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.

I'm interested in reading more about this. Please cite some sources where I can follow up

Galileo chose to back the Capernican system despite observed telescopic data at the time supporting the Tychonic system. Is that correct?

Not quite. The observed data (most of which was not telescopic) could not distinguish between a Copernican and Tychonic system. The Church astronomers/theologians argued that choosing between one and the other was a philosophical/religious/metaphysical choice.