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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (23273)	7/7/2006 10:31:52 PM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541375

I just think there are lots of unreasonable ideas that don't graduate to "flat-earthdom". Actually I used that term deliberately, and in historical context. Back before Columbus, flat was the standard 'educated' view in Western Europe. Nothing unreasonable about it. By the time Magellan left, the more radical thinkers were suspecting the earth might be round. And once the last ship was on the way back, it was really nearly proven. Even though it still seemed a wacky lunacy contradicting all previous teaching to the more, ah, conservative thinkers. And now it's a pose adopted only by a few who think it's somehow clever to deny what 'science' tells us. And I suspect and would lay money that in ten years or so this will be the equivalent position of anyone remaining who denies GW. Hence also why I mentioned that the earth's an oblate spheroid: an analogy for those who complained that calling the earth a sphere was strictly incorrect or did not explain all aspects, therefore this idea must be wrong. OK, a perfect sphere is not quite accurate: but it's still a lot closer than flat, and working from there gets a lot more usable assumptions and will generate better science.

To: TimF who wrote (23273)	7/8/2006 9:15:30 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541375

I just think there are lots of unreasonable ideas that don't graduate to "flat-earthdom". So where do you think the threshold of flat-earthdom is? At what point do we say that proposition A has so far outlived its supportability that it qualifies? Is the threshold a point in a temporal continuum set at, say, a generation or a century? Or a majority continuum set at, say, 90% ? Or a level of proof continuum, set at, say, plausible deniability? Or maybe it's an attitude thing--stubborness, resistance to change, close-mindedness, ignorance, preservation of assets, etc. At what point do you think that the term applies?