An Aside...

It was Voltaire who said (something like) “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. Fortunately for him, he was living in a pre-Internet age, because otherwise he would have contributed something very different to the realm of quotable quotes. Something like, “oh for God’s sake, shut up!”.

Everyone on the planet is entitled to their opinion. In some areas on the planet, you are entitled to whatever opinion is considered the status quo and heaven help you if you speak otherwise. Generally though, you are free to make your own mind up about certain things and operate accordingly. What everyone needs to remember, however, is that there’s a difference between what you think is true and what is actually true.

In these over-sharing days, people seem to have lost the ability to discern the difference between what is real and what is a load of horse-puckey. We live in an age where people adopt paleo-diet lifestyles with no discernment other than that some mildly famous TV presenter says that it’s “cool” (and that – erroneously – it sends cancer into remission, among other outright, unproven, lies). We live in a time when measles, whooping-cough and diphtheria are on the rise once more because there’s a handful of people out there – without any valid training whatsoever - who think that the science behind immunisation and herd immunity is “wrong”. We live in an age of chiropractors – it’s witchcraft people: look it up.

On the one hand, we have access to more information than we’ve ever had before. You’d think that that would make us all more rational and intelligent, but no – somehow it’s turned us all into drooling idiots. On the other hand, we live in a time when we’re told that our individuality and right to express that self-importance is at an all-time high. What that means is that we’ve become a population of fawning idolaters, trained upon the least hiccup of Kanye West and his misbegotten coterie (he’s mad, people; certifiable, and now in the loony-bin where he belongs. Huzzah!).

The people who come to this blog are, on the whole (when they’re actual people, not web-crawling robots or people searching for “hitler youth camps sex” – I’ve seen you out there: please stop) roleplayers, and it’s my opinion that that fact means you’re people who know the difference between what’s real and what’s not. Surely then, you can look someone like David Icke right in the eye and tell him where to get off?

My step-father helped to build the Large Hadron Collider; my sister is at the bleeding edge of genetic research: I’m surrounded by the notion of tested evidence and the value of peer review. You may read articles about people bodgy-ing their scientific papers and being caught out as cheats but this is just the scientific process in operation. Why does it make some people think that the entire scientific community is a bunch of shonk-meisters who continually lie about their findings?

(Conversely, these are generally the same people who think that the Illuminati rule world governments from the shadows, that people’s minds are being controlled by secret orbiting satellites, that footage of the World Trade Centre’s destruction “proves” it was an inside job and that David Icke is right when he says that Queen Elizabeth II is an eight-foot tall red lizard with the ability to cloud people’s minds. Seriously people: grow up.)

At one of my earlier positions, we had a very good customer, a Japanese professor who was trying to prove that all human life on the planet evolved from penguins. I shit you not. He was a very good customer, very personable and erudite, but seriously – who, for a moment, thinks that that has legs as far as scientific research is concerned? Of course, science is predicated upon the notion that proving a negative is just as valid as proving a positive – the Theory of Evolution (as some religious retards in the American south are keen to remind us) is just that – a theory. Our customer was obviously just shutting down a dead end, wilted twig on the tree of scientific discovery. Obvious for some, that is.

I see people come into my shop all the time who have fallen prey to other people’s opinions. They show up lurking about the fringes of the store, red-faced, wide-eyed and usually hyperventilating. It means that they’ve spent the morning downloading videos from YouTube about alien invasions, the Lithgow Panther, Yowies, or tracking devices in modern currency. It takes a lot of my time – time which would be better spent doing actual work – talking these idiots off the ledge and reassuring them that, just because something is somebody else’s opinion, doesn’t mean that it’s real.

Look, you come here because you’re a Lovecraft fan right? What did Lovecraft teach us? There’re no superpowers out there pulling the strings. The cosmos is indifferent to us – it rolls along without a plan, without a purpose. There is no conspiracy; there is no hidden agenda. Of course, you are more than entitled to your own opinion, but please, examine what that opinion is; test it against all available evidence (unless your source is somehow related to a Kardashian, then absolutely avoid and decry it), and if it stands up to scrutiny, for God’s sake, shut up.