the marketplace of ideas

Galileo?  I was thinking it was Copernicus who said the earth was round, but now I recall that what he said was that the earth moved around the sun.  He didn't quite come out and say that, fearing being burned at the stake, but he presented it as a plausible theory, much simpler than all the epicycles that were used to try to explain how the sun revolved around the earth, using Occam's razor as it was. 

But I don't think that there were similar problems with the idea that the earth was round.  I think only landlubbers thought that because people living by the oceans noted that when a ship sailed to sea, first the body of the ship disappeared beneath the horizon and then the sail.

Back in the old days, not that old, the time of, well the time before everybody had a computer on their desk or a smart phone in their pocket if you wanted to publish a book you had to get the acceptance of the publisher who wouldn't truck with some wild theory about chemtrails.  If you wanted to get on tv you had similar problems.  The establishment controlled the media, which was bad in that it could be stifling, but it did keep stupid ideas out, but now we have crazy sites and you-tube.

I don't hear the term much anymore, but there used to be talk of the marketplace of ideas.  It was kind of like a capitalism idea of ideas.  In a system where you have a free press (marketplace) all ideas will compete with each other and good ideas, ideas closer to the truth, that when you used them to make predictions those predictions would be true more often than predictions made using bad (further from the truth) ideas.  And just as the maker of expensive crappy shoes was driven out  of business by the maker of cheap good shoes, the bad ideas would wither away and we would have nothing but good ideas.

This is pretty much how it worked with the enlightenment, and it seemed to be working back in the days before the computer on the desk or in the pocket, but anymore it seems to have come a cropper.  Maybe the marketplace of ideas should not be so free, maybe the stifling blanket of the establishment is needed to keep out the crazier ideas that sprout and destroy clean commerce ideawise.

I came across the term marketplace of ideas when reading a book about Nixon by Gary Wills.  He was using it in reference to the way communism was stifled by things like banning communist speakers from college campuses.  The idea behind that was that communists didn't believe in a free press (there was no free press in Russia) therefore it shouldn't be allowed to compete in the marketplace of ideas because if it won, it would ban the marketplace.

Of course that seemed terribly wrong to me at the time, but am I not calling for something like that in wishing that the stifling, but soft, blanket of the establishment be laid down now over the popcorn of crazy ideas to keep stuff like chemtrails out?

Maybe I am Lois, maybe I am.