Alex WellersteinVerified account

5/ Further almost all of us who fight this issue in the #IDW voluntarily use people’s preferred pronouns outside of politics because kindness & compassion matter. People who despise anti-science activist excesses generally are personally trans compassionate. This is a non issue.

6/ So if this is a non issue, then what is it? It appears to be a deliberate device for smoking out any person w/ high independence & moderate to high intelligence who refuses to knuckle under to authoritarians. The game is revealed: Trans is the shibboleth to smoke out holdouts.

End/ I propose a counter measure. Let me put forward the Galileo Principle: the use of science is an ABSOLUTE defense against bigotry & discrimination by political activists. Science simply trumps activism & ToS. Line in the sand. Full stop. If you agree use #GalileoPrinciple.

Just a note from an actual historian of science: there's an irony in appealing to Galileo here. The popular Galileo is not the actual historical Galileo — the latter is a more complicated figure.

Notably for your invocation of him, Galileo actually lacked the evidence to distinguish between a Copernican and Tychonic worldview (the latter being the one the Church had adopted by the time of his trouble with them). Yet he championed the former exclusively.

It is clear that he did this not because the evidence was strong for it, but because it fit in with his metaphysical/philosophical worldview to have the Sun at the center of the universe. Fair enough, except the Church considered philosophical challenges to be religious ones.

Religious challenges at that time of religious strife and European wars were seen as political challenges. In other words: The Church saw Galileo as appealing to science when he was really making a political argument, and not fessing up to it. And they weren't really wrong.

That you're appealing to the authority of science to justify a blatantly political sentiment and calling it Galileo is... appropriate, I guess? But not probably in the way you mean it to be?