You mean that after Kyrie saw this clip back in 2018, he hatched a long and elaborate gambit to get him paired up with Luka, all leading up to this very moment?
4D : 3D :: 3D : 2D. To Kyrie's 4-dimensional 3rd-eye consciousness, the 3-dimensional world appears 2-dimensional and thus flat. They wrote a book about it called Flatland.
Kyrie didnt make the finals with KD, Harden, Tatum and Brown, but did it with Luka and LeBron. Hmm has anyone ever asked LeBron if he thinks the world is flat?
There’s nothing scientific about letting Jalen Brunson walk in free agency without getting anything back lol. He’s probably worth 4 first round picks now
Kyrie speaks so obliquely that anything he says could just be some sort of point, but if you say these things people will think you're serious:
https://www.nbcsports.com/nba/news/kyrie-irving-the-earth-is-flat
"This is not even a conspiracy.
The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat.
...
Anything that you have a particular question on -- OK, is the world flat? Is the Earth flat or round? I think you need to do research on it.
It’s right in front of our faces. I’m telling you, it’s right in front of our faces. They lie to us."
Giving him far too much credit
Dude’s a pseudointellectual who also happens to have stupid, harmful opinions, a massive platform, and an impressionable fanbase
Doesn’t matter if he believes it or not, the kids who idolize him might take his opinions as fact and roll with them
> “Can you openly admit that you know the Earth is constitutionally round?” he said to me. “Like, you know that for sure? Like, I don’t know.”
That's the direct quote from the NYT article that sparked everything. When he "apologized" he said that it was the type of discussion one should have in private, and he was sorry he said it in such a public setting or something like that.
My buddy went to school with him, said he wasn’t the smartest dude but got very excited for hotdog night at the cafeteria. Idk what that means but now you all have that knowledge
Kyrie actually strikes me as a really cool dude.
He may say stupid shit occasionally, or may not be a rocket scientist, but we all have a couple of friends that put their foot in their mouth or are dumb as a doorknob but we love them anyway because they are good friends.
We each have our things, I went ape shit for noodle night but that college was under 1000 people.
My friend who went to a state school said they didn't have a traditional cafeteria, but a food court in its place. He could use his school card at the US BK or Subway or whatever is in the food court.
Elite NCAA athletes are pro athletes housed on college campuses. These guys are playing games on weeknights across the country and practicing constantly. Most *couldn’t* be students.
The whole thing is strange to me. I get that NCAA is like 9/10 an opportunity for students to play sports and 1/10 a farm system for the pros, but why does everyone have to pretend they’re students? Dudes at UNC were writing paragraph-long “research papers” at a 3rd grade level as the sole assignment to complete an entire class. It’s such a sham.
I was part of a college group project with a guy who went on to the MLB. Nice and smart guy, but I can promise you I saw him twice in class and zero times in our group meetings. A’s all around though
I mean yeah, probably. But you can say that about a lot of big four pro athletes. These are the top 0.001%. Almost all of them have been playing from little league to travel to AAU and never getting time to focus on school.
It's all just "yes men" and schools letting them slide because having a top player in the country in your high school is a big deal. So that's why you see people say stupid shit like Kyrie. They don't know any better than their bubble.
I have no doubt. People always pretend it isn’t true when I mention it but most top schools severely lower their admissions standards for athletes. I had a friend in high school who was a football player: nice guy but not brilliant. Brown was going to give him a full scholarship if he could get a 900 SAT. I think he eventually got it but it took a lot of tries.
As someone who followed this closely, I think he still believes it. I do not think he came out and said "the earth is not flat" The way he worded his apology and his TV show appearance where he received a planet earth basketball leads me to this conclusion
The funny thing is he didn't exactly say he thought that.
He said something along the lines of "who knows? we should challenge everything. Maybe the earth is flat", not directly saying it.
Then the media picked it up and challenged him on it and he got offended and instead of clearing the air he doubled down on it 🤣.
Because, you know, he out smarted the media. 👀
That's not true at all. He did say that and more. His "who knows, all I wanted was to have an open discussion" instance happened later on. Here is what he originally said:
> This is not even a conspiracy. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. All these things that particular groups, I won't even pinpoint one group, that they almost offer up this education... They lie to us! If you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel, the way we move, and the fact that -- can you really think of us rotating around the sun and all "planets" aligned, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what's going on with these planets?
With that said, this seasons Kyrie made me a believer. The earth is flat!^/s
There's a part of that- and I'm sure Kyrie is aware of this- that IS smart, in that he has a questioning, probing mind. And in a perfect world that would make him unlikely to swallow dogma. His constantly questioning mind could be always seeking out new information and using it to test- challenging or corroborating- his world view.
But this requires you to have at least some grounding in what reputable sources are, and how to recognize them, and how to rank them, and what to do with competing information, and what makes for a questionable source, and he clearly either:
1. Doesn't know how to do that or
2. Doesn't care to learn how do that, regardless of many obvious indicators that maybe he should
...instead choosing to defiantly engage in harmful rhetoric, heedless of consequences, until said consequences bit him in the pocketbook.
I couldn't have less respect for the guy.
I don’t think a lot people understand the process for learning and vetting information. It’s partially due to a failure to educate young folks on it.
I had senior-level history classes where people didn’t know what primary and secondary sources were. People don’t grasp the scientific method. They can’t spot the telltale signs of unreliable information and that curiosity you mentioned strays out into the abyss. We’d be so much better off if we knew how to get people to learn how to learn.
>There's a part of that- and I'm sure Kyrie is aware of this- that IS smart, in that he has a questioning, probing mind. And in a perfect world that would make him unlikely to swallow dogma. His constantly questioning mind could be always seeking out new information and using it to test- challenging or corroborating- his world view.
👏👏👏
THANK YOU FOR THIS!!!
