Why do Astronauts need to know how to swim?
by Admiral FartmoreEditors note: ????????????????????????????????????
I read this book on a plane.
It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t so I could take shots out the window to show the curvature of the earth. I read this book on a plane to distract myself because I really, really hate flying. I hate being out of control, especially when I’m hurtling through space on a vessel I don’t understand. So what better way to pass the time than to read the ramblings of a man who is terrified of hurtling through space on a vessel he doesn’t understand?
Today we are discussing “The Earth is Flat: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid,” by Casper Stith. This book is part of Casper’s “Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid” series, which includes “The New World Order: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid,” “Satan: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid,” “Aliens: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid,” and more.
Supplementary searches suggested that Casper is somewhat of a nobody in the online conspiracy scene, with no online interviews or other media available. Aside from books, his personal website contains little beyond a picture of what appears to be everybody’s worst cousin:
Flat Earthism serves the dumb. And when I say that, I mean it serves both people that love it and people that hate it. It’s believed by fools, but it’s popularized by slightly-less-dumb people making fun of those fools. Some maniacs believe in a Flat Earth, but the topic is kept going by an army of regular people patting themselves on the back because they believe in a round earth. How smart.
Casper is clearly in the first group of dumbasses. I’ll now join the second group of dumbasses by saying this: his book is pissy shit piss boring piss shit piss bad piss shit pissy dull piss piss shit piss.
Where to begin?
Casper uses a lot of typical conspiracy theory approaches to beat his reader’s brain to death. The first approach is to cite definitions as if they were arguments. For example:
It’s a well-known cliché to begin speeches or essays with “The Oxford dictionary defines [insert topic] as…” and Casper tends to do this with every single argument he introduces. I remember my teacher in grade 8 teaching me this technique, and I remember my teacher in grade 10 teaching me not to do it. This leads me to conclude that Casper might not have his grade 10.
Either way, in an unscholarly attempt to appear scholarly, Casper spends half the book providing us definitions. It’s tedious and frustrating, because they are often provided in lieu of actual evidence. He will say a group is involved in corruption, proceed to define corruption, and then just move on as if to say “trust me, I know the definition of corruption.” Well shucks, Casper, I guess I can’t argue against a definition!
Another strategy of conspiracy writers is the firehose approach – just say a bunch of shit. This exhausts and confuses the reader while at the same time establishing their breadth of knowledge. But if you read carefully, you find some oddities that can bust up a writer’s credibility pretty quickly:
Lost here is the crucial point that data is transferred through radio waves, not sound waves. But Casper appears to believe instead that satellites are giant boom boxes blasting music at Earth. Not that this is exactly possible, but imagine the living nightmare that would be.
What do you really do with a block of text like this? The claim that airplanes are going to fly off the planet if they go in a straight line sure seems suspect, but I didn’t even notice it on first read.
Another common strategy that Casper employs is to make small claims (regardless of their bearing on theory) that the reader can connect with. For example, Casper points out that railroad tracks are flat:
But hold on; our boy Casper is making a lot of claims here. How am I supposed to know they are credible? You need citations! Luckily, he employs another classic play: citing South African writers from 1899.
Next, Casper employs one of the most base and one of the most winning strategies of all: targeting a public figure we all kind of hate.
Casper spends a lot of time attacking Neil Degrasse Tyson (and power to him) but it doesn’t make the world flat. It’s also boring. It might be more boring than Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I’m not including the quotes or saying any more. But you get the gist – “if Neil DeGrasse Tyson is in a photo with Obama, how can the world be round?”
Finally, Casper just really hates satellites. He spends chapters talking about how shit they are compared to other options. At one point, I wasn’t really sure if I was reading a flat earther book or if I was reading a pitch about airships.
This book is weird.
Casper doesn’t spend much time explaining his vision. He hates NASA, he hates Neil Degrasse Tyson, and he hates satellites. He does a lot of quoting and a lot of repeating himself. In the end, I think he might be saying NASA invented space to cover up their air balloon business. There’s more, including a rowboat in Antarctica, but who cares?
It’s a lot of flat earth talking points mashed into a book with no clear argument. I get the impression that Casper is more riding the coattails of flat earthism than really advancing their discussion points. He’s just trying to make a buck online, as some of the links on his website suggest:
I would not recommend Casper’s book to anyone – flat earther or not. It’s a poor showing in already weak division. That said, I’d like to thank him for one of the greatest one-liners I’ve ever read:
Admiral Fartmore, 2019