Kyrie Irving went to Duke, one of the most academically rigorous and prestigious universities in the United States and he also thinks the Earth is flat.
When it comes to facts that you think are settled, since, you know, for the last 2,600 years or so, we really can’t take anything for granted anymore. We live in the Era of Bullshit and we’re all stepping in it every day. This weekend Cleveland Cavaliers point guard Kyrie Irving messed up our shoes, espousing his theory that the Earth isn’t a spherical planet orbiting around a star in a planetary system, but instead a flat plane, a pancake-shaped disc or square (he wasn’t specific) suspended aloft in the ether, with every human striding upon it flatly and, presumably, trying not to fall off the edges at any point.
“The Earth is flat,” Irving told his teammates Richard Jefferson and Channing Frye on their podcast this week. “…The fact that in our lifetimes that there are so many holes and so many pockets in our history … History is history, and it’s happened long before us, and it’s going to happen after us, and it always repeats itself somehow, in some way,” Irving said. “All these things that they keep giving to us, all this information, I’m just saying that these things that used to put me in fear, it makes you not want to question it naturally, because of how much information you actually can figure out and how much information there actually is out there. It’s crazy. Anything that you have a particular question on, ‘Okay, 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.”
Kyrie Irving shouldn't get to use a round ball; he should have to throw a frisbee.
— Chezzy (@JeremyDerifield) February 19, 2017
Who is “they,” you might ask? Who is this nefarious group who has somehow fooled all of humanity into thinking the Earth isn’t a piece of cardboard that God uses for breakdancing? You already know the answer. It’s “the man.”
“For what I’ve known for many years and what I’ve been taught is that the Earth is round,” Irving said. “But 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 align, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what’s going on with these ‘planets’ and stuff like this?”
Now, what would “the man” have to gain by forcing this whole “spherical Earth” nonsense on an unsuspecting public? And why is it that no scientist, or expert, or human that owns a telescope has discovered this? What information does the braintrust of Irving, Rabber B.o.B. and Tila Tequila have at their disposal that the rest of us have missed?
As conspiracies go, this one has lasted a good, long time. Since about 600 or so B.C., in fact, when the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who probably couldn’t sink a 20-foot jump shot to save his life, first postulated that the Earth was a sphere.
The Earth, by Kyrie Irving. https://t.co/5tv0573viO pic.twitter.com/hyv0dvYlgT
— Kotaku (@Kotaku) February 19, 2017
By the time Plato rolled around in 400ish B.C. and established his school in Athens, the Earth’s “roundness” was just a fact. There are no remaining records of how many NCAA Tournaments Plato U made, but probably none.
When pressed for proof, Plato’s student Aristotle brought up that one thing he noticed, and you know, call him nuts if you want, is that the shadow of the Earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse was round. Round like a basketball that I can all but guarantee Aristotle was unable to dunk.
Not only did people know the Earth was a sphere 600 years before the birth of Christ, they actually correctly predicted how big the Earth was. This time it was a dude named Eratosthenes who lived in Libya in 240 B.C. He calculated it by using the angle of a shadow during the summer solstice in the cities of Syene and Alexandria. In Syene, the sun was directly overhead and cast no shadow. In Alexandria, at the exact moment of the solstice, it did cast a shadow. It turns out that Eratosthenes was so close, he was off by just about two percent. But how many free throws could he hit in a row? Maybe two, at best.
Kyrie Irving be like.. pic.twitter.com/E7p6INbbnN
— BLACK ADAM SCHEFTER (@B1ackSchefter) February 19, 2017
But Kyrie Irving knows all that 2,600 years of common human knowledge and history is just “the man” telling lies.
“Question things, but even if an answer doesn’t come back, you’re perfectly fine with that, because you were never living in that particular truth,” Irving said. “There’s a falseness in stories and things that people want you to believe and ultimately what they throw in front of us.”
Uh huh. Yeah. The man went to Duke for God’s sake.
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