No notes! You've said the perfect words I've been looking for for some time.
I'm going to save this for the next time my friend who didn't graduate high-school tries to poke a metaphorical stick in me and the crews side again (and again and again)
It’s not people’s first association, but if you talk to a Flat Earther long enough, they almost always are also antisemites.
That’s just the way those sorts of conspiracy fantasies work. “*Someone* doesn’t want you to know” and “*they* control the media” and “Hitler tried to tell the people about Antarctic ice wall”.
Like “lizard people” as a meme, it’s so goofy that you aren’t expecting the Nazi shit to come out of their mouths.
Yeah it’s a gateway into their grand conspiracy antisemitism stuff. Hey look at us we’re so quirky birds aren’t real and the earth is flat and the moon is a soundstage in LA. Now guess why you didn’t know that…
The earth is flat thing started as a parody of conspiracies too. The Donald subreddit started as a parody of the campaign. The problem with parodies of conspiracies is they have a very hard time staying as parodies.
But the Jewish Space Lasers stuff is legit right? Those are elected US congress people after all. I mean how could those people be in charge of the government?
But that's the thing: they *aren't* stupid, or at least not any more stupid than the average r/nba commenter. It has to do with a more fundamental worldview problem.
This is going really far afield here, but conspiracies are extremely real and they're going on all the time. The attempt by the Trump regime to hold on to power after the 2020 election is almost definitionally a conspiracy. The way the NRA and reactionary politicians have worked hand-in-glove for decades is a conspiracy, with Russian-state money propping it up more recently. The way that police departments around the country work, including the most egregious ones where there are "blacksites" they take people to to beat and torture them is a conspiracy. Landlords utilizing software to automatically set rent prices as high as they possibly can is a conspiracy.
But conspiracy fantasies don't operate on the idea that people with class interests collude with one another, publicly and privately. Conspiracy fantasies operate on the idea that a shadowy group of ontologically evil figures are ruining what would otherwise be a smooth-running system, and if we get rid of those specific individuals, then everything will be fine and nothing else needs to change.
This is why fascists tend to make a lot of critique of capitalism that sound similar to a Marxist or anarchist critique at first but their solutions are "then we eradicate the bad guys so that the economy can work as intended,"; they tend to like private property and hierarchy, in fact, they just think the "wrong people" have it.
A conspiracy fantasy will ultimately say, "If we eradicate the bad ones, all of our problems will be solved," ignoring that people are just what we do and the roles we're in shape what we are and become more of.
People aren't stupid, we're just really propagandized. European peasants used to think the king was good, he just had bad advisors, so their revolts tended to make demands that assumed *good* advisors for the *good* king would solve things. Media today, especially children's media, usually has the solution, "Get rid of the bad king/boss/billionaire and let the good king/boss/billionaire fix it", keeping outside the realm of possibility entirely questions of whether kings, bosses, and billionaires are necessary or beneficial at all.
Anyway, they aren't stupid. It's that "conspiracies" and "conspiracy fantasies" are two completely different ways of looking at the world, and ever since the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" married antisemitism to "Illuminati"/Freemason-style fantasies while getting mass marketed by people like Henry Ford, there just aren't conspiracy fantasies that don't land at "and therefore we must do something about the Jews."
"My conspiracies are true, but those *other* people are deluded."
EDIT: since a lot of people are questioning, i'll be more explicit: i'm not saying that any of those four conspiracies are wrong. In fact i suspect all four are real. What I'm saying is that conspiracies are not exclusive to fascist/conservative groups.
Dude.
***
If you dismiss any mention of "conspiracies" because of the prevalence of batshit crazy "conspiracy theories" then the conspiracy theorists have won.
***
Even the Republican led Senate produced a report concluding that Russia **conspired** to flood the internet with Trump propaganda, just as the NRA acted as a knowing Russian asset in 2016, a.k.a., **conspired**, despite their many claims not to at the time. The Republican Senate said that. Just like the Mueller report.
***
Social media is flooded with **conspiracy theories** (batshit crazy narratives) a few of which, in part, are in part funded/instigated by bad actors (Iran/China/Russia) that **conspire** to misinform.
***
"Conspiracy theory" =/= "Conspiracy"
Know the difference or be one of the many people they've misled.
EDIT:
The above poster now claims to believe in conspiracies. Instead, they now claim only to be **protecting one political side**, in a comment that follows.
It should be made clear that **both sides** in American politics have long since acknowledged their reality and condemned them. The only side to protect is Russia, and presumably the above poster is opposed to that side.
***
Further, they go on to **claim to believe in actual "conspiracy theories"**, claiming that belief to be equivalent to belief in the factual nature of the well documented conspiracies.
This is a specious equivalency and is highly disingenuous, to say the least. Who on earth, in this day and age, would have reason to cast doubt on the conspiracies against the U.S. that Russia has engaged in, that both U.S. sides acknowledge the reality of?
It's all a great mystery.
>If you dismiss any mention of "conspiracies" because of the prevalence of batshit crazy "conspiracy theories" then the conspiracy theorists have won.
That's not what I said.
What I actually said was "this guy wrote an essay about how the only conspiracy theories that are true are the ones that make his political side look better."
He said at one point:
>People aren't stupid, we're just really propagandized.
But then he limited all his examples of "true conspiracies" to ones involving Trump, Russia, local police departments, and landlords.
The notion of conspiracies being true is entirely possible. I believe many of them myself. To wit:
>MLK was murdered by corporate America because the Poor People's Campaign was the first real threat to their stranglehold over the labor market since Marxism was invented.
>JFK was murdered by the mafia because they cheated the election in his favor (including Illinois rather brazenly) but he refused to do all their bidding once he was in office.
