Flat Earth Ibrox Fans Will Never Understand The Celtic Supporter Mind-Set.

There is a segment of the Ibrox support which stands alone above all other football fans in Europe. They are unique. They are special, they are different, because they are impervious to fact, logic and reason. Reason is the worst one. It means that when you try to talk sense to them, when you try to present them with evidence they entrench.

And I realised that they remind me of the Flat Earthers.

I find the Flat Earthers hilarious. There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there, but none of them can be as just stone stupid as the one they subscribe to and some of the variations of it are even more ridiculous than just the idea that Earth is not round. Some of them believe the planet is a flat surface inside a dome and that it is surrounded by a wall of ice.

Ibrox fans say a lot of things like that. The SFA is biased against their club. The media is biased against their club. The Grand Conspiracy Of The Unseen Fenian Hand has to be, after the Flat Earth theory, the craziest and most deluded idea ever debated in public. The SFA, a national bank, the government in Holyrood, the government in Westminster (run by different parties), HMRC and others all got together to harm them, because all were run from Celtic Park.

If you said that to most normal, sane people they would laugh. For a long time. They would bust a gut at how utterly ridiculous this idea is, in the same way I want to laugh when I am subjected to the Flat Earth theory in all of its mad forms. It does not matter than you can disprove every aspect of this, and present them with the proof of that … they believe it in absolutely.

Let me tell you a little bit about how this stuff works. This might help you make sense out of the lunacy. This is how people can completely ignore evidence and continue to believe crazy things.

The evidence in favour of the spherical earth is so overwhelming that it really can’t be properly contradicted. All modern navigation equipment is configured on that basis; that seems to work pretty well, right? It’s been proved mathematically. It’s been demonstrated in all those pictures of a spherical planet, where you can see the shape clearly, which have been taken from space. In fact, if you fly above 35,000 feet the curve is actually discernible to the naked eye. One rather glaring hole in their theory is that you can fly from Australia to Chile (7000 miles) in 12 hours. If the earth was flat, as they claim, you would need to fly over the rest of the global landmass to get from one point to the other, which is 17,000 miles instead … and no plane is getting you there.

Yet a handful of people have been determined, for years, to prove that the earth is actually flat. They believe that all the evidence contradicting this is fabricated. They believe there’s a conspiracy involving governments, scientists, the avionics industry, that NASA itself was set up as a cover to “hide the truth.” None of them can give you a solid reason why all these people would want to conceal the shape of the earth … it makes no sense at all.

And so, some of them are determined – absolutely determined – to prove the alternative. Yes, they want to prove their “flat planet surrounded by ice inside a dome” idea. And their “scientists” have worked hard on doing this … I am not joking. I wish I was.

Now bear in mind, this idea arose in the 50’s, died out in the 70’s and ought never to have reared its head again. Except for one thing … and this will kill you. The invention of the internet. The tool that allows us to share news and discuss our club every day of the week has also resulted in the proliferation of wild ideas, and the rebirth of some crazy ones.

I mean, it’s where the Survival and Victim Lies came from, right?

In 2009, Flat Earth went global. Unfortunately. And it hooked people across the world. All of them just like the foaming at the mouth section of the Ibrox fan-base; crazy people looking for validation and finding it in believing they were privy to some hidden “truth” the rest of us were too dumb to see.

It’s the tribe thing again; the need to belong.

In 2017, the Flat Earthers had a hero. Or they thought they did.

One of their own, a guy called Mike Hughes, said he would check out this idea about seeing the curve of the earth for himself by building a rocket. He crowdfunded the cost; $20,000 dollars. He got his money from other “like minds” and sought about getting it into the air.

The first attempt failed because he was on public land without a permit. Which turned out to be lucky for him, as his crack team had forgotten to “arm” the parachute on the rocket. On his second try he got to 2000 feet. Which is alright, I guess, except it was too low.

Remember when I said that if you can reach 35,000 feet you can actually see it for yourself?

Well you can do that cheaper, and with less chance of catastrophic failure, than with a $20,000 rocket.

He could have just got on a plane … for about $150.

Turns out that he was a daredevil rocket enthusiast who “used” the Flat Earther’s to fund his joyride. It’s like that article I wrote earlier on the Ibrox fans and their new strip; as one of the great poker players once said, “It’s immoral to let a sucker keep his money.”

(Mike Hughes died in an accident when one of his experimental rockets launched him into the sky … and the parachute malfunctioned. Another thing with the Sevconuts; they never do learn from their past mistakes.)

In 2018, a group of “scientists” tried to prove the theory using lasers. Science tells us the earth spins on an axis of 360 degrees in a day; that’s 15 degrees of rotation per hour. So, one of them spent another five-figure sum on a laser gyroscope. They left it on for an hour. Guess what? It measured 15 degrees. Rather than accept this number, they came up with a lot of fancy explanations for what might have thrown it off. So, they then spent even more money to buy a Zero Gauss Chamber; this is like a fully enclosed piece of equipment which creates a non-static environment; they stuck the laser gyroscope in that, waited and hour … and got 15 degrees.

