Today in inarguably oblique spheroids...

Hey, did you know that Shaquille O'Neal, star of classic Super NES fighting game Shaq-Fu and I don't know, basketball or something, believes that we're living on a flat slab hurtling through the void? You didn't? Well, he does and I think it's important that we point out how not flat the Earth really is:

Pictured: The oblique spheroid upon which we live.
Not Pictured: any room for argument. Like, at all.

Because they're also round? Look,
I don't know where I was going with
that either, but the Earth is round, ok?

I guess now that Trump is President, Earth-roundess denying is kind of like the new 'where's the birth certificate?' because for real, where else are you going to go from there? And Shaq is, of course, not the first person to put forth this theory, in fact he's not even the first basketball player in the last month to do so, which is weird, because you know, basketballs? But since O'Neal is more famous (well, 90's famous) than the other guy, Kyrie Irving, we're talking about him. O'Neal was apparently defending Irving's crazy-town claims on his own podcast when he outed himself as a fan of flat-earth:

"I'm just saying, I drive from Florida to California all the time and it seems flat to me."

Um...ok, so he's a skeptic. There's nothing wrong with that. I've never personally seen the alien Reptoids that secretly walk among us but that doesn't mean they're not everywhere, manipulating world events and preparing us for the Great Culling. 

Speaking of, they come thousands of light years to conquer us in secret and the
best they could do is a mask from Spirit Halloween Store? C'mon guys, get it together.

Tales of murder, disease and genocide,
but nothing about falling off the Earth.

But you're probably wondering how someone could cling to the flat Earth idea when humans have known that the world's a spheroid since like Aristotle. I mean, it's not like there isn't evidence of its roundness. There's the shadow cast on the surface of the moon during an eclipse, there's the curvature observed out the window on a plane if you're high enough (as in altitude...grow up) and contrary to the myths about panicky sailors worrying about sailing over the edge, explorers have been circumnavigating the globe and lived to tell the tale. So how could an otherwise intelligent person believe something so...you know, batshit?

Above: an unrelated picture
of Sean Spicer. For no reason.

Don't know and doesn't matter. The truth is Shaq's inexplicable refusal to accept the Earth's slightly-squashed at the polls, yet inarguably roundish shape will have exactly zero impact on your day, but falsehoods, no matter how preposterous, can not be allowed to stand unchallenged. Now, more than ever, we need to call people out when they repeat things that are demonstrably lies. We don't have to be jerks about it, and there's a line between calling bullshit on bullshit and attacking someone for having beliefs, but it's got to be done. 

Look, I don't mean to pick on Shaq, but if we're going to make it through these particularly insane times where anyone's crazy-town conspiracy theories can be accepted as just as valid as real science as long as they've got a podcast or a YouTube video about it, there can't be any wiggle room when it comes to objective fact. Oh and if you need further evidence of why you shouldn't necessarily listen to people because they're famous, check out the poster from 1996's Kazaam:

The yellow text is kind of hard to read, so allow me to reiterate what it says:
He's A Rappin' Genie-With-An-Attitude...And He's Ready For Slam-Dunk Fun!
That should be reason enough to believe the opposite of everything Shaq believes.