An Indian Flat Earther

I get strange emails from grifters sometimes.

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

Some time ago, I got an email from someone who, though he claimed to be an atheist, wanted me to have a debate with someone who not only believed in a god, but also had “some arguments about Earth’s shape”.

As you can see, my correspondent was at great pain to explain that he was “not praising this person”. But at the same time, he didn’t want me to judge him or think him stupid. He was even willing to make promises on his behalf, going so far as to confidently say that neither of them will ever publish my phone number anywhere.

You see, Mister Flat Earther was not stupid. He knew that him praising himself will make him look silly. He also knew that him challenging me directly will make him look desperate if I ignored him. So he made up a polite persona to approach me with. One that was even an atheist.

Great plan, right? Just wait. It gets greater!

Because he did it five more times and sent me five more emails. Each was from a different email address but miraculously contained the exact same words and was sent within minutes of each other. Masterful scheme I must say!

I imagine the intention was to make it look like he has a lot of fond followers who, despite not agreeing with him, find him so compelling that they can’t stop themselves from recommending him as a debate-worthy intellectual, even going as far as to make promises on his behalf because he is just such a stand-up guy.

Out of curiosity, I took a look at his channel. It’s your average pile of YouTube garbage, advocating anti-science positions and trying desperately to position himself as an expert on subjects he knows little about. There is even some garden variety sanatan-giri happening in there.

His base of followers has doubled. In the attention economy, truth and value are not rewarded, but the ability to be sensationalist is. Every grifter has figured out that if they can just put themselves before a large enough number of people, they can have a chance to build themselves into a professional podcast guest.

There is a network of Hindi language podcasts that publishes slop at an unstoppable pace and has no qualms about supporting pseudoscience, bigotry, and lies as long as it gets them views and makes them money. This flat earther is just another client to them.

You can’t beat this clownfest by debating it. That only increases their visibility and makes them stronger. They know this. They don’t mind looking silly. They know that being silly will draw silly audiences which in time, can become their own personal cult.

Eventually, the cult and its influence becomes a tool that any political upstart can rent on an hourly basis to generate endorsements and, in time, success at the ballots.

This, in short, is the nature of our democracy.