And they then abandoned the experiment until they could “work out” what they were doing wrong. Get that. Instead of looking at that 15-degree number and accepting what most people would have at that point – that they had, in fact, inadvertently proved what the rest of us know to be true – they dismissed their own results as tainted and tried to figure out how to create an environment which would give them the ones they wanted.

This pattern repeats itself over and over again with them, just as it does with the Sevconuts. They are digging through old games right now on their forums, looking for the proof that refs have conspired to help Celtic for eons. Their explanation for not coming up with it? Not that it doesn’t exist, but that it did exist and does but that it has been supressed. That it’s been removed from the archives like Winston Smith tossing old newspaper clippings down the memory hole.

Of course, when we point out that the SFA is historically biased against Celtic, and that we can prove this with many pieces of evidence, they ignore it, just as the Flat Earthers ignore everything you offer them to demonstrate how dumb they actually are.

This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect; it is actually their ignorance that convinces them that they have expertise.

It’s only when you look into the areas which contradict what you think you know that you start to get the education that would serve you well.

As long as you don’t know what it is that you don’t know you can convince yourself of anything.

The old analogy is of two people learning Spanish. One gets much further than the other but bizarrely doesn’t have the confidence of the one who knows less, because the one who knows less doesn’t know all the subtleties and nuances which go into learning a language, about inflection and emphasis and all the little tricks you only learn as an advanced user, and so his handful of words, whilst spoken confidently are not spoken competently … the other guy labours much more, because he knows where his knowledge still has gaps and where he still comes up short, but his own practical use of Spanish is miles more sophisticated.

Liz Truss is a fascinating example of The Dunning-Kruger effect in action. Her conviction that she could be Prime Minister and her unquestioning belief in her own ideas – no matter how barmy – caused her to reject expert analysis and even the people around her who she would have classed as friends and confidantes … her own husband told her that it would end in disaster, so sure he was that she was wildly overestimating her own abilities.

I watched a video recently of some of the Flat Earth morons discussing their theories, and one of them tried to actually use Newtonian physics in his argument by claiming that planetary rotation would mean that if you fired a bullet at a target 90 seconds away that it would miss that target by 25 miles because in the time it took to get there the whole surface of the planet would be that distance from where it was when you fired the gun.

It’s moronic. There is so much ignorance in that one assertion alone that it blows your mind.

I have seen Ibrox fans do this with the Victim Lie. They also present it whenever they talk about how we should face “sporting sanctions” if the club reaches an out of court settlement with the Boys Club victims. They point to their own “sporting sanctions” and demand parity.

But this is talking about two different things and not comprehending that they are different. Newtonian physics actually disproves the case of the moving target; the Flat Earther’s fail to comprehend that the planet, the bullet, the gun and the target are all moving at the same time in the same direction as the planet revolves around the sun.

The Ibrox club faced sporting sanctions because they had 1) entered administration 2) wanted to reform as a new Rangers but needed to settle all of Rangers debts before that would be allowed 3) eeerrr … that’s it for sporting sanctions.

The second of those isn’t even a sanction in itself but something done to satisfy football debts rather than dump those with the others.

In fact, Rangers didn’t suffer any sporting penalties except for the standard administration points deduction.

They never were “relegated”.

They cheated football and all the rest of the clubs and never even lost the trophies and titles which resulted from the cheating. Ibrox still claims those titles and trophies to this day, so what actual meaningful sanctions were there?

Even if Celtic did everything these Peepul have been saying for years, even if we’d run the Boys Club, knew everything that happened in it and covered it up … even if our previous boards were the monsters they claim (remember, all this happened decades ago) that had zero impact on Scottish football results. None. There was no effect on the sport itself. Not one game was decided by it.

So, sporting sanctions for what? Just because they stamp their feet?

They are convinced these things correlate.

They will not accept any competing argument, no matter how sensible, no matter how based in fact or reason. If you’ve ever watched a Flat Earther on YouTube (I subjected myself to it, believe it or not, and I laughed my ass off all the way through it) you’ll see exactly the same minds at work. Watching them trying to explain why objects fall without referencing gravity is as hilarious as listening to a Sevconian try to explain the method by which Rangers was ‘relegated’ from the league, in stark contrast to what even they know actually happened.

It is easy to work out what happened to their club; we all accept these things as facts. They ran out of money, went into administration, couldn’t cut costs enough to satisfy their debts and HMRC made it clear that anyone who bought the assets would be liable, at some point, for the Big Tax Bill, and so nobody did.

They went out of business. Their club was removed not only from the league but Scottish football itself. Charles Green bought the assets. He lobbied to be able to put a team calling itself Rangers into the system. The governing bodies flirted with the idea of putting the NewCo in the top flight but needed permission from the clubs. The clubs said no. They tried to put them into the second tier. The clubs in the Scottish League said no. They did however permit the club into the league, but in the lowest tier of the professional game.