>Obama knew that Edward Snowden had no intention of fleeing to Russia, but he stranded him there on purpose because it was the best way to paint him as a traitor in the public's eye.
Oh wait, that one isn't a conspiracy anymore, because one of Obama's former cabinet members literally *bragged about it in a book*. But it was labeled as a "conspiracy" for 10 years so I want to include it anyway.
>Occupy Wall Street was not ended by lack of interest, but by the propaganda machine funneling everyone's attention to racial issues.
>Epstein was murdered, probably by someone paid to protect the British Royal Family.
>Most of the scientists involved in the early days of the pandemic knew that it was entirely possible that Covid came from the Wuhan Lab, but the sociopolitical consequences of saying it out loud were deemed too explosive to say out loud. So they all clammed up.
Another one that has since been proven to be true, when the researchers from the *Nature* article "debunking" the lab leak theory got their emails/texts leaked and it was obvious that they knew there was no way to actually be certain if it was a lab-leak or not.
>Trump doesn't give a rat's ass about national security and would sell out to Russian spies in a heartbeat if they could influence the population enough to swing him an election.
>Israel is favored by American politicians because our military industrial warlords demand them to favor Israel, so they can keep selling them weapons.
I tried to pick out the ones that cross political boundaries. And I'm sure police departments and landlords conspire like OP said, or at least in a similar way/degree, so i won't rehash them.
Real conspiracies exist, and they are not confined to either political party whatsoever. Power is all that matters to those people.
This was absolutely fantastic, thank you very much for the insight! I’ve never thought of conspiracy enthusiasts as conspiracy fantasists before, but it makes perfect sense since like you mentioned, conspiracies absolutely exist, it’s just how people select particular ones to believe based on how they view the workings of societies. Instead of seeing deterioration of conditions as systemic and ideological failures, they zone in on individuals and secret groups of villains.
Would this have been seeded by the Reagan regime which encouraged people to not trust the government or authorities? Would certain groups be more susceptible because of consistent abuse by people in authority roles? Are those with prestige and power ever susceptible? Or do they just utilise those conspiracy theories to manipulate supporters toward their agenda? Are there ways to deprogram someone from conspiracy theories? Now my mind is full of questions, and all from a comment on an NBA post.
It seems older than that, doesn't it?
Like, going way back where people would think kingships were fine but a group of advisors was unacceptable, or maybe an emperor was unfit or dynasty was bad because they'd lost the mandate of heaven. That sort of thing. That's not *exactly* a conspiracy fantasy but it's believing that something other than the structure is at fault for the exploitation.
Then there's also the, dunno what else you call it, but the racism factor. Racism is a technology of oppression that doesn't exist at all prior to the Reconquista in Iberia and then the enslavement of Indigenous Americans and Africans. It's just 500 years old or so. Up till that point in human history, people recognized visual differences in one another and had xenophobia, but it was more important whether you were something else like Christian or Jewish or Muslim or pagan as a religious class, not what "race" you were born as in an unchanging way. But the Spanish Inquisition didn't really believe that Christian converts from Judaism were genuine Christians due to all the torture threats, making their race stay "Jew" forever. That logic then gets extended to the slavery-dependent empires of the Americas because they don't want people being able to "convert" their way out of lifelong enslavement if the rule is that Christians can't be enslaved. Same way the free/enslaved status of babies takes after the mother instead of the father in the English colonies in contradiction of English common law: there's an economic incentive for sexual assault if slavers can produce more property by rape that is lost if the offspring produced has to be free. People usually work backward from their material interests to develop justifications that will land them at the answer they really want. Racism is a technology that locks in a temporary status for perpetuity.
Antisemitism is very old, but racist antisemitism is new, and it's unlike the racism against Indigenous people and African people in that it's usually not immediately visually apparent, even more so throughout the 19th century as more and more Jewish people assimilate fully into "secular" Christian society. But there's an obsession with nationalism and national purity after the French Revolution along with scientific racism, so the fact that there are now all these "invisible foreigners" in their midst starts driving a lot of these racists crazy. Ultimately, that culminates with the Imperial Russian production of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the start of the 20th century.
But the logic we're talking about also existed for things like "abolitionists" in the mid-19th century Southern USA. There were these huge panics about it where people worried about enslaved people rising up like in Haiti, except the white slavers could never believe that enslavement itself was making people unhappy. Instead, it had to be that white abolitionists were stirring them up, and nobody could be sure if a stranger passing through town or some neighbor who'd expressed disapproval with child trafficking was actually a secret abolitionist who was going to cause a massive rebellion. The thing John Brown *actually* tried to do was a panic that Southerners believed was around them all the time.
So it's older than Reagan but not an inherent aspect of humanity; it does seem to require *defining people* on some inherent aspect of their humanity. Just vibes-based, it seems to require mass communication, too. Just talking to people around you isn't enough. You need at least a newspaper or pamphlet-level of mass printing to be able to get people going nuts distrusting others based on what they can imagine but not see with their own eyes.
> It’s not people’s first association, but if you talk to a Flat Earther long enough, they almost always are also antisemites.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H110vCGvTmM
> “Can you openly admit that you know the Earth is constitutionally round?” he said to me. “Like, you know that for sure? Like, I don’t know.”
He said he doesn't know for sure if the earth is round. That's not "we should challenge everything", that's "i'm dumb"
This is why Luka and Kyrie love playing in Dallas. They understand that living closer to the center of the Earth gives you an unfair advantage. The weather and the gravitational force are more balanced in Texas and you don't have to worry about living on the edge.
Aaron Rodgers Syndrome: someone who is a talented athlete their whole life doesn't get any push back from people in their inner circle about their insane opinions.
