Should Flat-Earthers be debated or ignored?

[EgoDeath]

So you don't think there are any trolls in the FE movement?

Well, there was one example of Shaq joking that Earth was flat and he proved that you can't joke about it because FE took it seriously and he had to apologize of spreading misinformation.

But you know how it is: people believe in all sorts of stupid things like Arthur Conan Doyle believed in faeries, or people believe in Sai Baba, creationism, fake Moon landings, Santa etc so I don't see how this in particular would be a joke or more insane compared to that.

Ok, so you didn't answer the question. Mostly because you know the answer.

There ARE trolls in the FE movement and while I'm not making any claims about specific individuals, there certainly are people in the FE movement who want nothing more than to piss off "globetards" or "Nassholes" -  the latter of which is, I hate to admit, a hilarious insult by the way (NASA + assholes), and they probably spend as much time trolling people online as most people do at their full time jobs.

That's the things about trolls; they're losers. They have nothing better to do than sit online 40+ hours a week and piss people off. A large portion of them are probably overweight and physically unattractive, hence why they're much more drawn to online interactions with people than real ones. Whether it's a good thing or not, it's tough to get along while being fat AND ugly, so they retreat to the only domain where they can have SOME kind of advantage over someone.

I don't think you're giving this any credit. I'd be willing to be the trolls in the FE movement are far less numerous than Yon suggests but far more numerous than you imply. I don't by any means think that "most" FEers are trolls, but certainly a large percentage of them are.

And this is all the more reason to ignore the entire movement as a whole, if anything.

I have a friend who actually buys into all of it and it's to the point where a lot of people I know literally won't go over his house anymore or even interact with him on a personal level; a conversation with him lasting more than ten minutes will eventually lead back to a discussion of the flat earth.