The mighty Counterknowledge site has done the world another favour by reminding us that the Flat Earth Society is still there, holding aloft the stationary disc of Truth.
Flat-Earthers, as the site points out, do not like the name being used as a term of media abuse like Tory, Zionist or White Working Class. Let us call them Horizoneers.
Horizoneers are not pudgy Kennedy Grassyknollers or goateed 9/11 Truthers. The latter can spin a skein of half-truths into a sticky candyfloss blob that threatens to engulf all Mankind and the Intern Net, like Prof Quatermass's Experiment.
TV presenters, actors, Willie Nelson, Robert Fisk - in short, the people we've learned to emulate since the demise of non-Islamic religions and universities that teach stuff - they're all suddenly "just asking questions" about explosions controlled by giant owls from the Bilderberg Group etc.
Not Horizoneers. They don't need to pervert simple truths to their own sick ends. They have dignity. They simply ignore everything that suggests the world isn't a circle without a beginning. Physics - out. Australia - it's somewhere else and full of liars. Planes - they go round and round. The Moon - it's just tethered off Holyhead. Google Earth - shove it up your arse.
(Except that The Flat Earth Society would never be so demotic in public. Its members belong to that select group of people who still write "whilst". Other members include Sir John Major, Daily Mail letter writers and members of the British National Party who like to be naked at the computer.)
Horizoneers pass the Crimea Test. If faced with having to charge into their own Valley of Death, Truthers and other conspirators would suddenly recall serious misgivings they've always had about their ratfaced little theories and run honking from both ends into the embrace of orthodoxy. Not the Horizoneers. They'd ride straight in. That's why they are magnificent.
I once lost an argument with the Dolgellau Branch of The Flat Earth Society (Cymdeithas Y Ddaear Wastad) at the bar of the Cross Keys, considered the town's intellectual hub because of the gravitational pull of the neighbouring Free Library (closed 1978). Les Maip Môn, a retired lead thief from Anglesey, set out the disky case succinctly:
"A Harrier jump jet takes off over Dolgellau, and hovers. If the Earth and Moon are spinning about like a pair of bollocks in a washing machine like Boyo Junior says, pilot just has to sit tight and he'll travel all over the shop without moving. But, because they're flat, he'll not move from Dolgellau. Case closed, your round."
(Les thinks the Moon is also flat. Hardcore.)
I tried in vain to counter this, but felt like Patrick Moore in a roomful of headhunters. I went for a little walk, came back, and decided they were probably right.
Horizoneers don't "just ask questions", they provide the answers. And that, in this modern world in which we're living in, is a rare commodity.