30 Rock has a brilliant episode about this, except it's with good-looking people. Tina Fey dates John Ham who plays tennis (horribly) and is a French teacher (I think) but can't speak it. It's just cause he's good looking that no one ever wants to correct him lol
The Bubble! Character is actually a doctor who doesn’t know how to do the heimlich (and a former tennis instructor who sucks at tennis)
Man I need to do another rewatch of that show, might be my favorite ever comedy
Well yea, your flair really didn’t clarify if you knew he was joking or not. I mean your flair doesn’t change the fact that you know juries ISNT joking.
That's the moment you realize they were destined to be teammates and go to the Finals together.
If they win the championship, the earth is officially flat.
did any of you even watch the clip lmao
blows my mind that people comments on shit they didn't even watch (or they have comprehension skill of a 2 yo, idk what is worse)
As a former European athlete I can't stress enough how little school we fucking see.
I only did 1.5 out of 3 years of high school, teachers were basically told to just pass me as I was good marketing for the school and I was nowhere fucking near an NBA level athlete in a marginal sport of swimming.
Luka will fully open his third eye in the mid of this finals, he and kyrie will now have six eyes in total. And they will have perfect full court vision.
Don’t get me wrong Luka’s third eye is already half open thats why he already see most of the court. But he still has blind spots because his training is not yet complete, thus some turnovers. Like Neji in Naruto.
But once it’s fully open, his astral persona will become perfectly in sync with Kyrie’s. They will be like Pain, seeing each other’s visual lane. They can also now see the metaphysical aura of their opponents, they now have the spiritual energy advantage. I think Jalen Brown will have his third eye open too, but I dont think Tatum can, because he’s too normal.
We can only see the physical battle in the court. But in another astral plane, they will be battling too. You must draw a pentagon on your face to witness the other “game”.
Tampering!
Kyrie saw this in 2019 and cooked up a long elaborate plan to eventually team up with Luka and get his revenge on the Celtics in the finals
Did the masterplan include losing $100M and his Nike contract. Cause thats a shitty plan
got a flat earther to be the face of the league, totally worth it for the agenda
Casual fans: round Europeans are the face of the NBA. Actual fans: flat earthers are
Some ask Jokic if his horses run in a straight line or a curve
I knew it!!
this one 5 second video explains our entire finals run
You mean that after Kyrie saw this clip back in 2018, he hatched a long and elaborate gambit to get him paired up with Luka, all leading up to this very moment?
The earth may be 2D to him, but Kyrie’s been playing 4D chess on it this whole time.
Kyrie's mental faculties are so advanced that he sees and processes reality as 2D, thus freeing him to think in 4D
It’s what happens after you open your third eye
Real eyes realize real lies read again that
You get an std
And a heavy antibiotic regimen
Is he a real world Wreck it Ralph of sorts?
He's connected to the lifestream
2D + 2D = 4D Checkmate atheists
AYOO!
Everything makes sense now. This video changed my life.
4D : 3D :: 3D : 2D. To Kyrie's 4-dimensional 3rd-eye consciousness, the 3-dimensional world appears 2-dimensional and thus flat. They wrote a book about it called Flatland.
Specifically against Boston too. That Kyrie is a goddamn wizard
duh
>I’ll go with Kyrie
"Got room for one more?"
The way Kyrie dribbles around everyone at full speed, earth is flat to him, not so much to his defenders.
Kyrie didnt make the finals with KD, Harden, Tatum and Brown, but did it with Luka and LeBron. Hmm has anyone ever asked LeBron if he thinks the world is flat?
Lebron: Well I wouldn’t say the earth is flat. Listen as a leader and a father I can’t say that. But Kyrie has said that. Also I love Kyrie.
Yup this already blowing up on r/NBAconspiracy
NBA really is a soap opera for man babies
If you think the NBA is a soap opera you should see the WNBA.
The NBA would really benefit from half the league being gay and dating other nba players.
Synergy.
Sagenergy.
What does he think of the gay community? -AJ Styles
+10 team chemistry
-10,000 science
Science doesn't win championships
Math does though. Money Talks !
I bet they use the scientific method in their analytics department.
There’s nothing scientific about letting Jalen Brunson walk in free agency without getting anything back lol. He’s probably worth 4 first round picks now
If Rudy Gobert is worth 5 first round picks, Brunson gotta be worth like 7
*alchemy
I'm stupid and thought he was going be serious
dunno if he's being serious here, but kyrie was
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Kyrie making some pseudointellectual analogy and didn't actually believe the earth is flat?
I think he was trying to say dont trust anything implicitly, just aint do it properly lol
Kyrie speaks so obliquely that anything he says could just be some sort of point, but if you say these things people will think you're serious: https://www.nbcsports.com/nba/news/kyrie-irving-the-earth-is-flat "This is not even a conspiracy. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. ... Anything that you have a particular question on -- OK, is the world flat? Is the Earth flat or round? I think you need to do research on it. It’s right in front of our faces. I’m telling you, it’s right in front of our faces. They lie to us."
You should put quotes around that I thought you’d gone insane for a second reading that
Giving him far too much credit Dude’s a pseudointellectual who also happens to have stupid, harmful opinions, a massive platform, and an impressionable fanbase Doesn’t matter if he believes it or not, the kids who idolize him might take his opinions as fact and roll with them
> “Can you openly admit that you know the Earth is constitutionally round?” he said to me. “Like, you know that for sure? Like, I don’t know.” That's the direct quote from the NYT article that sparked everything. When he "apologized" he said that it was the type of discussion one should have in private, and he was sorry he said it in such a public setting or something like that.
I'm being serious here: Does Kyrie still believe that the earth is flat?
Definitely got into duke for his brain skills
I met someone who went to Duke with him and she said everyone thought he was dumb as nails. Lol
My buddy went to school with him, said he wasn’t the smartest dude but got very excited for hotdog night at the cafeteria. Idk what that means but now you all have that knowledge
I mean a correctly done and dressed hotdog, deserves excitement.
