Left But Not Left Behind

 

Mercator projection with Tissot's indicatrixes of distortion in the form of the red circles, each of which represents an area with a 10,000-kilometer diameter. Image by Justin Kumimune via Wikipedia.

A brief encounter with some Naderite yielded a pretty good analogy

That's ironic. At least a flat earth would have two dimensions, whereas your perspective is to insist that there's only one, the single line from L to R.

— Yaslight (@Yastreblyansky) May 8, 2022

it's kind of spectacular how much he didn't get it:

If you want to get granular, you can subdivide them into various other "axes". But broadly speaking, you can compress them into a single spectrum that moves left to right.

— Jonathan Hibberd 🌹🏳️‍🌈☯️🍣 (@kageneko) May 8, 2022

Yes indeed, you can, and you can flatten a globe into a Mercator projection,  but when you're planning global activities you don't pretend to believe that Greenland is really twice the size of South America or that Anchorage is 25,000 miles from Vladivostok. Making a practical use of the left-right spectrum as a basis for decision making is like deliberately setting out to make yourself an order of magnitude dumber than a flat-earther.

Literary Corner: The Size of Texas, the Surprise of Death

From the president's press conference, San Antonio, Wednesday, 10 April, reported by Seahorse at GardenWeb, a remarkable pair of sonnets taking a long walk through his current preoccupations, the need for a wall, the fact that Texas is larger than the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which Central Americans don't realize, and the unexpected relationship between walking and death:

Two Border Sonnets

by Donald J. Trump

I. A Vast State

If we had the wall, the good people
will not be able — you’ll see them on the other
side of the wall. Number one, they won’t
come, because they’ll see there’s no way
of getting through. Right now they think there’s a
way to get through. And the people back home
never hear about that, they start to walk.
They tell them Houston’s half a mile away,

but it’s 300 miles. It’s desert. This
is a vast state, it’s a vast area. You look
at it, the state’s tremendous. I come from
New York. You have Fifth Avenue and that connects you
to Park Avenue, it's not too far away,
but this is hundreds of miles between places.

Late 17th-century print of an etching, ca. 1520, by Daniel Hopfer of Augsburg, Death and the Devil Surprise Two Women, from the collections of the Victoria and Albert, London.