There's guarantee that you will sympathize with someone, or that they will sympathize with you for that matter. But how are you going to find out how they think if you never have a conversation?
(I'm not a flat earther, I'm just tired of reading hot takes on the internet)
Edit: clarity
If being nice turns out to be the best strategy for curbing this movement, then I am all for it. If screaming in their faces about it turns out to be more effective, then we have to do that.
I would love for everyone to be able to "rejoin society" but at a certain point we also have to defend society against those who reject it in harmful ways. Not every illogical cult-like community is as harmless as flat-Earthers.
It's not your job to enforce your views on people. Let the government handle it, no one elected you. At least in the US, the government has proven the best institution to protect the public while also giving due consideration to people's rights.
In this day and age, given the quality of medical treatment available to most of the population, any outbreak of diseases can be handled in a much better way, and with less comparative casualties than ever before, regardless of the use o vaccines.
Vaccines are useful, there is no doubt about that, but they are in no way a necessity without which we cannot live.
Just because something wasn’t needed before doesn’t mean it isn’t needed now that circumstances have changed. We also existed for hundreds of thousands of years without seatbelts.
But why would they?
We're brutally, brutally mean to people like this.
Every time somebody dunks on a flat earther or their ilk, puts somebody down to defend the superiority of their own worldview, they've added a brick to the wall that keeps these people from feeling like they can rejoin society.
The first time they pop out of the cave, feeble amateurs in the world of normies, they slip up just a tiny bit and get their head bitten off. There is nobody there to to say "if you tried, we'd have you". For most of us, it isn't true.
It seems like few people realize that this is part of the residue we unwittingly leave on the world. That the cost of performative intellectual superiority, even if you're actually right, is the burning of rungs on their ladder back up.
Needlessly dunking on misguided people worsens a world that we ourselves are stuck with.
Be nice.