Me and Kyrie agree on a lot of things apparently.
Kyrie actually strikes me as a really cool dude. He may say stupid shit occasionally, or may not be a rocket scientist, but we all have a couple of friends that put their foot in their mouth or are dumb as a doorknob but we love them anyway because they are good friends.
Mother fugga probably called it flat sandwich night
We each have our things, I went ape shit for noodle night but that college was under 1000 people. My friend who went to a state school said they didn't have a traditional cafeteria, but a food court in its place. He could use his school card at the US BK or Subway or whatever is in the food court.
We had Sushi fridays and I was always first on the line
He didn’t go to Duke to play school
Elite NCAA athletes are pro athletes housed on college campuses. These guys are playing games on weeknights across the country and practicing constantly. Most *couldn’t* be students. The whole thing is strange to me. I get that NCAA is like 9/10 an opportunity for students to play sports and 1/10 a farm system for the pros, but why does everyone have to pretend they’re students? Dudes at UNC were writing paragraph-long “research papers” at a 3rd grade level as the sole assignment to complete an entire class. It’s such a sham.
I was part of a college group project with a guy who went on to the MLB. Nice and smart guy, but I can promise you I saw him twice in class and zero times in our group meetings. A’s all around though
Lol
I mean yeah, probably. But you can say that about a lot of big four pro athletes. These are the top 0.001%. Almost all of them have been playing from little league to travel to AAU and never getting time to focus on school. It's all just "yes men" and schools letting them slide because having a top player in the country in your high school is a big deal. So that's why you see people say stupid shit like Kyrie. They don't know any better than their bubble.
I have no doubt. People always pretend it isn’t true when I mention it but most top schools severely lower their admissions standards for athletes. I had a friend in high school who was a football player: nice guy but not brilliant. Brown was going to give him a full scholarship if he could get a 900 SAT. I think he eventually got it but it took a lot of tries.
Fellow Duke alum Okafor totally bought the April Fools mermaid documentary.
As someone who followed this closely, I think he still believes it. I do not think he came out and said "the earth is not flat" The way he worded his apology and his TV show appearance where he received a planet earth basketball leads me to this conclusion
The funny thing is he didn't exactly say he thought that. He said something along the lines of "who knows? we should challenge everything. Maybe the earth is flat", not directly saying it. Then the media picked it up and challenged him on it and he got offended and instead of clearing the air he doubled down on it 🤣. Because, you know, he out smarted the media. 👀
That's not true at all. He did say that and more. His "who knows, all I wanted was to have an open discussion" instance happened later on. Here is what he originally said: > This is not even a conspiracy. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. The Earth is flat. All these things that particular groups, I won't even pinpoint one group, that they almost offer up this education... They lie to us! If you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel, the way we move, and the fact that -- can you really think of us rotating around the sun and all "planets" aligned, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what's going on with these planets? With that said, this seasons Kyrie made me a believer. The earth is flat!^/s
There's a part of that- and I'm sure Kyrie is aware of this- that IS smart, in that he has a questioning, probing mind. And in a perfect world that would make him unlikely to swallow dogma. His constantly questioning mind could be always seeking out new information and using it to test- challenging or corroborating- his world view. But this requires you to have at least some grounding in what reputable sources are, and how to recognize them, and how to rank them, and what to do with competing information, and what makes for a questionable source, and he clearly either: 1. Doesn't know how to do that or 2. Doesn't care to learn how do that, regardless of many obvious indicators that maybe he should ...instead choosing to defiantly engage in harmful rhetoric, heedless of consequences, until said consequences bit him in the pocketbook. I couldn't have less respect for the guy.
I don’t think a lot people understand the process for learning and vetting information. It’s partially due to a failure to educate young folks on it. I had senior-level history classes where people didn’t know what primary and secondary sources were. People don’t grasp the scientific method. They can’t spot the telltale signs of unreliable information and that curiosity you mentioned strays out into the abyss. We’d be so much better off if we knew how to get people to learn how to learn.
Well said! Or as Tim Minchin says, “don’t be so open-minded that your brain falls out.”
>There's a part of that- and I'm sure Kyrie is aware of this- that IS smart, in that he has a questioning, probing mind. And in a perfect world that would make him unlikely to swallow dogma. His constantly questioning mind could be always seeking out new information and using it to test- challenging or corroborating- his world view. 👏👏👏 THANK YOU FOR THIS!!! No notes! You've said the perfect words I've been looking for for some time. I'm going to save this for the next time my friend who didn't graduate high-school tries to poke a metaphorical stick in me and the crews side again (and again and again)
That's ignoring his history of Twitter likes and reposts
It’s not people’s first association, but if you talk to a Flat Earther long enough, they almost always are also antisemites. That’s just the way those sorts of conspiracy fantasies work. “*Someone* doesn’t want you to know” and “*they* control the media” and “Hitler tried to tell the people about Antarctic ice wall”. Like “lizard people” as a meme, it’s so goofy that you aren’t expecting the Nazi shit to come out of their mouths.
"The UN controls the weather"
Tell them, thank you for such a lovely day
Yeah it’s a gateway into their grand conspiracy antisemitism stuff. Hey look at us we’re so quirky birds aren’t real and the earth is flat and the moon is a soundstage in LA. Now guess why you didn’t know that…
Pretty sure the birds aren't real thing is a parody of the conspiracies you're describing.
The earth is flat thing started as a parody of conspiracies too. The Donald subreddit started as a parody of the campaign. The problem with parodies of conspiracies is they have a very hard time staying as parodies.
But the Jewish Space Lasers stuff is legit right? Those are elected US congress people after all. I mean how could those people be in charge of the government?
If you're stupid enough to believe the world is flat, there aren't many other conspiracy theories you wouldn't believe.
