away, like this boat off of Australia, which was intercepted when it crossed into a “restricted marine zone” (yeah, right).
And if you made it past the warships in open water, this is what you’d find:
Of course, no one would hear from you again, because that UN ship would sink your boat before you could get away. Once you’ve seen the Ice Wall, you simply know too much.
I guess we’d all better be good sheeple and do as the elites tell us: stay away from the Ice Wall!
Okay, wow. That was a lot of mental backflips, all to deny a simple reality. Why would anyone go through such elaborate contortions and believe so many obviously untrue things?
If you’re a flat-earther, then this sort of denial pretty much comes with the territory (which is all flat, of course). These denials are the younger siblings of the big denial at the heart of this false belief: that Earth isn’t a globe.
If you believe Earth is actually a flat disk with the North Pole at the center, then there can be no brain-shaped continent at the opposite pole. That’s because there is no opposite pole, just an edge. And you have to believe there’s an ice wall around that edge; otherwise, the oceans would flow off the disk, not to mention people falling off.
If people tell you they’ve been to Antarctica, then you have to believe they’re either shills for the UN psy-op or they were conned by the people who took them there. (This means that all the expedition companies and their employees are in on the plot.)
This is just one of many things a flat-earther is required to believe — that ships don’t disappear over the horizon hull-first; that gravity doesn’t work the way either Newton or Einstein thought it did; that all those pictures from space are faked; that space itself probably isn’t real; and much more. The question is, why would the “globies” go to such lengths to create this deception? Especially since the “pictures from space” piece of the deception costs billions, even trillions?
There are two answers to this. The least convincing one is that “globeism” is just another anti-religious belief, like a belief in Evolution. And many flat-earthers do come from a religious, especially a Christian, worldview. But this can’t explain the motives of a globie like Johannes Kepler, who thought he was simply reading the book of nature that God had written for us.
The more convincing explanation, as far as providing the elites with a convincing motive, is that more land exists beyond the Ice Wall. Of course the 1%, the bankers, the globalists, etc., don’t want us to know that vast empty lands with abundant resources exist beyond the Ice Wall. They want to keep us fighting over scraps in the known territories of Earth. When the time comes to access those resources beyond the wall, only the elites will control them.
This is where flat-earthism bleeds into more sinister and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about globalist moneyed elites. It might be tempting to laugh them off as a harmless fringe group, but we’ve seen a lot of fringe ideas move into the mainstream to disastrous effect on politics, healthcare, and more. So it pays to keep an eye on them, if only to see how the same structures of thinking play out in areas more critical to our lives.
Meanwhile, I’ll be dreaming of the day when I can afford my own trip to Antarctica to see the place for myself. A similar trip forms one main arc of Ship of Fools, and it leads to some surprising places.
Have you been to Antarctica or the South Pole? If so, what are some of the ways you knew where you were? And if you haven’t been, where would you look for clues that you were standing on the “bottom” of a spinning globe? I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments!
Come back on Friday, when Ship of Fools leaves port with the Prologue. While you’ll find a lot more funny stuff about flat-earthers in the novel itself, this first installment features my two philosopher-cowboys, Slim and Shorty, arguing over how we can know anything at all.
Next Tuesday, I’ll explore the link between Wordle and conspiracy theories.
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