Think it through, dickhead...

The joys of having the opportunity of thinking something through before uttering it are, for the most part, lost on myself in addition to the majority of the rest of the human race. Often this takes the shape of an amusing 'miss-speak', such as my saying to a non-countryside type person "I have to close my window at night otherwise I get woken up by my next door neighbour's fierce cock". Sometimes it results in putting one's foot in it, such as the time I suggested that someone was a bit of pain in the arse before being told they recently died of anus cancer.

But there are occasions when I can and must insist on thinking something through before developing a clear opinion. This is particularly true on occasions where I may be unsure of my facts in a situation where facts are important, such as when a girl asks you if that's a didgeridoo in your pocket, or if you're merely pleased to see them. Though this works swimmingly in some settings, occasionally not giving an instant clear answer can hamstring your ability to change someones mind, mainly due to the problem of primacy (the first thing you hear on a subject is the thing you tend to believe) and this presents a balancing issue.

In order to balance the need to keep someone open to a change of heart and to ensure you're not sprouting high grade bollocks there remains a need to form opinions based on what little you know of the subject in the first place. But this cannot work if you know absolutely nothing about the subject in the slightest. And that, boys and girls, is why the Daily Mail is such utter shite.

You always think you're right...

'You always think you're right'. The single most ridiculous thing people say to me, and they say it on a regular basis. More ridiculous than 'baseball is so much more interesting than cricket' or 'science doesn't give you real answers' and even more ridiculous than 'will you be voting Conservative?'. The implication is that I have opinions that I think are right, which is an obvious truism. The only possible alternative to that is to have opinions you know to be wrong. This would be a bizarre thing to do (and a prerequisite for taking holy orders).

What they really mean is 'you always think you're more right than I am.' This is more acceptable but still a touch daft. If they know more about it than I do, then I can understand their annoyance, but they should lay out their arguments and I may change my mind. If they know less about it than me, I cannot and will not. If you think the world revolves around god's arse as it (probably) says so somewhere in the bible or koran, and I think it doesn't based on the work of every physicist and star gazer since Copernicus as well as stuff I can directly do to prove the heliocentric model, I have a strong basis to think I'm more right than you are. It's a question of demonstration of demonstrable knowledge. as I once heard Christopher Hitchens say, 'claims made without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.'

The risk with having a good knowledge base for your opinions is that it can alienate people. Though being confident works in so many ways, arrogance never does. The problem is there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance. Luckily I know the difference. Mainly because I'm so awesome.