As to people taking offense, well. If no-one was quite so utterly stupid as to believe in this claptrap, we wouldn’t need to point out that they are so completely fucking stupid it’s a wonder they can remember to breathe.

Yes. Being nice hasn’t bloody worked. It’s SLAPPING TIME! In areas like this – areas of simple, plain, unadulterated moronic belief – a little bit of condescension, arrogance and downright rudeness is exactly what’s called for. The idea that in the 21st century – the twenty-first bloody century! We’re supposed to be driving flying cars by now! – it’s still considered OK to believe in shite like this, that it’s not mocked and belittled and gigglingly pissed upon at every turn is a disgusting insult to the Enlightenment, rationalists everywhere, and the venerated decomposing corspe of Carl Sagan.

Seriously. They had an end-of-year show on Radio 5 several days ago. It included an astrologer making predictions about the coming year. Ignoring even the fact that his predictions were shite (“we won’t see much of Jude Law in the coming year” – well, you could knock me down with an IMDb!), I was infuriated that nobody even thought to challenge him on his failure to draw up even one horoscope in the previous year that said, for example, “you will be drowned in a vast tsunami on the coast of the Indian Ocean”. For somebody come on and try to influence people and to make money out of deceitfully “predicting” the future, mere days after such an horrific demonstration of the future’s terrifying unpredictability, was not merely asinine, it was actually offensive.

So yes. This was good. Both for the reasons stated above, and also because someone seems to have taken Charlie Brooker on in an all-Grauniad swearing competito0n, and that’s a fucking good thing too…

Being rude is not very nice. But I’d rather people were rude to others based on what they do, rather than their race, sex, class, etc. Rational argument is important but there are other forms of rhetoric one can shoot down idiocy with.