Recently I’ve been having a lot of arguments with people on the internet. One nineteen page long argument that I had in a forum was with an obsessive Christian who was blurting out blatant lies like “like it or not, you choose who or what you are attracted to”. I’m tired of it. Tired of that and the actual worldwide homophobia that started the whole thing.

I told somebody else that I didn’t like the style of much of Mozart’s music and they retorted with “could you do better?”. Which just jarred me off even more, because it’s such a stupid thing to say. Of course I can’t, that’s not the point at all. If we could talk critically only about things that we could personally better, we’d get very little said. And very little bettered.

Somebody else tried to convince me that “Pessimists are disappointed a lot less often than optimists”. What bilge. I’ve learnt that people don’t understand that optimism isn’t about naively anticipating the best from any situation; it’s about making the most of what we’ve got.

Why should I spend so much time on those people who refuse to make decisions based on reason and goodness and refuse to be pragmatic and fair; why should I spend time - the time I keep preaching about making the best of because it’s running down, it’s running out, and there’s so much so good to do - arguing with the people who disagree and want to follow mindless rules and disregard other people and do what some book or law or deity or authority tells them to do instead of thinking for themselves and questioning everything to find sense?

I don’t think I should. They’re a bloody unreasonable bunch. I wrote a few months back about trying to reason with unreasonable people. It’s beyond impossible. And I don’t mind that these are people who are determined to spend their whole lives on something that may well be a waste of their time, or spend their whole lives wasting their time on nothing, because it’s their life, their time, but I mind that people are hurting other people and disregarding other people’s feelings, other peoples’ lives, and I mind that there’s so much mindless discrimination going on and that everyone is letting everyone else get away with it.

I had a look back over that homosexuality thread again today. I read posts like “we have to have a set of rules - without them we would just have anarchy”. Who decides which rules we live by? Every person lives by a set of completely different rules, whether it’s obvious or not. What worries me is when people follow rules because they’re there, or because somebody told them to. What worries me is when people follow rules that don’t benefit the most people possible and inconvenience the fewest.

Emotions aren’t scientific. Life is too complicated to put a formula to it. If there were no rules, how would we make our decisions?

People might just start thinking for themselves.