So I was in a bad mood the last few days for some reason, and spent several hours — spread out over those days — trying to pick fights with people on the Strange Horizons message boards. (I say trying because nobody ever came back after I attacked them.) (I feel kinda bad about that, but only kinda, ’cause they were still wrong. But hopefully they’ll realize that my opinion doesn’t matter, and keep reading and posting.)

Anyway, part of this was, as noted, my mood; but, I realized today, all these posts of mine have a theme. The theme is, people should be free to make up their own minds.

If this sounds dirt-stupid and obvious, that’s because it is.

What gets me wound up, though, is

1. people to whom it’s not obvious;
2. people who think it’s obvious, but don’t realize they’re arguing against it; and
3. people who agree with it in principle but in not in practice because they’re convinced that they, and only they, are in Full Possession Of The Facts.

People like that drive me straight up the wall.

Villains, I say to you now: Knock off all that evil!

And on that note I’d like to bring in this slightly out-of-context quote from Marco Roth:

America is a democracy, and precisely because it is a democracy and not Plato’s Republic, the people are free to make dumb decisions with irrevocable consequences based on imperfect or misleading information.

This should be understood as a good thing.

---

Update: Finally turned up this great Cory Doctorow post that I’ve been wanting to find again for the last several days. I think it’s relevant.

“That guy has too much spare time” is one of the most odious, intellectually dishonest, dismissive things a person can say. It disguises a vicious ad-hominem attack as a lighthearted verbal shrug. The subtext of the remark is that the subject's passions — this remark is almost always directed at someone engaged in some labor of love — are so meritless that their specific shortcomings don't even warrant discussion. The subtext is that any sane person who considers these passions will immediately see their total worthlessness. To direct this remark at someone is to utterly dismiss their personal fire and so their ability to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy.