> Galileo was able to defeat the Church which was the largest country in Europe
The Church is not a country and never was? And Galileo was forced to recant then spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The Church defeated him.
> Science is meritocratic in the sense that even the small guy has a chance of fighting the machine as eventually things need to be defended on their technical merits
Nobody who has followed the shenanigans of scientific institutions in the last decade believes this anymore, sorry. Modern science consists of credentialed charlatans plying entirely fraudulent claims and those being accepted, over and over, with no end in sight, and everyone who tries to point out the problems in The Science end up being cancelled or burning out because the employers of said charlatans are the modern Church. They simply do not care if their people tell the truth or not.
Just addressing the Galileo part, but as was recently linked in hackernews [1][2], Galileo was wrong (in the sense that he was arguing for an already discredited theory, and that the theory he was arguing against was also already discredited).
Using Galileo as the standard of the suppression of free thought is sorta painting the Church as overzealously standing up for good science, not highlighting the Church as an enemy of truth.
The Papal states were literally a country, although surely not the largest in Europe. Galileo did not live there but rather in the Duchy of Florence (later Grand Duchy of Tuscany); however, as a Catholic he could still be tried by the Inquisition, which was essentially the Interpol of heresy.
The Church is not a country and never was? And Galileo was forced to recant then spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The Church defeated him.
> Science is meritocratic in the sense that even the small guy has a chance of fighting the machine as eventually things need to be defended on their technical merits
Nobody who has followed the shenanigans of scientific institutions in the last decade believes this anymore, sorry. Modern science consists of credentialed charlatans plying entirely fraudulent claims and those being accepted, over and over, with no end in sight, and everyone who tries to point out the problems in The Science end up being cancelled or burning out because the employers of said charlatans are the modern Church. They simply do not care if their people tell the truth or not.