Pensar

I may be many things, but I'm not a fucking snob. I don't believe that everyone should share my tastes and predilections, and I get quite arsey* when confronted with that attitude when it's aimed toward me, or towards someone or something that means a lot to me. I don't expect everyone to enjoy music that sounds like someone projectile vomiting into a broken cement mixer, or to share my twin loves of modernism and abstraction, but if y're going to tell me something's worthless, then I expect a reasoned argument to underlie that opinion. If you just don't like something, at a visceral level, that's fine, just say so, but if y're going to contemptuously dismiss whatever the something in question is, without coming to some sort of understanding of it, that's different.

I know that my language can be a little untempered at times**, but I try to never call something shit, or dismiss it out of hand without having a damn fucking good reason to do so***, because it not only makes you look ignorant, but shows a fundamental lack of respect for others viewpoints/tastes/whatever, and therefore makes you not just ignorant, but an arsehole. And yeah, before anyone points it out, I'm fully aware that I'm capable of being the most stubborn, intransigent cunt you can imagine, but, and this is the kicker, only when I'm on home turf and the person I'm talking to knows fuck all and isn't willing to listen. If we're on yr pet subject, or artform or whatever it is that floats yr boat, then I may have opinions, but I want to hear your perspectives, to learn, because you know more about it than me, and even if we still disagree, I've learnt something, had my viewpoint expanded, gained new insight into whatever it is we're discussing (obviously the same should apply with the roles reversed).

And hell, maybe my less-informed ideas might open up new avenues in yr thought too, simply because of the infinite number of angles from which it's possible to come at a subject. But the point is, it's a conversation of, if not equals, but at least two people who share some of the same knowledge, who can rationally take on board what's being said, who's mindsets are flexible enough, who have enough empathy, to not necessarily agree, but reach a mutual area of understanding, and also to accept when they're wrong or misguided. But when you just dismiss someone out of hand, with no understanding, no empathy whatsoever, y're not just an arsehole, not just a snob, but a fair way down the fucking road to becoming a bigot.

*This may be a slight understatement.

**See the above footnote.

***Except when some fucking hippy is attempting to convince me that some loopy psuedoscientific concept is right and Physics is wrong. Not that I don't have a fucking good reason in this case, it's just that a. it's absolutely impossible to argue with these fuckwits, because they don't understand the underlying principles behind what they think they're talking about§, and b. think you represent some kind of conspiracy to keep the true knowledge of the nature of the universe out of the hands and minds of the population at large. Life's too short to waste my breath on such idiocy, you will be told to fuck off in no uncertain terms.

§Reichian/Orgone horseshit and perpetual motion machines being two typical offenders. It doesn't matter how carefully you attempt to couch yr arguments, or how you organise or manipulate the data you think you've gathered, everything you are claiming violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and yr hypothesis is, in layman's terms, completely fucked. Or as Eddington put it:

"The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

And don't even get me started on homeopathy. Chemical fucking memory my arse. When you have a "discipline" where no one who practices it can actually explain in any way the mechanism underlying what they do, you have charlatanism, nothing more. It makes me almost physically sick that you can get a fucking BSc in homeopathy, which is no more a fucking science than astrology or having a fucking wank.