Neither do tornados. Both happen on far too small a scale for the coriolis forces to have a significant effect.

Hurricanes, prevailing winds, Foucault's pendulum etc depend on the hemisphere.

An incidental note. When arguing with someone with a bizarre view like this, they undoubtably know the standard list of objections that will be raised. After winning the rhetorical point about toilets, they prove that they know more than you do and then will disregard the rest of what you have to say. Thus common myths like this one make it easier for them to defend and maintain their own views.

Cheers,
Ben

Or do it yourself with 5 different toilets. Better than 90% odds say that you'll find two that flush in opposite directions.

Here is a more subtle experiment. Fill a bathtub. Give it a few pushes with your hand one way. Drain it. Observe what happens. Repeat with pushing the other way. Observe what happens.

The direction water goes down the drain is the direction it was already rotating in the tub. This only matches the direction of the Earth's rotation by chance unless you're really careful to set things up just right. (If you leave the water for a day then reach in with your hand, your hand probably causes it to swirl the wrong way. Maybe if you left it in for a day then pulled the chain carefully you'd see the Earth's rotation. But in reality the effect is just too small to see.

Cheers,
Ben

A given toilet swirls in a given direction based on the angle of the jets. This has an effect that completely overwhelms the Earth's rotation.

Cheers,
Ben

But he probably knows more about this than you do.

It is not the conclusion of science that when two objects are in motion around each other that it is always equally valid to say that A orbits B as it is to say that B orbits A. There are physical effects of rotation that are easily measured, and others have mentioned some. (Foucault's pendulum, the Jet Stream, coriolis forces...)

For a simple, common sense illustration of this, pick up a bucket of water and whirl it around your head. Ask whether you are going around the bucket or the bucket is going around you. His claim is that the two statements are equivalent, and clearly they are not.

Now, that said, there is some truth that he is mangling. That truth is that the laws of physics hold regardless of the coordinate system you use to describe what is going on. So you can pick any coordinate system that you choose, then be really careful about how you state the physics, and you can make all of the answers come out right. (To do it exactly right you need to introduce the concept of a "metric". There is no need to worry about the details though, suffice it to say that it can be done.)

But the coordinate system is completely and utterly meaningless! Switching coordinate systems is like switching between km and miles, it has absolutely nothing to do with what is actually happening, it just changes the language that we use to talk about it. The coordinate system is free to be changed exactly because it is meaningless.

For instance it is possible to measure how much an object is rotating or accelerating. This measurement does not depend on the coordinate system. Guess what! You find that the Earth rotates about once a day! (That's off by a few percent because in a day we also move partway through our orbit.) By contrast you find that there is a coordinate system that is still relative to the center of the Sun which is barely rotating at all! And in that coordinate system, the Earth goes around the Sun once a year. (And rotates about its axis a bunch more times.)

Furthermore he is wrong to say that this requires general relativity. The above fact is is a triviality that has been noticed since Rene Descartes invented Cartesian coordinates. When Foucault came up with his pendulum, he used the pendulum as a way of measuring a component of the rotation of a rotating coordinate system.

So why does he think that general relativity has anything to do with this? Well in general relativity once you introduce masses, there is no perfect coordinate system. In theories up to and including special relativity there are "inertial frames of reference", which is to say simple Cartesian coordinate systems in which objects that are still relative to the coordinate system stay still unless something pushes them. Generally people prefer working in these coordinate systems because the laws of physics get a lot simpler. But in general relativity there are no inertial frames of reference. You have to deal with the non-inertiality of your frame of reference.

However while no reference frame is perfect in general relativity, some reference frames are closer to being inertial than others. Working in those is still preferred, because the corrections to treating physics naively are much smaller and more manageable.

And, as you might guess, a geocentric coordinate system is a lot farther from being inertial than a heliocentric one.

Cheers,
Ben

The Ptolemaic system used epicycles to make the orbits all come out to what they should around the Earth.

Coopernicus used only circles, but made the Earth go around the Sun, and then all of the planets go around the Sun as well. His system was more complex than the Ptolemaic. (And his justifications were extremely mystical points about what he thought was natural.)

The idea that orbits were elliptical is due to Kepler (who supported the Coopernican system). Kepler's 3 laws say:

1. Planets move in orbits that are ellipses.
   
2. The planets move such that the line between the Sun and the Planet sweeps out the same area in the same area in the same time no matter where in the orbit.
   
3. The square of the period of the orbit of a planet is proportional to the mean distance from the Sun cubed.
   

(Note, you thought that the "weird elliptical orbits" were Ptolemaic. They were not.)

These laws were found to be very close, but not quite perfect. However Isaac Newton demonstrated that the second law implies that all forces on the planets are directed towards the Sun. The third law implies that the forces in question vary as distance squared. He verified that these two facts explain why the orbits are elliptical (actually they are conic sections). He found that if the force pulling us to the Earth also varies as distance squared, he could explain the Moon's orbit. He then showed that if he assumed that all pairs of masses attracted each other in this matter he could not only explain the above orbital facts, but he could explain a plethora of other phenomena, including tides, the precession of the Earth and the orbits of moons around other planets.

Cheers,
Ben

But note that your estimate was wrong. To a good approximation, the distance that you see varies as the square root of your height. So on top of a mountain that is 1000 times as high as you are, you can see about 31.6 times as far.

Cheers,
Ben