Bad science: The Hollow Earth

[unixronin]

Crank alert!

Yo, people.  If there was a hitherto unknown green, verdant landmass at or near the North Pole holding a polar opening 890 miles across into the interior of the hollow earth, we would have seen it from orbit by now.  (Actually, never mind orbit ... intercontinental flights cross the north polar region every day.)

Remember, kids, just because you saw it on the Internet doesn't mean it's true ... and this is a classic example.  This is so crackpot loony it's not even wrong.

Comments

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

Right or wrong, don't they have as much right to believe whatever they do as you have?

What I find most distressing is how easy it has gotten for us to forget the basic principle of tolerance. We're supposed to protect the rights of the minority - not make fun of them, or try to throw them in a loony bin or strand them on the North Pole.

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

They unquestionably have the right to have their own opinions.

They do not have the right to have their own facts, or the right for their wildly-at-odds-with-facts worldview to be spared from public scorn.

I respect their rights. I'm not going to get in their way, I'm not going to get them involuntarily committed. And, likewise, they must support my rights, including the right to not take them at all seriously, and to do so at a modestly loud volume.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Right or wrong, don't they have as much right to believe whatever they do as you have?

Well, sure.  But if I choose to believe that the world is floating in a bowl of water carried on the back of four elephants standing upon the backs of a stack of turtles extending down to infinity, or that the world is flat (a belief which was first demonstrated to be false 3500¹ years ago, if memory serves), I have little room to complain if others point at me and wonder at my sheer fruitloopery. I'm entitled to my beliefs, but they're equally entitled to their opinions of my beliefs.

[1] Correction — about 2250 years ago; I just looked it up. I was misremembering it as circa 1500BC, but Eratosthenes actually performed his experiment in around 240BC.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

To expand on that a little, it is one thing to hold personal belief in something intangible and unmeasurable (at least by any known means), and to be guided by that belief, particularly if one makes a serious effort to reconcile belief with tangible reality when there is the appearance of conflict between the two. It is quite another to believe in some perfectly tangible and measurable theory about the real physical world that is tangibly, measurably, demonstrably, provably utterly and completely false, and to dismiss its utter inconsistency with almost the entire body of physical science over the past two thousand years by quite unabashedly concluding asserting, with no supporting evidence or logic whatsoever, that the entire last two thousand years of physical science must simply be completely wrong.

The former is worthy of respect; the latter, of amusement and polite ridicule.

[rain-manpnw.livejournal.com]

Yes, but our tolerance of them is a gift - it is not a right that they are entitled to.

The have absolutely every right to be loony. We have absolutely every right to point and laugh. We also have absolutely every right to encourage them in their lunacy, nay, even to enable them in said lunacy, as a means of cleaning out the gene pool.

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

My point, and I still stress it here, is that there is no "them" or "we" - there is only "us". All humanity is part of one pool, no matter what ideas, genetics, or philosophy we contribute to that pool. Whenever you start pointing a finger, you are creating an artificial division that keeps you and the rest of us at odds against each other. We'd be so much better off to stop dividing and start working together.