Somehow, The Flat Earth Movement Is Just Getting Crazier

Last weekend, about 200 flat earthers gathered on what we assume was the ground floor of a three-star hotel in Birmingham for Britain's first ever Flat Earth Convention (or FLEA Con -- please get that trending). During the conference, these flat-minded people shared their most groundbreaking new theories, showing again that what they lack in traditional fact-checking, they more than make up for with moxie.

(For aesthetic reasons, this article has chosen to omit the words "whoa" and "man" at the start and end of every single sentence, respectively, though it is very much in the spirit of these claims to include them while reading.)

Unlike most conventions, this one seemed to be all about what topics don't actually exist. Stuff like gravity, apparently! One speaker confidently claimed that he had disproved planetary motion and a few centuries' worth of science just by tracking the moon in his back garden with a phone app and a camera. According to him, the only reason we all stick to the Earth is natural electromagnetism, furthering the fringe Flat Earth theory that the world is actually a massive fridge door.

If you're wondering which parts of this article are the jokes, the answer is: Yes.

What else doesn't exist? Australia. That's right, readers from Australia -- or should we say, paid actors -- your country is simply a clever cover-up for a mass criminal genocide in Victorian Britain. And all those sheeple who think they spent their year after college there, they've been duped. Pilots just fly around in circles for a couple of hours and then take you to South America, landing on a set with actors pretending it's a fictional Oceania continent. Or as we like to call it, doing a reverse Peter Jackson.

In fact, current flat earthers are so set on disproving their entire reality that they even turn on their own traditional theories. Gone are the old, silly days of believing such nonsense like the Earth resting on the back of a giant turtle. The new "plausible" model is that our diamond-shaped world is simply firmly affixed to a set of pillars. Space pillars. Much more sensible.

The pillars themselves are still on turtles, obviously.

Even the old fear of being able to fall off this flat Earth of ours have now been roundly debunked through a simple yet revolutionary bit of nonsense called the "Pac-Man effect." See, you can't fall off the edges of the Earth because spacetime instead warps you back to the other side, like Pac-Man hitting an open end of the maze. And if they think Pac-Man proves anything, their minds are going blown when they discover parallax scrolling in a couple of years.

But if the conference proved one thing (which is one thing more than most of these manage), it's that the Flat Earth movement won't be going away any time soon. Organizers rightly pointed to their movement getting more popular with each day, citing "mistrust of governments" as one of the main reasons their super mega dumb beliefs now span all of the Earth's very sharp corners. And if hating governments is really what draws people to them, we look forward to half the world's population attending the Flat Earth convention in 2020 to discuss the possibility of the Earth resting on the back of Donkey Kong.

For more attempts at witticisms and his personal recipes for toilet wine, do follow Cedric on Twitter.

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