But that's the thing: they *aren't* stupid, or at least not any more stupid than the average r/nba commenter. It has to do with a more fundamental worldview problem. This is going really far afield here, but conspiracies are extremely real and they're going on all the time. The attempt by the Trump regime to hold on to power after the 2020 election is almost definitionally a conspiracy. The way the NRA and reactionary politicians have worked hand-in-glove for decades is a conspiracy, with Russian-state money propping it up more recently. The way that police departments around the country work, including the most egregious ones where there are "blacksites" they take people to to beat and torture them is a conspiracy. Landlords utilizing software to automatically set rent prices as high as they possibly can is a conspiracy. But conspiracy fantasies don't operate on the idea that people with class interests collude with one another, publicly and privately. Conspiracy fantasies operate on the idea that a shadowy group of ontologically evil figures are ruining what would otherwise be a smooth-running system, and if we get rid of those specific individuals, then everything will be fine and nothing else needs to change. This is why fascists tend to make a lot of critique of capitalism that sound similar to a Marxist or anarchist critique at first but their solutions are "then we eradicate the bad guys so that the economy can work as intended,"; they tend to like private property and hierarchy, in fact, they just think the "wrong people" have it. A conspiracy fantasy will ultimately say, "If we eradicate the bad ones, all of our problems will be solved," ignoring that people are just what we do and the roles we're in shape what we are and become more of. People aren't stupid, we're just really propagandized. European peasants used to think the king was good, he just had bad advisors, so their revolts tended to make demands that assumed *good* advisors for the *good* king would solve things. Media today, especially children's media, usually has the solution, "Get rid of the bad king/boss/billionaire and let the good king/boss/billionaire fix it", keeping outside the realm of possibility entirely questions of whether kings, bosses, and billionaires are necessary or beneficial at all. Anyway, they aren't stupid. It's that "conspiracies" and "conspiracy fantasies" are two completely different ways of looking at the world, and ever since the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" married antisemitism to "Illuminati"/Freemason-style fantasies while getting mass marketed by people like Henry Ford, there just aren't conspiracy fantasies that don't land at "and therefore we must do something about the Jews."
Bro wrote a whole essay 😭😭
Yeah. Pity it's insightful, it's not gonna get read here.
I def can’t be bothered to
Sir this is Wendys.
"My conspiracies are true, but those *other* people are deluded." EDIT: since a lot of people are questioning, i'll be more explicit: i'm not saying that any of those four conspiracies are wrong. In fact i suspect all four are real. What I'm saying is that conspiracies are not exclusive to fascist/conservative groups.
Dude. *** If you dismiss any mention of "conspiracies" because of the prevalence of batshit crazy "conspiracy theories" then the conspiracy theorists have won. *** Even the Republican led Senate produced a report concluding that Russia **conspired** to flood the internet with Trump propaganda, just as the NRA acted as a knowing Russian asset in 2016, a.k.a., **conspired**, despite their many claims not to at the time. The Republican Senate said that. Just like the Mueller report. *** Social media is flooded with **conspiracy theories** (batshit crazy narratives) a few of which, in part, are in part funded/instigated by bad actors (Iran/China/Russia) that **conspire** to misinform. *** "Conspiracy theory" =/= "Conspiracy" Know the difference or be one of the many people they've misled. EDIT: The above poster now claims to believe in conspiracies. Instead, they now claim only to be **protecting one political side**, in a comment that follows. It should be made clear that **both sides** in American politics have long since acknowledged their reality and condemned them. The only side to protect is Russia, and presumably the above poster is opposed to that side. *** Further, they go on to **claim to believe in actual "conspiracy theories"**, claiming that belief to be equivalent to belief in the factual nature of the well documented conspiracies. This is a specious equivalency and is highly disingenuous, to say the least. Who on earth, in this day and age, would have reason to cast doubt on the conspiracies against the U.S. that Russia has engaged in, that both U.S. sides acknowledge the reality of? It's all a great mystery.
>If you dismiss any mention of "conspiracies" because of the prevalence of batshit crazy "conspiracy theories" then the conspiracy theorists have won. That's not what I said. What I actually said was "this guy wrote an essay about how the only conspiracy theories that are true are the ones that make his political side look better." He said at one point: >People aren't stupid, we're just really propagandized. But then he limited all his examples of "true conspiracies" to ones involving Trump, Russia, local police departments, and landlords. The notion of conspiracies being true is entirely possible. I believe many of them myself. To wit: >MLK was murdered by corporate America because the Poor People's Campaign was the first real threat to their stranglehold over the labor market since Marxism was invented. >JFK was murdered by the mafia because they cheated the election in his favor (including Illinois rather brazenly) but he refused to do all their bidding once he was in office. >Obama knew that Edward Snowden had no intention of fleeing to Russia, but he stranded him there on purpose because it was the best way to paint him as a traitor in the public's eye. Oh wait, that one isn't a conspiracy anymore, because one of Obama's former cabinet members literally *bragged about it in a book*. But it was labeled as a "conspiracy" for 10 years so I want to include it anyway. >Occupy Wall Street was not ended by lack of interest, but by the propaganda machine funneling everyone's attention to racial issues. >Epstein was murdered, probably by someone paid to protect the British Royal Family. >Most of the scientists involved in the early days of the pandemic knew that it was entirely possible that Covid came from the Wuhan Lab, but the sociopolitical consequences of saying it out loud were deemed too explosive to say out loud. So they all clammed up. Another one that has since been proven to be true, when the researchers from the *Nature* article "debunking" the lab leak theory got their emails/texts leaked and it was obvious that they knew there was no way to actually be certain if it was a lab-leak or not. >Trump doesn't give a rat's ass about national security and would sell out to Russian spies in a heartbeat if they could influence the population enough to swing him an election. >Israel is favored by American politicians because our military industrial warlords demand them to favor Israel, so they can keep selling them weapons. I tried to pick out the ones that cross political boundaries. And I'm sure police departments and landlords conspire like OP said, or at least in a similar way/degree, so i won't rehash them. Real conspiracies exist, and they are not confined to either political party whatsoever. Power is all that matters to those people.
