Fyi, "chem trails", or "cloud seeding", as it's actually called, is very much real. When you search by it's real name, you'll find programs going back to the 60s. California, for example.

MANY conspiracy theories are based on a shred of truth. UFOs are mostly classified craft(the Blackbird was one, once known as the UFO "Aurora").

Flat Earth was just a group that liked to jokingly entertain crazy ideas for shits and giggles that got coopted by people who took the satire seriously.

We'd do ourselves a great service if we stopped seeing every issue in broad strokes and saw the nuance and context behind it. You're no better with your rant broadly denouncing a wide array of topics in mass.

I always assumed it was something like that. A thought experiment that someone who wasn't "in the know," stumbled upon, latched onto, and created an entire subculture.

As I understood it back in the old times…. The Flat Earth Society was a groups of logical rationalist who got together and for shits and giggles (as well as practicing rational debate) would pick an indefensible argument (eg. the earth is flat) and attempt to use rational arguments to support that indefensible claim.

Basically a rowdy drunk philosophers get together.

Edit: there is no proof of this, just something I read online in the early days of the internet.

Sounds like something someone trying to spread round earth propaganda and discredit the true flat earth would say.