> What I am doing is criticising the equally crass argument that if someone wants to suppress something enough, it's probably an indication there's some merit to it...
Which is not the argument that I'm making, at least not quite. I'm discussing the interaction between suppression and counterargument. If an idea is suppressed in the absence of any convincing counterargument, that combination of factors can be heavily suggestive of merit.
tbh my criticism was more directed at PG's essay and particularly his linked earlier than anything you had to say. I mean, I largely agree that absence of convincing counterargument is a point in favour of the suppressed idea [though even Lysenko attempted one, and I'm not sure anyone's ever disproved TimeCube ;)]
But I'm not convinced that the suppression is correlated with whether the idea is remotely worth exploring or not, still less that it's positively correlated with it being a good thing. And I think that's where 'is there a good reason why people researching into this are ostracised comes into question, which is where there's a less obvious case of a risk to society from heliocentrism than sympathetic takes on Naziism
Which is not the argument that I'm making, at least not quite. I'm discussing the interaction between suppression and counterargument. If an idea is suppressed in the absence of any convincing counterargument, that combination of factors can be heavily suggestive of merit.