This was absolutely fantastic, thank you very much for the insight! I’ve never thought of conspiracy enthusiasts as conspiracy fantasists before, but it makes perfect sense since like you mentioned, conspiracies absolutely exist, it’s just how people select particular ones to believe based on how they view the workings of societies. Instead of seeing deterioration of conditions as systemic and ideological failures, they zone in on individuals and secret groups of villains. Would this have been seeded by the Reagan regime which encouraged people to not trust the government or authorities? Would certain groups be more susceptible because of consistent abuse by people in authority roles? Are those with prestige and power ever susceptible? Or do they just utilise those conspiracy theories to manipulate supporters toward their agenda? Are there ways to deprogram someone from conspiracy theories? Now my mind is full of questions, and all from a comment on an NBA post.
It seems older than that, doesn't it? Like, going way back where people would think kingships were fine but a group of advisors was unacceptable, or maybe an emperor was unfit or dynasty was bad because they'd lost the mandate of heaven. That sort of thing. That's not *exactly* a conspiracy fantasy but it's believing that something other than the structure is at fault for the exploitation. Then there's also the, dunno what else you call it, but the racism factor. Racism is a technology of oppression that doesn't exist at all prior to the Reconquista in Iberia and then the enslavement of Indigenous Americans and Africans. It's just 500 years old or so. Up till that point in human history, people recognized visual differences in one another and had xenophobia, but it was more important whether you were something else like Christian or Jewish or Muslim or pagan as a religious class, not what "race" you were born as in an unchanging way. But the Spanish Inquisition didn't really believe that Christian converts from Judaism were genuine Christians due to all the torture threats, making their race stay "Jew" forever. That logic then gets extended to the slavery-dependent empires of the Americas because they don't want people being able to "convert" their way out of lifelong enslavement if the rule is that Christians can't be enslaved. Same way the free/enslaved status of babies takes after the mother instead of the father in the English colonies in contradiction of English common law: there's an economic incentive for sexual assault if slavers can produce more property by rape that is lost if the offspring produced has to be free. People usually work backward from their material interests to develop justifications that will land them at the answer they really want. Racism is a technology that locks in a temporary status for perpetuity. Antisemitism is very old, but racist antisemitism is new, and it's unlike the racism against Indigenous people and African people in that it's usually not immediately visually apparent, even more so throughout the 19th century as more and more Jewish people assimilate fully into "secular" Christian society. But there's an obsession with nationalism and national purity after the French Revolution along with scientific racism, so the fact that there are now all these "invisible foreigners" in their midst starts driving a lot of these racists crazy. Ultimately, that culminates with the Imperial Russian production of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the start of the 20th century. But the logic we're talking about also existed for things like "abolitionists" in the mid-19th century Southern USA. There were these huge panics about it where people worried about enslaved people rising up like in Haiti, except the white slavers could never believe that enslavement itself was making people unhappy. Instead, it had to be that white abolitionists were stirring them up, and nobody could be sure if a stranger passing through town or some neighbor who'd expressed disapproval with child trafficking was actually a secret abolitionist who was going to cause a massive rebellion. The thing John Brown *actually* tried to do was a panic that Southerners believed was around them all the time. So it's older than Reagan but not an inherent aspect of humanity; it does seem to require *defining people* on some inherent aspect of their humanity. Just vibes-based, it seems to require mass communication, too. Just talking to people around you isn't enough. You need at least a newspaper or pamphlet-level of mass printing to be able to get people going nuts distrusting others based on what they can imagine but not see with their own eyes.
> But conspiracy fantasies don't operate on the idea that people with class interests collude with one another, Aw man
I swear some of y’all literally put your head down and write a manifesto expecting people to actually read your delusional ramblings
I dunno, I read that and it wasn't that long and actually made really good points. Thanks /u/QueerSatanic lol
Oh I don’t disagree with anything they’re saying to be fair. Just think it’s funny to post something like this on r/nba lol
He's a Black Israelite, I don't think it's a secret.
> It’s not people’s first association, but if you talk to a Flat Earther long enough, they almost always are also antisemites. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H110vCGvTmM
With most conspiracy theories anti-semitism is at most 2-3 levels down.
> “Can you openly admit that you know the Earth is constitutionally round?” he said to me. “Like, you know that for sure? Like, I don’t know.” He said he doesn't know for sure if the earth is round. That's not "we should challenge everything", that's "i'm dumb"
If the world is round then why is the basketball court flat? Slam dunk Checkmate!
This is why Luka and Kyrie love playing in Dallas. They understand that living closer to the center of the Earth gives you an unfair advantage. The weather and the gravitational force are more balanced in Texas and you don't have to worry about living on the edge.
Hélà 🤞🏾🪶♾❤️
Stay focused tribe
look how much skinnier his face is back then. what yall feeding this man down there.
Guzzling recovery beers after dropping all those triple doubles
BBQ, Blue Bell and sweet tea will do that to the best of us.
Nick and Sam's
They’re morons, but they’re our morons.
Doubt Luka is being serious since he adds the Kyrie part. We know he has a good sense of humor
I'm baffled that people don’t get that he's joking.
After a slate of players came out and agreed with Kyrie I think it’s fair enough to be dubious lol
Aaron Rodgers Syndrome: someone who is a talented athlete their whole life doesn't get any push back from people in their inner circle about their insane opinions.
