I think the difference is as much as I think Rugby is boring, I wouldn't bother going on to a Rugby forum to tell everyone how stupid they are and how rubbish the sport they follow is. [...] The idea that anyone would believe in a flat earth [...] is mind-blowing to me.
I don't like football but I don't waste my time saying so. I wonder why you do about FE?
I'm not hugely into golf but I did watch the last day of the Masters - Woods' win was amazing and it was a great day of sport.
I loved it. But yeah, you could say "A man used a stick to hit a ball into a hole and everyone lost their shit, how ridiculous".
You can deconstruct any sport like this.
But while there are some sports I like, others I don't, sport is, in general, very popular. Over a billion people watched the last World Cup Final.
You might not like it, maybe you don't understand why people do but you are aware that it is a very popular sport.
Till recently I wasn't even aware that FE was a popular sport, so to speak.
And, fun fact: taste in sport/music/tv/films is subjective. The shape of the earth is not subjective. It is what it is.
Scientific ideas are not subjective. They can be tested. For example, Galileo said that objects of different masses fall at the same rate on earth (I know I've expressed that poorly, please don't nit pick!).
And he was right. That is not my opinion. It can be tested.
Of course, ideas may evolve over time as we learn more - two cannonballs of different mass may hit the ground at the same time if you drop them at the same time, a hammer and a feather do not. Other forces are at work on earth which don't have a significant effect on cannonballs but do on feathers. So that slightly changes the original assertion.
As David Scott showed during Apollo 15, drop a feather and a hammer at the same time
in a vacuum and they do fall at the same rate.
So, having discovered that this was a thing, FE piqued my interest and when I saw Tom saying stuff like sunset can be caused by perspective then I felt the need to chip in. I think it's important that stuff which is demonstrably wrong is challenged. He is demonstrably wrong about perspective, and horizon dip. That doesn't mean the earth is a globe of course. Does it matter if people believe wrong stuff? Not in this case, maybe. But there are other examples - I gave one above - where this sort of woolly thinking has consequences.
And coming back to the point I'm trying to make, if you did go to a football forum to tell them how rubbish football is and you found every thread was from Rugby fans telling them why Rugby was brilliant and football was a game for pansies then wouldn't you find that odd? It's a football forum but none of the football fans on it are on there discussing who their best player is, whether the manager should be sacked, their hopes for next season. Every thread is Rugby fans telling them how rubbish their sport is. Wouldn't you wonder why they don't either kick them out or create their own threads? And if they did create their own threads and those threads were hijacked by the Rugby fans then maybe they should create their own section of the forum where they could just discuss football. Maybe they'd let some of the Rugby fans in but not the ones who only want to say how rubbish football is.