The Benefits of Sitting on the Fence 

I've spent most of this week reading about GM food and immunization. The two topics are often in the news these days, and I've recently started reading more about them because my brain aches every time I log onto Facebook and read the endless inanity that haunts the worlds most intellectually vapid social networking site. Merely sticking the words "like" and "share" underneath a badly edited photograph seem to magically imbue an image with validity, and then lo and behold, something obviously wrong and factually ridiculous to all but the most slowed high-school student is plastered all over my wall by some enthusiastic sharer, and I am forced to gnash my teeth and berate people that alas, I once called friend. 

They teach you how to process this nonsense at a very young age In high-schools back in England. My teachers expertly displayed the power of propaganda to me at a very young age in fact, by showing my class an anti-abortion video in one lesson of Personal and Social Education, a mandatory hour long life lesson that we were forced to sit through each week because presumably many parents don't have the brains to teach their kids not to be idiots. After only ten minutes watching said video, I was indeed anti-abortion, because I was convinced that an 8 week old fetus was capable of defeating me in a game of Connect 4. Indeed, according to the video I had just seen, the unborn children of the UK were patiently sat inside the wombs of the nation reading novels and tapping their feet to the music on Mom's Ipod. 

Totally True Fetus at 6 weeks

Well, it was more of a battery devouring cassette player with headphones that weighed two kilos back in 1990, but you get the idea. 

A week later, the class was made to watch a different video, one that was aggressively pro-choice. I recall finding it somewhat amusing, because if you watched that video on its lonesome you could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that heading for an abortion was a pleasurable experience, and children are so devoid of life that any parent with a particularly moody teenager should be allowed to perform a retroactive abortion by legally drowning their kids in the bathtub before their eighteenth birthday. 

I'm not sure if they teach PSE these days, but it appears that the lesson has been entirely lost on today's youth. The message was an obvious one, and its painfully simple to put it into practice. 

If you see a picture of something on the internet, check the source. If there is no source, Google the "fact" and see for yourself. If you have never heard of the source, check that out as well. There are numerous well known groups and factions that are politically active today, and countless thousands of not well known ones. Obviously nobody can be expected to know them all, but here is a hint, if the groups title infers an obvious choice, then you should treat their message as suspect and take the time to check things out for yourself.

If you are capable of using a computer, you are capable of thinking for yourself. If a group is called something clearly inflammatory like "Gays Cause Hurricanes" or "Blacks and Jews Wreck Your Week" it should set some alarm bells ringing. The BBC is a pretty good source for news, but its still got a slant, so does the much maligned Daily Mail. Here's the rub though, Greenpeace don't sit on the fence either, neither does The Guardian, or groups called "If you don't recycle, you are practically a baby raper"  

Every publication is written by a fallible human being with a word processor, few of them will be as fallible as the writer of this particular blog, but the message is clear to anyone with even a basic understanding of how information works. Check the left, check the right, and then somewhere around the middle you will probably arrive at something like an answer, because everybody is desperate to sway you to their cause.

If you spend half an hour reading about either of the aforementioned topics, its painfully obvious that there is a sensible answer to both, so long as you are even remotely impartial about things. Choosing whether or not to have a termination is a painful decision, often a heartbreaking one, and always a difficult one, but there are a plethora of experts and scientists that have decided that a fetus is incapable of feeling or knowing anything at all before 20 weeks. Smarter people than you or I have decided such a thing, and funny thing, I like to ask an expert. Just because you have an opinion, it doesn't make it a valid one. 

I often point this out when I am being lectured about science by a scientific illiterate. Would you ask your dentist for psychiatric advice? If the flush isn't working in your bathroom, do you toss the plumbers number away and demand that the gardener take a look at it? How about asking the guy in Starbucks how to fix the gear box on your 1975 Austin Allegro? 

If in every single aspect of your life you are more than happy to follow the advice of those in the know, why would you allow your emotions to cloud your judgement and cause you to make absurd decisions on really important decisions, such as the health of your kids or your own personal well-being? This principal can be applied to almost all of the big issues of the day. 

Why not ask a geologist about fracking? Why not ask a General what he thinks of the war in Afghanistan? Why not ask a seismologist when he thinks "the big one" is going to hit California? 

The Facebook generation seems to think that all of the above is bad advice, and they should take all of their advice on myriad complex and confusing topics from people that are charismatic but entirely ignorant of the subject in question. I saw a guy talking about how 9/11 was an inside job which was actually carried out by Freemason affiliated Muslim Ninja's who secretly love George W. Bush even though he gave billions of dollars to Israel. He wasn't a world renowned scholar with long experience in economics and geopolitics though, he was a hippy with a loud shirt and a matted beard, and I'm pretty sure he was giving the interview in his mothers basement. 

To sum up, please don't listen to me, I may well have been typing in jest, but that is the pivotal point. Don't listen to anybody. Read several different sources from across the political spectrum and then sit down in solitude and make your own mind up. If you think you may be leaning unfairly in one direction, perhaps take a moment to ask yourself why. Nothing is black and white in reality, and almost everything is more complicated than it first appears if you take the time to learn about it. And remember, sitting on the fence can be boring and thankless, but it beats jumping down and putting your foot in dog-shit.

Oh and for the record, I eat GM food because I ate it for two decades before all this fuss started and It didn't seem to do me any harm, I will Immunize my kids, and I will always allow my missus to make her own decisions when it comes to her ovaries regardless of my feelings on the matter.

They are her ovaries after all...