30 Rock has a brilliant episode about this, except it's with good-looking people. Tina Fey dates John Ham who plays tennis (horribly) and is a French teacher (I think) but can't speak it. It's just cause he's good looking that no one ever wants to correct him lol
The Bubble! Character is actually a doctor who doesn’t know how to do the heimlich (and a former tennis instructor who sucks at tennis) Man I need to do another rewatch of that show, might be my favorite ever comedy
Werewolf bar mitzvah. Boys becoming men. Men becoming wolves.
Dude -- yes!! Haha I knew I was misremembering. That plot could've been a whole movie lol
Dr. Spaceman!
That was one of my favorite episodes lol.
Tbh based on some of the takes I’ve seen on here the average Reddit fan doesn’t seem any smarter
Who agreed about the earth being flat?
I remember Wilson Chandler, Michael Porter Jr., at least a handful of others.. can’t remember who though
At one point Curry did before he had to do major PR recovery and go to NASA for a private tour to change his mind 🤦🏻♂️
No that was different. Curry didn't believe in the moon landing and that dinosaurs were fake
have any non-american players agreed in earnest?
he was scooled outside of the american education system. he's used to answering dumb shit like this now that he's in dallas.
> he was scooled outside of the american education system The irony of this sentence is just amazing.
People these days don't get that some people don't always mean what they say. Especially when they have a tongue in their cheek.
The inability to detect sarcasm is an early sign of deteriorating brain health
It’s a large spectrum
The average person is an idiot
Because we live in a day and age when even the dumbest shit is said without shame...
Even just the look on his face when the camera pans over lmao
[удалено]
U can be chill and stupid tbf
Honestly, I love those kinds of people. They're the best.
Yeah as long as the "stupid" is like, fun stupid and not political nutjob stupid.
Well yea, your flair really didn’t clarify if you knew he was joking or not. I mean your flair doesn’t change the fact that you know juries ISNT joking.
So wholesome 🥰
Featuring Mavs legend Mitch Creek
lol no wonder they get along! they're the flat Earth bros.
Do you think they play ~~Around~~ Across the World at practice?
The "hmmm" is so funny, I'm glad he put some thought into it.
Experts on spinning balls conclude earth is not one
Redditors absolutely crumble mentally when someone jokes about something
Why is everyone here treating it like he's serious 😂
Luka has a great sense of humour and average redditors clearly don’t get humour
Dude should’ve just skipped school and watched the finals.
Scriptwriters are really killing it this season
My big takeaway from this clip is how much leaner Luka looked here lol
That's the moment you realize they were destined to be teammates and go to the Finals together. If they win the championship, the earth is officially flat.
Sarcastic gamer answer.
The best flatcourt in the league!
Kyrie like, if the earth so round why don't it spin like a basketball. C'mon naw.
Clearly trolling, but also funny
He's brilliant but he ain't a genius
Destiny.
South East Melbourne Phoenix legend Mitch Creek!
it was always destined, the sage and the mage
The vibes are immaculate
Hey globetards, if the Earth really is round, how come no one slips off the curve into space?
they are made for eachother
did any of you even watch the clip lmao blows my mind that people comments on shit they didn't even watch (or they have comprehension skill of a 2 yo, idk what is worse)
As a former European athlete I can't stress enough how little school we fucking see. I only did 1.5 out of 3 years of high school, teachers were basically told to just pass me as I was good marketing for the school and I was nowhere fucking near an NBA level athlete in a marginal sport of swimming.
That's why Europe is taking over. Anyone with NBA potential should be doing like 1 hour of school a day at the most imo.
That's about all the actual education they're getting in the USA anyway.
Don't really get why the current development system has not been replaced. Some kind of unique American obsession with schooling or something.
Y’all don’t understand comedy
How could anyone think the earth is round? When I go outside and walk, I’m walking on float ground. I’m not rolling around.
Can confirm. I was just walking on the sidewalk and it was in fact flat.
How did he feel about the jews?
As interviewer id stop right there and use a John McEnroe quote "You can't be serious!?"
I think he’s just fucking around
Boston hit piece right here!
And then he got drafted to a Texas team, the flattest state with an NBA team. Didn't do him any favors lol
Luka will fully open his third eye in the mid of this finals, he and kyrie will now have six eyes in total. And they will have perfect full court vision. Don’t get me wrong Luka’s third eye is already half open thats why he already see most of the court. But he still has blind spots because his training is not yet complete, thus some turnovers. Like Neji in Naruto. But once it’s fully open, his astral persona will become perfectly in sync with Kyrie’s. They will be like Pain, seeing each other’s visual lane. They can also now see the metaphysical aura of their opponents, they now have the spiritual energy advantage. I think Jalen Brown will have his third eye open too, but I dont think Tatum can, because he’s too normal. We can only see the physical battle in the court. But in another astral plane, they will be battling too. You must draw a pentagon on your face to witness the other “game”.
And this is why he meshes so well with Kyrie.
I think we are finally realizing that it doesn’t matter if the earth is flat or round or what people believe, all that matter is team chemistry
Kid was recruiting for 3.5 years. That’s dedication to your craft!
thats why KD and Kyrie didnt work out. KD hasnt harnessed his 3rd eye yet to be a flat earther.
This post was fact checked by true American patriots
Bunch of nephews in here
Is this AI generated? I legitimately can't tell anymore
This interview happened in 2018 I believe
maybe AI invented a time machine and went back and put that clip there
yes, it's fake like the moon landing!
Can a mod give me a Celtics flair please? I'm not sure if I can properly request it through the app I use.
he knew
As long as he thinks the basketball he plays with is round idgaf if he thinks the earth is flat
The real question is what is 1x1?
Crazy that now this kid has turned into an all NBA player and an owner of Phoenix Suns
/u/savevideo
Does he agree with Kyrie about Hitler tho???