That’s easy to comprehend, it’s backed by the facts, it explains everything.

Like the science behind the spherical earth, it all adds up and it all makes sense and it doesn’t require a bunch of mad theories to make sure it stands.

For God’s sake, we watched it happen.

Some of us documented every bit of it.

And yet for years they have told us that what we thought we saw didn’t happen at all, that they were “relegated”, which there was no mechanism for, and that Scottish football allowed that to take place.

It’s a lot of denial of reality. But these Peepul do it every single day.

When I told my mate I was doing this piece he laughed, and said he would send me something. And he did, and it was worth including; it was a Flat Earther actually trying to convince our own Leigh Griffiths to consider the theory. It might be one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a while, so I’m sticking it at the bottom of the article.

(The “bendy water” claim is so ludicrous I almost bust a gut laughing at it. They’ve never heard of “sea level”? I’ll give them a clue; it works the same as “flight level”; if you’re flying at 37,000 feet – at which you can actually see the curve, don’t forget – that stays constant even though you are traveling around that curve. These people are full-on nuts.)

The media thinks we think the same way they do. This is at the centre of the “Old Firm” nonsense. That we’re two heads of the same coin.

What rubbish. If Celtic fans believed in some of the demonstrable nonsense Ibrox fans do I would be calling them out on it every single day. I do this with those who believe that our club conspired with them to let a version of Rangers into the league, and that we’ve thrown them titles to keep them in business … it’s rubbish, it’s obvious rubbish. We couldn’t have done it if we tried, short of writing the cheques to them ourselves, which we did not.

We deal in observable reality here. There are a handful of our fans who think our whole summer was a set-up to throw Ibrox the league; we reckoned without The Mooch and his stupidity then. We could have hired a lesser manager than Brendan Rodgers.

The less controversial explanation is that our board is led by arrogant idiots who literally think they know football as well as he does, and that every bit of our success over the last few years was down to them and their own genius, and not so much the guys in the dugout … and I believe that because it’s consistent with their prior behaviour.

Do we believe in refereeing conspiracies in Scotland? Yeah, because Andrew Dallas dad was the head of refs and was sacked for a sectarian email, and John Beaton drinks in an Ibrox fan bar and has a supporters club named after him and others have done the Sash Bash circuit after they left. We believe it because people like Alan Morrison have actually produced demonstrable evidence to prove the “pattern of assistance.”

We know the SFA has had an anti-Celtic and pro-Ibrox bias because of Farry and because of Gordon Smith and because we know Campbell Ogilvie signed the first EBT letters and then pretended that neither he nor the SFA had even known they existed.

We are not the same as they are. We do not think the same way. We are not seeking refereeing reform to flip things our way (why would we bother if we were secretly running everything?); we want a level playing field where things are out in the open and where we can trust people. And we want that although we win titles and trophies again and again and again … we don’t actually need reform to keep slapping the Ibrox club all over Glasgow.

We want the game straight. We want it fair. For everyone. We don’t want biased, pro-Celtic officials any more than we want pro-Ibrox ones. But self-centred people who never think about anything but themselves can never understand those who don’t think beyond their own selfish interests.

So, they believe what they want to. Like the Flat Earthers, impervious to reason.

On my trip through this lunacy, I came across a weird fact; the Flat Earther Society found a travel company that was willing to take their ideas seriously, and was organising a trip right to the edge of the world so that they could visit “the ice wall.” And a lot of them were getting all geared up to go. They seemed to think this was a breakthrough.

But just as Mike Hughes built his rocket on their money, this was just a gigantic corporation that saw a chance to make a few bucks at the expense of their stupidity. Because I’m willing to bet that the travel firm had done its due diligence and so knew full well that one of the core beliefs these people have is that the giant ice wall itself is protected by armed soldiers from all the countries which signed up to the Antarctic Treaty in 1959 … and so even if it existed, they wouldn’t be able to sail within hundreds of miles of it anyway.

The thing is, they all know that themselves.

So why would anyone travel on that boat?

Well it would have been a nice piece of positive reinforcement for those who spent a fortune going to see it and didn’t get the chance.

Wasted money? No, just more proof of the Grand Conspiracy at work.

Never getting to see the thing that would have proved you right … actually proves you right?

Fools. And their money. And oh how easily parted from it they are.

I will not labour the point I raised earlier about Castore, who marketed them a bespoke product which was mass produced in Turkish warehouses … but I will say that putting a party tent outside Ibrox prior to our visit there was moronic and ego-driven, and that offering season tickets for the next campaign, in early March, should have backfired massively.

But they sold them out. Go figure.

They were top of the league at the time though, and with things still to be decided their board must have figured there was no better time.

From that lofty point the Ibrox fans could only see the flat-lands stretching out before them, and if there was a curve in the earth, well, it wasn’t visible on the horizon anyway, so why let it get in the way of their 56 fantasies?

Oh man, it is going to be so good if we retain this title.